Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
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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 Æschylus,
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