Thomas Wolfe, page 265
Still, the life of that little place did have a kind of self-conscious restraint, the atmosphere of a maintained gentility. It was so wonderfully like a certain kind of boarding house he had seen and known everywhere. It was like a place that he had known in London, in Tavistock Square in the Bloomsbury district. It was like another place that bore the more sumptuous title of “private hotel” in Bath. It was like a pension where he had lived for a short time at St. Germaine-en-Laye, outside of Paris. It belonged, really, to the great company of Genteel Boarding Houses of the Universe, Ltd. One was always afraid to laugh out loud in Fräulein Bahr’s establishment, although one often wanted to. One was always a little afraid to talk in his natural tone of voice, openly, frankly, enthusiastically, to engage occasionally in heated argument or debate. Their voices were subdued, their laughter politely restrained, their conversations somewhat delicately limited. They were all a little conscious, he thought, of one another, a little too considerate, he believed, and also a little too critical. It was, in other words, not a very easy atmosphere. One attained gentility at the sacrifice of naturalness, restraint at the expense of enthusiasm, politeness at the cost of warmth.
It was the same way with the food. For the first time in Germany he found himself in a place where there was just barely enough of everything. To his own way of thinking, there was not enough. He never dared to ask for a second helping because no one else ever asked for one. It was embarrassing, this feeling that there was just barely enough to go around, and the painful suspicion that if one had intemperately called for a second portion he would have got it, but that one of the servants, the cook, the waitress, or the maid, would have had to do without. There were eight of them at table, and when the meat was served, whether pork or roast or veal, there were always just eight slices, pretty thinly cut, upon the plate. Each of them took his slice delicately and with refined restraint as it was offered. And the rest of them coyly kept their eyes averted while this process was going on. It was the same way with the bread and vegetables. There was just enough of everything.
Monk used to be ravenously hungry all the time. Whether this was because of insufficient portions in the pension or a kind of enormous hunger of the spirit and of the imagination which reacted on him physically as well, he did not know. It was probably a mixture of both.
But he believed those others, for all their air of refined appeasement and modified restraint, used to feel it too. He knew they would not admit it if they did. It was not the spirit and the temper of that high-toned place. But he often suspected them of having secret sources of refreshment, victuals cunningly cached away in the privacy of their rooms, to which they could gluttonously resort in safe seclusion, faced only by the accusing eye of their own conscience and their God. He used to have his dark suspicions of them all. It seemed to him that sometimes when they got up, said “Mahlzeit,” and made their refined and dignified departures, he could detect in their manners traces of unclean eagerness and indecent haste, or observe in the expression of their eyes the awakened fires of a gluttonous and faintly obscene lust. Then he would follow them in his mind’s eye as they went from the dining room and down the corridor to their own room. In his mind’s eye he could see them, walking deliberately at first with dignified restraint, but quickening their footsteps perceptibly as they went on, until, as they turned the corner and went down the empty hallway towards their own door, they fairly broke into a run, frantically fumbled at the lock, opened the door and closed and bolted it behind them, and then, laughing hysterically, fairly hurled themselves upon a sausage, greedily crammed the dainties of their guilty pleasure in their mouths.
He had, in fact, a grotesque and comic confirmation of this. One afternoon, when he had gone to pay the weekly bill, he caught Fräulein Bahr and her older brother in the act. He had just knocked upon the door of their own sitting room. One of the waitresses was coming out with an empty tray. She opened the door as he arrived, and before they could prepare for him, he was upon them. There was nothing then for her to do, of course, except to ask him in, which she did do very kindly. And he went in, his eyes bulging from his head, fairly glued upon the table, which, it seemed to him, was groaning with a surfeit of Lucullan dainties. Fräulein Bahr flushed a little, then remarked that they were having tea, and invited him to have a cup with them. Tea! Yes, they did have tea all right. But they had many other things as well. They had those fat, spicy, fragrant, delicious little sausages, fairly bursting in their oil-tight skins. They had liverwurst and salami, they had crusty rolls and they had stacks of pumpernickel, they had delicious little pats of butter, little sumptuous jars of jam, preserves, and confitures. They had those luscious, rich, delicious miracles of German pastry, covered with preserved cherries, strawberries, plums, and apples, with an inch-thick roof of firm whipped cream. It was a banquet. He understood now why Fräulein Bahr and her genial and good-natured brother were always so quickly satisfied at table.
