The Mortgaged Heart (30 page)

The rest of the nonfiction published in a range of magazines, including the now defunct
Decision
edited by Klaus Mann, is for the most part concerned with writing—her own and that of other writers. "The Flowering Dream" is actually some of the notes from a longer work still in progress at the time of her death.

In addition to being able to detect suggestions of characters that appear in her fiction, such as the unlikely pair in "Brooklyn Is My Neighbourhood" who bear a similarity to Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon in
The Ballad of the Sad Café,
the reader can see Carson's themes weaving throughout all that she wrote—predominantly the search for identity, the ecclesiastical sense of time and chance, and love.

F
ROM THE WINDOWS
of my rooms in Brooklyn, there is a view of the Manhattan sky-line. The sky-scrapers, pastel mauve and yellow in colour, rise up sharp as stalagmites against the sky. My windows overlook the harbour, the grey East River, and the Brooklyn Bridge. In the night, there are the lonesome calls of the boats on the river and at sea. This water-front neighbourhood is the place where Thomas Wolfe used to live, and Hart Crane. Often when I am loafing by the window, looking out at the lights and the bright traffic crossing the Bridge, I think of them. And I am homesick in a way that they were often homesick.

It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the home town or the country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers. Poe turned inward to discover an eerie and glowing world of his own. Whitman, that noblest of vagabonds, saw life as a broad open road. Henry James abandoned his own adolescent country for England and the airy decadence of nineteenth-century drawing-rooms. Melville sent out his Captain Ahab to self-destruction
in the mad sailing for the great white whale. And Wolfe and Crane—they wandered for a lifetime, and I am not sure they knew themselves just what it was they sought.

But these writers, our spokesmen, are dead. And although the harbour and the Bridge instinctively make me think of them, I have these days remembered also a friend of mine from whom I got a card a couple of weeks ago.

My friend is named Lester, and he lives down in North Carolina. Lester is about twenty years old with a gangling body and a pleasant, sunburned face. He has some responsibility, as he is the eldest child in the family and his father is dead. He and his mother have a little store and filling-station on Highway U.S.
I
. This road runs from New York down through to Miami. It cuts through the long coastal plain that lies between the Appalachian Hills and the Atlantic. There are thousands of stands and filling-stations on this highway.

Lester takes care of the gas-pump and waits behind the counter of the store. This filling-station is out in the country a few miles from the town where I used to live, so sometimes when I was out walking in the woods I would stop in and warm myself by the stove and drink a glass of beer. Coming out of the pine woods and crossing the grey winter fields, it was good to see the lights ahead.

In the afternoon, the store would be cosy and quiet, with the air smelling of sawdust and smoke, and with the sleepy ticking of a clock the only sound in the room. Sometimes Lester would be out hunting and would come in as I was drinking my beer. He would come in from the frosty twilight with his wet-nosed hound, and maybe in his sack there would be a couple of quail for his mother to fry at suppertime. Other days, if the weather were warm, I would watch Lester just sitting on a crate by the gas-pump, a peaceful halo of flies around his head, waiting for some tourist to pass along the road and stop for service.

Lester was a great traveller. He had hitch-hiked a good deal and seen much of the country. But mostly he had travelled in his mind. On the shelf behind the counter of the store there were stacks of old
National Geographies
and a collection of atlases. When I knew Lester first it was long before the war had started, and the maps were different then. "Paris, France," Lester would say to me. "That's where I mean to go someday. And Russia and India and down in the jungles of Africa—"

It was a passion with Lester—this hunger to know the world. As he talked of the cities of Europe, his grey eyes widened, and there was about them a quality of quiet craziness. Sometimes as we were sitting there, a car would pull up to the gas-pump, and the manner in which Lester treated the customer would depend on several things. If the driver were known to him, someone from those parts, Lester did not put himself to much trouble. But if the licence plate were from some distant place, such as New York or California, he polished the windshield lovingly, and his voice became gentle and slurred.

He had a deft way of extracting information as to the places the tourist had seen in his lifetime. Once a man stopped who had lived in Paris, and Lester made friends with him and got him drunk on white-lightning so that the customer had to stay overnight in the town.

Lester did not often talk about the places he had actually seen, but he knew much of America. A couple of years before he had gone into the C.C.C. and had been sent out to the forests of Oregon. He had passed over the prairies of the Middle West and seen the tawny wheat-fields under the summer sun. He had crossed the Rockies and looked out on the magnificence of the Pacific Ocean.

Then later, after a year in the Oregon camp, he had stayed for a while with an uncle in San Diego. On his way home again, he had hitch-hiked and taken a zigzagged course—through Arizona, Texas, the delta of the Mississippi. He had seen south Georgia in peach time and discovered the lazy grandeur of Charleston. He had come back to North Carolina in time for the tobacco harvest, after having been away from home two years.

But about this odyssey Lester did not talk much. His longing was never for home, or for the places he had seen and known and made a part of himself. He hungered always for the alien, the country far away
and unattainable. And in the meantime he was wretched in his own countryside, and waited by the gas-pump thinking always of distant things.

When the war started, Lester did not concern himself as much with the happenings in Europe as I had expected. He was convinced that the war could not last longer than a few months because Hitler would run out of gasoline. Then in the late spring I went away and did not hear from him until his card reached me this autumn. He mentioned the tobacco crop and told me his hound had got mange. At the end he wrote: "Look at what happened to the places I meant to go. There is certainly one thing about this war. It leaves you no place to be homesick for."

A lonely little store and gas-pump down on Highway U.S.
I
seems far away from the harbour of Manhattan. And Lester, a foot-loose adolescent, does not appear to have very much in common with our poets of the time before the war—with Wolfe and Hart Crane. But their longing, their restlessness, their turning to the unknown is the same.

There are thousands of Lesters, but poets come rarely and are the spiritual syntheses of their time and place. And the world of these poets, and of all of us who lived before this debacle, has been ruthlessly amputated from the world of today. Frontiers, both of the earth and of the spirit, were open to them and have since been closed to us. America is now isolated in a way that we never before could have foreseen.

The Manhattan harbour is quiet this year. Wolfe and Hart Crane no longer wander in these water-front streets—Wolfe maddened by unfocused longing. Hart Crane sick for a nameless place and broken and inflamed by drink. The harbour, yes, is quieter now, and the great ships from abroad do not come to port so often any more. Most of the boats I see from my windows are the small sort that did not go out far from shore. In the late autumn afternoons, a soft fog veils the sky-line of Manhattan. There is a sadness about this scene. And no wonder—a sky-line facing outward toward the Atlantic and the grim convulsions of the world beyond. Not only sad, but somehow hopeless.

So we must turn inward. This singular emotion, the nostalgia that has been so much a part of our national character, must be converted to good use. What our seekers have sought for we must find. And this is a great, a creative task. America is youthful, but it can not always be young. Like an adolescent who must part with his broken family, America feels now the shock of transition. But a new and serene maturity will come if it is worked for. We must make a new declaration of independence, a spiritual rather than a political one this time. No place to be homesick for. We must now be homesick for our own familiar land, this land that is worthy of our nostalgia.

[
Vogue,
December 1, 1940]

O
N THIS NIGHT
—the last dark evening of the old year and the first morning of the new—there will be listeners over all the earth. Big Ben will sound at midnight. It may be that in the last hour the Clock Tower itself will be damaged or destroyed. But even so the bells of Big Ben will be heard. For there is a tense listening independent of the ear, a listening that causes the blood to wait and the heart itself for a moment to be hushed.

