Thomas Wolfe, page 509
And there were great displays of marching men, sometimes ungunned but rhythmic, as regiments of brown shirts went swinging through the streets. By noon each day all the main approaches to the games, the embannered streets and avenues of the route which the Leader would take to the stadium, miles away, were walled in by the troops. They stood at ease, young men, laughing and talking with each other—the Leader’s bodyguards, the Schutz Staffel units, the Storm Troopers, all ranks and divisions in their different uniforms—and they stretched in two unbroken lines from the Wilhelmstrasse up to the arches of the Brandenburger Tor. Then, suddenly, the sharp command, and instantly there would be the solid smack of ten thousand leather boots as they came together with the sound of war.
It seemed as if everything had been planned for this moment, shaped to this triumphant purpose. But the people—they had not been planned. Day after day, behind the unbroken wall of soldiers, they stood and waited in a dense and patient throng. These were the masses of the nation, the poor ones of the earth, the humble ones of life, the workers and the wives, the mothers and the children—and day after day they came and stood and waited. They were there because they did not have money enough to buy the little cardboard squares that would have given them places within the magic ring. From noon till night they waited for just two brief and golden moments of the day: the moment when the Leader went out to the stadium, and the moment when he returned.
At last he came—and something like a wind across a field of grass was shaken through that crowd, and from afar the tide rolled up with him, and in it was the voice, the hope, the prayer of the land. The Leader came by slowly in a shining car, a little dark man with a comic-opera mustache, erect and standing, moveless and unsmiling, with his hand upraised, palm outward, not in Nazi-wise salute, but straight up, in a gesture of blessing such as the Buddha or Messiahs use.
The first weeks passed, and George began to hear some ugly things. From time to time, at parties, dinners, and the like, when George would speak of his enthusiasm for Germany and the German people, various friends that he had made would, if they had had enough to drink, take him aside afterward and, after looking around cautiously, lean toward him with an air of great secrecy and whisper, “But have you heard . . . ? And have you heard . . . ?”
He did not see any of the ugly things they had whispered about. He did not see anyone beaten. He did not see anyone imprisoned, or put to death. He did not see any men in concentration camps. He did not see openly anywhere the physical manifestations of a brutal and compulsive force.
True, there were men in brown uniforms everywhere, and men in black uniforms, and men in uniforms of olive green, and everywhere in the streets there was the solid smack of booted feet, the blare of brass, the tootling of fifes, and the poignant sight of young faces shaded under iron helmets, with folded arms and ramrod backs, precisely seated in great army lorries. But all of this had become so mixed in with the genial temper of the people making holiday, as he had seen and known it so many pleasant times before, that even if it did not now seem good, it did not seem sinister or bad.
Then something happened. It didn’t happen suddenly. It just happened as a cloud gathers, as a fog settles, as rain begins to fall.
A man George had met was planning to give a party for him and asked him if he wanted to ask any of his friends. George mentioned one. His host was silent for a moment; he looked embarrassed; then he said that the person George had named had formerly been the editorial head of a publication that had been suppressed, and that one of the people who had been instrumental in its suppression had been invited to the party, so would George mind—?
George named another, an old friend named Franz Heilig whom he had first met in Munich years before, and who now lived in Berlin, and of whom he was very fond. Again the anxious pause, the embarrassment, the halting objections. This person was—was—well, George’s host said he knew about this person and knew that he did not go to parties—he would not come if he were invited—so would George mind—?
George next spoke of a lady named Else von Kohler, and the response to this suggestion was of the same kind. How long had he known this woman? Where, and under what circumstances, had he met her? George tried to reassure his host on all these scores. He told the man he need have no fear of any sort about Else. His host was instant, swift, in his apologies: oh, by no means—he was sure the lady was eminently all right—only, nowadays, with a mixed gathering—he had tried to pick a group of people whom George had met and who all knew one another—he had thought it would be much more pleasant that way—strangers at a party were often shy, constrained, and formal—Frau von Kohler would not know anybody there—so would George mind—?
Not long after this baffling experience a friend came to see him. “In a few days,” his friend said, “you will receive a phone call from a certain person. He will try to meet you, to talk to you. Have nothing to do with this man.”
George laughed. His friend was a sober-minded German, rather on the dull and heavy side, and his face was so absurdly serious as he spoke that George thought he was trying to play some lumbering joke upon him. He wanted to know who this mysterious personage might be who was so anxious to make his acquaintance.
To George’s amazement and incredulity, his friend named a high official in the government.
But why, George asked, should this man want to meet him? And why, if he did, should he be afraid of him?
At first his friend would not answer. Finally he muttered circumspectly:
“Listen to me. Stay away from this man. I tell you for your own good.” He paused, not knowing how to say it; then: “You have heard of Captain Roehm? You know about him? You know what happened to him?” George nodded. “Well,” his friend went on in a troubled voice, “there were others who were not shot in the purge. This man I speak of is one of the bad ones. We have a name for him—it is ‘The Prince of Darkness.’”
