Thomas Wolfe, page 65
He was desperately afraid of people in crowds: at class meetings, or smokers, or at any public gathering, he was nervous and constrained until he began to talk to them, and got them under him. He was always afraid that some one would make a joke about him, and that he would be laughed at. But he was not afraid of any man alone: he felt that he could handle any one if he got him away from his crowd. Remembering his savage fear and hatred of the crowd, with a man alone he would play cruelly, like a cat, snarling gently at him, prowling in on him softly, keeping cocked and silent the terrible tiger’s paw of his spirit. All of their starch oozed out of them; they seemed to squeak and twitter, and look round for the door. He would get some loud pompous yokel—the student president of the Y. M. C. A., or the class president—and bear down on him with evil gentle matter-of-factness.
“Don’t you think,” he would begin with earnest piety, “don’t you think that a man should kiss his wife on her belly?”
And he would fasten all the eager innocence of his face into a stare.
“For, after all, the belly is sometimes more beautiful than the mouth, and far cleaner. Or do you believe in the belly-less marriage? I, for one,” he went on with proud passion, “do not! I stand for more and better Belly-Kissing. Our wives, our mothers, and our sisters expect it of us. It is an act of reverence to the seat of life. Nay! it is even an act of religious worship. If we could get our prominent business men and all the other right-thinking people interested in it, it would bring about the mightiest revolution ever known in a nation’s life. In five years it would do away with divorce and re-establish the prestige of the home. In twenty years it would make our nation the proud centre of civilization and the arts. Don’t you think so? Or do you?”
Eugene thought so. It was one of his few Utopias.
Sometimes, when he was in a chafed and bitter temper, he would hear a burst of laughter from a student’s room, and he would turn snarling, and curse them, believing they laughed at him. He inherited his father’s conviction at times that the world was gathered in an immense conspiracy against him: the air about him was full of mockery and menace, the leaves whispered with treason, in a thousand secret places people were assembled to humiliate, degrade, and betray him. He would spend hours under the terrible imminence of some unknown danger: although he was guilty of nothing but his own nightmare fantasies, he would enter a class, a meeting, a gathering of students, with cold constricted heart, awaiting exposure, sentence, and ruin, for he knew not what crime. Again, he would be wild, extravagant, and careless, squealing triumphantly in their faces and bounding along possessed with goaty joy, as he saw life dangling like a plum for his taking.
And thus, going along a campus path at night, fulfilled with his dreams of glory, he heard young men talking of him kindly and coarsely, laughing at his antics, and saying he needed a bath and clean underwear. He clawed at his throat as he listened.
I think I’m hell, thought Eugene, and they say I stink because I have not had a bath. Me! Me! Bruce-Eugene, the Scourge of the Greasers, and the greatest fullback Yale ever had! Marshal Gant, the saviour of his country! Ace Gant, the hawk of the sky, the man who brought Richthofen down! Senator Gant, Governor Gant, President Gant, the restorer and uniter of a broken nation, retiring quietly to private life in spite of the weeping protest of one hundred million people, until, like Arthur or Barbarossa, he shall hear again the drums of need and peril.
Jesus-of-Nazareth Gant, mocked, reviled, spat upon, and imprisoned for the sins of others, but nobly silent, preferring death rather than cause pain to the woman he loves. Gant, the Unknown Soldier, the Martyred President, the slain God of Harvest, the Bringer of Good Crops. Duke Gant of Westmoreland, Viscount Pondicherry, twelfth Lord Runnymede, who hunts for true love, incognito, in Devon and ripe grain, and finds the calico white legs embedded in sweet hay. Yes, George-Gordon-Noel-Byron Gant, carrying the pageant of his bleeding heart through Europe, and Thomas-Chatterton Gant (that bright boy!), and François-Villon Gant, and Ahasuerus Gant, and Mithridates Gant, and Artaxerxes Gant, and Edward-the-Black-Prince Gant; Stilicho Gant, and Jugurtha Gant, and Vercingetorix Gant, and Czar-Ivan-the-Terrible Gant. And Gant, the Olympian Bull; and Heracles Gant; and Gant, the Seductive Swan; and Ashtaroth and Azrael Gant, Proteus Gant, Anubis and Osiris and Mumbo-Jumbo Gant.
