Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/647

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PAUL ROSENFELD
551

trying to go his way, and through them felt himself right and knew what the seed in himself was trying to realize. But Bourne was filled with the Lord Spring. His being had thrust outside the form of existence led around him a sort of lodestone, a sort of star of intenser richer living. And the projected values, vague though they must perforce have been, mere faintly shimmering asteroids, nevertheless had drawn him counter to the current of society and towards the life of wisdom and of art. They had made him go hunt whatever material for growth this world afforded; made him create out of the raw an environment in which the youth and appetite for high adventure stored within him could breathe and come to ever fresher burgeoning. It was difficult for Bourne to make his way unaided to the university; and, at the conclusion of high-schooling he took first the position of secretary to some moneyed drearies; then of musical proof-reader in a pianola-record factory; then of accompanist to a toreador singing-master in Carnegie Studios who euchred him of his pay. And still, in his twenty-third year, he reached Columbia, and used Columbia. He became perhaps the most distinguished of all John Dewey's pupils. In learning to write, he developed a technique of expressing past experience and present desire in combination, thus at once making room in himself for deeper experience and greater desire, and forcing the world to sustain him in his unconventional manner of living. His first book, a defence of his own budding principle called Youth and Life, was published while he was still a junior. His poor body notwithstanding, he found his way to the places where gardens grow about women. With his inappeasable appetite for the personal, he found his way to young women and men in Columbia, in Greenwich Village, in the offices of magazines and advertising companies, who were being thrust forward much as he; some of them queer people enough: beautiful hysterical girls, half-poets, founders of ideal communities, composers who composed in obsolete styles, old children, helpless radicals; almost abortive efforts of life to maintain itself on a more spiritual plane who, nevertheless, were far more generously human than the folk better adjusted to the American scene. And from them he learned, too. Through them, he came to feel his own enthusiasms and ideals more intensely. Like "Mon Amie," the girl with whom he used to go walking during his months in Paris, they all brought him, to some