You Can't Go Home Again

by Thomas Wolfe

  --Lies Green!

  And this is bad--most bad--oh, very bad--and should not be allowed! For, as our young Jewish friend has just indignantly proclaimed, it "shows no consideration for other people"--which means, for other Standard Concentrated Blotters. Green has no right to go falling in this fashion in a public place. He has no right to take unto himself any portion of this Standard Concentrated Blot, however small. He has no business being where he is at all. A Standard Concentrated Blotter is not supposed to be places, but to go places.

  You see, dear Admiral, this is not a street to amble in, to ride along, to drift through. It is a channel--in the words of the Standard Concentrated Blotter-Press, an "artery". This means that it is not a place where one drives, but a place where one is driven--not really a street at all, but a kind of tube for a projectile, a kind of groove for millions and millions of projectiles, all driven past incessantly, all beetling onwards, bearing briefly white slugged blurs of driven flesh.

  As for the sidewalk, this Standard Concentrated Mobway is not a place to walk on, really. (Standard Concentrated Blotters have forgotten how to walk.) It is a place to swarm on, to weave on, to thrust and dodge on, to scurry past on, to crowd by on. It is not a place to stand on, either. One of the earliest precepts in a Concentrated Blotter's life is: "Move on there! Where th' hell d'you think you are, anyway--in a cow pasture?" And, most certainly, it is not a place to lie on, to sprawl out on.

  But look at Green! Just look at him! No wonder the Jewish youth is angry with him!

  Green has wilfully and deliberately violated every Standard Concentrated Principle of Blotterdom. He has not only gone and dashed his brains out, but he has done it in a public place--upon a piece of Standard Concentrated Mobway. He has messed up the sidewalk, messed up another Standard Concentrated Blotter, stopped traffic, taken people from their business, upset the nerves of his fellow Blotters--and now lies there, all sprawled out, in a place where he has no right to be. And, to make his crime unpardonable, C. Green has----

  --Come to Life!

  Consider that, old Drake! We can understand some measure of your strangeness, because we heard you swearing in the tavern and saw your sails stand to the west. Can you now do the same for us? Consider strangeness, Drake--and look at Green! For you have heard it said by your own countryman, and in your living generation: "The times have been that, when the brains were out, the man would die." But now, old Drake, what hath Time wrought? There is surely here some strangeness in us that you could never have foretold. For the brains are "out" now--and the man has----

  --Come to Life!

  What's that, Admiral? You do not understand it? Small wonder, though it's really very simple:

  For just ten minutes since, C. Green was a Concentrated Blotter like the rest of us. Ten minutes since, he, too, might hurry in and out of the subway, thrust and scurry on the pavement, go hurtling past with whited blur in one of our beetles of machinery, a nameless atom, cypher, cinder, swarming with the rest of us, just another "guy" like a hundred million other "guys". But now, observe him! No longer is he just "another guy"--already he has become a "special guy"--has become "The Guy". C. Green at last has turned into a--Man!

  Four hundred years ago, brave Admiral Drake, if we had seen you lying on your deck, your bronze gone pale and cold, imbrued in your own blood, and hewn to the middle by the Spaniards' steel, we could have understood that, for there was blood in you. But Green--this Concentrated Blotter of ten minutes since--made in our own image, shaped in our own dust, compacted of the same grey stuff of which our own lives are compacted, and filled, we thought, with the same Standard Concentration of embalming fluid that fills our veins--oh, Drake, we did not know the fellow had such blood in him! We could not have thought it was so red, so rich, and so abundant!

  Poor, shabby, and corrupted cypher! Poor, nameless, and exploded atom! Poor little guy! He fills us Concentrated Blotters of the Universe with fear, with shame, with awe, with pity, and with terror--for we see ourselves in him. If he was a man with blood in him, then so are we! If he, in the midst of his always-driven life, could at last be driven to this final and defiant gesture of refusal to remain a Concentrated Blotter, then we, too, might be driven to a point of equal desperation! And there are other methods of defiance, other ways of ultimate refusal, other means of exercising one's last-remaining right of manhood--and some of them are no less terrifying to contemplate than this! So our fascinated eyes go up and up, past floor after floor of Standard Concentrated brick, and fasten on the open window where he stood--and suddenly we crane our necks along the ridges of our collars, look away with constricted faces, and taste the acrid bitterness of steel upon our lips!

