She became the most beautiful woman that ever lived—and not in any symbolic or idealistic sense—but with all the blazing, literal, and mad concreteness of his imagination. She became the creature of incomparable loveliness, the creature with whose image he would for years walk the city’s swarming streets.
They go to a theatrical performance down on the East Side in Manhattan and Thomas Wolfe, still a hopeful dramatist, is immediately overcome with a contempt for the audience, for sophisticated people who are suddenly his enemies and “who would really undermine and wreck his work if he allowed them to.” Twitches of paranoia are a natural companion to the self-aggrandizing soul of Thomas Wolfe in New York, where everyone caught alone is a mouse. As for the loved one, Mrs. Jack, “this flushed, rosy, and excited little person . . . she seemed almost to belong to another world, a world of simple joy. . . of sweetness and of naturalness, of innocence and morning.”
Esther Jack is cheerful, energetic, and a convicted “prisoner of love.” The place in which George Webber is living is a squalid dump and she will find a large floor in an old house on Waverly Place, “send a man in tomorrow to wash the windows and to scrub the floors” and furnish the place with things from her own house. She knows the best butchers and greengrocers and cooks huge meals like a farm wife, while working and coming back with stories of famous people and grand parties, which will cause her lover to think of half the population living “in filth and squalor.” “How could she be a part of it? . . . It whipped his spirit to a frenzy, it made him turn on her at times and rend her, bitterly accuse her with unjust and cruel words.”
George Webber describes his destruction of love with chilling credibility; jealousy, accusation, maniacal demands, monstrous envy, pages and pages of domestic argument blasting through the walls:
He: Do anything you damn please—just leave me alone, that’s all!
She: He got what he wanted from her . . . used her for what she was worth to him. . . . Now she’s no use to him anymore!
He: Used you! Why, you—you—you hussy, you—what do you mean by used you! Used me, you mean!
He rages against “the whole damned crowd of million-dollar Jew and Gentile aesthetes” who despise him. She: “They neither love nor hate you. Most of them have never heard of you.” The affair is broken and he is off again for the seventh trip abroad, where in a drunken brawl at the Oktoberfest in Munich he gets badly beaten up.
•
You Can’t Go Home Again returns to Esther Jack and the long, crowded pages of imagined and lived scenes are as brilliant as any to be found in Wolfe’s writings. It begins with a curious evocation of Mr. Jack, the husband, waking up in their apartment on Park Avenue a few days before the 1929 stock market crash. The bedroom “was one of modest and almost austere simplicity, subtly combined with a sense of spaciousness, wealth, and power.” The bathroom where we will find Mr. Jack shaving has creamy porcelain and polished silver fixtures. “He liked the tidy, crowded array of lotions, creams, unguents, bottles, tubs, jars, brushes”; he mixes the hot and cold water, does a few exercises—all a wild presumption about the husband of the loved one.
Mr. Jack in the portrait is a solid, comfortable man of Wall Street, neither “cruel nor . . . immoderate,” who likes the social swim, is kind and generous to a friend in need. He is driven to his office by his chauffeur, who is reckless and a swindler in the matter of bills for gasoline, oil, and tires, which Mr. Jack can accept as the way of the world. He will help people down on their luck, friends, relatives, and superannuated domestics, but in the false world of speculation such men did not see themselves as gamblers, but as “brilliant executives of great affairs.” Thus a double edge, not quite so pleasing to the piercing sense of exclusion George Webber is born with as Mr. Jack is born with his distance from George’s furious, “envenomed passages of night.” The moral superiority of his own distress, madness, and longing is a dogma, a sacred oil or unguent in all of Wolfe’s encounters with riches or power.
Esther Jack wakes up in the Park Avenue apartment where she is planning a great party that evening which George will attend. She is usually glowing, jolly, filled with “immortal confidence”; and then again somber and brooding:
She was three parts a Jewess, and in her contemplative moods the ancient, dark, and sorrowful quality of her race seemed to take complete possession of her. . . . This look . . . had always troubled George Webber when he saw it because it suggested some secret knowledge buried deep within the woman whom he loved and whom he believed he had come to know.
