Thomas Wolfe, page 419
And what was the reason for this madness? He did not know, and yet he knew that he was mad. He could sit in a chair and watch the madness soak into his brain and crawl along his flesh as a man might watch the progress of a poison in his blood. It was a madness that his mind contested, that his reason knew was false, and yet it conquered him. It drove him brain-sick, heart-sick, cursing through the streets at night, it drove him stamping through the streets clutching his great hands together at the waist, and if he heard a burst of laughter in the dark, if he heard voices and the pronouns “he” and “she” he was sure the words had reference to his wife and him or to a rival, and he would turn and curse the people who had spoken. The interest of the earth and of the town he thought was fastened on his own life and his wife’s: the earth was full of malevolent voices, evil whisperings—he saw himself at times as trapped, duped, tricked and mocked at by all men; he greeted his parishioners with a sick heart and a livid smile, and he searched their eyes, their faces, for a sly lurking humor, an evil and secret glee, or for some evidence that they knew the nature of his hurt, the ugly dishonor in his brain and heart, the foul color of his secret.
And it was not, it could no longer be, he felt, a secret; he felt as naked as an infant, he thought the reason for his grief was legible in every word and action, and when he went out in the streets, sometimes his spirit cowered in a dreadful kind of shame—he felt like shielding his face from sight. Shame pressed upon him from the skies, he could not escape it—and when it was not shame of his own dishonor, it was shame because he feared that he was being mocked and jeered at as a fool and cuckold by the world.
Great shapes of fear and cruelty were evoked out of immense and timeless skies, they hovered above him wherever he went, they darkened the wintry lights of desolate little towns like smears of blood: it seemed to him that there would never again be joy and confidence on earth, that the shapes of death and madness would walk in his brain forever and, having lost his faith in God, he now sought desperately for some faith in man: he dreamed of finding some earthly father, some man superior to himself in strength, wisdom, and age to whom he could confess the burden of his packed and overladen heart, from whom he might derive some wisdom, some medicine for the plague that was consuming him.
But he never found him, in his heart he knew that such a physician and confessor did not exist: he was caught in a trap, he could not confess the evil weight that lay upon his soul, he took the last full measure of man’s loneliness. He could not add to his own dishonor by bringing dishonor on his wife, and always there was a censor in his brain, a core of sanity that in the darkest and evilest hours yet judged fairly, and told him he was mad.
Then it left him. When it seemed that life was no longer tolerable it left him. It guttered out as a fierce flame gutters out of the fuel it has fed upon, and it left him full of weariness, indifference, and a sense of completion: he turned from the hurt, bewildered woman into the orbit of his own remote and secret life, he went on into new lives, new places and projects, and he forgot her.
—
And now, as I looked at the old man, I had a sense of union with the past. It seemed to me if he would only speak, the living past, the voices of lost men, the pain, the pride, the madness and despair, the million scenes and faces of the buried life—all that an old man ever knew—would be revealed to me, would be delivered to me like a priceless treasure, as an inheritance which old men owed to young, and which should be the end and effort of all living. My savage hunger was a kind of memory: I thought if he could speak, it would be fed.
And for a moment, it seemed, I saw the visages of time, dark time, the million lock-bolts shot back in man’s memory, the faces of the lost Americans, and all the million casual moments of their lives, with Bascom blazing at them from a dozen pulpits, Bascom, tortured by love and madness, walking the streets of the nation, stumping the rutted roads, muttering through darkness with clasped bony hands, a gaunt and twisted figure reeling below immense and cruel skies across the continent. Light fell upon his face and darkness crossed it:—he came up from the wilderness, from derbied men and bustled women, from all of the memories of lavish brown, and from time, dark time—from a time that was further off than Saxon thanes, all of the knights, the spearheads, and the horses.
Was all this lost?
“It was so long ago,” the old man said.
Bitterly, bitterly Boston one time more: the flying leaf, the broken cloud. Was no love crying in the wilderness?
