The Party at Jack's

by Thomas Wolfe

  And in addition to all this there was Miss Mandell. He never seemed to follow her.

  Mr. Lawrence Hirsch was wounded sorrowfully. But he could wait.

  He did not beat his breast, or tear his hair, or cry out “Woe is me!” If he had, he might have found some easement of his agony, some merciful release for his swart pain. But instead, Mr. Hirsch remained himself, the captain of his soul, the man of many interests, the master of immense authorities. And he could wait.

  And so he did not follow her by so much as a glance. And yet one always knew that he was there. He did not speak to her in any way, nor say to her, “Beloved, thou art fair, beloved, thou art fair: thou hast dove eyes,” nor did he say, “Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest,” nor did he compare her to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots, nor say to her, “Also our bed is green.” He did not remark to her that she was beautiful as Tirzah or comely as Jerusalem or terrible as an army with banners, nor that her teeth were as a flock of sheep which go up from the washing, nor that her navel was like a round goblet which wanteth nor liquor, nor that her belly was like a bag of wheat set about with lilies.

  In fact he did not even speak to her in any way, nor ask anyone to stay him with flagon or comfort him with wine, or confess that he was sick of love. And as for confessing to anyone that his beloved put her hand in at the hole of the door and that his bowels were moved by her, the idea probably never occurred to him.

  For Mr. Lawrence Hirsch was wounded sorrowfully. But he could wait.

  He did not cry out to her in his agony: “Flaunt me with your mockery and scorn, spurn me with your foot, lash me with your tongue, trample upon me like the worm I am, spit upon me like the dust of which I am composed—revile me to your friends and ridicule me to your lovers, make me crawl far and humbly, if you like, to pimp for you, to act as your procurer, to act as willing cuckold and as pander to the systems of your transient and adulterous lovers—do anything you like, I can endure it—but oh, for God sake, notice me! Look at me for just a moment—if just with scorn! Speak to me with just a word—if just with hate! Be near me for just a moment, make me happy with just a touch—even if the nearness is but loathing, and the touch a blow! Do anything you like! Treat me in any way you will!—But, in the name of God, I beg you, I implore you—oh beloved as thou art—” Out of the corner of his steady but tormented eye he followed for a moment the lavish undulations of that opulent behind—“In God’s name, let me see you know that I am here!”

  And yet he did not seem to follow—anyone. For Mr. Lawrence Hirsch was wounded sorrowfully. But he could wait.

  “Hm! Interesting!” Mr. Hirsch murmured politely. He craned a little at the collar and ran attentive fingers underneath the collar’s rim. The eyeballs of his weary eyes were shot with red.—“I had not realized the real facts were so interesting—Oh absolutely! I agree with you entirely—He was an Elizabethan out of place, if ever there was one.”

  And distinguished and assured he moved on, following the weaving undulations of that lavish form, without ever seeming so to follow it. It was grotesquely, in that brilliant gathering of fashion, talent, and of wit, a brutal comedy: a hunt that dogs could follow even in these best of men. But though the eye might burn and redden, yet the tongue was cool—“Oh really?—Absolutely—You’re looking awfully well.” And Beddoes! Beddoes!—But the hunt was on.

  For Mr. Lawrence Hirsch was wounded sorrowfully. But he could wait.

  * * * * *

  There was a sound of music in one corner of the room. Teddy Samuels, Amy Van Leer’s most recent lover, had been playing some of the songs he had written for his last revue: he was seated at the grand piano in the corner, running through the scores, playing a few bars of the deft, neat music lightly, then changing swiftly into something else. Meanwhile, the young people gathered around him—Amy, Ernest, Jack, and Alvin, the gay Japanese, and two or three of the young people from the repertory theatre leaned on the polished leaf of the great piano humming the catchy airs and in a graceful and engaging group keeping time to their brisk rhythm with tapping feet, light drumming fingers, and moving shoulders.

