Thomas Wolfe, page 376
“You’d better not let your father hear you say that,” Rebecca said.
“I hope he does hear me!” Bella cried. “I’d like to see him writhe! God! How he’s made me hate his race. When I see them coming I feel like starting a pogrom of my own!”
“Bella!” Rebecca cried. “How can you talk like that! Someday you may be married to a Jew.”
“Married to one of them!” said Bella. “I’ll be damned if I will! They can boil me in oil before I do! God! I hate the sight of them! I hate their big noses and that come-on-please-hurt-me look they have. If I ever marry, I’m going to marry a Goy!”
“Bella!”
“Yes, I am! I mean it!" Bella said, suddenly beginning to laugh. “A nice blue-eyed, blond-headed uncircumcised son of a Goy! And so are you, Beck! You know you are.”
“I have not thought about it,” Rebecca said. “Anyway, we never get a chance to meet anyone but Jewish people.”
“We’ll get the chance,” said Bella mysteriously. “You’ll see. . . . Now, Beck,” she said teasingly, “you know you’ve thought about it hundreds of times. You needn’t roll your innocent eyes at me, old girl. You know you’d like to have a nice blue-eyed Goy make love to you. . . . It’s what we all want.”
“Bella!”
“Well, I would!” Bella cried. “And I’m going to have one, too! I’m going to get me a nice blue-eyed, blond-headed uncircumcised son of a Christian, and if he has freckles on the back of his neck, so much the better. Yes! And if he’s been to Yale or Harvard College, so much the better! Yes, Beck, I’d like to have a nice fancy Goy name—Mrs. Cavendish Montgomery, or something like that—and bring up a whole flock of nice little tow-headed polo players!”
“Why, Bella.” Rebecca said, “I believe you’re just trying yourself to see how far you can go.”
“Trying myself!” said Bella. “Why, I haven’t begun to try myself yet. If I told you some of the things I really think about. I’d make your hair stand straight up on your head.”
“Then I hope you never tell me,” Rebecca said. “What are they?” she continued in a moment.
Bella laughed an open, joyful laugh, because she was young, proud with song, a girl.
“Oh, Beck,” she cried. “I wonder if you know what a wonderful place the world is! You must have thought about it! My God, here we are starving to death in the midst of plenty! But we won’t starve forever!” she said, flying her arms out in a powerful gesture. “Why has this hunger been put in us if we are never going to be fed? Sometimes I feel as if I could open my arms and crush the whole earth in my hug. If father only knew what goes on inside me! Sometimes I feel as [if] I could tear his whole little Jewish world to pieces as if it were a rotten cloth! And someday I will!” she said. “I’ll knock his whole little house of cards to pieces! God! If these fools could know what goes on in us!”
She strode restlessly back and forth for a moment, then she picked up a book which her sister had been reading and opened it.
“Oh, listen to this, will you, Beck?” she said immediately, with a rising intonation of strong scornfulness, as she read the first line her eye fell on:
“The young girl turned her clear eyes upon Delano for a moment with a glance that was direct, pure, and full of great reproach.
“‘I am afraid you did not quite—understand, Mr. Delano,’ she said simply.
“For a moment he said nothing. He stared blankly at her. Then, slowly, a flash of deepest red overspread his features.
“‘I beg your pardon,’ he stammered. ‘I assure you, Miss Josephine, I meant nothing—’”
“O rats!” Bella cried, hurling the book across the room. “He meant nothing! The poor fool! ‘The young girl lifted her pure eyes,’ did she? The lying young bitch, you’d better say. What she wanted to lift was her skirt! Beck, I don’t see how you can spend your time reading such foolishness!” she burst out furiously.
“Well,” Rebecca said. “It might not hurt you if you read a book sometime. You wouldn’t prance around so. Did you ever try? Did you ever in your life read a whole book through from beginning to end?”
