Thomas Wolfe, page 369
I know now how wretched and poor the lives of all these people must have been. There was very little in themselves on which they could depend: everything in them turned outward, they had to secure the applause and attention of the world, or they were lost. They could not be alone. I know also how miserable and shabby was their physical existence. There was at that time among the people of these small towns all over America a legend that the life of the actor was gay, luxurious, and sinful. They were not considered respectable, or fit company for decent people, but the people in these towns regarded them with fascination and awe. As soon as the company appeared in a new town they were marched out by the natives as “show people,” and from that time until they left they were the centre of the town’s curiosity wherever they went. If they went out in the streets, children followed them about, and men loafing in front of shops and stores would grow silent when they passed. Later these men would nudge and speak behind their backs: “There he goes! There goes that show feller!”
This attention was not always friendly. Hostility and suspicion were mixed with wonder. The women in the company were regarded by the townspeople as prostitutes: if a woman was young and attractive, she rarely escaped the clumsy foulness of some village Casanova. And neither the actors nor the townspeople had any understanding of one another: the conception each had of the other’s life was completely legendary. To the townsman the actor dwelt in a world of fabulous and glittering vice. And to the actor the townsman was a yokel, a gullible hayseed. To the townsman the actor was a figure in a melodrama, and to the actor, the townsman was a buffoon in a farce. The actor came from a legendary city called New York: the townsman dwelt in a legendary village called Hicksville. I think that each believed what he wanted to believe about the other: when the actor talked to a native, his manner was glib and bantering in the fashion of the city fellow pulling the leg of the greenhorn.
Although the actors mocked at these small towns and cursed the fate that sent them on these tours, I know they cherished the conspicuous attention they received. It pleased them to hear the whispers, to see the stares and nudges: it gave their poor lives a sense of dignity and importance, a stimulus they could not do without. They talked of the splendid lives and brilliant opportunities that awaited them in New York, they spoke of their past triumphs, for the most part mythical—each had his own tale of fame and glory to relate, but I think that most of them were really grateful in their hearts even for the shabby insecurity of the road. Their city lives had in the main been records of pain and hunger, of rare employments and of long and weary quests for work, of poverty, rebuff, and squalid living.
For what? They did not know: in these dark histories of defeat and disappointment there was a hope of glory they could not forego, a sense of magic which enthralled them and kept them from every other kind of life. And I think of them as I sat there beside my father with a memory that is full of tenderness: I remember the hard, the aching weariness of the night, the distressed and shabby pattern of their lives, the dull monotony and the ghastly ugliness and discomfort of that life of cheap hotels, of long night waits and pauses, and I remember how quickly they could laugh, how little it took to make them merry, with what fierce and reckless courage they brought brightness back, how fiercely their lives fought for ecstasy. We sat there in that dingy room that had grown bright with all our laughter, and presently, as the time grew tense with the hour for the train, the actors got up and went out upon the platform. Bright morning sparkled on the tracks, and before my vision the powerful rails bent out of sight like space and music.
My father lifted me onto an empty trunk and I sat there with my short legs swinging off the edge, seeing the whole earth perfectly at last. The delicate morning light concealed nothing and yet gave a lyrical quality to the immense ugliness of the station tracks and sheds, the freight cars on the sidings, the cindered yard, and the ragged baldness of the warehouse and factory backs. In the intense purity and sweetness of this light there was enormous hopefulness. A man came from the baggage room drawing a heavy truck piled high with mailbags. The actors stood about in groups and talked or walked up and down the platform. There was an extra cut to everything they did or said; it was in all their clothes and gestures, an added vividness and intensity in their appearance that distinguished them from other people: they were like men in vivid masks.