  At this moment there was a burst of laughter from the group: someone had looked up and espied Roy Farley who had gone out and returned and was now standing in the door, looking languorously over the crowd, with deep violet-lidded eyes and the drowsy arrogance of a prima donna. Samuels stopped playing suddenly, and looked up laughing, and Amy’s hoarse excited voice could be heard, laughing, saying quickly: “There’s Roy!—But look at him! Isn’t he the most!—I mean!—you know!” Thus encouraged, Roy Farley took full advantage of the moment: It was, he knew, “Good theatre” and he “played it up” for all that it was worth. The drowsy arrogance of his prima donna manner deepened perceptibly: he burlesqued the role absurdly, slowly looking around the room with eyes that were now so heavy-lidded that they were almost closed. He had to hold his head far back even to see out of them at all. Finally, pretending to see someone in the crowd he knew, he waved his hand with a kittenish gesture, at the same time saying, “Oh, hello,” in a tone half-way between a greeting and a croon, and then, lidding his eyes still further, and making his voice yield the last atom of lewd suggestiveness he could put into the words, he said: “You must come over.”

  With these words, simpering like an ancient whore, he advanced into the room, now closing his eyes and lifting his head with a tragic mien, at the same time saying in the husky and melodramatic monotone of a famous actress: “That’s all there is. There isn’t any more.”

  The gathering apparently found this curious performance hilariously amusing: there were little shrieks of laughter from the women, coarser guffaws from the men, as Mr. Farley made his calculated entrance.

  The comedian was a frail young man with lank reddish hair, a thin face of unnatural whiteness—it looked indeed, as if it had been coated with white powder—and a thin, ruined mouth. He was by profession an actor but his greatest celebrity had come from his impersonation of female parts in which at the moment he enjoyed a considerable minor reputation, and he was also on occasions of this sort in considerable demand as a kind of court jester.

  It was the spirit of the time. People of Mr. Farley’s type and gender enjoyed a perverse celebrity. There was scarcely a fashionable hostess of the period or a smart gathering which did not have their own accredited Mr. Farley as an essential functionary of the feast. He was a kind of privileged comic personality, a cross between a lapdog and a clown.

  The homosexual had in fact usurped the place and privilege of the hunchback jester of an old king’s court. It was a curious analogy: his own deformity had become, like the crooked backs of royal clowns, a thing of open jest and ribaldry. And his mincing airs and graces, his antics and his gibes, the spicy sting of his feminine and envenomed wit, were like the malicious quips, the forked tongues of the clowns of ancientry, approved and privileged by the spirit of the time and given license that is given only to a clown—or a king. It was, perhaps, an aspect of those times that the great, full throat of laughter, the huge side-shaking humor of the belly, the full, free, commonality of hearty mirth, wise, simple, deep, affectionate and all-embracing, were so rarely heard.

  These were more piping times: the world had grown older, subtler, more aware—such ribaldry as made their fathers laugh, or as enlivened coarse breeds of human clay were not for gentry such as these. Their palates now were more adept and jaded, it took a subtler sauce, a more cunning chef to stir the appetites of these sophisticates.

  Therefore, in that great citadel of wealth and power and loveliness and sky-flung faery to which the lowly of the earth so yearningly aspire, there was small laughter in those years of grace that did not have the serpent’s fangs behind it, and little mirth that was not omened by the rattles of the snake. And for such splendid folk as these, such jests as shook the ribs of Rabelais and filled the taverns of Elizabeth with lusty mirth were not enough. These gentle folk had grown wise and fine beyond
all reckoning in their wits’ demand. They could no longer be prodded into laughter by the coarser thumbs of Fielding, Dickens, or of Swift—apparently their risible refinements could only be aroused by the humors of a mincing whore.

  The subtlety of this celebrated performance was now being graciously unveiled by Mr. Farley in its full and finest flower for the benefit of the admiring host. He made his entrance opportunely, with all eyes fixed upon him and faces already half upon the grin as they waited for the latest flowering of his genius. So encouraged, so inspired—for Mr. Farley like all his precious tribe and others of the Thespian cult—could do nothing unless the eyes and ears of men were fixed upon him—made an impressive entrance. His wit apparently depended largely upon the arts of mimicry—and the art of mimicry where Mr. Farley was concerned depended solely upon impersonation of the female sex.

