A Man of Talent

by Robert Silverberg

There was a scrap of a clipping that Emil Vilar carried about with him, a review of his first and only volume of poetry. Now, on this new world, he drew it out and read it for the ten-thousandth time. It was yellow with age, and the print was blurred, but that hardly mattered; the words were graven deep in Emil Vilar’s memory.

We welcome Emil Vilar both for his technical gifts and his breadth of understanding. He speaks with the authentic poetic voice. His book, certainly the most promising debut volume in many years, perhaps heralds the arrival of a major poet. Yet it must be doubted that Mr. Vilar will have the opportunity to fulfil this promise, working as he must in a world where such art as his is doomed to be stillborn. With the audience for poetry of any quality already nearly extinct, how can an Emil Vilar sustain and develop his talent?

Vilar had reddened with shame when the review appeared. He had known, inwardly, that it was the truth, that he had the stuff of a major poet within him, but he neither dared to take that resonant label upon himself nor welcomed another’s saying it. But it had not mattered much. With or without the burden of that reputation, he had failed to find his following. It was not an age of poetry but of verse: the occasional ode, the snappy quatrain, the glorified limerick. The craft of poetry was nearly dead, the poet’s function distorted. Practical matters, the immediately useful thing—they had triumphed on Earth. It was no century for the artist. A crowded, harried world could not afford such luxuries.

He had tried. For twenty years after, he had continued to write and to try. And finally he had admitted the truth of what the anonymous reviewer had said—and he had left Earth forever.

He looked up from the clipping at the landscape of his new world. He had selected it at random, from the thick volume of catalogued worlds in the library. Which world it was did not matter to him. All that mattered was that it was not Earth.

“Rigel Seven,” he said aloud. The words were strange in his mouth, and he savored the interplay of the not-quite-assonant vowels of the two mild trochees that named his new home.

He was faintly disappointed, now that he was here, that he had picked a Terraformed planet. His motives had been clear enough at the start: he wanted a world as much like and as far from Earth as possible, where he could work in peace, unknown and undisturbed—where people would not plague him with their well-meant misinterpretations of his work, sting him with accusations of ivory-towerism or artistic irresponsibility, or call him any of the other names they had called him because he insisted on writing his poetry for himself and himself alone.

Earth didn’t understand. Earth wanted him to be a rhymer, not a poet—and so Emil Vilar had quietly removed himself from the Terran scene. He had chosen a Terraformed planet as his new home. But as he looked at the gently sloping green hills and the familiar-seeming puffs of white fleece in the soft blue sky, he realized he had made one of his rare mistakes. How much richer his imagination would have been, he thought sadly, had he selected an Alienform world—one which had not yet been converted into a carbon copy of the mother planet. Here he had the same sky and the same clouds as on Earth; only the Sun was different, a hard, distant dot of incalculably ferocious intensity.

Well, he was here, and here he would stay. Carefully he folded his clipping and slid it into his wallet. Rigel Seven was as good a place as any, and any would be better than Earth.

The robot in the Earthside routing office had told him, with a smirk on its mirrored face, that he was the first emigrant to Rigel Seven in over five hundred years. That had been all right, too.

The planet had been settled eight hundred years earlier by sixteen wealthy Terran families, who had purchased it jointly as a private estate. The conditions of the sale, of course, had been that the planet remained open to all comers for emigration, but that was a safe risk. The sky was full of stars, and each had its cluster of worlds; who would cross five hundred light-years to settle on Rigel Seven, when Sirius and Vega and Procyon and the Centauri stars beckoned just a few light-years from Earth?

Who but Emil Vilar, fleeing quietly from the world that would never understand him?

He had saved, in his fifty years, some five thousand dollars. That had nearly covered the transit fee. The rest had been supplied by his friends.

There had been six of them, men with faith in Emil Vilar. They had fought his going, but when they saw he was determined to go, they helped him. They contributed the needed thousand to see him through the journey, and they established a trust fund that would provide a monthly remittance for him for the rest of his life.

He took a deep breath. Rigel Seven was Terraformed, but they had left out the stink of Earth’s air and the filth of her cities. The air was fresh and clear here. He smiled at the sight of his shadow, stretched mightily ahead of him over the grass.

