OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  But unannealed by water the gaunt days sloped into the grots of time.

  Paris, Saturday Night: Today has been a horrible one--I was able to sleep only the most diseased and distressed sleep (the worst sort of American-in-Europe sleep) last night after leaving Mrs. Morton. I was sick with my loss (the loss of the picture and several letters Helen sent me) and I got up sick and with the shakes this morning--I came to the Abiga bar--I went to the Am. Ex. Co.--I went to Wepler's in Montmartre--At each place, as I knew they would, with mean and servile regret cut by mocking, they were sorry, sorry, sorry.

  The day was of the most horrible European sort--Something that passes understanding--the wet heavy air, that deadens the soul, puts a lump of indigestible lead in the solar plexus, depresses and fatigues the flesh until one seems to lift himself leadenly through the thick wet steaming air with a kind of terrible fear--an excitement that is without hope, that awaits only the news of some further grief, failure, humiliation, and torture. There is a lassitude that enters the folds and lappings of the brain, that makes one hope for better things and better work tomorrow, but hope without belief or conviction.

  The grey depression of the wet buildings--the horrible nervous pettiness of the French, swarming, honking, tooting along the narrow streets and the two-foot sidewalks, while the heavy buses beetle past--

  A chapter called PARIS or So You're Going to "Paris"? (Perhaps a piece for a magazine in This.)

  The fear always of the corners--you are coming out into the open, there will be waiting to thrust at you, the heavy grinding buses, the irritation of the horns, etc.

  A chapter to be called "The Arithmetic of the Soul."

  The music deepened like a passion.

  All of our hearts are fulfilled of you, all of our souls are growing warm with you, all of our lives are beating out their breath for you, and the strange feel of our pulses is playing through our blood for you, immortal and unending living.

  Sunday--Up at noon, bathed, etc. Lunch at Casenave's--Went to Delacroix and Louvre--Something over-rich and bloody about it.--Note how French love to paint blood (Delacroix)--then along Seine bookstalls--found only junk--then to Lipp's for beer and cervelas--then back to hotel where worked from 6.30-10.30--Then out to eat at Taverne Royale--Walk back through Vendôme and Rue St. Honoré--Read a little and worked from one to 3.00--6 hours today.

  Sunday Night: I feel low--discouraged by the mass of things again tonight. I must make some decisive action--the new web of streets behind the dome has depressed me.

  The mind grows weary with such a problem as mine, by constantly retracing his steps, by constantly feeling around the same cylinder from which there seems at present to be no escape.

  The European temper is one that has learned control--that is, it has learned indifference--Each man writes his own book without worrying very much about what the other has written--he reads little or if he reads much, it is only a trifle--a spoonful of the ocean of print that inundates everything--Picture Anatole France--with a reputation for omniscience--picking daintily here and there among the bookstalls of the Seine. To go by them affects me with horror and weariness--as it does Paul Valéry--but I lack his power to resist. I must go by there--and if I do again and again I cannot keep away from them.

  More and more I am convinced that to be a great writer a man must be something of an ass. I read of Tolstoi that he read no newspapers, that he went away and lived among peasants for 7 years at a time, and that for six years he read nothing except the novels of Dumas. Yet such a man could write great books. I almost think it is because of this that he did.

  Bernard Shaw, one of our prophets at the present time, is worshipped past idolatry by many people who consider that he knows everything or practically everything.

  From what I have been able to discover of his reading from his writing, I can be sure that he has read Shakespeare--not very carefully, Ibsen very carefully, a book by Karl Marx, which made a deep impression on him, the tracts of the Fabian Society, and the writings of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb.

  There is always the moment when we must begin to write. There are always the hundreds, the thousands, of struggle, of getting up, of pacing about, of sitting down, of laborious uneven accomplishment. During the time of actual work, what else besides ourselves can help us? Can we call to mind then the contents of 20,000 books? Can we depend on anything other than ourselves for help?