  And this impersonation, to judge from the effect it immediately produced upon the audience, was—in common phrase—“simply killing.” Mr. Farley minced forward delicately with a languorous and exaggerated movement of the hips. As he did so he kept one frail and slender hand arched gracefully upon his thigh as with the other he pawed daintily at the air with plucking fingers as if reaching timidly for an unseen flower.

  Meanwhile, he kept his head, the powdered whiteness of his parchment face, held languidly to one side, the weary eyes half closed and heavy-lidded—with an expression of simpering coyness at the lewd confines of his ruined and sunken mouth. And, as he minced along in this position he paused from time to time to wave maidenly at various people of his acquaintance in different parts of the big room saying, as he did so, “Oh, hello!—There you are!—How are you?—You must come over!”—in such an irresistibly mincing and ladylike manner that the effect upon that distinguished gathering was convulsing.

  The ladies shrieked with laughter, the gentlemen spluttered and guffawed. As for Mrs. Jack, her rosy face grew almost purple. She was fairly overcome, she shrieked faintly: “Honestly!—isn’t he the most killing—” and was unable to continue.

  The celebrated wit now came mincing up to her, took her hand and kissed it, and taking full advantage of the expectant silence that had fallen, he said, quite loudly in a throaty, languid and effeminate tone that could be heard in every corner of the room: “Oh, Esther, darling! I have news for you! …”

  He paused and waited, and thus forewarned she clapped her little hand up to her deaf ear, turned her jolly little face half away from him with the expression and manner of a child listening eagerly and gleefully for the first time to the music coming from a gramophone, and said quickly: “Hah? Yes? What is it—What did you hear, Roy?”

  “Well,” he said languidly in a voice, however, of great carrying power, “you know the Hotel Manger there on Broadway?”

  “Yes? What about it, Roy?”

  “They’re going to change its name,” he said.

  “Hah?”—eagerly, almost gleefully—“Why? Why are they going to change its name, Roy?”—with her own theatrical training she was the good trouper now and played right into his hands to give full point and flavor to his jest.

  “Because of what people have to say,” said Mr. Farley.

  “Hah? What have they begun to say, Roy?”

  “Why,” said he with lewd insinuation, “you know?—If it’s good enough for Jesus it’s good enough for me?”

  In the roar of laughter that followed this splendid sally he sauntered mincingly away as one adept in the “timing” of the stage, waving his hand girlishly at various guests and speaking to them as if he were completely, nonchalantly unaware of the humorous sensation he had created.

  But now the doorbell rang again. Mrs. Jack looked around doubtfully, inquiringly, a little startled, as if she were not certain whether she had heard its sharp ring. Then she saw Molly going towards the door: she looked quickly at the little watch upon her wrist. It was after ten o’clock. In a moment the door from the centre vestibule was opened, and a woman and a man came into the hall. It was Saul Levenson and his wife, Virginia. He had been a true and devoted friend of Mrs. Jack’s since childhood, but one would never have suspected it from the sneering arrogance of the look which he now gave her. Even as he stood there in the hall waiting for his wife to return, and arrogantly surveying the crowd within the room, the tragic fact of an incurable distemper in the man was instantly apparent. It stuck out all over him. He was a mass of sore thumbs. He had gnawed his own liver for so long a time that it had colored his whole life. Even his flesh seemed to have been soaked in bile; he was dyed through with the pigments of his own distemper, a kind of tragic stain of his own torment that could never be got out. And yet—and this was also apparent—he was a richly talented man. Just lacking genius, he had many shining gifts. He wrote brilliantly, he was a subtle and a penetrating critic, he was deep in the history of the arts, and an authority on modern painting, and he had a true and just appreciation of literature. Furthermore, he was one of the leaders of the modern theatre and one of its most eminent designers.

  With gifts like these, with talents of such extraordinary variety, and with an accomplishment of work that had crowned his career with recognition and success for many years, it might be inferred that Levenson was a very happy man. Such, unhappily, was not the case. He was a very extraordinary man, he was often, where appreciation of true merit, or recognition of the good work of other people was concerned, a very generous and fine spirited man. But he was not a happy man. He was a tormented, wretchedly inverted, complicated man.

