Look Homeward, Angel

by Thomas Wolfe

  He knew nothing of the Elizabethan drama beyond Shakespeare's plays. But he very early came to know a little of the poetry of Ben Jonson, whom Margaret looked on as a literary Falstaff, condoning, with the familiar weakness of the schoolmarm, his Gargantuan excess as a pardonable whimsy of genius.

  She was somewhat academically mirthful over the literary bacchanalia, as a professor in a Baptist college smacks his lips appetizingly and beams ruddily at his classes when he reads of sack and porter and tankards foaming with the musty ale. All this is part of the liberal tradition. Men of the world are broadminded. Witness Professor Albert Thorndyke Firkins, of the University of Chicago, at the Falcon in Soho. Smiling bravely, he sits over a half-pint of bitter beer, in the company of a racing tout, a sway- backed barmaid, broad in the stern, with adjustable teeth, and three companionable tarts from Lisle street, who are making the best of two pints of Guinness. With eager impatience he awaits the arrival of G. K. Chesterton and E. V. Lucas.

  "O rare Ben Jonson!" Margaret Leonard sighed with gentle laughter. "Ah, Lord!"

  "My God, boy!" Sheba roared, snatching the suggested motif of conversation out of the air, and licking her buttered fingers noisily as she stormed into action. "God bless him!" Her hairy red face burned like clover, her veinous eyes were tearful bright. "God bless him, 'Gene! He was as English as roast beef and a tankard of musty ale!"

  "Ah, Lord!" sighed Margaret. "He was a genius if ever there was one." With misty eyes she gazed far off, a thread of laughter on her mouth. "Whee!" she laughed gently. "Old Ben!"

  "And say, 'Gene!" Sheba continued, bending forward with a fat hand gripped upon her knee. "Do you know that the greatest tribute to Shakespeare's genius is from his hand?"

  "Ah, I tell you, boy!" said Margaret, with darkened eyes. Her voice was husky. He was afraid she was going to weep.

  "And yet the fools!" Sheba yelled. "The mean little two-by-two pusillanimous swill-drinking fools--"

  "Whee!" gently Margaret moaned. John Dorsey turned his chalk-white face to the boy and whined with vacant appreciation, winking his head pertly. Ah absently!

  "--for that's all they are, have had the effrontery to suggest that he was jealous."

  "Pshaw!" said Margaret impatiently. "There's nothing in that."

  "Why, they don't know what they're talking about!" Sheba turned a sudden grinning face upon him. "The little upstarts! It takes us to tell 'em, 'Gene," she said.

  He began to slide floorwards out of the wicker chair. John Dorsey slapped his meaty thigh, and bent forward whining inchoately, drooling slightly at the mouth.

  "The Lord a' mercy!" he wheezed, gasping.

  "I was talking to a feller the other day," said Sheba, "a lawyer that you'd think might know a LITTLE something, and I used a quotation out of The Merchant of Venice that every schoolboy knows--'The quality of mercy is not strained.' The man looked at me as if he thought I was crazy!"

  "Great heavens!" said Margaret in a still voice.

  "I said, 'Look here, Mr. So-and-so, you may be a smart lawyer, you may have your million dollars that they say you have, but there are a lot of things you don't know yet. There are a lot of things money can't buy, my sonny, and one of them is the society of cult-shered men and women.'"

  "Why, pshaw!" said Mr. Leonard. "What do these little whipper-snappers know about the things of the mind? You might as well expect some ignorant darky out in the fields to construe a passage in Homer." He grasped a glass half full of clabber, on the table, and tilting it intently in his chalky fingers, spooned out a lumpy spilth of curds which he slid, quivering, into his mouth. "No, sir!" he laughed. "They may be Big Men on the tax collector's books, but when they try to associate with educated men and women, as the feller says, 'they--they--'" he began to whine, "'why, they just ain't nothin'.'"

  "What shall it profit a man," said Sheba, "if he gain the whole world, and lose--"

  "Ah, Lord!" sighed Margaret, shaking her smoke-dark eyes. "I tell you!"

  She told him. She told him of the Swan's profound knowledge of the human heart, his universal and well-rounded characterization, his enormous humor.

