Thomas Wolfe, page 333
It was some time after that when he finally dropped off. The storm was still howling like a madman round the house, but he was no longer aware of it.
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CHAPTER 37
THE MORNING AFTER
George lay in merciful and dreamless sleep, as leaden as if he had been knocked senseless by a heavy club. How long he had slept he did not know, but it hardly seemed five minutes when he was awakened suddenly by someone shaking him by the shoulder. He opened his eyes and started up. It was McHarg. He stood there in his underwear, prancing around on his storklike legs like an impatient sprinter straining at the mark.
“Get up, George, get up!” he cried shrilly. “For Christ’s sake, man, are you going to sleep all day?”
George stared at him dumbfounded. “What—what time is it?” he managed finally to say.
“It’s after eight o’clock,” McHarg cried. “I’ve been up an hour. Shaved and had a bath, and now,” he smacked his bony hands together with an air of relish and sniffed zestfully at the breakfast-laden air, “boy, I could eat a horse! Don’t you smell it?” he cried gleefully. “Oatmeal, eggs and bacon, grilled tomatoes, toast and marmalade, coffee. Ah!” he sighed with reverent enthusiasm. “There’s nothing like an English breakfast. Get up, George, get up!” he cried again with shrill insistence. “My God, man, I let you sleep a whole hour longer than I did because you looked as if you needed it! So get your clothes on! We don’t want to keep breakfast waiting!”
George groaned, dragged his legs wearily from the covers, and stood groggily erect. He felt as if he wanted nothing so much as to sleep for two days on end. But under the feverish urging of this red fury, he had nothing left to do except to awake and dress. Like a man in a trance, he pulled on his clothes with slow, fumbling motions, and all the while McHarg fumed up and down, demanding every two seconds that he get a move on and not be all day about it.
When they got downstairs the Reades were already at the table. McHarg bounced in as if he had a rubber core, greeted both of them cheerfully, took a seat, and instantly fell to. He put away an enormous breakfast, talking all the time and crackling with electricity. His energy was astounding. It was really incredible. It seemed impossible that the exhausted wreck of a few hours before could now be miraculously transformed into this dynamo of vitality. He was in uproarious spirits, and full of stories and adventures. He told wonderful yarns about the ceremonies at which his degree had been presented and about all the people there. Then he told about Berlin, and about people he had met in Germany and in Holland. He told of his meeting with Mynheer Bendien, and gave a side-splitting account of their madhouse escapades. He was full of plans and purposes. He asked about everyone he knew in England. His mind seemed to have a thousand brilliant facets. He took hold of everything, and whatever he touched began to crackle with the energy and alertness of his own dynamic power. He was a delightful companion. George realized that he was now seeing McHarg at his best, and his best was wonderfully and magnificently good.
After breakfast they all took a walk together. It was a rare, wild morning. The temperature had dropped several degrees during the night and the fitful rain had turned to snow, which was now coming down steadily, swirling and gusting through the air upon the howling wind and piling up in soft, fleecy drifts. Overhead, the branches of the bare trees thrashed about and moaned. The countryside was impossibly wild and beautiful. They walked long and far, filled with the excitement of the storm, and with a strange, wild joy and sorrow, knowing that the magic could not last.
When they came back to the house, they sat beside the fire and talked together. McHarg’s gleeful exuberance of the morning had subsided, but in its place had come a quiet power—the kind of Lincolnesque dignity of repose and strength which George had observed in him the day before. He took out his old silver-rimmed spectacles and put them on his homely, wry, and curiously engaging face. He read some letters which he had in his pocket and had not opened, and after that he talked to his old friend. What they talked about was not important in itself. What was important, and what George would always remember, was the way McHarg looked, and the way he sat and talked, with his bony knuckles arched and clasped before him in an attitude of unconscious power, and the dignity, wisdom, and deep knowledge of his speech. Here was a man with greatness in him, a man who was now showing the basic sources of his latent strength. His speech was full of quiet affection for his old friend. One felt something unshakable and abiding in him—a loyalty that would not change, that would remain always the same, even though he might not see his friend again for twenty years.
They had a good lunch together. Wine was served, but McHarg partook sparingly of it. After lunch, to Webber’s great relief, McHarg told him quietly that they were returning to London in the afternoon. He said nothing about the projected tour of England which he had depicted in such glowing colors the day before. Whether that had been just a passing whim, or whether he had given up the idea because he sensed George’s lack of enthusiasm for it, George did not know. McHarg did not refer to it at all. He merely announced their return to London as a fact and let it go at that.
But now, as if the thought of going back to the city was more than he could bear, he immediately underwent another of his astonishing transformations. Almost at once his manner again became feverish and impatient. By three o’clock, when they left, he had worked himself into a state of inflamed distemper. He seemed on edge, like one who wanted to get some disagreeable business over and done with.