  At La Régence:

  How certain trivial words and phrases haunt the brain--cannot be forgotten--come back again even when years have passed. Today, have been hearing old voices, old songs, fleeting forgotten words of twenty years ago--my mother's--my father's--the voices of the summer boarders on the porches--most of all, Dinwood Bland, sitting in pleasant backyard of his house in Norfolk, a drink in his hand, his blind eyes blindly fixed upon the flashing sparkling waters of Hampton Roads, blindly on a white ship passing--his thin, senile, evil, strangely attractive face touched with bitterness, revulsion, and his weary disgust with life as he said:

  "My father was an educated loafer."

  And now, all day long, "the sound of these words rings and echoes in my mind until I can listen to nothing else." And sitting here I feel like Coleridge when the rhyme for Youth and Age came to him (10 Sept. 1823 Wed. morning 10 o'clock)--"An Air," he says, "that whizzed dia engkefalou" (right across the diameter of my brain) exactly like a Hummel Bee--etc.

  So too, with me, all afternoon--and Dinwood Bland's haunting phrase about his father has now become:

  "My father was an educated loafer,

  My mother was an alcoholic bum,

  My sister's name was Nelly, she had a lovely belly,

  Aside from that she was a lousy scum.

  "My brother Pete, he went and joined the Navy,

  My brother Hank, he went and caught the clap,

  My little sister Anny, fell down and bruised her fanny--

  Because we had an educated Pap,"--etc.

  Obscure, ridiculous--but old words, old phrases, and forgotten sayings--why do they come back to haunt our meaning?

  At La Régence:

  On quotations--The practice of nineteenth-century "good" writers was to decorate their compositions with neat little patterns of quotations. That practice still persists in a great deal of the correct writing of the present--viz., the essays and leading articles of The Atlantic Monthly, The Spectator, Harper's, The Century, The London Mercury, etc.--The quotation habit is generally a vicious one, often it has not even so worthy a design as to borrow from stronger and greater people an energy and clearness that we do not have, but rather serves as a sort of diploma to certify culture--said culture consisting in our ability to quote scraps from Lamb, Dickens, John Keats, Browning, Doctor Johnson, and Matthew Arnold. The distortion this works upon the original sinew of the mind is incalculable--writing becomes a meeting of pseudo-courtliness neatly designed to arrive before Lamb with a bow and to be handed by Dickens to Lord Tennyson with a graceful flourish. The phrase "apt quotation" is one of the most misleading phrases ever invented. Most quotations, so far from being apt to any purpose, are distinguished by all the ineptitude a politician displays when, having spoken for twenty minutes on the Nicaraguan question, he says: "That reminds me of a little story I heard the other day. It seems there were two Irishmen whose names were Pat and Mike"--then proceeds to a discussion of the Prohibition issue, after his convulsed audience is somewhat recovered.

  Europe and America are still too far apart--the "interminable" day is far too long--six days are far too long--for the intense impression--to compare and observe their essential difference--

  Results: We must have them closer together--as the English and the French--as Dover and Calais--things that matter in our life cannot be recalled so easily. I have lived deeply, intensely, vividly, on the whole unhappily, for six months. Some people say that is all that matters. I do not think it is. But things cannot be called up so easily.

  I am wondering in a vast vague about her. I lov
e her, I think of seeing her again with a sense of strangeness and wonder; but I have no sort of idea what it will be like, or what has happened. Why can we not remember the faces of those we love? This is true: Their faces melt into a thousand shades and shapes and images of faces the moment that we try to fix them in our memory. It is only the face of a stranger we remember there. Why?

  Never have the many-ness and the much-ness of things caused me such trouble as in the past six months. But never have I had so firm a conviction that our lives can live upon only a few things, that we must find them, and begin to build our fences.

  All creation is the building of a fence.

  But deeper study always, sharper senses, profounder living; never an end to curiosity!

  The fruit of all this comes later. I must think. I must mix it all with myself and with America. I have caught much of it on paper. But infinitely the greater part is in the wash of my brain and blood.

