The Web and the Rock - Thomas Wolfe

by Thomas Wolfe

  It never occurred to him that he might fail. And indeed with faith like his, with such devotion as he brought, the chance of failure was impossible. Other men might rise to greater summits in the city's life.

  Other men might rise to greater substance of success, of wealth, of fame, achievement, or reputation. But no man would ever belong more truly to the city, or the city's life to him, than Gerald Alsop.

  He was made for it; it was made for him. Here was a pond that he could swim in, a pool where he could fish. Here was the food for all his thousand appetites, the provender for his hundred mouths. Here was living water for the quenchless sponge that was himself: the rumor with the million tongues that could feed forever his insatiate ear, the chronicle of eight million lives that could appease his ceaseless thirst for human history.

  Alsop was a man who had to live through others. He was an enormous Ear, Eye, Nose, Throat, an absorptive sponge of gluttonous humanity--he was not a thrust or arm--and in such a way as this, and so perfectly, so completely, the city was his oyster. And in his way he was incomparable. All that was best in him was here revealed. He communicated to everyone around him the contagion of his own enthusiasm, the sense of magic and of rapture which the city gave to him.

  With him, an excursion of any sort was a memorable event. A trip downtown in the subway, the gaudy lights, the thronging traffics of Times Square, the cut-rate ticket basement of Gray's Pharmacy, the constant nocturnal magic of the theatres, the cheap restaurants, a cafeteria or a lunchroom, a chop suey place, the strange faces, signs, and lights, the foreign vegetables, the unknown edibles of Chinatown- all this was simply magic. He was living in an enchanted world, he carried it with him everywhere he went.

  His was the temper of the insatiable romantic. In no time at all, instantly, immediately, he inherited the city's hunger for celebrity.

  If he could not be great himself, he wanted to be near those who were.

  He lapped up every scrap of gossip about celebrated people he could read or hear. The records, diaries, comments, observations of the news paper columnists were gospel to him. The pronouncements of a certain well-known dramatic critic, Cotswold, were like holy writ: he memorized them down to the last whimsical caprice of ornate phrasing.

  He went religiously to see every play the critic praised. One night he saw the great man himself, a fat and puffy little butter-ball of a man, in the interim between the acts, with another celebrated critic and a famous actress. When Alsop returned home he was transported--if he had seen Shakespeare talking to Ben Jonson, his emotion could not have been so great.

  He became a watcher around stage doors. It was the period of the Ziegfeld shows, the glorified chorines, the proud, lavish flesh draped in a fold of velvet. Alsop now was everywhere, he delighted in these glorified carnalities. The girls were famous, he watched till they came out, and, like some ancient lecher, he licked his chops and gloated while the Ziegfeld Beauties and their moneyed purchasers walked away. The meeting of expensive flesh with shirt front, tails, and tall silk hatdom now delighted him. Strange work for old Pine Rock?-

  By no means: it was enhaloed now, set like a jewel in the great Medusa of the night, privileged by power and wealth and sanctioned by publicity. The aged lecher licking his dry lips and waiting with dead eyes for his young whore of Babylon, delighted Alsop now. He told of such a one: the beauty, already famed in print, came by--the aged lecher fawned upon her--"Oh, for Christ's sake!" said the beauty wearily, passing on.

  "She meant that thing," said Alsop gloatingly. "Yes, suh! She meant that thing!" His great belly heaved, his throat rattled with its scream of phlegm. "God! The most beautiful damn woman that you ever saw!" said Alsop appetizingly as he shook his great jowled head. "She sure did get him told!" The scene delighted him.