But what, said Eugene very slowly into the darkness, if I’m not a Genius? He did not ask himself the question often. He was alone: he spoke aloud, but in a low voice, in order to feel the unreality of this blasphemy. It was a moonless night, full of stars. There was no thunder and no lightning.
Yes, but what, he thought with a livid snarl, but what if anybody else thinks I’m not? Ah, but they’d like to, the swine. They hate me, and are jealous of me because they can’t be like me, so they’ll belittle me if they can. They’d like to say it, if they dared, just to hurt me. For a moment his face was convulsed with pain and bitterness: he craned his neck, holding his throat with his hand.
Then, as was his custom, when he had burnt his heart out, he began to look nakedly and critically at the question.
Well, he went on very calmly, what if I’m not? Am I going to cut my throat, or eat worms, or swallow arsenic? He shook his head slowly but emphatically. No, he said, I am not. Besides, there are enough geniuses. They have at least one in every high school, and one in the orchestra of every small-town movie. Sometimes Mrs. Von Zeck, the wealthy patroness of the arts, sends a genius or two off to New York to study. So that, he estimated, this broad land of ours has by the census not less than 26,400 geniuses and 83,752 artists, not counting those in business and advertising. For his personal satisfaction, Eugene then muttered over the names of 21 geniuses who wrote poetry, and 37 more who devoted themselves to the drama and the novel. After this, he felt quite relieved.
What, he thought, can I be, besides a genius? I’ve been one long enough. There must be better things to do.
Over that final hedge, he thought, not death, as I once believed—but new life—and new lands.
Erect, with arm akimbo on his hip, he stood, his domed head turned out toward the light: sixty, subtle and straight of body, deep-browed, with an old glint of hawk-eyes, lean apple-cheeks, a mustache bristle-cropped. That face on which the condor Thought has fed, arched with high subtle malice, sophist glee.
Below, benched in rapt servility, they waited for his first husky word. Eugene looked at the dull earnest faces, lured from the solid pews of Calvinism to the shadowland of metaphysics. And now his mockery will play like lightning around their heads, but they will never see it, nor feel it strike. They will rush forward to wrestle with his shadow, to hear his demon’s laughter, to struggle solemnly with their unborn souls.
The clean cuffed hand holds up an abraded stick. Their stare follows obediently along its lustre.
“Mr. Willis?”
White, bewildered, servile, the patient slave’s face.
“Yes, sir.”
“What have I here?”
“A stick, sir.”
“What is a stick?”
“It’s a piece of wood, sir.”
A pause. Ironic eyebrows ask their laughter. They snicker smugly for the wolf that will devour them.
“Mr. Willis says a stick is a piece of wood.”
Their laughter rattles against the walls. Absurd.
“But a stick is a piece of wood,” says Mr. Willis.
“So is a tree or a telephone-pole. No, I’m afraid that will not do. Does the class agree with Mr. Willis?”
“A stick is a piece of wood cut off at a certain length.”
“Then we agree, Mr. Ransom, that a stick is not simply wood with unlimited extension?”
The stunned peasant’s face with its blink of effort.
“I see that Mr. Gant is leaning forward in his seat. There is a light in his face that I have seen there before. Mr. Gant will not sleep of nights, for thinking.”
“A stick,” said Eugene, “is not only wood but the negation of wood. It is the meeting in Space of Wood and No-Wood. A stick is finite and unextended wood, a fact determined by its own denial.”
The old head listens gravely above the ironic intake of their breath. He will bear me out and praise me, for I am measured against this peasant earth. He sees me with the titles of proud office; and he loves victory.
“We have a new name for him, Professor Weldon,” said Nick Mabley. “We call him Hegel Gant.”
He listened to their shout of laughter; he saw their pleased faces turn back on him. That was meant well. I shall smile—their Great Original, the beloved eccentric, the poet of substantial yokels.
“That’s a name he may be worthy of,” said Vergil Weldon seriously.
