by Thomas Wolfe
Jim was a good deal older than any of the others. He was by this time nearing thirty. And his legend still clung to him. Monk never saw him walk across the room without remembering instantly how he used to look as he started one of his great sweeps around right end behind his interference. In spite of his years, he was an amazingly young and boyish person, a creature given to impulse, to the sudden bursts of passion, enthusiasm, sentiment and folly and unreason of a boy. But just as the man had so much of the boy in him, so did the boy have so much of the man. He exerted over all of them a benevolent but paternal governance, and the reason that they all looked up to him as they did, the reason that all of them, without thought or question, accepted him as their leader, was not because of the few years' difference in their ages, but because he seemed in every other way a mature and grown man.
What is it that a young man wants? Where is the central source of that wild fury that boils up in him, that goads and drives and lashes him, that explodes his energies and strews his purpose to the wind of a thousand instant and chaotic impulses? The older and more assured people of the world, who have learned to work without waste and error, think they know the reason for the chaos and confusion of a young man's life. They have learned the thing at hand, and learned to follow their single way through all the million shifting hues and tones and cadences of living, to thread neatly with unperturbed heart their single thread through that huge labyrinth of shifting forms and intersecting energies that make up life--and they say, therefore, that the reason for a young man's confusion, lack of purpose, and erratic living is because he has not "found himself."
In this, the older and more certain people may be right by their own standard of appraisal, but, in this judgment on the life of youth, they have really pronounced a sterner and more cruel judgment on them selves. For when they say that some young man has not yet "found himself," they are really saying that he has not lost himself as they.
For men will often say that they have "found themselves" when they have really been worn down into a groove by the brutal and compulsive force of circumstance. They speak of their life's salvation when all that they have done is blindly follow through an accidental way. They have forgotten their life's purpose, and all the faith, hope, and immortal confidence of a boy. They have forgotten that below all the apparent waste, loss, chaos, and disorder of a young man's life there is really a central purpose and a single faith which they themselves have lost.
What is it that a young man does--here in America? How does he live? What is the color, texture, substance of his life? How does he look and feel and act? What is the history of his days--the secret of the fury that devours him--the core and center of his one belief--the de sign and rhythm of his single life?
All of us know what it is. We have lived it with every beating of our pulse, known it with every atom of our bone, blood, sinew, mar row, feeling. The knowledge of it is mixed insolubly into the substance of our lives. We have seen and recognized it instantly, not only in our selves, but in the lives of ten thousand people all around us--as familiar as the earth on which we tread, as near as our own hearts, as certain as the light of morn. And yet we never speak of it. We can not speak of it. We have no way to speak of it.
Why? Because the young men of this land are not, as they are often called, a "lost" race--they are a race that never yet has been discovered.
And the whole secret, power, and knowledge of their own discovery is locked within them--they know it, feel it, have the whole thing in them--and they cannot utter it.
George Webber was not long in finding out that perhaps it is just here, in the iron-breasted city, that one comes closest to the enigma that haunts and curses the whole land. The city is the place where men are constantly seeking to find their door and where they are doomed to wandering forever. Of no place is this more true than of New York.
Hideously ugly for the most part, one yet remembers it as a place of proud and passionate beauty; the place of everlasting hunger, it is also the place where men feel their lives will gloriously be fulfilled and their hunger fed.
In no place in the world can the life of the lonely boy, the countryman who has been drawn northwards to the flame of his lust, be more barren, more drab, more hungry and comfortless. His life is the life of subways, of rebreathed air, of the smell of burned steel, weariness and the exhausted fetidity of a cheap rented room in the apartment of "a nice couple" on 113th Street, or perhaps the triumph of an eighty dollar apartment in Brooklyn, upper Manhattan, or the Bronx which he rents with three or four other youths. Here they "can do as they please," a romantic aspiration which leads to Saturday night parties, to cheap gin, cheap girls, to a feverish and impotent fumbling, and perhaps to an occasional distressed, drunken, and half-public fornication.
If the youth is of a serious bent, if he has thoughts of "improving" himself, there is the gigantic desolation of the Public Library, a cut rate ticket at Gray's and a seat in the balcony of an art-theatre play that has been highly praised and that all intellectual people will be seeing, or the grey depression of a musical Sunday afternoon at Carnegie Hall, filled with arrogant-looking little musicians with silky mustaches who hiss like vipers in the dark when the works of a hated composer are played; or there is always the Metropolitan Museum.
Again, there is something spurious and unreal in almost all attempts at established life in the city. When one enters the neat little apartment of a young man or a young married couple, and sees there on neat, gaily-painted shelves neat rows of books--the solid little squares of the Everyman, and the Modern Library, the D. H. Lawrence, the Budden brooks, the Cabell, the art edition of Penguin Island, then a few of the paper-backed French books, the Proust and the Gide, and so on--one feels a sense of embarrassment and shame: there is something fraudu lent about it. One feels this also in the homes of wealthy people, whether they live in a "charming little house" on Ninth Street which they have rented, or in the massive rooms of a Park Avenue apartment.
