Thomas Wolfe, page 154
At first, as Eugene ran, he felt strong and lithe and eager. He was aware of an aerial buoyancy: his step was light, his stride was long and easy, his breath came softly, without labor, and the swift feet of the running boys thudded before, behind, around him, on the hard path, pleasantly, and he was secure in his strength and certitude again, and thought that he was one of them, and could run with them to the end of the world and back, and never feel it.
He thought he had recovered all the lean sinew and endurance of a boy, that the storm-swift flight, the speed, the hard condition, and resilient effort of a boy were his again, that he had never lost them, that they had never changed. Then a leaden heaviness began to steal along his limbs, he felt the weariness of effort for the first time, a thickening slowness in the muscles of his legs, a numb weight-like heaviness tingling at his finger-tips, and now he no longer looked so sharply and so smartly at the swinging crew below him, the nimbly running boys around him.
He began to pound ahead with dogged and deliberate effort, and his heart was pounding like a hammer at his ribs, his breath was laboring hoarsely in his throat and his tongue felt numb and thick and swollen in his mouth, and blind motes were swimming drunkenly before his eyes. He could hear his voice, unfamiliar and detached, weirdly unreal, as if some one else were speaking in him, as it panted hoarsely:
“Come on, Merton! . . . Come on, Merton! . . . Come on, Merton!”
And now the nimbler running footsteps all around him had passed, had gone ahead of him, had vanished. He could no longer see the crews nor know if they were there. He ran on blindly, desperately, hearing, seeing, saying nothing any longer, an anguished leaden creature, weighted down with a million leaden hours and weary efforts, pounding heavily, blindly, mindlessly along, beneath gray timeless skies of an immortal weariness, across the gray barren earth of some huge planetary vacancy—where there was neither shade nor stay nor shelter, where there would never be a resting place, a room, nor any door which he could enter, and where he must pound blindly, wearily along, alone, through that huge vacancy forever.
Then voices swarmed around him once again, and he could feel strong hands on him. They seized him, stopped him, and familiar faces swarmed forward at him through those swimming motes of blind gray vacancy. He could hear again the hoarse ghost-unreality of his own voice panting: “Come on, Merton!” and see his friends again, now grinning, laughing, shouting, as they shook him. “Stop! The race is over! Merton won!”
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LXXV
Their names were Octave Feuillet, Alfred Capus, and Maurice Donnay; their names were Hermant, Courteline, and René Bazin; their names were Jules Renard, Marcelle Tinayre, and André Theuriet; and Clarétie, and Frapié and Tristan Bernard; and de Régnier and Paul Reboux, and Lavedan; their names were Rosny, Gyp, Boylesve, and Richepin; their names were Bordeaux, Prévost, Margueritte, and Duvernois—their names, Great God, their names were countless as the sands upon the shore—and in the end, their names were only names and names and names—and nothing more.
Or, if their names were something more than names—if they sometimes shaped themselves in his mind as personalities—these personalities were faded, graceful, and phantasmal ones—each talented and secure in his position, and curiously alike—each brave and good and gentle in his trade, like lesser-known knights of the Round Table. He knew that few of them had been the hero of a generation, the leader of a century; he knew that none of them had rivalled Balzac, surpassed Stendhal, out-done Flaubert. And for this reason, their vague, phantasmal company became more haunting-strange to him than if they had.
He knew, as well, that there must be among them great differences of talent, great differences of style. His reason told him that some were good, and some were fair, and some were only cheap; even his meagre understanding of their tongue showed him that there was a great range, every kind of difference in their choice and treatment of a subject—a range that swept from the gracefully ironic sentiment of Les Vacances d’un Jeune Homme Sage to the stern earth-and-peasant austerity of Le Blé qui lève; from the dream nostalgia of Le Passé Vivant to the salty and difficult drolleries of Messieurs les Ronds-de-Cuir or Le Train de 8h 47.