Perhaps the other people in the pension did the same. He never knew. He only knew that he was hungry all the time, ravenous as he had never been in his whole life before, and nothing that he did or ate could stop or diminish it. And it was not just the pension. If he had had three times as much to eat, it would have been the same. It was a hunger not only of the belly, but a hunger of the mind and heart and spirit, which got translated in the most astounding and appalling way to all the appetites of sense and flesh. It was a hunger that he had felt from the moment he had entered Germany, a hunger that Munich had intensified, that Munich had concentrated and enlarged. For that was what the place had done to him, that was the kind of place that Munich was.
Munich was not only a kind of German heaven. It was an enchanted land of Cockaigne, where one ate and drank forever and where one was never filled. It was Scharaffenland—it made him think of Peter Breughel’s picture of that name, which showed the little roast pigs trotting conveniently to serve your pleasure, with knives and forks stuck juicily in their tender, crackling hides, with pieces cut out of their hind quarters, with plump broiled chickens on their way to feed you, and bottles dropping from the sky, and trees and bushes drooping down with growths of pastry and with fruits of food. It may have been in part the clean vitality of the Alpine air that kept him hungry. It may have been the food he needed but had not been fed. But it was more than this. A raging hunger and a quenchless thirst was gnawing at him, and no matter what he ate or drank he could not get enough.
It cannot be told about, it can never be described, it cannot be called a name. It was appalling, it was revolting, it was loathsome and disgusting. It was a hunger that was no hunger, it was a thirst that was no thirst, it was a hunger and a thirst that grew from everything they fed upon. It consumed him even as he tried to feed it and to conquer it. It was like some enormous consumption of the soul and body for which there is no cure, for which there is no end.
In the morning he would go out while the girl was making up his room and pass along the Theresienstrasse to walk about the English Gardens, and a dozen times along the way he would be halted by the temptations of this agonizing hunger and this thirst. It was as much as he could do to pass a food, a pastry, or a sweet shop without going into it. The whole city seemed fairly to be groaning with these little fat, luxurious shops. He wondered how they lived and how they managed—where, in this stricken land, the people and the money came from to support them. The windows of the “Feinkost” shops were maddening. They were crammed with the most astounding variety of appetizing foods, sausages of every shape and kind that fairly made his mouth water when he looked at them, cheeses, roasts of meat, smoked hams, tall, slender bottles of fine wine, a profusion of luxury, a gourmet’s treasure house, that exerted over him an irresistible hypnotic fascination. Whenever he approached one of these places, and they were everywhere, he would turn his eyes away, lower his head, and try to hurry past—but it was no use. If a wizard had drawn a magic line across the pavement and cast a spell upon the place, his effort could have been no greater, his defeat more abject and complete. It was impossible to go by them without stopping. He would stand before the windows and fairly gorge his lustful eyes, and if he got by one, there was always another. If he entered one and made a purchase, he was always haunted by the memory of all the purchases he had not made, the maddening goodies he had missed. If he bought one kind of sausage, there was always the tantalizing memory of a dozen other kinds that might taste better. If he gorged and fed his eyes and spent his money in one shop, inevitably he would see another crammed with good things that made the first one poor by comparison. It was the same way with the pastry shops with their cherry, plum, and peach, and apple cakes, their crusty miracles of bakery, covered with whipped cream. So, too, with all the sweet and candy stores. There were the chocolates and bonbons, the candies and the crystal fruits, the glacéed plums and cherries and the cubes of pineapple, the brandied chocolates and the fragrant gums.
