Thomas Wolfe, page 371
“Most of the boys down here,” he wrote, “have had about enough of this war, but I see that the women and preachers back home are determined to fight it out to the bitter end. I never saw such a bloodthirsty lot as these women and preachers are: they just seem to live on fighting and it looks like they’re not going to give the rest of us much peace until they’ve got the rebs all mashed up into jelly. For my part, I never felt so peaceable in my life, I’ve had enough fighting to do me from now to Kingdom Come, I could be friends right now with almost anyone, I could be friends with a reb or a preacher. I’ve got a good idea: in the next war why don’t they let the women and the preachers do the fighting? It seems to me that they ought to let these people fight who enjoy fighting, and let the rest of us who want to be peaceable stay at home and make the crops. They could put all the women on one side and all the preachers on the other and let them fight it out to their heart’s content.
“Bud, I’ve been having dreams about you. Have you still got that big fat belly? I’ve been telling some of the boys about it and they say, by God, they don’t believe I’m telling them the truth, they say they’re coming home with me to see it when the war is over. My own gut is rammed up against my backbone: they’re like twins, I don’t know if I’ll ever get them apart again, but if I do I’m going to see to it they stay strangers as long as I live. Anyway, we’re better off than the rebs: I was talking to one we took prisoner the other day and he said they’d been eating so much parched corn on his side some of the fellows had begun to crow like roosters. He said one of them came by him down the road the other day running for all he was worth. When he asked him where he was going this fellow flapped his arms a couple of times and cackled right in his face. When the man got so he could talk he said he’d eaten so much corn the hens thought he was a rooster: he said every hen in Virginia had been after him, he said they wouldn’t leave him alone, and with that he let out another cackle, flapped his arms, and let out down the road with six big Donnecker hens right after him. Now, Bud, do you believe that fellow was telling the truth? Well, Bud, you take care of yourself now and that big belly. When I come home I want to look at it and feel it and see if it is real.
“Your brother,
“Sam Barrett”
From this letter, with its reference to “women and preachers,” I believe that my grandfather must have been thinking of his wife and her church friends, and my father told me this was true. I think anyone could see from reading this letter that the man who wrote it was brave, kind, and wise: his feeling about war is the feeling that many people have today and that we have come to think of as “modern,” but I think that my grandfather and my father must have been very much alike in this respect: they were such men as belong to no particular time, but are able to live for themselves and by themselves. They are able to get wisdom out of living without being very much influenced by the custom of the moment. My father had this power more than anyone I have ever known.
There was another cause for the bitter feeling between my father and his mother. After the family came to New York, he went frequently with his father to the theatre. My grandfather loved the theatre and had committed to memory the entire plays of Shakespeare. By his fourteenth year my father knew more about these plays than most educated people ever know: they read or declaimed the speeches to each other, and they set each other a task of tagging lines the other began. Once my father caught him up in a mistake, and he said it was the proudest moment of his life. During the war my grandfather had become a good friend of an actor in his regiment (of this man I shall speak later), and now, in New York, he knew a great many people in the theatre. He knew the great actor Booth, and he knew Joseph Jefferson. Many of these people came to see him at his house: when they did there was laughter and music and punch in the parlor. My grandmother refused to take any part in these gatherings: she thought that her house was polluted by the presence of such people, and she reviled and insulted her husband for having such friends. At that time, the actor was almost a social outcast: he lived a wretched wandering life on the fringes of society; even the few distinguished artists like Booth and Jefferson never won the full acceptance to which their talents entitled them. To millions of church people like my grandmother, the actor was a depraved and evil man, and the theatre the devil’s dwelling place. My grandmother was convinced that this was true, yet, she could boast at the same time that she had never been in a theatre in her life.
A year before her husband’s death an incident occurred which enraged her, and helped to hasten the final breach with her son. My father at this time was only seventeen, but for years, from the first time his father had taken him into a theatre, he had felt the complete fascination of its magic and he had already resolved that this was the life he wanted and the life he was going to follow. In this desire his father agreed, and wanted to help him. That year, accordingly, he was given his first chance. His father’s war-time friend, of whom I have spoken, was a man named Clark: Mr. Clark was an actor who had played in many parts and had also been a manager of several theatres. Mr. Clark, therefore, got my father a small part in a play that was soon to open: it was a melodrama and in one scene there was a thrilling fight between two groups of hoodlums. My father was given the part of leader of one of these gangs, and he was given a single speech of three short words. My father was supposed to rush out on the stage at the head of his gang, glare fiercely at the other leader when he saw him, throw up his fists in a fighting attitude, and run forward crying: “Now for it!”
As every actor knows, it is often more difficult to play a small part well than to play a big part. When the actor is given only one or two short speeches, he is likely to be oppressed by a feeling that he must make every syllable and situation count, that there cannot be the slightest flaw or slip in his execution. As a consequence he is often strained and unnatural in his delivery of a few words, whereas if the words were only a fragment of a larger part, he could deliver them with perfect ease and naturalness.
