THOMAS WOLFE’S OWN efforts to re-create the past continued to spark Masters’s curiosity. Through his early weeks at the Chelsea in 1937, as autumn turned to winter, the younger writer had kept to himself inside his rooms, building his outline chapter by chapter, and then, when it was time to begin writing, hiring a secretary to speed up his work. To his neighbors, Wolfe seemed to live in an intense state of creative solitude, rarely seeing anyone besides the secretary, Joan Lanier; his agent, Elizabeth Nowell, who dropped by to smoke his cigarettes and comb through his manuscripts for possible short stories to sell; and the occasional literary admirer or family member who drifted through town.
Like Masters, Wolfe maintained a disciplined work routine. He woke each day at eleven o’clock and soon after began writing, by hand, having warned the hotel maids to stay away. Just after lunchtime, Joan quietly let herself in to the apartment, picked up the manuscript pages that Wolfe had dropped on the floor, and typed them at a small table in the foyer while Wolfe continued writing. Once Joan was finished, Wolfe dictated new scenes to her until five-thirty or six in the evening, pacing from room to room and speaking rapidly and without pause, lost in the drama of his characters’ lives. Following the dictation sessions, Wolfe would correct Joan’s typescript. Then Joan would leave, and Wolfe would reward himself with a drink at the Hotel Chelsea bar and a large meal, followed by a nighttime walk through glittering Times Square. Then he would return home for a final writing session, from midnight to four in the morning.
Masters sometimes spotted the younger writer alone at the bar downing drinks while eavesdropping on others’ conversations, or dining at a corner table in one of Masters’s own favorite establishments—the Oasis on Twenty-Third Street or the Players Club at Gramercy Park. He found Wolfe’s appetite for both food and drink astounding, a hunger to which the novelist himself had long ago confessed, writing, “The desire for it All comes from an evil gluttony in me.” That hunger had grown with the anxiety Wolfe felt through the month of November as the sections of his novel in progress kept “rumbling and roaring around in my head” with no sense of cohesion. As Thanksgiving drew near, he began to grow desperate. If Robert Linscott, the editor from Houghton Mifflin, came to New York to look at the manuscript as promised, Wolfe would have nothing to show him. He should have been relieved when Linscott subsequently postponed the trip, but the editor’s absence increased Wolfe’s anxiety. “Goddammit,” he exploded to his agent one night. “Are they giving me the runaround?”
Sensing—correctly, in fact—that Linscott had picked up the scent of trouble with this book and was rethinking his ten-thousand-dollar offer, Wolfe again experienced the awful feeling of futility he had endured at the beginning of his career. A great longing for his former editor welled up in him; one night, he banged out on the typewriter a five-page, single-spaced letter to Perkins reviewing the reasons for their separation in the tortured language of an estranged lover. “I have not had anything affect me as deeply as this in ten years,” he concluded, “and I have not been so bereaved . . . since my brother’s death.”
Into this emotional breach walked another publishing executive—Edward Aswell of Harper and Brothers—who had heard of Wolfe’s split from Scribner’s and invited the writer to dinner in the Village in the hope of persuading him over to Harper’s side. Wolfe found that he liked this Southerner, a Harvard graduate like him and almost exactly the same age. After dinner, he invited Aswell back to the Chelsea, where he subjected him to an impassioned account of the entire history of his relationship with Perkins.
If Aswell was taken aback by Wolfe’s rant, or by the piles of papers and books, the dirty dishes and unwashed clothes, the overflowing ashtrays and half-empty coffee cups littering Wolfe’s rooms, he didn’t show it. In fact, he offered to match Linscott’s offer of ten thousand dollars—or perhaps give an even larger advance of fifteen thousand—for Wolfe’s novel in progress, sight unseen. The size of the offer stopped Wolfe in his tracks, but deeply touched as he was, he hesitated to commit himself. Aswell was so young, and Wolfe had relied so heavily on the older Perkins, whom he continued to consider the “father of his spirit.” Besides, Linscott, whom Wolfe also admired, had approached him first. Promising to consider the offer, he ushered Aswell out the door and returned to work the next day with new commitment and passion.
