Thomas Wolfe, page 305
During the course of the meal the man became very friendly and attentive. It seemed he just couldn’t do enough for George. He kept helping him to various dishes and filling his glass with more wine. And whenever George turned to him he would find the man looking at him with an expression of such obvious sympathy and commiseration that finally he felt compelled to ask him what the trouble was.
“Ah,” he said, shaking his head with a doleful sigh, “I was mighty sorry when I read about it.”
“Read about what?”
“Why,” he said, “the prize.”
“What prize?”
“But didn’t you read about it in the paper? Didn’t you see what happened?”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said George, puzzled. “What did happen?”
“Why,” he said, “you didn’t get it.”
“Didn’t get what?”
“The prize!” he cried—“the prize!”—mentioning a literary prize that was awarded every year. “I thought you would be sure to get it, but—” he paused a moment, then went on sorrowfully—“they gave it to another man. . . . You got mentioned . . . you were runner-up . . . but—” he shook his head gloomily—“you didn’t get it.”
So much for his good friend, the millionaire. George never saw him again after that. And yet, let no one say that he was ever bitter.
Then there was Dorothy.
Dorothy belonged to that fabulous and romantic upper crust of New York “Society” which sleeps by day and begins to come awake at sunset and never seems to have any existence at all outside of the better-known hot spots of the town. She had been expensively educated for a life of fashion, she had won a reputation in her set for being quite an intellectual because she had been known to read a book, and so, of course, when George Webber’s novel was listed as a best seller she bought it and left it lying around in prominent places in her apartment. Then she wrote the author a scented note, asking him to come and have a cocktail with her. He did, and at her urging he went back to see her again and again.
Dorothy was no longer as young as she had been, but she was well built, had kept her figure and her face, and was not a bad-looking wench. She had never married, and apparently felt she did not need to, for it was freely whispered about that she seldom slept alone. One heard that she had bestowed her favors not only upon all the gentlemen of her own set, but also upon such casual gallants as the milkmen on her family’s estate, stray taxi drivers, writers of da-da, professional bicycle riders, wasteland poets, and plug-ugly bruisers with flat feet and celluloid collars. So George had expected their friendship to come quickly to its full flower, and he was quite surprised and disappointed when nothing happened.
His evenings with Dorothy turned out to be quiet and serious tête-à-têtes devoted to highly intellectual conversation. Dorothy remained as chaste as a nun, and George began to wonder whether she had not been grossly maligned by evil tongues. He found her intellectual and æsthetic interests rather on the dull side, and was several times on the point of giving her up in sheer boredom. But always she would pursue him, sending him notes and letters written in a microscopic hand on paper edged with red, and he would go back again, partly out of curiosity and a desire to find out what it was the woman was after.
He found out. Dorothy asked him to dine with her one night at a fashionable restaurant, and on this occasion she brought along her current sleeping companion, a young Cuban with patent-leather hair. George sat at the table between them. And while the Cuban gave his undivided attention to the food before him, Dorothy began to talk to George, and he learned to his chagrin that she had picked him out of all the world to be the victim of her only sacred passion.
“I love you, Jawge,” she leaned over and whispered loudly in her rather whiskified voice. “I love you—but mah love for you is pewer!” She looked at him with a soulful expression. “You, Jawge—I love you for your maind,” she rumbled on, “for your spirit! But Miguel! Miguel!—” here her eyes roved over the Cuban as he sat tucking the food away with both hands—“Miguel—I love him for his bawd-y! He has no maind, but he has a fa-ine bawd-y,” she whispered lustfully, “a fa-ine, beaut-iful bawd-y—so slim—so boyish—so La-tin!”
She was silent for a moment, and when she went on it was in a tone of foreboding:
“I wantcha to come with us to-naight, Jawge!” she said abruptly. “I don’t know what is going to happen,” she said ominously, “and I wantcha nee-ah me.”
“But what is going to happen, Dorothy?”
“I don’t know,” she muttered. “I just don’t know. Anything might happen! . . . Why, last naight I thought that he was gone! We had a fight and he walked out on me! These La-tins are so proud, so sen-sitive! He caught me looking at another man, and he got up and left me flat! . . . If he left me I don’t know what I’d do, Jawge,” she panted. “I think I’d die! I think I’d kill myself!”
Her eye rested broodingly upon her lover, who at this moment was bending forward with bared teeth toward the tines of his uplifted fork on which a large and toothsome morsel of broiled chicken was impaled. Feeling their eyes upon him, he looked up with his fork poised in mid-air, smiled with satisfaction, then seized the bit of chicken in his jaws, took a drink to wash it down, and wiped his moist lips with a napkin. After that he elegantly lifted one hand to shield his mouth, inserted a fingernail between his teeth, detached a fragment of his victuals, and daintily ejected it upon the floor, while his lady’s fond eye doted on him. Then he picked up the fork again and resumed his delightful gastronomic labors.
“I shouldn’t worry about it, Dorothy,” George said to her. “I don’t think he’s going to leave you for some time.”
