Thomas Wolfe, page 506
Moreover, no matter who won the fight, no matter on which side the decision lay, Joe Vila’s confidence was unperturbed, his prognostications in the light of retrospect were infallible. If Kid Getti were the winner, Joe Vila could be depended on next day to emphasize his own triumphant vindication. “As we have been telling the so-called wise boys all along,” he would modestly begin, “McGillicuddy was nothing but a set-up for the Brownsville Bomber. Early in the second stanza Getti hung his right on Cyclone’s jaw, which put the Boston boy on Queer Street for the remainder of the go.” Similarly, if McGillicuddy won the fight, Joe would hold next day an ironic inquest. “We tried to tell the suckers, but they wouldn’t listen,” he would observe. “Getti was a pushover for the Bean Town Bull. The Kid has nothing but a right-hand punch, and as everybody knows, no boxer with the knowledge of the rudiments will ever get hit with a right.”
Joe, by the way, was full of expert knowledge of this sort. He was constantly asserting most impressively that “no one trained in the rudiments of boxing could ever be hit with a right hand”—a statement which I always found surprising, since I had seen a number of bouts myself in which people who had been trained in the rudiments of boxing did get hit and very forcibly hit with a right hand. I used to ponder this particular assertion very earnestly, and the more I pondered it, the stranger it became. Why, I reflected, if no boxer who is trained in the rudiments of boxing could ever be hit by a right hand—why should any boxer bother to have a right hand? Why, since a right hand was such a very rudimentary possession, and of absolutely no value to a well-trained boxer, why shouldn’t he amputate it and save the trouble and expense of having it carried into the ring with him? Why, in fact,—the idea would develop very brilliantly as its manifold possibilities took hold of me—why shouldn’t we develop a race of one-armed boxers, each equipped solely and simply with a left hand, trained to the very apex of perfection? Surely, a bout of this sort between two crafty, one-armed strategists of the ring would be a thrilling one. Again, as their knowledge and skill increased, might it not be that each of them would become so cunning and so skillful in the uses of his weapon that he could completely and effectually checkmate the other one in every move. Then—the logic of this development was beautifully apparent—then we could cut off the left hands of all boxers and have bouts thereafter between boxers with no hands at all. This would undoubtedly be an improvement over most of the contests one saw, anyway, and besides that, how much greater was the appeal to one’s intelligence, how much more fascinating its imaginative possibilities. Boxers would no longer crudely feint and thrust and smash at each other with their physical appendages. No, on the contrary, what we would see would be a kind of boxing match of the wits, a kind of inspired chess play of the roped arena, where one feinted swiftly with the left ventricle of his brain and countered with his right, left-hooked by intuition or uppercutted with a crafty sneak-punch of the subconscious mind. The possibilities of this kind of warfare were apparent. It was really intellectual warfare of the highest and most subtle nature. Its benefits to all mankind would be enormous. I became fascinated with all the brilliant possibilities of my own discovery. I was just on the point of proposing it to my favorite expert in a public letter when poor Joe Vila died. And, as I say, I missed him. In looking back, I think it is just as well now that I did not write the letter. For now it is apparent to me the kind of handless, armless boxing match that I was on the point of putting forth before the world as my own unique discovery had really been familiar to Joe Vila and to all the other experts for many years. It was, in fact, a fundamental tool of their equipment, an essential part of their method, an indispensable property of their paraphernalia. They carried on forever these handless, armless contests of the wit and imagination. They were forever fighting with themselves, forever chasing their own shadows around the ring, forever ducking, weaving, shifting, feinting, bobbing against opponents of their own creation, and finally knocking themselves out with a terrific uppercut, to the accompaniment of tremendous roars of applause delivered by themselves. Joe Vila was himself, in fact, a master of this kind of shadow-boxing. He was forever carrying on sanguinary but completely imaginary contests between imaginary opponents of his own choosing in contests conceived in his own feverish imagination and staged within the roped arena of his own fancy. What, for example, would have been the result if Bob Fitzsimmons, Fitzsimmons of the Nineties, had met Jack Dempsey—the Dempsey of the Twenties—at a time when both were “at their best”? I leave the rest to Joe Vila’s superior descriptive power. “The bell clangs. Fitzsimmons shuffles awkwardly out of his corner on his knock-kneed spindly legs, advances cautiously toward his opponent when already, with the tigerish spring of a cat, the Manassa Mauler is upon him. Dempsey shoots his left and misses; close in he smashes savagely with a deadly right that has sent Willard, Carpentier, and Firpo reeling to the canvas. Long Bob does not seem to move. He merely shifts his head. The deadly, dynamite-laden glove whizzes harmlessly past. Dempsey finds himself tied up, unable to use his arms; for the first time a look of dazed surprise comes into the Mauler’s eyes”—etc. And so on to the thrilling end, in which Fitzsimmons sometimes won with his terrible solar plexus punch in the fourteenth round, in which Dempsey sometimes got up, dazed and bleeding, from the canvas to hurl himself upon his opponent and fairly beat him to the earth with the last surges of a furious fighter’s instinct, but which usually, I am glad to say, ended in a gory but an honorable draw.