  It is too hard, and not to be endured--to know that little Green, speaking our own tongue and stuffed with our own stuffing, had yet concealed in him some secret, dark, and frightful thing more terrible than anything that we have ever known--that he bore within him some black and hideous horror, some depth of madness or of courage, and could stand there--upon the sheer and nauseating verge of that grey window-ledge for five full minutes--and know the thing he was about to do--and tell himself he must now!--that he had to!--that the compulsion of every horror-fascinated eye down in the gulf below had now made escape impossible--and then, horror-sick past all regeneration, see, too, before he jumped, his fall, the downward-hurtling plunge, and his own exploded body--feel the bones crack and fly apart, and the brutal obliteration of the instant when his brains would shoot out against the lamp-post--and even while his soul drew back from that sheer verge of imagined terror, shame, and unutterable self-loathing, crying: "I cannot do it!"--then jumped!

  And we, brave Drake? We try to see it, but we cannot see. We try to fathom it, but we cannot plunge. We try to comprehend the hell of hells, the hundred lives of horror, madness, anguish, and despair that were exhausted in five minutes by that shabby creature crouched there on the window-ledge. But we cannot understand, or look at it any longer. It is too hard, too hard, and not to be endured. We turn away with nausea, hollowness, blind fear, and unbelief within us.

  One man stares, cranes his neck, wets his lips, and whispers: "Jesus! To do a thing like that takes guts!"

  Another, harshly: "Nah! It don't take guts! A guy who'd do a thing like that is crazy! He don't know what he's doin' to begin with!"

  And others, doubtfully, half-whispering, with eyes focused on the ledge: "But Jesus!"

  A taxi-driver, turning away and moving towards his cab, with an attempt at casual indifference that does not ring entirely true: "Oh, well! Just another guy, I guess!"

  Then one man, turning to his companion with a little puckered smile: "Well, what about it, Al? You still feel like eating?"

  And his companion, quietly: "Eating, hell! I feel like two or three stiff shots of rye! Come on, let's go round to Steve's!"

  They go. The Concentrated Blotters of the World cannot abide it. They must somehow blot it out.

  So a policeman comes round the corner now with an old tarpaulin, with which he covers the No-Head. The crowd remains. Then the green wagon from the morgue. The Thing, tarpaulin and all, is pushed into it. It drives away. A policeman with thick-soled boots scuffs and pushes skull-pieces and brain-fragments into the gutter. Someone comes with sawdust, strews it. Someone from the drugstore with formaldehyde. Later, someone with a hose and water. From the subway come an adolescent boy and girl with the hard, tough faces of the city; they walk past it, deliberately and arrogantly step among it, look at the lamp-post, then at each other, and laugh!

  All's over now, all's gone, the crowd's departed. Something else remains. It cannot be forgotten. There's a sick, humid smell upon the air, what was light and clear and crystal has gone out of day, and something thick and glutinous--half taste, half smell, and all impalpable--remains upon your tongue.

  There would have been a time and place for such a thing, brave Admiral Drake, if he, our fellow Green, had only fallen as a hollow man and landed dryly, or if he had opened
to disperse a grey embalming fluid in the gutter. It would have been all right if he had just been blown away like an old paper, or if he had been swept aside like remnants of familiar litter, and then subsumed into the Standard Concentrated stuff from which he came. But C. Green would not have it so. He exploded to drench our common substance of viscous grey with the bright indecency of blood, to resume himself from number, to become before our eyes a Man, and to identify a single spot of all our general Nothingness with the unique passion, the awful terror, and the dignity of Death.

  So, Admiral Drake--"an unidentified man fell 'or jumped yesterday at noon" from a window of your own hotel. That was the news. Now you've had the story.

  We are "the hollow men, the hollow men"? Brave Admiral, do not be too sure.

