by Thomas Wolfe
After the party, the noises of the great city once again enter the Jacks’ apartment; the cause is the outbreak of a fire in the building. Almost immediately the intimate little group remaining with Esther undergoes some frenzy when it hears the sirens and smells smoke, but eventually everyone joins the “ghostly” procession and leaves the building. The honeycomb of the apartment building takes on an atmosphere of unreality as the dim lights and thick, acrid smoke cast a haze over this world. Wolfe makes this frightening ordeal of escape a kind of hell. From this strange world, a “tide of refugees … marched steadily” out of the building. It seems as if, the old order destroyed as in Frederick’s dream, all humanity comes together in “an extraordinary and bizarre conglomeration—a parade of such fantastic quality as had never been witnessed in the world before.” The lover is moved by this “enormous honeycomb of life,” young and old, rich and poor, speaking together a babel of languages representative of all the languages of mankind. Indeed, the apartment building itself seems a little world representative of the larger world of the city, “with a whole universe of flesh, and blood, a world incarnate with all the ecstasy, anguish, hatred, joy, and vexed intrigue that life could know.” Only a great writer or painter like Shakespeare or Brueghel (or Wolfe perhaps) can present the enormity of such a spectacle. George realizes that this great event unraveling before him, this symphonic sweep of brotherhood and humanity, seems to take on the majesty of a vision, and he notes as well a sense of prophetic doom. For this mass of humanity gathered before him seems like victims of some great shipwreck, like the Titanic, “all the huge honeycomb of life … assembled now, at this last hour of peril, in a living fellowship—the whole family of earth, and all its classes, at length united on these slanting decks.” Man is indeed united in the vast honeycomb of life, and every action is ineluctably interwoven.
Eventually the fire is brought under control and the crowd is dispersed, but there is a sense of foreboding within the small group taking refuge in a little drugstore nearby. These “lords and masters of the earth” have for a moment relinquished the illusion of control to which they have become accustomed. They are like “shipwrecked voyagers … caught up and borne onwards, as unwitting of the power that ruled them as blind flies fastened to the revolutions of a wheel.” Like Hemingway’s ants upon a burning log, Wolfe’s inhabitants are little more than insects blinded to the larger world beyond their small realities and propelled from life to death by forces greater than their own.
The various cells in which concurrent action is taking place are exposed for us to see. For example, in the vast hive of the tunnels beneath the apartment building decisions are being made that will affect the lives of 500 train passengers traveling outward to their individual destinies, and some design begins to formulate itself: “lights changed and flashed … poignant as remembered grief, burned there upon the checkerboard of the eternal dark.” As the men in the train tunnel work to restore “order,” firemen free the bodies of two trapped elevator operators whose deaths will be noted by a hardened reporter in the few lines he files with his newspaper.
Faced with a common danger, these Park Avenue apartment dwellers and their high-society guests had mingled with maids, butlers, cooks, and other workers and had briefly felt a common bond of humanity. With the all-clear signal, the privileged class returns to the building with the assorted retainers. The old order is quickly reestablished. Nothing has really changed; the sense of brotherhood, indeed, the prophetic hope for the future, has vanished like smoke from the extinguished fire, as the old “ordered formality” and “cold restraint” once more prevail. Class animosity boils up again when Esther feels bruised by Henry’s cold and unyielding lack of response. She longs for what she will probably never again have, the cordial and familiar humanity of someone like John Enborg and Herbert Anderson.
Like her lover, Esther is aware that something great and perilous has happened, something that somehow threatens their very lives: “When you think of how sort of big—things have got— … And how a fire can break out in the same building where you live and you won’t even know about it—I mean, there’s something sort of terrible about it, isn’t there?” She is aware as well of the greatness of the spectacle in which both she and George have been participants and observers. But when she attempts to return the world to just the two of them, to the fantasy of the “good child’s” dream, George realizes that he has already left her behind.
