Thomas Wolfe, page 517
The trouble between Zachariah and Theodore afterward was that the war proved to be the great event in Theodore’s life, and he never got over it. His existence had been empty and pointless enough before the war, and afterward, knowing there was nothing to live for that could possibly match the glories he had seen, he developed rather quickly into the professional warrior, the garrulous hero forever talking of past exploits. This is what annoyed Zachariah more and more as time went on, and he never let a chance go by to puncture Theodore’s illusions of grandeur and to take him down a peg or two.
Theodore should have had a group photograph taken of himself. He should have been blocked out by Rubens, painted in his elemental colors by fourteen of Rubens’ young men, had his whiskers done by Van Dyck, his light and shade by Rembrandt, his uniform by Velasquez; then if the whole thing had been gone over by Daumier, and touched up here and there with the satiric pencil of George Belcher, perhaps in the end you might have got a portrait that would reveal, in the colors of life itself, the august personage of Colonel Theodore Joyner, C.S.A.
Theodore rapidly became almost the stock type of the “Southern Colonel—plumed knight” kind of man. By 1870, he had developed a complete vocabulary and mythology of the war—“The Battle of the Clouds,” Zachariah termed it. Nothing could be called by its right name. Theodore would never dream of using a plain or common word if he could find a fancy one. The Southern side of the war was always spoken of in a solemn whisper, mixed of phlegm and reverent hoarseness, as “Our Cause.” The Confederate flag became “Our Holy Oriflamme—dyed in the royal purple of the heroes’ blood.” To listen to Theodore tell about the war, one would have thought it had been conducted by several hundred thousand knighted Galahads upon one side, engaged in a struggle to the death against several hundred million black-hearted rascals, the purpose of said war being the protection “of all that we hold most sacred—the purity of Southern womanhood.”
The more completely Theodore emerged as the romantic embodiment of Southern Colonelcy, the more he also came to look the part. He had the great mane of warrior hair, getting grayer and more distinguished looking as the years went by; he had the bushy eyebrows, the grizzled mustache, and all the rest of it. In speech and tone and manner he was leonine. He moved his head exactly like an old lion, and growled like one, whenever he uttered such proud sentiments as these:
“Little did I dream, sir,” he would begin—“little did I dream, when I marched out at the head of the Joyner Military Academy—of which the entire enrollment, sir—the entire enrollment had volunteered to a man—all boys in years, yet each breast beating with a hero’s heart—one hundred and thirty-seven fine young men, sir—the flower of the South—all under nineteen years of age—think of it, sir!” he growled impressively—“one hundred and thirty-seven under nineteen!—”
“Now wait a minute, Theodore,” Zachariah would interpose with a deceptive mildness. “I’m not questioning your veracity, but if my memory is not playing tricks, your facts and figures are a little off.”
“What do you mean, sir?” growled Theodore, and peered at him suspiciously. “In what way?”
“Well,” said Zachariah calmly, “I don’t remember that the enrollment of the academy had risen to any such substantial proportions as you mention by the time the war broke out. One hundred and thirty-seven under nineteen?” he repeated. “Wouldn’t you come closer to the truth if you said there were nineteen under one hundred and thirty-seven?”
“Sir—sir—” said Theodore, breathing heavily and leaning forward in his chair. “Why, you—Sir!” he spluttered, and then glared fiercely at his brother and could say no more.
To the credit of Theodore’s lads, and to the honor of the times and Colonel Joyner’s own veracity, let it be admitted here and now that whether there were nineteen or fifty or a hundred and thirty-seven of them, they did march out “to a man,” and many of them did not return. For four years and more the grass grew thick and deep on Hogwart Heights: the school was closed, the doors were barred, the windows shuttered.
When the war was over and Theodore came home again, the hill, with its little cluster of buildings, was a desolate sight. The place just hung there stogged in weeds. A few stray cows jangled their melancholy bells and wrenched the coarse, cool grass beneath the oak trees, before the bolted doors. And so the old place stood and stayed for three years more, settling a little deeper into the forgetfulness of dilapidation.