He knew that each of these men must have had his own style, his special quality which would instantly be discerned and appraised by a French reader—he knew that some had written of the quiet life of the provinces, and that others wrote of the intrigue, the love affairs, the worldly and sophisticated gentry, of Paris; he knew that some were writers of a graceful sentiment, some delicately ironic, some drolly comic, some savagely satiric, and some grimly tragic.
But all of them seemed to come from the same place, to have the same quality, to evoke the same perfume. They were the vague and shadowy figures of a charming, beautiful, and legendary kind of life—a life that was all the more legendary to him because he was constantly groping with half-meanings, filling in his faulty understanding of the language with painful intuitions, tearing desperately at the contents of unnumbered volumes, with a tortured hunger of frustration, an aching brain, a dictionary in one hand, and one of these slick and flimsy little volumes in another.
And for this reason, perhaps, as much as any other—because of this savage struggle with an alien tongue, this agonizing, half-intuitive effort by which he groped his way to understanding through a book—the books themselves, and these graceful and shadowy figures who produced them, took on a quality that was as strange as the whole experience of these first weeks in Paris had become. Indeed, in later years, the legendary quality of his savage conflict with this world of print became indistinguishably mixed with the legendary quality of the life around him. Perhaps, even the swift, graceful, and fascinating little drawings and illustrations which dotted the pages of these books were in some measure responsible for this illusion: the pictures gave to the hard and difficult pages of a thousand fictions the illusion of an actual reality: in these little pictures he could see and recognize a thousand things that had already grown familiar to him—the narrow sidewalks and the tall and ancient houses of the Latin Quarter, the bridges of the Seine, the interior of a railway compartment, the great grilled gate of a château, people sitting at the tables in a café or on the terrace, the walls, the roofs, the chimney-pots of Paris which, no matter what changes had come about in human costume, feminine fashions, top-hats, frock-coats, or facial whiskerage, had themselves changed very little.
The most extraordinary and vividly imagined phenomenon of his desperate struggle to understand these innumerable fictions was this: Although his reason told him that all these men—all these phantasmal and haunting names—Feuillet, Capus, Donnay, Tinayre, Boylesve, Bazin, Theuriet—and all the rest of them—must have known all the sweat and anguish of hard labor, the solicitude, the grinding effort, and the desperate patience, that every artist knows, he became obsessed, haunted with the idea that the works of all this graceful, strange, and fortunate company were written without effort, with the most superb casualness and ease. It was his strange delusion that all of them were not only of an equal talent—could do all kinds of writing equally well and with equal ease—but that the reason for this marvellous endowment lay somehow in the fact that they were “French”—that by the fortunate accident of race and birth each one had somehow been constituted an artist who could do all things gracefully and well, and could do nothing wrong. Favored at birth by the great inheritance of their language, blood, and temperament, they grew up as children of a beautiful, strange, and legendary civilization whose very tongue was a guaranty of style, whose very tradition an assurance of form. These men could write nothing badly because it was not within the blood and nature of their race to do so: they must do everything gracefully, easily, and with an impeccable sense of form, because grace and ease and form were innate to them.
Finally, the most extraordinary fact of this curious obsession was his belief that all these books had been written by their authors not in the stern and lonely solitude of some midnight room, but swiftly, casually, and easily, as one might write a letter at the table of a café.
The obsession was so strong that he could see them writing at such a place—Feuillet, Capus, Donnay, Bazin—all the rest of them, each seated in the afternoon at his own inviolable table in his favorite café, each with a writing pad, a pen and ink before him, a half-emptied bock or glass of wine beside him, an adoring and devoted old waiter hovering anxiously near him—each writing steadily, rapidly, and gracefully the pages of some new and faultless story, some graceful, perfect book, filling up page after page of manuscript in their elegant, fine handwriting, without erasures or deletions, pausing thoughtfully from time to time to stare dreamily away, stroking their lank, disordered hair, their elegant French whiskers with a thin white hand, and so far from being distracted by the gaiety, the noise and clatter of the café crowd around them, deriving a renewed vitality from its sparkling stimulation, and returning to fill up page after page again.