“—So long ago. I have lived so long. I have seen so much. I could tell you so many things,” my uncle said huskily, with weariness and indifference. His eye was lustreless and dead, he looked for a moment tired and old.
All at once, a strange and perplexing vision, which was to return many times in the years that followed, came to me. It was this: there were a company of old men and women at dinner, seated together around a table. All of them were very old, older than my uncle; the faces of the old men and women were fragile and delicate like old yellowed china, their faces were frail and sexless, they had begun to look alike. In their youth all these people had known one another. The men had drunk, fought, whored, hated one another, and loved the women. Some had been devoured by the sterile and corrupt fear and envy that young men know. In secret their lips were twisted, their faces livid, and their hearts bitter; their eyes glittered with a reptilian hatred of another man—they dreaded his success, and they exulted in his failure, laughing with a delirious joy when they heard or read of his hurt, defeat or humiliation. They had been afraid to speak or confess what was in their hearts, they feared the mockery of their fellows; with one another their words were careful, picked, and disparaging. They gave the lie to passion and belief and they said what they knew was false. And yet along dark roads at night they had shouted out into the howling winds their great goat cries of joy, exultancy and power; they had smelled snow in thick brooding air at night, and they had watched it come, softly spitting at the window glass, numbing the footfalls of the earth with its soft silent fall, filling their hearts with a dark proud ecstasy, touching their entrails with impending prophecy. Each had a thousand dark desires and fantasies; each wanted wealth, power, fame and love; each saw himself as great, good and talented; each feared and hated rivals in business or in love—and in crowds they glared at one another with hard hostile eyes, they bristled up like crested cocks, they watched their women jealously, felt looks and glances through their shoulder blades, and hated men with white spermatic necks, amorous hair, and faces proud and insolent with female conquest.
They had been young and full of pain and combat, and now all this was dead in them: they smiled mildly, feebly, gently, they spoke in thin voices, and they looked at one another with eyes dead to desire, hostility, and passion.
As for the old women, they sat there on their yellowed and bony haunches. They were all beyond the bitter pain and ecstasy of youth—its frenzy, its hope, its sinew of bright blood and agony: they were beyond the pain and fear of anything save age and death. Here was a faithful wife, a fruitful mother; here was an adulterous and voluptuous woman, the potent mistress of a dozen men, here was her cuckold husband, who had screamed like a tortured animal when he had found her first in bed with another man, and here was the man he found her with; here was another man in whom the knowledge of his wife’s infidelity had aroused only a corrupt inverted joy, he exulted in it, he urged her on into new love affairs, he besought her greedily to taunt him with it, he fed upon his pain—and now they were all old and meagre and had the look of yellowed china. They turned their mild sunken faces toward one another with looks in which there was neither hate nor love nor desire nor passion, they laughed thinly, and their memory was all of little things.
They no longer wanted to excel or to be first; they were no longer mad and jealous; they no longer hated rivals; they no longer wanted fame; they no longer cared for work or grew drunk on hope; they no longer turned into the dark and struck their bloody knuckles at the wall; they no longer writhed with shame upon their beds, cursed at the memory of defeat and desolation, or ripped the sheets between convulsive fingers. Could they not speak? Had they forgotten?
Why could not the old men speak? They had known pain, death and madness, yet all their words were stale and rusty. They had known the wilderness, the savage land, the blood of the murdered men ran down into the earth that gave no answer; and they had seen it, they had shed it. Where were the passion, pain and pride, the million living moments of their lives? Was all this lost? Were they all tongueless? It seemed to me that there was something sly and evil in their glances as they sat together, as if they hoarded some cunning and malevolent wisdom in their brains, as if the medicine to all our grief and error was in them, but as if through the evil and conspirate communication of their glance, they had resolved to keep it from us. Or were they simply devoured with satiety, with weariness and indifference? Did they refuse to speak because they could not speak, because even memory had gone lifeless in them?
Yes. Words echoed in their throat but they were tongueless. For them the past was dead: they poured into our hands a handful of dry dust and ashes.
—
The dry bones, the bitter dust? The living wilderness, the silent waste? The barren land?
