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

But to Eugene, Ben talked more freely than ever before. As they sat upon their beds at night, reading and smoking before they slept, all of the pain and bitterness of Benjamin Gant’s life burst out in violent denunciation. He began to speak with slow sullen difficulty, halting over his words as he did when he read, but speaking more rapidly as his quiet voice became more passionate.

“I suppose they’ve told you how poor they are?” he began, tossing his cigarette away.

“Well,” said Eugene, “I’ve got to go easy. I mustn’t waste my money.”

“Ah-h!” said Ben, making an ugly face. He laughed silently, with a thin and bitter contortion of his lips.

“Papa said that a lot of boys pay their own way through college by waiting on tables and so on. Perhaps I can do something like that.”

Ben turned over on his side until he faced his brother, propping himself on his thin hairy forearm.

“Now listen, ‘Gene,” he said sternly, “don’t be a damned little fool, do you hear? You take every damn cent you can get out of them,” he added savagely.

“Well, I appreciate what they’re doing. I’m getting a lot more than the rest of you had. They’re doing a lot for me,” said the boy.

“For YOU, you little idiot!” said Ben, scowling at him in disgust. “They’re doing it all for themselves. Don’t let them get away with that. They think you’ll make good and bring a lot of credit to them some day. They’re rushing you into it two years too soon, as it is. No, you take everything you can get. The rest of us never had anything, but I want to see you get all that’s coming to you. My God!” he cried furiously.

“Their money’s doing no one any good rotting in the damned bank, is it? No, ‘Gene, get all you can. When you get down there, if you find you need more to hold your own with the other boys, make the old man give it to you. You’ve never had a chance to hold your head up in your own home town, so make the most of your chances when you get away.”

He lighted a cigarette and smoked in bitter silence for a moment.

“To hell with it all!” he said. “What in God’s name are we living for!”

Eugene’s first year at the university was filled for him with loneliness, pain, and failure. Within three weeks of his matriculation, he had been made the dupe of a half-dozen classic jokes, his ignorance of all campus tradition had been exploited, his gullibility was a byword. He was the greenest of all green Freshmen, past and present: he had listened attentively to a sermon in chapel by a sophomore with false whiskers; he had prepared studiously for an examination on the contents of the college catalogue; and he had been guilty of the inexcusable blunder of making a speech of acceptance on his election, with fifty others, to the literary society.

And these buffooneries — a little cruel, but only with the cruelty of vacant laughter, and a part of the schedule of rough humor in an American college — salty, extravagant, and national — opened deep wounds in him, which his companions hardly suspected. He was conspicuous at once not only because of his blunders, but also because of his young wild child’s face, and his great raw length of body, with the bounding scissor legs. The undergraduates passed him in grinning clusters: he saluted them obediently, but with a sick heart. And the smug smiling faces of his own classmen, the wiser Freshmen, complacently guiltless of his own mistakes, touched him at moments with insane fury.

“Smile and smile and s-mile — damn you!” he cursed through his grating teeth. For the first time in his life he began to dislike whatever fits too snugly in a measure. He began to dislike and envy the inconspicuous mould of general nature — the multitudinous arms, legs, hands, feet, and figures that are comfortably shaped for ready-made garments. And the prettily regular, wherever he found it, he hated — the vacantly handsome young men, with shining hair, evenly parted in the middle, with sure strong middling limbs meant to go gracefully on dancefloors. He longed to see them commit some awkward blunder — to trip and sprawl, to be flatulent, to lose a strategic button in mixed company, to be unconscious of a hanging shirt-tail while with a pretty girl. But they made no mistakes.

As he walked across the campus, he heard his name called mockingly from a dozen of the impartial windows, he heard the hidden laughter, and he ground his teeth. And at night, he stiffened with shame in his dark bed, ripping the sheet between his fingers as, with the unbalanced vision, the swollen egotism of the introvert, the picture of a crowded student-room, filled with the grinning historians of his exploits, burned in his brain. He strangled his fierce cry with a taloned hand. He wanted to blot out the shameful moment, unweave the loom. It seemed to him that his ruin was final, that he had stamped the beginning of his university life with folly that would never be forgotten, and that the best he could do would be to seek out obscurity for the next four years. He saw himself in his clown’s trappings and thought of his former vision of success and honor with a lacerating self-contempt.

There was no one to whom he could turn: he had no friends. His conception of university life was a romantic blur, evoked from his reading and tempered with memories of Stover at Yale, Young Fred Fearnot, and jolly youths with affectionate linked arms, bawling out a cheer-song. No one had given him even the rudimentary data of the somewhat rudimentary life of an American university. He had not been warned of the general taboos. Thus, he had come greenly on his new life, unprepared, as he came ever thereafter on all new life, save for his opium visions of himself a stranger in Arcadias.

He was alone. He was desperately lonely.

But the university was a charming, an unforgettable place. It was situated in the little village of Pulpit Hill, in the central midland of the big State. Students came and departed by motor from the dreary tobacco town of Exeter, twelve miles away: the countryside was raw, powerful and ugly, a rolling land of field, wood, and hollow; but the university itself was buried in a pastoral wilderness, on a long tabling butte, which rose steeply above the country. One burst suddenly, at the hill-top, on the end of the straggling village street, flanked by faculty houses, and winding a mile in to the town centre and the university. The central campus sloped back and up over a broad area of rich turf, groved with magnificent ancient trees. A quadrangle of post-Revolutionary buildings of weathered brick bounded the upper end: other newer buildings, in the modern bad manner (the Pedagogic Neo–Greeky), were scattered around beyond the central design: beyond, there was a thickly forested wilderness. There was still a good flavor of the wilderness about the place — one felt its remoteness, its isolated charm. It seemed to Eugene like a provincial outpost of great Rome: the wilderness crept up to it like a beast.

Its great poverty, its century-long struggle in the forest, had given the university a sweetness and a beauty it was later to forfeit. It had the fine authority of provincialism — the provincialism of an older South. Nothing mattered but the State: the State was a mighty empire, a rich kingdom — there was, beyond, a remote and semi-barbaric world.

Few of the university’s sons had been distinguished in the nation’s life — there had been an obscure President of the United States, and a few Cabinet members, but few had sought such distinction: it was glory enough to be a great man in one’s State. Nothing beyond mattered very much.

In this pastoral setting a young man was enabled to loaf comfortably and delightfully through four luxurious and indolent years. There was, God knows, seclusion enough for monastic scholarship, but the rare romantic quality of the atmosphere, the prodigal opulence of Springtime, thick with flowers and drenched in a fragrant warmth of green shimmering light, quenched pretty thoroughly any incipient rash of bookishness. Instead, they loafed and invited their souls or, with great energy and enthusiasm, promoted the affairs of glee-clubs, athletic teams, class politics, fraternities, debating societies, and dramatic clubs. And they talked — always they talked, under the trees, against the ivied walls, assembled in their rooms, they talked — in limp sprawls — incessant, charming, empty Southern talk; they talked with a large easy fluency about God, the Devil, and philosophy, the girls, politics, athletics, fraternities and the girls — My God! how they talked!