Old Fox, I too can juggle with your phrases so they will never catch me. Over the jungle of their wits our unfoiled minds strike irony and passion. Truth? Reality? The Absolute? The Universal? Wisdom? Experience? Knowledge? The Fact? The Concept? Death—the great negation? Parry and thrust, Volpone! Have we not words? We shall prove anything. But Ben, and the demon-flicker of his smile? Where now?
The Spring comes back. I see the sheep upon the hill. The belled cows come along the road in wreaths of dust, and the wagons creak home below the pale ghost of the moon. But what stirs within the buried heart? Where are the lost words? And who has seen his shadow in the Square?
“And if they asked you, Mr. Rountree?”
“I’d have told the truth,” said Mr. Rountree, removing his glasses.
“But they had built a good big fire, Mr. Rountree.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Mr. Rountree, putting his glasses on again.
How nobly we can die for truth—in conversation.
“It was a very hot fire, Mr. Rountree. They’d have burned you if you hadn’t recanted.”
“Ah. I’d have let them burn,” said the martyred Rountree through moistening spectacles.
“I think it might be painful,” Vergil Weldon suggested. “Even a little blister hurts.”
“Who wants to be burned for anything?” said Eugene. “I’d have done what Galileo did—backed out of it.”
“So should I,” said Vergil Weldon, and their faces arched with gleeful malice over the heavy laughter of the class.
Nevertheless, it moves.
“On one side of the table stood the combined powers of Europe; on the other stood Martin Luther, the son of a blacksmith.”
The voice of husky passion, soul-shaken. This they can remember, and put down.
“There, if ever, was a situation to try the strongest soul. But the answer came like a flash. Ich kann nicht anders—I can’t do otherwise. It was one of the great utterances of history.”
That phrase, used now for thirty years, relic of Yale and Harvard: Royce and Munsterberg. In all this jugglery, the Teutons were Weldon’s masters, yet mark how thirstily the class lap it up. He will not let them read, lest some one find the rag-quilt of his takings from Zeno to Immanuel Kant. The crazy patchwork of three thousand years, the forced marriage of irreconcilables, the summation of all thought, in his old head. Socrates begat Plato. Plato begat Plotinus. Plotinus begat St. Augustine. . . . Kant begat Hegel. Hegel begat Vergil Weldon. Here we pause. There’s no more to beget. An Answer to All Things in Thirty Easy Lessons. How sure they are they’ve found it!
And to-night they will carry their dull souls into his study, will make unfleshly confessions, will writhe in concocted tortures of the spirit, revealing struggles that they never had.
“It took character to do a thing like that. It took a man who refused to crack under pressure. And that is what I want my boys to do! I want them to succeed! I want them to absorb their negations. I want them to keep as clean as a hound’s tooth!”
Eugene winced, and looked around on all the faces set in a resolve to fight desperately for monogamy, party politics, and the will of the greatest number.
And yet the Baptists fear this man! Why? He has taken the whiskers off their God, but for the rest, he has only taught them to vote the ticket.
So here is Hegel in the Cotton Belt!
During these years Eugene would go away from Pulpit Hill, by night and by day, when April was a young green blur, or when the Spring was deep and ripe. But he liked best to go away by night, rushing across a cool Spring countryside full of dew and starlight, under a great beach of the moon ribbed with clouds.
He would go to Exeter or Sydney; sometimes he would go to little towns he had never before visited. He would register at hotels as “Robert Herrick,” “John Donne,” “George Peele,” “William Blake,” and “John Milton.” No one ever said anything to him about it. The people in those small towns had such names. Once he registered at a hotel, in a small Piedmont town, as “Ben Jonson.”
The clerk spun the book critically.
“Isn’t there an h in that name?” he said.
“No,” said Eugene. “That’s another branch of the family. I have an uncle, Samuel, who spells his name that way.”
Sometimes, at hotels of ill-repute, he would register, with dark buried glee, as “Robert Browning,” “Alfred Tennyson,” and “William Wordsworth.”
Once he registered as “Henry W. Longfellow.”
“You can’t fool me,” said the clerk, with a hard grin of disbelief. “That’s the name of a writer.”