George now knows that his allegiances lie elsewhere. George must search for that vaster world, the world of fellowship, deprivation, and social injustice awaiting an articulate voice. Esther is indeed noble and worthy of his love if viewed in isolation from her class, but she is doomed like the others; and if George stays, he too will perish. Two good men have already perished, their deaths the direct result of their eagerness to serve the class that the Jacks represent. “The dark green wagon … with a softly throbbing motor” that removes the bodies of the dead is reminiscent of the earlier imagery of automobiles, vehicles associated with the frenzied life of a money-grubbing city. As Mr. Jack prepares for sleep, he feels that peace has been restored. “It was so solid, splendid, everlasting and so good. And it was all as if it had always been—all so magically itself as it must be saved for its magical increasements, forever.” Yet the reader, remembering the tremors that Frederick has felt before and now senses again, understands that all is not the same. The world that Jack has built, the world of moneyed luxury and power, is an endangered world, precipitously resting on a foundation now cracking apart.
In The Party at Jack’s, Thomas Wolfe conceived and wrought to a virtually complete state a social fable of universal proportions, a work prefiguring other socially conscious themes and images in the Webber cycle, a work offering powerful and prophetic testimony of the writer he was striving to become.
EDITORIAL POLICY AND TEXT
• • •
To present The Party at Jack’s as Wolfe left it in the hands of his new editor at Harpers’s, Edward Aswell, we had two major questions to answer: What material should we include? What kinds of textual flaws should we silently correct? Otherwise, we intended to reproduce Wolfe’s words as we found them. Although Wolfe thought of this work as his “most densely woven piece of writing” (Letters of Thomas Wolfe, 653), it has never been published in its entirety. The piece by that title appearing in Scribners Magazine (May 1939) was trimmed to fewer than 17,000 words by his agent, Elizabeth Nowell, and Aswell used a truncated version in You Can’t Go Home Again.
Our silent corrections cover such typographical errors as transposed letters, missing letters, and the typists’ failure to include opening or closing quotation marks. We silently corrected misspelled words (e.g., ecstasy for ecstacy) and changed commas to semicolons if, in our judgment, a comma splice created a misreading. We added capitals to proper nouns where lower-case letters appeared; we italicized the titles of books; we changed Jacobs to Jack and Alice to Esther in accordance with Wolfe’s decision to use a different surname and given name in those instances where that change had not been made in the text; we added accent marks to foreign words and phrases as required by convention; we marked an ellipsis by three spaced periods instead of following the inconsistent practice of Wolfe’s typists in their use of two to ten unspaced periods or two or more widely spaced hyphens; we added terminal periods that had not been typed, and we supplied, as needed, commas before nouns of direct address. Although the name of the Jacks’ maid sometimes appeared as Katy, we used Molly throughout in accordance with Wolfe’s greater frequency of use of the latter. After debating whether to hold to the name Will for the elevator operator that the Jacks attempt to have carry them to safety, we decided to use John in accordance with Wolfe’s statement that elevator operators named John and Herbert had died during the fire.
Our most substantial editorial act was to delete repetitive passages occasioned by Wolfe’s practice of rewriting an episode or section as he added fresh material. Our guide
through a maze of drafts was Wolfe’s outline as given in the Introduction. That outline, we are convinced, forms the basis of the “single thing” Wolfe came to see as he reworked the piece.
We incorporated Wolfe’s handwritten corrections and followed his directions for inserting additional handwritten or typed material, with one exception. At the end of the typescript where Wolfe had changed Mr. Jack to Mrs. Jack, and the pronouns accordingly, we left the wording as it appeared in the typescript. From Nowell’s notes to Aswell, we knew that Wolfe’s changes there were prompted by his hope of cutting the piece for Redbook. Restoring the passage to its original state has the added advantage of giving the piece the powerful thematic closure that Wolfe intended.