For the first time in his memory, he felt happy.

The Rigel Seven spaceport was at the edge of a broad field that swept up the side of the hill in the distance like a green carpet. Farther back, on the hill, Vilar could see the shimmering paleness of a domed house. Someone was coming down the brown, winding path that led from the hill to the field.

He hefted his small suitcase and started to walk forward rapidly. The man met him in the middle of the field. He was tall and bronzed, shirtless, with long, rippling muscles lying flat and firm on his arms and chest. Vilar felt suddenly ashamed of his own dumpy body.

“You’re the emigrant, aren’t you?”

“I am Emil Vilar. The ship has just left me here.”

“I know,” the tall man said, grinning affably. “We saw it come down. It was quite a novelty for us. We don’t get much traffic here, you know.”

“I can imagine,” Vilar said quietly. “Well, I shan’t bother you much. I keep to myself most of the time.”

“We have a place all ready for you. My name’s Carpenter, by the way—Melbourne Hadley Carpenter. Come, I’ll show you to your shack, and then you can come visit us later. We’ll tell you how things work here.”

“Work? But—I do not plan to participate in any communal activ—”

He paused, frowning, and shook his head gently. This was no time to spout a declaration of principles. “Never mind,” he said. “Show me where I stay.”

Carpenter led him back up the path to the foot of the hill, where there was a small shack looking upward at the great domed house.

“This is ideal,” said Vilar. It was just what he had envisioned when he had made arrangements to live here.

“See you later,” Carpenter told him, waved cheerily, and left. Vilar put a hand on the door-opener, broke the photonic circuit, and stepped in.

One bookcase, one bed, one closet, one dresser.

Ideal.

Vilar unpacked his single suitcase rapidly. It had been no struggle for him to break away from his Earthly possessions; he had been able to bring everything he owned and still make the fifty-pound mass limit of the subspace liner with ease.

First came the books, just eight of them. There was the slim blue-bound copy of Poems, by Emil Vilar (London, 2743, 61 pp.). After that, Pound’s Cantos, the complete hundred and forty. Next came the King James Bible, Swann’s Way, the complete Yeats, Davis’s On Historical Analysis (both volumes in one), the plays of Cyril Tourneur, and the Greek Anthology. These were all Vilar had kept from a lifetime of reading, and he had added the most recent—the single volume of Proust—sixteen years before. Now he considered his library closed.

His meagre wardrobe followed, and he arrayed it in the closet and dresser with customary methodical precision. After that his linens and other household goods. Next the thin file envelope containing his poetic output since the 2743 volume. It was all unpublished, and the world had seen little of it.

Those works which had somehow passed muster and been shown to a few friends—those poems Vilar now regarded as tainted, though he kept them. Each seemed stained by the muddle-headed criticism it had inspired.

“A wonderful thing, Emil—but isn’t it a shade too long?”

“Marvelous imagery, Emil. But when you bring in Dido, I think you’re reaching too far for effect—”

“Splendid, but—”

“Magnificent, but—”

“Why all these tensions, Vilar? Why not relax the texture a trifle? If you had only—”

“Am I being too blunt in saying that I feel your work lately has been tending towards a dead end, a geometrical stasis that can only damage your standing? The failure of sensibility—”

He had listened patiently to each of them, digested their often conflicting critical views with dignity, and, finally, turned his back on the lot of them. They were chatterers. They made knowing noises, but what they really wanted to tell him was that his lines did not jingle enough. Retreating to Rigel Seven was the easiest solution. There had been no other way. Had he remained on Earth, he would have spent the rest of his days unchangingly, plagued by the cultists, the centre of a tiny, well-meaning circle of admirers who longed to share his gift, though they had no notion of the anguish they brought to its possessor. Better to be ignored, as he was by most of the world, than to have such a claque. So he had gone away.

He continued unpacking. He drew out two reams of paper: all he would need for the rest of his life. His pen. His notebook. He looked around. Everything was as it should be. The room was complete.

