Thomas Wolfe, page 319
Four hundred years ago, brave Admiral Drake, if we had seen you lying on your deck, your bronze gone pale and cold, imbrued in your own blood, and hewn to the middle by the Spaniards’ steel, we could have understood that, for there was blood in you. But Green—this Concentrated Blotter of ten minutes since—made in our own image, shaped in our own dust, compacted of the same grey stuff of which our own lives are compacted, and filled, we thought, with the same Standard Concentration of embalming fluid that fills our veins—oh, Drake, we did not know the fellow had such blood in him! We could not have thought it was so red, so rich, and so abundant!
Poor, shabby, and corrupted cipher! Poor, nameless, and exploded atom! Poor little guy! He fills us Concentrated Blotters of the Universe with fear, with shame, with awe, with pity, and with terror—for we see ourselves in him. If he was a man with blood in him, then so are we! If he, in the midst of his always-driven life, could at last be driven to this final and defiant gesture of refusal to remain a Concentrated Blotter, then we, too, might be driven to a point of equal desperation! And there are other methods of defiance, other ways of ultimate refusal, other means of exercising one’s last-remaining right of manhood—and some of them are no less terrifying to contemplate than this! So our fascinated eyes go up and up, past floor after floor of Standard Concentrated brick, and fasten on the open window where he stood—and suddenly we crane our necks along the ridges of our collars, look away with constricted faces, and taste the acrid bitterness of steel upon our lips!
It is too hard, and not to be endured—to know that little Green, speaking our own tongue and stuffed with our own stuffing, had yet concealed in him some secret, dark, and frightful thing more terrible than anything that we have ever known—that he bore within him some black and hideous horror, some depth of madness or of courage, and could stand there—upon the sheer and nauseating verge of that grey window ledge for five full minutes—and know the thing he was about to do—and tell himself he must now!—that he had to!—that the compulsion of every horror-fascinated eye down in the gulf below had now made escape impossible—and then, horror-sick past all regeneration, see, too, before he jumped, his fall, the downward-hurtling plunge, and his own exploded body—feel the bones crack and fly apart, and the brutal obliteration of the instant when his brains would shoot out against the lamp post—and even while his soul drew back from that sheer verge of imagined terror, shame, and unutterable self-loathing, crying, “I cannot do it!”—then jumped!
And we, brave Drake? We try to see it, but we cannot see. We try to fathom it, but we cannot plunge. We try to comprehend the hell of hells, the hundred lives of horror, madness, anguish, and despair that were exhausted in five minutes by that shabby creature crouched there on the window ledge. But we cannot understand, or look at it any longer. It is too hard, too hard, and not to be endured. We turn away with nausea, hollowness, blind fear, and unbelief within us.
One man stares, cranes his neck, wets his lips, and whispers: “Jesus! To do a thing like that takes guts!”
Another, harshly: “Nah! It don’t take guts! A guy who’d do a thing like that is crazy! He don’t know what he’s doin’ to begin with!”
And others, doubtfully, half-whispering, with eyes focused on the ledge: “But Jesus!”
A taxi driver, turning away and moving toward his cab, with an attempt at casual indifference that does not ring entirely true: “Oh, well! Just another guy, I guess!”
Then one man, turning to his companion with a little puckered smile: “Well, what about it, Al? You still feel like eating?”
And his companion, quietly: “Eating, hell! I feel like two or three stiff shots of rye! Come on, let’s go around to Steve’s!”
They go. The Concentrated Blotters of the World cannot abide it. They must somehow blot it out.
So a policeman comes around the corner now with an old tarpaulin, with which he covers the No-Head. The crowd remains. Then the green wagon from the morgue. The Thing, tarpaulin and all, is pushed into it. It drives away. A policeman with thick-soled boots scuffs and pushes skull-pieces and brain-fragments into the gutter. Someone comes with sawdust, strews it. Someone from the drug store with formaldehyde. Later, someone with a hose and water. From the subway come an adolescent boy and girl with the hard, tough faces of the city; they walk past it, deliberately and arrogantly step among it, look at the lamp post, then at each other, and laugh!
All’s over now, all’s gone, the crowd’s departed. Something else remains. It cannot be forgotten. There’s a sick, humid smell upon the air, what was light and clear and crystal has gone out of day, and something thick and glutinous—half taste, half smell, and all impalpable—remains upon your tongue.