Have no lips trembled in the wilderness? No eyes sought seaward from the rock’s sharp edge for men returning home? Has no pulse beat more hot with love or hate upon the river’s edge? Or where the old wheel and the rusted stock lie stogged in desert sand: by the horsehead a woman’s skull. No love?
No lonely footfalls in a million streets, no heart that beat its best and bloodiest cry out against the steel and stone, no aching brain, caught in its iron ring, groping among the laybrinthine canyons? Naught in that immense and lonely land but incessant growth and ripeness and pollution, the emptiness of forests and deserts, the unhearted, harsh and metal jangle of a million tongues, crying the belly-cry for bread, or the great cat’s snarl for meat and honey? All, then, all? Birth and the twenty thousand days of: snarl and jangle—and no love, no love? Was no love crying in the wilderness?
It was not true. The lovers lay below the lilac bush; the laurel leaves were trembling in the wood.
Suddenly it seemed to me, that if I could put my hand upon my uncle, if I could grip my fingers in his stringy arm, my strength and youth would go into him, and I could rekindle memory like a living flame in him, I could animate for an hour his ancient heart with the exultancy, the power, the joy that pulsed in me; I could make the old man speak.
I wanted to speak to him as people never speak to one another, I wanted to say and hear the things one never says and hears. I wanted to know what his own youth beyond its grim weather of poverty, loneliness, and desperation had been like. He had been over ten years old when the war had ended, he had seen the men plod home in wreaths of dust and heard their casual voices in a room, he had breathed the air of vanished summers, he had seen cloud shadows floating on the massed green of the wilderness, the twisting of a last lone leaf upon a bough; and he had heard the desolate and stricken voices in the South long, long ago, the quiet and casual voices of lost men, a million vanished footsteps in the streets of life. And he had known the years of brown, dark lavish brown, the lost and hypocritic years, the thunder of the wheels and hooves upon the cobbles, the color of bright blood—the savagery, the hunger and the fear.
Was the memory of all this lost?
I touched him—I put my hand upon his shoulder, he did not move. Sunken in what lost world, buried in what incommunicable and tongueless past, he said—“So long ago.”
Then I got up and left him and went out into the streets where the singing and lyrical air, the man-swarm passing in its million-footed weft, the glorious women and the girls compacted in a single music of belly and breasts and thighs, the sea, the earth, the proud, potent, clamorous city, all of the voices of time fused to a unity that was like a song, a token and a cry. Victoriously, I trod the neck of doubt as if it were a serpent: I was joined to the earth, a part of it, and I possessed it; I would be wasted and consumed, filled and renewed eternally; I would feel unceasingly alternate tides of life and dark oblivion; I would be emptied without weariness, replenished forever with strong joy. I had a tongue for agony, a food for hunger, a door for exile and a surfeit for insatiate desire: exultant certainty welled up in me, I thought I could possess it all, and I cried: “Yes! It will be mine!”
[¬]
THE WEB OF EARTH
[Scribner’s Magazine, July 1932]
. . . in the year that the locusts came, something that happened in the year the locusts came, two voices that I heard there in that year. . . . Child! Child! It seems so long ago since the year the locusts came, and all of the trees were eaten bare: so much has happened and it seems so long ago. . . .
“What say?” I said.
Says, “Two . . . Two,” says, “Twenty . . . Twenty.”
“Hah? What say?”
“Two . . . Two,” the first voice said; and, “Twenty . . . Twenty,” said the other.
“Oh, Two!” I cried out to your papa, and “Twenty . . . Twenty—can’t you hear them?”
“Two . . . Two,” it said again, the first voice over by the window, and “Twenty . . . Twenty” said the second, at my ear.
“Oh, don’t you hear it, Mr. Hawke?” I cried.
“Why, Lord, woman!” your papa said. “What on earth are you talking about? There’s no one there,” he said.
“Oh, yes, there is!” I said, and then I heard them once again, “Two . . . Two” and “Twenty . . . Twenty.”
“There they are!” I said.
