Thomas Wolfe, page 499
The world being the grim place it sometimes is, it is sorrowful but not surprising to relate that there were a few wicked spirits who took a cruel delight in unearthing these lush phrases years after they had been uttered, and after they had lain decently interred in old copies of the Fortnightly Cycle for so long presumably they were as dead as most of the books that had evoked them. Then the worthy Doctor had to pretend he did not know they were there, or else eat them, and of all forms of diet this is the toughest and least palatable.
But on the whole the Doctor came through nobly. The sea at times was stormy and the waves ran very high, but the staunch ship that was Turner weathered through.
Among his followers, it is true, there are some whose tendencies were so conservative that they deplored the catholicity of the Doctor’s tastes. And among his enemies, there were some who were cruel enough to suggest that he wanted to be all things to all people, that Turner was not only the proper, but the inevitable, name for him, that the corkscrew shaped his course, and that if he went around the corner he would run into himself on the way back. Doctor Turner’s answer to both these groups was simple, dignified, and complete: “In the Republic of Letters,” said he, “of which I am a humble citizen, there are, I am glad to say, no factions, groups, or class distinctions. It is a true Democracy, perhaps the only one that now exists. And as long as I am privileged to belong to it, in however modest a capacity, I hope I shall be worthy of it, too, and broad enough to see all sides.” The simple dignity of this ringing utterance had answered all of Doctor Turner’s critics more effectively than any vituperative tirade could have done. And it was in tribute to these celebrated words that Peter Bilke, the Doctor’s editorial colleague who for years, under the nom de plume of Kenelm Digby, had delighted readers of the Cycle in his weekly accounts of his whimsical explorations in unknown corners of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Hoboken—which he had made immortal with the tender appellation of “Old Hobey”—had dubbed the Doctor with a nickname fashioned from his own reply—“Old Broadsides”—a name by which he was now invariably known to his intimates and to those who loved him best.
III
In appearance, Old Broadsides was scarcely prepossessing. He was so much below middle height that at first sight it seemed that one of Singer’s Midgets had enjoyed a run of extra growth. He may have been four inches over five feet tall; as for his sides, so far from being broad, the whole man, from his shoulders right down to the ground, was astonishingly narrow—he was a mere forked radish of a man, if ever one was ever made. His little bread-crumb of a body, for in appearance he suggested nothing so much as a piece of well-done toast, was surmounted by a head of normal size which appeared too large for the meager figure that supported it. In its other qualities it resembled somewhat the face of the little man one so often sees in political cartoons, and which bears the caption of The Common People. It was such a face as one might see upon the streets a hundred times a day, and never think of later: it may have belonged to a bank clerk, a bookkeeper, an insurance agent, or someone going home to Plainfield on the 5:15.
Doaks himself was one of the good Doctor’s more belated discoveries. When the author’s first book, Home to Our Mountains, had appeared some time before, Dr. Turner had not been favorably impressed. The review in the Fortnightly Cycle had been a very gem of bland dismissal: “No doubt the thing is well enough,” said Turner, “but after all, old Rabelais is really so much better”—a conclusion which the unhappy author was by no means minded to dispute.
Five years later, upon the publication of Doaks’s second book the good Doctor was still undecided just what he was going to do about it or him. Three weeks before the book was released for general sale, in fact, the Doctor had met Doaks’s publisher and, after confessing that an advance copy of the new work had been sent to him, had added grimly: “I haven’t made up my mind about Doaks yet. But,” said he bodingly, “I’ll make it up within a week or two.” Within the next two weeks, however, Dr. Turner felt the telepathy of moderating influences—“You can always tell,” he was wont to say, “when Things are in the Air”—to such a degree that when his critique ultimately appeared, it was much more favorable than Doaks or his publisher had dared to hope. Not that the Doctor was thoroughly persuaded, but he took a more conciliating tone. The book, he averred, “could hardly be called a novel”—he did not trouble to explain what could—it was really “a Spiritual Autobiography,” and having arrived at this sounding definition, he discussed the volume freely in spiritual-autobiographical terms, and on the whole was pretty favorable about it, too, having neatly furnished forth a special little nest for Mr. Doaks without in any way impinging on the jealous precincts of more splendid birds on more important boughs.
The way for rapprochement was thus opened gracefully, and when the author met the Doctor some months later, their greetings were of a friendly kind.
“Darling,” said Dr. Turner to his wife, “I want you to meet Mr. Doaks. By George! I can’t get used to this ‘Mister’ stuff, I’m going to call you Joe!” cried Dr. Turner with an air of bluff heartiness that was simply irresistible. “I know so many people that you know, and I’ve heard them call you Joe for years, no other name seems possible.”
