This is a fairy tale. And it is a success story. It is a story which is not only full of goodness and beauty, but it is also a true story. It is full of purity, innocence, and happiness. Since it is the kind of experience which could only occur in America and the kind of a story which has and must have a happy ending, it shows that America has to be discovered again and again by everyone in America, for America is always new and always full of the unknown and undiscovered.
Melvin Smith was a prosperous businessman. He was a manufacturer of scholastic jewelry and thus his prosperity was comparatively stable because whenever a young boy or girl was graduated from high school or college, the parents felt that it was a matter of pride to congratulate their progeny by presenting them with a scholastic ring or some other form of scholastic jewelry as a reward and as a token of their progress in higher education.
His wife, Naomi Smith, was a strong and domineering woman who had helped her husband in business from the very start, when he was very poor; and she had become an equal and far from silent partner, as soon as the business became successful.
Melvin Smith wanted his son to be his junior partner as soon as he was graduated from high school. But Paul asked his father to give him just one year at college. And since so many other boys were also going to college, it was difficult to deny Paul’s desire. The father’s feeling for his son was a very strong one, for he thought of him as a part of himself, refreshed, renewed, youthful once more. He felt almost as intensely about his son as he felt about his own body when he had a toothache, or an upset stomach. There were two other children, Mildred—but she was a girl and thus did not satisfy the father’s need—and Howard—but he was just a little boy, and the father was only able to think of him as the baby of the family.
Paul went to a Midwestern university, for it was only by going out of town that he was able to believe that he was really going to college as he had fondly imagined it. He was unhappy there, since he was afraid of girls. This was the one remaining dreg or drag of his shyness. In all other things he made his voice heard, but he thought that he was too plain for girls to like him very much. He was plain, but not repellent, as he supposed, and when he asked a dormitory friend if any girl would ever really love him, the friend thought that Paul must be joking. Then his friend perceived that Paul was not joking, that he awaited an answer fearful that his doubts would be confirmed. Hence the friend sought to explain to Paul that most girls were not really interested in good-looking men, they wanted something else, a sense of power, or a sense of importance, for the sake of their unborn children. But Paul would not believe him. He thought that his friend was just trying to reassure him.
“You just like to cheer up your friends,” Paul declared, self-convinced and self-dismayed. Some three years before this time, having been told that one grew to look like the objects one looked at a great deal, he had purchased a bust of Apollo, placed it in his bedroom, looked at it as much as possible for the next few months, and obtained no results.
Paul did not know that his exuberance and his bouncing, exciting, delightful vitality made him attractive to girls. What happened on dates was that he rushed to make amorous overtures, he rushed for fear of rejection, and when his haste was criticized, he concluded that was an absolute judgment and refusal.
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During the first year at this Midwestern university, Paul became known to the other students, and in fact he was loved as a delightful fantast who did many hilarious things. He was arrested for drunkenness and he argued with the policeman and the judge that they had no right to judge him because they had studied neither Plato’s Republic, nor the works of D. H. Lawrence, where the necessity of spontaneity and wholeness of being was shown to be an imperative of nature, an imperative blocked and frustrated by our industrial civilization, thus forcing all who were intelligent and sensitive to take up hard liquor and sprees. No one really knew what he was saying, but it seemed to some charming and to some hilarious.
And when he walked up the steps of the library with his crony Sylvester, who like him came from New York, and when Sylvester asked him to speak in a lower voice, if he used four-letter words (Sylvester was more sensitive than Paul to conventional mores), Paul responded by denouncing the conventions and the squeamishness of gentility, of academic institutions, of the entire middle class.
“I face the facts,” he shouted to Sylvester, “I use four-letter words because existence is full of four-letter facts and phenomena! I refuse to be an ostrich! And I don’t care if all the nervous prudes shudder when they hear Four! Four! Four! As for me, I like it very much, I find it delightful. It is delicious. It is most enjoyable, Four! Four! Four!”
When, during the worst part of the great depression and during the year before the New Deal began, Paul Smith began to become very much interested in Marxism, he became a member of the student political group which was called YPCL, or Young People’s Communist League. Voluble and dogmatic as ever, Paul argued with his friend Sylvester about Marxism and Communism and the Soviet Union and he had like arguments, when he went home during holidays, with his father.
Sylvester infuriated Paul by telling him that he did not understand his own motives for being interested in Marxism or joining the YPCL’s. Even when Paul was elected president of the YPCL’s, a post he desired for its own sake and in the hope that it would make him more attractive to the girls who were his comrades, Paul refused to admit that his reasons for being a political radical were purely personal and sexual and artistic.
“How about you?” said Paul, irritated and triumphant. “What reason is there for your hatred of Marxism and Communism except the fact that you are a serf of the lower middle class and lack the courage to emerge from your class and place and join the brotherhood of the human race.”
Sylvester told Paul that he would change his mind again and again, but Sylvester did not suspect that in twenty years’ time Paul would be an ardent and self-righteous defender of Senators McCarthy and Jenner, arguing as violently about their political Tightness as he argued in defense of Josef Stalin, Karl Marx, and the Soviet Union.