They drove cautiously down the whitened, trackless lane, over which no car had passed that day, leaving behind them the low-eaved comfort of that fine old house, now warmly fleeced in its blanket of snow, and George felt again the almost unbearable sadness that always came to him when he said good-bye to people whom he knew he would never see again. The lovely woman stood in the doorway and watched them go, with Reade beside her, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his velvet jacket. As the car took the turn McHarg and George looked back. Reade and his wife waved, and they waved back, and something tightened in George’s throat. Then they were out of sight. McHarg and George were alone again.
They reached the highroad and turned north and sped onward toward London. Both men were silent, each absorbed in his own thoughts. McHarg sat back in his corner, quiet, abstracted, sunk deep into his inner world. Darkness came, and they said nothing.
And now the lights were up, and there against the sky George saw again the vast corrupted radiance of the night—the smoke, the fury, and the welter of London’s unending life. And after a little while the car was threading its way through the jungle warren of that monstrous sprawl, and at last it turned into Ebury Street and stopped. George got out and thanked McHarg; they shook hands, exchanged a few words, and then said good-bye. The little driver shut the door, touched his cap respectfully, and climbed back into his seat. The big car purred and drove off smoothly into the darkness.
George stood at the curb and looked after it until it disappeared. And he knew that he and McHarg might meet and speak and pass again, but never as they had in this, their first meeting; for something had begun which now was finished, and henceforth they would have to take their separate courses, he to his own ending, McHarg to his—and which to the better one no man knew.
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BOOK VI
“I HAVE A THING TO TELL YOU”
(„Nun Will Ich Ihnen ’Was Sagen“)
By spring, when George returned to New York, it seemed to him that he had his new book almost finished. He took a small apartment near Stuyvesant Square and buckled down to a steady daily grind to wind it up. He thought two months more would surely see him through, but he always fooled himself about time, and it was not till six months later that he had a manuscript that satisfied him. That is to say, he had a manuscript that he was willing to turn over to his publisher, for he was never really satisfied with anything he wrote. There was always that seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the thing imagined and the thing accomplished, and he wondered if any writer had ever been able to look calmly at something he had done and honestly say:
“This conveys precisely the ideas and feelings I wanted it to convey—no more, no less. The thing is just right, and cannot be improved.”
In that sense he was not at all satisfied with his new book. He knew its faults, knew all the places where it fell short of his intentions. But he also knew that he had put into it everything he had at that stage of his development, and for this reason he was not ashamed of it. He delivered the bulky manuscript to Fox Edwards, and as its weight passed from his hands to Fox’s he felt as if a load that he had been carrying for years had been lifted from his mind and conscience. He was done with it, and he wished to God he could forget it and never have to see a line of it again.
That, however, was too much to hope for. Fox read it, told him in his shy, straight way that it was good, and then made a few suggestions—for cutting it here, for adding something there, for rearranging some of the material. George argued hotly with Fox, then took the manuscript home and went to work on it again and did the things Fox wanted—not because Fox wanted them, but because he saw that Fox was right. Two more months went into that. Then there were proofs to read and correct, and by the time this was done another six weeks had gone. The better part of a year had passed since his return from England, but now the job was really finished and he was free at last.
Publication was scheduled for the spring of 1936, and as the time approached he became increasingly apprehensive. When his first book had come out, wild horses could not have dragged him from New York; he had wanted to be on hand so he could be sure not to miss anything. He had waited around, and read all the reviews, and almost camped out in Fox’s office, and had expected from day to day some impossible fulfillment that never came. Instead, there had been the letters from Libya Hill and his sickening adventures with the lion hunters. So now he was gun-shy of publication dates, and he made up his mind to go away this time—as far away as possible. Although he did not believe there would be an exact repetition of those earlier experiences, just the same he was prepared for the worst, and when it happened he was determined not to be there.
Suddenly he thought of Germany, and thought of it with intense longing. Of all the countries he had ever seen, that was the one, after America, which he liked the best, and in which he felt most at home, and with whose people he had the most natural, instant, and instinctive sympathy and understanding. It was also the country above all others whose mystery and magic haunted him. He had been there several times, and each time its spell over him had been the same. And now, after the years of labor and exhaustion, the very thought of Germany meant peace to his soul, and release, and happiness, and the old magic again.
So in March, two weeks before the publication of his book, with Fox at the pier to see him off and reassure him that everything was going to be all right, he sailed again for Europe.
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CHAPTER 38
THE DARK MESSIAH
George had not been in Germany since 1928 and the early months of 1929, when he had had to spend weeks of slow convalescence in a Munich hospital after a fight in a beer hall. Before that foolish episode, he had stayed for a while in a little town in the Black Forest, and he remembered that there had been great excitement because an election was being held. The state of politics was chaotic, with a bewildering number of parties, and the Communists polled a surprisingly large vote. People were disturbed and anxious, and there seemed to be a sense of impending calamity in the air.
This time, things were different. Germany had changed.