“I did not!” said Bella proudly. “Thank God, I’ve better ways to waste my time! Oh, of course, I’ve got no brain. Beck. I know that. But sometimes I think I have more sense than a lot of people who have brains. Why are smart people such big fools! They read and study all their lives and then they don’t know how to get across the street! Don’t you think it’s queer, Beck? Here are all these wonderful brainy people who can settle the affairs of the world and everyone else, but they can’t settle their own for five minutes? I have no sense, but sometimes I think I know more than any of them. Anyway, I know how to get across the street, and I know what I want. Good heavens! You wonder where these people spend their lives. Do they never learn anything? Do they never use their eyes? God, sometimes I wish that I could write a book! I’d tell them a few things that would make their eyes stick out, all right! You can just bet I’d tell them what young girls really think about! . . . I wonder what would happen. Beck, if a woman ever wrote the truth down in a book.”
“Why, I suppose the other women would deny it was the truth,” Rebecca said.
“That’s it!” cried Bella. “That’s just it! Of course they would! They’re afraid to tell the truth! They think it would spoil the game for them.”
“No, I don’t think that’s it,” Rebecca said.
“Then why has none of them ever written about it: you know what I mean, Beck. Don’t pretend you don’t. You know this business of the young girl blushing is all bosh. Why don’t they say so?”
“Perhaps they can’t,” Rebecca said. “It’s not so easy.”
“Well, I could,” Bella said. “There are some things I’d like to tell them.”
“What sort of things?”
“Oh, the most wonderful sort of things!” cried Bella. “The others can tell of what goes on in their heads. I have no head to tell about. I’d love to tell them what goes on between my shoulders and my hips! God! That would be a-plenty! It’d make juicy reading, I tell you! I’d like to tell of the slope of a man’s shoulders. Don’t you love the slope of their shoulders, Beck? And the way they carry themselves. God! I think the line of a man’s back and the shape of his hips is the most beautiful thing in the world. The other day I saw a man digging a ditch. He was naked to the waist and as brown as a piece of leather. Honestly, I could hardly keep my hands off him.”
“Bella!”
“It’s the truth! I can’t help it. I watched him as he bent and straightened up, and the way his muscles came and went was just like music. I felt my fingers itching to touch that strong salty skin. I got so close I could smell the sweat. Talk about your perfumes of Araby! I tell you, Beck, they were nothing compared—”
“Good heavens Bella!”
“Oh, but you haven’t heard the half of it yet, old girl! I could tell you things about policemen and sailors that would curdle your blood!”
“Sailors!”
“Yes, sailors. Sailors are lovely. Why I adore them, Beck. It’s those britches that they wear that does it. I can’t keep my eyes away from them! Up and down! Up and down! Yes! And handsome young doctors! Oh, I’d love to have an affair with a handsome young doctor, Beck! God! If I can ever afford it, I’m going to be an invalid a large part of the time. I’d look at him with my pure innocent young girl’s eyes in a way that would melt the heart of an iceberg. I have thought about it thousands of times: I can close my eyes and see it just the way I know it’s going to be. I shall receive him all stretched out in a crimson negligee; I shall be pale and wan and tell him my throat hurts me. Something tells me if he ever gets a look at my tonsils, he’s as good as mine already. He will be very strong and tender and handsome and when he bends over me I shall adore the way his head is set upon his shoulders! God! I think there’s nothing more wonderful than the way a man’s head is set upon his shoulders, Beck. Don’t you think so? I wouldn’t dream of marrying a man if his head and his shoulders didn’t meet properly. I don’t want any of these drooping, furtive, hang-dog Jews-heads! No thank you! Not for me! I like that proud, fearless, blue-eyed Christian look! They’re the boys for Bella! I don’t suppose they’re so strong in the upper-story, but O! Beck, how I could love them! . . . I suppose I’ll die an old maid. That’s what usually happens to women like me. I’ve got a what-do-you-call-it—an obsession—for big blue-eyed, blond-haired Goys, and if I don’t get one I suppose I’ll never take anything else!”
“Well!” Rebecca said. “I must say, Bella, you’ve outdone all your former efforts today! I’m glad there’s no one here to take you seriously. If you really believed all the things you say, I’d think I had a pretty wild sister!”
