Thomas Wolfe, page 403
For Mr. Lawrence Hirsch was wounded sorrowfully. But he could wait.
—
There was a sound of music in one corner of the room. Teddy Samuels, Amy Van Leer’s most recent lover, had been playing some of the songs he had written for his last revue: he was seated at the grand piano in the corner, running through the scores, playing a few bars of the deft, neat music lightly, then changing swiftly into something else. Meanwhile, the young people gathered around him—Amy, Ernest, Jack, and Alvin, the gay Japanese, and two or three of the young people from the repertory theatre leaned on the polished leaf of the great piano humming the catchy airs and in a graceful and engaging group keeping time to their brisk rhythm with tapping feet, light drumming fingers, and moving shoulders.
At this moment there was a burst of laughter from the group: someone had looked up and espied Roy Farley who had gone out and returned and was now standing in the door, looking languorously over the crowd, with deep violet-lidded eyes and the drowsy arrogance of a prima donna. Samuels stopped playing suddenly, and looked up laughing, and Amy’s hoarse excited voice could be heard, laughing, saying quickly: “There’s Roy!—But look at him! Isn’t he the most!—I mean!—you know!” Thus encouraged, Roy Farley took full advantage of the moment: It was, he knew, “Good theatre” and he “played it up” for all that it was worth. The drowsy arrogance of his prima donna manner deepened perceptibly: he burlesqued the role absurdly, slowly looking around the room with eyes that were now so heavy-lidded that they were almost closed. He had to hold his head far back even to see out of them at all. Finally, pretending to see someone in the crowd he knew, he waved his hand with a kittenish gesture, at the same time saying, “Oh, hello,” in a tone half-way between a greeting and a croon, and then, lidding his eyes still further, and making his voice yield the last atom of lewd suggestiveness he could put into the words, he said: “You must come over.”
With these words, simpering like an ancient whore, he advanced into the room, now closing his eyes and lifting his head with a tragic mien, at the same time saying in the husky and melodramatic monotone of a famous actress: “That’s all there is. There isn’t any more.”
The gathering apparently found this curious performance hilariously amusing: there were little shrieks of laughter from the women, coarser guffaws from the men, as Mr. Farley made his calculated entrance.
The comedian was a frail young man with lank reddish hair, a thin face of unnatural whiteness—it looked indeed, as if it had been coated with white powder—and a thin, ruined mouth. He was by profession an actor but his greatest celebrity had come from his impersonation of female parts in which at the moment he enjoyed a considerable minor reputation, and he was also on occasions of this sort in considerable demand as a kind of court jester.
It was the spirit of the time. People of Mr. Farley’s type and gender enjoyed a perverse celebrity. There was scarcely a fashionable hostess of the period or a smart gathering which did not have their own accredited Mr. Farley as an essential functionary of the feast. He was a kind of privileged comic personality, a cross between a lapdog and a clown.
The homosexual had in fact usurped the place and privilege of the hunchback jester of an old king’s court. It was a curious analogy: his own deformity had become, like the crooked backs of royal clowns, a thing of open jest and ribaldry. And his mincing airs and graces, his antics and his gibes, the spicy sting of his feminine and envenomed wit, were like the malicious quips, the forked tongues of the clowns of ancientry, approved and privileged by the spirit of the time and given license that is given only to a clown—or a king. It was, perhaps, an aspect of those times that the great, full throat of laughter, the huge side-shaking humor of the belly, the full, free, commonality of hearty mirth, wise, simple, deep, affectionate and all-embracing, were so rarely heard.
These were more piping times: the world had grown older, subtler, more aware—such ribaldry as made their fathers laugh, or as enlivened coarse breeds of human clay were not for gentry such as these. Their palates now were more adept and jaded, it took a subtler sauce, a more cunning chef to stir the appetites of these sophisticates.