He was devoured by a vast strange hunger for life. At night, he listened to the million-noted ululation of little night things, the great brooding symphony of dark, the ringing of remote churchbells across the country. And his vision widened out in circles over moon-drenched meadows, dreaming woods, mighty rivers going along in darkness, and ten thousand sleeping towns. He believed in the infinite rich variety of all the towns and faces: behind any of a million shabby houses he believed there was strange buried life, subtle and shattered romance, something dark and unknown. At the moment of passing any house, he thought, some one therein might be at the gate of death, lovers might lie twisted in hot embrace, murder might be doing.
He felt a desperate frustration, as if he were being shut out from the rich banquet of life. And against all caution, he determined to break the pattern of custom, and look within. Driven on by this hunger, he would suddenly rush away from Pulpit Hill and, as dusk came on, prowl up and down the quiet streets of towns. Finally, lifted beyond all restraint, he would mount swiftly to a door and ring the bell. Then, to whoever came, reeling against the wall and clutching at his throat, he would say:
“Water! In God’s name, water! I am ill!”
Sometimes there were women, seductive and smiling, aware of his trick, but loath to let him go; sometimes women touched with compassion and tenderness. Then, having drunk, he would smile with brave apology into startled and sympathetic faces, murmuring:
“Pardon me. It came on suddenly—one of my attacks. I had no time to go for help. I saw your light.”
Then they would ask him where his friends were.
“Friends!” he glanced about wildly and darkly. Then, with a bitter laugh, he said, “Friends! I have none! I am a stranger here.”
Then they would ask him what he did.
“I am a Carpenter,” he would answer, smiling strangely.
Then they would ask him where he came from.
“Far away. Very far,” he would say deeply. “You would not know if I told you.”
Then he would rise, looking about him with grandeur and compassion.
“And now I must go!” he would say mysteriously. “I have a long way to go before my journey is done. God bless you all! I was a stranger and you gave me shelter. The Son of Man was treated not so well.”
Sometimes, he would ring bells with an air of timid inquiry, saying:
“Is this number 26? My name is Thomas Chatterton. I am looking for a gentleman by the name of Coleridge—Mr. Samuel T. Coleridge. Does he live here? . . . No? I’m sorry. . . . Yes, 26 is the number I have, I’m sure. . . . Thank you . . . I’ve made a mistake . . . I’ll look it up in the telephone directory.”
But what, thought Eugene, if one day, in the million streets of life, I should really find him?
These were the golden years.
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39
Gant and Eliza came to his graduation. He found them lodgings in the town: it was early June—hot, green, fiercely and voluptuously Southern. The campus was a green oven; the old grads went about in greasy pairs; the cool pretty girls, who never sweated, came in to see their young men graduate, and to dance; the mamas and papas were shown about dumbly and shyly.
The college was charming, half-deserted. Most of the students, except the graduating class, had departed. The air was charged with the fresh sensual heat, the deep green shimmer of heavy leafage, a thousand spermy earth and flower-scents. The young men were touched with sadness, with groping excitement, with glory.
On this rich stage, Gant, who had left his charnel-house of death for three days, saw his son Eugene. He came, gathered to life again, out of his grave. He saw his son enthroned in all the florid sentiment of commencement, and the whole of his heart was lifted out of the dust. Upon the lordly sward, shaded by great trees, and ringed by his solemn classmen and their families, Eugene read the Class Poem (“O Mother Of Our Myriad Hopes”). Then Vergil Weldon spoke, high-husky, deep, and solemn-sad; and Living Truth welled in their hearts. It was a Great Utterance. Be true! Be clean! Be good! Be men! Absorb the Negation! The world has need of. Life was never so worth. Never in history had there been. No other class had shown so great a promise as. Among other achievements, the editor of the paper had lifted the moral and intellectual level of the State two inches. The university spirit! Character! Service! Leadership!
Eugene’s face grew dark with pride and joy there in the lovely wilderness. He could not speak. There was a glory in the world: life was panting for his embrace.
Eliza and Gant listened attentively to all the songs and speeches. Their son was a great man on the campus. They saw and heard him before his class, on the campus, and at graduation, when his prizes and honors were announced. And his teachers and companions spoke to them about him, and said he would have “a brilliant career.” And Eliza and Gant were touched a little by the false golden glow of youth. They believed for a moment that all things were possible.