It was the same with everything he saw, with everything he did. He wanted everything. He wanted to eat up everything, to drink up everything, to read up everything, to remember and to look up everything, to get his hands upon the palpable and impossible body, the magnificent plenitude, of a whole groaning earth, to devour it, to consume it, to have and hold it for his own forever. It was madness, it was agony, it was a cureless, quenchless, hopeless disease of mind and flesh and spirit. He would surfeit himself with everything that he could buy, with everything he could afford, with everything that he could see or hear or could remember, and still there was no end.
He went to the museums, those crowded and innumerable granaries into which they had collected the enormous treasures of their art. He invaded them, tried to devour them with the gluttony of an impossible and mad desire. He tried to feed upon the very pigments of the canvas, he tried to print each picture in his brain and on his memory with such voracious eagerness that it seemed as if the very color had gone out of them and had sunk through into his eyes. Day after day he walked the crowded galleries of the Old Pinakothek until the guards were fearful of his purpose and followed him from room to room. He almost pulled Mathias Grünewald from the wall; he walked straight out of there carrying those lovely naked girls of Lucas Cranach in his brain. He pulled every ounce of rose-hued flesh, every swirling universe of heaven and of earth, out of the swarming canvases of Rubens, and every canvas in that whole enormous gallery, from Grünewald to Rubens, from Lucas Cranach to Hans Holbein, from Breughel to “The Apostles” of Albrecht Dürer, and from Teniers to the Master of “The Life of Mary.” He had them all enlisted in his brain, printed in his heart, painted on the canvas of his soul.
He haunted bookshops with the same insatiate and unreasoning desire. He spent hours before the crowded windows of the book stores, memorizing the names of countless books, written in a language he could scarcely read. He filled notebook after notebook with the titles of these books. He would buy books he could not afford, books he could not read, and carry them with him everywhere he went, together with a dictionary, and so decipher them. That swarming multitude of Gothic print, that staggering superflux of German culture, maddened him with an intolerable and impossible hunger for possession. He informed himself upon the number of books that came out yearly from the German presses. It was horrible, it was appalling. There were over 30,000. He hated them for the same gluttony that was devouring him. He wondered how they could endure it, how they could ever draw their breath again in peace, in clearness, in repose, under the nightmare superfetation of that flood of print.
He was horribly involved, caught up, entangled, in the Laocoön coils of his own madness. He wanted to satiate himself upon that which was itself unable to be fed, he wanted to assuage himself upon the unassuageable, appease himself upon the unappeasable, come to the end of all Unendlichkeit, unweave the swarming web, unthread to its last filament the texture of a pattern which could have no end. He wanted to possess in its entirety, fathom in its profundity, utter in its finality, that which was in itself unpossessable, unfathomable, and unutterable—the old Germanic and swarm-haunted mind of man.
And it could not be done. He knew it, and because he knew, he hated “them.” He loathed the hunger that consumed him. He hated the food of which he ate because he could not eat all that he wanted of it. He hated the family of the earth to which he himself belonged because he himself belonged to it, because its blood was in him, his in it, because twin demons of his soul divided him in unending warfare. He hated the face of the great swine, the creased neck of the unsated beast, because he felt himself the hungers of the beast’s never-ending lust, and could find no end of it. There were in him two powers discrete, two forces of the soul and of inheritance, and now they waged contention daily in his life upon a battlefield where there could never be a victor, where he was caught in his own trap, imprisoned by his own forces, held captive by the very powers which were himself. He understood it all so well, because he had himself created it. He understood it all so well, because it had itself created him. He hated it so much because he had such deep and everlasting love for it. He fled from it and knew he never could escape.
At night he walked the streets. He went into the crowded places. He sought the beer-fogged flash and roar, the enormous restaurants. He plunged into the roaring tumult of the Hofbrau Haus, swung to the rhythm of that roaring life, breathed the air, felt the warmth, the surge, the powerful communion of those enormous bodies, gulped down from stone mugs liter after liter of the cold and powerful dark beer. He swung and swayed and roared and sang and shouted in the swaying mass, felt a terrible jubilation, a mad lust, the unsated hunger filling him, and still could find no end and seek no rest.