Therefore, in that great citadel of wealth and power and loveliness and sky-flung faery to which the lowly of the earth so yearningly aspire, there was small laughter in those years of grace that did not have the serpent’s fangs behind it, and little mirth that was not omened by the rattles of the snake. And for such splendid folk as these, such jests as shook the ribs of Rabelais and filled the taverns of Elizabeth with lusty mirth were not enough. These gentle folk had grown wise and fine beyond all reckoning in their wits’ demand. They could no longer be prodded into laughter by the coarser thumbs of Fielding, Dickens, or of Swift—apparently their risible refinements could only be aroused by the humors of a mincing whore.
The subtlety of this celebrated performance was now being graciously unveiled by Mr. Farley in its full and finest flower for the benefit of the admiring host. He made his entrance opportunely, with all eyes fixed upon him and faces already half upon the grin as they waited for the latest flowering of his genius. So encouraged, so inspired—for Mr. Farley like all his precious tribe and others of the Thespian cult—could do nothing unless the eyes and ears of men were fixed upon him—made an impressive entrance. His wit apparently depended largely upon the arts of mimicry—and the art of mimicry where Mr. Farley was concerned depended solely upon impersonation of the female sex.
And this impersonation, to judge from the effect it immediately produced upon the audience, was—in common phrase—“simply killing.” Mr. Farley minced forward delicately with a languorous and exaggerated movement of the hips. As he did so he kept one frail and slender hand arched gracefully upon his thigh as with the other he pawed daintily at the air with plucking fingers as if reaching timidly for an unseen flower.
Meanwhile, he kept his head, the powdered whiteness of his parchment face, held languidly to one side, the weary eyes half closed and heavy-lidded—with an expression of simpering coyness at the lewd confines of his ruined and sunken mouth. And, as he minced along in this position he paused from time to time to wave maidenly at various people of his acquaintance in different parts of the big room saying, as he did so, “Oh, hello!—There you are!—How are you?—You must come over!”—in such an irresistibly mincing and ladylike manner that the effect upon that distinguished gathering was convulsing.
The ladies shrieked with laughter, the gentlemen spluttered and guffawed. As for Mrs. Jack, her rosy face grew almost purple. She was fairly overcome, she shrieked faintly: “Honestly!—isn’t he the most killing—” and was unable to continue.
The celebrated wit now came mincing up to her, took her hand and kissed it, and taking full advantage of the expectant silence that had fallen, he said, quite loudly in a throaty, languid and effeminate tone that could be heard in every corner of the room: “Oh, Esther, darling! I have news for you! . . .”
He paused and waited, and thus forewarned she clapped her little hand up to her deaf ear, turned her jolly little face half away from him with the expression and manner of a child listening eagerly and gleefully for the first time to the music coming from a gramophone, and said quickly: “Hah? Yes? What is it—What did you hear, Roy?”
“Well,” he said languidly in a voice, however, of great carrying power, “you know the Hotel Manger there on Broadway?”
“Yes? What about it, Roy?”
“They’re going to change its name,” he said.
“Hah?”—eagerly, almost gleefully—“Why? Why are they going to change its name, Roy?”—with her own theatrical training she was the good trouper now and played right into his hands to give full point and flavor to his jest.
“Because of what people have to say,” said Mr. Farley.
“Hah? What have they begun to say, Roy?”
“Why,” said he with lewd insinuation, “you know?—If it’s good enough for Jesus it’s good enough for me?”
In the roar of laughter that followed this splendid sally he sauntered mincingly away as one adept in the “tinning” of the stage, waving his hand girlishly at various guests and speaking to them as if he were completely, nonchalantly unaware of the humorous sensation he had created.
