The Web and the Rock

by Thomas Wolfe

  His features, his face, were small, compact--somewhat pug-nosed, the eyes set very deep in beneath heavy brows, the forehead rather low, the hair beginning not far above the brows. When he was listening or talking to someone, his body prowling downward, his head thrust forward and turned upward with a kind of packed attentiveness, the simian analogy was inevitable; therefore the name of "Monk" had stuck. Moreover, it had never occurred to him, apparently, to get his figure clothed in garments suited to his real proportions. He just walked into a store somewhere and picked up and wore out the first thing he could get on. Thus, in a way of which he was not wholly conscious, the element of grotesqueness in him was exaggerated.

  The truth of the matter is that he was not really grotesque at all.

  His dimensions, while unusual and a little startling at first sight, were not abnormal. He was not in any way a freak of nature, although some people might think so. He was simply a youth with big hands and feet, extremely long arms, a trunk somewhat too large and heavy, with legs too short, and features perhaps too small and compact for the big shoulders that supported them. Since he had added to this rather awkward but not distorted figure certain unconscious tricks and mannerisms, such as his habit of carrying his head thrust forward, and of peering upward when he was listening or talking, it was not surprising if the impression he first made on people should sometimes arouse laughter and surprise. Certainly he knew this, and he sometimes furiously and bitterly resented it; but he had never inquired sufficiently or objectively enough into the reasons for it.

  Although he had a very intense and apprehensive eye for the appearance of things, the eager, passionate absorption of his interest and attention was given to the world around him. To his own appearance he had never given a thought. So when, as sometimes happened, the effect he had on people was rudely and brutally forced upon his attention, it threw him into a state of furious anger. For he was young- and had not learned the wisdom and tolerant understanding of experience and maturity. He was young--still over-sensitive. He was young--not able to forget himself, to accept the jokes and badinage good-naturedly. He was young--and did not know that personal beauty is no great virtue in a man, and that this envelope of flesh and blood, in which a spirit happened to be sheathed, could be a loyal and enduring, though ugly, friend.

  All this--and many more important things besides--had got him into a lot of confusion, a lot of torture, and a lot of brute unhappiness.

  And the same thing was happening to a million other young men at that time. Monk was a hard-pressed kid. And because he was hard pressed, he had wangled himself into a lot of nonsense. It wouldn't be true to say, for example, that he hadn't got anything out of his "education." Such as it was, he had got a great deal out of it, but, like most of the "education" of the time, it had been full of waste, foolishness, and misplaced emphasis.

  The plain, blunt truth of the matter was that, essentially, although he did not know it, Monk was an explorer. And so were a million other young people at that time. Well, exploring is a thrilling thing.

  But, even for the physical explorers, it is a hard thing, too. Monk had the true faith, the true heroism, of an explorer. He was a lot more lonely that Columbus ever was, and for this reason he was desperately confused, groping, compromising, and unsure.

  It would be nice to report that he was swift and certain as a flame, always shot true to the mark, and knew what he knew. But this wasn't true. He knew what he knew, but he admitted that he knew it only seldom. Then when he did, he asserted it; like every other kid, he "went to town." He said it, he shot it home, he made no apologies- he was passionate and fierce and proud, and true--but the next morn ing he would wake up feeling that he had made a fool of himself and that he had something to explain.

  He "knew," for example, that freight cars were beautiful; that a spur of rusty box cars on a siding, curving off somewhere into a flat of barren pine and clay, was as beautiful as anything could be, as any thing has ever been. He knew all the depths and levels of it, all the time evocations of it--but he couldn't say so. He hadn't found the language for it. He had even been told, by implication, that it wasn't so. That was where his "education" came in. It wasn't really that his teachers had told him that a freight car was not beautiful. But they had told him that Keats, Shelley, the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis, West minster Abbey, the Louvre, the Isles of Greece, were beautiful. And they had told it to him so often and in such a way that he not only thought it true--which it is--but that these things were everything that beauty is.

  When the freight car occurred to him, he had to argue to himself about it, and then argue with other people about it. Then he would become ashamed of himself and shut up. Like everyone who is a poet, and there really are a lot of poets, he was an immensely practical young man, and suddenly he would get tired of arguing, because he knew there was not anything to argue about, and then shut up.

  Furthermore, he had the sense that some people who said that a freight car was beautiful were fake ïsthetes--which they were. It was a time when smart people were going around saying that ragtime or jazz music were the real American rhythms, and likening them to Beethoven and Wagner; that the comic strip was a true expression of American art; that Charlie Chaplin was really a great tragedian and ought to play Hamlet; that advertising was the only "real" American literature.

  The fellow who went around saying that advertising was the only "real" American literature might be either one of two things: a successful writer or an unsuccessful one. If he was a successful one--a writer, say, of detective stories which had had an enormous vogue and had earned the man a fortune--he had argued himself into believing that he was really a great novelist. But "the times were out of joint," and the reason he did not write great novels was because it was impossible to write great novels in such times: "the genius of America was in advertising," and since there was no use doing anything else, the whole spirit of the times being against it, he had become a writer of successful detective stories.