  Shaw makes a fool of himself when he writes of Napoleon, because he hates Napoleon and wants to make him ridiculous. But Shaw makes a hero of himself when he writes of Cæsar; Shaw's Cæsar is the best Cæsar I know of. It beats Shakespeare. It is as Cæsar looks (Naples Museum), I am sure. I am sure Cæsar was like this.

  But it is a mistake to suppose that Napoleon got his hair in the soup.

  Dirge: Why are we unhappy?--I have no need to envy this man's fame--nor skill to cloak myself in that man's manner--I am as naked now as sorrow--and all I ask is: Why are we so unhappy?

  Why are we unhappy?

  In my father's country there are yet men with quiet eyes and slow, fond, kindly faces.

  LXXVI

  About four o'clock on the afternoon of New Year's Eve, 1924, as Eugene was entering the Louvre, he met Starwick. Starwick was elegantly dressed, as always, in casual, beautifully tailored, brown tweed garments. He still carried a cane and twirled it indolently as he came down the steps. He was the same old picture of bored, languorous, almost feminine grace, but instead of a shirt he was wearing a Russian blouse of soft blue wool which snuggled around his neck in voluptuous folds and had a kind of diamond-shaped design of crimson threads along the band.

  For a moment, half-way down the grey stone steps, worn and hollowed as ancient European steps are worn and hollowed by the soft incessant eternity of feet, as the other people thronged past him, he paused, his pleasant ruddy face and cleft chin turned vaguely up towards those soft skies of time, already fading swiftly with the early wintry light.

  As always, Frank looked magnificent, and with his Russian blouse, and the expression of inscrutable sorrow on his face, more mysterious and romantic than ever. Even in this foreign scene he seemed to take possession of his surroundings with a lordly air. So far from looking like an alien, a foreigner, or a common tourist, Frank seemed to belong to the scene more than anybody there. It was as if something very frail and rare and exquisite and weary of the world--Alfred de Musset or George Moore, or the young Oscar, or Verlaine--had just come out of the Louvre, and it all seemed to belong to him.

  The enormous central court of the Louvre, the soaring wings of that tremendous and graceful monument, the planned vistas of the Tuileries before him, fading into the mist-hazed air and the soft greying light--the whole tremendous scene, with all its space and strength and hauntingly aerial grace--at once as strong as ancient battlemented time, and as delicate and haunting as music on a spinet--swept together in a harmonious movement of spaciousness and majesty and graceful loveliness to form a background for the glamorous personality of Francis Starwick.

  Even as he stood there, the rare and solitary distinction of his person was evident as it had never been before. People were streaming out of the museum and down the steps past him--for already it was the closing hour--and as they went by they all looked common, shabby and drearily prosaic by comparison. A middle-aged Frenchman of the middle-class, a chubby, ruddy figure of a man, dressed in cloth of the hard, ugly ill-cut black that this class of Frenchmen wear, came by quickly with his wife, his daughter and his son. The man was driven along by the incessant, hot sugar of that energy which drives the race and which, with its unvaried repetition of oaths, ejaculations, denials, affirmations, and exactitudes, lavished at every minute upon the most trivial episodes of life, can become more drearily tedious than the most banal monotone. Compared with Starwick, his figure was thick, blunt, common in its clumsy shapelessness, and his wife had the same common, swarthy, blunted look. An American came down the steps with his wife: he was neatly dressed in the ugly light-greyish clothes that so many Americans wear, his wife was also neatly turned out with the tedious and metallic stylishness of American apparel. They had the naked, inept and uneasy look of tourists; everything about them seemed troubled and alien to the scene, even to the breezy quality of the air and the soft thick skies about them. When they had descended the steps they paused a moment in a worried and undecided way, the man pulled at his watch and peered at it with his meagre prognathous face, and then said nasally:

  "Well, we told them we'd be there at four-thirty. It's about that now."

  All of these people, young and old, French, American, or of whatever nationality, looked dreary, dull and common, and uneasily out of place when compared with Starwick.