No matter what atmosphere of usage, servants, habitude, case, and solid establishment there may be, one always has this same feeling that the thing is fraudulent, that the effort to achieve permanence in this impermanent and constantly changing life is no more real than the suggested permanence in a theatrical setting: one would not be surprised to return the next morning and find the scene dismantled, the stage bare, and the actors departed. Sometimes even the simplest social acts--the act of visiting one's friends, of talking to them in a room, of sitting around a hearth-fire with them--oh, above all else, of sitting around a hearth-fire in an apartment in the city!--seem naked and pitiful. There is an enormous sadness and wistfulness about these attempts to simulate an established life in a place where the one permanent thing is change itself.
In recent years many people have felt this insistent and constant movement. Some have blamed it on the war, some on the tempo of the time, some have called it "a jazz age" and suggested that men should meet the rhythm of the age and move and live by it; but although this notion has been fashionable, it can hardly recommend itself to men who have been driven by their hunger, who have known loneliness and exile, who have wandered upon the face of the earth and found no doors that they could enter, and who would to God now that they might make an end to all their wandering and loneliness, that they might find one home and heart of all their hunger where they could live abundantly forever. Such men, and they are numbered not by thousands but by millions, are hardly prepared to understand that the agony and loneliness of the human spirit may be assuaged by the jerky automata of jazz.
Perhaps this sense of restlessness, loneliness, and hunger is intensified in the city, but if anyone remembers his own childhood and youth in America he is certain to remember these desires and movements, too.
Everywhere people were driven by them. Everyone had a rocking chair, and in the months of good weather everyone was out on his front porch rocking away. People were always eager to "go some wheres," and when the automobile came in, the roa
ds, particularly on Sunday, were choked with cars going into the country, going to another town, going anywhere, no matter how ugly or barren the excursion might be, so long as this terrible restlessness might in some measure be appeased.
In the city, it is appalling to think how much pain and hunger people--and particularly young men--have suffered, because there is no goal whatever for these feverish extravasations. They return, after their day's work to a room which, despite all efforts to trick it out with a neat bed, bright colors, a few painted bookshelves, a few pictures, is obviously only a masked cell. It becomes impossible to use the room for any purpose at all save for sleeping; the act of reading a book in it, of sitting in a chair in it, of staying in it for any period of time whatever when one is in a state of wakefulness, becomes intolerable.
Yet, what are these wretched people to do? Every instant, every deep conviction a man has for a reasonable human comfort is out raged. He knows that every man on earth should have the decency of space--of space enough to extend his limbs and draw in the air without fear or labor; and he knows that his life here in this miserable closet is base, barren, mean, and naked. He knows that men should not defile themselves in this way, so he keeps out of his room as much as possible.
But what can he do? Where can he go? In the terrible streets of the city there is neither pause nor repose, there are no turnings and no place where he can detach himself from the incessant tide of the crowd, and sink unto himself in tranquil meditation. He flees from one desola tion to another, he escapes by buying a seat "at some show," or snatch ing at food in a cafeteria, he lashes about the huge streets of the night, and he returns to his cell having found no doors that he could open, no place that he could call his own.
It is therefore astonishing that nowhere in the world can a young man feel greater hope and expectancy than here. The promise of glorious fulfillment, of love, wealth, fame--or unimaginable joy--is always impending in the air. He is torn with a thousand desires and he is unable to articulate one of them, but he is sure that he will grasp joy to his heart, that he will hold love and glory in his arms, that the intangible will be touched, the inarticulate spoken, the inapprehensible apprehended; and that this may happen at any moment.
Perhaps there is some chemistry of air that causes this exuberance and joy, but it also belongs to the enigma of the whole country, which is so rich, and yet where people starve, which is so abundant, exultant, savage, full-blooded, humorous, liquid, and magnificent, and yet where so many people are poor, meager, dry, and baffled. But the richness and depth of the place is visible, it is not an illusion; there is always the feeling that the earth is full of gold, and that who will seek and strive can mine it.
In New York there are certain wonderful seasons in which this feeling grows to a lyrical intensity. One of these are those first tender days of Spring when lovely girls and women seem suddenly to burst out of the pavements like flowers: all at once the street is peopled with them, walking along with a proud, undulant rhythm of breasts and buttocks and a look of passionate tenderness on their faces. Another season is early Autumn, in October, when the city begins to take on a magnificent flash and sparkle: there are swift whippings of bright wind, a flare of bitter leaves, the smell of frost and harvest in the air; after the enervation of Summer, the place awakens to an electric vitality, the beautiful women have come back from Europe or from the summer resorts, and the air is charged with exultancy and joy.
Finally, there is a wonderful, secret thrill of some impending ecstasy on a frozen Winter's night. On one of these nights of frozen silence when the cold is so intense that it numbs one's flesh, and the sky above the city flashes with one deep jewelry of cold stars, the whole city, no matter how ugly its parts may be, becomes a proud, passionate, Northern place: everything about it seems to soar up with an aspirant, vertical, glittering magnificence to meet the stars. One hears the hoarse notes of the great ships in the river, and one remembers suddenly the princely girdle of proud, potent tides that bind the city, and suddenly New York blazes like a magnificent jewel in its fit setting of sea, and earth, and stars.