Vilar sat down at his desk and reached for a book. His hand lingered momentarily over his own little volume, quivered a bit, and moved on. He drew forth Yeats, then reconsidered and put him back. Fugitive lines from Eliot, whom he had long since memorized and so had not needed to bring with him, flickered through his mind:

…Gull against the wind, in the windy straits

Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn.

White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,

And an old man driven by the Trades

To a sleepy corner.

Tenants of the house,

Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

He worked, for most of the night, on a free fantasy based on the opening lines of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Towards dawn, he rose, tore up the sheet, and blotted what he had written from his mind. He went outside on his tiny porch to watch the strange sun creep above the horizon of Rigel Seven. At this distance, bloated Rigel looked far smaller than Sol—but the savage blaze of its hot blue-white light betrayed the alien star’s true power.

Shortly after sunrise, Melbourne Hadley Carpenter returned.

“Have a good night?”

Vilar, rumpled-looking and red-eyed, nodded. “Excellent.”

“Glad to hear it. Suppose you come up to the house now. My father’s waiting to meet you, and so are all the others.”

Vilar frowned suspiciously. “Why do they want to meet me?”

“Oh, just curiosity, I guess. You’re the only one here who’s not one of the Families, you know.”

“I know,” Vilar said, relieved. “You’re sure you’ve never heard of me then?”

Carpenter shrugged. “How would we ever hear of you? We’re completely out of touch with things, you know.”

“True.” One major worry was thereby avoided—he would be a complete stranger here, as he had hoped. A fresh start would be possible. The old man’s brain was not dry; here in this sleepy corner, he could scale the greatest heights without attracting the clumsy attention that was so fatal to artistic endeavour.

He followed the tall young man up the hill and into the domed house. The lines of the building were clear and simple; in his amateur’s way, Vilar approved of the architecture wholeheartedly. It had none of the falseness of Earth’s current pseudo-archaism.

In the spacious central hall, an immense table had been set and at least fifty people sat around it. A tall man looking much like Melbourne Hadley Carpenter, but much older, with iron-grey hair and faintly stooping shoulders, rose from his seat at the head of the table.

“You’re Emil Vilar,” he said ringingly. “We’re very happy to see you. I’m Theodore Hadley Carpenter, and this is my family.”

Awed, Vilar nodded hesitantly. With a sweeping gesture of his hand, Theodore Hadley Carpenter indicated six almost identical younger men sitting to his right.

“My sons,” he said.

Farther down the table were still younger men—this was the generation of Melbourne Hadley Carpenter, Vilar decided. “My grandsons,” the patriarch said, confirming this.

“You have a very fine family, Mr Carpenter,” Vilar said.

“One of the best, sir,” Carpenter replied blandly. “Will you join us now for breakfast? We can talk afterwards.”

Vilar had no objections, and took a vacant seat at the table. Breakfast proceeded—served, he noted, by pretty young girls who were probably Carpenter’s granddaughters. There were no outsiders on this planet, no servants, no one who was not part of a Family.

Except me, he thought with wry amusement. Always the outsider.

Breakfast had been as efficiently Terraformed as the planet itself. Bacon and eggs, warm rolls, coffee—why, it was ludicrous to travel—what was it, five hundred and forty-five light years, untold trillions of miles?—and have warm rolls and coffee for breakfast. But people tend to cling, Vilar thought. What was the entire Terraforming project but a mighty whimper, a galaxy-shaking yawp of puny defiance (barbaric yawp, his well-stocked mind footnoted automatically)? Man was progressively carving the worlds of space into the image of Earth, and eating rolls for breakfast.

Vilar considered the thought. Later, he knew, it would emerge concealed in the webwork of one of his poems, and still later he would see it there, and destroy the poem as a silly timebound polemic.

He sat back in his chair when he had finished eating. The table was cleared. Then, to his astonishment, old Carpenter clapped his hands and one of his look-alike sons fetched a musical instrument. It was stringed, the strings stretched tight over a graven sounding board. A dulcimer, Vilar thought in wonderment as the patriarch began to play, striking the strings with two carved ivory sticks.

