James Norman Hall 1887-1951

1887-1951

by ELLERY SEDGWICK

WHEN James of Norman Hall was was born, the mold of Iowa clay was broken, never to be used again. Romance goes pulsing through the veins of many a farmer’s son, but in Hall it had to break through gates and locks tight closed. Diffidence checked it: fastidiousness choked it; inertia, which so often paralyzes good in a bad world, might well have been the death of it. That he lived the life he did proves that all is possible. Providence may seem made of brass, but sometimes there is a streak of sympathy within, some latent trace of conscience, which cannot bear to lose an opportunity that may not come again.

Every quality of Hall’s pulled hard against every other. Yet he won through, and Luck, so indifferent to young men whose ambition does not lie on the surface, turned up trumps. Just because a dozen opposing traits so warred within him that forward motion seemed impossible, she produced Charles Nordhoff, quite obviously for the purpose of transferring the drawn battle within to a manlier contest with the outer world. Civil wars are forgotten when invasion comes, and just so Nordhoff’s militant spirit denied Hall the privilege of wrestling peaceably with his own angel and forced him to put up his hands and fight. Nordhoff prodded and Hall accepted the challenge.

How well I remember the two boys — for still boys they were when, the First World War over, they came to the Atlantic to take counsel concerning their lifework. One passionate desire they held in common binding them together tighter than all the rest. Their intensest, freest life, each had lived alone, flying thousands of feet above the filth and beastliness of the trenches. When they fought their final battles, the Age of Chivalry was curiously reincarnate in another element, and now that peace had come they revolted against what seemed to them the sluttishness of modern life, where men fought not for a cause but selfishly, haggling for their dollars and their bread. To live they must find new heavens and new earth. So it was they went together to the South Seas.

What a contrast, those two young men! Nordhoff slightly scornful, very ambitious, Hall modest to a fault; Nordhoff skeptical and distrusting, Hall with no formulated belief but trusting absolutely in good. Both had a compelling sense of beauty; but for Nordhoff it was the beauty of strength and the outward world, for Hall the fairness of the inner, poetry and dream. Nordhoff was strikingly handsome in those days, a young David straight as a javelin, with aristocratic features and a manner that showed friendliness was not to be imposed upon. Hall wore a homely pleasantness about him reminding one, in spite of his soldiering abroad, of the good earth of his father’s farm. Nordhoff had his inhibitions, too, but he was full of confidence and too eager to let doubts raise their interrogating heads. As he sat smiling in his chair, you knew that Hall’s ambition was some lonely, lovely haven where he could dream out his dreams.

Copyright 1951, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

They were young then and Life turned them topsy-turvy as Life is apt to do, but the picture of those days is what I best like to remember. My own happened to be the life I loved, but a desk chair has its prosaic aspects and their adventure was my vicarious romance, Hall and Nordhoff were my Dioscuri.

2

THE isles of the South Seas turned out to have their less idyllic aspects. Sunshine and perfume are no aids to composition; spicy breezes and opaline wavelets play hob with work. There were times when the manna of the breadfruit tree offered their only supper, and fish their single source of vitamins; times when Nordhoff’s leg, injured on barnacles, would not heal, when Hall feared his subtropical ailment might be the precursor of elephantiasis. Then Providence, long asleep, woke up.

Living within a mile or two of the young men, in a heavenly Tahitian garden, was their friend and guardian, Skipper Smith, of whom Legend tells this story. Now Legend has a great advantage over History through telling what ought to have happened, as History seldom takes pains to do. Long and arduously Professor Smith had toiled at his roll-top desk in Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One morning he was surveying in disgust this symbol of weary years. Suddenly he looked down and noted lying upon it an envelope with a lawyer’s name printed in the corner. The letter ran somewhat as follows, just as it would have if printed in the Youth’s Companion: “This will notify you that your aunt, Mrs. S., has named you as her exclusive heir. Her property valued at $500,000 can be converted into cash at your discretion. This pleasing missive Smith read three times. His unremembered affection for the dear old lady came vividly to mind. Instinctively his arms shot up, and down rolled the old top, closing with an everlasting click.

That very afternoon ex-Professor Smith called on his friend, Professor Barbour of the Peabody Museum. “Tom,” he asked, “what is the most, interesting thing a man like me can do?” The answer came back: “Cultivate dendrology in Borneo.”

So dendrology it was, and Borneo too; but in after years Skipper Smith — for a layman’s title had replaced the academic — had transported his garden to a still more enchanting spot in Tahiti, where he soon assumed paternal relations with our heroes. More than that, he wrote to me invaluable letters concerning their health and the more delicate matter of how much lotus-eating was good for them. I acted warily. Instead of direct subsidies, I sent money to the Skipper, instructing him to dole it out as if every dollar were the last — he to bear all reproaches, I to reap the reward. Meantime I saw to it that the war insurance policies should not lapse.

Of this confidential arrangement I think neither Hall nor Nordhoff ever knew the details. Certainly it was successful. While the hibiscus exhaled its delicate scent, the young noses were held fast to the grindstone.

Original causes are hard to seek, but it chanced that in my nursery at Stoekbridge, Massachusetts, was a volume bound in red, bearing the title Pitcairn’s Island. At eight I pored over this book and often served as one of the Bounty’s crew mutinying under the old hemlock on the lawn. On one of his American holidays, Hall and I were silting on my piazza. My vague memories coalesced. Conviction seized me that by opportunity, taste, and skill, Hall was the natural inheritor of the Bounty story. I told him the tale.