  All others, too: the rumors of a thousand tongues, the fruitage of a thousand whispered gossips: who slept with so-and-so; whose wife was faithless unto Caesar; whose wit had uttered such unprinted jest; what famous names, what authors, had behaved in such-and-such a way at such-and-such a party, had grown drunk there, had disappeared, had locked themselves in bedrooms with attractive women, gone into bathrooms with them, quarreled, fought with whom; what rather aged actress, famous for her lustihood in roles, had gone with boys of apple checked persuasion; and who the famous fairies were, and the dance halls where they went to dance with one another, and what they said, the mincing syllables of their fond intercourse with one another- here belly heaved and Alsop screamed with choking laughter--such wickedness, together with all whimsicalities, and Morley's columns in the purest vein of elfin whimsey--"Pure genius! Pure damned elfin genius!"--old London in the byways of New York, Dickensian by lights of the city ways, and the thronging chaoses of Herald Square, Park Row; the grime of unrubbed brasses, never noticed by the man hordes passing by, but seen now in a certain light, and properly, the true quaintness of the world around him: the shopgirls eating sandwiches of pimento cheese among the drug store slops of luncheon hour were really like the clients of an inn in Eastcheap ninety years ago.

  So, all together--Ziegfeld, beautiful chorines, and ancient lechers in silk hats; hot gossip of the great, the rumor of drunken riot with the famed and few, what Miss Parker said, and so-and-so; together with the Great Heart of the town, the men in subways and park benches-

  Lamb redivivus, alive and prowling among unrubbed brass in the quaint byways of Manhattan--all such as this was meat, drink, breath of life to Alsop.

  So the food. His taste, like Dr. Samuel Johnson's, was not fine--he liked abundance and he liked to slop it in. He had a love for China town, chop suey, and the pungent sauce: it was abundant, it was cheap.

  The strange faces of the Chinks, the moisty vapors, Oriental and some- what depressant, all delighted him. He loved to go with several other people--one could order several dishes and thus share. When it was over he would call for paper bags, slop the remainders into them, and wheeze and choke with laughter as he did so.

  When all this palled, or when he felt the belly hungers for familiar food--for home to heart and stomach was still very near--he and his cronies would buy up "a mess of stuff." There were stores everywhere, around the corner in every city block were stores, and the crowded opulence of night, and lighted windows, slanting shelves of vegetables and fruit; and butcher shops, chain groceries, bakeries, every kind of vast provisioning. They would go out upon their errands, they would buy the foods of home: a package of ground hominy--otherwise known as grits; string beans, which really were the same as they had always been, except no one knew how to cook them here, a piece of fat salt pork to give them seasoning; flour for gravy and for biscuit dough- for Alsop paled not at such formidable enterprise; steak, no worse if it were cheap and tough, but with the flour gravy and the condiments; bread from the bakery, butter, coffee. Then back to the basement, the two-roomed flat, a chaos of young voices, laughter, humorous, accusal-

  Alsop chuckling, serious, and all-governing, giving directions, bustling about in slippered feet, from whose stale socks protruded the fat hinge of his dirty heels. And then the pungency of native foods again--grits, fried steak with thick brown gravy, string beans savory, deep-hued with fat-back, brown-hued biscuits, smoking hot, strong coffee, melting butter. The vigorous confusion of young, drawling voices, excited, Southern, ingrown each to each, tribal and most personal--the new adventure of each daily life told eagerly and to the common mall, with laughter, agreement, strong derision. They appraised the new world where they lived with critic tongue, and often with a strong and dis approving mockery.

  They had small thought of ever going home again. At least, they seldom told their love. Their love, in fact, was mainly here--for most of them, like Alsop, were immersed in glamor now, had cottoned to this brave, new world, had taken it for their own domain as only people from the South can take it--some strange and stiff-necked pride kept them from owning it. They lived in legend now: among the thrill of all this present pageantry, they loved to descant on
their former glories.

  "The South"--for in quotation marks they saw it--was now an exiled glory, a rich way of life, of living, and of human values which "these people up here" could never know about.

  Perhaps they set this glory as a kind of reassuring palliative to their shock sense, the thrilling and yet terrifying conflict of the daily struggle.

  It was an occasional sop to wounded pride. The customs and the mores of the new world were examined critically and came off second best.

  A chicanery of the Northern ways, the suspicion of the hardened eye, the itching of the grasping palm, the machinations of the crafty Jew- all were observed upon with scorn and frequent bitterness. People in "the South" were not like this. As Alsop said, one had to come "up here" in order to find out just "how fine and sweet and lovable" they were.

