Manhattan Monologues by Louis Auchincloss Page A

afternoons.
    If tall and slender, he was also firmly built and smartly clad, even for a country hike, usually in soft gray, as if to match the thick and prematurely whitening hair that descended in a triangle over a high clear brow, pointing to the thin tip of his aquiline nose. His voice was low and grave, his articulation precise, and his blue-gray eyes twinkled with a mockery that was inconsistently gentle. He had been, I learned from my parents, a long-time bachelor, marrying late the woman he had adored and continued to adore, having awaited her through two messy divorces.
    He was the first adult who had ever
listened
to me. My teachers at school were interested only in testing what I had learned, and my parents only in detecting some signs of a sensible maturity. But Mr. Slocum exhibited what I came to accept as a genuine desire to share with me the delights of poetry; he loved to quote and hear me quote bits of Shelley and Keats, and soon he was widening my literary horizon with choices of his own, particularly with samples of his idol, George Meredith.
    "He's the only example we have, besides Hardy," he suggested, "of a man who was at once a great poet and a great novelist. In English, that is. The French, of course, have Hugo. Meredith shows us that no literary form is beyond the range of a great romantic."
    That very night I found
Diana of the Crossways
in one of the standard sets in the family library and finished it by the weekend. Mr. Slocum then lent me his signed first edition of
Modern Love,
which I devoured, wondering whether the adultery of Meredith's first wife, which had so notoriously inspired the sonnet sequence, had a duplicate in Mr. Slocum's vision of his own wife's stormy love life. But I dared not ask him.
    When, as our mutual trust developed, I confided in him some of my distaste for school and for Cedarhurst society, he reminded me forcefully of my blessings. "You have the marshes, Tony! You've had the sense to grab hold of them and make them your own. Never underestimate that, my boy. The terns and the gulls and the herons. And you and I may have the luck to spot again that prothonotary warbler you were lucky enough to sight."
    "But what can I do with all that? When I'm a lawyer or a broker or whatever?"
    "What does it matter what you'll
do
with it? You'll have your visions."
    "Visions of what?"
    He embraced our landscape with a wide gesture. "All of that. What you see today."
    "You mean if I write it down? In a poem, say?"
    "Well, yes, if you like, though it's not essential. I used to write sonnets in the trenches during the war about the old abbey in Normandy that my father converted into our summer house."
    "Did you ever publish them?"
    "Oh, no. They were no good."
    "How do you know? Did anyone ever read them?"
    "Never. They were just mine. A single poet and a single reader. It was a very satisfactory relationship. A very fine one."
    "But isn't that selfish?" I asked, more boldly now. "Shouldn't beautiful things be shared? Suppose Shakespeare had burned
Hamlet
when he finished it?"
    "Well, my efforts were not
Hamlet.
But I won't get into the pros and cons of publishing. What I suggest is that some great art may never have seen the light of day. Because it was utterly free of the egotism and passion for glory that consumes so many writers."
    "You mean like Emily Dickinson locking up her poems?"
    "Or Cézanne abandoning a canvas in the woods. Or Wordsworth leaving the
Prelude
unprinted for fifty years. I'm glad, of course, that those wonderful things were recovered for posterity; my only point is that the complete absence of ego, or its complete assimilation into the work created, may be a mark of great art. Like Emily Dickinson's slant of light on a winter afternoon. Do you know it?"
    I asked him to recall it to me, and he recited slowly:
When it comes, the landscape listens—
Shadows—hold their breath—
When it goes, 'tis like the distance
On the look of death—
    "Don't you