The Web and the Root

by Thomas Wolfe

  “I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man, winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honored men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place;—then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigurement—and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.

  “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.’”

  Alsop read these famous lines in a voice husky with emotion, and, at the end, paused a moment before speaking, to blow his nose vigorously. He was genuinely and deeply affected, and there was no doubt that his emotion and the way in which he read the passage had produced a profound effect on his audience. At the conclusion, after the vigorous salute into his handkerchief, and a moment’s silence, he looked around with a misty little smile and said quietly:

  “Well, what do you think of that? Do you think that comes up to Mr. Dusty What’s-His-Name or not?”

  There was an immediate chorus of acclamation. They all agreed vociferously that that passage not only “came up” to Mr. Dusty What’s-His-Name, but far surpassed anything he had ever accomplished.

  In view of the fact that none of them knew anything about Mr. Dusty What’s-His-Name and were yet willing to pass judgment with such enthusiastic conviction, Monk felt his anger rising hot and quick, and broke in indignantly:

  “That is not the same thing at all. The situation is altogether different.”

  “Well, now,” said Jerry persuasively, “you must admit that fundamentally the situation is essentially the same. It’s the idea of love and sacrifice in both cases. Only it seems to me that Dickens’ treatment of the situation is the superior of the two. He says what Dostoevski is trying to say, but it seems to me he says it much better. He presents a more rounded pictuah, and lets you know that life is going to go on and be just as fine and sweet as it ever was in spite of everything. Now,” he said, quietly and persuasively again, “don’t you agree, Monk, that Dickens’ method is the best? You know you do, you scannel!” Here he chortled richly, shoulders and his great belly shaking with good-natured glee. “I know how you feel at the bottom of your heart. You’re just arguing to hear yourself talk.”

  “Why not at all, Jerry,” Monk came back with hot earnestness, “I mean everything I say. And I don’t see any similarity at all between the two situations. What Sidney Carton says has no relation to what Alyosha is trying to say at the end of The Brothers Karamazov. One book is a skillful and exciting melodrama, which makes use of some of the events of the French Revolution. The other book is, in this sense, not a story at all. It is a great vision of life and of human destiny, as seen through the spirit of a great man. What Alyosha is saying is not that man dies for love, not that he sacrifices his life for romantic love, but that he lives for love, not romantic love, but love of life, love of mankind, and that through love his spirit and his memory survive, even when his physical self is dead. That’s not the same thing at all as the thing that Sidney Carton says. What you have on the one hand is a profound and simple utterance of a great spiritual truth, and what you have on the other is the rhetorical and sentimental ending to a romantic melodrama.”

  “No suh!” Jerry Alsop now cried hotly, his face flushed with anger and excitement. “No suh!” he cried again, and shook his big head in angered denial. “If you call that sentimental, you just don’t know what you’re talking about! You’ve just gone and got yourself completely lost! You don’t even know what Dickens is trying to do!”

  The upshot of it was that a cat-and-dog fight broke out at this point, a dozen angry, derisive voices clashing through the air trying to drown out the rebel, who only shouted louder as the opposition grew; and it continued until the contestants were out of breath and the entire campus was howling for quiet from a hundred windows.

  It wound up with Alsop standing, pale but righteous, in the center of the room, finally restoring quiet, and saying:

  “We’ve all tried to be your friends, we’ve tried to help you out. If you can’t take it the way it’s meant, you don’t need to bothah with us any more. We all saw the way that you were going—” he went on in a trembling tone; and Monk, stung by these final words into maddening and complete revolt, cried passionately:

  “Going—going hell! I’m gone!” And he stormed out of the room, clutching the battered volume underneath his arm.

  When he had gone the tumult broke out anew, the loyal cohorts gathering round their wounded chief. The end of it all, when the whole tumult of bitter agreement had quieted down, was summed up in the final dismissal of Alsop’s words:

  “He’s just an ass! He’s just gone and played hell, that’s what he’s done! I thought there was some hope for him, but he’s just gone and made a complete damned ass of himself! Leave him alone! Don’t fool with him any longer, he’s not wuth it!”

  And that was that.

  “GET THE FACTS, Brother Webber! Get the Facts!”

  The square Sphinx head, shaven, paunch-jowled, putty-grey; the grim, dry mouth, puckered with surly humor; the low rasp of the voice. He sat in squat immobility, staring at them ironically.

  “I am a Research Man!” he announced finally. “I get the Facts.”

  “What do you do with them after you get them?” said Monk.

  “I put salt on their tails and get some more,” said Professor Randolph Ware.

  His stolid, ironic face, iron lidded, enjoyed the puzzled worship of their stare.

  “Have I any imagination?” he asked. He shook his head in solemn negation. “No-o,” he said with a long grunt of satisfaction. “Have I any genius? No-o. Could I have written King Lear? No-o. Have I more brains than Shakespeare? Yes. Do I know more about English literature than the Prince of Wales? Yes. Do I know more about Spenser than Kittredge, Manley, and Saintsbury put together? Yes. Do I know more about Spenser than God and Spenser put together? Yes. Could I have written The Faery Queen? No-o. Could I write a doctoral thesis about The Faery Queen? Yes.”

