Читать книгу Wickford Point онлайн

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A veritable galaxy of beauty.... Here at last is a novel of America with the mysticism of A Blithedale Romance and the rustic humor of a Hardy.

Utterly breath-taking.... One need look no further for this year's best seller.

"How's it going?" Allen asked. "Do you like it? Do you like it really?"

Then I knew that the time had come to be kind, that everyone has some quality of mercy. The time had come to say something that would not wound him.

"You've given everything you have," I said.

Allen stood up very straight.

"Thanks, Jim," he said. "You really see that, do you? You really feel that? You're not laughing?"

"No," I said, "I'm not laughing."

"Then I guess everything's all right," Allen said. "Jim, I can't begin to thank you. But go ahead and finish it."

It would have been unkind to laugh. He was trying like other outlanders to write a novel of New England, and unfortunately he had come from Minnesota. He was trying to be a fearless modern Hawthorne, bringing to his work the physical aspects of existence which he had gathered from the modern school. His theme dealt with that transient intellectual blooming in the Wickford Valley, which had once boasted a tenuous connection with the life of transcendental Concord. Even in its unnaturalness it was a scene with which I was partially familiar, because our whole family was a product of the blooming, although I had not thought of it just that way. It was the narration of a scholar, decorated and redecorated by stray sprigs of knowledge, gleaned from his research into the lives of the Thoreaus, Alcotts, and the rest of the New England intelligentsia. When he left fact behind to rely upon his imagination, the result was very bad. The attempts at humor were elephantine; the attempts at naturalness genuinely embarrassing. Yet in spite of clumsiness the pages had the arresting quality which sometimes makes bad work more provocative than good. I might have told him a number of ways to fix up those pages, but he would not have listened. What piqued me was my previous discovery, which grew the more bizarre when I thought of it, that I was a part of what he was trying to say, and that I could say it better.