  "Fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock!" She laughed. "The fat rascal! Imagine a man keeping the time!"

  And, carefully: "It was the custom of the time, 'Gene. As a matter of fact, when you read some of the plays of his contemporaries you see how much purer he is than they are." But she avoided a word, a line, here and there. The slightly spotty Swan?muddied a little by custom. Then, too, the Bible.

  The smoky candle-ends of time. Parnassus As Seen From Mount Sinai: Lecture with lantern-slides by Professor McTavish (D.D.) of Presbyterian College.

  "And observe, Eugene," she said, "he never made vice attractive."

  "Why didn't he?" he asked. "There's Falstaff."

  "Yes," she replied, "and you know what happened to him, don't you?"

  "Why," he considered, "he died!"

  "You see, don't you?" she concluded, with triumphant warning.

  I see, don't I? The wages of sin. What, by the way, are the wages of virtue? The good die young.

  Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo!

  I really feel so blue!

  I was given to crime,

  And cut off in my prime

  When only eighty-two.

  "Then, note," she said, "how none of his characters stand still. You can see them grow, from first to last. No one is the same at the end as he was in the beginning."

  In the beginning was the word. I am Alpha and Omega. The growth of Lear. He grew old and mad. There's growth for you.

  This tin-currency of criticism she had picked up in a few courses at college, and in her reading. They were--are, perhaps, still--part of the glib jargon of pedants. But they did her no real injury. They were simply the things people said. She felt, guiltily, that she must trick out her teaching with these gauds: she was afraid that what she had to offer was not enough. What she had to offer was simply a feeling that was so profoundly right, so unerring, that she could no more utter great verse meanly than mean verse well. She was a voice that God seeks. She was the reed of demonic ecstasy. She was possessed, she knew not how, but she knew the moment of her possession. The singing tongues of all the world were wakened into life again under the incantation of her voice. She was inhabited. She was spent.

  She passed through their barred and bolted boy-life with the direct stride of a spirit. She opened their hearts as if they had been lockets. They said: "Mrs. Leonard is sure a nice lady."

  He knew some of Ben Jonson's poems, including the fine Hymn to Diana, "Queen and huntress, chaste and fair," and the great tribute to Shakespeare which lifted his hair at

  ". . . But call forth thundering é

  Euripides and Sophocles to us."--

  and caught at his throat at:

  "He was not for an age, but for all time!

  And all the Muses still were in their prime . . ."

  The elegy to little Salathiel Pavy, the child actor, was honey from the lion's mouth. But it was too long.

  Of Herrick, sealed of the tribe of Ben, he knew much more. The poetry sang itself. It was, he thought later, the most perfect and unfailing lyrical voice in the language--a clean, sweet, small, unfaltering note. It is done with the incomparable ease of an inspired child. The young men and women of our century have tried to recapture it, as they have tried to recapture Blake and, a little more successfully, Donne.

  Here a little child I stand

  Heaving up my either hand;

  Cold as paddocks though they be,

  Here I lift them up to Thee,

  For a benison to fall

  On our meat and on us all. Amen.

  There was nothing beyond this--nothing that surpassed it in precision, delicacy, and wholeness.

  Their names dropped musically like small fat bird-notes through the freckled sunlight of a young world: prophetically he brooded on the sweet lost bird-cries of their names, knowing they never would return. Herrick, Crashaw, Carew
, Suckling, Campion, Lovelace, Dekker. O sweet content, O sweet, O sweet content!

  He read shelves of novels: all of Thackeray, all the stories of Poe and Hawthorne, and Herman Melville's Omoo and Typee, which he found at Gant's. Of Moby Dick he had never heard. He read a half-dozen Coopers, all of Mark Twain, but failed to finish a single book of Howells or James.

  He read a dozen of Scott, and liked best of all Quentin Durward, because the descriptions of food were as beautiful and appetizing as any he had ever read.

  Eliza went to Florida again during his fourteenth year and left him to board with the Leonards. Helen was drifting, with crescent weariness and fear, through the cities of the East and Middle-West. She sang for several weeks in a small cabaret in Baltimore, she moved on to Philadelphia and thumped out popular tunes on a battered piano at the music counter of a five and ten cent store, with studious tongue out-thrust as she puzzled through new scores.