The South was stunned and prostrate now, and Theodore himself was more stunned and prostrate than most of the men who came back from the war. The one bit of purpose he had found in life was swallowed up in the great defeat, and he had no other that could take its place. He did not know what to do with himself. Halfheartedly, he “took the bar” again, and for the third time failed. Then in 1869 he pulled himself together, and using money that his brothers loaned him, he repaired the school and opened it anew.
It was a gesture of futility, really—and a symptom of something that was happening all over the South in that bleak decade of poverty and reconstruction. The South lacked money for all the vital things, yet somehow, like other war-struck and war-ravaged communities before it, the South found funds to lay out in tin-soldierism. Pygmy West Points sprang up everywhere, with their attendant claptrap of “Send us the boy, and we’ll return you the man.” It was a pitiable spectacle to see a great region and a valiant people bedaubing itself with such gim-crack frills and tin-horn fopperies after it had been exhausted and laid waste by the very demon it was making obeisance to. It was as if a group of exhausted farmers, singed whiskers and lackluster eyes, had come staggering back from some tremendous conflagration that had burned their homes and barns and crops right to the ground, and then had bedecked themselves in outlandish garments and started banging on the village gong and crying out: “At last, brothers, we’re all members of the fire department!”
Theodore took a new lease on life with the reopening of the Joyner Military Academy. When he first decided to restore the place, he thought he could resume his career at the point where the war had broken in upon it, and things would go on as if the war had never been. Then, as his plans took shape and he got more and more into the spirit of the enterprise, his attitude and feelings underwent a subtle change. As the great day for the reopening approached, he knew that it would not be just a resuming of his interrupted career. It would be much better than that. For the war was a heroic fact that could not be denied, and it now seemed to Theodore in some strange and transcendental way the South had been gloriously triumphant even in defeat, and that he himself had played a decisive part in bringing about this transcendental victory.
Theodore was no more consciously aware of the psychic processes by which he had arrived at this conclusion than were thousands of others all over the South who, at this same time, were coming to the same conclusion themselves. But once the attitude had crystallized and become accepted, it became the point of departure for a whole new rationale of life. Out of it grew a vast mythology of the war—a mythology so universally believed that to doubt its truth was worse than treason. In a curious way, the war became no longer a thing finished and done with, a thing to be put aside and forgotten as belonging to the buried past, but a dead fact recharged with a new vitality, and one to be cherished more dearly than life itself. The mythology to which this gave rise acquired in time the force of an almost supernatural sanction. It became a kind of folk-religion. And under its soothing, other-worldly spell, the South began to turn its face away from the hard and ugly realities of everyday living that confronted it on every hand, and escape into the soft dream of vanished glories—imagined glories—glories that had never been.
The first concrete manifestation of all this in Theodore was an inspiration that came to him as he lay in bed the night before the great day when the Joyner Military Academy was to reopen its doors. As he lay there, neither quite awake nor yet asleep, letting his mind shuttle back and forth between remembered exploits on the field of battle and the exciting event scheduled for the morrow, the two objects of his interest became fused: he felt that they were really one, and he saw the military school as belonging to the war, a part of it, a continuation and extension of it into the present, and on down through the long, dim vista of the future. Out of this there flowed instantly into his consciousness a sequence of ringing phrases that brought him as wide awake as the clanging of a bell, and he saw at once that he had invented a perfect slogan for his school. The next day he announced it at the formal convocation.
It is true that Theodore’s slogan occasioned a good deal of mirth at his expense when it was repeated all over town with Zachariah’s running commentary upon it. The father of one of the students was one of Zack’s most intimate friends; this man had attended the convocation, and he told Zack all about it afterward.
“Theodore,” this friend reported, “gave the boys a rousing new motto to live up to—earned, he said, by their predecessors on the glorious field of battle. Theodore made such a moving speech about it that he had all the mothers in tears. You never heard such a blubbering in your life. The chorus of snifflings and chokings and blowing of noses almost drowned Theodore out. It was most impressive.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Zack. “Theodore always did have an impressive manner. If he only had the gray matter that ought to go with it, he’d be a wonder. But what did he say? What was the motto?”