However, this morning she is struggling with her drunken Irish maid, Nora, in scenes of bright household comedy. In a section called “Service Entrance” the doorman, the man on the front elevator, and the one on the service elevator are introduced with their squabbles, complaints, and doorman obsequiousness, each to play his part in the disaster of the coming evening party. A face, a brief encounter or thicker association with the hundreds that appear in the fictions are magically enlivened by individual patterns of speech, psychological quirks, private history the writer could not have known. “Autobiography” is merely the outer skin, tags of character, not what is accomplished by the imagination in the unaccountable, unrelenting scribbled flood.
At the party, “The hour has now arrived for Mr. Piggy Logan and his celebrated circus of wired dolls.” The puppet show, a fleeting rage in the city, appears to be an inspiration created by Alexander “Sandy” Calder:
There were miniature circus rings made of rounded strips of tin or copper which fitted neatly together. There were . . . an astonishing variety of figures made of wire to represent all the animals and performers. There were clowns and trapeze artists, acrobats and tumblers, horses and bareback lady riders.
The trapeze act was the first failure when the two flying dolls failed to catch hands. The sword-swallowing act, a hatpin to go down the mouth of a rag doll, only succeeded in tearing the stuffing out, but the cheerful Mr. Piggy went on. Friends of his, which included some young women that had the “unmistakeable look of having gone to Miss Spence’s school” crowded the devastated living room and turned the lavish evening party into a New York item of gossip. And then outside the roar of a fire truck.
Smoke is filling the halls and the guests rush out, but downstairs the elevator men are struggling to get up to an old lady on a high floor. She has made her way out, but the two elevator men on their mission of rescue are stuck when the power goes out and will die of smoke inhalation. For George: “He has sensed how the hollow pyramid of a false social structure had been erected and sustained upon a base of common mankind’s blood and sweat and agony.” It is the signal for a break with Esther Jack:
And to make it easier, for her as well as for himself, there was one thing he would not tell her. It would be surer, swifter, kinder not to tell her that he loved her still, that he would always love her, that no one else could ever take her place.
The virtues of Aline Bernstein come to be seen as a smothering shroud from which the genius is determined to free himself: she clings, threatens suicide, imagines Maxwell Perkins has aided the collapse of the stormy love. In fact and in written elaboration, Thomas Wolfe brings wretchedness to Esther Jack, but she at least triumphs in being the single moment of happiness, romantic love, surrender of his own shroud of self-love:
After all the blind, tormented wanderings of youth, that woman would become his heart’s centre and the target of his life, the image of immortal one-ness that again collected him to one, and hurled the whole collected passion, power, and might of his one life into the blazing certitude, the immortal governance and unity, of love. (Of Time and the River)
Anti-Semitism: he longs, in his notebooks, for letters from his “little Jew” and in the same notebook, before they had met and when Wolfe dreamed of success as a dramatist:
Artistically, at any rate, the Jew is a menace. He controls the theatre in New York. . . . The character of New York audiences is itself determined, in large measure, by
the members of his race. . . . In our small towns, we see our small tradesmen steadily driven to the wall, outwitted and out-reached on every side by their Jewish competitor. . . . His botanical selection is ever the sunflower, never the violet. Indeed, I am becoming convinced that he gained his title of “chosen of God” because of the many good things he had to say of himself, oft-repeated before the Lord.
Wolfe, ever to remain in many ways a bumpkin from the South, grew up at a time when the local Jews ran clothing and jewelry stores on Main Street and were respected but apart, with little social mingling until the later years when they became lawyers, judges, doctors, and professors if there was a local college. In New York City it will be otherwise indeed; perhaps they are the “web” on the rock in that title.