There would have been a time and place for such a thing, brave Admiral Drake, if he, our fellow Green, had only fallen as a hollow man and landed dryly, or if he had opened to disperse a grey embalming fluid in the gutter. It would have been all right if he had just been blown away like an old paper, or if he had been swept aside like remnants of familiar litter, and then subsumed into the Standard Concentrated stuff from which he came. But C. Green would not have it so. He exploded to drench our common substance of viscous grey with the bright indecency of blood, to resume himself from number, to become before our eyes a Man, and to identify a single spot of all our general Nothingness with the unique passion, the awful terror, and the dignity of Death.
So, Admiral Drake—“an unidentified man fell or jumped yesterday at noon” from a window of your own hotel. That was the news. Now you’ve had the story.
We are “the hollow men, the hollow men”? Brave Admiral, do not be too sure.
[¬]
CHAPTER 30
THE ANODYNE
Fox read it instantly, the proud nose sniffing upward sharply—“man fell or jumped . . . Admiral Francis Drake Hotel . . . Brooklyn.” The sea-pale eyes took it in at once, and went on to more important things.
Fox was cold, then? Hard? Selfish? Lacking in understanding? Unsympathetic? Unimaginative? By no means.
Could not have known Green, then? Was too much the patrician to know Green? Was too high, too rare, too subtle, too fine-fibered to know Green? None of these.
Fox knew everything, or almost everything. (If there’s a lack here, we will smell it out.) Fox had been born with everything, and had learned much, yet his learning had not made him mad, or ever blunted the keen blade of knowing. He saw all things as they were: had never (in his mind and heart) called man a “white man” yet, because Fox saw man was not “white man”—man was pink man tinged with sallow, man was sallow tinged with grey, man was pink-brown, red-bronze, or white-red-sallow, but not white.
So Fox (in mind and heart) would call it as it was. This was the boy’s straight eye. Yet his clarities were obscured for other men. His straightness was thought cunning by crude-cunning rogues, his warmth seemed ice to all the hearty-false, and to the false-sincere Fox was a twister. Not one of these things was true of him.
Fox knew Green all right—knew him better than we, the Concentrated Blotters of Green’s ilk. For, being of the ilk, we grow confused, struggle with Green (so with ourselves), argue, debate, deny, are tarred with the same brush, and so lose judgment.
Not so, Fox. Not of Green’s ilk, yet was he still of the whole family of earth. Fox knew at once that Green had blood in him. Fox placed him instantly: saw sky above him, Admiral Drake Hotel behind him, lamp post, pavement, people, Brooklyn corner, cops, rouged Jewesses, the motor cars, the subway entrance, and exploded brains—and, had he been there, would have said in a low, somewhat puzzled, and abstracted tone:
“Oh. . . . I see.”
Would have seen, too, my mad masters; never doubt it. Would have seen clearly and seen whole, without our agony, without confusion, without struggling with the surface of each brick, each square inch of concrete pavement, each scale of rust upon the fire escapes, the raw-green paint of the lamp post, the sterile red-front brightness of the cigar store, the shapes of windows, ledges, cornices, and doorways, the way the shops were set into old houses along the street, all the heart-sick ugliness exploded into the nothingness of Brooklyn. Fox would have seen it instantly, without having to struggle to see all, know all, hold all clearly, singly, permanently, in the burning crystal of the brain.
And if Fox had lived in Brooklyn, he would have got much else as well—got it clear and straight—while we were trying to make our maddened ears spread out like funnels to absorb it—every whispered word in Flatbush, every rhythmic-creaking spring in the back bedrooms of whore’s Sand Street (by old yellow shades concealed), every barker’s cry in Coney, all the jargons of each tenement from Red Hook to Brownsville. Yes, while we wrestled with our five senses there in Jungletown, our tormented brain caught in the brutal chaos of “Gewirr! Gewirr!”—Fox would have got it all, without madness, agony, or the fevered eye, and would have murmured:
“Oh. . . . I see.”
Wherever he was, Fox was one to get the little things—the little, most important things that tell you everything. He never picked a little thing because it was a little thing, to show he was a devilish cunning, subtle, rare, and most æsthetic fellow: he picked a little thing because it was the right thing—and he never missed.