It was early in the Spring. My father was wearing a light overcoat of a rich tan color; it was a magnificent garment that fitted him perfectly, with a bold firm line, and came down almost to his ankles. He had a cane below one arm and now he began to walk up and down the platform rapidly. At the same time Mr. Dixie began to do the same thing. They approached and passed each other from opposite ends of the platform; then, as their mad exuberance gained on them, they began to glare and mutter melodramatically as they passed. Again and again they passed each other in this manner and each time their glares grew fiercer, and their mutterings grew louder. Each time they got closer to each other, until, at length, they bumped together. Then, with a tigerish ferocity, they sprang apart and faced each other.
“Hah!” my father cried in a terrible voice.
“Hah!” cried Mr. Dixie in the same tone.
“Hold, villain, and defend yourself!” my father cried and whipped his cane out underneath his arm as if it were a sword.
“Have at you, dawg! Your hour is come,” cried Mr. Dixie, whipping his cane out in the same manner. Then, furiously, their bright canes flashed and struck together in that pure light: with fierce cries and noble imprecations they thrust and lunged and parried; and all the time my father leaped and moved with an incomparable grace, with the proud and beautiful balance, the rhymed precision of his strong delicate figure that had been trained to twist and fall in circuses. Now, they duelled fiercely up and down the platform, they drove each other back and forth, and suddenly my father stopped, struck Mr. Dixie’s cane up, and ran him through the body. And Mr. Dixie cried out in a great and moving voice:
O Woe! O, I am dead, dead, dead! Villain, thou hast slewn me!
And he sank upon the platform while the gapmouthed natives stared at him, and the actors cheered, and the train came roaring round the bend and stopped, panting in its hot sides, and the conductor swung down, and all of us got up and went into the train, and there was a smell of old red plush and cinders in it. Then we left that place of night and ugliness, we went out across the country, we moved across the huge and thoughtful earth, we saw its wild rude immensity, its rough pelt still embourned with water, its tangled lakes and undergrowths: we saw the fields and meadows of the nation, the red barns and the old frame houses, the tattered posters of sudden forgotten circuses, the whipping of light wind among coarse grasses, the rude sweet bursting from the earth of April. We saw the moving light that came and went across great fields, the lift, the fall, the sweep and fold and hollow, the lyric ugliness and fecundity of this immense and everlasting earth that can never be remembered, that can never be forgotten, that has never been described, and that lives in our brain and our heart forever: America.
There was no answer to that living earth. There was nothing but immortal joy. These cities were the ugly haunts of children: we scored their grime and rickets off the earth as men score scum away from buried emeralds. The proud voice of the land said “Here!”—we saw the great plantations, and the actors, the children and the wanderers, vivid as the innocence of a print, rolled through the land toward bright retrievements in new towns and better cities.
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IV
[A BABY IS BORN]
The clock had finished striking, and Robert sat there in the dark clutching his fat knees where the coarse-ribbed stocking covered them: he was only a blur of fat boy face with a carroty twist of red Jew’s hair.
Again, a horse sparked down the ringing street, it stopped quite near: there were voices, laughter, and farewells, and the crisp rattle of a Christmas package. The horse moved on, and a door was opened and shut. Silence.
Robert was grieved and lonely, and he hated darkness. He hated quiet. He hated Bella’s husband for commanding quiet. Bella’s husband was a doctor: therefore, Robert hated doctors.
He decided he would not be a doctor. He would not do anything where one always had to be so quiet and dark. When he grew up he was going to be something where there was lots of light and people. He wanted gaiety and voices and heroic actions. He wanted deeds and sentiments. He wanted love and romance. Robert knew very well what he was going to be. He was going to be an actor like his Uncle Joe. It would be fine to be an actor if one could be like Uncle Joe: he had fine things to say, he always came out on top—well, almost always—and if anyone talked back to him he’d give him one. Robert thought of the Cassidy boy and reflected how well he should like to give him one.
Robert thought he would like to be like Uncle Joe in Saved at the Switch. You could hear the thunder of the night express as it came closer and closer, the girl was tied down to the rails so that she couldn’t move, with Henshaw gloating over her.
