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

In the cruel volcano of the boy’s mind, the little brier moths of his idolatry wavered in to their strange marriage and were consumed. One by one the merciless years reaped down his gods and captains. What had lived up to hope? What had withstood the scourge of growth and memory? Why had the gold become so dim? All of his life, it seemed, his blazing loyalties began with men and ended with images; the life he leaned on melted below his weight, and looking down, he saw he clasped a statue; but enduring, a victorious reality amid his shadow-haunted heart, she remained, who first had touched his blinded eyes with light, who nested his hooded houseless soul. She remained.

O death in life that turns our men to stone! O change that levels down our gods! If only one lives yet, above the cinders of the consuming years, shall not this dust awaken, shall not dead faith revive, shall we not see God again, as once in morning, on the mountain? Who walks with us on the hills?

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Eugene spent the next four years of his life in Leonard’s school. Against the bleak horror of Dixieland, against the dark road of pain and death down which the great limbs of Gant had already begun to slope, against all the loneliness and imprisonment of his own life which had gnawed him like hunger, these years at Leonard’s bloomed like golden apples.

From Leonard he got little — a dry campaign over an arid waste of Latin prose: first, a harsh, stiff, unintelligent skirmishing among the rules of grammar, which frightened and bewildered him needlessly, and gave him for years an unhealthy dislike of syntax, and an absurd prejudice against the laws on which the language was built. Then, a year’s study of the lean, clear precision of Cæsar, the magnificent structure of the style — the concision, the skeleton certainty, deadened by the disjointed daily partition, the dull parsing, the lumbering cliché of pedantic translation:

“Having done all things that were necessary, and the season now being propitious for carrying on war, Cæsar began to arrange his legions in battle array.”

All the dark pageantry of war in Gaul, the thrust of the Roman spear through the shield of hide, the barbaric parleys in the forests, and the proud clangor of triumph — all that might have been supplied in the story of the great realist, by one touch of the transforming passion with which a great teacher projects his work, was lacking.

Instead, glibly, the wheels ground on into the hard rut of method and memory. March 12, last year — three days late. Cogitata. Neut. pl. of participle used as substantive. Quo used instead of ut to express purpose when comparative follows. Eighty lines for tomorrow.

They spent a weary age, two years, on that dull dog, Cicero. De Senectute. De Amicitia. They skirted Virgil because John Dorsey Leonard was a bad sailor — he was not at all sure of Virgilian navigation. He hated exploration. He distrusted voyages. Next year, he said. And the great names of Ovid, lord of the elves and gnomes, the Bacchic piper of Amores, or of Lucretius, full of the rhythm of tides. Nox est perpetua.

“Huh?” drawled Mr. Leonard, vacantly beginning to laugh. He was fingermarked with chalk from chin to crotch. Stephen (“Pap”) Rheinhart leaned forward gently and fleshed his penpoint in Eugene Gant’s left rump. Eugene grunted painfully.

“Why, no,” said Mr. Leonard, stroking his chin. “A different sort of Latin.”

“What sort?” Tom Davis insisted. “Harder than Cicero?”

“Well,” said Mr. Leonard, dubiously, “different. A little beyond you at present.”

“— est perpetua. Una dormienda. Luna dies et nox.”

“Is Latin poetry hard to read?” Eugene said.

“Well,” said Mr. Leonard, shaking his head. “It’s not easy. Horace —” he began carefully.

“He wrote Odes and Epodes,” said Tom Davis. “What is an Epode, Mr. Leonard?”

“Why,” said Mr. Leonard reflectively, “it’s a form of poetry.”

“Hell!” said “Pap” Rheinhart in a rude whisper to Eugene. “I knew that before I paid tuition.”

Smiling lusciously, and stroking himself with gentle fingers, Mr. Leonard turned back to the lesson.

“Now let me see,” he began.

“Who was Catullus?” Eugene shouted violently. Like a flung spear in his brain, the name.

“He was a poet,” Mr. Leonard answered thoughtlessly, quickly, startled. He regretted.

“What sort of poetry did he write?” asked Eugene.

There was no answer.

“Was it like Horace?”

“No-o,” said Mr. Leonard reflectively. “It wasn’t exactly like Horace.”

“What was it like?” said Tom Davis. “Like your granny’s gut,” “Pap” Rheinhart toughly whispered.

“Why — he wrote on topics of general interest in his day,” said Mr. Leonard easily.

“Did he write about being in love?” said Eugene in a quivering voice.

Tom Davis turned a surprised face on him. “Gre-a-at Day!” he exclaimed, after a moment. Then he began to laugh.

“He wrote about being in love,” Eugene cried with sudden certain passion. “He wrote about being in love with a lady named Lesbia. Ask Mr. Leonard if you don’t believe me.”

They turned thirsty faces up to him.

“Why — no — yes — I don’t know about all that,” said Mr. Leonard, challengingly, confused. “Where’d you hear all this, boy?”

“I read it in a book,” said Eugene, wondering where. Like a flung spear, the name.

— Whose tongue was fanged like a serpent, flung spear of ecstasy and passion.

Odi et amo: quore id faciam . . .

“Well, not altogether,” said Mr. Leonard. “Some of them,” he conceded.

. . . fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

“Who was she?” said Tom Davis.

“Oh, it was the custom in those days,” said Mr. Leonard carelessly. “Like Dante and Beatrice. It was a way the poet had of paying a compliment.”

The serpent whispered. There was a distillation of wild exultancy in his blood. The rags of obedience, servility, reverential awe dropped in a belt around him.

“She was a man’s wife!” he said loudly. “That’s who she was.”

Awful stillness.

“Why — here — who told you that?” said Mr. Leonard, bewildered, but considering matrimony a wild and possibly dangerous myth. “Who told you, boy?”

“What was she, then?” said Tom Davis pointedly.

“Why — not exactly,” Mr. Leonard murmured, rubbing his chin.

“She was a Bad Woman,” said Eugene. Then, most desperately, he added: “She was a Little Chippie.”

“Pap” Rheinhart drew in his breath sharply.

“What’s that, what’s that, what’s that?” cried Mr. Leonard rapidly when he could speak. Fury boiled up in him. He sprang from his chair. “What did you say, boy?”

But he thought of Margaret and looked down, with a sudden sense of palsy, into the white ruination of boy-face. Too far beyond. He sat down again, shaken.

— Whose foulest cry was shafted with his passion, whose greatest music flowered out of filth —

“Nulla potest mulier tantum se dicere amatam

Vere, quantum a me Lesbia amata mea es.”

“You should be more careful of your talk, Eugene,” said Mr. Leonard gently.

“See here!” he exclaimed suddenly, turning with violence to his book. “This is getting no work done. Come on, now!” he said heartily, spitting upon his intellectual hands. “You rascals you!” he said, noting Tom Davis’ grin. “I know what you’re after — you want to take up the whole period.”

Tom Davis’ hearty laughter boomed out, mingling with his own whine.

“All right, Tom,” said Mr. Leonard briskly, “page 43, section 6, line 15. Begin at that point.”