Fox was a great fox, and a genius. He was no little Pixy of the Æsthetes. He did not write nine-page reviews on “How Chaplin Uses Hands in Latest Picture”—how it really was not slap-stick, but the tragedy of Lear in modern clothes; or on how Enters enters; or on how Crane’s poetry can only be defined, reviewed, and generally exposited in terms of mathematical formulae—ahem! ahem, now!—as:
(Bring on the Revolution, Comrades; it is Time!)
Fox did not go around making discoveries nine years after Boob McNutt had made them. He didn’t find out that Groucho was funny seven years too late, and then inform the public why he was. He did not write: “The opening Volte of the Ballet is the historic method amplified in history, the production of historic fullness without the literary cliché of the historic spate.” He had no part in any of the fine horse-manure with which we have allowed ourselves to be bored, maddened, whiff-sniffed, hound-and-hornered, nationed, new-republicked, dialed, spectatored, mercuried, storied, anviled, new-massed, new-yorkered, vogued, vanity-faired, timed, broomed, transitioned, and generally shat upon by the elegant, refined, and snobified Concentrated Blotters of the Arts. He had nothing to do with any of the doltish gibberings, obscene quackeries, phoney passions, and six-months-long religions of fools, joiners, and fashion-apes a trifle brighter and quicker on the uptake than the fools, joiners, and fashion-apes they prey upon. He was none of your little franky-panky, seldesey-weldesey, cowley-wowley, tatesy-watesy, hicksy-picksy, wilsony-pilsony, jolasy-wolasy, steiny-weiny, goldy-woldly, sneer-puss fellows. Neither, in more conventional guise, was he one of your groupy-croupy, cliquey-triquey, meachy-teachy devoto-bloato wire-pullers and back-scratchers of the world.
No, Fox was none of these. He looked at the whole thing, whatever it was, and got it straight, said slowly, “Oh. . . . I see,” then like a fox would begin to pick up things around the edges. An eye here, a nose there, a cleft of lip, a length of chin elsewhere—and suddenly, within the frame of a waiter’s face, he would see the grave, thought-lonely visage of Erasmus. Fox would turn away reflectively and drink his drink, glance casually from time to time as the man approached him, catch his coat lapels and turn, stare fixedly at the waiter’s face again, turn back to the table, turn again and stare, bend over, staring right up into the waiter’s face:
The waiter, troubled now, and smiling doubtfully: “Sir? . . . Is there anything wrong, sir?”
Fox, slowly, almost in a whisper: “Did you ever hear of—Erasmus?”
And the waiter, still smiling, but more doubtfully than ever: “No sir.”
And Fox, turning away and whispering hoarsely with astounded conviction: “Simply astonishing!”
Or, again, it will be a hat-check girl at the place where he has lunch—a little tough-voiced, pert, hard-boiled girl. Fox will suddenly stop one day and look at her keenly with his sea-pale eyes, and will give her a dollar as he goes out.
“But Fox,” friends will protest, “in God’s name, why did you give that girl a dollar?”
“But isn’t she the nicest person?” Fox will say, in a low and earnest whisper.
And they will stare at him in blank amazement. That girl! That little tough, gold-digging, hard-boiled—oh, well, what’s the use? They give it up! Rather than shatter the illusions and wound the innocence of this trusting child, they’ll hold their tongues and leave him to his dream.
And she, the little hard-boiled hat-check girl, in a hoarse, confiding tone to the other hat-check girl, excitedly: “Say! Do you know that guy that comes in here every day for lunch—the queer one that always orders guinea hen—an’ that didn’t usta wanna let us have his hat at all?”
The other, nodding: “Sure, I know! He usta try to wear it w’ile he’s eatin’! You awmost had to throw ’im down an’ take it from ’im befoeh he’d letcha have it.”
She, rapidly, nodding: “Yeah! That’s him!” Then, lowering her voice to an excited whisper: “Well, y’know, he’s been givin’ me a dollah tip every day for the last mont’!”
The other, staring, stunned: “G’wan!”
She: “Honest t’ Gawd!”
The other: “Has he made any passes atcha yet?—any wisecracks?—any funny tawk?”