“You can’t tell me that the one hundred fifty million people of the Soviet Union are all wrong!” Paul cried loudly to Sylvester.
“Many millions of human beings have been wrong again and again and will be wrong again and again,” said Sylvester hopelessly.
“What egotism!” said Paul, “You think you’re right and yet you’re only one among millions and millions of human beings: a guy like you ought to want to be something more than a lackey of the lower middle-class.”
“I just want to be a human being,” said Sylvester, hopelessly and hopefully, “a human being and an American: I was born in Brooklyn and thus I was fortunate enough to be born a native of the United States, an American; but what I want now is to be permitted the right implicit in the Constitution, the right to the pursuit of being a human being and not the hypnotized puppet of an economical interpretation of history and of human nature.”
“Chauvinism, pure chauvinism!” said Paul, stalking off in ideological indignation.
During school holidays, Paul had arguments of a like kind with his father. Melvin Smith told his son with pride that since he was the son of a capitalist, he ought to be a capitalist himself, and join the family business as junior partner, instead of joining the traitors and revolutionists who were trying to destroy capitalism and take over the family business.
“If I were not a capitalist,” said Melvin Smith, “you would not be going to an out-of-town college. You would be a shipping clerk in the garment center and a parlor socialist on Sundays and holidays. You can’t have your cake and eat it too unless you want indigestion and constipation or unless you are a capitalist and can afford to buy more and more cake.”
In reply, Paul denounced him as a vicious and shameless sentimentalist as well as a petty bourgeois blinded by capitalist lies.
But Paul did not remain a Communist for very long. He had become interested in music and in making music and he decided to be a great musician like Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. For a long time he had been delighted by jazz music and he had played the piano very well with a small jazz band on Saturday nights. But now he decided that he was against jazz, he detested it. Jazz was a debased expression of the anxiety and frustration of the creative, progressive, and revolutionary working-class.
His interest in studying classical music came into conflict with his political activity very soon, and he quickly decided that he was through with Communism, a shift which was made the more rapid when two factions of his party unit sought to win his favor by denouncing the other faction as in the pay of the police, an accusation entirely untrue of both factions.
“Something quite theatrical,” Paul told Sylvester, “theatrical and histrionic about their behavior. It is as if they were acting out the scenario written for them by previous revolutionary movements. The police are called the Cossacks, not the cops.”
At the music school where Paul now went to study harmony and counterpoint, he denounced anyone who seemed to be conscious of the trials and crises of society. He said that they really hated art and tried to deform it. And he studied very hard, amid his denunciations, and he fell in love with an extremely pretty and extremely self-conscious girl named Dorothea. Dorothea was also an ambitious musician and she responded first of all to Paul’s extravagant vitality and forthrightness, even though she sometimes was shocked by his foul language. Dorothea not only admired Paul very much, but she was sure that he was a genius: she thought that she was a genius too, but said nothing about this certainty to Paul or anyone else.
In a short time, Paul and Dorothea were very much in love with each other, and when Dorothea introduced Paul to her parents, and told them she intended to marry Paul, they were horrified. Paul’s preoccupation with the writing of great music was set to one side when Dorothea told him of her parents’ refusal to accept Paul as her husband and their son-in-law. He recognized for the first time that Dorothea was not only very intelligent but that she was very much in love with him: hence he became even more in love with her than he had been all along, and he proposed an elopement, immediately. Despite the poverty which troubled Paul so much, since his father refused to do more than pay his tuition fee, Paul insisted that Dorothea elope with him immediately. Paul was in a hurry and Dorothea was thrilled by the idea of an elopement, and even more thrilled because her parents prohibited her marriage to a genius. She was also thrilled because Paul was in a hurry, he was always in a hurry; he kept saying that either the elopement occurred immediately or he would live a celibate’s life, just as Beethoven had. After six weeks of disputation and impatience, Paul and Dorothea eloped and were married. Neither of them had any money and Paul had to take a poor job with sheet music publishers, and the newly wedded couple had to live in a seedy rooming house.
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Soon enough Paul was writing arrangements for jazz bands. Soon he was leading his own jazz band. But he did not in the least surrender or forget his desire to be a great composer. He began his second symphony and Dorothea, who had voiced her suspicion that the dean of the music school was jealous of Paul, encouraged him passionately.
“I know I am right,” said Dorothea. “You will prove that I am right and that you are a great composer.”
And she supported her hope and admiration for her husband by drawing forth her inexhaustible fund of examples of unrecognized genius in music and in the other arts as well.
“How can it possibly be otherwise, dearest,” she argued. “How can genius as original and unique as yours be clear to everyone from the very start?”
“But dearest,” said Paul reasonably, “you know that you are my wife and that you love me, that’s why you see me the way you do.”