  Gant wrote her faithfully twice a week--a blue but copious log of existence. Occasionally he enclosed small checks, which she saved, uncashed.

  "Your mother," he wrote, "has gone off on another wild-goose chase to Florida, leaving me here alone to face the music, freeze, or starve. God knows what we'll all come to before the end of this fearful, hellish, and damnable winter, but I predict the poorhouse and soup-kitchens like we had in the Cleveland administration. When the Democrats are in, you may as well begin to count your ribs. The banks have no money, people are out of work. You can mark my words everything will go to the tax-collector under the hammer before we're done. The temperature was 7 above when I looked this morning, coal has gone up seventy-five cents a ton. The Sunny South. Keep off the grass said Bill Nye. Jesus God! I passed the Southern Fuel Co. yesterday and saw old Wagner at the window with a fiendish smile of gloatation on his face as he looked out on the sufferings of the widows and orphans. Little does he care if they all freeze. Bob Grady dropped dead Tuesday morning as he was coming out of the Citizen's Bank. I had known him twenty-five years. He'd never been sick a day in his life. All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. Old Gant will be the next. I have been eating at Mrs. Sales' since your mother went away. You've never seen such a table as she keeps in your life--a profusion of fruits piled up in pyramids, stewed prunes, peaches, and preserves, big roasts of pork, beef, lamb, cold cuts of ham and tongue, and a half dozen vegetables in an abundance that beggars description. How in God's name she does it for thirty-five cents I don't know. Eugene is staying with the Leonards while your mother's away. I take him up to Sales' with me once or twice a week and give him a square meal. They look mighty serious when they see those long legs coming. God knows where he puts it all--he can eat more than any three people I ever saw. I suppose he gets pretty lean pickings at the school. He's got the lean and hungry Gant look. Poor child. He has no mother any more. I'll do the best I can for him until the smash comes. Leonard comes and brags about him every week. He says his equal is not to be found anywhere. Every one in town has heard of him. Preston Carr (who's sure to be the next governor) was talking to me about him the other day. He wants me to send him to the State university law school where he will make lifelong friends among the people of his own State, and then put him into politics. It's what I should have done. I'm going to give him a good education. The rest is up to him. Perhaps he'll be a credit to the name. You haven't seen him since he put on long pants. His mother picked out a beautiful suit at Moale's Christmas. He went down to Daisy's for Christmas and put them on. I bought him a cheap pair at the Racket Store for every-day wear. He can save the good ones for Sunday. Your mother has let the Old Barn to Mrs. Revell until she gets back. I went in the other day and found it warm for the first time in my life. She keeps the furnace going and she's not afraid to burn coal. I hardly ever see Ben from one week to another. He comes in and prowls around in the kitchen at one and two o'clock in the morning and I'm up and gone hours before he's awake. You can get nothing out of him--he never says a half-dozen words and if you ask him a civil question he cuts you off short. I see him down-town late at night sometimes with Mrs. P. They're thick as thieves together. I guess she's a bad egg. This is all for this time. John Duke was shot and killed by the house detective at the Whitstone hotel Sunday night. He was drunk and threatening to shoot every one. It's a sad thing for his wife. He left three children. She was in to see me to-day. He was well-liked by every one but a terror when he drank. My heart bled for her. She's a pretty little woman. Liquor has caused more misery than all the other evils in the world put together. I curse the day it was first invented. Enclosed find a small check to buy yourself a present. God knows what we're coming to.

  Aff. Your Father,

  W. O. Gant."

  She saved carefully all his letters--written on his heavy slick business stationery in the huge Gothic sprawl of his crippled right hand.

  In Florida, meanwhile, Eliza surged up and down the coast, stared thoughtfully at the ungrown town of Miami, found prices too high at Palm Beach, rents too dear at Daytona, and turned inland at length to Orlando, where, groved round with linked lakes and citrous fruits, the Pentlands waited her approach, Pett, with a cold lust of battle on her face, Will with a grimace of itching nervousness while he scaled stubbily at the flaky tetter of his hand.

  24

  With thick chalked fingers John Dorsey thoughtfully massaged his torso from loin to chin.

  "Now, let me see," he whined with studious deliberation, "what he gives on this." He fumbled for the notes.

