Читать книгу Long Long Ago - Alexander Woollcott - Страница 11

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VERY once in a while some reporter writes a story so peculiarly satisfying to the members of his own craft that fond clippings of it molder to powder in the admiring wallets of all the newspapermen from San Francisco to Park Row. A few years ago some anonymous neighbor of mine stuck such a clipping into an envelope and posted it to me. God knows who did me this service, so I have mentioned him favorably in my prayers ever since. For there in print, before my wondering and envious eyes, was just such a story as every reporter worth his salt has at least planned to write somewhere, somehow, some day.

Sitting morose in the corner of a dingy and littered city-room, his feet on the desk, his hat tilted down over his eyes, weary of writing up windy banquets and never saying how deadly dull they were, sick of turning out routine obituaries and never once erupting with a hint at how delighted the bereaved were with their sad loss, every reporter certainly has sketched out some such rebellious piece in his mind and thought that, though he might be fired next day, sued for libel, arrested for slander and enthusiastically horsewhipped by the parties concerned, it would be a sweet game to play and one well worth the candle. And here at last, apparently, was such a dream story come true in print.

It was a wedding notice. The opening paragraph lulled one with its stock phrases and complete conventionality. It merely related that the daughter of the So-and-sos had been united in holy wedlock on the preceding Wednesday to a scion of the house of Whoozis. I forget the actual names. One was also informed that the Reverend Such-and-such of the Maple Avenue Baptist Church had performed the ceremony. So far so good. But then the false mask slipped and the story went on as follows:

The groom is a popular young bum who hasn’t done a lick of work since he got shipped in the middle of his junior year at college. He manages to dress well and keep a supply of spending money because his dad is a soft-hearted old fool who takes up his bad checks instead of letting him go to jail where he belongs.

The bride is a skinny, fast little idiot who has been kissed and handled by every boy in town since she was twelve years old. She paints like a Sioux Indian, sucks cigarettes in secret, and drinks mean corn liquor when she is out joyriding in her dad’s car at night. She doesn’t know how to cook, sew, or keep house.

The groom wore a rented dinner suit over athletic underwear of imitation silk. His pants were held up by pale green suspenders. His number-eight patent-leather shoes matched his state in tightness and harmonized nicely with the axle-grease polish of his hair. In addition to his jag he carried a pocketknife, a bunch of keys, a dun for the ring and his usual look of imbecility.

The bride wore some kind of white thing that left most of her legs sticking out at one end and her bony upper end sticking out at the other. The young people will make their home with the bride’s parents, which means they will sponge on the old man until he dies and then she will take in washing. The happy couple anticipates a blessed event in about five months.

I was engaged at the time in sundry projects of moment, but I dropped them all in favor of an inquiry about that clipping. From the cluster of homely social items on the reverse side, I knew it came from a small-town newspaper, and from the strong whiff of corn liquor exhaled by the blushing bride, I gathered that that small town lay south of the Mason and Dixon line.

I did not myself recognize the type, and I wanted to learn at once from what paper it had been clipped, if only to find out then what had befallen the editor in consequence. Had he left town? And if so, had he departed quietly under his own steam? Or noisily, and on a rail? I felt I must know. Wherefore, I went vainly from neighbor to neighbor until at last I found one who, with a maddening Good-God-What-Ignorance expression on his face, told me that it was from the Fountain Inn Tribune, a weekly newspaper edited in South Carolina by one Robert Quillen. Any fool, he implied, would have known that.

Until then I had never heard of that weekly and, as is so often the way, seemed immediately thereafter never to pick up a newspaper anywhere without finding in it some quotation from the Fountain Inn Tribune, much as one used to see all newspapers peppered with paragraphs from the Atlanta Constitution and the Yonkers Statesman. I have faithfully subscribed ever since, finding perennial and substantial refreshment in every line this Quillen writes for his paper, whether he be looking over a Presidential candidate or reporting the violent death of the hard-working housewife around the corner.