During the course of rehearsals my father was repeatedly told to accent the second of his three words—that is, to say “Now for it!” Invariably, however, perhaps because he had been warned so often and erred through trying to avoid error, he would deliver his three words with the accent, thus bounding up upon the last: “Now for it!” Finally, the director, out of patience, told him curtly he would be discharged if he did not deliver his speech correctly on the night of the dress rehearsal. My father was heartsick and desperate at the prospect: he strode up and down backstage for hours repeating “Now for it!” thousands of times, until he thought it was rooted in his brain beyond possibility of error. On the night of the dress rehearsal, however, he failed again. He rushed out on the stage, shouted “Now for it!” and then, turning to the director, he burst into tears and begged the man to give him another chance. To his stupefaction everyone roared with laughter, and the director told him to say his speech in any way he pleased. Thereafter, he always got it right: the play ran for several weeks and he performed creditably.
My grandmother had known nothing of this. When Mr. Clark had got the job for him, my father and my grandfather agreed to say nothing to her about it. But my father’s absences from home on the evenings aroused her suspicion: when she asked him what he was doing, he told her. She flew into a terrible fit of temper, told him he was on the road to hell, and insisted that he give up his work at once. He refused; she then turned upon her husband, demanded that he compel the boy to stop, but he would not do this: he stood by his son and told her he should do as he wished. After the play had finished its run, my father made no effort to find new employment in the theatre, knowing that it would cause new tirades and invectives and that his father, now enduring the last hours of his agony, would have to bear the brunt of her bitterness and hate. But she never forgave either of them for it: she thought that both of them were damned and lost, and the harsh weight of her tongue was turned upon her husband to the end.
But now that he was dead, and his house was filled with these people his wife brought there from her church, my father could not endure this obscenity of mourning. It did not seem to him as if his father had died: it seemed that life had died, that the house in which they lived had died, that the corrupted body there belonged to death, was itself death, and had never had a union with his father’s life. He remembered his father’s bright living eye, his great laugh, and the superb purity and courage of his spirit, which had lived life with such fierce joy, and had been trapped to die there in that corrupted flesh whose evil stench had, even in the last months of his life, polluted the air about him. And now that this corrupted carcass should be cherished hideously by this woman to do duty to these rusty mourners in place of the bright spirit they could never know was not to be endured: my father went to her and begged her to have it taken from the house at once and buried. She refused: I think she must have been insane because she told him that this odor of putrefaction came from evil living, and that the road which he was travelling would lead him to the same decay.
My father went almost mad: he went out and walked the streets like a man who has been struck at the base of the brain and has no knowledge of what he is doing. Toward dark, however, he composed himself somewhat and went to see his father’s friend, the actor, Clark. When my father had told his story to Mr. Clark, the man got up, took his hat, and told my father to come with him. They went directly to my grandfather’s house: when they got there full dark had come, dim lamps were burning, and they could hear the voices of the mourners filled with their lust of pain and darkness. When Mr. Clark went into the house, he asked my grandmother if she would let him speak to her in private: immediately she denounced him and ordered him out of the house. My father protested at this, he told her Clark had been one of his father’s best friends and that he had asked him to come there to talk with her: at this, his mother started to revile them both. She said Clark had been responsible for her husband’s wickedness and that he was now bent on ruining her son. My father said that this was not true. His mother then appealed to her friends, the mourners: she asked them if they had heard the son say that his mother lied, and they said yes, they had heard, and they had never listened to such infamy. She then screamed at him that she had loved him and tried to save him, she said she had done all a mother could do for him, and that he was an unnatural son. She told him he would have to choose between herself and God and “that actor,” meaning Mr. Clark. She said if he did not do as she wished and go with her to Connecticut for the burial, he could get out of her house at once and that she never wanted to see his face again. My father waited until she had finished: then he told her he would go and that she could have her wish. Then my father left the house with Mr. Clark, and from that day he never saw his mother again. She went back to her home in Connecticut, she spent the rest of her life there, but she had not long to live: she died there three years later.
What spirit shaped this woman? Of what unknown elements was she made: Wrought by what troubled brain, what cruel heart? In all the chronicles of my life’s rich journey there has been no one to be compared with her: we, with our fruitful cries, our warmth of love, our hate of hate, our depth of passion and of living, had strangeness and mystery enough for unbelief; but I knew the source we came from. But she would live for me like some legendary monster of some tainted earth, had I not proof of her existence: she coined the metal of her soul and flesh into the substance of her oldest child, her daughter, my Aunt Kate, with whom a portion of my youth was spent, and in whom I saw the spirit of this woman rise and walk. And my other proof lies bound up in a handful of yellowed letters which she wrote my father during these last years of her life. I have them yet: the faded scrawl upon those faded pages lives with a fierce eternity of hatred, a corrupt animation which no years nor centuries can wither up.