  * * *

  30. The Anodyne

  Fox read it instantly, the proud nose sniffing upwards sharply--"man fell or jumped...Admiral Francis Drake Hotel...Brooklyn." The sea-pale eyes took it in at once, and went on to more important things.

  Fox was cold, then? Hard? Selfish? Lacking in understanding? Unsympathetic? Unimaginative? By no means.

  Could not have known Green, then? Was too much the patrician to know Green? Was too high, too rare, too subtle, too fine-fibred to know Green? None of these.

  Fox knew everything, or almost everything. (If there's a lack here, we will smell it out.) Fox had been born with everything, and had learned much, yet his learning had not made him mad, or ever blunted the keen blade of knowing. He saw all things as they were: had never (in his mind and heart) called man a "white man" yet, because Fox saw man was not "white man"--man was pink man tinged with sallow, man was sallow tinged with grey, man was pink-brown, red-bronze, or white-red-sallow, but not white.

  So Fox (in mind and heart) would call it as it was. This was the boy's straight eye. Yet his clarities were obscured for other men. His straightness was thought cunning by crude-cunning rogues, his warmth seemed ice to all the hearty-false, and to the false-sincere Fox was a twister. Not one of these things was true of him.

  Fox knew Green all right--knew him better than we, the Concentrated Blotters of Green's ilk. For, being of the ilk, we grow confused, struggle with Green (so with ourselves), argue, debate, deny, are tarred with the same brush, and so lose judgment.

  Not so, Fox. Not of Green's ilk, yet was he still of the whole family of earth. Fox knew at once that Green had blood in him. Fox placed him instantly: saw sky above him, Admiral Drake Hotel behind him, lamp-post, pavement, people, Brooklyn corner, cops, rouged Jewesses, the motor-cars, the subway entrance, and exploded brains--and, had he been there, would have said in a low, somewhat puzzled, and abstracted tone:

  "Oh...I see."

  Would have seen, too, my mad masters; never doubt it. Would have seen clearly and seen whole, without our agony, without confusion, without struggling with the surface of each brick, each square inch of concrete pavement, each scale of rust upon the fire-escapes, the raw-green paint of the lamp-post, the sterile red-front brightness of the cigar store, the shapes of windows, ledges, cornices, and doorways, the way the shops were set into old houses along the street, all the heart-sick ugliness exploded into the nothingness of Brooklyn. Fox would have seen it instantly, without having to struggle to see all, know all, hold all clearly, singly, permanently, in the burning crystal of the brain.

  And if Fox had lived in Brooklyn, he would have got much else as well--got it clear and straight--while we were trying to make our maddened ears spread out like funnels to absorb it--every whispered word in Flatbush, every rhythmic-creaking spring in the back bedrooms of whore's Sand Street (by old yellow shades concealed), every barker's cry in Coney, all the jargons of each tenement from Red Hook to Brownsville. Yes, while we wrestled with our five senses there in Jungletown, our tormented brain caught in the brutal chaos of "Gewirr! Gewirr!"--Fox would have got it all, without madness, agony, or the fevered eye, and would have murmured:

  "Oh...I see."

  Wherever he was, Fox was one to get the little things--the little, most important things that tell you everything. He never picked a little thing because it was a little thing, to show he was a devilish cunning, subtle, rare, and most aesthetic fellow: he picked a little thing because it was the right thing--and he never missed.

  Fox was a great fox, and a genius. He was no little Pixy of the Aesthetes. He did not write nine-page reviews on "How Chaplin Uses Hands in Latest Picture"--how it really was not slap-stick, but the tragedy of Lear in modern clothes; or on how Enters enters; or on how Crane's poetry can only be defined, reviewed, and generally exposited in terms of mathematical formulae--ahem! ahem, now!--as:

  _____________________ /an pxt = n-F3(B18+ 11) -------- ------------ 237 2

  (Bring on the Revolution, Comrades; it is Time!)