For Joe Vila, unlike many other experts, really tried to be impartial. He really tried to referee his own straw battles fairly. He was an expert, but in the end he had a good heart and a sense of justice. He did little harm. He was for the winner. He was against the loser. He was loyal to one while he was the champion, but he didn’t betray one when he lost. He always knew just where Joe Vila stood. Of all the types of experts, his was the best. He was a newspaper expert. And newspaper experts are the best. You always know where you stand with newspaper experts, because newspapermen are whores. And you always know where you stand with whores. For that reason, I have always had an uneasy and a stubborn liking for both kinds. You may not like what a whore does to you, but you’re really not much surprised about it later, because you always know why she did it. You pay your money and take your choice. You don’t always know what you’re getting, but at any rate you know the chance you’re taking. You may be mistaken but you are not fooled. A whore may rob you, or get you drunk or drug you, or pick your pockets when you are not looking, but she won’t say later that she did it because of her great love for you. She may welcome you with open arms and call you sweetheart when your luck is in and you have money in your pockets, and she may throw you out of doors and tell you that you’re a dirty bum when your luck is out and there is no money left, but she won’t say later that she did it out of love of all mankind, devotion to a sacred principle, the conviction that her obligation to her own ideals, her duty to her fellow men, was greater than her own love. If she stabs you in the back, she stabs you in the back, and that’s all there is to it. There are no fancy reasons given for it later unless she’s talking to the police. A whore is also a kind of expert in her line and one, it seems to me, of the least harmful kind. And so it is also with her spiritual twin, the newspaperman. I have known a good number of them, and most of them I liked. Those I didn’t like were those that tried to lie about it, who had fancy reasons for it later. The newspaper criticos, the tony uppercrust of journaldom, half in, half out and hanging by their fangs upon the fringes of the arts, the gossip-scavengers with the daily columns, the gossip-mongers of the literary life, the musicos, the dramaticos, the criticos, politicos, aestheticos of every sort. You can’t put faith in this kind of expert. They are much too fast and fancy for you. They’ve got a reason ready on their lips for every stab, an argument for every slander, a justification for every cowardly attack. No, give me the good old homely, ink-stained harlot of the city room, the plain old whore of daily print. Give me the fellow who will come to see you for an interview, who will read your mail when you’ve gone out to get a drink for him, who will look at your telephone bill to see how much you owe, who will try the telephone to see if the service has been cut off, who will poke around in dusty corners, investigate your dirty linen, take advantage of your youth, your excitement, your enthusiasm, your eagerness to make a good impression and have a good piece in the paper and will twist it all around, garble it all, mangle it all, make a fool out of you, betray your honesty and your youth, betray the innocence and belief of man, all for the purpose of “getting a good story” out of it. Give me this kind of whore, I say, because you know just where you stand with him, and in the end you won’t be fooled. You know that he is with you when you win; you know he is against you when you lose. You know he will write well of you when you are a public favorite, when the public wishes to hear good news of you. You know that he will write badly of you when you are no longer fortune’s child, when that same public which applauded wants to hear the worst. You know that if the worst is not bad enough, the whore of print will make it so. And knowing this, you can remember—and forget. And in the end, somehow, you like the rascal. In the end, you take him as he is, you see what he has to do. You forgive him. You see that he usually does not wish you harm. You see that usually he wishes well. You see that only he does not wish well hard enough. You see that usually he wants what is good in life, but he did not want it hard enough. And you see that usually the whole nature of his fault is here; he sold out along the road. But