  “Did you ever see a doctor’s thesis that was worth reading?” asked Monk.

  “Yes,” said the implacable monotone.

  “Whose was it?”

  “My own.”

  They answered with a young yell of worship.

  “Then what’s the use of the Facts?” said Monk.

  “They keep a man from getting soft,” said Randolph Ware grimly.

  “But a Fact has no importance in itself,” said Monk. “It is only a manifestation of the Concept.”

  “Have you had your breakfast, Brother Webber?”

  “No,” said Monk, “I always eat after class. That’s to keep my mind fresh and active for its work.”

  The class snickered.

  “Is your breakfast a Fact or a Concept, Brother Webber?” He stared grimly at him for a moment. “Brother Webber made a One in Logic,” he said, “and he has breakfast at noon. He thinks he is another convert to Divine Philosophy, but he is wrong. Brother Webber, you have heard the bells at midnight many times. I have myself seen you below the moon, with your eyes in a fine frenzy rolling. You will never make a Philosopher, Brother Webber. You will spend several years quite pleasantly in Hell, Getting the Facts. After that, you may make a poet.”

  Randolph Ware was a very grand person—a tremendous scholar, a believer in the discipline of formal research. He was a scientific utilitarian to the roots of his soul: he believed in Progress and the relief of man’s estate, and he spoke of Francis Bacon—who was really the first American—with a restrained but passionate wisdom.

  George Webber remembered this man later—grey, stolid, ironic—as one of the strangest people he had ever known. All of the facts were so strange. He was a Middle-Westerner who went to the University of Chica
go and learned more about English literature than the people at Oxford knew. It seemed strange that one should study Spenser in Chicago.

  He was gigantically American—he seemed almost to foreshadow the future. George met few people who were able to make such complete and successful use of things as they are. He was a magnificent teacher, capable of fruitful and astonishing innovation. Once he set the class in composition to writing a novel, and they went to work with boiling interest. George rushed into class breathlessly three times a week with a new chapter written out on the backs of paper bags, envelopes, stray bits of paper. And Randolph Ware had the power of communicating to them the buried magic of poetry: the cold sublimity of Milton began to burgeon with life and opulent color—in Moloch, Beelzebub, Satan, without vulgarity or impertinence, he made them see a hundred figures of craft and rapacity and malice among the men of their time.

  Yet it always seemed to George that there was in the man a cruelly wasted power. There was in him a strong light and a hidden glory. He seemed with deliberate fatalism to have trapped himself among petty things. Despite his great powers, he wasted himself compiling anthologies for use in colleges.

  But the students who swarmed about him sensed the tenderness and beauty below his stolid and ironic mask. And once George, going in to see him at his house, found him at the piano, his blunt, heavy body erect, his putty face dreaming like a Buddha, as his pudgy fingers drew out with passion and wisdom the great music of Beethoven. Then George remembered what Alcibiades had said to Socrates: “You are like the god Silenus—outwardly a paunched and ugly man, but concealing inwardly the figure of a young and beautiful divinity.”

  IN SPITE OF the twaddle that the prominent educators of the time were always talking about “democracy and leadership,” “ideals of service,” “the place of the college in modern life,” and so on, there wasn’t much reality about the direction of such “education” as George had had. And that’s not to say there had been no reality in his education. There was, of course—not only because there’s reality in everything, but because he had come in contact with art, with letters, and with a few fine people. Maybe that’s about as much as you can expect.

  It would also be unfair to say that the real value of this, the beautiful and enduring thing, he had had to “dig out” for himself, and this fact was “beautiful”—a lot of young fellows all together, not sure where they were going, but sure that they were going somewhere.

  So he had this, and this was a lot.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Rock

  Some fifteen or more years ago (as men measure, by those diurnal instruments which their ingenuity has created, the immeasurable universe of time), at the end of a fine, warm, hot, fair, fresh, fragrant, lazy, furnacelike day of sweltering heat across the body, bones, sinews, tissues, juices, rivers, mountains, plains, streams, lakes, coastal regions, and compacted corporosity of the American continent, a train might have been observed by one of the lone watchers of the Jersey Flats approaching that enfabled rock, that ship of life, that swarming, million-footed, tower-masted, and sky-soaring citadel that bears the magic name of the Island of Manhattan, at terrific speed.

  At this moment, indeed, one of the lone crayfishers, who ply their curious trade at this season of the year throughout the melancholy length and breadth of those swamplike moors which are characteristic of this section of the Jersey coast, lifted his seamed and weather-beaten face from some nets which he had been mending in preparation for the evening’s catch, and, after gazing for a moment at the projectile fury of the Limited as it thundered past, turned and, speaking to the brown-faced lad beside him, said quietly:

  “It is the Limited.”

  And the boy, returning his father’s look with eyes as sea-far and as lonely as the old man’s own, and in a voice as quiet, said:

  “On time, father?”

  The old man did not answer for a moment. Instead, he thrust one gnarled and weather-beaten hand into the pocket of his peajacket, fumbled a moment, and then pulled forth an enormous silver watch with compass dials, an heirloom of three generations of crayfishing folk. He regarded it a moment with a steady, reflective gaze.