But now the doorbell rang again. Mrs. Jack looked around doubtfully, inquiringly, a little startled, as if she were not certain whether she had heard its sharp ring. Then she saw Molly going towards the door: she looked quickly at the little watch upon her wrist. It was after ten o’clock. In a moment the door from the centre vestibule was opened, and a woman and a man came into the hall. It was Saul Levenson and his wife, Virginia. He had been a true and devoted friend of Mrs. Jack’s since childhood, but one would never have suspected it from the sneering arrogance of the look which he now gave her. Even as he stood there in the hall waiting for his wife to return, and arrogantly surveying the crowd within the room, the tragic fact of an incurable distemper in the man was instantly apparent. It stuck out all over him. He was a mass of sore thumbs. He had gnawed his own liver for so long a time that it had colored his whole life. Even his flesh seemed to have been soaked in bile; he was dyed through with the pigments of his own distemper, a kind of tragic stain of his own torment that could never be got out. And yet—and this was also apparent—he was a richly talented man. Just lacking genius, he had many shining gifts. He wrote brilliantly, he was a subtle and a penetrating critic, he was deep in the history of the arts, and an authority on modern painting, and he had a true and just appreciation of literature. Furthermore, he was one of the leaders of the modern theatre and one of its most eminent designers.
With gifts like these, with talents of such extraordinary variety, and with an accomplishment of work that had crowned his career with recognition and success for many years, it might be inferred that Levenson was a very happy man. Such, unhappily, was not the case. He was a very extraordinary man, he was often, where appreciation of true merit, or recognition of the good work of other people was concerned, a very generous and fine spirited man. But he was not a happy man. He was a tormented, wretchedly inverted, complicated man.
The result was grotesque but it was also terrible. The man’s face was simply unbelievable. One’s first and involuntary impulse on seeing him for the first time was to burst out in an explosive and uncontrollable laugh in which incredulity was mixed with amusement. But such a laugh was swiftly checked when one saw what inconceivable anguish of the mind and spirit it must have taken to wreak such anguish on the features of a high and sensitive man.
His face was a kind of living crazy-quilt of obnoxious and distressful colors. Or, rather, with its naturally oriental and Hebraic swarthiness, it was now a kind of Turkish rug into which every color of distemper and spiritual distress had been ruthlessly and grotesquely poured.
It was purple, it was green, it was dingy yellow, it was crimson, it was black. It seemed to have in it, in about equal proportions, the mixtures of jaundice and of apoplectic strangulation. It was, as Mrs. Jack thought instantly and with a momentary tendency toward explosive mirth, “the damnedest face you ever saw”—and then, with the instant repercussion of overwhelming sympathy: “Poor thing! Poor thing!”
To say that Levenson carried this grotesque patchquilt of a visage proudly like a flaming banner would be a modest understatement of the truth. He not only carried it, he brandished it. And as if those gargoyle features were not in their unhappy state of nature enough to do him vengeful service had he wished—to frighten little children with, had he so willed, to startle strangers and to shock his friends—he made it do a double duty in repulsion by conforming it to every eloquent expression that contempt and scorn can know.
It was an outrageously arrogant face. The quality of its arrogance was so exaggerated, so extravagant, so insultingly enlarged and emphasized that by comparison the expression of the celebrated Pooh Bah was ingenuous in its sweet democracy.
Even before Levenson spoke to anyone, even before he greeted a stranger, those jaundiced eyes and that chromatic gargoyle of a face looked his unhappy victim up and down with such hyperbole of sneering contempt and disdain that if he had at the same time emitted a mocking laugh and snarled: “Really, who is this low fellow anyway? Do I have to be bored by such a clodhopper or will not some good Samaritan come and rescue me from having to endure any more of the drivel of this bourgeois num-skull”—his arrogance and scorn could not have been more plainly uttered.
And this really was the way he often felt. His was a tragic paradox of the gifted intellectual of his race. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too. Gifted by nature and by inheritance not only with an artist’s talent, but with an artist’s love and appreciation of beauty, and of the gifts and talents of other people, no one could be more quick and warm and selfless in his generous and intelligent recognition of the work of other men. And yet he could also be torn by feelings of envy. He could writhe with a torment of jealousy and scorn.