Doaks murmured that he was enchanted thus to be addressed, meanwhile feeling a little helpless and confused under the hypnotic influence of Mrs. Turner, who, still holding him by the hand, was looking steadily into his eyes with a slow, strange smile.
“You,” she said at length, very slowly and decidedly. “You! You wrote the book,” she concluded simply.
He felt definitely vague about this, but managed to mumble that he had. The lady’s answer to this was to continue to hold the author by the hand, to regard him steadily with a fixed smile that seemed to harbor some dawning mirth to which no one else was a party.
“You,” she said presently again. “I don’t know, but somehow you make me laugh. You amuse me. There is something about you that is like—is like—an Elf!”
“Yes,” said Dr. Turner quickly, and meeting Doaks’s bewildered eye, he went on with an air of hasty explanation in the manner of people steering away from well-known reefs: “My wife was awfully interested in that book of yours. Awfully. Of course, we all were,” he went on rapidly. “Matter of fact, I wrote three full columns on it,” he went on with just a tinge of nervous constraint, as if he hoped this would make everything all right. “I believe it was the longest review I have done since An American Tragedy. I was awfully interested in it,” said the Doctor, now like Yser, rolling rapidly. “Did you see my review, by any chance?” he asked, and then quickly, before the other had a chance to answer, “I was really awfully interested; I called it a kind of spiritual autobiography,” he went on. “I mean,” he said quickly, as the other opened his mouth as if to speak, “it really made me think of Wilhelm Meister. Not,” the Doctor quickly cried, as Doaks started to open his mouth again, “not that that was all of it—of course there were passages in it that were very much like War and Peace—I remember saying to Mrs. Turner at the time, ‘You know, there are times when he is very much like Tolstoi.’”
“And like an—Elf” said Mrs. Turner at this point, never for a moment relinquishing her grasp on the author’s hand, and continuing to smile steadily at him in a slow, strange way—“So—like—an—Elf,” she said, and laughed deliberately.
“And, of course,” said Doctor Turner rapidly, “there’s the Moby Dick influence, too. I know I told my wife at the time that there were passages, magnificent passages,” cried Doctor Turner, “that were very much like Herman Melville—”
“And—like—an—Elf!” the wife said.
“And very much like Moby Dick!” the Doctor said decidedly.
“And very,” Doaks, whose mind at last was beginning to work slowly, thought, “oh, very, very, like a whale!”
Meanwhile, the critic’s lady continued to hold him by the hand, looking steadily at him, smiling a slow smile.
In this way, after so long and perilous a voyage, the storm-tossed mariner, Mr. Doaks, came to port. And if he was not berthed among the mighty liners, at least he now had anchorage in the slips where some of the smaller vessels in the Turnerian heaven were.
[¬]
THE PARTY AT JACK’S
[Scribner’s Magazine, May 1939]
From the outside the building was—just a building. It was not beautiful, but it impressed one by its sheer massivity. A mighty shape, twelve stories high, with ramparts of enduring stone, spaced evenly by a thousand windows, the great building filled a city block, and fronted on both sides. It was so grand, so huge, so solid, it seemed to be hewn from the everlasting rock itself, to be built there for eternity, and to endure there while the rock itself endured.
And yet this really was not true at all. That mighty building was really tubed and hollowed like a giant honeycomb. It was sustained on curving arches, pillared below on riddled vacancy, its nerves and bones and sinews went down depth below depth among the channeled rock: below these basal ramparts of enduring stone, there was its underworld of storied basements. Below all these, far in the tortured rock, there was the tunnel’s depth.
Therefore, it happened sometimes, that dwellers in this imperial tenement would feel a tremor at their feet as something faint and instant passed below them, and perhaps remember that there were trains, far, far below them in these tunneled depths. Then all would fade away into the riddled distances of the tormented rock. The great building would grow solidly to stone again, and people would smile faintly, knowing that it was enduring and unshaken, now and forever, as it had always been.
A little before seven o’clock, just outside the building, as he was going in for the night’s work, old John was accosted by a man of perhaps thirty years in a state of unkempt dilapidation.
“Say, Mac—” at the familiar words, the old man tried to move away. But the creature plucked at his sleeve with unclean fingers. “I was just wonderin’ if you could spare a guy a—”
“Nah-h!” the old man snapped angrily. “I can’t spare you anything! I’m twice your age and I always had to work for everything I had. If you was any good you’d do the same!”
“Oh, yeah?” the other jeered, with eyes suddenly gone hard and ugly.
“Yeah!” old John snapped back in the same tone, and then went on, feeling that this ironic repartee was perhaps a little inadequate but the best he could do on the spur of the moment.
He was still muttering to himself as he entered the great arched entrance of the building and started along the colonnades that led to the south wing.
