He had perpetrated this “joke” so often, and at such unseasonable places, that it had now become embarrassing. He seemed, in fact, to delight in coming upon his victim while he was in serious conversation with some dignified-looking person, and he had already caught the boy three times in this way while he was talking to Dodd, to Professor Hatcher, and finally to a professor with a starched prim face, who had taught American Literature for thirty years, and whose name was Fust. Nothing could be done to stop him; protests at the impropriety of the proceeding only served to set him off again; he was delighted at the embarrassment he caused and he would shout down every protest rapturously, screaming, “Yis, yis, yis — nice flat girl — like this, eh,” and would shape fat suggestion with his fat hands.
xvi
The purposes of Professor Hatcher’s celebrated school for dramatists seemed, as stated, to be plain and reasonable enough. Professor Hatcher himself prudently forbore from making extravagant claims concerning the benefits to be derived from his course. He did not say that he could make a dramatist out of any man who came to take his course. He did not predict a successful career in the professional theatre for every student who had been a member of his class. He did not even say he could teach a student how to write plays. No. He made, in fact, no claims at all. Whatever he said about his course was very reasonably, prudently, and temperately put: it was impossible to quarrel with it.
All Professor Hatcher said about his course was that, if a man had a genuine dramatic and theatrical talent to begin with, he might be able to derive from the course a technical and critical guidance which it would be hard for him to get elsewhere, and which he might find for himself only after years of painful and even wasteful experiment.
Certainly this seemed reasonable enough. Moreover, Professor Hatcher felt that the artist would benefit by what was known as the “round-table discussion”— that is, by the comment and criticism of the various members of the class, after Professor Hatcher had read them a play written by one of their group. He felt that the spirit of working together, of seeing one’s play produced and assisting in the production, of being familiar with all the various arts of the theatre — lighting, designing, directing, acting, and so on — was an experience which should be of immense value to the young dramatist of promise and of talent. In short, although he made no assertion that he could create a talent where none was, or give life by technical expertness to the substance of a work that had no real life of its own, Professor Hatcher did feel that by the beneficent influence of this tutelage he might trim the true lamp to make it burn more brightly.
And though it was possible to join issue with him on some of his beliefs — that, for example, the comment and criticism of “the group” and a community of creative spirits were good for the artist — it was impossible to deny that his argument was reasonable, temperate, and conservative in the statement of his purposes.
And he made this plain to every member of his class. Each one was made to understand that the course made no claims of magic alchemy — that he could not be turned into an interesting dramatist if the talent were not there.
But although each member of the class affirmed his understanding of this fundamental truth, and readily said that he accepted it, most of these people, at the bottom of their hearts, believed — pitiably and past belief — that a miracle would be wrought upon their sterile, unproductive spirits; that for them, for THEM, at least, a magic transformation would be brought about in their miserable small lives and feeble purposes — and all because they now were members of Professor Hatcher’s celebrated class.
The members of Professor Hatcher’s class belonged to the whole lost family of the earth, whose number is uncountable, and for this reason they could never be forgotten.
And, first and foremost, they belonged to that great lost tribe of people who are more numerous in America than in any other country in the world. They belonged to that unnumbered horde who think that somehow, by some magic and miraculous scheme or rule or formula, “something can be done for them.” They belonged to that huge colony of the damned who buy thousands of books that are printed for their kind, telling them how to run a tea-shop, how to develop a pleasing personality, how to acquire “a liberal education,” swiftly and easily and with no anguish of the soul, by fifteen minutes’ reading every day; how to perform the act of sexual intercourse in such a way that your wife will love you for it; how to have children or to keep from having children; how to write short-stories, novels, plays, and verses which are profitably saleable; how to keep from having body-odour, constipation, bad breath, or tartar on the teeth; how to have good manners, know the proper fork to use for every course, and always do the proper thing — how, in short, to be beautiful, “distinguished,” “smart,” “chic,” “forceful,” and “sophisticated”— finally, how to have “a brilliant personality” and “achieve success.”
Yes, for the most part, the members of Professor Hatcher’s class belonged to this great colony of the lost Americans. They belonged to that huge tribe of all the damned and lost who feel that everything is going to be all right with them if they can only take a trip, or learn a rule, or meet a person. They belonged to that futile, desolate, and forsaken horde who felt that all will be well with their lives, that all the power they lack themselves will be supplied, and all the anguish, fury, and unrest, the confusion and the dark damnation of man’s soul can magically be healed if only they eat bran for breakfast, secure an introduction to a celebrated actress, get a reading for their manuscript by a friend of Sinclair Lewis, or win admission to Professor Hatcher’s celebrated class of dramatists.
And, in a curious way, the plays written by the people in Professor Hatcher’s class illustrated, in one form or another, this desire. Few of the plays had any intrinsic reality, for most of these people were lacking in the first, the last, the foremost quality of the artist, without which he is lost: the ability to get out of his own life the power to live and work by, to derive from his own experience — as a fruit of all his seeing, feeling, living, joy and bitter anguish — the palpable and living substance of his art.
Few of the people in Professor Hatcher’s class possessed this power. Few of them had anything of their own to say. Their lives seemed to have grown from a stony and a fruitless soil and, as a consequence, the plays they wrote did not reflect that life, save by a curious and yet illuminating indirection.
Thus, in an extraordinary way, their plays — unreal, sterile, imitative, and derivative as most of them indubitably were — often revealed more about the lives of the people who wrote them than better and more living work could do. For, although few of the plays showed any contact with reality — with that passionate integument of blood and sweat and pain and fear and grief and joy and laughter of which this world is made — most of them did show, in one way or another, what was perhaps the basic impulse in the lives of most of these people — the impulse which had brought them here to Professor Hatcher’s class.
The impulse of the people in the class was not to embrace life and devour it, but rather to escape from it. And in one way or another most of the plays these people wrote were illustrative of this desire. For in these plays — unnatural, false, and imitative, as they were — one could discern, in however pale and feeble a design, a picture of the world not as its author had seen and lived and known it, but rather as he wished to find it or believe in it. And, in all their several forms — whether sad, gay, comic, tragic, or fantastical — these plays gave evidence of the denial and the fear of life.
The wealthy young dawdler from Philadelphia, for example, wrote plays which had their setting in a charming little French café. Here one was introduced to all the gay, quaint, charming Frenchmen — to Papa Duval, the jolly proprietor, and Mamma Duval, his rotund and no less jolly spouse, as well as to all the quaint and curious habitués that are so prolific in theatrical establishments of this order. One met, as well, that fixture of these places: old Monsieur Vernet, the crusty, crotchety, but kindly old gentleman who is the café‘s oldest customer and has had the same table in the corner by the window for more than thirty years.