  That was one form of it. Then there was the fellow who was not quite good enough to be good at anything. He sneered at the writer of detective stories, but he also sneered at Dreiser and O'Neill and Sinclair Lewis and Edwin Arlington Robinson. He was a poet, or a novelist, or a critic, or a member of Professor George Pierce Baker's playwriting class at Harvard or at Yale, but nothing that he did came off; and the reason that it didn't was because "the times were out of joint," and "the real literature of America was in the advertising in popular magazines." So this fellow sneered at everything from a superior elevation. Dreiser, Lewis, Robinson, O'Neill, and the advertising in the Saturday Evening Post were all the same, really--"Plus ïa change, plus c'est la mïme chose."

  At that time in George Webber's life, amidst all the nonsense, con fusion, torture, and brute unhappiness that he was subject to, he was for the first time trying to articulate something immense and terrible in life which he had always known and felt, and for which he thought he must now find some speech, or drown. And yet it seemed that this thing which was so immense could have no speech, that it burst through the limits of all recorded languages, and that it could never be rounded, uttered, and contained in words. It was a feeling that every man on earth held in the little tenement of his flesh and spirit the whole ocean of human life and time, and that he must drown in this ocean unless, somehow, he "got it out of him"--unless he mapped and charted it, fenced and defined it, plumbed it to its uttermost depths, and knew it to its smallest pockets upon the remotest shores of the everlasting earth.

  The greater part of his life had been lived in the confines of a little town, but he now saw plainly that he could never live long enough to tell the thousandth part of all he knew about its life and people--a knowledge that was not merely encyclopïdic and mountainous, but that was as congruent and single as one gigantic plant, which was alive in all its million roots and branches, and must be shown so, or not at all. It now seemed that what had been given to him was not only his father's sturdy, soli
d power, but that all the million fibrous arms and branches of his Joyner blood, which had sprung from the everlasting earth, growing, thrusting, pushing, spreading out its octopal feelers in unceasing weft and thread, were also rooted into the structure of his life; and that this dark inheritance of blood and pas sion, of fixity and unceasing variousness, of wandering forever and the earth again--this strange legacy which by its power and richness might have saved him and given him the best life anyone had ever had--had now burst from the limits of his control and was going to tear him to pieces, limb from limb, like maddened horses running wild.

  His memory, which had always been encyclopïdic, so that he could remember in their minutest details and from his earliest years of childhood all that people had said and done and all that had happened at any moment, had been so whetted, sharpened, and enlarged by his years away from home, so stimulated by his reading and by a terrible hunger that drove him through a thousand streets, staring with madman's eyes into a million faces, listening with madman's cars to a million words, that it had now become, instead of a mighty weapon with a blade of razored sharpness which he might use magnificently to his life's advantage, a gigantic, fibrous, million-rooted plant of time which spread and flowered like a cancerous growth. It mastered his will and fed on his entrails until he lost the power to act and lay inert in its tentacles, while all his soaring projects came to naught, and hours, days, months, and years flowed by him like a dream.

  The year before he had grown sick and weary in his heart of his clumsy attempts to write. He began to see that nothing he wrote had anything to do with what he had seen and felt and known, and that he might as well try to pour the ocean in a sanitary drinking cup as try to put the full and palpable integument of human life into such efforts. So now, for the first time, he tried to set down a fractional part of his vision of the earth. For some time, a vague but powerful unrest had urged him on to the attempt, and now, without knowledge or experience, but with some uneasy premonition of the terrific labor he was attempting to accomplish, he began--deliberately choosing a subject that seemed so modest and limited in its proportions that he thought he could complete it with the greatest case. The subject he chose for his first effort was a boy's vision of life over a ten-month period between his twelfth and thirteenth year, and the title was, "The End of the Golden Weather."

  By this title he meant to describe that change in the color of life which every child has known--the change from the enchanted light and weather of his soul, the full golden light, the magic green and gold in which he sees the earth in childhood, and, far away, the fabulous vision of the golden city, blazing forever in his vision and at the end of all his dreams, in whose enchanted streets he thinks that he shall some day walk a conqueror, a proud and honored figure in a life more glorious, fortunate, and happy than any he has ever known.

  In this brief story he prepared to tell how, at this period in a child's life, this strange and magic light--this "golden weather"--begins to change, and, for the first time, some of the troubling weathers of a man's soul are revealed to him; and how, for the first time, he be comes aware of the thousand changing visages of time; and how his clear and radiant legend of the earth is, for the first time, touched with confusion and bewilderment, menaced by terrible depths and enigmas of experience he has never known before. He wanted to tell the story of this year exactly as he remembered it, and with all the things and people he had known that year.

  Accordingly, he began to write about it, starting the story at three o'clock in the afternoon in the yard before his uncle's house.