  “Aye, lad,” he said simply, “on time—or thereabouts. She will not miss it much tonight, I reckon.”

  But already the great train was gone in a hurricane of sound and speed. The sound receded into silence, leaving the quiet moors as they had always been, leaving them to silence, the creaking of the gulls, the low droning of the giant mosquitoes, the melancholy and funereal pyres of burning trash here and there, and to the lonely fisher of the moors and his young son. For a moment, the old man and the lad regarded the receding projectile of the train with quiet eyes. Then, silently, they resumed their work upon their nets again. Evening was coming, and with it the full tide, and, with the coming of the tide, the cray. So all was now as it had always been. The train had come and gone and vanished, and over the face of the flats brooded as it had always done the imperturbable visage of eternity.

  Within the train, however, there was a different scene, a kind of wakening of hope and of anticipation. Upon the faces of the passengers there might have been observed now all the expressions and emotions which the end of a long journey usually evokes, whether of alert readiness, eager constraint, or apprehensive dread. And on the face of one, a youth in his early twenties, there might have been observed all of the hope, fear, longing, exultancy, faith, belief, expectancy, and incredible realization that every youth on earth has always felt on his approach for the first time to the enchanted city. Although the other people in the coach were already restless, stirring, busy with their preparations for the journey’s end, the boy sat there by a window like one rapt in dreams, his vision tranced and glued against the glass at the rushing landscape of the lonely moors. No detail of the scene escaped the ravenous voracity of his attention.

  The train rushed past a glue factory. With the expression of one drunk with wonder the young man drank the pageant in. He saw with joy the great stacks, the glazed glass windows, the mighty furnaces of the enormous works; the pungent fragrance of the molten glue came to him and he breathed it in with rapturous appeasement.

  The train swept on across a sinuous stream, itself an estuary of the infinite and all-taking sea, itself as motionless as time, scummed richly with a moveless green; the sheer beauty of the thing went home into his mind and heart forever.

  He raised his eyes as men against the West once raised their eyes against the shining ramparts of the mountains. And there before him, at the edges of the marsh, rose the proud heights of Jersey City—the heights of Jersey City blazing forever to the traveler the smoldering welcome of their garbage dumps—the heights of Jersey City, raised proudly against the desolation of those lonely marshes as a token of man’s fortitude, a symbol of his power, a sign of his indomitable spirit that flames forever like a great torch in the wilderness, that lifts against the darkness and the desolation of blind nature the story of its progress—the heights of Jersey, lighted for an eternal feast.

  The train swept on and underneath the crests of yon proud, battlemented hill. The hill closed in around the train, the train roared in beneath the hill, into the tunnel. And suddenly darkness was upon them. The train plunged in beneath the mighty bed of the unceasing river, and dumbness smote the youth’s proud, listening ears.

  He turned and looked upon his fellow passengers. He saw wonder on their faces and something in their hearts that none could divine; and even as he sat there, dumb with wonder, he heard two voices, two quiet voices out of life, the voices of two nameless ciphers out of life, a woman’s and a man’s.

  “Jeez, but I’ll be glad to get back home again,” the man said quietly.

  For a moment the woman did not answer, then, the same quiet tone, but with a meaning, a depth of feeling, that the boy would never after that forget, she answered simply, “You said it.”

  Just that, and nothing more. But, simple as those words were, they sank home into his
heart, in their brief eloquence of time and of the bitter briefness of man’s days, the whole compacted history of his tragic destiny.

  And now, even as he paused there, rapt in wonder at this nameless eloquence, he heard another voice, close to his ears, a voice soft, low, and urgent, sweet as honey dew, and suddenly, with a start of recognition and surprise, he realized the words were meant for him, for him alone.

  “Is you comin’, boss?” the soft voice said. “We’se gettin’ in. Shall I bresh you off?”

  The boy turned slowly and surveyed his dark interrogator. In a moment he inclined his head in a slight gesture of assent and quietly replied:

  “I am ready. Yes, you may.”

  But even now the train was slowing to a halt. Grey twilight filtered through the windows once again. The train had reached the tunnel’s mouth. On both sides now were ancient walls of masonry, old storied buildings, dark as time and ancient as man’s memory. The boy peered through the window, up as far as eyes could reach, at all those tiers of life, those countless cells of life, the windows, rooms, and faces of the everlasting and eternal city. They leaned above him in their ancient silence. They returned his look. He looked into their faces and said nothing, no word was spoken. The people of the city leaned upon the sills of evening and they looked at him. They looked at him from their old walls of ancient, battlemented brick. They looked at him through the silent yet attentive curtains of all their ancient and historic laundries. They looked at him through pendant sheets, through hanging underwear, through fabrics of a priceless and unknown tapestry, and he knew that all was now as it had always been, as it would be tomorrow and forever.

  But now the train was slowing to a halt. Long tongues of cement now appeared, and faces, swarming figures, running forms beside the train. And all these faces, forms, and figures slowed to instancy, were held there in the alertness of expectant movement. There was a grinding screech of brakes, a slight jolt, and, for a moment, utter silence.