Thomas Wolfe, page 498
It is so cool along the lake to-night, and you are sitting on the roof beneath the moon, with music playing, a cold drink in your hand, with well-dressed men and women all around you on the lake to-night, you don’t smell train-smoke on the lake to-night, but there is something in your heart you cannot say.
Where shall I go now? What shall I do?
She said with silver laughter, and echoes of the Riviera in her voice: “Oh, Jim, how simply priceless that you are the way you are!—I mean, I’ve been so long away. I’m really such a foreigner, if you see what I mean. . . . I mean, I really think my way of thinking and living have become completely European—I mean, you’re so Chicago, if you see what I mean. But tell me all the news—I’m simply dying to hear all the news. Of course, Bob Sprague is living in the East!—Anne’s living in the South of France, I see her all the time—where’s Steve Garrison—and Ed—and Emily—tell me—”
It is so cool and sweet along the lake to-night, there is the lighted panoply of the greatest shirt-front in America, but a wind has risen from the West, across the roofs tonight there sweeps the thick and fat aroma of the slaughtered swine.
“Is Jimmy Oberholt still here?—Did Billy Wade ever marry Sally Ellinger—”
The butchers stand upon raised platforms with their polished knives, one has a very quiet face, and watches carefully. The nigger curses, slipping in the blood, as he plunges booted to the hips among the hogs, he gets the chains around the small protesting hoofs, the hog jerks, squealing in the air, and squealing, swings along the runway to the doom he knows is there. But the butchers are such kindly thoughtful men, they stand there on raised platforms, patiently at ease, the hog comes to them squealing, the butcher shifts the quid of plug tobacco in his cheek, offers, then waits, the hog squeals, it is so swiftly and so softly done, the long knife just slides over, the fat throat divides, the wine-bright hog-blood, redder than you ever dreamed that red could be, outgushes downward to the floor, the hog just jerks a little squealing faintly, so relieved to find it has not been so bad, and another hog is on its way again.
“And what about the Hunt? Is Hugh still Master of the Hounds? You see, I’m simply starved for news. I’ve been away so long—I know absolutely nothing of what’s happened since I left.”
But a wind is rising from the West to-night.
OH, ROCKY MOUNTAINS
Where shall we go now? And what shall we do?
The song sweeps westward to the painted rock, to-night there is the silence of the moon on painted rock and there is hackled moonlight on the Rocky Mountains. The Santa Fe winds past the painted buttes. Miss Crocker for the fourteenth time is going to the Hopi Dance. She’s quite an expert now on Indian customs in the great Southwest—“You see,” she says to spellbound tenderfeet, with just the proper touch of Beacon Hill refinement, with a very nice and telling thumb-and-finger gesture of her bony little hand: “The relation between the Indian and the snake is quite remarkable.” The Santa Fe winds on and leaves the painted buttes, but takes Miss Crocker with The Santa Fe.
Where shall we go now? What shall we do?
But moonlight on the painted buttes again, the fiendish silence of the desert world, the mesa’s lift, and off the road in an arroyo bed, a shattered Ford, a dead man, two drunk Mexicans—“Meestaire—oh, Meestaire”—so eager, soft-tongued, plaintive, pleading, strange—“Meestaire”—and then the eerie nearness of the wild coyote yelp, and seven miles to go to Santa Fe. What shall we do now? And where shall we go?
OH, HOLLYWOOD
“It’s something that you shouldn’t miss out here in California—I mean a preem-year is a great experience: Joe’s working on the set, he’s got seats tonight—it’s something you ought not to miss, so come along.”
To these dense herdings, thrusting at the breach, here to the glare of light before a facade like a most appallingly splendiferous chop-suey joint—the crowd is here—that maddened thrust of brutal violence, that empty yawn of Kansas gone to Hollywood with maw insatiate to be fed on vacancy, hats knocked askew on reddened faces, sometime-people thrusting, swaying, shoving, out of mind—The uniformed police thrust back, force, maul and snarl—“Get back there! Get back now, or I’ll throw you back!” and heaving, sweating, swaying, Kansas, unmanned, ignoble, most inhuman-human, surges to the very ledges of the canopy—the sleek cars arrive, the lights explode, the dazzling sweethearts of the land appear—“That’s her!” cries Kansas—is mauled back into line and surges forward with reddened face and all its hairpins gone awry—“That’s her!” it roars and surges forward obscenely—and something perfect, empty, glittering, passes by, pauses, responds with a smile of brilliant vacancy—and passes on. “That’s her!” screams Kansas—and “Yes, sir. Yes, sir,” replies assuring Mike, “The little lady’s here herself—and just a moment, folks, just a moment—I’m trying to get her—she’s coming this way—ah-h-h—hah-hah-hah, what a crowd! What a crowd!—I’m trying to get her attention now!—and yes, sir! I believe I’ve got her. She’s coming toward the microphone now!—And here she is, folks! Here—she—is!!”