  Jerry Alsop was changing. More than any of the others, he had plunged into the sea of life. As he said, his "sphere had widened," and now it was ready to burst through the little clinging circle he had so carefully built up around himself. His disciples hung on for a time, then, one by one, like leaves straying in a swirling flood, were swept away. And Alsop let them go. The truth was that the constant devotions of the old fellowship had begun to bore him. He was heard to mutter that he was getting "damned tired of having the place used as a clubhouse all the time."

  There was a final scene with Monk. The younger man's first story had been rejected, and a word that Monk had spoken had come back to Alsop and stung him. It was some bitter, youthful word, spoken with youth's wounded vanity, about "the artist" in a "world of Philis tines," and of the artist's "right." The foolish word, just salve to wounded pride, with its arrogant implication of superiority, infuri ated Alsop. But, characteristically, when he saw Monk again he did not make the direct attack. Instead, he referred venomously to a book that he had been reading by one of the ïsthetic critics of the period, putting into his mouth, exaggerating and destroying, the foolish words of wounded vanity and youth.

  "I'm an artist,'" Alsop sneered. "'I'm better than these God-damned other people. Philistines can't understand me.'"

  He laughed venomously, and then, his pale eyes narrowed into slits, he said: "Do you know what he is? He's just an ass! A man who'd talk that way is just a complete ass! 'An artist!'" and again he laughed sneeringly, "My God!"

  His eyes were really now so full of rancor and injured selfesteem that the other knew it was the end. There was no further warmth of friendship here. He, too, felt a cold fury: envenomed words rose to his lips, he wanted to sneer, to stab, to ridicule and mock as Alsop had; a poison of cold anger sweltered in his heart, but when he got up his lips were cold and dry, he said stiffly: "Good-bye."

  And he went out from that basement room forever.

  Alsop said nothing, but sat there with a pale smile on his face, a feeling of bitter triumph gnawing at his heart that was its own reprisal. As the lost disciple closed the door, he heard for the last time the jeering words: "'An artist!' Jesus Christi!"--then the choking fury of his belly laugh.

  Jim Randolph felt for the four youths who lived with him a paternal affection. He governed them, he directed them, as a father might direct the destinies of his own sons. He was always the first one up in the morning. He needed very little sleep, no matter how late he had been up the night before. Four or five hours' sleep always seemed to be enough for him. He would bathe, shave, dress himself, put coffee on to boil, then he would come and wake the others up. He would stand in the doorway looking at them, smiling a little, with his powerful hands arched lightly on his hips. Then in a soft, vibrant, and strangely tender tone he would sing: "Get up, get up, you lazy devils. Get up, get up, it's break o' day."

  Jim would cast his head back and laugh a little. "That's the song my father used to sing to me every morning when I was a kid way down there in Ashley County, South Carolina.... All right," he now said, matter-of-factly, and with a tone of quiet finality and command: "You boys get up. It's almost half-past eight. Come on, get dressed now.

  You've slept long enough."

  They would get up then--all except Monty, who did not go to work till five o'clock in the afternoon; he was employed in a midtown hotel and didn't get home until one or two o'clock in the morning.

  Their governor allowed him to sleep later, and, in fact, quietly but sternly enjoined them to silence in order that Monty's rest be not disturbed.

  Jim himself would be out of the place and away by eight-thirty. He was gone all day.

  They ate together a great deal at the apartment. They liked the life, its community of fellowship and of comfort. It was tacitly assumed that they would gather together in the evening and formulate a pro gram for the night. Jim, as usual, ruled the roost. They never knew what his plans were. They awaited his arrival with expectancy and sharp interest.

  At six-thirty his key would rattle in the lock. He would come in, hang up his hat, and without preliminary say with authority: "All right, boys. Dig down in your pockets, now. Everyone's chip. ping in with fifty cents."

  "What for, for God's sake?" someone would protest.

  "For the best damn steak you ever sunk yo' teeth into," Jim would say. "I saw it in the butcher shop as I came by. We're going to have a six-pou
nd sirloin for supper tonight or I miss my guess.... Perce," he said, "you go to the grocery store and buy the fixings. Get us two loaves of bread, a pound of butter, and ten cents' worth of grits.

  We've got potatoes.... Monk," he said, "you get busy and peel those potatoes, and don't cut away two-thirds of 'em like you did last time.

  I'm going to get the steak," he said, "I'll cook the steak. That nurse of mine is coming over. She said she'll make biscuits."

  And, having instantly energized the evening and dispatched them on the commission of their respective duties, he went off upon his own.

  They were constantly having girls in. Each of them would bring in recruits of his own discovery, and Jim, of course, knew dozens of them. God knows where he picked them up or when he found the time and opportunity to meet them, but women swarmed around him like bees around a honeycomb. He always had a new one. He brought them in singly, doubly, by squadrons, and by scores. It was a motley crew. They ranged all the way from trained nurses, for whom he seemed to have a decided flair, to shop girls and stenographers, wait resses in Childs restaurants, Irish girls from the remotest purlieus of Brooklyn, inclined to rowdy outcries in their drink, to chorines, both past and present, and the strip woman of a burlesque show.