The Web and the Root

by Thomas Wolfe

  The fellow who went around saying that advertising was the only “real” American literature might be either one of two things: a successful writer or an unsuccessful one. If he was a successful one—a writer, say, of detective stories which had had an enormous vogue and had earned the man a fortune—he had argued himself into believing that he was really a great novelist. But “the times were out of joint,” and the reason he did not write great novels was because it was impossible to write great novels in such times: “the genius of America was in advertising,” and since there was no use doing anything else, the whole spirit of the times being against it, he had become a writer of successful detective stories.

  That was one form of it. Then there was the fellow who was not quite good enough to be good at anything. He sneered at the writer of detective stories, but he also sneered at Dreiser and O’Neill and Sinclair Lewis and Edwin Arlington Robinson. He was a poet, or a novelist, or a critic, or a member of Professor George Pierce Baker’s playwriting class at Harvard or at Yale, but nothing that he did came off; and the reason that it didn’t was because “the times were out of joint,” and “the real literature of America was in the advertising in popular magazines.” So this fellow sneered at everything from a superior elevation. Dreiser, Lewis, Robinson, O’Neill, and the advertising in the Saturday Evening Post were all the same, really—“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”

  AT THAT TIME in George Webber’s life, amidst all the nonsense, confusion, torture, and brute unhappiness that he was subject to, he was for the first time trying to articulate something immense and terrible in life which he had always known and felt, and for which he thought he must now find some speech, or drown. And yet it seemed that this thing which was so immense could have no speech, that it burst through the limits of all recorded languages, and that it could never be rounded, uttered, and contained in words. It was a feeling that every man on earth held in the little tenement of his flesh and spirit the whole ocean of human life and time, and that he must drown in this ocean unless, somehow, he “got it out of him”—unless he mapped and charted it, fenced and defined it, plumbed it to its uttermost depths, and knew it to its smallest pockets upon the remotest cores of the everlasting earth.

  The greater part of his life had been lived in the confines of a little town, but he now saw plainly that he could never live long enough to tell the thousandth part of all he knew about its life and people—a knowledge that was not merely encylopædic and mountainous, but that was as congruent and single as one gigantic plant, which was alive in all its million roots and branches, and must be shown so, or not at all. It now seemed that what had been given to him was not only his father’s sturdy, solid power, but that all the million fibrous arms and branches of his Joyner blood, which had sprung from the everlasting earth, growing, thrusting, pushing, spreading out its octopal feelers in unceasing weft and thread, were also rooted into the structure of his life; and that this dark inheritance of blood and passion, of fixity and unceasing variousness, of wandering forever and the earth again—this strange legacy which by its power and richness might have saved him and given him the best life anyone had ever had—had now burst from the limits of his control and was going to tear him to pieces, limb from limb, like maddened horses running wild.

  His memory, which had always been encyclopædic, so that he could remember in their minutest details and from his earliest years of childhood all that people had said and done and all that had happened at any moment, had been so whetted, sharpened, and enlarged by his years away from home, so stimulated by his reading and by a terrible hunger that drove him through a thousand streets, staring with madman’s eyes into a million faces, listening with madman’s ears to a million words, that it had now become, instead of a mighty weapon with a blade of razored sharpness which he might use magnificently to his life’s advantage, a gigantic, fibrous, million-rooted plant of time which spread and flowered like a cancerous growth. It mastered his will and fed on his entrails until he lost the power to act and lay inert in its tentacles, while all his soaring projects came to naught, and hours, days, months, and years flowed by him like a stream.