And he could see them meeting every afternoon—that band of Bohemian immortality, that fortunate and favored company of art that could do no wrong—in some café on the Boulevards, or in some quiet, gracious old place hallowed by their patronage, in the Latin Quarter, in Montparnasse, or on the Boul St. Mich or in Montmartre.
He saw the whole scene with a blazing imagery, an exact detail, as if he had himself been present and seen and heard it all. He could hear the spirited light clamor of their conversation—like everything they did, gracious, faultless, full of ease—could see them rise to greet their famous comrades—whoever they might be—Feuillet, Capus, or Donnay, all the rest of them—could see them shake hands with the swift, firm greeting, so graceful, worldly, and so French, and hear them saying:
“Ah, my dear Maurice—how goes it with you? But—I see that I disturb you—pardon, my friend!—I see that you are busy with another of your admirable tales—Ah-h, my old one, not for the world would I disturb the flow of your so admirable genius. Parbleu! Do I wish my wretched name to become infamous to all posterity, to be heard with execration—ah, the devil! Non! The black forgetfulness of the grave is better! Eh, well, then, old comrade, till tomorrow—Then I hope——”
“Ah, but no, but no, but no, but no, but no! My dear Octave, you shall remain! These pages here!—Pouf! it is nothing! I am already done—Attend!” Swiftly he scrawls a line or two, and then triumphantly: “Voilà! C’est fini, old cock! A trifle I was finishing for my scoundrel of a publisher, who demands it for tomorrow.—But, tell me, my dear boy—what the devil kept you in the provinces for so long a time—so long away from this dear Pa-ree? Ah, how we have missed you: my dear fellow, Paris really never is the same unless you are here to give it grace! Tiens! Tiens! Poor Courteline has been quite inconsolable! Capus has sworn daily he would go and fetch you back! Tinayre is grouchy as a bear! My dear fellow, we have all lamented you! De Régnier was certain you had got another mistress! Boylesve insisted that she was at least a duchess—Bazin, a milkmaid——”
“And you, my old one?”
“I? My dear fellow—I knew it must be chicken-pox or measles: I was certain you would not have to stir a foot out of Pa-ree to find a wench.”
“But tell me, Octave, how are all our friends? I am starved for news, I have read nothing. First of all—René——?”
“Has published another admirable work—an excellent study of life in the provinces.”
“Ah, good. And Duvernois?”
“His latest comedy has been produced and is un succès fou—a charming thing—witty, naughty, quite in his best vein, my dear boy.”
“Renard?”
“A comedy, a book of stories, a romance—all excellent, all doing well.”
“And Courteline?”
“Une chose incomparable, my boy: a book of dialogues in his drollest vein—the public is convulsed: the police are in a towering rage about Le Gendarme est sans Pitié——”
“And Abel?”
“A formidable book, my lad—just what you would expect, a powerful tragedy, exact psychology, brilliant—but here he comes, all smiles—ah-h! I thought so! He sees you—My dear Abel, welcome: behold, our prodigal has come home again——”
Yes, it was so that it was done, without anguish, error, or maddening of the soul.
And far, far away from all this certain grace, this ease of form, this assured attaining of expression—there lay America—and all the dumb hunger of its hundred million tongues, its unfound form, its unborn art. Far, far away from this enchanted legend of a city—there lay America and the brutal stupefaction of its million streets, its unquiet heart, its vast incertitude, the huge sprawled welter of its life—its formless and illimitable distances.
And Great God! Great God! but it was farther, stranger than a dream—he noted its cruelty, savagery, horror, error, loss and waste of life, its murderous criminality, and its hypocritic mask of virtue, its lies, its horrible falseness, and its murderous closure of a telling tongue—and Great God! Great God! with every pulse and fibre in him, with the huge, sick ache of an intolerable homelessness, he was longing with every beating of his anguished heart for just one thing—return!