“You have, Becksie, but you don’t know it! You don’t begin to know it yet. But you will! I promise you that. I tell you what, old girl: I think I’m a bit of a whore, you know.”
“Bella!”
“Well, where there’s so much smoke, there’s bound to be some fire. And God knows I’m boiling with smoke!”
“You’re boiling with talk, you mean,” Rebecca said. “You love to talk, that’s all. As for your conduct, you have stricter morals than a rabbi.”
“I don’t know what morals a rabbi has,” said Bella. “But I’ve got none at all.”
“Oh, Bella! What a fib!”
“It’s true, so help me God! Rabbi! That’s it. You’d better say rabbit. I’ve got no more morals than a rabbit. Neither have you.”
“You can speak for yourself,” Rebecca said. “You’re not speaking for me!”
“Yes I am! I’m speaking for every woman in the world. Look here, Beck, you know good and well that a woman doesn’t care two raps of her fingers for morals. They believe what the men tell them they ought to believe—it’s all only a kind of fashion or style as far as we are concerned: if the style changed in favor of going stark naked you know perfectly well we’d all be running around without a rag on in six months’ time—yes! And we’d laugh at all the fool women who used to wear clothes in the old days!”
“Not I, Bee! You’re not speaking for me!”
“Well, I would,” said Bella, slapping her hips, and swinging her opulent figure with a happy laugh. “And be glad of the chance to show my wares!”
“Oh no, you wouldn’t, Bee. No woman with any character could do a thing like that.”
“No woman has any character,” Bella said. “We have no morals and no character—no more than a wheat field. And I tell you what, Beck: we’re all waiting for the plough. If we don’t get that, old girl, we’re alone in the desert. And I’m going to get it!” she said exultantly. “God! Sometimes I think I’d love to be a regular daughter of the regiment. I could take them as they came—whole platoons and companies of them all lined up—the dear little blue-eyed boys! Oh now, don’t you worry,” she said, noting her sister’s alarmed expression, “I’m not going to. I’m not so big a fool. The game’s not played that way! I haven’t been brought up in a respectable Jewish household for nothing. If a man wants me he’s got to marry me! As the Chinaman says, no tickee, no washee!”
At this moment a carriage stopped in the street, there was the slamming of a carriage door, and the sound of someone mounting the steps outside.
“Bella!” Rebecca said quickly. “There’s father!”
“Well,” said Bella, “there’s one man I’ll never have to marry, thank God!”
As he entered the room he stopped, for a moment his short figure was turned harsh and full against her; at length they broke the fierce stare of their unquiet eyes with a kind of hard effort, and Bella went past him out of the room without saying a word to him.
The reason for this bitter war was plain. Bella at this time was a completely innocent girl, but all of the fiercely sensual energy, the hot chemistry of her blood, her enormous hunger for living, fought savagely against the narrow cell of custom and convention in which her father tried to jail her. For her, at this time, the world glowed with a hundred light and sparkling colors, a furious swarm of desires and hungers, of tongueless expectancies and dateless fulfillments which beat like a drone of frustrate bees within her: There was nothing for her to grip in her devouring hug, no words that could utter her deep, driven desires, nothing at which she could hurl her strength. She sweltered in fury, in that maddening fury and bafflement of young people who feel within them enormous power and yet have no means of harnessing it, of focusing it, of expressing it. They do not feel that the delight they want, the life they desire, is intangible and amorphous: they feel it is as tangible as flesh or earth, but when they try to grasp it they cannot, even when they try to utter their desire they cannot—they are devoured by their own hunger, and they have no words to utter the desire that feeds upon them. Their energy is torn asunder and diffused by the wild, unyoked horses of desire, they are maddened by the concrete immanence of wonder which is yet just beyond their touch or utterance; they try to speak, and in their fury they strike their fist vainly into the air, or beat their flesh, in a gesture of bafflement and fury. At no other time in life does one have such lucid and terrible flashes of wisdom—in a second the magical and irrecoverable moment is struck by lightning, the youth knows instantly all that can be known of the human destiny and of man’s brief wink of sentience in time—he sees the moment go forever.