  The year before he had grown sick and weary in his heart of his clumsy attempts to write. He began to see that nothing he wrote had anything to do with what he had seen and felt and known, and that he might as well try to pour the ocean in a sanitary drinking cup as try to put the full and palpable integument of human life into such efforts. So now, for the first time, he tried to set down a fractional part of his vision of the earth. For some time, a vague but powerful unrest had urged him on to the attempt, and now, without knowledge or experience, but with some uneasy premonition of the terrific labor he was attempting to accomplish, he began—deliberately choosing a subject that seemed so modest and limited in its proportions that he thought he could complete it with the greatest ease. The subject he chose for his first effort was a boy’s vision of life over a ten-month period between his twelfth and thirteenth year, and the title was, “The End of the Golden Weather.”

  By this title he meant to describe that change in the color of life which every child has known—the change from the enchanted light and weather of his soul, the full golden light, the magic green and gold in which he sees the earth in childhood, and, far away, the fabulous vision of the golden city, blazing forever in his vision and at the end of all his dreams, in whose enchanted streets he thinks that he shall some day walk a conqueror, a proud and honored figure in a life more glorious, fortunate, and happy than any he has ever known. In this brief story he prepared to tell how, at this period in a child’s life, this strange and magic light—this “golden weather”—begins to change, and, for the first time, some of the troubling weathers of a man’s soul are revealed to him; and how, for the first time, he becomes aware of the thousand changing visages of time; and how his clear and radiant legend of the earth is, for the first time, touched with confusion and bewilderment, menaced by terrible depths and enigmas of experience he has never known before. He wanted to tell the story of this year exactly as he remembered it, and with all the things and people he had known that year.

  Accordingly, he began to write about it, starting the story at three o’clock in the afternoon in the yard before his uncle’s house.

  JERRY ALSOP WAS changing. More than any of the others, he had plunged into the sea of life. As he said, his “sphere had widened,” and now it was ready to burst through the little clinging circle he had so carefully built up around himself. His disciples hung on for a time, then, one by one, like leaves straying in a swirling flood, were swept away. And Alsop let them go. The truth was that the constant devotions of the old fellowship had begun to bore him. He was heard to mutter that he was getting “damned tired of having the place used as a clubhouse all the time.”

  There was a final scene with Monk. The younger man’s first story had been rejected, and a word that Monk had spoken had come back to Alsop and stung him. It was some bitter, youthful word, spoken with youth’s wounded vanity, about “the artist” in a “world of Philistines,” and of the artist’s “right.” The foolish word, just salve to wounded pride, with its arrogant implication of superiority, infuriated Alsop. But, characteristically, when he saw Monk again he did not make the direct attack. Instead, he referred venomously to a book that he had been reading by one of the aæsthetic critics of the period, putting into his mouth, exaggerating and destroying, the foolish words of wounded vanity and youth.

  “I’m an artist,’” Alsop sneered. “I’m better than these God-damned other people. Philistines can’t understand me.’”

  He laughed venomously, and then, his pale eyes narrowed into slits, he said:

  “Do you know what he is? He’s just an ass! A man who’d talk that way is just a complete ass! ‘An artist!’” and again he laughed sneeringly, “My God!”

  His eyes were really now so full of rancor and injured self-esteem that the other knew it was the end. There was no further war
mth of friendship here. He, too, felt a cold fury: envenomed words rose to his lips, he wanted to sneer, to stab, to ridicule and mock as Alsop had; a poison of cold anger sweltered in his heart, but when he got up his lips were cold and dry, he said stiffly:

  “Good-bye.”

  And he went out from that basement room forever.

  Alsop said nothing, but sat there with a pale smile on his face, a feeling of bitter triumph gnawing at his heart that was its own reprisal. As the lost disciple closed the door, he heard for the fast time the jeering words:

  “An artist!’ Jesus Christ!”—then the choking fury of his belly-laugh.