“You fiend!” she cried. “Will you add murder to your other crimes? May heaven forgive you for your black heart’s infamy.”
Then Henshaw had laughed in a very sinister tone of voice.
“In another minute the night mail will dismember that proud form. You will be strewn to the winds. Yield, girl! Even now it is not too late! Even now you may be saved if you submit to my desire!”
“Never! A thousand deaths were better than the shame you offer me! Villain, if Rodney Whittaker were here your life would pay the measure of this bloody crime.”
“Fool! Your fine lover has forsaken you and cares nothing for your pleas. Even now he dallies in the embraces of the Lady Maude.”
“You lie! You coward and villain, you lie!” cried Uncle Joe, at this moment leaping down upon him from a twenty foot embankment. In the desperate struggle that followed it was the girl who got rescued and Henshaw who was run over by the first night mail. This was just. This was excellent and good.
Robert had been to see this drama seven times on passes which his Uncle Joe had given to him: he had loved it, loved it, brooded upon it with such fervor that he could now almost repeat each of the splendid speeches line for line. With the familiar intensity of children in their fantasies, the boy had long since broken down the bridge between living fact and melodrama: his fortunes and his own identity had mingled with those of his uncle, and his uncle’s with those of the wonderful hero he portrayed; and the sardonic visage of the villain Henshaw had fused insensibly with the Irish toughness of Rags Cassidy. The imperial magic of the theatre had wrought its wizardry in Robert: he had crouched in the enthralled darkness of the gaudy gas-lit houses, his young eye had cherished all the gilded follies—the golden cornucopias, the terrestrial grapes and fat gilt cherubs, the screws and scrolls and painted pilasters, the mellow plushy staleness of the boxes and that splendid painted gas-lit world upon the stage—those unreal and flawless figures of heroism, virtue, villainy, of brashness or gentleness, of spurious motives, and instant solutions. He loved them all, the beautiful figures of the play had become real to him—the splendid defiances of menaced virtue, the proud resolution of heroism, the ringing voice of his uncle, so clear, so brave, so glorious, as he cried “You lie! You coward and villain, you lie!” as he sprang upon villainy—these sentiments and actions were more real to Robert now than all the daily humdrum of house and school.
The beautiful figures of the play had become so real to him that he saw them now not only in the scenes that had been made for them: he saw them in a thousand lives, a thousand plays, he knew the source from which they came and he could project them and himself instantly into any situation. A thousand times he triumphed over Henshaw-Cassidy, a thousand times vile wrongs and tyrannies were requited, a thousand times the beautiful, the sweet, the sad misunderstandings of the lover and his mistress were resolved and rectified. The scenes shifted, but the figures of his world were constant—the troubling perplexity and confusions of the earth, the complexity of human character; the dense and obscure weaving of men’s destinies were unknown in this simple and heroic world in which he was always brave, good, and victorious. Here he had the brave grey eye of his Christian uncle, he was never afraid of anything, and he always won.
Yet there were flaws even in this bright world. His Uncle Joe had not always conquered and survived, there had been troubling interludes, parts and speeches that he could not comprehend: grief and disaster had stricken his great hero, he tried to shut the memory from his mind, but it returned now in dark silence. Once he had gone to see his uncle in one of these old plays he did not like. There were a lot of people dressed in old time costumes. All the men wore tights and carried swords and Uncle Joe had been the best of the lot: some of them were always talking big and drawing their swords out, but they were such a skinny, puny lot they could not have killed a rabbit. Uncle Joe had the best build of any of them, but just when things were beginning to get interesting. Uncle Joe got killed. It was not fair, they killed him by a trick. Uncle Joe got into a fight with another fellow who also had a sword and Uncle Joe was getting the best of him as usual when a friend of Uncle Joe’s had to butt in and try to separate them. While he was doing this and Uncle Joe couldn’t see what was happening, the other fellow stuck his sword clean through him. Robert saw it go in and come out on the other side. It was a mean, sneaking thing to do, nobody but a coward would do it: if he’d stood up like a man and fought fair Uncle Joe would have killed him as dead as a door nail. Uncle Joe’s friend didn’t have any business to come in the way he did, and Uncle Joe told him so. He said:
“What did you have to go and interfere for? He got in under your arm when I wasn’t looking. If it hadn’t been for you I would have killed him by now!”