  After a moment's shock of stunned surprise, a drunken surge of impossible joy, Eugene ran towards him shouting, "Frank!"

  Starwick turned, with a startled look upon his face: in a moment the two young men were shaking hands frantically, almost hugging each other in their excitement, both blurting out at once a torrent of words which neither heard. Finally, when they had grown quieter, Eugene found himself saying:

  "But where the hell have you been, Frank? I wrote you twice: didn't you get any of my letters?--what happened to you?--where were you?--did you go down to the South of France to stay with Egan, as you said you would?"

  "Ace," said Starwick--his voice had the same, strangely mannered, unearthly quality it had always had, only it was more mysterious and secretive than ever before--"Ace, I have been there."

  "But why?--" the other began, "why aren't you?--" He paused, looking at Starwick with a startled glance. "What happened, Frank?"

  For, by his few quiet and non-committal words Starwick had managed to convey perfectly the sense of sorrow and tragedy--of a grief so great it could not be spoken, a hurt so deep it could not be told. His whole personality was now pervaded mysteriously by this air of quiet, speechless and incommunicable sorrow; he looked at the other youth with the eyes of Lazarus returned from the tomb, and that glance said more eloquently than any words could ever do that he now knew and understood things which no other mortal man could ever know or understand.

  "I should prefer not to talk about it," he said very quietly, and by these words Eugene understood that some tragic and unutterable event had now irrevocably sundered Starwick from Egan--though what that event might be, he saw it was not given him to know.

  Immediately, however, in his old, casual, and engaging fashion, speaking between lips that barely moved, Starwick said:

  "Look! What are you doing now? Is there any place you have to go?"

  "No. I was just going in here. But I suppose it's too late now, anyway."

  At this moment, indeed, they could hear the bells ringing in the museum, and the voices of the guards, crying impatiently:

  "On ferme! On ferme, messieurs!"--and the people began to pour out in streams.

  "Ace," said Starwick, "they're closing now. Besides," he added wearily, "I shouldn't think it would matter to you, anyway. . . . God!" he cried suddenly, in a high, almost womanish accent of passionate conviction, "what junk! What mountains and oceans of junk! And so bad!" he cried passionately, in his strange, unearthly tone. "So incredibly and impossibly bad. In that whole place there are just three things worth seeing--but they!"--his voice was high again with passionate excitement--"they are unspeakably beautiful, Eugene! God!" he cried, high and passionate again, "how beautiful they are! How utterly, impossibly b
eautiful!" Then with a resumption of his quiet, matter-of-fact tone he said, "You must come here with me some time. I will show them to you. . . . Look!" he said, in his casual tone again, "will you come to the Régence with me and have a drink?"

  The whole earth seemed to come to life at once. Now that Starwick was here, this unfamiliar world, in whose alien life he had struggled like a drowning swimmer, became in a moment wonderful and good. The feeling of numb, nameless terror, rootless desolation, the intolerable sick anguish of homelessness, insecurity, and homesickness, against which he had fought since coming to Paris, and which he had been ashamed and afraid to admit, was now instantly banished. Even the strange dark faces of the French as they streamed past no longer seemed strange, but friendly and familiar, and the moist and languorous air, the soft thick greyness of the skies which had seemed to press down on his naked sides, to permeate his houseless soul like a palpable and viscous substance of numb terror and despair, were now impregnated with all the vital energies of living, with the intoxication of an unspeakable, nameless, infinitely strange and various joy. As they walked across the vast court of the Louvre towards the great arched gateway and all the brilliant traffic of the streets, the enormous dynamic murmur of the mysterious city came to him and stirred his entrails with the sensual premonitions of unknown, glamorous and seductive pleasure. Even the little taxis, boring past with wasp-like speed across the great space of the Louvre and through the sounding arches, now contributed to this sense of excitement, luxury and joy. The shrill and irritating horns sounded constantly through the humid air, and filled his heart with thoughts of New Year: already the whole city seemed astir, alive now with the great carnival of New Year's Eve.