“Hello, everybody! Hello, America! I—I—well, I’m just so happy I don’t know what to say! This is the greatest, most beautiful and wonderful moment in my whole life. And well—ah-hah-hah—I guess you know what I mean! I’d just like to give you all a great big hug! And—well, that’s about all I can say! Good-night, everybody! And God bless you all! Good-night, America!” And good-night, good-night.
What shall we do now? Where shall we go?
The last street-car going for the night, a sound of absence after it has gone, somewhere a screen door slammed and voices going, and “Good-night.” “Good-night, Ollie, good-night, May . . . where’s Checkers: did you let him out?” and silence, silence, and “Good-night, good-night,” and voices going in Carlisle, “Good-night, good-night”—and voices going in Meridian, “Good-night, good-night . . . and hurry back again!”—and voices going in a thousand little towns—in Macon and Montgomery, in Asheville, Tallahassee, Waco, and Columbia—and “Good-night, goodnight”—in Ann Arbor, Wichita, Fort Wayne, Des Moines, Tacoma, Oakland, Monterey—“Good-night.”
For everywhere, through the immortal dark, across the land, there has been something moving in the night, and something stirring in the hearts of men, and something crying in their wild unuttered blood, the wild unuttered tongues’ huge prophecies. Where shall we go now? And what shall we do? Smoke-blue by morning in the chasmed slant, on-quickening the tempo of the rapid steps, up to the pinnacles of noon; by day and ceaseless, the furious traffics of the thronging streets; forever now, upbuilding through the mounting flood-crest of these days, sky-hung against the crystal of the frail blue weather, the slamming racketing of girdered steel, the stunning riveting of the machines.
And blazing moonlight on the buttes to-night, a screen door slammed, the clicking of a latch and silence in ten thousand little towns, and people lying in the darkness, waiting, wondering, listening as we—“Where shall we go now and what shall we do?”
For there is something marching in the night; so soon the morning, soon the morning—oh, America.
[¬]
PORTRAIT OF A LITERARY CRITIC
[The American Mercury, April 1939]
I
The personality of the celebrated Dr. Turner—or Dr. Hugo Twelvetrees Turner as he was generally known to the reading public—was not an unfamiliar one to Joseph Doaks, the novelist. Dr. Turner’s wider reputation had been well known to the public for fifteen years or more. And for ten years he had been the guiding spirit of the splendid journal he had himself established, the Fortnightly Cycle of Reading, Writing, and the Allied Arts.
The establishment of the Fortnightly Cycle marked, as one critic says, “one of the most important literary events of our time,” and life without it, another offered, would have been “simply unthinkable.” The Cycle came into being at a time when the critical field was more or less divided between the somewhat prosaic conservatism of the Saturday Review of Literature and the rather mannered preciosity of the Dial. Between the two, Dr. Turner and the Cycle struck a happy medium; the position of the Cycle might be best classified as a middle-of-the-road one, and Dr. Turner himself might be described as the nation’s leading practitioner of middle-of-the-roadism. Here, really, lay his greatest contribution.
It is true that there were certain skeptics who stubbornly disputed Dr. Turner’s right to such a title. These critics, instead of being reassured by the broad yet sane liberalism of the Doctor’s views, were seriously alarmed by it: they professed to see in Dr. Turner’s critical opinions a tendency toward a disturbing—nay dangerous!—radicalism. Such a judgment was simply ridiculous. Dr. Turner’s position was neither too far to the right nor too far to the left, but “a little left of center.” To such a definition he himself would have instantly agreed; the phrasing would have pleased him.
True, there had been a period in Dr. Turner’s rich career when his position had been a much more conservative one than it now was. But to his everlasting credit, let it be said that his views had grown broader as the years went on; the years had brought increase of tolerance, depth of knowledge, width of understanding; ripeness with this valiant soul was all.