Of course his friend was sorry for what he did, he said he thought he acted for the best, but that did no good after Uncle Joe had been killed.
Before he died, Uncle Joe had said: “A plague on both your houses,” and although Robert had been somewhat puzzled by the phrase at first, Uncle Joe had explained it all to him when he asked about it. It was like this: Robert’s mother ran a boarding house on Forty-fourth Street, and two or three years before she had taken the house next door as well because the house she had was too small to hold all the people who wanted to board with her. She had knocked a hole through the walls of the two houses and joined them with a passageway that ran from one dining room to another. Uncle Joe called this passageway the Bridge of Size and when Robert asked him why he called it such a name he said it was because the boarders at his mother’s grew to such a great size. So when Robert asked his uncle what “a plague on both your houses” meant, his Uncle Joe had said:
“Well, a plague on one house would not be so bad, would it? But if someone had two houses, like your mother has, it would be a pretty bad thing, wouldn’t it, if she had a plague on both of them?”
Robert had never thought about it in this way before, but now he did, and he said, “Yes, it would be.”
But still the memory of defeat and woe, the finality of death, made its small pulse of sorrow in his brain. He stirred uneasily. At this moment his dark quiet was broken suddenly, the door opened in the hall, and Bella stood there calling sharply to him.
“Robert!”
He jumped, got quickly to his feet, ran toward her. For a bewildered second he saw the dark design of the room, somberly lighted by a lamp that made a small hot pool of light around it. He was conscious of the moving figures of the doctor and Else, but his glance went straight to the big fourposted bed before him: in the centre of the breadth of bedding he could see my mother propped with pillows, holding her long white arms straight up above her head. What he saw distressed and frightened him, he did not know why: he turned suddenly and walked away toward the stairs, liking it better there. At this moment he heard a thin long wail, remote but penetrating as from another world, and he felt a wave of anger, jealousy and resentment pass over him. Bella called to him again, he walked on stubbornly. Then she came after him, seized him and wheeled him around sharply, gripping her strong warm paws about his arms.
“Robert!” she said with such fierce excitement that he trembled. “Go to your Uncle Joe as fast as you can! Tell him he has a little girl! Tell him that all—everyone—is well! Go! Go quick, boy!”
He stared at her. She gave him a little push and clapped her palms.
“Go!”
Instantly he turned and ran downstairs. The night was cold and frosty but he did not pause to take his hat or overcoat. He ran outside and down the stone steps of the stoop into the street. Then he chugged briskly off, a runner down enormous streets, a tiny speck upon a swarming rock, below the terrible desolation of proud stars, a puny messenger among ten thousand other instant births and deaths, but yet, he thought, the bearer of a mission, life’s pulse and heart, the centre of it all—a fat little boy who stammered.
At this time my father was appearing in a play called Esther Craig: it was one of the most famous plays of the time, it had run for years and broken records for performances. It was a play about a poor but beautiful and virtuous miller’s daughter who loved and was loved by a lord. She was disowned and driven away from home by her stern father who thought no honest girl could love a lord, and after a period of misunderstanding which almost ended in tragedy, she was restored to the arms of her lover once more. It was just such a play as Robert loved: there was never a purer heroine or more noble hero, and, although the play was, to his taste, a little quiet, and somewhat lacking in the more violent action that delighted him, there was an excellent and moving scene at the end where the heroine was hurled into the mill pond by the father and rescued by her lover. My father did not have the hero’s part in this play. He took the part of Pittacus Green.
