Thomas Wolfe, page 418
The question surprised me, because he rarely asked about them: most of the time he seemed to have forgotten their existence, to be wholly indifferent to them. I told him that I had seen one of his daughters the week before.
“My children—basely and damnably, basely and damnably, have deserted me!” he said with bitter passion. Then, quietly, indifferently, as if stating the fact more truthfully and temperately, he said: “I never see any of them any more. They never come to my house and I never go to theirs. I do not care. No, sir, I do not care. It makes no difference to me. O, not the slightest! None whatever!” and he dismissed it with his big-boned hand. In a moment he added: “Their mother visits them, I believe. . . . Their mother goes, of course, whenever she gets invited.”—Here again, the note of bitterness and scorn was evident, as if he held his wife guilty of some treachery in visiting her own children; but indifference and contempt were also in his voice—he spoke of his wife and children as if they were all strangers to him, as if their lives touched only remotely the edges of the buried world—the world in which he lived and moved, in which his soul wrought out its fated destiny.
And this was true: like all of his family he had passed through a dozen lives in living his own, he was done with his children and done with his wife, he had forgotten them, he was indifferent to them, he did not need them. But they, two daughters and two sons, the youngest of whom was over thirty, the oldest more than forty, were neither able to forget him nor forgive him. He lived in their bitter memory; like men who are searching the causes for some fatal catastrophic flaw which has broken the back of a mighty bridge they went back through the painful annals of their childhood, the years of frustration and bitterness they had lived beneath his roof, the years they could not forget, escape, or. deny. His shadow fell across them: they never saw him, and they always talked of him, aping his speech, his gesture, and his manner, mocking him with limber tongues, but living in his life again and secretly feeling the old fear, the old awe, because his life alone had done what it had wished to do—warped and twisted though it may have been, it had held the rails, it had kept its way, it had seen new lands. For them, it sometimes seemed, the years were passing like a bitter water on the wheel of life: the wheel turned and they got older.
And now, as if he, too, had seen them as he spoke of them, he said: “They can all look after themselves. Every one must look after himself—say!” he paused suddenly, tapping his great finger on my knee, with the enquiring and combative glitter of his eye. “Does any one help you to die? Does any one go down into the grave with you? Can you do anything for any one? No!” he said decisively, and in a moment he added, slowly and deliberately: “Is not my help in me?”
—
Then, ruminant and lost, he stared across the archway of his hands. In a moment, with what was only an apparent irrelevance, with what was really a part of the coherent past, a light plucked from dark adyts of the brain, he said: “Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?”
He was silent and thoughtful for a moment; then he added sadly: “I am an old man. I have lived a long time. I have seen so many things. Sometimes everything seems so long ago.”
Then his eye went back into the wilderness, the lost earth, the buried men.
Presently he said, “I hope you will come out on Sunday. O, by all means! By all means! I believe your aunt is expecting you. Yes, sir, I believe she said something to that effect. Or perhaps she intends to pay a visit to one of her children. I do not know, I have not the remotest—not the faintest idea of what she proposes to do,” he howled. “Of course,” he said impatiently and scornfully, “I never have any notion what she has in mind. No, sir, I really could not tell you. I no longer pay any attention to what she says—O! not the slightest!” he waved his great hand through the air—“Say!” stiffly and harshly he tapped my knee, grinning at me with the combative glitter of his ptotic eye—“Say! did you ever find one of them with whom it was possible to carry on a coherent conversation? Did you ever find one of them who would respond to the processes of reason and ordered thought? My dear boy!” he cried, “You cannot talk to them. I assure you you cannot talk to them. You might as well whistle into the wind or spit into the waters of the Nile for all the good it will do you. In his youth man will bare the riches of his spirit to them, will exhaust the rich accumulations of his genius—his wisdom, his learning, his philosophy—in an effort to make them worthy of his companionship—and in the end, what does he always find? Why,” said Uncle Bascom bitterly, “that he has spent his powers in talking to an imbecile”—and he snarled vengefully through his nose. In a moment more, he contorted his face, and nasally whined in a grotesque and mincing parody of a woman’s voice, “O, I feel so sick! O, deary me, now! I think my time is coming on again! O, you don’t love me any mo-o-ore! O, I wish I was dead! O, I can’t get up to-day! O, I wish you’d bring me something nice from ta-own! O, if you loved me you’d buy me a new hat! O, I’ve got nothing to we-e-ar!” here his voice had an added snarl of bitterness—“I’m ashamed to go out on the street with all the other wim-men!”
