Smith

By Ken Everett

Smith is a complex person. His family tries to provide him an education in farming. In an effort to take charge of his own life. He decides to study Literature. He then marries a girl he hardly knows. He succeeds in his career, his marriage, and his relationship with his daughter, but it becomes a struggle. As he ages, will he look back on his life and feel satisfied with the road he had taken. Less
John Smith was born into a poor farming family in Missouri. Sent to a university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces the life of a scholar. Over the years, Smith experiences a series of disappointments: marrying a "real" family alienates him from his parents; his career is hampered; his wife and daughter coldly turn their backs on him; A transformative new love experience ends under threat of scandal. Driven deeper and deeper, Smith rediscovers the stoic stillness of his ancestors and confronts an underlying loneliness. John Smith emerges not only as an archetypal American, but also as an unlikely existential hero,

The central theme of the story is surely that of love, of love's many forms and of all the forces that oppose it. "It [love] was neither a passion of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that encompassed them both as if they were just the matter of love, its specific substance."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Everett
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005180461

Book preview

Smith

By Ken Everett

To family… without them we would have nothing.

Characters

John Smith: The main character of the novel, referred to as Smith throughout the book, is a farm boy-turned-English professor. He uses his love of literature to deal with his unfulfilling family life.

Sharon Bostwick Smith: Smith's wife, a neurotic woman, came from a strict and sheltered upbringing. Smith falls in love with the idea of her, but soon realizes that she is bitter and has been for so long before they were married.

Doris Smith: Smith and Sharon's only child, Doris is easily influenced by her mother. Sharon keeps Doris away from and against her father because of the couple's failed relationship as a sort of punishment for Smith.

George Wren: Smith's colleague and only real ally and friend, he has known Smith since her grad school and becomes the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. His affable and outgoing demeanor contrasts with Smith's.

Brian Doyon: Smith's friend from grad school, he is killed during World War I, but his words have a lasting impact on Smith's worldview.

Bowman Quinn: As Smith's teacher and mentor, he inspired Smith to leave farming and study English literature. He is old and sickly when Smith is hired at the university.

Robin Loomis: Quinn's replacement at  the university, he and Smith started out as friends, but Smith eventually sees him as an enemy. Smith and Loomis disagree on their working lives. He is described as a hunchback.

Colin Stander: Loomis' crippled mentee, he is an arrogant and duplicitous young man who uses rhetorical flourishes to hide his scientific ineptitude. He also becomes an enemy of Smith.

Charlotte Durbin: A younger teacher, she is having an affair with Smith. University politics and circumstances prevent her from continuing the relationship.

Summary

John Smith was born into a poor farming family in Missouri. Sent to a university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces the life of a scholar. Over the years, Smith experiences a series of disappointments: marrying a real family alienates him from his parents; his career is hampered; his wife and daughter coldly turn their backs on him; A transformative new love experience ends under threat of scandal. Driven deeper and deeper, Smith rediscovers the stoic stillness of his ancestors and confronts an underlying loneliness. John Smith emerges not only as an archetypal American, but also as an unlikely existential hero,

The central theme of the story is surely that of love, of love's many forms and of all the forces that oppose it. It [love] was neither a passion of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that encompassed them both as if they were just the matter of love, its specific substance.

Chapter 1

John Smith entered the University of Missouri that year as a freshman

1910, aged nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his doctorate in philosophy and accepted a teaching position at the same university where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few of the students remembered him clearly after attending his courses. When he died, his colleagues donated a medieval manuscript to the university library as a commemorative contribution. This manuscript is still in the Rare Books Collection and bears the inscription: Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of John Smith, Department of English. By his members.

A casual student who comes across the name may wonder who John Smith was, but rarely pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Smith's colleagues, who did not hold him in high esteem when he was alive, rarely talk about him now; for the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and for the younger ones it's just a sound that evokes no sense of the past and no identity to connect themselves or their careers with.

He was born in 1891 on a small farm in central Missouri near the village of Booneville, about forty miles from Columbia, home of the university. Though his parents were young when he was born—his father twenty-five, his mother barely twenty—Smith considered them old even as boys. At thirty his father looked fifty; Bent over from his work, he looked hopelessly at the dry piece of land that supported the family from year to year. His mother watched her life patiently as if it were a long moment to endure. Her eyes were pale and blurry, and the tiny lines around her were accentuated by thin, graying hair that she wore straight over her head and tied in a bun at the back.

For as long as he can remember, John Smith has had his duties. By the age of six he was milking the bony cows, throwing the pigs into the pen a few yards from the house and collecting small eggs from a flock of scrawny hens. And even when he began attending country school eight miles from the farm, his day was filled with one or two jobs from before dawn until after dark. At seventeen his shoulders were already beginning to sag under the weight of his job.