The trouble with the novel that had plagued Wolfe up to now was the sense that in telling the story of America’s boom years, he had only scratched the surface. Yes, he had conveyed the sense of alienation, the awful isolation that he himself had experienced during those years and that he felt were universal throughout the nation at the time. Yet he did not feel that he had quite put his finger on why the events leading up to this Depression felt so much more perilous than the booms and busts of the past.
Increasingly, his thoughts kept returning to his experiences on his recent trip to Berlin. Absorbed with his own problems as he had been in recent years, he had not paid close attention to the political developments in Germany. Stories had reached him of the Nazis’ intentions, yet even as late as 1935, he had managed to shrug them off. But watching the lines of Nazi soldiers at the Summer Olympics in Berlin, Wolfe had heard in “the solid smack of ten thousand leather boots as they came together” the gunning of the “great engines of war” already being “enlarged and magnified.” Sick at heart, Wolfe had recorded his impressions in a story called “I Have a Thing to Tell You”—the tale of a journey by train from Berlin to Paris on which a Jewish passenger is arrested and removed while the travelers he has befriended remain silent and let him go.
The story, published after his return home, had served as Wolfe’s farewell to Germany. But now, his memories of that time kept returning. He sensed some kind of connection between the poison spreading through Europe and the betrayal visited on the American people in the form of the economic crash. The two events sprang from the same source, he believed—“something old and genuinely evil in the spirit of man.” For “wherever ruthless men conspired together for their own ends,” he wrote, “wherever the rule of dog-eat-dog was dominant, there it bred.” Night after night at the big round table in his Chelsea room, he prodded these ideas, yet the core insight he needed continued to elude him.
In the past, Wolfe had used alcohol to help spark ideas and unleash his flood of words. But even though he lengthened his visits to the hotel bar, whose bartender, Norman Kleinberg, had considerable practice helping writers wind down, Wolfe could not seem to relax. Something was nagging at his subconscious—something that had to be identified before he could continue. Then, near the end of November, he learned of Sherwood Anderson’s imminent arrival to the city. This news came as a relief. In recent years, the two writers had begun a correspondence in which Anderson, twenty-four years Wolfe’s senior and now deeply immersed in left-wing activism, attempted to move the younger writer beyond a vague sense of himself as a “brother to the workers” to see the need to fix the system. In recent weeks, Wolfe had met with some of Anderson’s political friends in New York. As a result, he later wrote, “I caught glimpses of the great, the rich, the fortunate ones of all the earth living supinely upon the very best of everything . . . At the same time I began to be conscious of the submerged and forgotten Helots down below, who with their toil and sweat and blood and suffering unutterable supported and nourished the mighty princelings at the top.”
Surely, Anderson would be able to help him solve the problem at the core of his novel. Dining with the writer and his friends in the Village on December 1, an inebriated Wolfe related the story of his recent trip to Asheville to Ella Winter, widow of the recently deceased muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens and a sophisticated intellectual in her own right. Politely tolerating Wolfe’s sodden efforts to pinpoint the source of his malaise, Winter laughed and lightly remarked, “But don’t you know, you can’t go home again?”
The words penetrated Wolfe’s alcoholic haze and stunned him. That was it, he realized—the key to what he
had been trying to express on paper in his Chelsea rooms. Of course, it was true in a personal sense: He could never really “go home” again after having exposed the underbelly of his hometown. Nor could he ever return “home” to his early relationship with Perkins, now that mistrust had pushed them apart. But in a larger sense—on the greater stage on which he had set his novel—he felt that the American people themselves had lost their way.
“America went off the track somewhere,” Wolfe would write later that winter in his lonely room. “Instead of . . . developing along the line in which the country started out, it got shunted off in another direction—and now we look around and see we’ve gone places we didn’t mean to go. Suddenly we realize that America has turned into something ugly—and vicious—and corroded at the heart of its power with easy wealth and graft and special privilege . . . And the worst of it is the intellectual dishonesty which all this corruption has bred. People are afraid to think straight—afraid to face themselves—afraid to look at things and see them as they are.”