Then he paused broodingly for a moment more, wheeled abruptly and tapped me on the knee again: “The proper study of mankind is—say!” he said with a horrible fixed grimace and in a kind of cunning whisper—“Does the poet say—woman? I want to ask you: does he, now? Not on your life!” yelled Uncle Bascom. “The word is man, man, man! Nothing else but man!”
Again he was silent: then, with an accent of heavy sarcasm, he went on: “Your aunt likes music. You may have observed your aunt is fond of music——”
It was, in fact, the solace of her life: on a tiny gramophone which one of her daughters had given her, she played constantly the records of the great composers, particularly of Wagner, lost in the enchanted forests of the music, her spirit wandering drunkenly down vast murky aisles of sound, through which the great hoarse throats of horns were baying faintly. And occasionally, on Sundays, on one of her infrequent excursions into the world, when her daughters bought her tickets for concerts at Symphony Hall—that great gray room lined on its sides with pallid plaster shells of Greece—she would sit perched high, a sparrow held by the hypnotic serpent’s eye of music—following each motif, hearing minutely each subtle entry of the mellow flutes, the horns, the spinal ecstasy of violins—until her lonely and desolate life was spun out of her into aerial fabrics of bright sound.
“—Your aunt is fond of music,” Bascom said deliberately. “Perhaps you may have thought—perhaps it seemed to you that she discovered it—perhaps you thought it was your aunt’s own patent and invention—but there you would be wrong! O yes! my boy!” he howled remotely. “You may have thought so, but you would be wrong—Say!” he turned slowly with a malevolent glint of interrogation, a controlled ironic power—“was the Fifth Symphony written by a woman? Was the object of your aunt’s worship, Richard Wagner, a female?” he snarled. “By no means! Where are their great works—their mighty symphonies, their great paintings, their epic poetry? Was it in a woman’s skull that the Critique of Pure Reason was conceived? Is the gigantic work upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel the product of a woman’s genius?—Say! Did you ever hear of a lady by the name of William Shakespeare? Was it a female of that name who wrote King Lear? Are you familiar with the works of a nice young lady named John Milton? Or Fräulein Goethe, a sweet German girl?” he sneered. “Perhaps you have been edified by the writ-ings of Mademoiselle Voltaire or Miss Jonathan Swift? Phuh! Phuh! Phuh! Phuh! Phuh!”
He paused, stared deliberately across his hands, and in a moment repeated, slowly and distinctly: “The woman gave me of the tree and I did eat. Ah! that’s it! There, my boy, you have it! There, in a nut-shell, you have the work for which they are best fitted.” And he turned upon me suddenly with a blaze of passion, his voice husky and tremulous from the stress of his emotion. “The tempter! The Bringer of Forbidden Fruit! The devil’s ambassador! Since the beginning of time that has been their office—to madden the brain, to turn man’s spirit from its highest purposes, to corrupt, to seduce, and to destroy! To creep and crawl, to intrude into the lonely places of man’s heart and brain, to wind herself into the core of his most secret life as a worm eats its way into a healthy fruit—to do all this with the guile of a serpent, the cunning of a fox—that, my boy, is what she’s here for!—and she’ll never change!” And, lowering his voice to an ominous and foreboding whisper, he said mysteriously, “Beware! Beware! Do not be deceived!”
In a moment more he had resumed his tone and manner of calm deliberation and, with an air of irrelevance, somewhat grudgingly, as if throwing a bone to a dog, he said, “Your aunt, of course, was a woman of considerable mentality—considerable, that is, for a female. Of course, her mind is no longer what it used to be. I never talk to her any more,” he said indifferently. “I do not listen to her. I think she said something to me about your coming out on Sunday! But I do not know. No, sir, I could not tell you what her plans are. I have my own interests, and I suppose she has hers. Of course, she has her music. . . . Yes, sir, she always has her music,” he said indifferently and contemptuously, and, staring across the apex of his hands, he forgot her.