“First at Manassas—”
“First to eat, he means!” said Zachariah.
“—fightingest at Antietam Creek—”
“Yes, fightingest to see who could get back first across the creek!”
“—and by far the farthest in the Wilderness.”
“By God, he’s right!” shouted Zachariah. “Too far, in fact, to be of any use to anyone! They thrashed around all night long, bawling like a herd of cattle and taking potshots at one another in the belief that they had come upon a company of Grant’s infantry. They had to be gathered together and withdrawn from the line in order to prevent their total self-destruction. My brother Theodore,” Zachariah went on with obvious relish, “is the only officer of my acquaintance who performed the remarkable feat of getting completely lost in an open field and ordering an attack upon his own position. . . . His wounds, of course, are honorable, as he himself will tell you on the slightest provocation—but he was shot in the behind. So far as I know, he is the only officer in the history of the Confederacy who possesses the distinction of having been shot in the seat of the pants by one of his own sharpshooters, while stealthily and craftily reconnoitering his own breastworks in search of any enemy who was at that time nine miles away and marching in the opposite direction!”
From this time on, the best description of Theodore is to say that he “grew” with his academy. The institution thrived in the nostalgic atmosphere that had made its resurrection possible in the first place, and Theodore himself became the personal embodiment of the post-war tradition, a kind of romantic vindication of rebellion, a whole regiment of plumed knights in his own person. And there can be no doubt whatever that he grew to believe it all himself.
According to the contemporary accounts, he had been anything but a prepossessing figure when he went off to war, and if any part of Zachariah’s extravagant stories can be believed, anything but a master strategist of arms on the actual field of battle. But with the passage of the years he grew into his role, until at last, in his old age, he looked a perfect specimen of the grizzled warrior.
Long before that, people had stopped laughing at him. No one but Zachariah now dared to question publicly any of Theodore’s pronouncements, and Zachariah’s irreverence was tolerated only because he was considered to be a privileged person, above the common mores. Theodore was now held in universal respect. Thus the youngest of “the Joyner boys”—the one from whom the least had been expected—finally came into his own as a kind of sacred symbol.
In Libya Hill during those later years it was to be a familiar spectacle every Monday—the day when the “cadets” enjoyed their holiday in town—to see old Colonel Joyner being conveyed through the streets in an old victoria driven by an aged Negro in white gloves and a silk hat. The Colonel was always dressed in his old uniform of Confederate gray; he wore his battered old Confederate service hat, and, winter or summer, he was never seen without an old gray cape about his shoulders. He did not loll back among the faded leather cushions of the victoria: he sat bolt upright—and when he got too old to sit bolt upright under his own power, he used a cane to help him. He would ride through the streets, always sitting soldierly erect, gripping the head of his supporting cane with palsied hands, brown with the blotches of old age, and glowering out to left and right beneath bushy eyebrows of coarse white with kindling glances of his fierce old eyes, at the same time clenching his jaw firmly and working sternly at his lips beneath his close-cropped grizzled mustache. This may have been just the effect of his false teeth, but it suggested to awed little boys that he was uttering war-like epithets. That is what every inch of him seemed to imply, but actually he was only growling out such commands as “Go on, you scoundrel! Go on!” to his aged charioteer, or muttering with fierce scorn as he saw the slovenly posture of his own cadets lounging in drugstore doors.
“Not a whole man among ’em! Look at ’em now! A race of weaklings, hollow-chested and hump-backed—not made of the same stuff their fathers were—not like the crowd we were the day we all marched out to a man—the bravest of the brave, the flower of our youth and our young manhood! One hundred and thirty-seven under nineteen! Hrumph! Hrumph!—Get along, you scoundrel! Get along!”
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THE NEWSPAPER
[The Hills Beyond, Harper & Brothers 1941]
Time: A hot night in June 1916.