  Tom Davis turned his reddening cheeks toward the window, a low sputter of laughter escaping from his screwed lips.

  Guy Doak gazed solemnly at Eugene, with a forked hand stroking his grave pallid face.

  "Entgegen," said Eugene, in a small choked voice, "follows its object."

  John Dorsey laughed uncertainly, and shook his head, still searching the notes.

  "I'm not so sure of that," he said.

  Their wild laughter leaped like freed hounds. Tom Davis hurled himself violently downward over his desk. John Dorsey looked up, adding uncertainly his absent falsetto mirth.

  From time to time, in spite of himself, they taught him a little German, a language of which he had been quite happily ignorant. The lesson had become for them a daily hunger: they worked it over with mad intensity, speeding and polishing their translation in order to enjoy his bewilderment. Sometimes, deliberately, they salted their pages with glib false readings, sometimes they interpolated passages of wild absurdity, waiting exultantly for his cautious amendment of a word that did not exist.

  "Slowly the moonlight crept up the chair in which the old man was sitting, reaching his knees, his breast, and finally,"--Guy Doak looked up slyly at his tutor, "giving him a good punch in the eye."

  "No-o," said John Dorsey, rubbing his chin, "not exactly. 'Catching him squarely in the eye' gets the idiom better, I think."

  Tom Davis thrust a mouthful of strange gurgling noises into his desk, and waited for the classic evasion. It came at once.

  "Let me see," said John Dorsey, turning the pages, "what he gives on this."

  Guy Doak scrawled a brief message across a crumpled wad and thrust it on Eugene's desk. Eugene read:

  "Gebe mir ein Stuck Papier,

  Before I bust you on the ear."

  He detached two slick sheets from his tablet, and wrote in answer:

  "Du bist wie eine bum-me."

  They read sweet gluey little stories, fat German tear-gulps: Immensee, Hé als die Kirche, Der Zerbrochene Krug. Then, Wilhelm Tell. The fine lyrical measure of the opening song, the unearthly siren song to the fisher-boy, haunted them with its faery music. The heavy melodrama of some of the scenes was unhackneyed to them: they bent eagerly to the apple-shooting scene, and the escape by boat. As for the rest, it was, they wearily recognized, Great Literature. Mr. Schiller, they saw, was religiously impressed, like Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Paul Revere, with the beauties of Liberty. His embattled Swiss bounded ponderously from crag to crag
, invoking it in windy speeches.

  "The mountains," observed John Dorsey, touched, in a happy moment, by the genius of the place, "have been the traditional seat of Liberty."

  Eugene turned his face toward the western ranges. He heard, far off, a whistle, a remote, thunder on the rails.

  During this season of Eliza's absence he roomed with Guy Doak.

  Guy Doak was five years his senior. He was a native of Newark, New Jersey: his speech was touched with Yankee nasality, his manner with Yankee crispness. His mother, a boarding-house mistress, had come to Altamont a year or two before to retrieve her health: she was tubercular, and spent part of the winter in Florida.

  Guy Doak had a trim cocky figure of medium height, black hair, bright dark eyes, a pale, very smooth oval face, somehow suggestive, Eugene thought, of a fish's belly, with somewhat unhappily full jaws which made his lower features seem larger than his upper. He was foppishly neat in his dress. People called him a good-looking boy.

  He made few friends. To the boys at Leonard's this Yankee was far more remote than the rich Cuban boy, Manuel Quevado, whose fat dark laughter and broken speech was all for girls. He belonged to a richer South, but they knew him.

  Guy Doak had none of their floridity. He was lacking in their hearty violence. He did not laugh loudly. He had a sharp, bright, shallow mind, inflexibly dogmatic. His companions were bad Southern romantics, he was a false Yankee realist. They arrived, thus, by different means, at a common goal of superstition. Guy Doak had already hardened into the American city-dweller's mould of infantile cynicism. He was occasionally merry with the other boys in the classic manner of the city fellow with the yokels. He was wise. Above all, he was wise. It was safe to assume, he felt, that Truth was always on the scaffold, and Wrong forever on the throne. So far from being depressed by the slaughter of the innocents, the spectacle gave him much bitter amusement.