George did not know what to make of all this. He tried to puzzle it out but could not, so at last he dismissed it from his mind. But within a few days, the official whom his friend had named did telephone, and did ask to meet him. George offered some excuse and avoided seeing the man, but the episode was most spectacular and very unsettling.
Both of these baffling experiences contained elements of comedy and melodrama, but those were the superficial aspects. George began to realize now the tragedy that lay behind such things. There was nothing political in any of it. The roots of it were much more sinister and deep and evil than politics or even racial prejudice could ever be. For the first time in his life he had come upon something full of horror that he had never known before—something that made all the swift violence and passion of America, the gangster compacts, the sudden killings, the harshness and corruption that infested portions of American business and public life, seem innocent beside it. What George began to see was a picture of a great people who had been psychically wounded and were now desperately ill with some dread malady of the soul. Here was an entire nation, he now realized, that was infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysis which twisted and blighted all human relations. The pressures of a constant and infamous compulsion had silenced this whole people into a sweltering and malignant secrecy until they had become spiritually septic with the distillations of their own self-poisons, for which now there was no medicine or release.
So the weeks, the months, the summer passed, and everywhere about him George saw the evidences of this dissolution, this shipwreck of a great spirit. The poisonous emanations of suppression, persecution, and fear permeated the air like miasmic and pestilential vapors, tainting, sickening, and blighting the lives of everyone he met. It was a plague of the spirit—invisible, but as unmistakable as death. Little by little it sank in on him through all the golden singing of that summer, until at last he felt it, breathed it, lived it, and knew it for the thing it was.
[¬]
THE HOLLYHOCK SOWERS
[The American Mercury, August 1940]
I
There are some men who are unequal to the conditions of modern life, and who have accordingly retreated from the tough realities which they cannot face. They form a separate group or family or race, a little world which has no boundary lines of country or of place. One finds a surprising number of them in America, particularly in the more sequestered purlieus of Boston, Cambridge, and Harvard University. One finds them also in New York’s Greenwich Village, and when even that makeshift little Bohemia becomes too harsh for them, they retire into a kind of desiccated country life.
For all such people the country becomes the last refuge. They buy little farms in Connecticut or Vermont, renovate the fine old houses with just a shade too much of whimsy or restrained good taste. Their quaintness is a little too quaint, their simplicity a little too subtle, and on the old farms that they buy no utilitarian seeds are sown and no grain grows. They go in for flowers, and in time they learn to talk very knowingly about the rarer varieties. They love the simple life, of course. They love the good feel of “the earth.” They are just a shade too conscious of “the earth,” and one hears them say, the women as well as the men, how much they love to work in it.
And work in it they do. In spring they work on their new rock garden, with the assistance of only one other man—some native of the region who hires himself out for wages, and whose homely virtues and more crotchety characteristics they quietly observe and tell amusing stories about to their friends. Their wives work in the earth, too, attired in plain yet not unattractive frocks, and they even learn to clip the hedges, wearing gloves to protect their hands. These dainty and lovely creatures become healthily embrowned; their comely forearms take on a golden glow, their faces become warm with soaked-up sunlight, and sometimes they even have a soft, faint down of gold just barely visible above the cheekbone. They are good to see.
In winter there are also things to do. The snows come down, and the road out to the main highway becomes impassable to cars for three weeks at a time. Not even the truck of the A. & P. can get through. So for three whole weeks on end they have to plod their way out on foot, a good three-quarters of a mile, to lay in provisions. The days are full of other work, as well. People in cities may think that country life is dull in winter, but that is because they simply don’t know. The squire becomes a carpenter. He is working on his play, of course, but in between times he makes furniture. It is good to be able to do something with one’s hands. He has a workshop fitted up in the old barn. There he has his studio, too, where he can carry on his intellectual labors undisturbed. The children are forbidden to go there. And every morning, after taking the children to school, the father can return to his barn-studio and have the whole morning free to get on with the play.
It is a fine life for the children, by the way. In summer they play and swim and fish and get wholesome lessons in practical democracy by mingling with the hired man’s children. In winter they go to an excellent private school two miles away. It is run by two very intelligent people, an expert in planned economy and his wife, an expert in child psychology, who between them are carrying on the most remarkable experiments in education.
Life in the country is really full of absorbing interests which city folk know nothing about. For one thing, there is local politics, in which they become passionately involved. They attend all the town meetings, become hotly partisan over the question of a new floor for the bridge across the creek, take sides against old Abner Jones, the head selectman, and in general back up the younger, more progressive element. Over week-ends they have the most enchanting tales to tell their city friends about these town meetings. They are full of stories, too, about all the natives, and can make the most sophisticated visitor howl with laughter when, after coffee and brandy in the evening, the squire and his wife go through their two-part recital of Seth Freeman’s involved squabble and lawsuit with Rob Perkins over a stone fence. One really gets to know his neighbors in the country. It is a whole world in itself. Life here is simple, yet it is good.