The melody was a strange and complex one; the poet, who had a sound but far from detailed knowledge of musical theory, listened carefully. The short piece ended plaintively in the minor, coming to an abrupt halt with three descending thirds.

“My own composition,” the old man said, in the silence that followed. “It’s sometimes hard to get used to our music at first, but—”

“I thought it was fine,” Vilar said shortly. He was anxious to finish this meal and return to work, and hoped there would be no further talk of performing.

He rose from his chair.

“Leaving so soon?” the old man asked. “Why, we haven’t even talked.”

“Talked? About what?”

Carpenter knotted his fingers together. “About your contribution to our group, of course. We can’t happily let you stay with us and eat our food if you’re not going to offer us anything, stranger. Come now—what do you do?”

“I’m a poet,” Vilar said uneasily.

The old man chuckled. “A poet? Indeed, yes—but what do you do?”

“I don’t understand you. If you mean what is my trade, I have none. I’m merely a poet.”

“Grandfather means can you do anything else,” whispered one of the younger Carpenters near him. “Of course, you’re a poet—who ever said you wouldn’t be?”

Vilar shook his head. “Nothing but a poet.” It sounded like an indictment, self-spoken.

“We had hoped you were a medical man, or a bookbinder, or perhaps a blacksmith. Coming from Earth, as you were—who would have expected a poet? Why, we have poets aplenty here! Of all things for Earth to give us!”

Emil Vilar moistened his lips and fidgeted nervously. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he said weakly, turning up the palms of his hands. “Terribly sorry.”

The joke was on them, he thought later that morning. No wonder they had been so anxious to have him come. To them, Earth meant something rugged and harsh, strange and jagged. They had hoped to have the smooth rhythm of their life disrupted by the man from Earth.

Yes, the joke’s on them, he decided. Instead of a blacksmith, they got Earth’s last poet, her one and only poet. And Rigel Seven had plenty of those.

Emil Vilar looked up from his seat in the arboretum outside of the domed house. One of the tall grandsons—was it Melbourne Hadley Carpenter, or Theodore Hadley III, or one of the others?—stood near him.

“Grandfather would like to know if you would come inside now, Emil Vilar. He would like to see you alone.”

“Very well,” Vilar said. He rose and followed the tall young man inside and up the stairs to a richly panelled room in which sat the eldest of the Carpenter clan.

“Come in, please,” the old man said gently.

Vilar took the seat offered him and waited tensely for old Carpenter to speak. At close range, he could see that the old man was ancient, but well-preserved even at a probable age of a hundred and fifty.

“You say you’re a poet,” Carpenter said, hitting the plosive sound fiercely. “Would you mind reading this, and giving me your honest opinion of it?”

Vilar took the proffered sheet of paper, as he had taken so many other amateur poetic attempts back on Earth, and read the poem very carefully. It was a villanelle, smoothly accomplished except for a slip in scansion in the third line of the quatrain. It was also shallow and completely lacking in poetic vision. For once, Vilar determined to be absolutely unsparing in his criticism.

“A pretty exercise,” he said casually. “Neatly handled, except for this blunder in the next line to last.” He indicated the blemish, and added, “Other than that, the work’s totally devoid of value. It doesn’t even have the virtue of being entertaining; its emptiness is merely offensive. Have I made myself clear?”

“You have,” Carpenter said stiffly. “The verses were mine.”

“You asked for honest criticism,” Vilar reminded him.

“So I did—and I received it, perhaps. What of those paintings on the wall?”

They were abstracts, strikingly handled, in the neo-industrialist manner. “I’m not a painter, you realize,” Vilar said haltingly. “But I’d say they were excellent—quite good, certainly.”

“Those are mine, too,” Carpenter said.

Vilar blinked in surprise. “You’re very versatile, Mr Carpenter. Musician, composer, poet, painter—you hold all the arts at your command.”

“Nothing unusual about it,” Carpenter said. “Customary. A tenet of our society since the first settlers came here. Art’s part of life, like breathing. We make no fuss about it. A man’s got to have certain skills if he’s to call himself civilized, and we develop them. Why set a few men aside as artists and canonize them? We’ve never let ourselves be mere spectators. We pride ourselves on our artistic ability—every last one of us. We are all poets, Mr Vilar. We all paint, we all play instruments, we all compose. And we regard it as unremarkable to do so.”