It was a lonely household of which he was the only child, and it was held together by the necessity of his work. In the evening the three of them sat in the little kitchen, which was lit by a single kerosene lamp, and stared at the yellow flame; often the only sound that could be heard during the hour between supper and bed was the weary movement of a body on a straight chair and the soft creaking of a beam that was giving slightly with the age of the house.

The house was built in a rough square, and the unpainted beams hung around the porch and doors. It had taken on the colors of the dry land over the years – gray and brown, striped with white. To one side of the house was a long drawing room, sparsely furnished with straight chairs and a few carved tables, and a kitchen where the family spent most of their time together. On the other side were two bedrooms, each with a white-enameled iron bedstead, a single straight chair, and a table with a lamp and washbasin on it. The floors were unpainted planks, unevenly spaced and cracked with age, through which dust constantly seeped and was swept back by Smith's mother every day.

At school, he did his classes as if they were chores, just a little less strenuous than those on the farm. When he finished high school in the spring of 1910, he expected to do more work in the fields; it seemed to him that his father was getting slower and more tired as the months went by.

But one late spring evening, after the two men had spent a day chopping corn, his father accosted him in the kitchen after the dinner dishes had been cleared.

County agent came by last week.

John looked up from the red and white checked oilcloth spread flat across the round kitchen table. He didn't speak.

"Says they have a new school at Columbia University. They call her a

College of Agriculture. Says he thinks you should go. It'll take four years. Four years, John said. Does it cost money?"

You could work your room and board, his father said. Your mother owns a first cousin who owns something outside of Columbia. There would be books and such. I could send you two or three dollars a month.

John spread his hands on the tablecloth, which shimmered dully in the lamplight. He had never been further from home than Booneville, fifteen miles away. He swallowed to steady his voice.

Do you think you could manage the store yourself? he asked.

Your mother and I could do it. I would plant the top twenty in wheat; that would reduce manual labor.

John looked at his mother. Mummy? he asked. She said tonelessly, You do what your da says.

You really want me to go? he asked, as if half hoping for a refusal. Do you really want me?

His father shifted his weight in the chair. He looked at his thick, calloused fingers, the cracks in which dirt had gotten so deep it couldn't be washed away. He interlaced his fingers and held them up from the table, almost in an attitude of prayer.

I've never had any formal education, he said, looking down at his hands. I started working on a farm when I finished sixth grade. When I was young, I never stuck to school. But now I don't know anymore. Seems the land is getting drier and harder to work with every year; it's not rich like it was when I was a boy. The district agent says they have new ideas, methods of doing things that they teach you at university. Maybe he's right. Sometimes when I work in the fields I have to think. He stopped. His fingers spasmed and his clasped hands fell on the table. I'm starting to think... He scowled at his hands and shook his head. "You're going to college in the fall.

It was the longest speech he had ever heard his father give. That fall he did not go to Columbia and enrolled as a freshman at the College of the University

Agriculture. He came to Columbia with a new black wool suit that he ordered from the Sears & Roebuck catalog and paid for with his mother's egg money, a worn coat that had belonged to his father, and blue serge pants that he wore once a month had gone to the Methodist church in Booneville, two white shirts, a change of work clothes, and twenty-five dollars in cash his father had borrowed from a neighbor for the fall wheat. He began his trek in Booneville, where his father and mother took him early that morning on the farm's flat-bottomed mule-drawn wagon.

It was a hot fall day and the road from Booneville to Columbia was dusty; He had walked for almost an hour when a boxcar pulled up next to him and the driver asked if he wanted a ride. He nodded and got up in the car seat. His serge trousers were red with dust to the knees, and his face, tanned by sun and wind, was caked with dirt where the dust of the road had mixed with his sweat. During the long drive, he smoothed his slacks with clumsy hands and ran his fingers through his straight, sandy-colored hair, which would not fall flat on his head.

They arrived in Columbia in the late afternoon. The driver dropped Smith on the outskirts of town and pointed to a cluster of buildings shaded by tall elms. This is your university, he said. You will go to school there.

After the man pulled away, Smith stood motionless for several minutes, staring at the building complex. He had never seen anything so posing. The red brick buildings stretched upwards from a wide green field punctuated by stone paths and small patches of garden. Beneath his awe, he suddenly felt a sense of security and serenity he had never felt before. Even though it was late, he walked around the campus for minutes only looking like he had no right to enter it.

It was almost dark when he asked a passer-by about Ashland Gravel, the road that would lead him to the farm of Jim Foote, his mother's first cousin, for whom he was to work; and it was after dark when he came to the white two-story frame house where he was to live. He had never seen the Footes before, and it seemed odd going to see them so late.

They greeted him with a nod and eyed him closely. After a moment where Smith stood awkwardly in the doorway, Jim Foote waved him into a small, gloomy drawing room crammed with overstuffed furniture and nick-knacks on matte-finished tables. He wasn't sitting.