Day by day, hour by hour, and minute by minute, the blind hunger tore at his naked entrails with a vulture’s beak. He prowled the streets of Paris like a maddened animal, he hurled himself at the protean complexities of its million-footed life like a soldier who hurls himself into a battle: he was baffled, sick with despair, wrung, trembling and depleted, finally exhausted, caught in the toils of that insatiate desire, that terrible devouring hunger that grew constantly from what it fed upon and that drove him blindly to madness. The hopeless and unprofitable struggle of the Faustian life had never been so horribly evident as it now was—the futility of his insane efforts to memorize every stone and paving brick in Paris, to burn the vision of his eyes through walls and straight into the lives and hearts of a million people, to read all the books, eat all the food, drink all the wine, to hold the whole gigantic panorama of the universe within his memory, and somehow to make “one small globe of all his being,” to compact the accumulated experience of eternity into the little prism of his flesh, the small tenement of his brain, and somehow to use it all for one final, perfect, all-inclusive work—his life’s purpose, his heart’s last pulse and anguish, and his soul’s desire.
As a result of all this anguished and frustrated struggle he began now to go about with a small notebook in his pocket, the worn stub of a chewed pencil in his hands.
And because everything went into this mad mélange, because by every one of these scrawls of notes and sometimes incoherent words—even by the thousands of crude drawings, swift designs which he scrawled down in a thousand towns and places, to get the texture of a wall, the design of a door, the shape of a table, even the sword-cut on a man’s scarred face—because in all of these shells and splinters that were thrown off from his tormented and uneasy brain the terrible Faustian fever of his tortured spirit was evident—no better image of his life—the life of a young man of that period—of modern man caught in the Faustian serpent-toils of modern life—can be given than the splintered jottings in these battered little books afford.
Here then, picked out at random from the ferment of ten thousand pages, and a million words—put down just as they were written, in fragments, jots, or splintered flashes, without order or coherence—here, with all its vanity, faith, despair, joy, and anguish, with all its falseness, error and pretension, and with all its desperate sincerity, its incredible hope, its insane desire, is a picture of a man’s soul and heart—the image of his infuriate desire—caught hot and instant, drawn flaming from the forge of his soul’s agony.
Monday, November 17, 1924: Worked over 5 hours up to present (9:40) Cigarets and coffee—Very tired.
Tuesday: Worked 4 hours yesterday. Very tired today only an hour—more tonight——
Wednesday: Good week’s work last week—Four or five hours actual writing every day—I may succeed ultimately because I’m not content with what I do.
I was born in 1900—I am now 24 years old. During that period I think the best writing in English has been done by James Joyce in “Ulysses”—I think the best writing in the ballad has been done by G. K. Chesterton in “Lepanto.” The best writing in sustained narrative verse by John Masefield—particularly in “The Dauber,” “The River” and “The Widow in The Bye Street.” Who produce copiously—Arnold Bennet—The best practitioners of the Essay—Belloc—the most gigantically thorough realist—Theodore Dreiser—The most sparing selection and unfailingly competent—Galsworthy—The best play for Poetry—“The Playboy of Western World”—The best journalist—Sinclair Lewis.
The critic with the greatest subtlety—T. S. Eliot—The critic with the greatest range and power—H. L. Mencken—The best woman writer—May Sinclair—The next best—Virginia Woolf—The next best—Willa Cather.
Wednesday Night—November 26, 1924: At midnight eating at Chez Marianne—First day I have not worked for two weeks but am going home to work after eating. Up at 12:30 today after last night felt sick—walked to bank—found no mail—wrote and sent letters to Mama and to University. Talked to young fellow in bank about Switzerland—had lunch at Taverne Royale—Took taxi to Place des Vosges—Went to Victor Hugo Museum—Walked around Square—then back to Carnavalet—at National Archives—The narrow streets, the narrow sidewalks, the great busses, taxis, autos, bicycles, trucks and the catty people jabbering and squalling got me in a stew—Looked over distressing tons of books at a bookshop, and went on feeling crushed—Bought two books—Then got taxi Rue du Temple and so home through the jam of Rue de Rivoli—Women outside pawing cheap articles at Samaritaine. Then home to hotel where bathed went out to Deux Magots two Apéritifs then to Apollo Revue!—Not as bad as some—one or two good songs—but of course, on whole quite stupid.