And yet, a diversion in Of Time and the River. While teaching at New York University, Abraham Jones, an A student, arrogant, begins to haunt Eugene Gant as an enemy, a critic never satisfied with the chosen texts, a smirking judge, a nightmare of unendurable superiority. The combative, outraged teacher throws him out of the class, only to have the young man burst into tears and say, “Why, that’s the best class that I’ve got.” Jones will become the “first man-swarm atom he had come to know in all the desolation of the million-footed city,” a loyal friend.
Wolfe takes on the whole family, hears the story of the name “Jones” from the old Polish, Yiddish-speaking father, the story of sister Sylvia and her illegitimate child raised by the student, Abraham; another sister, Rose, “a dark, tortured and sensitive Jewess with a big nose and one blind eye.” Abe himself transformed from “an obscure and dreary chrysalis, and yet a dogged, loyal, and faithful friend, the salt of the earth, a wonderfully good, rare, and high person.”
•
You can find what you will in Thomas Wolfe, every dated cliché and skinhead notion and folly and “niggertown”; and then turn the page for a contemplation that might be in the words of a Boston abolitionist:
The South . . . the whole fantastic distortion of that period where people were said to live in “mansions,” and slavery was a benevolent institution, conducted as a constant banjo-strumming, the strewn largesses of the colonel and the shuffle-dance of his happy dependents . . . and the Rebel horde a company of swagger, death-mocking cavaliers. Years later . . .when their cheap mythology, their legend of the charm of their manner, the aristocratic culture of their lives, the quaint sweetness of their drawl, made him writhe—when he could think of no return to their life and its swarming superstition without weariness and horror . . . he still pretended the most fanatic devotion to them, excusing his Northern residence on grounds of necessity rather than desire. (Look Homeward, Angel)
Thomas Wolfe, a maw, gulping his family, the streets, the citizens, the Civil War, World War I, the Dempsey-Firpo fight, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, Europe, America. He is too much, too many rhapsodies, an inundation. Not a man you’d want to deal with. Drunken pages and drunken he often was as he prowled the midnight city. And yet the mystery of the books is that they are written with a rich, fertile vocabulary, sudden, blooming images, a murderous concentration that will turn everyone he meets into words. The books are all in print; fresh, beckoning paperbacks, American literature. Whether the new millennium with its gifts will include the time to read them is another question.
2000
THE FOSTER FATHER
Henry James
CATHERINE Sloper, in the clear, chilly masterpiece Washington Square, must explain to the handsome, corrupt fortune-hunter, Morris Townsend, that if she marries without her father’s consent, as she is willing to do, her own adequate fortune will not be augmented at the time of her father’s death. Dr. Sloper has correctly diagnosed, as it were, the insidious moral infection of the suitor, a wastrel who could not possibly be in love with his plain, awkward, naïvely trusting daughter. Townsend, however, is desperately in need; he is bent upon real money rather than Catherine’s sufficient income. He believes that if she pressed her case with more astute insistence she could bring her father around from the threat of disinheritance. The poor daughter knows better. Her reason comes forth at last in a painful recognition: “He is not very fond of me.”
Catherine is abandoned to enduring misery and pain. Although still chaste, she brings to mind a poem by Robert Burns about a rustic, betrayed girl. “And my fause luver staw my rose/ But ah! he left the thorns wi me.” Henry James’s fiction is rich in dramatic arrangements between parents and children. The childless bachelor was alert to the fierce conflictions in the will or doom of parents to be themselves, to live out a daily expression of their nature as singular beings for whom being a parent is only one of a stinging swarm of obligations, desires, follies, willed or accidentally improper involvements. The parents in their history and destiny have been shaped by years of experience, accumulated scars, agreeable turns, and disappointing outcomes. To these, small children look on as a sort of invited guest until they grow up so strangely themselves as to be not a reproduction but often a counterreaction. In the stories of James it is not always the young ones whose fate is at stake, but the grown offspring entering the world with the troublesome baggage of their parents’ journey through life.
The fictions do not have the atmosphere of autobiography, do not hint at the author’s life as the son of the learned, distinguished, loving and lovable, if somewhat balmy and improvident, Henry James Sr. and the steady, affectionate Mary Walsh James. The biographers, Leon Edel and the more recent Fred Kaplan, would have it otherwise; they find a stressful relation with his brother William hidden in the pages as well as homoerotic threads in the careful weavings.
In the teasing, flirtatious, elaborately composed prefaces for the New York Edition of his work, published between 1907 and 1909, James likes to tell of the “germ” or “seed” of an anecdote heard at the dinner table, a little acorn from which a “great oak” might grow. Like a waiter receiving a tip, modest enough, James puts the gratuity into an investment fund of striking possibilities for growth. Even Washington Square, his own fireside tale of lower Manhattan, improbably came to him from an anecdote related by the actress Fanny Kemble.
“The Pupil” begins: “The young man hesitated and procrastinated: it cost him such an effort to broach the subject of terms, to speak of money to a person who spoke only of feelings and, as it were, of the aristocracy.” The speaker, or not speaker, is a young graduate of Yale and Oxford, Pemberton, who has taken a position as tutor to Morgan Moreen, the sickly son of an American family traveling about Europe. Wages, which the elder Moreens cannot pay, are somehow to be made up for by the special charm and precocity of their little boy. “He’s a genius—you’ll love him,” the mother says, and to a degree that is true.
The pupil, Morgan Moreen with his damaged heart, is indeed a precocity of candor about the disreputable family. For himself, the tutor feels it would be improper to speak about the invisible wages; for that bit of politesse the boy calls him a “humbug.” Instead, young Morgan remembers the fate of a treasured nurse who finally left unrewarded for her services, only to have the parents insist they had paid every penny owed to the poor woman. In the pain of so much knowledge left like dust in the household, the child denounces the lying and cheating: “I don’t know what they live on, or how they live, or why they live!” Their snobbery, immunity to insult in the pursuit of fashionable connections, the way they move from city to city, from hotel to hotel, leaving a stack of unpaid chits—all of this is the ancestral heritage of the child, along with the genuine love the family feels for the boy, their free treasure.
The tutor, Pemberton, is also down on his luck after a mediocre career at Oxford and a time spent seeing the world. He is alive to the charm and oddity of his pupil and it is with regret that, by way of an offer to tutor a rich boy, he is forced to take off. The rich boy is a dolt and when Mrs. Moreen sends a scribbled note saying, “Implore you to come back instantly—Morgan dreadfully ill,” he returns. The end of the tale is somewhat in the shade, as
fictions by James are likely to be. However, without seriousness of intention, Morgan and Pemberton have chatted about going away together, settling somewhere. Suddenly the mother, claiming the tutor has stolen the boy’s affection for the family, insists that he take him in fact. Morgan: “Do you mean he may take me to live with him . . . ? Away, away, anywhere he likes?” The boy’s joy, the impractical obligation, leads the tutor to hesitate for a moment and, in the moment, Morgan is suddenly stricken and dies. Like Miles in The Turn of the Screw, “his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.”
In the unforgettable story, little Morgan Moreen is a neglected child, suffering not from absence or indifference, but from moral neglect. He is like a child visiting a parent imprisoned for fraud, receiving the hugs and kisses and yet always coming away with the terms of the indictment. Good society shuns the Moreen parents, his brothers and sisters are energetically engaged in shady maneuverings, and the tutor will soon learn of the family’s bold effrontery. Morgan is a genetic anomaly. His quick and candid revelations to the tutor may be thought almost unnatural, but they serve as an original and tragic moral awareness that literally breaks the child’s heart.
In the preface to the story, a “thumping windfall” related by a medical friend during a train journey, the “dear” Moreens are viewed in an unexpected light. The Moreens and I, James writes, go back to the “classic years of the great Americano-European legend; the years of limited communication, of monstrous and unattenuated contrast, of prodigious and unrecorded adventure.” Now, he laments the despoiling of the sacred cobbles of the great, old cities “through which the unconscious Barbarians troop with the regularity and passivity of ‘supplies,’ or other promiscuous goods, prepaid and forwarded.”
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 66