  George Webber had observed that there is no one on earth who is more patriotically devoted--verbally, at least--to the region from which he came than the American from the Southern portion of the United States. Once he leaves it to take up his living in other, less fair and fortunate, sections of the country, he is willing to fight for the honor of the Southland at the drop of a hat, to assert her supremacy over all the other habitable parts of the globe on every occasion, to speak eloquently and passionately of the charm of her setting, the superiority of her culture, the heroism of her men, and the beauty of her women, to defend her, to protect her, to bleed and die for her, if necessary--to do almost everything, in fact, for dear old Dixie except to return permanently to her to live.

  A great many, it must be owned, do return, but most of those are the sorrier and more incompetent members of the tribe, the failures, the defeated ones--the writers who cannot write, the actors who cannot act, the painters who cannot paint, the men and women of all sorts, of all professions, of all endeavors from law to soda water, who, although not wholly lacking in talent, lack it in sufficient degree to meet the greater conflict of a wider life, the shock of open battle on a foreign field, the intenser effort and the superior performances of city life. These are the stragglers of the army. They hang on for a while, are buffeted, stunned, bewildered, frightened, ultimately overwhelmed by the battle roar. One by one they falter, give way, and, dispirited, bitter, and defeated, straggle back to the familiar safety and the comforting assurance of the hinterland.

  Once there, a familiar process of the South begins, a pastime at which the inhabitants of that region have long been adept--the subtle, soothing sport of rationalization. The humbler members of the routed troops- the disillusioned soda-jerkers, the defeated filing clerks, department store workers, business, bank, and brokerage employees--arrive rapidly at the conclusion that the great city is "no place for a white man." The unfortunate denizens of city life "don't know what living really is."

  They endure their miserable existences because they "don't know any better." The city people are an ignorant and conceited lot. They have no manners, no courtesy, no consideration for the rights of others, and no humanity. Everyone in the city is "out for himself," out to do you, out to get everything he can out of you. It is a selfish, treacherous, lonely, and self-seeking life. A man has friends as long as he has money in his pocket. Friends melt away from him like smoke when money goes. Moreover, all social pride and decency, the dignity of race, the authority of class is violated and destroyed in city life--"A nigger is as good as a white man."

  When George was a child, there was a story that was current over all the South. Some local hero--some village champion of the rights of white men and the maintenance of white supremacy--told the gory adventure of his one and only, his first and last, his final, all-sufficient journey into the benighted and corrupted domains of the North. Some times the adventure had occurred in Washington, sometimes in Philadelphia or New York, sometimes in Boston or in Baltimore, but the essential setting was always the same. The scene for this heroic drama was always laid in a restaurant of a Northern city. The plumed knight from below the Mason-Dixon line had gone in to get something to eat and had taken his seat at a table. He had progressed no further than his soup, when, looking up, he found to his horror and indignation that a "big buck nigger" had come in and taken a seat opposite him, and at his own table. Whereupon--but let the more skillful small-town raconteurs of twenty years ago complete the tale: "Well, ole Jim says he took one look at him and says, 'You black son of-a-bitch, what do you mean by sitting at my table?' Well, the nigger begins to talk back to him, telling him he was in the North now, where a nigger was just as good as anyone. And ole Jim says, 'You black bastard you, you may be as good as a Yankee, but you're talking to a white man now!'--and with that, he says, he ups with a ketchup bottle and he just busts it wide open over that nigger's head. Jim says he reckoned he killed him, says he didn't wait to see, he just left him laying there and grabbed his hat and walked out. He says he caught the first train going South and he's never been North since, and that he don't care if he never sees the God-damn place again."

  This story was usually greeted with roars of appreciative and admiring laughter, the sound of thighs smitten with enthusiastic palms, gleeful exclamations of "'Oddam! I'd 'a' given anything to've seen it!

  Whew-w! I can just see ole Jim now as he let him have it! I'll betcha anything you like he killed that black bastard deader'n a doornail! Yes sir! Damned if I blame him either! I'd 'a' done the same thing!"