he sold out not because he was bad but just because he wasn’t good enough. But the remnants of that ruined goodness are still in him, and you like him for it. You see it somehow in his sallow face. You see it in his weary eyes. You see it in his shabby, somewhat wilted person, which always carries with it, somehow, something of the weary yet not wholly disagreeable relaxation of the deserted city room after the day’s work is over, of the quiet press room, the quiet presses, the smell of ink when the last edition has been run off. You see, finally, that even the fellow’s cynicism is just a diverted form of sentiment, his shallow hardness—just a shell. You see that he became a whore not because he wanted to become one, but because he didn’t want to become something else quite hard enough. So you know where you are with him. You see finally just where you stand. You learn to understand the newspaper expert, the journalistic whore, which brings me to another, and it seems to me, a worse type of both.
His name was Dexter Vespasian Joyner. He was the greatest expert that I ever knew. As to his eminence in prostitution, I must allow the reader to judge for himself. All I can attempt to do is to give some account of the beginning of his career as an expert—a career which, it seems to me, for astonishing versatility, for flexible adaptability, for swift reflex and for chameleon-like change, for the possession of a large and easy swallow that took everything and that balked at nothing, surpassed any similar career that I have ever known. And I have known many. If I had to give the reason for Dexter Joyner’s amazing success as an expert and the eminence which he was destined to attain, I think I should have to attribute it first of all to a kind of astonishing intellectual “nose for news,” a sort of uncanny quickness of instinct and reflex, a kind of sensory perspicuity, which felt things coming before most other people even knew that they were on the way, which smelled them in the air before most other people even knew that they had arrived and were knocking at the outposts of the city. He got the jump on every one, and in the end, I think, he suffered the fate other bright young men so often suffer—he got the jump on himself.
Even at college Dexter was always three or four jumps ahead of the rest of us. We were for the most part a benighted crowd, students at a little country college in the South; and Dexter, at the time when he first burst upon our vision, had already spent a year at Yale. It was my privilege as a Freshman to hear my fellows and, I am afraid, myself, dismissed by this young magnificent as “a crowd of yockels.” Yes, Dexter called us Yockels, very properly, no doubt, but, as I remember it, any indignation we may have felt was overwhelmed by hearing the word pronounced that way. The pronunciation fascinated us. All of us who had ever heard or seen the word before had concluded rashly that the proper pronunciation of the word was “yoakels.” Furthermore, I think that most of us had heretofore assumed that the expression was not one in general use in the more familiar episodes of American life. We felt, I think, that the word had decided poetical and literary connotations—it was such a word, for instance, as might be used in Shakespeare’s time for the description of a clown. It was such a word as the lord of the manor bound from London in Fielding’s time might have used for the description of the country fellows in the village. We were country fellows, that was true enough, and most of us were from a village, but I think most of us had previously assumed that a yockel was a country fellow who wore a smock, who gaped and touched his hat when young Lord Sneeringford rode by, and who said, “They do be saying, lads, there’s girt doings at his lardship’s.” Well, maybe Dexter was right about us. I suppose we really looked like yockels to him, and he certainly looked like young Lord Sneeringford to us. But, as I say, if we felt any resentment at the word I think it was all blotted out by the admiration and the wonder which his pronunciation of the word evoked. In fact, after that we became so fascinated with the word that it became a form of familiar address. Someone would knock at our door, and when we would cry, “Who’s there?” a voice would answer, “A couple of yockels come to see you.” “Come in, you yockels,” we would cry. The name became so famous that we even had a Yockels Club, with secret rites, governed by a Head Yockel, a First-Assistant Yockel, a Second-Assistant Yockel, a Lord High Yockel of the British Seal, and a Chief Yockel of the King’s Wardrobe. In fact, when Dexter finally left us, and leave us he did—it was asserted he had been yockeled out of college. He departed in his Junior year and went to Harvard, and I think we missed him. We felt that something precious had gone out of life. We continued to call one another yockels for a time, but somehow there didn’t seem to be much point in it any more. Even the Yockels Club went out of fashion; deprived of its chief inspiration, cut off from its energizing source, it lost the energies of its first conception, grew anemic, and like many other worthy institutions which have outlived their purpose, it withered finally and died.