There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man's bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never die.
14
The City Patriots
JERRY ALSOP HAD COME TO NEW YORK STRAIGHT OUT OF COLLEGE SEVERAL years before. Monk knew that he was there, and one day he ran into him. Neither seemed disposed to remember Monk's apostasy of college days; in fact, Jerry greeted his former protïgï like a long lost brother and invited him around to his place. Monk went, and later went again, and for a time their relationship was reestablished, on the surface at least, on something of its former footing.
Alsop lived in the same part of town, on a cross street between Broadway and the river, and not far from Columbia University. He had two basement rooms and a dilapidated kitchenette. The place was dark, and he had collected a congeries of broken-down furniture--an old green sofa, a few chairs, a couple of tables, a folding couch or day bed, covered with a dirty cloth, for visitors, another larger bed for himself, and a dirty old carpet. He thought it was wonderful, and because he communicated this sense of wonder to all his friends, they thought so, too. What it really represented to him was freedom--the glorious, intoxicating freedom that the city gave to him, to everyone.
So seen and so considered, his apartment was not just a couple of dirty, dark, old rooms, filled with a hodgepodge of nondescript furniture, down in the basement of a dismal house. It was a domain, an estate, a private castle, a citadel. Jerry conveyed this magic sense to everyone who came there.
When Monk first saw him there in all the strangeness of New York, the changes in Alsop's vision and belief appeared astonishing. Only, however, at first sight. The younger man's sense of shock, the result of the blinding clarity of his first impression after the years of absence, was only momentary. For Alsop had gathered around him now a new coterie, the descendants of the clique at old Pine Rock: he was their mentor and their guiding star, and his two dark basement rooms had become their club. And so Monk saw that Alsop had not really changed at all, that below all the confusion of outer change his soul was still the same.
One of the chief objects of his hatred at this time was Mr. H. L.
Mencken. He had become for Alsop the Beast of the Apocalypse.
Mencken's open ridicule of pedagogy, of Mother-idolatry, of the whole civilization which he called the Bible Belt and which referred to that part of life of which Alsop was himself a member, and, most of all, per haps, the critic's open and ungodly mockery of "the greatest man since Jesus Christ," to whom he referred variously as "the late Doctor Wilson," or "the martyred Woodrow"--all of this struck with an assassin's dirk at the heart of all that was near and dear to Alsop, and, it seemed to him, at the heart of civilization itself, at religion, at morality, at "all that men hold sacred." The result was that this smashing but essentially conservative critic, Mencken, became in Alsop's eyes the figure of the Antichrist. Month after month he would read the latest blast of the Baltimore sage with the passionate devotion of pure hate. It was really alarming just to watch him as he went about his venomous perusal: his fat and usually rather pale face would become livid and convulsed as if he were in imminent peril of an apoplectic stroke, his eyes would narrow into reptilian slits, from time to time he would burst out into infuriated laughter, the whole proceeding being punctuated by such comment as: "Well, I'll be God-damned!... Of all the!... Why, he's just a damned ass... yes suh!... That's the only name for him!... A plain damned ass. For God's sake now, listen to this!" Here his voice would mount to a choking scream. "Why, he hasn't got the brains of a louse!"--the whole winding up inevitably with the final recommendation for vindictive punishment: "You know what they ought to do with a man like that? They ought to take him out and-----."
He mentioned this act of mutilation with a hearty relish. It seemed
to be the first act of vengeance and reprisal that popped into his head whenever anyone said or wrote or did something that aroused his hatred and antagonism. And it was as if Mr. H. L. Mencken, whom Alsop had never seen, had been a personal enemy, a malignant threat in his own life, a deadly peril not only to himself but to his friends and to the world he had shaped about him.
And yet, all the time Alsop himself was changing. His adaptive powers were remarkable. Like a certain famous Bishop, "he had a large and easy swallow." And really, what mattered most to him was not the inner substance but the outer show. He could, with no difficulty whatever, have agreed that black was white, or that two and two make four and three-quarters, if the prevailing order of society had swung to that belief.
It was only that, in Alsopian phrase, his "sphere had widened." He had come from the provincial community of the Baptist college to the city. And that staggering transition, so painful, so perilous, and so confusing to so many other men, had been for Alsop triumphantly easy.
He had taken to the city like a duck to water. And in that complete and rapturous immersion was revealed, along with all that was shape less in his character, also all that was warm and imaginative and good.
Some come to the city, no doubt, with wire-taut nerves, with trembling apprehension, with a resolution of grim conflict, desperate struggle, and the conviction they must do or die. Some, shackled by old fears, still cumbered with the harness of old prejudice, come to it doubtfully and with mistrust. And for them, the city that they find will be a painful one. And some come to it with exultancy and hope, as men rush forward to embrace a beloved mistress, whom they have never seen but of whom they have always known, and it was in this way that Alsop--Alsop of the bulging belly and the butter-tub of fat- it was in just this way that Alsop came.