More determined than ever to write about “the life around me, the broader implications it has,” Wolfe decided to expand his novel’s time frame beyond 1929, to focus on what had happened in America in the years following the stock-market crash. The novel, now called “The Life and Times of Joseph Doaks,” could begin with the evocative account he had originally intended for a story called “K-19,” about a group of North Carolinians traveling home from New York by train during the 1920s boom. It would go on to tell of the failure of the fictionalized Asheville Central Bank and Trust, its president’s conviction for fraud, a former mayor’s suicide, and the onset of the Depression—events through which Wolfe hoped to throw light on what had happened during those years of “horrible human calamity” as Americans, caught in the pincers of overproduction and underconsumption, were “literally starving in the midst of plenty.”
Wolfe wandered the city streets that winter, gazing in despair at their “thousand dreary architectures” and taking in “the million faces” of his fellow New Yorkers, as “hard-mouthed, hard-eyed and strident-tongued” as the nineteenth-century malcontents in Edward Bellamy’s novel. Sometimes, in Wolfe’s imagination, the crowd of unhappy individuals merged together, moving down the street “like a single animal, with the sinuous and baleful convolutions of an enormous reptile.” Such thoughts sent him quickly back to the Chelsea bar, where his drinking had increased noticeably. Many nights, he stumbled drunkenly up to his room, loudly quarreling with anyone who got in his way, and passed out in his bed, only to begin the cycle again the next day.
As a result, when Linscott finally appeared at the end of December, Wolfe greeted him with empty hands. The flirtation withered, and Wolfe was left with no choice but to take Aswell’s offer to bet on a novel sight unseen. On New Year’s Eve, the Harper’s editor arrived at the Chelsea with a check and a contract. Wolfe signed away his bond with Perkins and his hopes for Linscott—essentially, his past—with “a strangely empty and hollow feeling . . . the sense of absolute loneliness and new beginning.”
Through the early months of 1938, Wolfe’s neighbors at the Chelsea grew accustomed to the sound of his deep, rich, Southern-accented voice drifting into the eighth-floor corridor every evening as the story began to fall into place. Perhaps, after all, his novel need not be as dark as he had first imagined. George Webber, as his protagonist was now called, might not be able to go home again, but he could go forward. Instead of writing “a book of personal revolt” against the evils of capitalism, and hence an alienation from life as it existed now in the United States, Wolfe decided to make his novel “a book of discovery, hence union, with life”—the story of one man finding his way in the new American reality.
As Wolfe’s confidence increased, his voice grew surer and stronger during his dictation sessions with Joan. Tapped into the “subterranean river” of his unconscious, falling into a state of almost “demoniacal possession,” he powered through his story without thought of self-censorship—until one day, after a particularly ribald passage, Joan surprised him by getting up from her desk, announcing, “I can’t listen to such language,” and stalking out the door. She was soon replaced by Gwen Jassinoff, a recent college graduate, less easily offended and even willing to tidy up before starting to type. But she could not stop Wolfe from adding great piles of manuscript paper that he had discarded in earlier months as he pushed the beginning of his story farther back to Webber’s childhood, then infancy, and then finally to his ancestors and genealogy.
Partly out of pity, partly from curiosity, Masters occasionally invited Wolfe down for a nightcap. He of all writers could sympathize with Wolfe’s agonies and felt inclined to offer a sympathetic ear. As taciturn as the younger writer was loquacious, Masters found it fascinating to watch Wolfe begin each visit with his usual awkwardness and then, as the whiskey kicked in, expand on his ideas “volubly and without cessation,” his stammer disappearing and his accent growing thicker as the words poured out. Pacing back and forth, reciting poems and reenacting scenes from memory, Wolfe seemed a force of nature, “drunk with words and thoughts and electric with living,” just as when dictating his chapters upstairs.