Manuscript copy in the Wisdom Collection, some of it perhaps dating as early as 1930, begins with a draft of Frederick Jacobs’s dream of his boyhood days in Germany (bMS Am 1883 [932]) and continues through fifteen additional sets (933–49), ending with lists of characters attending the party, notes on the tunnels and cellars beneath the solid-looking building on Park Avenue, and a page narrating Mrs. Jack’s emergence from her room to see whether everything is ready for her party. Most of these hundreds of manuscript pages were later given to typists. Where typists mistakenly read a word or phrase, Wolfe made corrections. On these typewritten pages he sometimes added text interlinearly or in the margins. Occasionally, he struck out words or sentences. Pages containing corrections and additions or deletions would then be retyped. Once he reached this state, Wolfe rarely did more than correct typographical errors. The two major exceptions to this practice occurred when he sought to develop the characters and ideas of the elevator men more fully and to introduce more guests at Esther’s party. For these and shorter passages elsewhere, he wrote additional copy, had it typed, and marked in the original where in should be inserted. Occupied with these revisions at Oteen, he wrote Nowell in New York, “I am working on ‘The Party at Jack’s.’ I have changed and revised it a great deal with an effort to weave it together better and to get it to move more quickly” (Letters of Thomas Wolfe, 635).
Copy text for this edition comes from material indexed in the Wisdom Collections as bMS Am 1883 (982), (983), (984), and (986). Material indexed under (985) apparently includes additions and revisions undertaken during Wolfe’s Oteen sojourn and after his return to New York. Much of that revised material appears in the pages indexed as (986). It was from these pages that Nowell extracted the story published in Scribners Magazine. Her choice of that draft indicates to us that it represents Wolfe’s intent to use it as copy text in Part IV of the projected You Cant Go Home Again. Groupings (985) and (986) reflect changes representing Wolfe’s decision to rework material originally written for “The October Fair” and that portion of it detailing Eugene Gant’s break with Esther and her circle. Consequently, stylistic practices in (986) are in accord with the simpler, less poetic, leaner prose of his final period. Copy text for Book II of You Can’t Go Home Again, as cut and revised by Aswell, comes from (982), (983), (984), and (986). A comparison of these pages with page proofs of the novel reveals that Aswell decided not to restore the Jacks’ son to the story. He changed the names Amy Van Leer to Amy Carleton, Robert Fetzer to Samuel Fetzer, and Katy Fogarty to Nora Fogarty. He gave words that Wolfe had put in Mr. Jack’s mouth to Mrs. Jack, and he added clarifying passages. For example, “Janie and May and Lily, in their trim, crisp uniforms and with their smiling, pink faces, were really awfully pretty” becomes “Janie and May, passing back and forth between the kitchen and the maids’ sitting room in their trim, crisp uniforms and their smiling, pink faces, were really awfully pretty.” He dropped a few of the guests that Wolfe had on hand for the party, perhaps because he feared legal action if he kept them in. Our text is entire and untouched except for the silent corrections and omissions of repetitive passages.
We find in these pages as reassembled what Wolfe hoped Nowell would discover when he mailed his revisions back to her from Oteen—“unity and the direction of a single thing” (Letters of Thomas Wolfe, 653).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• • •
Our indebtedness to persons and institutions for help, encouragement, and funding begins with Paul Gitlin, administrator of the Thomas Wolfe estate. To him we are deeply grateful. Various administrators at our universities, Pennsylvania State and Clemson, supported our efforts: from Penn State, English department head Robert Secor, Deans Margaret Leidy, Raymond Lombra, Leonard Mustazza, and Jack Royer; from Clemson, Dean Robert Waller and English department head James Andreas. Not the least of their commitments to this project were the sabbatical leaves we enjoyed. We express our thanks to Richard S. Kennedy, Aldo P. Magi, Harold Woodell, Carol Johnston, James Clark, David Strange, Ted Mitchell, Melinda M. Ponder, Darlene O’Dell, Susan Hilligoss, and the Houghton Reading Room staff.
For her belief in the worth of this project, we thankfully acknowledge the encouragement we received from Sandra Eisdorfer of the University of North Carolina Press.
John Idol expresses personal gratitude to Clemson’s English department for granting him one of the John Lane awards, to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a travel grant, to the Thomas Wolfe Society for a William B. Wisdom Grant in Aid of Research, and to Adelaide Wisdom Benjamin for the gift that funded the Wisdom Grant.
Suzanne Stutman expresses her thanks to Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, the Research and Graduate Studies Office, and the Office of the Associate Dean of the CES system for the grants that made this research possible.
Finally, we thank our families. Once again Fred and Marjorie proved themselves to be patient, understanding, interested, and wholly supportive.