Hall knew it well, and felt its power, but said he: “Nordy and I can’t do the story without going to London, and that’s expensive.”

“No need of that,” said I, “for I am going to London myself.”

So it was that the following winter a huge packet, of books went from London to Tahiti, and besides the records a complete set of Smollett’s novels to teach an eighteenth-century lingo. Also word reached me of a Bounty fan, a retired Captain of the Royal Navy, who had spent untold hours shaping a model of the ship, carved according to exact specifications. Often llall told me he came to know this so perfectly that, had he been given the chance of crawling over the deck of the original brig, he could have spotted every nail hole.

One providential service I was able to render at this time. There existed half a score of stories of the Bounty, but I noticed that they all covered the climacteric trial of the mutineers in very general terms. Inferring that all researches had been made in London, whereas the actual trial had been held in Plymouth, it seemed that a great advance could be made in enumerating details if the actual testimony could be secured. In the British Museum, I discovered one of those wonderfully learned ladies whose unrecorded borrowings make the reputations of the celebrated writers of history. At my direction, she went to Plymouth and copied the minutes of the trial. Now public records are not subject to copyright, but as the ensuing movie contract was important, the form of copyright was gone through with. The claim was carefully staked and the Mutiny on the Bounty by Nordhoff’and Hall became attractive to producers, even at a price, beyond all alternatives at their free disposal.

True to the nature of both writers, letters from Tahiti at that time were full of doubt, hesitation, and pain, but in Arlington Street absolute confidence reigned.

3

To a huge public the mystifying trick of the Bounty was how two disparate figures, in full sight of the audience, could completely coalesce. Here were two totally different examples of God’s creation suddenly become one, to all appearances indissoluble. The twain had visibly become one flesh. Neither could say like the happy bridegroom: “We two are one and I am that one ” There was neither first nor last; no clashes of style, no individual protuberances, no quirks of personal manner. David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias, were like as one but not one. Nordhoff and Hall were no identical twins, no twin Dromios. They were the single author of a single book. Once in literary history, I recall a similar phenomenon. The French writers Frekmann and Chatrian wrote a series of joint novels much read during my youth, but in English-speaking literature, I recall no example.

With Nordhoff and Hall complete success was due not to the similarity but to the diversity of the component halves. Neither half lost anything of his personality, but the sum of both was ampler and richer than either alone. Nordhoff gave energy and passion, Hall meditation and understanding. Nordhoff gave action, Hall beauty. Nordhoff’s humor was in a higher key. Hall gave a quieter satisfaction. I defy the liveliest critic to pick up the volume and say: “This is Hall, this Nordhoff.” Footnoted in my own copy are Hall’s penciled notations of authorship, so let any cocksure reviewer write and give me a chance to tell him how wrong he is.

I remember asking Nordie: “Which of you acquired the burr of Scotch dialect?” He answered; “I got that, straight from Sir Walter Scott.” The legitimacy of the descent pleased me.

A decade or so ago, a group of graduates of the Lafayette Escadrille fought their old battles round a dinner table. A hundred anecdotes were recalled. Then there was a pause and one old pilot broke the silence: “Damn it, Hall, but as I look back you were the only Christian in the bunch.” And a Christian he was in the least literal and most veracious sense. The Church meant nothing to him, though he doubtless approved it. Missionaries stirred him to wrath. He judged them with a perverse judgment because the sense of sin which they imported had borne unhealthy fruit in the idyllic islands he loved so well. But his whole soul was enlisted in his detestation of America’s darling sin, vulgarity.

The chiefest symbol of Yankee success is advertising, and advertising he loathed. In his simplicity he believed that merit would out, that the violet would not be hidden by the mossy stone. Here was a perpetual difficulty for his publisher. The most innocent intrusion of the first personal pronoun was an affront to him. When “I” unobtrusively appeared in a script of his, he looked at it as the basilisk looks at whatever it is the basilisk likes to pounce upon. He could as readily boast of his prowess in the air as allow the telephone poles of “l’s” to run through a narrative passage. It was useless to tell him that the universal practice was not only harmless, but that the circuit made to avoid it was a literary offense. He would simply remark: “I did not set out to advertise myself.”

As religion shapes the souls of men, so poet reshaped Hall’s. He seldom quoted it aloud, but to himself he was forever repeating stanzas and poems and cantos of it. The poets of his youth were the poets of his maturity. He had no truck with the dissonance of today or with that obscurity which on a third reading deepens to opacity. Reverence for the masters cumbered, I think, his own efforts at verse. Overtones from choirs of the past hindered more than they helped him when he sought to rhyme on paper. But if his monument is not poetry, poetry marie him what he was. It was the inner poetry of his being which gave him chivalry and kindness and love.

Men’s works live after them. These are what we admire, but it is a man we love. I doubt if there was anyone with whom Jimmie Hall spent a chance hour who did not feel there was a difference between him and others, or that that difference was a precious thing. He was a wanderer in the world and was happiest alone or with a very, very few. Perhaps today he walks with Joseph Conrad, the adoration of his youth, whom, when an easy and natural opportunity came, he was too shy to approach; or with that strange and harassed genius, Lafcadio Hearn; for it was after these two he named his only son. Hall yearned for lonely places. Now he is in the loneliest of all. The world seemed to him crowded almost to suffocation. He felt fettered and cramped, and longed for endless reaches of space and time.

In immensity, he is at home.