“I should die!” she muttered. “I really think that it would kill me! . . . Jawge, you’ve got to come with us to-naight! I just wantcha to be nee-ah me! I feel so safe—so secure—when you’re around! You’re so sawlid, Jawge—so comfawtin’!” she said. “I wantcha to be theah to tawk to me—to hold mah hand and comfawt me—if anything should happen,” she said, at the same time putting her hand on his and squeezing it.
But George did not go with her that night, nor any night thereafter. This was the last he saw of Dorothy. But surely none can say that he was ever bitter.
Again, there was the rich and beautiful young widow whose husband had died just a short time before, and who mentioned this sad fact in the moving and poignantly understanding letter she wrote to George about his book. Naturally, he accepted her kind invitation to drop in for tea. And almost at once the lovely creature offered to make the supreme sacrifice, first beginning with an intimate conversation about poetry, then looking distressed and saying it was very hot in here and did he mind if she took off her dress, then taking it off, and everything else as well, until she stood there as God made her, then getting into bed and casting the mop of her flaming red hair about on the pillow, rolling her eyes in frenzied grief, and crying out in stricken tones: “O Algernon! Algernon! Algernon!”—which was the name of her departed husband.
“O Algernon!” she cried, rolling about in grief and shaking her great mop of flaming hair—“Algie, darling, I am doing it for you! Algie, come back to me! Algie, I love you so! My pain is more than I can bear! Algernon!—No, no, poor boy!” she cried, seizing George by the arm as he started to crawl out of bed, because, to tell the truth, he did not know whether she had gone mad or was playing some wicked joke on him. “Don’t go!” she whispered tenderly, clinging to his arm. “You just don’t understand! I want to be so good to you—but everything I do or think or feel is Algernon, Algernon, Algernon!”
She explained that her heart was buried in her husband’s grave, that she was really “a dead woman” (she had already told him she was a great reader of psychologies), and that the act of love was just an act of devotion to dear old Algie, an effort to be with him again and to be “a part of all this beauty.”
It was very fine and high and rare, and surely no one will think that George would sneer at a beautiful emotion, although it was too fine for him to understand. Therefore he went away, and never saw this lovely and sorrowful widow any more. He knew he was not fine enough. And yet, not for a moment should you think that he was ever bitter.
Finally, there was another girl who came into George Webber’s life during this period of his brief glory, and her he understood. She was a beautiful and brave young woman, country-bred, and she had a good job, and a little apartment from which you could see the East River, the bridges, and all the busy traffic of the tugs and barges. She was not too rare and high for him, although she liked to take a part in serious conversations, to know worth-while people with liberal minds, and to keep up her interest in new schools and modern methods for the children. George became quite fond of her, and would stay all night and go away at daybreak when the streets were empty, and the great buildings went soaring up haggardly, incredibly, as if he were the first man to discover them, in the pale, pure, silent light of dawn.
He loved her well; and one night, after a long silence, she put her arms around him, drew him down beside her, and kissed him, whispering:
“Will you do something for me if I ask you to?”
“Darling, anything!” he said. “Anything you ask me, if I can!”
She held him pressed against her for a moment in the dark and living silence.
“I want you to use your influence to get me into the Cosmopolis Club,” she whispered passionately——
And then dawn came, and the stars fell.
This was the last he saw of the great world of art, of fashion, and of letters.
And if it seems to anyone a shameful thing that I have written thus of shameful things and shameful people, then I am sorry for it. My only object is to set down here the truthful record of George Webber’s life, and he, I feel quite sure, would be the last person in the world to wish me to suppress any chapter of it. So I do not think that I have written shamefully.
The only shame George Webber felt was that at one time in his life, for however short a period, he broke bread and sat at the same table with any man when the living warmth of friendship was not there; or that he ever traded upon the toil of his brain and the blood of his heart to get the body of a scented whore that might have been better got in a brothel for some greasy coins. This was the only shame he felt. And this shame was so great in him that he wondered if all his life thereafter would be long enough to wash out of his brain and blood the last pollution of its loathsome taint.
And yet, he would not have it thought that he was bitter.
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CHAPTER 24
MAN-CREATING AND MAN-ALIVE
It must be abundantly clear by now that George Webber was never bitter. What cause had he for bitterness? When he fled from the lion hunters he could always go back to the loneliness of his dismal two-room flat in Twelfth Street, and that is what he did. Also, he still had the letters from his friends in Libya Hill. They had not forgotten him. For four months and more after the publication of his book they continued to write him, and all of them took pains to let him know exactly what place he held in their affections.
Throughout this time George heard regularly from Randy Shepperton. Randy was the only one that George had left to talk to, so George, in answering Randy, unburdened himself of everything he thought and felt. Everything, that is, except upon a single topic—the rancor of his fellow-townsmen against the author who had exposed them naked to the world. Neither of the friends had ever mentioned it. Randy had set the pattern for evasion in his first letter, feeling that it was better to ignore the ugly gossip altogether and to let it die down and be forgotten. As for George, he had been too overwhelmed by it, too sunk and engulfed in it, to be able to speak of it at first. So they had chiefly confined themselves to the book itself, exchanging their thoughts and afterthoughts about it, with comments on what the various critics had said and left unsaid.