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47
A VISIT TO THE FAIR
September was advancing to its close and the season of the Oktoberfest was at hand. Everywhere throughout Munich he saw posters announcing the event, and wherever he went people were talking about it. In the pension in the Theresienstrasse the table guests spoke to him about it with that elaborate jocoseness that men use towards a child—or a foreigner who speaks the language badly. His mind was busy with conjectures and images, but he could get no very clear picture of the approaching carnival. But the affair began to take on in his mind a ritualistic significance. He began to feel that at last he was to come close to the heart of this people—as if, after a voyage through the old barbaric forest, he would come suddenly upon them at their altars in a cleared ring.
One Sunday afternoon, early in October, a day or two after the carnival had opened, Monk made his way, accompanied by Heinrich Bahr, to the Theresien Fields, on the eastern edges of the city, where the Fair was now going on. As they walked along past the railway station and towards the carnival grounds, the street, and all the streets that led to it, began to swarm with people. Most of them were native Müncheners, but a great number were also Bavarian country people. These Bavarians were brawny men and women who stained the crowd brilliantly with the rich dyes of their costume—the men in their elaborately-embroidered holiday shorts and stockings, the women in their bright dresses and lace bodices, marching briskly along with the springy step of the mountaineer. These peasants had the perfect flesh and the sound teeth of animals. Their smooth, round faces wore only the markings of the sun and the wind: they were unworn by the thought and pain that waste away man’s strength. Monk looked at them with a pang of regret and of envy—their lives were so strong and so confident, and, having missed so much, they seemed to have gained so greatly. Their lives were limited to one or two desires. Most of them had never read a book, a visit to this magic city of Munich was to them a visit to the heart of the universe, and the world that existed beyond their mountains had no real existence for them at all.
As they neared the Theresien Fields, the crowd became so thick that movement was impeded and slowed down. The huge noises of the Fair came to them now, and Monk could see the various buildings. His first feeling as he entered the Fields was one of overwhelming disappointment. What lay before him and around him seemed to be only a smaller and less brilliant Coney Island. There were dozens of booths and sheds filled with cheap dolls, teddy bears, candy wrappers, clay targets, etc., with all the accompanying claptrap of two-headed monsters, crazy houses, fat ladies, dwarfs, palmists, hypnotists, as well as all the elaborate machinery for making one dizzy: whirling carriages and toy automobiles that spun about on an electrified floor, all filled with people who screamed with joy when the crazy vehicles crashed together and were released again by the attendant.
Heinrich Bahr began to laugh and stare like a child. The childlike capacity of all these people for amusement was astonishing. Like children, they seemed never to grow weary of the whole gaudy show. Great fat fellows with shaven heads and creased necks rode on the whirling and whipping machines, or rode round and round, again and again, on the heaving wooden horses of the merry-go-rounds. Heinrich was fascinated. Monk rode with him several times on the breathless dip-and-dive of the great wooden trestlelike railway, and then was whipped and spun dizzy in several of the machines.
Finally Heinrich was content. They moved slowly along down the thronging central passage of the Fair until they came to a more open space at the edge of the Fields. Here, from a little platform, a man was haranguing the crowd in harsh, carnival barker’s German. Beside him on the platform stood a young man whose body and arms were imprisoned in a sleeveless canvas jacket and manacled with a chain. Presently the barker stopped talking, the young man thrust his feet through canvas loops, and he was hauled aloft, feet first, until he hung face downward above the staring mob. Monk watched him as he began his desperate efforts to free himself from the chain and jacket that fettered him, until he saw his face turn purple, and the great veins stand out in ropes upon his forehead. Meanwhile a woman passed through the crowd soliciting contributions, and when she had got all the money that the crowd would yield, the young man, whose swollen face was now almost black with blood, freed himself very quickly and was lowered to the earth. The crowd dispersed, almost, it seemed to Monk, with a kind of sullenness as if the thing which they had waited to see had now happened but had somehow disappointed them, and while the barker began his harangue again, the young man sat in a chair recovering himself, with his hand before his eyes. Meanwhile the woman who had collected money stood by him anxiously, looking at him, and in a moment spoke to him. And somehow, just by their nearness to each other and by no other outward sign, there was communicated to Monk a sense of tenderness and love.