“What’s the matter, Pop?”—it was Ed, the day elevator man, who spoke to him—“Who got your goat?”
“Ah-h!” John muttered, still fuming with resentment. “It’s these panhandling bums! A young fellow no older than you are tryin’ to panhandle from an old man like me!”
“Yeah?” said Ed, in a tone of mild interest.
“Yeah,” said John. “They ought to keep these fellows away from here. They got no right to bother the kind of people we got here,” There was just a faint trace of mollification in his voice as he spoke the words “the kind of people we got here”: one felt that on this side reverence lay—“the kind of people we got here” were, at all odds, to be protected and preserved.
“That’s the only reason they hang around this place,” the old man said. “They know they can work on the kind of people we got here and get it out of them. If I was the management I’d put a stop to it.”
And having made these pronouncements, John went in at the service entrance of the south wing, and in a few moments was at his post, ready for the night’s work.
II
John Enborg had been born in Brooklyn more than sixty years before, the son of a Norwegian seaman and an Irish serving-girl. In spite of this mixed parentage, one would have said without hesitation that he was “old stock” American-New England Yankee. Even his physical structure had in one brief generation taken on that kind of special pattern wrought out upon the whole framework of flesh and bone, that is unmistakably “American.” He had the dry, lean, furrowed neck of the American. He had the dry face, too, the dry mouth, a little harsh and woodenly inflexible, the lower jaw outcropping slightly, as if some conflict in the life around him had hardened the very formations of the jaw into this sinewy tenacity. His speech was spare, dry, nasal, with a kind of tartness that was really not at all truculent but that at times seemed so. He was far from being an ill-natured old man, but his humor concealed itself dryly behind a mask of almost truculent denial.
This was apparent now as Herbert Anderson came in. Herbert was the night elevator man for the south entrance. He was a young, chunky, good-natured fellow with two pink spots in his plump cheeks, and lively and good-humored eyes. He was really John’s especial favorite in the whole building, although one might not have instantly gathered this from the exchange that now took place between them.
“Well, what do you say, Pop?” cried Herbert as he entered the service elevator. “You haven’t seen anything of two blondes yet, have you?”
The faint, dry grin about John Enborg’s mouth deepened a little as he swung the door to and pulled the lever.
“Ah-h,” he said sourly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
He said nothing more, but stopped the machine and pulled the door open at the basement floor.
“Sure you do!” Herbert said vigorously as he walked over to the line of lockers, and peeled off his coat. “You know those two blondes I been tellin’ you about, doncha, Pop?”
By this time he had peeled his shirt off his shoulders, and had stooped to take off his shoe.
“Ah-h,” said the old man, sour as before, “you’re always tellin’ me about something. It goes in one ear and comes out the other.”
“Oh yeah?” said Herbert. He bent to unlace his other shoe.
“Yeah,” said John in the same tone.
The old man’s tone had from the beginning been touched with this dry note of disgusted unbelief. And yet, somehow indefinably, there was the unmistakable suggestion that he was enjoying himself. For one thing, he had made no move to depart. Instead he had propped himself against the side of the open elevator door, and waited there as if against his own admission he was enjoying the debate.
“Where’s old Organizin’ Pete?” Herbert said presently. “Seen him tonight?”
“Who?” said John, looking at him with a somewhat bewildered expression.
“Henry.”
“Oh!” The word was small but the accent of disgust was sufficient. “Say,”—the old man waved a gnarled hand stiffly in a downward gesture of dismissal—“that guy’s a pain in the neck! No, I ain’t seen him tonight.”
“Oh, Hank’s all right,” said Herbert cheerfully. “You know how a guy gets when he gets all burned up about somethin’. But he’s not a bad guy when you get him to talkin’ about somethin’ else.”
“Yeah!” cried John excitedly, as if he was suddenly remembering something. “And you know what he says to me the other day: ‘I wonder what all the rich mugs in this house would do if they had to do a hard day’s work for a livin’ once in a while!’ Yeah,” cried John indignantly, “and him a-gettin’ his livin’ from the people in this house! Nah-h!” John muttered to himself. “I don’t like that fellow.”
“Oh,” said Herbert easily. “Hank don’t mean half of it—he’s just a grouch.”
By this time he was putting on the stiff, starched shirt front which was a part of his uniform. A moment later, squinting in the mirror, he said half-absently, “So you’re goin’ to run out on me and the two blondes? You can’t take it, huh?”
“Ah-h,” said old John surlily. “I had more girls in my day than you ever thought about.”
“Yeah?” said Herbert.
“Yeah,” said John, “I had blondes and brunettes and every other kind.”
“Just a rounder, hunh?” said Herbert. “Just an old petticoat chaser.”