I was not privileged to see Dexter for several years after this. And during this time great changes had been wrought. Dexter had been to Oxford for a year or two, and now we companions of an earlier time had become “the peasants.” It was, I think, a much more bitter word than “yockel.” He uttered it quite venomously, I thought. It had, unquestionably, a sharper bite, a deeper penetration than had “yockel.” But personally I regretted the change. I felt that Dexter had grown away from us, that he was too much of the world, that he had become too sophisticated, that he was cutting himself away from his roots. A strangeness had come up between us. I missed the good old homely smack of yockel. There was something so familiar, so plain, so quaint—so—so damned intimate about it. I hated to see it go. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell Dexter so. But by now he had become so grand. He was so much a part of the great world of travel, of fashion, and the arts, that I did not dare even timidly suggest to him that I missed the word, and would he not go back to it. I heard, however, later on, one illuminating story of this Oxford period in his life. My informer was an English youth who had been at Oxford while Dexter was there and was, in fact, a member of his college. According to my English friend, he had been present on the occasion and at the exact moment when Dexter had first appeared upon the Oxford scene. This was at the first dinner of the term in the hall. Dexter appeared, as was his custom, a little late, and when the others of his table were already seated. He bowed and then took the place assigned to him and pursued his meal with quiet dignity until one of the dons who sat at the head of the table broke the silence hospitably and asked him for his name and origins. Dexter gave his name with satisfaction, admitted with a smile that he was American, and when pressed for more explicit information as to his native geography, finally confessed with a quiet little shrug and an ironic lifting of the brows, “Oh, I’m sure it’s nowhere in America that you’ve ever heard of. My people (all of English stock of course) were from Virginia, but I, alas, grew up among the peasants down in North Carolina.” No one, according to my English friend, said anything for a moment, but finally the don, lifting his eyebrows with an air of polite astonishment, remarked: “But—how extraordinary—I never knew that there were peasants in North Carolina.”
After this Dexter was allowed not only to resume but to complete his meal in silence.
[¬]
THREE O’CLOCK
[The North American Review, summer 1939]
George Webber lay on the grass one afternoon before his uncle’s house. George Webber had good eyes, a sound body, he was twelve years old. He had a wonderful nose, a marvelous sense of smell, nothing fooled him. He lay there in the grass before his uncle’s house, thinking: “This is the way things are. Here is the grass, so green and coarse, so sweet and delicate, but with some brown rubble in it. There are the houses all along the street, the concrete blocks of walls, somehow so dreary, ugly, yet familiar, the slate roofs and the shingles, the lawns, the hedges, and the gables, the backyards with their accidental structures of so many little and familiar things as hen houses, barns. All common and familiar as my breath, all accidental as the strings of blind chance, yet all somehow fore-ordered as a destiny: the way they are, because they are the way they are!”