Likewise, endowed by nature with a brilliant mind, a fine intelligence and with a critical faculty that sought and loved the truth for its own sake, these high intellects were being constantly twisted and perverted from their clear purposes, their grand detachments, and their nobler impersonality, by the corrosive vanities of the intellectual. As a result, he was constantly getting embroiled in picayune and acrid arguments with other people of this sort, the total effect of which too often was that both sides failed to see the woods because there were so many trees. “What precisely I said in my last letter to your columns and what precisely Mr. Katzstein said in his reply is now a matter of record—” etc., etc.,—and so on back and forth until all that was left of the original issue, had there been one, was the sordid spectacle of two embittered egotisms crossing useless t’s and dotting worthless i’s.
All these unhappy and conflicting qualities in this tormented and yet exceptional and distinguished spirit were now evident as he made his entrance at the party at Jack’s. While his wife, a plain featured, and rather ugly little New Englander whom he loved devotedly and for whom he had felt such a consuming passion that he had turned all colors of the rainbow until his face positively resembled an outbreak of the plague, and for whom he had left a beautiful and voluptuous spouse of his own race, had undergone a complete physical collapse and an eight months’ period of reconstruction at Zurich under the enlightened eye of Dr. Jung—while this quiet little lady, who had been the cause of so much shipwreck and so many rainbow hues was divesting herself of her wraps in the room that had been given over to the women, Levenson remained in the outer corridor, removed his hat, took off his light spring overcoat and slowly and disdainfully unwound from his collar an outrageous scarf which was a confusion of so many violent and distempered colors that it seemed almost that he must have chosen it in a deliberate effort to outdo his face.
He waited until his wife came back before entering the crowded living room. She entered first and for a moment Levenson remained standing in the door, slowly and insolently turning upon the combined assemblage the small-pox battery of his bubonic face. The look of scorn and revulsion upon his astounding features was now so eloquent in its violence that people turned and stared at him appalled. If he had chosen that moment to break into a loud and sneering laugh and say: “So! It has come to this, hey? I have taken all this trouble to get here—and this—ha, ha, ha,—is what I find.”—His contempt could not have been more explicit than it now seemed to be, and few people would have been surprised.
In a moment, however, his wife, feeling his absence and sensing from the lull that had descended upon the gathering that something was amiss, turned quickly, saw him, and gave him a quiet, quick, and warning look. This swift warning glance of his small guardian angel toned him down at once. He immediately composed himself, came into the room, and began to greet people in a natural tone of voice. Then he spoke to Mrs. Jack with the quiet affection of an old and valued friend.
“Esther, I’m sorry that we’re late,” he said, “We stopped in to look at your new show. I wanted to see your set.”
“Oh, did you see it, Saul?” she cried, clapping her hand to her ear and bending forward a little to hear better as her rosy face flushed deeper with excitement and interest: “Did you like it? Hah?”
For a moment his face was again distempered by its old look of arrogance and scorn:
“Oh, I suppose it will pass very well as an example of La Jack in one of her better moments. Of course, nothing anyone could do could hurt a piece of tripe like that play anyway. So I suppose it doesn’t matter much what the set is like. If they haven’t got sense enough to come to me in the first place it doesn’t matter who designs it.”
She was not annoyed. She had known him too long. She knew too much about him. She laughed and said: “God! You hate yourself don’t you?”—At the same time taking him in—the whole discolored pamphlet of his face—in one swift glance, thinking a trifle cynically, but good-humoredly and utterly without rancour:
“That fellow thinks he’s hell, doesn’t he? And, my God!”—for a moment as she looked at the polychromia of his astounding face the old swift impulse to explosive and incredulous mirth rose up in her and almost choked her—“What a face! Would anyone believe it! It’s—it’s—it’s like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tale!”—she thought, and then immediately, with a swift and overwhelming sense of pity: “Poor Saul! Poor thing!”
More quietly now, her face still flushed with laughter, her wise eyes twinkling shrewdly and good-naturedly, she looked at him and said: “Well, Saul, I’ll tell you something. No one’s ever going to get a swelled head from staying around you.”
“Don’t listen to him, Esther,” Levenson’s wife said quietly. “He’s crazy about your set—he told me so. And I thought it was beautiful,” she added simply.