From the atlas and the postal guide, I found that Fountain Inn was a village of fifteen hundred people—white, black and blended—situate not far from Greenville in the uplands of South Carolina, and about sixty miles south of the fancy town of Asheville, where the wealthier strata of the phthisic go to breathe the sweet, rare air of the Blue Ridge. For a time, I dreamed of waylaying Master Quillen when, as most people do, he should pass through New York some day, but it finally dawned on me that anyone who wanted to see him would have to go, willy-nilly, to Fountain Inn.

I think that then and there I made a secret resolve to do just that when I could, and so find out for myself what manner of man this Quillen was and, since greater journals elsewhere must always be wanting him, what there was in Fountain Inn to keep him there. And, since he appeared to write up his fellow townsmen in so singularly uningratiating a manner, how he managed to get enough advertising to provide him with three square meals a day. Finally, in the spring, when the woodlands in Virginia and the Carolinas were lovely with the purple of the Judas tree, and the Valley of the Shenandoah was heavenly sweet with myriad apple blossoms, I drove a thousand miles to knock at Robert Quillen’s front door.

I knew I could recognize his garden by its far-famed granite shaft erected in honor of Eve, the First Woman. And by the gates of his front doorway. You see, I remembered the Tribune’s report of their installation:

The new iron gates for my front driveway arrived this week and will be put up as soon as Uncle Dick Jones finds time. They are uncommonly heavy gates, but a three-ton truck driven by a half-wit could crumple them up in accordion style. This, therefore, is fair warning that if and when these new gates are smashed, there will be a strange face in the idiot section of the New Jerusalem.

Then I had been promised a welcome. At least he had written me that if the hired girl said “Yes, sah, he’s in, but he’s wuckin’ an’ cain’t see nobody till two o’clock,” I was just to push her aside and come in anyway.

On the way I made inventory of what, since first I heard tell of him, I had already learned about this Quillen. I knew that he was a Kansan in his middle forties, that the name was originally McQuillen, and that there was French and Scotch blood in the pioneer stocks that had bred him. I knew that he was the author of two far-flung syndicated features called “Aunt Het” and “Willie Willis” respectively, that he wrote an editorial every day for the Washington Post and, most important of all, that he also wrote for syndication a batch of twenty-one paragraphs every day before lunch.

These are published in some papers over his signature, and in others scattered over the editorial page and in each community ascribed, no doubt, to local authorship. Indeed, when a punditical anthologist of American humor once undertook to list the hundred best paragraphs of the year, more than half of them turned out to be Quillen’s, but the anthologist never knew it.

The income from such an output explains why he is able to sit in Fountain Inn and edit the Tribune for his own amusement, spurning the cure-all advertisements which are the mainstay of such newspapers if they must pay their way, referring cheerfully to South Carolina, as an “illiterate, barbarous and murderous” community without fear of angering the subscribers or at least indifferent to their reprisals, and occasionally letting fly with some such scourge as that wedding notice which, though the names be fictitious, is recognized as deadly truth by the crowd reading it down at the filling station, or on the steps of the general store. Thus, when he embalms such vital statistics as this:

Born, on Monday, January 27, to Mr. and Mrs. Jim Daderight, a son. The little fellow has the community’s sincere sympathy. On his mother’s side are three idiots and one jailbird of record, and nobody on the father’s side of the house can count above four. With that start in life, he faces a world that will scorn and abuse and eventually hang him through no fault of his own—his readers down the street may know there are really no Daderights in Fountain Inn at all, but that Quillen has nevertheless said a mouthful about South Carolina.

As a faithful subscriber, I have bitter reason to know that he will sometimes let weeks go by without writing for the Tribune at all. When, with July and August burning Fountain Inn to a crisp, he sneaks off to the mountains up the road, or, when, haply, he has a belly-ache, or when he is just plain lazy, his place in the columns will be filled with a kind of oppressive digest of the current magazines, all of a distinctly improving trend. Then one year the subscribers found the entire issue of the New Year’s Eve number blank save for this brief hand-set notice:

The last blankety blank Tribune

for thisblankety blank year

The linotype is busted. No can do. That explains why the

Tribune is blank this week. It’s awful, but we can’t help it. Next

week we’ll do better. Meanwhile we wish you a Happy New Year.