  Fox did not go round making discoveries nine years after Boob McNutt had made them. He didn't find out that Groucho was funny seven years too late, and then inform the public why he was. He did not write: "The opening Volte of the Ballet is the historic method amplified in history, the production of historic fullness without the literary cliché of the historic spate." He had no part in any of the fine horse-manure with which we have allowed ourselves to be bored, maddened, whiff-sniffed, hound-and-hornered, nationed, new-republicked, dialled, spectatored, mercuried, storied, anvilled, new-massed, new-yorkered, vogued, vanity-faired, timed, broomed, transitioned, and generally shat upon by the elegant, refined, and snobified Concentrated Blotters of the Arts. He had nothing to do with any of the doltish gibberings, obscene quackeries, phoney passions, and six-months-long religions of fools, joiners, and fashion-apes a trifle brighter and quicker on the uptake than the fools, joiners, and fashion-apes they prey upon. He was none of your little frankypanky, seldesey-weldesey, cowley-wowley, tatesy-watesy, hicksy-picksy, wilsony-pilsony, jolasy-wolasy, steiny-weiny, goldy-woldly, sneer-puss fellows. Neither, in more conventional guise, was he one of your groupy-croupy, cliquey-triquey, meachy-teachy devotobloato wire-pullers and back-scratchers of the world.

  No, Fox was none of these. He looked at the whole thing, whatever it was, and got it straight, said slowly: "Oh...I see," then like a fox would begin to pick up things round the edges. An eye here, a nose there, a cleft of lip, a length of chin elsewhere--and suddenly, with the frame of a waiter's face, he would see the grave, thought-lonely visage of Erasmus. Fox would turn away reflectively and drink his drink, glance casually from time to time as the man approached him, catch his coat lapels and turn, stare fixedly at the waiter's face again, turn back to the table, turn again and stare, bend over, staring right up into the waiter's face:

  The waiter, troubled now, and smiling doubtfully: "Sir?...Is there anything wrong, sir?"

  Fox, slowly, almost in a whisper: "Did you ever hear of--Erasmus?"

  And the waiter, still smiling, but more doubtfully than ever: "No sir."

  And Fox, turning away and whispering hoarsely with astounded conviction: "Simply astonishing!"

  Or, again, it will be a hat-check girl at the place where he has lunch--a little tough-voiced, pert, hard-boiled girl. Fox will suddenly stop one day and look at her keenly with his sea-pale eyes, and will give her a dollar as he goes out.

  "But Fox," friends will protest, "in God's name, why did you give that girl a dollar?"

  "But isn't she the nicest person?" Fox will say, in a low and earnest whisper.

  And they will stare at him in blank amazement. That girl! That little tough, gold-digging, hard-boiled--oh, well, what's the use? They give it up! Rather than shatter the illusions and wound the innocence of this trusting child, they'll hold their tongues and leave him to his dream.

  And she, the little hard-boiled hat-check girl, in a hoarse, confiding tone to the other hat-check girl, excitedly: "Say! Do you know that guy that comes in here every day for lunch--the queer one that always orders guinea-hen--an' that didn't usta wanna let us have his hat at all?"

  The other, nodding: "Sure, I know! He usta try to
wear it w'ile he's eatin'! You awmost had to throw 'im down an' take it from 'im befoeh he'd letcha have it."

  She, rapidly, nodding: "Yeah! That's him!" Then, lowering her voice to an excited whisper: "Well, y'know, he's been givin' me a dollah tip every day for the last mont'!"

  The other, staring, stunned: "G'wan!"

  She: "Honest t' Gawd!"

  The other: "Has he made any passes atcha yet?--any wisecracks?--any funny tawk?"

  She, with a puzzled look in her eye: "That's the funny paht of it--I can't make 'im out! He 'tawks funny awright--but--he don't mean what I thought he did. The first time he said somethin' I thought he was goin' t' be fresh. He comes up t' get his hat one day, an' stands lookin' at me with that funny look until I got the willies. So I says: 'So what!' 'Married?' he says--just like that. Just stands lookin' at me an' says: 'Married?'"

  The other: "Gee! That was fresh!" Eagerly: "Well, go on--w'atcha say to 'im? W'atcha tell 'im?"