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

Mr. Leonard’s “men of tomorrow” were doing nicely. The spirit of justice, of physical honor was almost unknown to them, but they were loud in proclaiming the letter. Each of them lived in a fear of discovery; each of them who was able built up his own defenses of swagger, pretense, and loud assertion — the great masculine flower of gentleness, courage, and honor died in a foul tangle. The great clan of go-getter was emergent in young boys — big in voice, violent in threat, withered and pale at heart — the “He-men” were on the rails.

And Eugene, encysted now completely behind the walls of his fantasy, hurled his physical body daily to defeat, imitated, as best he could, the speech, gesture, and bearing of his fellows, joined, by act or spirit, in the attack on those weaker than himself, and was compensated sometimes for his bruises when he heard Margaret say that he was “a boy with a fine spirit.” She said it very often.

He was, fortunately, thanks to Gant and Eliza, a creature that was dominantly masculine in its sex, but in all his life, either at home or in school, he had seldom known victory. Fear he knew well. And so incessant, it seemed to him later, had been this tyranny of strength, that in his young wild twenties when his great boneframe was powerfully fleshed at last, and he heard about him the loud voices, the violent assertion, the empty threat, memory would waken in him a maniacal anger, and he would hurl the insolent intruding swaggerer from his path, thrust back the jostler, glare insanely into fearful surprised faces and curse them.

He never forgot the Jew; he always thought of him with shame. But it was many years before he could understand that that sensitive and feminine person, bound to him by the secret and terrible bonds of his own dishonor, had in him nothing perverse, nothing unnatural, nothing degenerate. He was as much like a woman as a man. That was all. There is no place among the Boy Scouts for the androgyne — it must go to Parnassus.

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In the years that had followed Eliza’s removal to Dixieland, by a slow inexorable chemistry of union and repellence, profound changes had occurred in the alignment of the Gants. Eugene had passed away from Helen’s earlier guardianship into the keeping of Ben. This separation was inevitable. The great affection she had shown him when he was a young child was based not on any deep kinship of mind or body or spirit, but on her vast maternal feeling, something that poured from her in a cataract of tenderness and cruelty upon young, weak, plastic life.

The time had passed when she could tousle him on the bed in a smother of slaps and kisses, crushing him, stroking him, biting and kissing his young flesh. He was not so attractive physically — he had lost the round contours of infancy, he had grown up like a weed, his limbs were long and gangling, his feet large, his shoulders bony, and his head too big and heavy for the scrawny neck on which it sagged forward. Moreover, he sank deeper year by year into the secret life, a strange wild thing bloomed darkly in his face, and when she spoke to him his eyes were filled with the shadows of great ships and cities.

And this secret life, which she could never touch, and which she could never understand, choked her with fury. It was necessary for her to seize life in her big red-knuckled hands, to cuff and caress it, to fondle, love, and enslave it. Her boiling energy rushed outward on all things that lived in the touch of the sun. It was necessary for her to dominate and enslave, all her virtues — her strong lust to serve, to give, to nurse, to amuse — came from the imperative need for dominance over almost all she touched.

She was herself ungovernable; she disliked whatever did not yield to her governance. In his loneliness he would have yielded his spirit into bondage willingly if in exchange he might have had her love which so strangely he had forfeited, but he was unable to reveal to her the flowering ecstasies, the dark and incommunicable fantasies in which his life was bound. She hated secrecy; an air of mystery, a crafty but knowing reticence, or the unfathomable depths of other-wordliness goaded her to fury.

Convulsed by a momentary rush of hatred, she would caricature the pout of his lips, the droop of his head, his bounding kangaroo walk.

“You little freak. You nasty little freak. You don’t even know who you are — you little bastard. You’re not a Gant. Any one can see that. You haven’t a drop of papa’s blood in you. Queer one! Queer one! You’re Greeley Pentland all over again.”

She always returned to this — she was fanatically partisan, her hysterical superstition had already lined the family in embattled groups of those who were Gant and those who were Pentland. On the Pentland side, she placed Steve, Daisy, and Eugene — they were, she thought, the “cold and selfish ones,” and the implication of the older sister and the younger brother with the criminal member of the family gave her an added pleasure. Her union with Luke was now inseparable. It had been inevitable. They were the Gants — those who were generous, fine, and honorable.

The love of Luke and Helen was epic. They found in each other the constant effervescence, the boundless extraversion, the richness, the loudness, the desperate need to give and to serve that was life to them. They exacerbated the nerves of each other, but their love was beyond grievance, and their songs of praise were extravagant.

“I’ll criticise him if I like,” she said pugnaciously. “I’ve got the right to. But I won’t hear any one else criticise him. He’s a fine generous boy — the finest one in this family. That’s one thing sure.”

Ben alone seemed to be without the grouping. He moved among them like a shadow — he was remote from their passionate fullblooded partisanship. But she thought of him as “generous”— he was, she concluded, a “Gant.”

In spite of this violent dislike for the Pentlands, both Helen and Luke had inherited all Gant’s social hypocrisy. They wanted above all else to put a good face on before the world, to be well liked and to have many friends. They were profuse in their thanks, extravagant in their praise, cloying in their flattery. They slathered it on. They kept their ill-temper, their nervousness, and their irritability for exhibition at home. And in the presence of any members of Jim or Will Pentland’s family their manner was not only friendly, it was even touched slightly with servility. Money impressed them.

It was a period of incessant movement in the family. Steve had married a year or two before a woman from a small town in lower Indiana. She was thirty-seven years old, twelve years his senior, a squat heavy German with a big nose and a patient and ugly face. She had come to Dixieland one summer with another woman, a spinster of lifelong acquaintance, and allowed him to seduce her before she left. The winter following, her father, a small manufacturer of cigars, had died, leaving her $9,000 in insurance, his home, a small sum of money in the bank, and a quarter share in his business, which was left to the management of his two sons.

Early in Spring the woman, whose name was Margaret Lutz, returned to Dixieland. One drowsy afternoon Eugene found them at Gant’s. The house was deserted save for them. They were sprawled out face downward, with their hands across each other’s hips, on Gant’s bed. They lay there silently, while he looked, in an ugly stupor. Steve’s yellow odor filled the room. Eugene began to tremble with insane fury. The Spring was warm and lovely, the air brooded slightly in a flowering breeze, there was a smell of soft tar. He had come down to the empty house exultantly, tasting its delicious silence, the cool mustiness of indoors, and a solitary afternoon with great calf volumes. In a moment the world turned hag.