THE PARTY AT JACK’S
• • •
MORNING
• • •
“Hartmann!”
“Hier, Herr Professor.”
“Das wort für garten.”
“Hortus, Herr Professor.”
“Deklination?”
“Zweite.”
“Geschlecht?”
“Maskulinum, Herr Professor.”
“Deklinieren!”
Hartmann stiffened his shoulders slightly, drew a deep breath, and, looking straight before him with a wooden expression, rapidly recited in an expressionless sing-song tone:
“Hortus, horti, horto, hortum, horte, horto; horti, hortorum, hortis, hortos, horti, hortis.”
“So. Setzen sie, Hartmann.”
Hartmann sat down blowing slightly at the corners of his thick mouth. For a moment he held his rigid posture, then he relaxed warily, his little eyes wavered craftily from side to side, he stole a look of triumph and of satisfaction at his comrades.
He was only a child in years, but his limbs and features held in miniature the mature lineaments of a man. He seemed never to have been young or child-like. His face was tough, sallow and colorless: the skin looked as thick and rough as a man’s and it was covered unpleasantly with thick white hair which was not visible until one came close to him. His eyes were small, red, and watery looking and thickly lashed and browed with the same silken, unpleasantly white, hair. His features were small, blunted, and brutal: the nose small and turned up and flattened at the tip, so that the nostrils had a wide flaring appearance, the mouth was coarse, blurred and indefinite, and the cheekbones also had a blunted flattened-out appearance.
Hartmann’s head was shaved, a bluish stubble of hair covered it evenly, and the structure of the skull was ugly, mean, and somehow repellent: it seemed to slant forward and downward from the bony cage at the back of the brain to a pinched and painful brow. Finally Hartmann’s body was meagre and stringy looking, but immensely tough, his hands were disproportionately large and raw, and dangled crudely and clumsily at his sides. Brutal in mind and body, neither his person nor his character was pleasing, and Frederick hated him. And this hatred Hartmann returned on him with cordial measure.
“Jack!”
Frederick did not hear that
word of harsh command. His dark eye brooded into vacancy, his mind was fixed and lost in stellar distances, his spirit was soaring far away across the surging blue, the immense and shiny wink of an ocean that washed the shores of all the earth. And a channel of bright water led him straight to the goal of all his dreaming. Upon the decks of clean white river-steamers he went down the river Rhine. He went from Koblenz on to Bonn, from Bonn, to Köln, from Köln to Düsseldorf, and then through Holland to the sea. And then he put out to sea upon another mightier ship. The sea was blue and shining, but there was also gold upon it: it was never grey. The great ship foamed and lifted with a lordly prancing motion, like a horse, he felt the rock and swell, the infinite plangent undulance of the sea beneath that foaming keel, and the great ship rushed onward day by day into the west.
And now, after many days, Frederick saw before him the outposts of the land. He smelled the brave familiar fragrance of the land, the spermy sea-wrack and the warmth of earth, and he saw before him first pale streaks of sand, a low coast, and then faint pallid greens, and little towns and houses. Now, the ship entered the narrow gateways of the harbor, and now Frederick saw before him a great harbor busy with the play and traffic of a thousand boats. And he saw before him, at the harbor’s base, a fabulous city, built upon an island. It swept upward from an opalescent cloud, from which it seemed to grow, on which it was upborne lightly, and as magical as a vision, and yet it was real and shining, and as solid as the rock on which it had been founded. And by the city flowed a river—“ein Fluss viel schoner als den Rhein”—a thing almost incredible, and yet it must be so, for Uncle Max had seen it, and sworn just the night before that it was true. Beyond the city was an immense, fertile, and enchanted land—“ein Land von unbegrenzte möglich keiten,” Uncle Max had sworn, and surely Uncle Max had known, for he had come back from that country speaking its strange nasal accents, wearing its strange garments, rich with the tribute of its enormous bounty. And he had said that some day he would come and take Frederick back with him, and Frederick, dreaming of the wealth, the gold, the glory and the magic of that far shining city that floated upward from its cloud of mist hoped for this more than for anything on earth.