Ever since 1933, when the change occurred, George had read, first with amazement, shock, and doubt, then with despair and a leaden sinking of the heart, all the newspaper accounts of what was going on in Germany. He found it hard to believe some of the reports. Of course, there were irresponsible extremists in Germany as elsewhere, and in times of crisis no doubt they got out of hand, but he thought he knew Germany and the German people, and on the whole he was inclined to feel that the true state of affairs had been exaggerated and that things simply could not be as bad as they were pictured.
And now, on the train from Paris, where he had stopped off for five weeks, he met some Germans who gave him reassurance. They said there was no longer any confusion or chaos in politics and government, and no longer any fear among the people, because everyone was so happy. This was what George wanted desperately to believe, and he was prepared to be happy, too. For no man ever went to a foreign land under more propitious conditions than those which attended his arrival in Germany early in May, 1936.
It is said that Byron awoke one morning at the age of twenty-four to find himself famous. George Webber had to wait eleven years longer. He was thirty-five when he reached Berlin, but it was magic just the same. Perhaps he was not really very famous, but that didn’t matter, because for the first and last time in his life he felt as if he were. Just before he left Paris a letter had reached him from Fox Edwards, telling him that his new book was having a great success in America. Then, too, his first book had been translated and published in Germany the year before. The German critics had said tremendous things about it, it had had a very good sale, and his name was known. When he got to Berlin the people were waiting for him.
The month of May is wonderful everywhere. It was particularly wonderful in Berlin that year. Along the streets, in the Tiergarten, in all the great gardens, and along the Spree Canal the horse chestnut trees were in full bloom. The crowds sauntered underneath the trees on the Kurfürstendamm, the terraces of the cafés were jammed with people, and always, through the golden sparkle of the days, there was a sound of music in the air. George saw the chains of endlessly lovely lakes around Berlin, and for the first time he knew the wonderful golden bronze upon the tall poles of the kiefern trees. Before, he had visited only the south of Germany, the Rhinelands and Bavaria; now the north seemed even more enchanting.
He planned to stay all summer, and one summer seemed too short a time to encompass all the beauty, magic, and almost intolerable joy which his life had suddenly become, and which he felt would never fade or tarnish if only he could remain in Germany forever. For, to cap it all, his second book was translated and brought out within a short time of his arrival, and its reception exceeded anything he had ever dared to hope for. Perhaps his being there at the time may have had something to do with it. The German critics outdid each other in singing his praises. If one called him “the great American epic writer,” the next seemed to feel he had to improve on that, and called him “the American Homer.” So now everywhere he went there were people who knew his work. His name flashed and shone. He was a famous man.
Fame shed a portion of her loveliness on everything about him. Life took on an added radiance. The look, feel, taste, smell, and sound of everything had gained a tremendous and exciting enhancement, and all because Fame was at his side. He saw the world with a sharper relish of perception than he had ever known before. All the confusion, fatigue, dark doubt, and bitter hopelessness that had afflicted him in times past had gone, and no shadow of any kind remained. It seemed to him that he had won a final and utterly triumphant victory over all the million forms of life. His spirit was no longer tormented, exhausted, and weighted down with the ceaseless effort of his former struggles with Amount and Number. He was wonderfully aware of everything, alive in every pore.
Fame even gave a tongue to silence, a language to unuttered speech. Fame was with him almost all the time, but even when he was alone without her, in places where he was not known and his name meant nothing, the aura which Fame had shed still clung to him and he was able to meet each new situation with a sense of power and confidence, of warmth, friendliness, and good fellowship. He had become the lord of life. There had been a time in his youth when he felt that people were always laughing at him, and he had been ill at ease with strangers and had gone to every new encounter with a chip on his shoulder. But now he was life’s strong and light-hearted master, and everyone he met and talked to—waiters, taxi drivers, porters in hotels, elevator boys, casual acquaintances in trams and trains and on the street—felt at once the flood of happy and affectionate power within him, and responded to him eagerly, instinctively, with instant natural liking, as men respond to the clean and shining light of the young sun.
And when Fame was with him, all this magic was increased. He could see the wonder, interest, respect, and friendly envy in the eyes of men, and the frank adoration in the eyes of women. The women seemed to worship at the shrine of Fame. George began to get letters and telephone calls from them, with invitations to functions of every sort. The girls were after him. But he had been through all of that before and he was wary now, for he knew that the lion hunters were the same the whole world over. Knowing them now for what they were, he found no disillusion in his encounters with them. Indeed, it added greatly to his pleasure and sense of power to turn the tactics of designing females on themselves: he would indulge in little gallantries to lead them on, and then, just at the point where they thought they had him, he would wriggle innocently off the hook and leave them wondering.
And then he met Else. Else von Kohler was not a lion hunter. George met her at one of the parties which his German publisher, Karl Lewald, gave for him. Lewald liked to give parties; he just couldn’t do enough for George, and was always trumping up an excuse for another party. Else did not know Lewald, and took an instinctive dislike to the man as soon as she saw him, but just the same she had come to his party, brought there uninvited by another man whom George had met. At first sight, George fell instantly in love with her, and she with him.