—
Yet, he had been young, and full of pain and madness. For a space he had known all the torments any lover ever knew. So much my aunt had told me, and so much he had not troubled to deny. For bending toward me swiftly, fiercely, and abruptly in the full rich progress of a meal, her eyes ablaze with a mad and earnest light, she had suddenly muttered this ominous warning: “Take care, Dave! Take care, boy! You’re one of them! Don’t brood! Don’t brood! You mustn’t be mawbid,” she whispered hoarsely, fixing the mad glitter of her bright old eyes even more intensely on me. “You’re like all the rest of them—it’s in the blood!” she muttered, hoarsely and fatally.
“Ah, what are you talk-ing about?” Bascom snarled in a tone of the profoundest contempt. “Scotch! English! Finest people on the face of the earth—no question about it!”
“Fugitive ideation! fugitive ideation!” she chattered like a monkey over a nut. “Mind goes off in all diwections—can’t keep attention focused on anything foh five minutes! The modern decadents! Wead Nordau’s book, Dave—you’ll see, you’ll see! You’ah all alike,” she muttered. “You’ah ovah-sexed—all of you!”
“Ah,” he snarled again, “You talk like a fool! Some more of your psychology, I suppose,” he said with a heavy sneer. “The black magic of little minds.”
He knew nothing about it, of course; occasionally he still read Kant, and he could be as deep in absolutes, categories, moments of negation, and definitions of a concept, as she with all of her complicated and extensive paraphernalia of phobias, complexes, fixations, and repressions.
Then, bending toward me once again, as if she had not heard him, she whispered: “Oh, yes! he’s indifferent enough to me now—but there was a time, there was a time, I tell you!—when he was mad about me! The old fool!” she cackled suddenly and bitterly with a seeming irrelevance. Then bending forward suddenly with a resumption of her former brooding intensity she whispered: “Yes! he was mad, mad, mad! Oh, he can’t deny it!” she cried. “He couldn’t keep his eyes off me for a minute! He went cwazy if any other man so much as looked at me!”
“Quite true, my dear! Quite true!” my uncle said without a trace of anger or denial in his voice, with one of his sudden and astonishing changes to a mood of tender and tranquil agreement. “Oh, yes,” he said again, staring reminiscently across the apex of his great folded hands. “It is all quite true—every word as she has spoken it—quite true, quite true. I had forgotten but it’s all quite true.” And he shook his gaunt head gently from side to side, turning his closed eyes downward, and snuffling gently, blindly, tenderly, with laughter, with a passive and indifferent memory.
For a year or two after his marriage he had been maddened by a black insanity of jealousy. It descended on his spirit like a choking and pestilence-laden cloud, it entered his veins with blackened tongues of poison, it crept along the conduits of his blood, sweltered venomously in his heart, it soaked into the convolutions of his brain until his brain was fanged with hatred, soaked in poison, stricken, maddened, and unhinged. His gaunt figure wasted until he became the picture of skeletonized emaciation, jealousy and fear ate like a vulture at his entrails, all of the vital energy, the power and intensity of his life, was fed into this poisonous and consuming fire and then, when it had almost wrecked his health, ruined his career, and destroyed his reason, it left him as suddenly as it came: his life reverted to its ancient and imbedded core of egotism, he grew weary of his wife, he thought of her indifferently, he forgot her.
And she, poor soul, was like a rabbit trapped before the fierce yellow eye, the hypnotic stare of a crouching tiger. She did not know whether he would spring, strike forth his paw to maul her, or walk off indifferently. She was dazed and stricken before the violence of his first passion, the unreasoning madness of his jealousy, and in the years that followed she was bewildered, resentful, and finally embittered by the abrupt indifference which succeeded it—an indifference so great that at times he seemed to forget her very existence for days at a time, to live with her in a little house as if he were scarcely conscious of her presence, stumping about the place in an intensity of self-absorption while he cursed and muttered to himself, banged open furnace doors, chopped up whatever combinations of raw foods his fantastic imagination might contrive, and answering her impatiently and contemptuously when she spoke to him: “What did you say-y? Oh, what are you talk-ing about?”—and he would stump away again, absorbed mysteriously with his own affairs. And sometimes, if he was the victim of conspiracy in the universe—if God had forsaken him and man had tricked and cheated him, he would roll upon the floor, hammer his heels against the wall, and howl his curses at oblivious heaven.