  JIM RANDOLPH FELT for the four youths who lived with him a paternal affection. He governed them, he directed them, as a father might direct the destinies of his own sons. He was always the first one up in the morning. He needed very little sleep, no matter how late he had been up the night before. Four or five hours’ sleep always seemed to be enough for him. He would bathe, shave, dress himself, put coffee on to boil, then he would come and wake the others up. He would stand in the doorway looking at them, smiling a little, with his powerful hands arched lightly on his hips. Then in a soft, vibrant, and strangely tender tone he would sing:

  “Get up, get up, you lazy devils. Get up, get up, it’s break o’ day.” Jim would cast his head back and laugh a little. “That’s the song my father used to sing to me every morning when I was a kid way down there in Ashley County, South Carolina…. All right,” he now said, matter-of-factly, and with a tone of quiet finality and command: “You boys get up. It’s almost half-past eight. Come on, get dressed now. You’ve slept long enough.”

  They would get up then—all except Monty, who did not go to work till five o’clock in the afternoon; he was employed in a midtown hotel and didn’t get home until one or two o’clock in the morning. Their governor allowed him to sleep later, and, in fact, quietly but sternly enjoined them to silence in order that Monty’s rest be not disturbed.

  Jim himself would be out of the place and away by eight-thirty. He was gone all day.

  They ate together a great deal at the apartment. They liked the life, its community of fellowship and of comfort. It was tacitly assumed that they would gather together in the evening and formulate a program for the night. Jim, as usual, ruled the roost. They never knew what his plans were. They awaited his arrival with expectancy and sharp interest.

  At six-thirty his key would rattle in the lock. He would come in, hang up his hat, and without preliminary say with authority:

  “All right, boys. Dig down in your pockets, now. Everyone’s chipping in with fifty cents.”

  “What for, for God’s sake?” someone would protest.

  “For the best damn steak you ever sunk yo’ teeth into,” Jim would say. “I saw it in the butcher shop as I came by. We’re going to have a six-pound sirloin for supper tonight or I miss my guess…. Perce,” he said, “you go to the grocery store and buy the fixings. Get us two loaves of bread, a pound of butter, and ten cents’ worth of grits. We’ve got potatoes…. Monk,” he said, “you get busy and peel those potatoes, and don’t cut away two-thirds of ’em like you did last time…. I’m going to get the steak,” he said, “I’ll cook the steak. That nurse of mine is coming over. She said she’ll make biscuits.”

  And, having instantly energized the evening and dispatched them on the commission of their respective duties, he went off upon his own.

  They were constantly having girls in. Each of them would bring in recruits of his own discovery, and Jim, of course, knew dozens of them. God knows where he picked them up or when he found the time and opportunity to meet them, but women swarmed around him like bees around a honeycomb. He always had a new one. He brought them in singly, doubly, by squadrons, and by scores. It was a motley crew. They ranged all the way from trained nurses, for whom he seemed to have a decided flair, to shop girls and stenographers, waitresses in Childs restaurants, Irish girls from the remotest purlieus of Brooklyn, inclined to rowdy outcries in their drink, to chorines both past and present, and the strip woman of a burlesque show.

  Monk never learned where he got this last one, but she was a remarkable specimen. She was a voluptuous creature, a woman of such carnal and sensuous magnetism that she could arouse the fiercest intensity of amorous desire just by coming in a room. She was a dark, luscious kind of woman, probably of some Latin or Oriental extraction. She might have been a Jewess, or a mixture of several breeds. She pretended to be French, which was ridiculous. She spoke a kind of concocted patter of broken English, interspersed with such classic phrases as “Oo là là,” “Mais oui, monsieur,” “Merci beaucoup,” “pardonnez-moi,” and “Toute de suite.” She had learned this jargon on the burlesque stage.

  Monk went with Jim to see her play one time when she was appearing at a burlesque house on 125th Street. Her stage manner, her presence, the French phrases, and the broken speech were the same upon the stage as when she visited them. Like so many people in the theatre, she acted her part continually. Nevertheless, she was the best thing in the show. She used her patter skillfully, with sensual and voluptuous weavings of her hips, and the familiar carnal roughhouse of burlesque comedy. She came out and did her strip act while the audience roared its approval, and Jim swore softly under his breath, and, as the old ballad of Chevy Chase has it, “A vow to God made he”—a vow which, by the way, was never consummated.