Suddenly he understands that such moments, that a single marvelous day, may not be repeated a dozen times in his life—and that all he lives in hope of finding and possessing may, even if the supremest fortune smile on him, be found, possessed, and relinquished in ten minutes. A kind of madness of desire overwhelms him—the desire to possess the moment as it may never be possessed, to feed hunger in an absolute fashion, as it may never be fed: at such moments he has constantly the sense of starving to death in the midst of plenty, of perching unfed in the greenery of life, of being made impotent by abundance.
Of course, it is true that very few people ever feel this hunger with such intensity, and most people would think this description of it, which only moderately and inadequately describes it, a wild exaggeration. Most young people, indeed, would condemn this statement of the youth-hunger and would deny that it represented their own feelings. But if youth is wonderful and rare and lovely, most of the young people are not, and youth is wasted on them. Youth is lonely, wild, and beautiful—it falters, it is blind, it is usually foolish and ridiculous, it is often afraid, it is almost always mistaken—but if all the poetry of all the mighty poets who ever lived and wrote in praise of youth, was bound together in one great book with words of living gold—yet the sum of all these priceless numbers would be paltry compared to the true excellence and beauty of youth. The reason men love youth is because they know it is so lovely and because they know, however wrong and foolish all of its actions may be, it is the truest and loveliest spirit on earth.
The true friends of youth, again, are the old men. Most young men are stupid, barren, fearful and gnawed by bitter envy: if they see hunger, they mock at it, they say it does not exist because they have no hunger in themselves. They must have something to ridicule, because they fear that ridicule will be turned against themselves, and this they cannot endure. They are afraid to be alone: therefore, they hate youth with the consuming hate of men who have no power to live within themselves. Youth goes alone, but young men go in crowds: they want to be safe, they want to be fashionable, they have no power of belief or disbelief in them, they know what they do not know, they live upon the lives of truer, bolder spirits, their words are hedged with fear, measured by timorous calculations. The young men are treacherous and disloyal, they betray one another, but they are united in their betrayal of youth: they hate its power, its faith, its loneliness, and they try to destroy it by ridiculing its follies and excesses.
For a young woman like Bella, who feels this savage hunger, the release is harder than for a man. For a man is a wanderer; he reels, he staggers, he gropes blindly across the earth, but he moves, strives, actively seeks and searches: his power is often foiled and wasted, but from this labor of defeat he comes to know himself upon the earth and at length to believe in fences. A man is nothing until he stands alone, a man alone may be a hero or a poet, but a woman alone is nothing. A man must invade and try to conquer the earth for himself, but a woman must be conquered and invaded before she can make her life prevail in any way. Her body is like the earth: she must be ploughed and sown before she can yield a harvest. Even in its physical structure her body resembles the earth: the likeness has been observed and written about by many poets. John Donne, in a magnificent tribute to his mistress, addresses her as “O my America! My new-found land, my kingdome, Safliest when with one man man’d”—he likens himself to an explorer and begs license for his “roaming hands, and let them go, Before, behind, between, above, below”—etc. Similarly, in “Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare has Venus petition young Adonis in these words:
‘I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
‘Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain,
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain:
Then be my deer, since I am such a park;
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark.’
It must be obvious that these splendid metaphors are not the product of a rich but wayward fancy. No. The poet has meditated them deliberately and he pursues the analogy of the earth with opulent detail.
Everyone must have observed the truth of this for himself: in its contours—its curves, slopes, hollows, mounds, its music of flowing rhythms, and its legend of fecundity, a woman’s body resembles the earth much more closely than a man’s. Moreover, many women have had an illusion of physical union with the earth—of being joined to the earth and a part of it, particularly during the period before the birth of a child. Finally, most women are much more beautiful in recumbency, in a position of languorous receptivity, than when erect.
