The Man says
Brilliance -I’ll tell you what that was, at least for me. I wrote several things that people called “brilliant.” One in particular, a little play of decadent epigram. It was acted amateurs before an admiring “select” audience. That was when I was twenty-one. From about sixteen on I had been acutely miserable -physically miserable. I never knew when I wouldn’t actually cave in. I felt like a bankrupt living on borrowed money. Of course, it’s plain enough now -the revolt of starved nerves. I cared only for my mind, grew only in that, and the rest of me withered up like a stalk in dry soil. So the flower drooped too -in decadent epigram. But nobody pointed out the truth of it all to me, and I scorned to give my body a thought. People predicted a brilliant future -for me, crying inside! Then I married. I married the girl who had taken the star part in the play. According to the logic of the situation, it was inevitable. Everybody remarked how inevitable it was. A decorative girl, you know. She wanted to be the wife of a great man…. Well, we didn’t get along. There was an honest streak in me somewhere which hated deception. I couldn’t play the part of “brilliant” young poet with any success. She was at me all the while to write more of the same thing. And I didn’t want to. The difference between the “great” man I was supposed to be and the sick child I really was, began to torture. I knew I oughtn’t to go on any further if I wanted to do anything real. Then one night we had an “artistic” dinner. My wife had gotten hold of a famous English poet, and through him a publisher. The publisher was her real game. I drank champagne before dinner so as to be “brilliant.” I was. And before I realized it, Norah had secured a promise from the publisher to bring out a book of plays. I remember she said it was practically finished. But it wasn’t, only the one, and I hated that. But I sat down conscientiously to write the book that she, and apparently all the world that counted, expected me to write. Well, I couldn’t write it. Not a blessed word! Something inside me refused to work. And there I was. In a month or so she began to ask about it. Norah thought I ought to turn them out while she waited. I walked up and down the park one afternoon wondering what to tell her…. And when I realized that either she would never understand or would despise me, I grew desperate. I wrote her a note, full of fine phrases about “incompatibility,” her “unapproachable ideals,” the “soul’s need of freedom” -things she would understand and wear a heroic attitude about -and fled. I came here….