  She was an extraordinary person, and in the end an amazingly chaste one. She liked all the boys at the apartment and enjoyed coming there. She had them in a state of frenzy. But in the end the result was the same as if they’d been members of her burlesque audience. It was the strip act, nothing more.

  Jim also had a nurse who used to come to see him all the time. His struggles with this girl were epic. There was a naked bluntness of approach and purpose in his attack. She was immensely fond of him, and, up to a certain point, immensely willing, but after that he got no further. He used to rage and fume up and down the place like a maddened tiger. He used to swear his oaths and make his vows. The others would howl with laughter at his anguish, but nothing came of it.

  In the end it began to be a shoddy business. All of them except Jim began to get a little tired ot it, and to feel a little ashamed and soiled by his shoddy community of carnal effort.

  Their life together could not go on forever. All of them were growing up, becoming deeper in experience, more confident and knowing in the great flood of the city’s life. The time was fast approaching when each, in his own way, would break loose for himself, detach himself from the fold, assert the independence of his own and separate life. And when that time came, they knew that they would all be lost to Jim.

  It was a fault and weakness of his nature that he could not brook equality. He was too much the king, too kingly Southern, and too Southern for a king. It was the weakness of his strength, this taint of manhood and this faulty Southernness. He was so shaped in the heroic and romantic mold that he always had to be the leader. He needed satellites as a planet needs them. He had to be central and invincibly first in all the life of which he was a part. He had to have the praise, the worship, and the obedience of his fellows or he was lost.

  And Jim was lost. The period of his fame was past. The brightness of his star had waned. He had become only a memory to those for whom he once had been the embodiment of heroic action. His contemporaries had entered life, had taken it and used it, had gone past him, had forgotten him. And Jim could not forget. He lived now in a world of bitter memory. He spoke with irony of his triumphs of the past. He spoke with resentment against those who had, he thought, deserted him. He viewed with bitter humor the exploits of the idols of the moment, the athletic heroes who were now the pampered favorites of popular applause. He waited grimly for their disillusionment, and, waiting, unable to forget the past, he hung on pitifully to the tattered remnants of his greatness, the adoration of a group of boys.

  Besides themselves, he had few intimates, and certainly non
e with men of his own age. His fierce and wounded vanity now feared the open conflict with the world, feared association with men of his own years, with men of his own or greater capacity. He feared and hated the possibility that he might have to yield to anyone, play second fiddle, admit the superior wisdom or ability of another person. In the whole city’s life he had formed only one other intimate acquaintance. This was a little man named Dexter Briggs, and Dexter, appropriately enough, was a little, amiably good-natured newspaper drunk who lacked every heroic quality of character or appearance that Jim had, and who, accordingly, adored Jim to the point of idolatry for the possession of them.

  As for the four youths, the fascination of apartment life in the great city was beginning to wear off. The freedom that had seemed so thrilling and so wonderful to all of them at first now had its obvious limitations. They were not so free as they had thought. They were getting tired of a freedom which always expressed itself in the monotonous repetition of sordid entertainments, of cheap girls or easy girls, of paid women or of unpaid women, of drunk Irish girls or half-drunk Irish girls, of chorines or burlesque queens or trained nurses, of the whole smiled and shoddy business, of its degraded lack of privacy, its “parties,” its Saturday-night gin-drinking and love-making, its constant efforts towards the consummation of a sterile and meaningless seduction.

  The rest of them were growing tired of it. There were times when they wanted to sleep and a party would be going on. There were times when they wanted privacy and there was no privacy. There were times when they were so tired and fed up with it that they wanted to clear out. They had begun to get on one another’s nerves. They had begun to wrangle, to snap back, to be irritable, to rub one another the wrong way. The end had come.