“I would not love you,” Dorothea answered, “if you were not what you are. When you love a person you know him better than anyone else does. Think of the late quartets of Beethoven, of Cézanne, of Van Gogh, of Keats, and Emily Dickinson. No one knew how wonderful they were. And Shakespeare did not know that he was Shakespeare! If he had, he would not have let some of his best plays remain unpublished during his lifetime.”
Paul was somewhat consoled by these remarks. And he found himself resorting to declarations of despair just to elicit reassurance from Dorothea, a reassurance rich in examples and praise which compared him with immortal masters.
Paul became a very successful jazz band leader and he played once a week on the radio also. He earned a very handsome salary, and he lived very well. His parents and his wife’s parents were now very proud of him, bragged about his early success. Paul and Dorothea began to move among the famous and the rich, and they acquired a taste for expensive living, and they took an apartment in a fashionable neighborhood. Paul tried hard to save enough money to be able to stop conducting for a time, so that he might finish his second symphony, but this desire was contradicted and denied by their ever-increasing desire to live well and to know interesting and gifted people who were in the limelight, or the public eye, as Paul said.
Paul’s success as a jazz band leader was secure. It depended upon effervescence and vitality more than upon his musicianship, but Paul strove to ignore this dependence whenever he became conscious of it. Finally, Paul secured six months of leisure, finished his second symphony, and persuaded a major orchestra to perform it.
The performance was to occur in the fall; during the summer Paul saw his friend Sylvester who was now a lawyer, none too successful, but quite content with his lot. Paul told Sylvester that he had really accomplished something new in music.
“I have augmented the world of sound in a fundamental way,” he declared.
Sylvester was used to such declarations and he was pleased to hear them because he knew that it meant that his friend, of whom he was very fond, was feeling very good.
During their meetings of recent years, the friends had argued long and in vain about the possibility of being a serious composer and yet a popular one.
“Shakespeare did it,” Paul insisted in a clamorous way. “If he did it, there is no reason why it can’t be done today.”
Sylvester felt that the Elizabethan age was different from the present. The analogy was wrong, and the whole character of modern society seemed to him to make it very difficult for a serious musician to be popular, except by some freak or accident.
“You are a melancholy Lear, howling in the wilderness,” answered Paul.
But when his symphony was performed that fall and praised politely and quickly forgotten, Paul was full of dismay. He felt that he was right back where he had started. Dorothea’s reassurances were again necessary, and now they were more extreme, more exaggerated than ever.
Paul returned to conducting a jazz band at a fashionable hotel, and he played once a week on the radio. He was determined as ever to be a great composer, and he began to think of his third symphony and his fourth—perhaps if he produced the two at once, he might win the acclaim he desired so much. But he also desired and enjoyed the pleasures and comforts of his standard of living, and this desire was encouraged in him by Dorothea just as much as his ambition as a composer. Husband and wife still denied to each other and to friends that there was any real conflict between the two desires.
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The year before, Paul’s sister Mildred had married a likely young man who was nothing if not willing to take Melvin Smith’s place in his business. Melvin Smith retired and the business continued to prosper, just as before. Since he had nothing to do with himself, Melvin Smith began to go to all the art shows in New York City, and then he began to paint himself, and in a comparatively short period of time, he was a primitive abstractionist. He showed his canvases to various art dealers, and to Claude Vermont, the brilliant critic of modern art, who told him that his primitive abstractionism was far superior to the primitive paintings of Grandma Moses. This sufficed to secure Melvin Smith a one-man show and one of his paintings was purchased by the Museum of Primitive Modern Art.
Melvin Smith gave two of his paintings to his son and daughter-in-law, and visited them frequently without announcing his coming to be sure that they kept his paintings upon the wall of their handsome Bauhaus living room.
When Paul told his father that he did not care for primitive or abstract art, he infuriated his fond father once again.
“You have sold out,” said Melvin Smith to his successful son. “You have sold out to Tin Pan Alley. Why don’t you be like Bela Bartok? Money is not everything: I will be your patron, if necessary! I will support you for at least two years if you write the kind of music you really want to write instead of writing tinkle and tom-tom for Tin Pan Alley!” Melvin Smith became aware that he was shouting and he lowered his voice, “Don’t you see that you will be much more satisfied with yourself, in the long run, if you stop wasting your time on pleasing the public? If you would just follow Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, and Prokofiev, you would enjoy the most important feeling in life, self-respect. You are just as good as you want to be! I knew that this was true when I was a boy and I know that it is true now.”
Paul was silenced for the first time in fifteen years. He did not know what to say in reply to his father. He felt sure that the world was coming to an end, or at least the world as he had known it. He had tried to remind his father how much parental resistance there had been to his becoming a musician at all, and how much family pride there had been when he was a popular and successful composer listened to on the radio and frequently in the public eye.
But his protestation was quite in vain. And in the depths of his heart in all truth Paul himself was unable to disagree with his father or possess any strong conviction that his father was wrong and he was right.
How beautiful this success story is, how good, how true! It is the equal of any fairy tale, it is full of purity, innocence, and happiness. It is like a newborn child. It is as if one were to say, believe, and hope that America were going to be discovered again.
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