  George must have heard this gory adventure gleefully related at least a hundred times during his childhood and the adolescent period of his youth. The names of the characters were sometimes different--some times it was "ole Jim" or "ole Bob" or "ole Dick"--but the essential circumstance was always the same; an impudent black limb of Satan entered, took the forbidden seat, and was promptly, ruthlessly, and gorily annihilated with a ketchup bottle. This story, in its various forms and with many modern innovations, was still current among returned wanderers from the Southland at the time when George first came to the great city to live. In more modern versions the insolent black had been annihilated on busses and in subway trains, in railway coaches or in moving picture theatres, in crowded elevators or upon the street- wherever, in fact, he had dared impudently to intrude too closely upon the proud and cherished dignity of a Southern white. And the existence of this ebony malefactor was, one gathered, one of the large con tributing reasons for the return of the native to his own more noble heath.

  Another, and probably more intelligent, portion of this defeated--and retreated--group had other explanations for their retreat, which were, however, derived from the same basic sources of rationalized self defense. These were the members of the more intellectual groups--the writers, painters, actors--who had tried the ardors of the city's life and who had fled from it. Their arguments and reasons were subtler, more refined. The actor or the playwright asserted that he found the integrity of his art, the authentic drama of the folk, blighted and corrupted by the baleful and unnatural influence of the Broadway drama, by artificiality, trickery, and cheap sensation, by that which struck death to native roots and gave only a waxen counterfeit of the native flower.

  The painter or the musician found the artist and his art delivered to the mercy of fashionable cliques, constricted with the lifeless narrowness of ïsthetic schools. The writer had a similar complaint. The creator's life was menaced in the city with the sterile counterfeits of art--the poison ous ethers of "the literary life," the poisonous intrigues of the literary cliques, the poisonous politics of log-rolling and back-scratching, critic mongering and critic-pandering, the whole nasty, crawling, parasitical world of Scribbleonia.

  In these unnatural and unwholesome weathers of creation, the artist- so these rebellious challengers asserted--lost his contact with reality, forgot the living inspirations of his source, had been torn away from living union with what he had begun to call his "roots." So caught and so imperiled, held high, Antïus-wise, away from contact with his native and restoring earth, gasping for breath in the dead vapors of an enclosed and tainted atmosphere, the
re was only one course for the artist if he would be saved. He must return, return to that place which had given him life and from which the strengths and energies of his art had been derived. But must renounce utterly and forever the sterile precincts of the clique, the salon, and the circle, the whole unnatural domain of the city's life. He must return again to the good earth, to affirmation of his origins, to contact with his "roots."

  So the refined young gentlemen of the New Confederacy shook off their degrading shackles, caught the last cobwebs of illusion from their awakened vision, and retired haughtily into the South, to the academic security of a teaching appointment at one of the universities, from which they could issue in quarterly installments very small and very precious magazines which celebrated the advantages of an agrarian society. The subtler intelligences of this rebel horde were forever formulating codes and cults in their own precincts--codes and cults which affirmed the earthly virtues of both root and source in such unearthly language, by such processes of ïsthetic subtlety, that even the cult adepts of the most precious city cliques were hard put to it to extract the meaning.

  All this George Webber observed and found somewhat puzzling and astonishing. Young men whose habits, tastes, and modes of thought and writing seemed to him to belong a great deal more to the atmospheres of the ïsthetic cliques which they renounced than to any other now began to argue the merits of a return to "an agrarian way of life" in language which was, it seemed to him, the language of a cult, and which assuredly few dwellers on the soil, either permanent or re turned, could understand. Moreover, as one who was himself derived from generations of mountain farmers who had struggled year by year to make a patch of corn grow in the hill erosions of a mountain flank, and of generations of farm workers in Pennsylvania who had toiled for fifteen hours a day behind the plow to earn a wage of fifty cents, it now came as a mild surprise to be informed by the lily-handed intellectuals of a Southern university that what he needed most of all was a return to the earthly and benevolent virtues of the society which had produced him.