II
In their old farmhouse they eat by candlelight at night. The pine paneling in the dining room has been there more than two hundred years. They have not changed it. In fact, the whole front part of the house is just the same as it has always been. All they have added is the new wing for the children. Of course, they had to do a great deal when they bought the place. It had fallen into shocking disrepair. The floors and sills were rotten and had to be replaced. They also built a concrete basement and installed an oil furnace. This was costly, but it was worth the price. The people who had sold them the house were natives of the region who had gone to seed. The farm had been in one family for five generations. It was incredible, though, to see what they had done to the house. The sitting-room floor had been covered with an oilcloth carpet. And in the dining room, right beside this beautiful old Revolutionary china chest, which they had persuaded the people to sell with the house, had been an atrocious phonograph with one of those old-fashioned horns. Can one imagine that?
Of course they had to furnish the house anew from cellar to garret. Their city stuff just wouldn’t do at all. It had taken time and hard work, but by going quietly about the countryside and looking into farmer’s houses, they have managed to pick up very cheaply the most exquisite pieces, most of them dating back to Revolutionary times, and now the whole place is in harmony at last. They even drink their beer from pewter mugs. Grace discovered these, covered with cobwebs, in the cellar of an old man’s house. He was eighty-seven, he said, and the mugs had belonged to his father before him. He’d never had no use for ’em himself, and if she wanted ’em he calc’lated that twenty cents apiece would be all right. Isn’t it delicious! And everyone agrees it is.
The seasons change and melt into one another, and they observe the seasons. They would not like to live in places where no seasons were. The adventure of the seasons is always thrilling. There is the day in late summer when someone sees the first duck flying south, and they know by this token that the autumn of the year has come. Then there is the first snowflake that melts as it falls to usher in the winter. But the most exciting of all is the day in early spring when someone discovers that the first snowdrop has opened or that the first starling has come. They keep a diary of the seasons, and they write splendid letters to their city friends:
“I think you would like it now. The whole place is simply frantic with spring. I heard a thrush for the first time today. Overnight, almost, our old apple trees have burst into full bloom. If you wait another week, it will be too late. So do come, won’t you? You’ll love our orchard and our twisted, funny, dear old apple trees. They’ve been here, most of them, I suspect, for eighty years. It’s not like modern orchards, with their little regiments of trees. We don’t get many apples. They are small and sharp and tart, and twisted like the trees themselves, and there are never too many of them, but always just enough. Somehow we love them all the better for it. It’s so New England.”
So year follows year in healthy and happy order. The first year the rock garden gets laid down and the little bulbs and Alpine plants set out. Hollyhocks are sown all over the place, against the house and beside the fences. By the next year they are blooming in gay profusion. It is marvelous how short a time it takes. That second year he builds the studio in the barn, doing most of the work with his own hands, with only the simple assistance of the hired man. The third year—the children are growing up now, they grow fast in the country—he gets the swimming pool begun. The fourth year it is finished. Meanwhile, he is busy on his play, but it goes slowly because there is so much else that has to be done.
The fifth year—well, one does miss the city sometimes. They would never think of going back there to live. This place is wonderful, except for three months in the winter. So this year they are moving in and taking an apartment for the three bad months. Grace, of course, loves music and misses the opera, while he likes the theater, and it will be good to have again the companionship of certain people whom they know. This is the greatest handicap of country life—the natives make fine neighbors, but one sometimes misses the intellectual stimulus of city life. And so this year he has decided to take the old girl in. They’ll see the shows and hear the music and renew their acquaintance with old friends and find out what is going on. They might even run down to Bermuda for three weeks in February. Or to Haiti. That’s a place, he’s heard, that modern life has hardly touched. They have windmills and go in for voodoo worship. It’s all savage and most primitively colorful. It will get them out of the rut to go off somewhere on a trip. Of course they’ll be back in the country by the first of April.
Such is the fugitive pattern in one of its most common manifestations. And always with this race of men the fundamental inner structure of illusion and defeat is the same. All of them betray themselves by the same weaknesses. They flee a world they are not strong enough to meet. If they have talent, it is a talent that is not great enough to win for them the fulfillment and success which they pretend to scorn, but for which each of them would sell the pitifully small remnant of his meager soul. If they want to create, they do not want it hard enough to make and shape and finish something in spite of hell and heartbreak. If they want to work, they do not want it genuinely enough to work and keep on working till their eyeballs ache and their brains are dizzy, to work until their loins are dry, their vitals hollow, to work until the whole world reels before them in a gray blur of weariness and depleted energy, to work until their tongues cleave to their mouths and their pulses hammer like dry mallets at their temples, to work until no work is left in them, until there is no rest and no repose, until they cannot sleep, until they can do nothing and can work no more—and then work again.
