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

The gymnasium was thick with the smell of steam and of sweating men coming in to the showers from the playing fields. Washed, with opened shirt, Eugene walked slowly away into the green budding shade of the campus, companioned by an acquaintance, Ralph Hendrix.

“Look!” said Ralph Hendrix, in a low angry tone. “Look at that, will you!” He nodded toward a group of students ahead. “That little Horse’s Neck is booting the Dekes all over the campus.”

Eugene looked, then turned to examine the bitter common face beside him. Every Saturday night, after the meeting of the literary society, Ralph Hendrix went to the drug-store and bought two cheap cigars. He had bent narrow shoulders, a white knobby face, and a low forehead. He spoke in a monotonous painful drawl. His father was foreman in a cotton mill.

“They’re all Horse’s Necks,” he said. “They can go to hell before I’ll boot to get in.”

“Yes,” said Eugene.

But he wanted to get in. He wanted to be urbane and careless. He wanted to wear well-cut clothes. He wanted to be a gentleman. He wanted to go to war.

On the central campus, several students who had been approved by the examining board, descended from the old dormitories, bearing packed valises. They turned down under the trees, walking toward the village street. From time to time they threw up an arm in farewell.

“So long, boys! See you in Berlin.” The shining and dividing sea was closer and not so wide.

He read a great deal — but at random, for pleasure. He read Defoe, Smollet, Stern, and Fielding — the fine salt of the English novel lost, during the reign of the Widow of Windsor, beneath an ocean of tea and molasses. He read the tales of Boccaccio, and all that remained of a tattered copy of the Heptameron. At Buck Benson’s suggestion, he read Murray’s Euripides (at the time he was reading the Greek text of the Alcestis — noblest and loveliest of all the myths of Love and Death). He saw the grandeur of the Prometheus fable — but the fable moved him more than the play of Æschylus. In fact, Æschylus he found sublime — and dull: he could not understand his great reputation. Rather — he could. He was Literature — a writer of masterpieces. He was almost as great a bore as Cicero — that windy old moralist who came out so boldly in favor of Old Age and Friendship. Sophocles was an imperial poet — he spoke like God among flashes of lightning: the �dipus Rex is not only one of the greatest plays in the world, it is one of the greatest stories. This story — perfect, inevitable, and fabulous — wreaked upon him the nightmare coincidence of Destiny. It held him birdlike before its great snake-eye of wisdom and horror. And Euripides (whatever the disparagement of pedantry) he thought one of the greatest lyrical singers in all poetry.

He liked all weird fable and wild invention, in prose or verse, from the Golden Ass to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the chief prince of the moon and magic. But he liked the fabulous wherever he found it, and for whatever purpose.

The best fabulists have often been the greatest satirists: satire (as with Aristophanes, Voltaire, and Swift) is a high and subtle art, quite beyond the barnyard snipings and wholesale geese-slaughterings of the present degenerate age. Great satire needs the sustenance of great fable. Swift’s power of invention is incomparable: there’s no better fabulist in the world.

He read Poe’s stories, Frankenstein, and the plays of Lord Dunsany. He read Sir Gawayne and the Greene Knight and the Book of Tobit. He did not want his ghosts and marvels explained. Magic was magic. He wanted old ghosts — not Indian ghosts, but ghosts in armor, the spirit of old kings, and pillioned ladies with high coned hats. Then, for the first time, he thought of the lonely earth he dwelt on. Suddenly, it was strange to him that he should read Euripides there in the wilderness.

Around him lay the village; beyond, the ugly rolling land, sparse with cheap farmhouses; beyond all this, America — more land, more wooden houses, more towns, hard and raw and ugly. He was reading Euripides, and all around him a world of white and black was eating fried food. He was reading of ancient sorceries and old ghosts, but did an old ghost ever come to haunt this land? The ghost of Hamlet’s Father, in Connecticut.

“. . . . . . I am thy father’s spirit,

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night

Between Bloomington and Portland, Maine.”

He felt suddenly the devastating impermanence of the nation. Only the earth endured — the gigantic American earth, bearing upon its awful breast a world of flimsy rickets. Only the earth endured — this broad terrific earth that had no ghosts to haunt it. Stogged in the desert, half-broken and overthrown, among the columns of lost temples strewn, there was no ruined image of Menkaura, there was no alabaster head of Akhnaton. Nothing had been done in stone. Only this earth endured, upon whose lonely breast he read Euripides. Within its hills he had been held a prisoner; upon its plain he walked, alone, a stranger.

O God! O God! We have been an exile in another land and a stranger in our own. The mountains were our masters: they went home to our eye and our heart before we came to five. Whatever we can do or say must be forever hillbound. Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget. We walked along a road in Cumberland, and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough. And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near. And the old hunger returned — the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go.

Eliza visited Helen in Sydney in the Spring. The girl was quieter, sadder, more thoughtful than she had ever been. She was subdued by the new life: chastened by her obscurity. She missed Gant more than she would confess. She missed the mountain town.

“What do you have to pay for this place?” said Eliza, looking around critically.

“Fifty dollars a month,” said Helen.

“Furnished?”

“No, we had to buy furniture.”

“I tell you what, that’s pretty high,” said Eliza, “just for down stairs. I believe rents are lower at home.”

“Yes, I know it’s high,” said Helen. “But good heavens, mama! Do you realize that this is the best neighborhood in town? We’re only two blocks from the Governor’s Mansion, you know. Mrs. Mathews is no common boarding-house keeper, I can assure you! No sir!” she exclaimed, laughing. “She’s a real swell — goes to all the big functions and gets in the papers all the time. You know Hugh and I have got to try to keep up appearances. He’s a young man just starting out here.”

“Yes. I know,” Eliza agreed thoughtfully. “How’s he been doing?”

“O’Toole says he’s the best agent he’s got,” said Helen. “Hugh’s all right. We could get along together anywhere, as long as there’s no damned family about. It makes me furious at times to see him slaving to feather O’Toole’s pockets. He works like a dog. You know, O’Toole gets a commission on every sale he makes. And Mrs. O’T. and those two girls ride around in a big car and never turn their hands over. They’re Catholics, you know, but they get to go everywhere.”

“I tell you what,” said Eliza with a timid half-serious smile, “it might not be a bad idea if Hugh became his own boss. There’s no use doing it all for the other fellow. Say, child!” she exclaimed, “why wouldn’t it be a good idea if he tried to get the Altamont agency? I don’t believe that fellow they’ve got is much account. He could get it without trying.”