There had been a time when Dr. Turner had dismissed the works of some of the more modern writers as being the productions of “a group of dirty little boys.” Indeed the first use of this delightfully homely and pungent phrase may be safely accredited to Dr. Turner himself; people on Beacon Hill read it with appreciative chuckles, gentlemen in clubs slapped the Fortnightly Cycle on their thighs and cried out “Capital!” It was just the way they had always felt about the fellow themselves, except that they had never found quite the words to put it so; but this man now, this What’s-His-Name, this Turner—oh, Capital! Capital! It was evident that a fearless, new, and salutary force had come into the Nation’s Letters!
A little later on, however, Dr. Turner’s dirty little boy had been qualified by the adjectival words “Who scrawls bad words which he hopes may shock his elders upon the walls of privies.” This was even better! For a pleasing image was thus conveyed to the readers of Dr. Turner’s Fortnightly Cycle that brought much unction to their souls. For what could be more comfortable for a devoted reader of the Fortnightly Cycle than the reassuring sense that just as he was settling comfortably to attend to one of the most inevitable of the natural functions, he might look up and read with an amused and tolerating eye certain words that various dirty little boys like Anatole France, George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and D. H. Lawrence had scrawled up there with the intention of shocking him.
If Dr. Turner had made no further contribution, his position would have been secure. But more, much more, was yet to come. For even at this early stage one of the salient qualities of Dr. Turner’s talent had revealed itself. He was always able to keep at least two jumps ahead not only of his own critics, but of his own admirers. It was Dr. Turner, for example, who first made the astonishing discovery that Sex was Dull. The news at first stunned the readers of the Fortnightly Cycle, who had begun to be seriously alarmed about the whole matter, shocked, appalled, and finally reduced to a state of sputtering indignation by “This, this Sort of Thing, now; Sort of Thing they’re writing nowadays; this, this, why, this Filth! This fellow Lawrence, now!”
Dr. Turner put these perturbed spirits to rest. Dr. Turner was neither appalled, shocked, nor incensed by anything he read about sex. He didn’t get indignant. He knew a trick worth six of these. Dr. Turner was amused. Or would have been amused, that is, if he had not found the whole business so excessively boring. Even as early as 1924, he was writing the following in comment on a recent book of D. H. Lawrence:
This preoccupation with Sex—really not unlike the preoccupation of a naughty little boy with certain four-letter words which he surreptitiously scrawls upon the sides of barns—[observe how the earlier exuberances of the Doctor are here subtly modified]—would on the whole be mildly amusing to an adult intelligence who had presumed that these were things that one had lived through and forgotten in one’s salad days, if it were not for the fact that the author contrives to make the whole business so appallingly dull. . . .
The readers of the Fortnightly Cycle were at first amazed, then simply enchanted by this information. They had been dismayed and sore perplexed—but now! Why, ah-hah-hah, the whole thing was very funny, wasn’t it? The extreme seriousness of the fellow about the Kind of Thing they had themselves forgotten since their Sophomore days—would really be quite amusing if he did not contrive to make it so abysmally Dull!
II
But there was more, much more, to come. The whole tormented complex of the twenties was upon good Dr. Turner. People everywhere were bewildered by the kaleidoscopic swiftness with which things changed. It was a trial that might have floored a less valiant spirit than that of Dr. Turner. Hardly a week went by but that a new great poet was discovered. Scarcely an issue of the Fortnightly Cycle appeared but that a new novel to equal War and Peace was given to the world. And not a month passed but that there was a new and sensational movement in the bewildering flux of fashion: Charles Chaplin was discovered to be not primarily a comedian at all, but the greatest tragic actor of the time (learned adepts of the arts assured the nation that his proper role was Hamlet). The true art-expression of America was the comic-strip (the productions of the Copleys, Whistlers, Sargents, Bellowses, and Lies could never hold a candle to it). The only theater that truly was native and was worth preserving was the burlesque show. The only music that was real was Jazz. There had only been one writer in America (his name was Twain, and he had been defeated just because he was—American; he was so good just because he was—American; but if he had not been American he could have been—so good!). Aside from this the only worthwhile writing in the land was what the advertising writers wrote; this was the true expression of the Yankee clime—all else had failed us, all was dross.
The madness grew from week to week. With every revolution of the clock the Chaos of the Cultures grew. But through it all, the soul of Dr. Turner kept its feet. Turner hewed true and took the Middle Way. To all things in their course, in their true proportion, he was just.
True, he had lapses. In culture’s armies, he was not always foremost to the front. But he caught up. He always caught up. If there were errors sometimes in his calculations, he always rectified them before it was too late; if he made mistakes, like the man he was, he gallantly forgot them.