  The result was grotesque but it was also terrible. The man’s face was simply unbelievable. One’s first and involuntary impulse on seeing him for the first time was to burst out in an explosive and uncontrollable laugh in which incredulity was mixed with amusement. But such a laugh was swiftly checked when one saw what inconceivable anguish of the mind and spirit it must have taken to wreak such anguish on the features of a high and sensitive man.

  His face was a kind of living crazy-quilt of obnoxious and distressful colors. Or, rather, with its naturally oriental and Hebraic swarthiness, it was now a kind of Turkish rug into which every color of distemper and spiritual distress had been ruthlessly and grotesquely poured.

  It was purple, it was green, it was dingy yellow, it was crimson, it was black. It seemed to have in it, in about equal proportions, the mixtures of jaundice and of apoplectic strangulation. It was, as Mrs. Jack thought instantly and with a momentary tendency toward explosive mirth, “the damnedest face you ever saw”—and then, with the instant repercussion of overwhelming sympathy: “Poor thing! Poor thing!”

  To say that Levenson carried this grotesque patchquilt of a visage proudly like a flaming banner would be a modest understatement of the truth. He not only carried it, he brandished it. And as if those gargoyle features were not in their unhappy state of nature enough to do him vengeful service had he wished—to frighten little children with, had he so willed, to startle strangers and to shock his friends—he made it do a double duty in repulsion by conforming it to every eloquent expression that contempt and scorn can know.

  It was an outrageously arrogant face. The quality of its arrogance was so exaggerated, so extravagant, so insultingly enlarged and emphasized that by comparison the expression of the celebrated Pooh Bah was ingenuous in its sweet democracy.

  Even before Levenson spoke to anyone, even before he greeted a stranger, those jaundiced eyes and that chromatic gargoyle of a face looked his unhappy victim up and down with such hyperbole of sneering contempt and disdain that if he had at the same time emitted a mocking laugh and snarled: “Really, who is this low fellow anyway? Do I have to be bored by such a clodhopper or will not some good Samaritan come and rescue me from having to endure any more of the drivel of this bourgeois num-skull”—his arrogance and scorn could not have been more plainly uttered.

  And this really was the way he often felt. His was a tragic paradox of the gifted intellectual of his race. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too. Gifted by
nature and by inheritance not only with an artist’s talent, but with an artist’s love and appreciation of beauty, and of the gifts and talents of other people, no one could be more quick and warm and selfless in his generous and intelligent recognition of the work of other men. And yet he could also be torn by feelings of envy. He could writhe with a torment of jealousy and scorn.

  Likewise, endowed by nature with a brilliant mind, a fine intelligence and with a critical faculty that sought and loved the truth for its own sake, these high intellects were being constantly twisted and perverted from their clear purposes, their grand detachments, and their nobler impersonality, by the corrosive vanities of the intellectual. As a result, he was constantly getting embroiled in picayune and acrid arguments with other people of this sort, the total effect of which too often was that both sides failed to see the woods because there were so many trees. “What precisely I said in my last letter to your columns and what precisely Mr. Katzstein said in his reply is now a matter of record—” etc., etc.,—and so on back and forth until all that was left of the original issue, had there been one, was the sordid spectacle of two embittered egotisms crossing useless t’s and dotting worthless i’s.

  All these unhappy and conflicting qualities in this tormented and yet exceptional and distinguished spirit were now evident as he made his entrance at the party at Jack’s. While his wife, a plain featured, and rather ugly little New Englander whom he loved devotedly and for whom he had felt such a consuming passion that he had turned all colors of the rainbow until his face positively resembled an outbreak of the plague, and for whom he had left a beautiful and voluptuous spouse of his own race, had undergone a complete physical collapse and an eight months’ period of reconstruction at Zurich under the enlightened eye of Dr. Jung—while this quiet little lady, who had been the cause of so much shipwreck and so many rainbow hues was divesting herself of her wraps in the room that had been given over to the women, Levenson remained in the outer corridor, removed his hat, took off his light spring overcoat and slowly and disdainfully unwound from his collar an outrageous scarf which was a confusion of so many violent and distempered colors that it seemed almost that he must have chosen it in a deliberate effort to outdo his face.