And once, on Christmas Eve, in a spasm of sheer boredom, this announcement ran clear across the page:

The Tribune is for sale, lock, stock and barrel, subscription list, print shop equipment, paper stock and good will. The price is one dollar, no more, no less. This isn’t a joke but it is a bargain. The first responsible man who planks down one dollar gets it. The business will be turned over to him on January 1, 1926.

More than five hundred takers appeared within a week, but the Tribune had not been on the street more than a minute when the furniture dealer across the way—one of the few men in Fountain Inn who had a dollar—paid it over in person and took possession. That was in 1925. After three years of paying its losses, the new publisher found that Quillen was kind of hankering to edit the old sheet again, so he solemnly sold it back to him—for one dollar and no other valuable consideration.

Fountain Inn is just a desolate wide place in the road. To a stranger nowadays it would seem to have been named on the same principle which annoyed Voltaire in the matter of the Holy Roman Empire. As he pointed out crossly, it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. But I understand there is a spring outside the town which might conceivably be called a fountain, and it used to refresh travelers along the King’s Highway when, on their way from the low country to the backwoods, they stopped at a hewn-log tavern which survived until three years ago.

The office of the Tribune is a single-room shop on Main Street. A likely youngster from the town gathers the local items, runs the linotype and addresses the issue, while another boy (colored) feeds the press and cuts the grass. The four pages are printed one a day, and the local delivery problem is considerably simplified by the fact that as each page is run off the press, the subscribers come down and get it. The telephone has been taken out because the post office is next door and too many people got into the habit of calling up and asking the editorial staff to step in and see if they wuz any mail.

Then I came to the lovely oasis of green grass and water oaks and crimson ramblers which is Quillen’s own home on the highway. He was through “wuckin” when I got there, and it was he who opened the door. He has said this of himself:

Some days ago a Western newspaper, fooled by sassy-items in the Tribune, described me as a fire-eating son-of-a-gun scared of nothin’—a howling curly wolf seeking whom he may devour, and things like that. It’s funny the way a man is judged by his writings. I have been called everything from a long-whiskered sage to a lunatic. And to people here at home I am just a soft-hearted, bald-headed old cooter who likes common folks and doesn’t like uppity ones—who never intentionally hurts anybody’s feelings, perennially serves as an easy mark for people with hard-luck stories, and is led about by the nose by his womenfolks. In fact, the contrast between what I am and what strangers think me is so great that I always meet them with reluctance. I dread that look on their faces which means: “My gosh! Is this it?”

To this I would add only that there is a kind of deadly and alarming quiet about him. He speaks softly. His eyes are full of sly inner amusement. He says little, and his very walk is sly. He does not so much walk as glide, like a man skating on gum shoes.

There were one or two matters I wanted to clear up. For instance there was the problem presented by the horrid rumor that, within his grounds, Quillen had built a pillared Greek temple wherein he might withdraw from the heat of the sun and the hubbub of his household and write his little items for a hundred and one newspapers.

This seemed grossly improbable, yet there the alien thing stood with a lily pond in front of it and everything. Inside, it was hushed, chaste, cool, immaculate. Not so much as a stamp littered the gleaming surface of the desk. No speck of dust lingered on the set of Voltaire.

I collapsed in my effort to imagine him working there. It is in Quillen to jot down lines like this:

There is some co-operation between wild creatures. The stork and the wolf usually work the same neighborhood.

Or this:

A hick town is one where there is no place to go where you shouldn’t be.

Or this:

Character is made by what you stand for; reputation by what you fall for.

Or this:

Another good reducing exercise consists in placing both hands against the table edge and pushing back.