“Pshaw, Mrs. Hawke,” your papa said. “It’s something you imagined. You fell asleep, you must have dreamed it.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t,” I said. “It’s there! It’s there all right!”—because I knew, I knew: because I heard it just as plain!
“It’s the condition you’re in,” he said. “You’re tired and overwrought and you’ve imagined it.”
Then all of the bells began to ring and he got up to go.
“Oh! don’t go!” I said. “I wish you wouldn’t go”—you know I had a premonition, and it worried me to see him go.
And then I heard it once again—“Two . . . Two,” the first voice said, and “Twenty . . . Twenty,” said the other . . . and I know, I know—why, yes! Lord God! don’t I remember, boy!—the hour, the time, the very year it happened to the day . . . because that was the year the locusts came at home and all of the trees were eaten bare.
“But, say, then!—Ed—Gil—Lee—pshaw! Boy! John! I mean—I reckon Lee is thinking of me at this moment, that’s why I keep calling you his name. Well, now—hah? What say?”
“You started to tell about two voices that you heard one time.”
“Oh, yes! That’s so! Well, now, as I was—say! What was that? Hah?”
“Those were the ships out on the harbor, mama.”
“What say? Harbor? Ships? Oh, yes, I reckon now that’s so. The harbor is yon way?”
“No, mama, it’s the other way. You’re turned around. It’s just the other way: it’s there.”
“Hah? That way? Why, no, child, surely not. . . . Are you telling me the truth? . . . Well, then, I’ll vow! I am mixed up. I reckon comin’ in that tunnel did it. But you couldn’t lose me in the country; give me a landmark of some sort to go by and I’ll be all right. . . . Why, boy, I’ll vow! . . . There goes that thing again! Why, Lord! It sounds like some old cow! And here you are right on the edge of it! How did you ever come to such a place? Lord! Listen—do you hear it? I reckon that’s a big one gettin’ ready to pull out. . . . Lord, God! You’re all alike: your daddy was the same—forever wantin’ to be up and gone. If I’d a let him he’d have been nothing but a wanderer across the face of the earth. . . . Child, child, you mustn’t be a wanderer all your days. . . . It worries me to think of you away off somewheres with strange people. . . . You mustn’t spend your life alone with strangers. . . . You ought to come back where your people came from. . . . Child, child, it worries me. . . . Come back again.”
—
“Well, now, as I was goin’ on to say, that night I heard it, the first voice—pshaw! there goes that whistle once again. Say, boy! I tell you what—it makes me want to pick right up and light out with it! Why, yes, I’m not so old! I could start out now—I tell you what, I’ve got a good mind to do it—I’d like to start right out and just see everything—why! all those countries, England, where all your folks came from, and France, Germany, Italy—say! I’ve always wanted to see Switzerland—that must certainly be a beautiful spot—as the feller says, the Wonderland of Nature. . . .
“Say . . . oh, now I hear it! . . . Now I know. . . . Why, yes! It’s out yon way. And where’s the bridge, then, that we walked across that night?”
“It’s here—right at the bottom of the street. Here! Come to the window and look out. Don’t you remember how we came?”
Remember! Now, boy, you ask me if I can remember! Lord, God! I reckon I remember things you never read about, the way it was, the things they never wrote about in books.
I reckon that they tried to put it down in books, all of the wars and battles, child, I guess they got that part of it all right, but Lord!—how could these fellers know the way it was when they weren’t born, when they weren’t there to see it: they made it seem so long ago and like it happened in some strange land—what could they know, child, of the way it was: the way the wind blew and the way the sun was shining, the smell of the smoke out in the yard, and mother singin’ and the scalded feathers, and the way the river swelled that spring when it had rained. The way the men looked as they marched back along the river road that day, as they were comin’ from the war, and the things we said, and the sound of all the voices of the people who are dead, and the way the sunlight came and went, and how it made me sad to see it, and the way the women cried as we stood there in Bob Patton’s yard, and the men marched by us, and the dust rose, and we knew the war was over. Lord, God! do I remember! Those are the things that I remember, child, and that’s the way things were.
