John Powys - After My Fashion

‘It’s like this, my dear,’ she went on. ‘Though I don’t want to annoy you. I think you have great powers. But I cannot say I think this poetry of yours has done justice to them. I believe you inject into it, as you read it to yourself, a great many vague feelings that are not conveyed to anyone else. Your poetry is a kind of self-indulgence. It is the expression of a good deal in you that is merely personal. It is too self-satisfied, too unruffled. It’s as if you had never really wrestled with life!’

He looked so completely miserable under her words that she took him by both his hands and pulled him towards her.

He responded to her caress almost savagely, seeking to recover his ascendency over her and to regain his self-respect in the oldest of primitive ways.

As he made love to her he withdrew his soul from her, letting it escape down some long corridor of reservation. His pride found a way to recover itself in this manner. Without actually formulating the malicious thought, what he felt in his mind was a derisive sense that she did not know at that moment how far his soul was wandering from her.

When the hour arrived for her to return to the theatre she was called for by Pat Ryan in his green Studebaker. They separated therefore at the door, Richard’s vanity completely reinstated upon its secret throne. ‘She is only a woman,’ he said to himself as he walked towards the elevated station. ‘Her art is instinctive, not intellectual. She does not understand the quieter, cooler, more magical kinds of poetry. She wants everything to be emotional and dramatic. In some ways Nelly has a truer feeling for beauty than she has. But Nelly’s childish impishness spoils her insight. Nelly laughs at her own soul.’

As he ascended the crowded steps to the little platform, Richard felt in better spirits than he had felt for many a long week. It was a relief that Nelly knew of his affair with Elise and apparently had no intention of doing anything about it. It was sad that it made her unhappy. It was sad that she insisted that all lover-like play between them should cease. But she clearly had made up her mind not to sulk; and they had had — even since her discovery of his unfaithfulness — some not uncheerful hours.

There was thus a base unction, a shallow satisfaction, a sleek slurring over of all deeper issues, in Richard’s mind as the elevated railway carried him down Sixth Avenue, the car in which he sat moving parallel to the third-storey windows of the larger shops.

It seemed as though the malicious revenge he had taken upon Elise had punished him by removing from his nature, in that hour, all nobler, all subtler feelings.

He had never caught himself in a mood quite so cynical, quite so brutal and crude, as he caught himself in then. It was a mood that seemed to fall into odious reciprocity with the external aspect of the New York thoroughfares at that evening rush hour.

Those pale-jowled rigid-faced men, those handsome self-assertive metallic-voiced women, pushing, jostling, scrambling, hurrying, driven by that elemental necessity of which Karmakoff had discoursed to him, seemed to fall in with this mood of his, to blend with it, to hearten it, to justify it. It was with a kind of prolonged snarl of predatory exultation that he — one of their number, one of the male animals of this wrestling tribe — chuckled to himself as he thought of the desperate struggle of life and how he was playing, in his dunghill isolation, his own little game against all these! Two women were ‘interested’ in him, two exceptional women, a great artist and a sweet-souled girl. How easily it might have happened, in this evil vortex, that no feminine creature worth a moment’s thought might have cared one jot what became of him! But two of the most exquisite did care, and in this alone he had surely attained something! One after another the little stations passed, each numbered by the number of a street, crossing Sixth Avenue. When the train stopped at Twenty-third Street two young businessmen got in, in company with an older person, an elderly woman. The three were quarrelling about something, and continued quarrelling as the train moved out. The woman’s face was gentle and very sad. The two young men were causing her some peculiar shame by the vulgarity and crudity of their discussion. Richard caught her eye, the eye of a hunted thing, looking desperately out of the train window, and then he caught her reverting her gaze into the interior of the car as though driven back by the menacing heartlessness of those glaring lights, gaudy advertisements and obtrusive store windows.

There swept over him a drowning wave of sudden remorse. Had he, in this eternal division between the sensitive and insensitive, slipped over to the wrong side? Had he ranged himself with the glaring advertisements and brutal sounds, with the lights and the iron and the paint and the roar, against the deeper voices that alone gave life any beauty or meaning?

Was he actually — he, Richard Storm — exulting in his possession of these two women as if he were a gross fool of a numbskull roué, devoid of all finer instincts?

Eighth Street! It was necessary for Richard to get out here, if he wished to walk through Cornelia Street and Le Roy Street to Seventh Avenue.

As he made his way through Greenwich Village with its laxer, easier, more careless atmosphere, he became conscious that there did exist in New York, hidden away among its iron buildings and its chaotic litter, many charming backwaters of friendly humanity.

In this particular quarter were artists of all the nations of the earth, writers, painters, journalists, bric-à-brac dealers, revolutionists, virtuosos, charlatans, dilettantes, actors, bachelor women, women workers, wealthy connoisseurs of the theatre, aesthetic dabblers, art-book dealers, literary recluses, imagist poets, futurist sculptors, popular mystics, cranks, faddists, philosophers, humbugs, devoted humanitarians, art-movement leaders, and many quiet solitary thinkers living between uptown fashion and downtown greed, intersected by wedges of every sort of foreign element. There was certainly a large, free, easygoing casualness in the air that seemed powerful enough to maintain itself unspoiled, in defiance of both economic necessity and social convention.

It was naïve and simple, this Quartier Latin of the New Atlantis; it was crude and self-conscious, but something of the great ocean spaces that surrounded it, something of those free winds and that high unclouded sky, had got into its manners and habits and usages. It was certainly primitive and unsophisticated in its ardours and devotions to what it proudly called ‘creative work’ but its very primitiveness preserved its love of beauty intact and pure, unspoiled by the cynical disillusionment of the traditional Bohemians of the Old World.

Here, if anywhere, wedged in between foreign tenements and big business, breathed the lungs of whatever mental and spiritual freedom that iron Manhattan could offer to her children!

When he reached the Charlton Street apartment he found that Nelly had already got their supper ready. She permitted him to kiss her, only turning her head a little to one side so as to avoid giving him her lips.

How blint and clumsy, how brutally callous and dull he had been, he thought. This avoidance of his lips made him suddenly aware of the infinite subtleties, the world of shy emotional reactions, so deep and so clear-edged, that women associate with this simple symbol. He was made obscurely conscious that he had hurt something in his wife’s soul of a different character, of a more sensitive texture, than anything which he possessed in his own.

Does any man, he thought, really understand what this touching of the lips implies in the heart of a woman?