And I simply cannot imagine observations of that flavor, which ought really to be drawled from the top of a cracker barrel, issuing, under any circumstances, from so sedulously sanctified a spot as that Greek temple in a South Carolina garden. But it is all right. I found the key to the mystery. There is no doubt that Quillen did build that flossy retreat for himself. But at least he never works in it.

Then there is the matter of his stubborn sequestration. If, as he says, “Gosh! Is this it?” is the visitor’s first thought on meeting him, the first question is “But why Fountain Inn?” In truth there is, in the surface aspect of the town, no ready explanation why anyone should live there who need not. Quillen is not native to it. He was born in Syracuse, Kansas, and in his father’s shop grew up with the intoxicating smell of printer’s ink in his nostrils.

A tramp printer in his teens, he was spending a mean winter in the slush of western Pennsylvania when he read a notice which said that a man with a print-shop in Fountain Inn wanted someone to come down and start a newspaper for him. Something in the chilled marrow of his bones bade him answer, and he got the job. It was great fun writing pieces for the only editor who would never reject them. He has remained there ever since.

When he was writing editorials for the Baltimore Sun, there was a strong propaganda for his moving to the Chesapeake, but he contented himself with staying in Fountain Inn and sending a South Carolina possum to the gang on the Sun. He shipped it in a box padded with sweet potatoes. It was delayed in transit and was, they tell me, perceptibly aromatic by the time it reached the Sun in Baltimore. Three days later, Quillen received this telegram: “Polecat arrived. God will punish you.”

There be those who make a cult of small-town life and would imply that the moment a city’s population passes the hundred-thousand mark, the inhabitants abruptly and mysteriously cease to be human beings. Quillen feels that these pretty theorists expect him to play up to them, and sometimes he will go so far as to say smugly that he likes it in Fountain Inn because he gets a better view of America when he is close to poverty and dirt and there are no high buildings to assure him that man is a wonder.

On this score he has done enough lying to make him suspect, in moments of candor, that he may end up in Hell. He knows well enough that he could do his stuff on the top floor of the Empire State Building. The simple truth is that he strayed to that South Carolina village by chance and, except for the annual family flight to the nearby mountains, and his frequent afternoon junkets to Greenville for a movie, a haircut and a soda, he stays there because he married a girl who would not be happy anywhere else. That is Miss Marcelle, whose name is at the masthead of the paper as publisher, and who runs his house for him. If you really want to know what keeps him in Fountain Inn, it is Mrs. Quillen.

I hope she continues to keep him in his place—and writing pieces for its paper. In and through him the American stream flows on. Like Mark Twain, he could not conceivably have sprung from any other soil. He is of the salt of this land as are, in the same sense, the Vermonters I know and cherish. You may have heard of the old man up Rutland way to whom a pretty bird-brain from the big city once said, in the condescending manner such people always affect when talking to the yokelry, “Good morning, Uncle Bill. Is it going to stop raining?” “Well,” he replied after some reflection, “it always has.”

I know a proud-stomached motorist, the kind that would angrily drive fifty miles along the wrong road rather than abase himself to the extent of asking his way. Once, however, he was hopelessly lost at a Vermont crossroads and must needs unbend enough to ask guidance. Pulling up in front of the corner store, he called out sternly to the group on the steps: “I want to go to Dorset.” They all inspected him meditatively until one of the group took a straw out of his mouth long enough to say: “We’ve no objection.” That, it seems to me, is peculiarly American humor, homely, laconic, grouchy. Of such humor Quillen’s pawky oddments are all compact, and there is, I think, a great wisdom in them.

They constitute an implicit reminder that there was once a way of life called America, that it still exists and that it is worth cherishing. It will abide when much that we now think important is dust scattered down the wind. Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, our faith triumphant o’er our fears, are, I think, bound up in it inextricably. But perhaps it would be more to the point if I merely made a note on my calendar of the date on which my subscription renewal falls due.