Louise, meanwhile, her children having left her, played Wagner on the gramophone, kept her small house tidy, and learned to carry on involved and animated conversations with herself, or even with her pots and pans, for when she scrubbed and cleaned them, she would talk to them: if she dropped one, she would scold it, pick it from the floor, spank it across the bottom, saying: “No, you don’t! Naughty, you bad thing, you!” And often, while he stumped through the house, these solitary conversations were interspersed by fits of laughter: she would bend double over her pots snuffling with soft laughter which was faintly broken at its climax, a long high “Who-o-op.” Then she would shake her head pityingly, and be off again, but at what she was laughing she could not have said.
Suddenly one night, however, she interrupted one of Bascom’s stamping and howling tirades by putting on her tiny gramophone The Ride of the Valkyries, as recorded by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Bascom, after the first paralysis of his surprise had passed, rushed furiously toward the offending instrument that was providing such melodious but mighty competition. Then Bascom halted; for suddenly he noticed that Louise was standing beside the instrument, that she was snuffling through her nose with laughter, and that from time to time she looked craftily toward him, and broke into a high piercing cackle. Bascom also noticed that she held a large carving knife in her hand. With a loud yell he turned and fled toward his room, where he locked the door, crying out strongly in an agony of terror: “O momma! Momma! Save me!”
All this had amused Louise enormously. She played the record over time after time, forever snuffling with laughter and the high cackle: “Who-oo-oo!” She bent double with it.
—
The next morning after Bascom had gone furtively away to his office, Louise looked at her image in a mirror. She looked for a long time, and she said: “I wonder if I am going mad.”
Her face at fifty was bloodless, birdlike, her bright eyes badly paunched and rimmed with red; her hair was dead white—all her delicate features were minutely carved with a fabric of tiny wrinkles. So she said: “I wonder if I’m going mad,” and took up the study of psychology.
She read all the works of William James, and those of Professor William McDougall as often as they appeared. She subscribed t:o several magazines, and wrote a book herself. She called it “The Surgery of Psychic Analysis”: the publishers rejected it.
“I’m a good hundred years ahead of my time,” she said to one of her daughters.
Thus, Louise found the life of reason. She had found a curative for all disease: she became convinced very shortly that she was one of the very few perfectly balanced people in the world and, of course, that Bascom was utterly mad.
But sometimes, even now, the old resentment and bewilderment would return—she would remember the time of his passionate absorption in her, even the black insanity of his jealousy, with bitterness and regret.
What she had said was true. For two years after their marriage, before she had her first child, he had been like a man beset by furies. For the first time in his life his enormous egotism had been pulled away from its centre: he went outside of himself, he became acutely sensitive to the world around him. Because of the fury of possession which raged in him, because the thing he possessed must be the best and dearest thing on earth, it suddenly seemed that men were united against him in an effort to take it from him. Louise was pretty and attractive: wherever she went men looked at her, and when Bascom noticed this, it almost drove him mad.
At this time he had his first church in a town in Illinois: sometimes in the middle of a sermon he would see her face below him and his own would grow livid; he would pause suddenly and lean forward gripping the edges of his lectern like a man stricken and foolish—he would recover himself and go on brokenly and indifferently, but his spirit would twist like a tortured animal, his entrails would get numb and sick, his heart seemed frozen in a ring of poison, and a thousand horrible and foolish doubts would torment him. There was no excess of fantastic possibility, no absurdity of suspicion that he did not know: his mind swarmed with poisonous fabrications, which in a second were translated into reality: he was unable to distinguish between cold fact and his delirious fancy—the moment he imagined anything he believed it to be true.