Wolfe seemed unaware of how much of himself he revealed at these times—his suspicions and fears, his loneliness and monumental self-absorption. Masters, who drank in relative moderation and was not subject to these kinds of tempests, listened with sympathy but also with a lawyer’s cool mind, assuring him that there was no need to worry about lawsuits from the real-life models for his thinly disguised characters and agreeing that anyone who drank and dined with a writer should expect to end up in his books.
Privately, though, Masters sensed something troubling in Wolfe’s deep unhappiness, his references to “this terrible vomit of print that covers the earth” alternating with grandiose fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, and endless love. Despite his passion, Wolfe “lacked fibre,” Masters decided. He was, at bottom, a narcissist, one who had never shed the shame of provincialism no doubt instilled in him at Harvard. As for Wolfe’s books, Masters concluded that “they had poetical beauty, but that [Wolfe] did not have architectural talent”—full of fine feeling as he unquestionably was.
At times, Wolfe’s rants made Masters reflect on his own long life, on how he, like every writer, had started out “wanting to be the best” and to that end had developed “a certain fanaticism,” focusing on his craft exclusively until he had eliminated everything extraneous—including people. At that point, a writer is no longer in control of his writing life; his writing has taken control of him. Perhaps that had been the case after the birth of Masters’s youngest son, Hilary, who had just turned ten. Masters had refused to let family life interfere with his writing, so when Hilary turned two, the poet had insisted on sending him to live with his wife’s parents while he and Ellen remained in New York.
In summers, Hilary traveled to New York to stay with his parents, and he was effortlessly incorporated into their routine. At the Chelsea, Sydney the elevator man, Captain Loomis the doorman, the grumbling maids, and the good-humored switchboard operators all treated him like a member of the family. No one complained about the boy spying on people at their typewriters or stalking them on the stairs. When he rode the elevator in his brown-paper Brown Knight’s costume, his fellow passengers addressed him respectfully according to his station, and one day he was even given a beautiful ancient edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur by one of the Chelsea’s elderly bibliophiles, George Iles. The summer of 1935, when Hilary was seven, was especially pleasurable. At the end of each workday, father and son walked down to the Automat at the corner of Seventh Avenue to eat fried cornmeal mush with syrup or crossed the street to the YMCA for Masters’s daily swim—pausing on the way out to put a nickel in a lobby vending machine and watch “a perfect, red, upstate apple, wrapped in paper . . . drop down inside the machine.”
Sending Hilary back to Kansas City that fall had been unbearably pa
inful for his father. “For days I could not get at anything, or compose my mind,” Masters later recalled. And it was probably Ellen’s separation from the child, along with her dislike for the bohemian hotel, that caused her to leave him the same year Wolfe arrived. Having abandoned his first family in Chicago, Masters found it very hard to lose his second.
Still, life went on. Masters consoled himself with the company of Alice Davis, a shy book lover whom he had met in the hotel lobby and who lived on the tenth floor. With Alice, who served as creative catalyst, the way he depended on women to do, Masters could live a light and playful existence, free of distractions, in a hotel where the necessities of an artistic life were taken for granted and where artists were not expected to appear more prosperous than they were. “Always poor, but together,” Dolly Sloan had written on her husband’s etching of one of their group outings. It was an appropriate motto for them all during those Depression years.
At about the time of Wolfe’s arrival, rumors swept through the Chelsea that the hotel stood at the brink of bankruptcy and would soon be sold or perhaps even demolished. Masters was stricken by the possibility of losing the artists’ community that for all of them had been so long in coming. Surely, it was a strange aspect of the American character that rushed at every turn to sacrifice the past in favor of the future, making and unmaking its self-identity, its values and passions, with every generation. Sitting at his desk in the rear-facing alcove, filled with nostalgia for a home he still occupied, Masters tried to imagine what it would be like if the Chelsea were gone. “Then who will know / About its ancient grandeur, marble stairs,” he wrote in the poem “The Hotel Chelsea.” “Who will then know that Mark Twain used to stroll / In the gorgeous dining-room, that princesses, / Poets and celebrated actresses / Lived here and made its soul . . .” The answer: no one—not in this amnesiac city. “All this will be but currents of the air,” he concluded. “Others will not remember, nor even care.”
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 12