She, with a puzzled look in her eye: “That’s the funny paht of it—I can’t make ’im out! He tawks funny awright—but—he don’t mean what I thought he did. The first time he said somethin’ I thought he was goin’ t’ be fresh. He comes up t’ get his hat one day, an’ stands lookin’ at me with that funny look until I got the willies. So I says, ‘So what?’ ‘Married?’ he says—just like that. Just stands lookin’ at me an’ says, ‘Married?’”
The other: “Gee! That was fresh!” Eagerly: “Well, go on—w’atcha say to ’im? W’atcha tell ’im?”
She: “Well, I says to myse’f, ‘Oh, ho! I knew this was comin’! This dollah-a-day stuff can’t keep up forever! Well,’ I thinks, ‘you can’t hang onto a good thing all yoeh life!’—so I decides to let ’im have it befoeh he has the chanct to staht gettin’ funny. So I lies to ’im: ‘Sure!’ I says, an’ looks ’im right in the eye—‘I’m good an’ married! Ain’t you?’ I thought that ought to hold ’im.”
The other: “An’ w’at did he say t’ that?”
She: “He just stood lookin’ at me with that funny look. Then he shook his head at me—as if I’d done somep’n—as if it was my fault—as if he was disgusted wit’ me. ‘Yes,’ he says, an’ gets his hat, an’ leaves his dollah, an’ walks out. Tie that one down! Well, I gets to thinkin’ it oveh, an’ I figure that next day he’s goin’ t’ spring it—staht givin’ me the old oil about how his wife don’t undehstand ’im, or how he’s not livin’ wit’ her an’ how lonesome he is—an’ how about it?—can’t we get togetheh some night for dinneh?”
And number two, rapt: “So w’at happens?”
And she: “When he comes to get his hat next day he just stands there lookin’ at me for a long time in that funny way of his that used to get me noivous—as if I’d done somep’n—so I says again, ‘So what?’ An’ he says in that funny voice—it’s so low sometimes you can’t hahdly hear it—he says, ‘Any children?’—just like that! Gee, it was funny! It wasn’t what I expected ’im t’ say at all! I didn’t know what t’ say, so fine’ly I says, ‘No.’ So, wit’ that, he just stands there lookin’ at me, an’ he shakes his head at me like he was disgusted wit’ me for not havin’ any. So then I gets sore, I forget I’m not married—the way he shakes his head at me as if it was my fault for not havin’ any children gets me good an’ sore—an’ I says to ’im: ‘So what? What if I haven’t? Have you?”
Number two, now fascinated: “So w’at happens? W’at does he tell yah?”
She: “He stands lookin’ at me, an’ says, ‘Five!’—just like that. An’ then he shakes his head again—‘All women,’ he says, as if he was disgusted wit’ me—‘Like yourself,’ he says. An’ then he takes his hat, an’ leaves his dollah, an’ walks out!”
Number two, in an aggrieved tone: “Say-y! Who does he think he is, anyway? How does he get that way? That guy’s pretty fresh, I’d say!”
She: “Well, I get to thinkin’ about it an’ I get sore. The noive of ’im, tawkin’ about women like that! So the next day when he comes to get his hat I says: ‘Listen,’ I says, ‘what’s eatin’ on you, anyway? What are yah—a woman-hatah or somep’n? Whatcha got against women, anyway? What’d they eveh do to you?’ ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘nothing—except act like women!’ Gee! The way he said that! An’ stood there shakin’ his head at me in that disgusted way like I’d done somep’n! He takes his hat then, leaves his dollah, an’ goes out. . . . So afteh that I decide t’ kid ’im along a little, seein’ he’s not tryin’ t’ get funny wit’ me. So every day afteh that I make some wisecrack about women, tryin’ to get a rise out of ’im, but I neveh do! Say! You can’t get a rise outa that guy! I’ve tried an’ I know! He don’t even know when you’re tryin’ t’ get a rise out of ’im! . . . So then he stahts t’ ast me questions about my husband—an’ gee!—was I embarrassed? He ast me all kinds of questions about ’im—what did he do, an’ how old was he, an’ where did he come from, an’ was his mother livin’, an’ what did he think about women? Gee! It usta keep me busy from one day to anotheh wonderin’ what he was goin’ to ast me next, an’ what t’ say to ’im. . . . Then he stahted astin’ me about my mother, an’ my sisters an’ brothers, an’ what did they do, an’ how old were they—an’ I could tell ’im those because I knew the answers.”