But by early March of the new year the flow of damning mail was past its flood and was thinning to a trickle, and one day Randy received from George the letter that he feared would have to come:
“I have spent most of my time this past week,” George wrote, “reading and rereading all the letters that my erstwhile friends and neighbors have written me since the book came out. And now that the balloting is almost over and most of the vote is in, the result is startling and a little confusing. I have been variously compared to Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, and Caesar’s Brutus. I have been likened to the bird that fouls its own nest, to a viper that an innocent populace had long nurtured in its bosom, to a carrion crow preying upon the blood and bones of his relatives and friends, and to an unnatural ghoul to whom nothing is sacred, not even the tombs of the honored dead. I have been called a vulture, a skunk, a hog deliberately and lustfully wallowing in the mire, a defiler of pure womanhood, a rattlesnake, a jackass, an alley-cat, and a baboon. Although my imagination has been strained trying to conceive of a creature who combined in himself all of these interesting traits—it would be worth any novelist’s time to meet such a chap!—there have been moments when I have felt that maybe my accusers are right. . . .”
Behind this semblance of facetiousness, Randy could see that he was sincerely disturbed, and, knowing the capacity of George’s soul for self-torture, he could pretty well imagine how deep and sore the extent of his full suffering might be. He revealed it almost immediately:
“Great God! What is it I have done? Sometimes I am overwhelmed by a sense of horrible and irrevocable guilt! Never before have I realized as I have this past week how terrible and great may be the distance between the Artist and the Man.
“As the artist, I can survey my work with a clear conscience. I have the regrets and dissatisfactions that every writer ought to have: the book should have been better, it failed to measure up to what I wanted for it. But I am not ashamed of it. I feel that I wrote it as I did because of an inner necessity, that I had to do it, and that by doing it I was loyal to the only thing in me which is worth anything.
“So speaks Man-Creating. Then, instantly, it all changes, and from Man-Creating I become simply Man-Alive—a member of society, a friend and neighbor, a son and brother of the human race. And when I look at what I have done from this point of view, suddenly I feel lower than a dog. I see all the pain and anguish I have caused to people that I know, and I wonder how I could have done it, and how there could possibly be any justification for it—yes, even if what I wrote had been as great as Lear, as eloquent as Hamlet.
“Believe me—incredible as it may sound—when I tell you that during these weeks I have even derived a kind of grotesque and horrible pleasure from reading those letters which simply abused, cursed, or threatened me. There is, I found, a bitter relief in having someone curse me with every foul name he can think of or invent, or tell me he will put a bullet through my brain if I ever set foot in the streets of Libya Hill again. At any rate, I feel that the poor devil got some satisfaction out of writing it.
“But the letters that drive the blade into my heart and twist it around are those which neither curse nor threaten—the letters written by stunned and stricken people who never did me any wrong, whose whole feeling toward me was one of kindly good will and belief, who did not know me as I am, and who write me now straight out of the suffering heart of man, with their spirits quivering, stripped, whipped by naked shame, to ask me over and over again in their bewilderment that terrible and insistent question: ‘Why did you do it? Why? Why? Why?’
“And as I read their letters I no longer know why. I can’t answer them. As Man-Creating, I thought I knew, and thought, too, that the answer was all-sufficient. I wrote about them with blunt directness, trying to put in every relevant detail and circumstance, and I did it because I thought it would be cowardly not to write that way, false to withhold or modify. I thought that the Thing Itself was its own and valid reason for being.
“But now that it is done, I am no longer sure of anything. I am troubled by the most maddening doubts and impossible regrets. I have moments when I feel that I would give my life if I could un-write my book, un-print its pages. For what has it accomplished, apparently, except to ruin my relatives, my friends, and everyone in town whose life was ever linked with mine? And what is there for me to salvage out of all this wreckage?
“‘The integrity of the artist,’ you may say.
“Ah, yes—if I could only soothe my conscience with that solacement! For what integrity is there that is not tainted with human frailty? If only I could tell myself that every word and phrase and incident in the book had been created at the top of my bent and with the impartial judgment of unrancorous detachment! But I know it is not true. So many words come back to me, so many whip-lash phrases, that must have been written in a spirit that had nothing to do with art or my integrity. We are such stuff as dust is made of, and where we fail—we fail! Is there, then, no such thing as a pure spirit in creation?
“In all the whole wretched experience there is also a grim and horrible humor. It is insanely comical to find in almost all these letters that I am being cursed for doing things I did not do and for saying things I did not say. It is even more ludicrous to hear myself grudgingly praised for having the one thing that I have not got. Few of these letters—even those which threaten hanging, and those which deny me the remotest scrap of talent (except a genius for obscenity)—fail to commend me for what their writers call ‘my memory.’ Some of them accuse me of sneaking around as a little boy of eight with my pockets stuffed with notebooks, my ears fairly sprouting from my head and my eyes popping out, in my effort to spy upon and snatch up every word and act and phrase among my virtuous and unsuspecting fellow-townsmen.