Scene: The city room of a small-town newspaper
The room has three or four flat-topped desks, typewriters, green-shaded lights hanging from the ceiling by long cords, some filing cabinets. Upon the wall, a large map of the United States. Upon the desks, newspaper clippings, sheets of yellow flimsy, paste pots, pencils, etc. Over all, a warm smell of ink, a not unpleasant air of use and weariness.
To the right, a door opening to a small room which houses the A.P. man, his typewriter, and his instruments. To the left, a glass partition and a door into the compositor’s room. This door stands open, and the compositors may be seen at work before the linotype machines, which make a quiet slotting sound. The A.P. man’s door is also open, and he can be seen within, typing rapidly, to the accompaniment of the clattering telegraph instrument on the table beside him.
In the outer room, Theodore Willis, a reporter, sits at his desk, banging away at a typewriter. He is about twenty-eight years old, consumptive, very dark of feature, with oval-shaped brown eyes, jet black hair, thin hands, and a face full of dark intelligence, quickness, humor, sensitivity. At another desk, his back toward Willis, sits another reporter—young, red-headed, red-necked, stocky—also typing. All of the men wear green eye-shades. Theodore Willis is smoking a cigarette, which hangs from the corner of his mouth and which he inhales from time to time, narrowing his eyes to keep the smoke out.
The A.P. Wire (clattering rapidly): . . . Wash June 18 Walter Johnson was invincible today held Athletics to four scattered hits Senators winning three to nothing batteries Washington Johnson and Ainsmith Philadelphia Bender Plank and Schalk.
(The telegraph instrument stops suddenly. The A.P. man gets up, pulls a sheet from the machine, comes out in the city room, and tosses it on Theodore Willis’s desk.)
The A.P. Man: Well, the big Swede was burning ’em in today.
Willis (typing, without looking up): Washington win?
The A.P. Man: Three-nothing.
Willis: How many did he fan?
A.P. Man: Fourteen. (He lights a cigarette and inhales.) Christ! If he had a decent team behind him, he’d never lose a game.
(Far off across the town, the screeching noise of Pretty Polly is heard, coming from the roof of the Appalachicola Hotel. She is a local character who for years has earned her living by singing in public places, and nobody ever calls her anything but Pretty Polly.)
Pretty Polly (singing away in the distance, and plainly audible to the last syllable): . . . threels—mee-uh—and stuh-heels—mee-uh—and luh-hulls—mee-uh—to r-r-r-rest. . .
(Benjamin Gant passes through the city room on way to compositors’ room. Pauses a moment with lean fingers arched upon his hips, head cocked slightly in direction of the sound.)
Pretty Polly (as before, but fading away now): . . . threels—mee-uh—and stuh-heels—mee-uh—and luh-hulls—mee-uh—to r-r-r-rest.
Ben Gant (jerking his head up scornfully and speaking to some unknown auditor): Oh for God’s sake! Listen to that, won’t you? (He goes into the compositors’ room.)
A.P. Man: Christ, what a voice!
Willis: Voice! That’s not a voice! It’s a distress signal! They ought to take her out to sea and anchor her off Sandy Hook as a warning to incoming liners.
(Harry Tugman, the chief pressman, enters at this moment with a bundle tied in a newspaper under his arm. He is a powerful man, brutally built, with the neck, shoulders, and battered features of a prize fighter. His strong, pitted face is colorless, and pocked heavily with ink marks.)
Tugman (yelling as he enters): Wow! Wouldn’t that old battle-ax be something in a fog! She’s hot tonight! Boy, she’s goin’ good! (These remarks are addressed to no one in particular, but now he pauses beside the little group of reporters and speaks to them with abusive good nature.) Hello, you lousy reporters. Is that lousy rag of yours ready to be run off yet?
Willis (quietly, and without looking up): Hello, you gin-swizzling sot. Yes, the lousy rag is ready to be run off, and so are you if the Old Man ever gets a whiff of that breath of yours. You’d better beat it downstairs now and get your press to rolling before he comes in and takes you for a brewery.