It was inspiring just to watch his growth. In 1923, for instance, he referred to the Ulysses of James Joyce as “that encyclopedia of filth which has become the bible of our younger intellectuals”; in 1925, more tolerantly, as “the bible of our younger intellectuals, which differs from the real one in that it manages to be so consistently dull”; in 1929 (behold this man!) as “that amazing tour de force which has had more influence on our young writers than any other work of our generation”; and in 1933, when Justice Woolsey handed down the famous decision that made the sale of Ulysses legally permissible throughout these States (in a notable editorial that covered the entire front page of the Fortnightly Cycle) as “a magnificent vindication of artistic integrity . . . the most notable triumph over the forces of bigotry and intolerance that has been scored in the Republic of Letters in our time. . . .”
Similarly, when one of the earlier books of William Faulkner appeared, Dr. Turner greeted it with an editorial that was entitled, “The School of Bad Taste.” He wrote:
One wonders what our bright young men will do for material now that the supply of four-letter words and putrescent situations has been so exhausted that farther efforts in this direction can only rouse the jaded reader to a state of apathy. Is it too much to hope that our young writers may grow tired of their own monsters and turn their talents to a possible investigation of—dare we hope it?—normal life?
A few years later, however, when Mr. Faulkner’s Sanctuary appeared, the Doctor had so altered his views that, after likening the author to Poe in “the quality of his brooding imagination . . . his sense of the Macabre . . . his power to evoke stark fear, sheer horror, as no other writer of his time has done,” he concluded his article by saying darkly to his readers, “This man may go far.”
Thus, although Dr. Turner was occasionally out of step, he always fell in again before the Top Sergeant perceived his fault. Moreover, once he got into the fore, he had a very brave and thrilling way of announcing his position to his readers as if he himself had been in the crow’s nest and cried, “Land Ho!” at the very moment when the faint shore of some new and brave America was first visible.
These then were among the Doctor’s more daring discoveries; some of the more conservative of his following were made uneasy by such risky venturesomeness, but they should not have been alarmed. For if the Doctor ever stuck his neck out, it was only when he had it safely armor-plated: his bolder sorties out among the new and strange were always well-hedged round by flanking guards of reservations. Upon more familiar ground, however, the Doctor went the whole hog in a way that warmed the soul. His praises of the Joyces, Faulkners, Eliots, and Lawrences were always fenced in by a parenthesis of safe reserve; even the Dreisers and the Lewises had their moderating checks; but when the Millays, Glasgows, Cabells, Nathans, and Morleys were his meat, he spoke out of the fullness of his heart—in vulgar phrase, the Doctor went to town.
And curiously enough, it was just here, when Dr. Turner was on what he himself was fond of classifying as “safe ground,” that his judgment was likely to grow giddy and was prone to err. This exuberance caused him some embarrassment; at various stages of his editorial career he had described Christopher Morley as being the possessor of “the most delightful prose style that the familiar essay has known since the days of his true contemporary and, may I say, almost his equal, Charles Lamb. Aside from Lamb there is no other essayist since Montaigne’s time to match him.” Of Ellen Glasgow: “Not only our greatest living novelist, but one of the greatest novelists that ever lived”; and of that lady’s many works, as “. . . in their entirety comprising a picture of a whole society that, for variety and scope, has no parallel in literature except the Comédie Humaine, and that, in the perfection of their form and style, achieve a faultless artistry that Balzac’s cruder talent never reached”; of the whimsy-whamsy of Robert Nathan as “. . . sheer genius. There is no other word for it; it’s sheer elfin genius of a kind that not even Barrie attained and that has no rival in our language unless perchance it be the elfin loveliness of the Titania-Oberon scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; of the baroque pilgrimage of Mr. Cabell in his Province of Cockaigne “. . . our greatest ironist. . . . The greatest prose style in the language. . . . Perhaps the only Pure Artist that we have”; and of a young gentleman who wrote a book about a Bridge in South America: “A great writer. . . . Certainly the greatest writer that the Younger Generation has produced. And the book! Ah, what a book! A book to be treasured, cherished, and re-read; a book to put upon your shelves beside War and Peace, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Candide . . . and withal a book, that, without one touch of the dreary and degrading realism that disfigures the work of most of our younger writers, is so essentially, splendidly American . . . as American as Washington, Lincoln, or the Rocky Mountains, since in its story are implicit the two qualities that are most characteristic of our folk: Democracy through Love; Love through Democracy. . . .”