Whether he ever answered these letters I do not know, nor did I ever ask him. I believe he must have, since hers had been addressed to him at various stages in his wanderings, and I suppose she must have known his address from letters which he wrote to her.
That woman seemed to have all the books of the Old Testament committed to memory, and she used them as an almanac, a prophesy, a constant weather report of human earthquake and catechism: there was not an evil mischance which could befall mankind for which she did not have at once the corresponding warning in the gospel. As she said, “it has all been written down”: she could see the hand of God, she could believe in His living presence only in some act of horror in the universe—the sum and confirmation of her fierce belief was suffering and destruction, and wherever she saw stricken men, wherever she saw grief and agony, her triumphant faith cried out that God lived and wrought and that his presence was abroad throughout the earth. As one reads these letters today, with their dense compilation of quoted prophesies, the immense and twisted erudition—with which instantly she could tag with prophetic doom the most trivial events—the death of a horse, the diseases of sheep and cattle, the intervention of lightning in the life of a child or a withered hag—the reader may have at first the sense of unbelief, a comic sense of something grotesque and droll. But as he reads, whatever quality of humor he felt will disappear: the woman emerges with a horrible intensity and reality, like someone we have never known but instantly recognize, a harpy screaming from the rocks of a separate, a stricken, planet, who belongs to no age, untouched by space or time, brought to this earth by what black charm, what evil incantation no one knows.
My father told me the whole story of his life with her only once, and I do not think I heard him speak of her, even casually, over a half dozen times in his life. He told me that he knew instantly when he left her that night that his feeling for her would never change, that he loathed her with all his heart and spirit, and that he would never see her again. At this moment of resolution all the tangled and bewildered dislike and resentment of years became clear and decisive: he knew exactly how he felt, he made a swingeing admission to himself, and thereafter he had no doubt about his feeling. Yet, he told me, for years he was to feel the bitter indecision of self-mistrust: he could not change his feeling for her, nor say he had any love or affection for her, but her last words of reproach and indictment haunted him. He wondered if she had been right—if he was an “unnatural” son, if his feeling branded him a monster, if his lack of love for her meant that there was a deformed and twisted isolation in his spirit. He was only a boy of eighteen years, and there was no one to whom he could confide. I think it was during these years that he acquired the certitude and independence of spirit that he had thereafter, but he bought it with the intense and lonely pain of his youth.
This was his final comment: one Sunday afternoon a great many years after this, and at least ten years after his marriage, for I must have been eight years old or more at the time, we had as a caller at Bella’s house, one of her friends, an actor named Grantham. Mr. Grantham was from Indiana, but he had not lived there for many years. Grantham’s mother had died a week or two before and he had gone back to Indiana for the funeral: he had just returned to New York and now he was telling us about his mother. I think that actors as a rule spend as little time in thinking of their parents or kinfolk as any class of people I know: the reason for this, I think, is that the actor lives in a world that is unduly separated from the one in which he was born, and he constantly becomes more absorbed in one and more remote from the other. Yet, no one can talk more eloquently than an actor about the beauty of mother love: his eyes will fill with tears at [the] sound of a “mammy song,” and he can weep copiously when he speaks of his love for a mother he has made no attempt to see in twenty years. Mr. Grantham was doing this now, and I think we all felt a little ashamed of him: everyone knew he had not been to see his mother for at least fifteen years, yet here he was saying that her death was the greatest sorrow he had ever known, that the thought of her and her teaching had inspired and guided him at every moment of his life, and that mother love was the most wonderful and beautiful thing on earth.
At length my father said: “I think you are very fortunate to feel that way.” Mr. Grantham looked at my father in a sharp suspicious manner. I think he was uneasy about his own feeling, and had been trying to convince himself of his devotion and grief by talking of it. At any rate, he thought that there was something critical of him in my father’s words.
“Fortunate?” he said. “How so? I only feel the way about my mother that all men feel.”
“No,” my father said. “I do not think so.”
Mr. Grantham became a little excited: he still thought his beautiful emotion was being doubted, and he said:
“I loved my mother more than anyone else in the world. No one can say I didn’t.”
“I do not doubt you,” my father answered. “I only said that all men do not feel as you.”
“Oh, yes they do!” said Mr. Grantham.
“Oh, no they don’t!” said father.
“Didn’t you?” said Grantham, feeling that he had my father trapped.
“No, I didn’t,” my father said at once.
“Do you mean to say,” said Grantham, slowly, “that you did not—love—really love—your mother?”
“Yes,” my father said, “that is what I mean to say. I did not love my mother. I will go farther than that. I did not even like her. I had the most intense dislike for her that I have ever felt for any person, and I know she felt the same for me.”