And dinner? asked Foote. No, sir, Smith replied.

Mrs. Foote pointed a finger at him and trotted off. Smith followed her through several rooms into a kitchen, where she gestured for him to sit at a table. She placed a jug of milk and several pieces of cold cornbread in front of him. He sipped the milk, but his mouth, dry with excitement, would not take the bread.

Foote came into the room and stood next to his wife. He was a small man, no more than five foot three inches tall, with a thin face and a sharp nose. His wife was four inches taller and heavy; rimless glasses hid her eyes and her thin lips were tight. The two watched hungrily as he sipped his milk.

Feed and water the cattle, feed the pigs in the morning, Foote said quickly.

Smith looked at him blankly. What?

You do that in the morning, Foote said, before you go to school. In the evening you feed and beat again, collect the eggs, milk the cows. Chop firewood when you find time. On weekends you help me with everything I do.

Yes sir, said Smith.

Foote studied him for a moment. College, he said, shaking his head.

So for nine months he fed and watered the cattle, shed pigs, collected eggs, milked cows and chopped firewood. He also plowed and harrowed fields, dug tree stumps (breaking through three inches of frozen ground in the winter), and churned butter for Mrs. Foote, who watched him with a grim nod of approval as the wooden butter churn squirted milk up and down.

It was housed on an upper floor that had formerly been a storeroom; His only furniture was a black iron bedstead with sagging frames that supported a thin spring mattress, a broken table with a kerosene lamp, a straight chair that sat unevenly on the floor, and a large box that he used as a desk. In the winter, the only warmth it got seeped up through the floor from the rooms below; He wrapped himself in the tattered quilts and blankets he was allowed and blew on his hands so they could turn the pages of his books without tearing them.

He did his work at the university like he did his work on the farm—thoroughly, conscientiously, without joy or sorrow. At the end of his freshman year, his GPA was just under a B; He was pleased it wasn't lower and not worried that it wasn't higher. He was aware that he had learned things he hadn't known before, but to him that just meant he could do as well in his sophomore year as he did in his first.

In the summer after his freshman year, he returned to his father's farm and helped with the harvest. Once his father asked him how he liked school and he replied that he liked it a lot. His father nodded and didn't bring up the matter again.

It wasn't until he returned for his sophomore year that John Smith learned why he had come to college. By his sophomore year, he was a familiar figure on campus. In every season he wore the same black wool suit, white shirt, and tie; his wrists poked out of the sleeves of his jacket and his trousers hung awkwardly around his legs like it was a uniform that had once belonged to someone else.

His working hours increased with the increasing indolence of his employers, and he spent the long evenings in his room systematically doing his classwork; he had begun the course of study that would lead him to a Bachelor of Science degree from the College of Agriculture, and during that first semester of his sophomore year he had two undergraduate courses, a course from the School of Agriculture in soil chemistry, and a course that was becoming rather superficial from required of all university students – a semester overview of English literature.

After the first few weeks he had little trouble with the science subjects; there was so much to do, so many things to remember. The study of soil chemistry aroused his general interest; it had never occurred to him that the brownish nuggets he had been working with for most of his life were anything other than what they appeared to be, and he was beginning to vaguely realize that his growing knowledge of them could be useful when he returned to his farm. But the required perusal of English literature troubled and troubled him like nothing before.

The instructor was a middle-aged man in his early fifties; his name was

Bowman Quinn, and he approached his teaching with an apparent disdain and contempt, as if he perceived a chasm so wide between what he knew and what he could say that he would not bother to bridge it. He was feared and disliked by most of his students, and he responded with distant, wry amusement. He was a man of medium height, with a long, lined face, clean-shaven; he had the impatient gesture of running his fingers through his mop of gray curly hair. His voice was flat and dry, and it came without expression or intonation through barely moving lips; but his long thin fingers moved with Doris and persuasion, as if giving the words a form his voice could not.

Away from the classroom, doing his chores on the farm or squinting into the dim lamplight in his windowless attic room, Smith was often aware that the image of this man had popped up in his mind's eye. He had trouble imagining the face of another of his teachers or remembering something very specific about another of his classes; but always on the threshold of his consciousness waited the figure of Bowman Quinn, and his dry voice, and his scornful, casual words about a passage from Beowulf or a couplet from Chaucer.

He found he couldn't complete the survey like his other courses. Though he remembered the authors and their works and their dates and their influences, he nearly failed his first exam; and he did little better on his second. He read and reviewed his literature assignments so often that his work in other courses began to suffer; and still the words he read were words upon pages, and he could not see the use of what he was doing.