“Whereas I’m limited to my one paltry art, is that it? I’m merely a poet?”

A sudden feeling of inferiority swept over him for the first time in ages. He had felt humble before—humble before Milton or Aeschylus, before Yeats or Shakespeare, as he struggled to equal their accomplishments, or even approach them. But there was a shade of difference between humility and inferiority. What he felt now was inadequacy, not merely as a poet, but as a person. For a man as self-assured as Vilar, it was a painful thing.

He looked up at old Carpenter.

“Will you excuse me?” he said, his voice strangely harsh and edgy.

Alone, in his shack, he stared at the sheet of paper, regretfully, and read the lines he had written:

Slippery shadows of daylight stand

Between each man and himself; each cries out,

But—

That was where they ended. He had just composed them—or so he had thought, at the moment. Now, five minutes later, he recognized them for what they were: lines from a poem he had composed in his youth and rightfully burned for the adolescent twaddle it was.

Where was his technique, his vaunted vowel sense, his intricate rhythms, and subtle verbal conflicts? He looked sadly at the clumsy nonsense his fear-numbed brain had dictated, and swept the sheet contemptuously to the floor.

Have I lost the gift?

It was a cold, soul-withering question, but it was followed hastily by another even more deadly: Did I ever have the gift?

But that was an easily answered question. There was the slim blue-bound volume, right over here—

The book was gone.

He stared at the quarter of an inch left vacant in the bookcase for a moment. The book had been taken. One of the Carpenters was evidently curious about his poetry.

Well, never mind, he thought, I still carry the poems with me.

To prove it, he recited “The Apples of Idun”, one of the longest, and, to his mind, the best. When he was finished, his old confidence had returned. His gift had been no illusion.

But neither was the Carpenter family. And he could no longer stay here in their presence.

Dejectedly, he recalled the performance of the patriarch: with astonishing versatility, the old man flitted from one art form to the next—as did the others. There wasn’t a man in the family who couldn’t turn a verse, set his own song to music, perform the piece on one of a dozen instruments, and render a nonobjective interpretation of it in oils, to boot. Beside formidable talent of this sort, Vilar felt his own paltry gift fade into insignificance. Art was as natural to these people as breathing. They had been bred to it; no one wore the label “artist” on Rigel Seven, no specialist lurked in his private nook or category.

And Emil Vilar was aware that there was no place for him in a world of this sort. His talent was too ephemeral to survive among these genial philistines—for philistines they were, despite or perhaps because of their great range of abilities. They had no awareness that art was a sacred rite. To them it was an amusement, a pastime for gentlemen. Whatever they did, they did well, for they were trained toward excellence, but it was all on the same level of affable skilled amateurism. That was to be admired, certainly, more than the crude boorishness of Earth, but such an environment was also fatal to the real poetic fire.

These people were omniartistic—and omnivorous, too. They would devour Emil Vilar.

He took his suitcase from the closet and calmly began to pack. Returning to Earth was out of the question, but he would go somewhere, somewhere where life was more complex and art more highly valued.

“Why are you packing?” a resonant voice asked.

Vilar whirled. It was old Carpenter, standing in the doorway.

“I’ve decided to go. That’s reason enough.”

Carpenter smiled pleasantly. “Go? Where could you go? Back to Earth?”

“No—but anywhere away from here.”

“You’ll find the other fifteen Families much the same,” the old man said. “Take my advice; stay here. We like you, Vilar. We don’t want to lose you so soon.”

Vilar was silent and motionless for a while. Then, without saying a word, he resumed packing.

Carpenter crossed the cabin quickly and put his hand on Vilar’s arm. The old man’s grip was surprisingly strong.

“Please,” he said urgently. “Don’t go.”

Vilar loosened the grip and stepped away. “I can’t stay here. I have to leave.”

“But why?”

“Because you’re driving me crazy!” Vilar shouted suddenly. It was the first time he had lost his temper in more than thirty years.

Quivering, he turned towards the older man. “You paint, you sing, you write, you compose. You do everything! And what of me? I’m a poet, nothing more. A mere poet. In this world that’s like being a man with only one arm—someone to be pitied.”

“But—”

“Let me finish,” Vilar said. “Let me pass this information along to you: you’re not artists, any one of you. You’re artists-manqué, would-be artists, not-quite artists.

“Art’s an ennobling thing—a gift, a talent. If everyone’s talented, no talent exists. When gold lines the street, it’s worth no more than dross. And so you people who are so proud of yourselves for many talents—why, you have none at all! Only skills.”

Carpenter seemed to ignore Vilar’s tirade. “Is that why you’re leaving?” he asked.

“I’m—I’m—” Vilar paused, confused. “I’m leaving because I want to leave. Because I’m a real artist, and I know I am. I don’t want to be polluted by the pretended art I see here. I have something real and wonderful, and I don’t want to lose it. And I will lose it here.”

“How wrong you are,” Carpenter said. “In just that last, I mean. You do have a gift—and we need it. We want you to stay. Will you?”

“But you said this morning that I couldn’t stay, not unless I brought something new to this place. And I haven’t. What good is one more poet in a town full of them? Even,” he added belligerently, “if that poet’s worth all the rest in one?”

“You misunderstand,” Carpenter said. “True, we need no more poets. But we need you. Vilar, we need an audience!”

Suddenly Emil Vilar understood. The joke was on him, after all. He had failed to see the real texture of life here, just as he had failed all these years to see his own role in human society. These people needed him, all right; what kind of army was it that had a thousand generals and no foot soldiers?

He started to laugh, slowly at first, then in violent upheaving gasps that brought tears to his eyes. After nearly a minute he grew silent again.

It was ideal, after all. So far as they were concerned, he had but a single talent: that of being an audience. Very well. They had no understanding of high art, and to them he was pitiful, useful only because of his limits. Good. Let them think that. Privately, he knew he was a poet, not an audience. But one had to pay a price in services rendered, in order to be a poet for one’s self alone.

“I see,” he said softly. “Very well, then. I’ll be your audience.”

He saw how the days to come would be. His value to them would be as a nonpainter, a noncomposer, an onlooker and critic. His private poetic endeavors would seem beneath contempt to them. Which was as he wanted it. The real artist was always alone, whether on Rigel Seven or in the midst of Earth’s most teeming city. The audience might find him, but he must not fret about finding the audience. On Earth he had found no audience at first, and that had been all right, really; only when he had acquired the wrong kind of audience, a falsely knowing one, had he decided it was time to flee. A mistake, for the solace he sought was not to be had anywhere. Now he had come to a place that would neither reject him as a person nor meddle in his art, and he saw the conclusion that had escaped him before. It was senseless to flee again. He would be misunderstood anywhere; he saw now that it had always been pointless to go on from place to place in quest of the true environment of art. That environment was a myth, unattainable, unreal. Or, rather, that environment was within him, wherever he was. The wise thing was to hold his ground, play some useful role in society, and privately practice his art.

Alone among these gifted but complicated people, he could work out his artistic destiny on this strange and familiar planet without fear of the watchers. The Carpenters, that closed family group, hungered for spectators, for the love and appreciation of outsiders who would admire them for their attainments. Vilar did not need that.

“By the way,” the old man said, smiling guiltily. “While you were in the park this morning, I took the liberty of borrowing this.” He reached inside his jacket and drew forth Vilar’s collected poems.

“Oh? What did you think of them?” Vilar asked.

The patriarch frowned, fidgeted, coughed. “Ah—”

“An honest opinion,” Vilar said. “As I gave this morning.”

“Well, to be frank—two of my sons looked at them with me. And none of us could see any meaning or value in the lot, Vilar. I don’t know where you got the idea you had any talent for poetry. You really don’t, you know.”

“I’ve often suspected that myself,” Vilar said happily. He took the book and fondled it with satisfaction. Already he was envisioning a second volume—a volume that would appear in an edition of one, for his eyes alone.

Content

A Man of Talent
by Robert Silverberg