England will hear Big Ben in darkness. Perhaps as the hour is tolled, there will be the roar of explosives and the deathly murmur of bombing planes—or the night may be a quiet one over there. In any case the bell will sound in our mind's ear. And these will be among the listeners: the sentries keeping watch over the dark channel; the city people in the air-raid shelters; and the homeless who huddle together on the platforms of the tubes; old farmers in wayside pubs. In the wards of hospitals the hurt and restless they also will hear. And somewhere a frightened child with an upturned face. A rough, rosy soldier on duty at an airport will blow warm breath into his cupped hands, stamp on the frosty ground, and stand silent for a moment at midnight These, then, will hear—for the sound will echo through the cities and all the countryside of the dark island.

Nor will the echoes stop there. The time will not actually be midnight everywhere. But the twelve slow strokes will for a moment seem to effect a synthesis of time throughout the world. In the defeated lands Big Ben will bring hope and, to the souls of many, a fevered quiver of rebellion. And if the people of the Axis countries were allowed to hear this bell who knows what their feelings and their doubts might be?

We in America will be listeners on this New Year. In all the states the tones of Big Ben will be broadcast. From Oregon to Georgia, in the homes of the comfortable who taste egg-nog from silver cups and in the grim tenements of the poor, the English New Year will be heard. Down in the South it will be early evening. Quiet, orange firelight will flicker on kitchen walls, and in the cupboards there will be the hog-jowl and the black-eyed peas to bring good fortune in the coming year. On the Pacific coast the sun will still be shining. In the Northern homes, with the cold blue glow of snow outside, the gathered families will wait for the hour.

On this night, London may be grey with fog, or the clean moonlight may make of the Clock Tower a silhouette against the winter sky. But when the bells sound it will be the heartbeat of warring Britain—somber, resonant, and deeply sure. Yes, Big Ben will ring again this New Year, and over all the earth there will be listeners.

[
Vogue,
January 1, 1941]

B
ROOKLYN
, in a dignified way, is a fantastic place. The street where I now live has a quietness and sense of permanence that seem to belong to the nineteenth century. The street is very short. At one end, there are comfortable old houses, with gracious facades and pleasant backyards in the rear. Down on the next block, the street becomes more heterogeneous, for there is a fire station; a convent; and a small candy factory. The street is bordered with maple-trees, and in the autumn the children rake up the leaves and make bonfires in the gutter.

It is strange in New York to find yourself living in a real neighbourhood. I buy my coal from the man who lives next-door. And I am very curious about the old lady living on my right. She has a mania for picking up stray, starving dogs. Besides a dozen of these dogs, she keeps a little green, shrewd monkey as her pet and chief companion. She is said to be very rich and very stingy. The druggist on the corner has told me she was once in jail for smashing the windows of a saloon in a temperance riot.

"The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to—"

On coming into the corner drug store in the evening, you are apt to hear a desperate voice repeating some such maxim. Mr. Parker, the druggist, sits behind the counter after supper, struggling with his daughter's homework—she can't seem to get on well in school. Mr. Parker has owned his store for thirty years. He has a pale face, with watery grey eyes and a silky little yellow mustache that he wets and combs out frequently. He is rather like a cat. And when I weigh myself, he sidles up quietly beside me and peers over my shoulder as I adjust the scale. When the weights are balanced, he always gives me a quick little glance, but he has never made any comment, nor indicated in any way whether he thought I weighed too little or too much.

On every other subject, Mr. Parker is very talkative. He has always lived in Brooklyn, and his mind is a rag-bag for odd scraps of information. For instance, in our neighbourhood there is a narrow alley called Love Lane. "The alley comes by its name," he told me, "because more than a century ago two bachelors by the name of DeBevoise lived in the corner house with their niece, a girl of such beauty that her suitors mooned in the alley half the night, writing poetry on the fence." These same old uncles, Mr. Parker added, cultivated the first strawberries sold in New York in their back garden. It is pleasant to think of this old household—the parlour with the coloured glass windows glowing in the candlelight, the two old gentlemen brooding quietly over a game of chess, and the young niece, demure on a footstool, eating strawberries and cream.