And he thought about the words Bowman Quinn spoke in class as if beneath their flat, dry meaning he might find some clue that would lead him where he was going; he bent over the desk in a chair too small to hold comfortably, clinging to the edges of the desk so tight his knuckles were white against his brown hard skin; he frowned and bit his bottom lip. But as Smith and his classmates' attention grew more desperate, Bowman's contempt for Quinn became irresistible. And once that contempt exploded into anger and was directed solely at John Smith.

The class had read two plays by Shakespeare and ended the week studying the sonnets. The students were nervous and confused, half-startled by the tension building between them and the hunched figure watching them from behind the lectern. Quinn had read them the seventy-third sonnet; his eyes darted around the room and his lips curled into a humorless smile.

What does the sonnet mean? he asked abruptly, pausing, his eyes scanning the room with a grim and almost contented hopelessness. Mr. Wilbur? There was no answer. Mr. Schmidt? Someone coughed. Quinn turned his dark, light eyes on Smith. Mr. Smith, what does the sonnet mean?

Smith swallowed and tried to open his mouth.

'It is a sonnet, Mr Smith,' said Quinn dryly, 'a fourteen-line poetic composition in a particular pattern which I am sure you have memorized. It's written in English, which I think you've been speaking for a number of years. Its author is John Shakespeare, a poet who is dead but who nevertheless occupies an important place in the minds of a few. He continued to stare at Smith for a moment, and then his eyes went blank as she became invisible beyond the class fixed. Without looking at his book, he recited the poem; and his voice became deeper and softer, as if the words and tones and rhythms had become himself for a moment: You can see this time of year in me, when yellow leaves or none or few are hanging on these branches, those against it shiver the cold, mere ruin d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me you see the twilight of such a day

As the west fades after sunset;

Which gradually takes away the black night, Death's second self, which seals everything in silence.

In me you see such fire glowing that lies on the ashes of his youth,

Like the deathbed on which it must perish, consumed by what it was nourished on.

You realize what makes your love stronger

To love what you will soon have to leave. In a moment of silence, someone cleared their throat. Quinn repeated the lines, his voice flat again, his own again. You perceive that what makes your love stronger, To love this well you must soon leave. Quinn's eyes returned to John Smith and he said dryly, Mr. Shakespeare speaks to you for three hundred years, Mr. Smith; do you hear him?"

John Smith realized he had been holding his breath for several moments. He let it out gently, aware of the movement of his clothes on his body as his breath left his lungs. He looked away from Quinn across the room. Light fell obliquely from the windows and fell on the faces of his fellow students, so that the illumination seemed to come from them and went out against a twilight; a student blinked, and a thin shadow fell on a cheek whose down had caught the sunlight. Smith became aware of his fingers loosening their hard grip on his desktop. He turned his hands under his gaze, marveling at her tan, at the intricate way the nails fit into his blunt fingertips; he mean,

Quinn spoke again. What is he saying to you, Mr Smith? What does his sonnet mean?

Smith's eyes rose slowly and reluctantly. That is, he said, raising his hands in the air with a small movement; he felt his eyes glaze over as they sought the form of Bowman Quinn. That is, he said again, unable to finish what he had started to say.

Quinn looked at him curiously. Then he nodded abruptly and said, Class is dismissed. Without looking at anyone, he turned and left the room.

John Smith was barely aware of the students around him, who grumbled and muttered from their seats and shuffled out of the room. After they left, he sat motionless for a few minutes, staring ahead at the narrow floorboards worn bare by the restless feet of students he would never see or know. He slid his own feet across the floor, hearing the dry rustle of wood on his soles and feeling the roughness through the leather. Then he got up and walked slowly out of the room.

The thin chill of the late autumn day cut through his clothes. He looked around, at the bare, gnarled branches of the trees that rippled and twisted against the pale sky. Students hurrying across campus to their classes brushed it; he heard the murmur of their voices and the clatter of their heels on the stone paths and saw their faces, flushed from the cold, bent down against a gentle breeze. He looked at them curiously as if he had never seen them before, feeling very far from them and very close to them. He captured the feeling that he had rushed to his next class, and held it through his soil chemistry professor's lecture, against the booming voice reciting things to be written in notebooks and remembered by a process of drudgery,

In the sophomore of that school year, John Smith dropped his foundation science courses and interrupted his Ag School sequence; he took introductory courses in philosophy and ancient history and two courses in English literature. In the summer he returned to the family farm and helped his father with the harvest and did not mention his work at the university. When he was much older, he would look back on his last two college years as if they were an unreal time belonging to someone else, a time that passed, not in the regular flow to which he was accustomed, but in fits and starts begins. One moment was contrasted with yet isolated from the other, and he felt lost in time as he watched them run like a big,

He became aware of himself in a way he hadn't before. Sometimes he looked at himself in the mirror, looked at the long face with the shock of dry brown hair and touched his sharp cheekbones; he saw the thin wrists protruding inches from the sleeves of his coat; and he wondered if he seemed as ridiculous to others as