Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [31]
I think she did.
A relatively poor girl making her own way—what Rodman would call “upward mobile”—she put a higher value on gentility than most who were bred to it, and a higher value on art and literature than those frail by-products of living can possibly support. She had the zeal of a convert or an aspirant. And Thomas Hudson, born as poor as herself and just as upward mobile, was gentility personified, sensibility made flesh.
Not yet thirty, he was already a reputation and an influence. He charmed both the literary and the social. Poems dropped from him as blossoms blew off the Burling apple trees in a spring breeze. He wrote a monthly department, “The Old Cupboard,” in Scribner’s magazine, that the literary waited for and discussed. Ostensibly the assistant of Scribner’s editor, Dr. Holland, he in fact did all of Holland’s work and made most of Holland’s decisions and found all the livelier contributors that Holland got credit for.
Susan was his discovery, and he hers. Most of her friends she met through Augusta, but Augusta met Thomas through her. Within a few weeks they were an inseparable trio. In that Edith Wharton version of New York they ran around safe, platonic, and happy to galleries, theaters, and concerts. I have no idea whether or not the 1870s provided editors with expense accounts, but Thomas acted as if they did. I have no idea, either, whether Thomas was courting Susan, or Augusta, or both, or neither. I doubt that any of them knew. If you are genteel enough, that sort of imprecision is possible.
It is hard for me to be just to Thomas Hudson, for I had him held up to me all through my childhood, and he was an impossible ideal. But I have heard former colleagues, American literature professors who study such things, call him the greatest editor the country ever had. Recently I was looking through a file of the Century, which he edited after Scribner’s closed up, and in the single issue of February 1885 I found, in addition to the Susan Burling Ward story that had led me to it, the final installment of a book by Mark Twain called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the ninth and tenth chapters of a novel by William Dean Howells called The Rise of Silas Lapham, and the opening installment of a novel by Henry James called The Bostonians. I wouldn’t be surprised if he found and published two thirds of the best literature of four decades. He was nearly as good as Grandmother thought him—a man of taste, intelligence, and integrity. He was one of the group of New York liberals who at various times cleaned up the Grant pigpen and put down Tammany Hall. A man any period could use. Thomas, thou shouldst be living at this hour. So I must curb my tendency to speak of him with condescension or amusement, simply because Grandmother used his perfection as a stick to beat me with.
In the 1870s he was gentle, thoughtful, amusing, a spirit that glowed through a frail, almost epicene body. He had come out of the war with wounds that kept him sickly, but he still managed to do the work of three. His hands were pale and attenuated, his smile was of great sweetness. He loved talk, and he assumed the stance of noble idealism as naturally as water fills a hole in beach sand. In one of her letters, Susan told him that he had a “truly feminine talent for saying lovely, sweet things, with a little pang in them.” Many of her letters address him playfully as “Cousin Thomas.” Over a span of several years he gave her a number of little presents—a Japanese teapot, a miniature Madonna, certain volumes of poetry—that she clung to while other things, Grandfather’s letters for instance, were getting lost. The volumes of poetry and the Madonna are down in the library right now, salted away like Grandmother’s rose petals.
Her editorial champion, her closest male friend, the beau ideal of genteel letters, Thomas had to suggest himself to Susan as a potential husband. Naturally no expression of that shows through the decorous playfulness of her letters to him. The closest thing I find is a discussion of Friendship, roughly at the level of Cicero: