OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  "No . . . who was it? Jonathan Swift?"

  "Guh-wan!"

  "Addison? . . . Dryden? . . . Matthew Arnold?" the youth asked hopefully.

  "Guh-wan, Guh-wan!" he shouted derisively. "Yuh're way off!"

  "Am I? . . . Who was it then?"

  "James Henry Cardinal Nooman," he crowed triumphantly. "Dat's who it was! . . . Father Dolan said so. . . . Chee! . . . Dey ain't nuttin' dat guy don't know! He's duh greatest English scholeh livin'! . . . Nooman wrote de Apologia pro Vita Suo," he said triumphantly. "Dat's Latin."

  "Well, yes, he is a good writer," said the other boy. "But Thomas Carlyle is a good writer, too?" he proposed argumentatively.

  "Guh-wan!" shouted Eddy derisively. "Watcha givin' me?" He was silent a moment; then he added with a grin, "Yuh know de reason why you say dat?"

  "No, why?"

  "It's because yuh're a Sout'paw," and suddenly he laughed, naturally and good-naturedly.

  "A Southpaw? How do you mean?"

  "Oh, dat's duh name de fellows call 'em out at school," he said.

  "Call who?"

  "Why, guys like you," he said. "Dat's de name we call duh Protestants," he said, laughing. "We call 'em Sout'paws."

  The word in its connotation of a life that was hostile, hard, fanatic, and suspicious of everything alien to itself was disgraceful and shameful, but there was something irresistibly funny about it too, and suddenly they both laughed loudly.

  After that, they got along together much better: Eddy came in to see the other youth quite often, he talked more freely and naturally, and sometimes he would bring his English themes and ask for help with them.

  Such were the Boston Irish as he first saw them; and often as he thought of the wild, extravagant and liberal creatures of his childhood--of Mr. Fogarty, Tim Donovan, and the MacReadys--it seemed to him that they belonged to a grander and completely different race; or perhaps, he thought, the glory of earth and air and sky there had kept them ripe and sweet as they always were, while their brothers here had withered upon the rootless pavements, soured and sickened in the savage tumult of the streets, grown hard and dead and ugly in the barren land.

  The only person near him in the house, and the only person there the boy saw with any regularity was a Chinese student named Wang: he had the room next to him--in fact, he had the two next rooms, for he was immensely rich, the son of a man in the mandarin class who governed one of the Chinese provinces.

  But his habits and conduct were in marked contrast to those of the average Oriental who attends an American university. These others, studious seekers after knowledge, had come to work. Mr. Wang, a lazy and good-humoured wastrel with more money than he could spend, had come to play. And play he did, with a whole-hearted devotion to pleasure that was worthy of a better purpose. His pleasures were for the most part simple, but they were also costly, running to flowered-silk dressing gowns, expensively tailored clothes cut in a rakish Broadway style, silk shirts, five-pound boxes of chocolate creams, of which he was inordinately fond, week-end trips to New York, stupendous banquets at an expensive Chinese restaurant in Boston, phonograph records, of which he had a great many, and the companionship of "nice flat girls"--by this he meant to say his women should be "fat," which apparently was the primary requisite for voluptuous pulchritude.

  Mr. Wang himself was just a fat, stupid, indolent, and good-hearted child: his two big rooms in the rear of the Murphy establishment were lavishly furnished with carved teak-wood, magnificent screens, fat divans, couches, and chests. The rooms were always lighted with the glow of dim and sensual lamps, there was always an odour of sandalwood and incense, and from time to time one heard Mr. Wang's shrill sudden scream of childish laughter. He had two cronies, young Chinese who seemed as idle, wealthy, and pleasure-loving as himself; they came to his rooms every night, and then one could hear them jabbering and chattering away in their strange speech, and sometimes silence, low eager whisperings, and then screams of laughter.

  The boy had grown to know the Chinese very well; Mr. Wang had come to him to seek help on his English composition themes--he was not only stupid but thoroughly idle, and would not work at anything--and the boy had written several for him. And Mr. Wang, in grateful recompense, had taken him several times to magnificent dinners of strange delicious foods in the Chinese restaurant, and was for ever urging on him chocolates and expensive cigarettes. And no matter where the Chinaman saw him now, whether in his room, or on the street, or in the Harvard Yard, he would always greet him with one joke--a joke he repeated over and over with the unwearied delight of a child or an idiot. And the joke was this: Mr. Wang would come up slyly, his fat yellow face already beginning to work, his fat throat beginning to tremble with hysterical laughter. Then, wagging his finger at the young American, the Chinaman would say:

  "Lest night I see you with big flat girl. . . . Yis, yis, yis," he would scream with laughter as the young man started to protest, shaping voluptuous curves meanwhile with his fat yellow hands--"Big flat girl--like this--yis, yis, yis!" he would scream again, and bend double, choking, stamping at the ground, "nice flat girl--like this--yis, yis, yis, yis, yis."

  He had perpetrated this "joke" so often, and at such unseasonable places, that it had now become embarrassing. He seemed, in fact, to delight in coming upon his victim while he was in serious conversation with some dignified-looking person, and he had already caught the boy three times in this way while he was talking to Dodd, to Professor Hatcher, and finally to a professor with a starched prim face, who had taught American Literature for thirty years, and whose name was Fust. Nothing could be done to stop him; protests at the impropriety of the proceeding only served to set him off again; he was delighted at the embarrassment he caused and he would shout down every protest rapturously, screaming, "Yis, yis, yis--nice flat girl--like this, eh," and would shape fat suggestion with his fat hands.

  XVI

  The purposes of Professor Hatcher's celebrated school for dramatists seemed, as stated, to be plain and reasonable enough. Professor Hatcher himself prudently forbore from making extravagant claims concerning the benefits to be derived from his course. He did not say that he could make a dramatist out of any man who came to take his course. He did not predict a successful career in the professional theatre for every student who had been a member of his class. He did not even say he could teach a student how to write plays. No. He made, in fact, no claims at all. Whatever he said about his course was very reasonably, prudently, and temperately put: it was impossible to quarrel with it.

  All Professor Hatcher said about his course was that, if a man had a genuine dramatic and theatrical talent to begin with, he might be able to derive from the course a technical and critical guidance which it would be hard for him to get elsewhere, and which he might find for himself only after years of painful and even wasteful experiment.

  Certainly this seemed reasonable enough. Moreover, Professor Hatcher felt that the artist would benefit by what was known as the "round-table discussion"--that is, by the comment and criticism of the various members of the class, after Professor Hatcher had read them a play written by one of their group. He felt that the spirit of working together, of seeing one's play produced and assisting in the production, of being familiar with all the various arts of the theatre--lighting, designing, directing, acting, and so on--was an experience which should be of immense value to the young dramatist of promise and of talent. In short, although he made no assertion that he could create a talent where none was, or give life by technical expertness to the substance of a work that had no real life of its own, Professor Hatcher did feel that by the beneficent influence of this tutelage he might trim the true lamp to make it burn more brightly.

  And though it was possible to join issue with him on some of his beliefs--that, for example, the comment and criticism of "the group" and a community of creative spirits were good for the artist--it was impossible to deny that his argument was reasonable, temperate, and conservative in the statement
of his purposes.

  And he made this plain to every member of his class. Each one was made to understand that the course made no claims of magic alchemy--that he could not be turned into an interesting dramatist if the talent were not there.

  But although each member of the class affirmed his understanding of this fundamental truth, and readily said that he accepted it, most of these people, at the bottom of their hearts, believed--pitiably and past belief--that a miracle would be wrought upon their sterile, unproductive spirits; that for them, for them, at least, a magic transformation would be brought about in their miserable small lives and feeble purposes--and all because they now were members of Professor Hatcher's celebrated class.

  The members of Professor Hatcher's class belonged to the whole lost family of the earth, whose number is uncountable, and for this reason they could never be forgotten.

  And, first and foremost, they belonged to that great lost tribe of people who are more numerous in America than in any other country in the world. They belonged to that unnumbered horde who think that somehow, by some magic and miraculous scheme or rule or formula, "something can be done for them." They belonged to that huge colony of the damned who buy thousands of books that are printed for their kind, telling them how to run a tea-shop, how to develop a pleasing personality, how to acquire "a liberal education," swiftly and easily and with no anguish of the soul, by fifteen minutes' reading every day; how to perform the act of sexual intercourse in such a way that your wife will love you for it; how to have children or to keep from having children; how to write short-stories, novels, plays, and verses which are profitably saleable; how to keep from having body-odour, constipation, bad breath, or tartar on the teeth; how to have good manners, know the proper fork to use for every course, and always do the proper thing--how, in short, to be beautiful, "distinguished," "smart," "chic," "forceful," and "sophisticated"--finally, how to have "a brilliant personality" and "achieve success."

  Yes, for the most part, the members of Professor Hatcher's class belonged to this great colony of the lost Americans. They belonged to that huge tribe of all the damned and lost who feel that everything is going to be all right with them if they can only take a trip, or learn a rule, or meet a person. They belonged to that futile, desolate, and forsaken horde who felt that all will be well with their lives, that all the power they lack themselves will be supplied, and all the anguish, fury, and unrest, the confusion and the dark damnation of man's soul can magically be healed if only they eat bran for breakfast, secure an introduction to a celebrated actress, get a reading for their manuscript by a friend of Sinclair Lewis, or win admission to Professor Hatcher's celebrated class of dramatists.

  And, in a curious way, the plays written by the people in Professor Hatcher's class illustrated, in one form or another, this desire. Few of the plays had any intrinsic reality, for most of these people were lacking in the first, the last, the foremost quality of the artist, without which he is lost: the ability to get out of his own life the power to live and work by, to derive from his own experience--as a fruit of all his seeing, feeling, living, joy and bitter anguish--the palpable and living substance of his art.

  Few of the people in Professor Hatcher's class possessed this power. Few of them had anything of their own to say. Their lives seemed to have grown from a stony and a fruitless soil and, as a consequence, the plays they wrote did not reflect that life, save by a curious and yet illuminating indirection.

  Thus, in an extraordinary way, their plays--unreal, sterile, imitative, and derivative as most of them indubitably were--often revealed more about the lives of the people who wrote them than better and more living work could do. For, although few of the plays showed any contact with reality--with that passionate integument of blood and sweat and pain and fear and grief and joy and laughter of which this world is made--most of them did show, in one way or another, what was perhaps the basic impulse in the lives of most of these people--the impulse which had brought them here to Professor Hatcher's class.

  The impulse of the people in the class was not to embrace life and devour it, but rather to escape from it. And in one way or another most of the plays these people wrote were illustrative of this desire. For in these plays--unnatural, false, and imitative, as they were--one could discern, in however pale and feeble a design, a picture of the world not as its author had seen and lived and known it, but rather as he wished to find it or believe in it. And, in all their several forms--whether sad, gay, comic, tragic, or fantastical--these plays gave evidence of the denial and the fear of life.

  The wealthy young dawdler from Philadelphia, for example, wrote plays which had their setting in a charming little French café. Here one was introduced to all the gay, quaint, charming Frenchmen--to Papa Duval, the jolly proprietor, and Mamma Duval, his rotund and no less jolly spouse, as well as to all the quaint and curious habitués that are so prolific in theatrical establishments of this order. One met, as well, that fixture of these places: old Monsieur Vernet, the crusty, crotchety, but kindly old gentleman who is the café's oldest customer and has had the same table in the corner by the window for more than thirty years. One saw again the familiar development of the comic situation--the day when Monsieur Vernet enters at his appointed time and finds at his table a total stranger. Sacrilege! Imprecations! Tears, prayers, and entreaties on the part of Papa Duval and his wife, together with the stubborn refusal of the imperious stranger to move! Climax: old Monsieur Vernet storming out of the café, swearing that he will never return. Resolution of conflict: the efforts of Papa and Mamma Duval to bring their most prized customer back into the fold again, and their final success, the pacification and return of Monsieur Vernet amid great rejoicing, thanks to a cunning stratagem on the part of Henri, the young waiter, who wins a reward for all these efforts, the hand of Mimi, Papa Duval's charming daughter, from whom he has been separated by Papa Duval's stern decree.

  Thus custom is restored and true love reunited by one brilliant comic stroke!

  And all this pretty little world, the contribution of a rich young man who came from Philadelphia! How perfectly God-damn delightful it all was, to be sure!

  The plays of old Seth Flint, the sour and withered ex-reporter, were, if of a different colouring, cut from the same gaudy cloth of theatrical unreality. For forty years old Seth had pounded precincts as a newsman, and had known city-rooms across the nation. He had seen every crime, ruin, and incongruity of which man's life is capable. He was familiar with every trait of graft, with every accursed smell and smear of the old red murder which ineradicably fouled the ancient soul of man, and the stench of man's falseness, treachery, cruelty, hypocrisy, cowardice, and injustice, together with the look of brains and blood upon the pavements of the nation, was no new thing to old Seth Flint.

  His skin had been withered, his eyes deadened, his heart and spirit burdened wearily, his faith made cynical, and his temper soured by the black picture of mankind which he had seen as a reporter--and because of this, in spite of this, he had remained or become--how, why, in what miraculous fashion no one knew--a curiously honest, sweet, and generous person, whose life had been the record of a selfless loyalty. He had known poverty, hardship, and self-sacrifice, and endured all willingly without complaint: he had taken the savings of a lifetime to send the two sons of his widowed sister to college; he had supported this woman and her family for years, and now, when his own life was coming to its close, he was yielding to the only self-indulgence he had ever known--a year away from the city-room of a Denver newspaper, a year away in the rare ether, among the precious and æsthetic intellects of Professor Hatcher's celebrated course, a year in which to realize the dream of a lifetime, the vision of his youth--a year in which to write the plays he had always dreamed of writing. And what kind of plays did he write?

  Alas! Old Seth did exactly what he set out to do; he succeeded perfectly in fulfilling his desire--and, by a tragic irony, his failure lay in just this fact. The plays which he produced with an
astounding and prolific ease--("Three days is enough to write a play," the old man said in his sour voice. "You guys who take a year to write a play give me a pain. If you can't write a play a week, you can't write anything; the play's no good")--these plays were just the plays which he had dreamed of writing as a young man, and therein was evident their irremediable fault.

  For Seth's plays--so neat, brisk, glib, and smartly done--would have been good plays in a commercial way, as well, if he had only done them twenty years before. He wrote, without effort and with unerring accuracy, a kind of play which had been immensely popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, but which people had grown tired of twenty years before. He wrote plays in which the babies got mixed up in the maternity ward of a great hospital, in which the rich man's child goes to the family of the little grocer, and the grocer's child grows up as the heir to an enormous fortune, with all the luxuries and securities of wealth around him. And he brought about the final resolution of this tangled scheme, the meeting of these scrambled children and their bewildered parents, with a skill of complication, a design of plot, a dexterity that was astonishing. His characters--all well-known types of the theatre, as of nurse tough-spoken, shop-girl slangy, reporter cynical, and so on--were well conceived to fret their purpose, their lives well-timed and apt and deftly made. He had mastered the formula of an older type of "well-made play" with astonishing success. Only, the type was dead, the interest of the public in such plays had vanished twenty years before.

  So here he was, a live man, writing, with amazing skill, dead plays for a theatre that was dead, and for a public that did not exist.

  "Chekhov! Ibsen!" old Seth would whine sourly with a dismissing gesture of his parched old hand, and a scornful contortion of his bitter mouth in his old mummy of a face. "You guys all make me tired the way you worship them!" he would whine out at some of the exquisite young temperaments in Professor Hatcher's class. "Those guys can't write a play! Take Chekhov, now!" whined Seth. "That guy never wrote a real play in his life! He never knew how to write a play! He couldn't have written a play if he tried! He never learned the rules for writing a play!--That Cherry Orchard now," whined old Seth with a sour sneering laugh, "--that Cherry Orchard that you guys are always raving about! That's not a play!" he cried indignantly. "Whatever made you think it was a play? I was trying to read it just the other day," he rasped, "and there's nothing there to hold your interest! It's got no plot! There's no story in it! There's no suspense! Nothing happens in it. All you got is a lot of people who do nothing but talk all the time. You never get anywhere," said Seth scornfully. "And yet to hear you guys rave about it, you'd think it was a great play."