Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (48 page)

"For my part I had rather bear with you than
bear you; yet I should bear no cross if I did bear you, for I think
you have no money in your purse."

This sort of thing reminded him unpleasantly of the
Pentlands.  The Fool in "Lear" alone he thought
admirable--a sad, tragic, mysterious fool.  For the rest, he
went about and composed parodies, which, with a devil's grin, he told
himself would split the sides of posterity.  Such as: 
"Aye, nuncle, an if Shrove Tuesday come last Wednesday, I'll do
the capon to thy cock, as Tom O'Ludgate told the shepherd when he
found the cowslips gone.  Dost bay with two throats, Cerberus? 
Down, boy, down!"

The admired beauties he was often tired of, perhaps
because he had heard them so often, and it seemed to him, moreover,
that Shakespeare often spoke absurdly and pompously when he might
better have spoken simply, as in the scene where, being informed by
the Queen of the death of his sister by drowning, Laertes says:
 

    
"Too much of water hast
thou, poor Ophelia,
     
And
therefore I forbid my tears."
 

You really can't beat that (he thought).  Aye,
Ben!  Would he had blotted a hundred!  A thousand!

But he was deep in other passages which the
elocutionist misses, such as the terrible and epic invocation of
Edmund, in King Lear, drenched in evil, which begins:
 

    
"Thou, Nature, art my
goddess,"
 

and ends,
 

    
"Now, gods, stand up
for bastards."
 

It was as dark as night, as evil as Niggertown, as
vast as the elemental winds that howled down across the hills: he
chanted it in the black hours of his labor, into the dark and the
wind.  He understood; he exulted in its evil--which was the evil
of earth, of illicit nature.  It was a call to the unclassed; it
was a cry for those beyond the fence, for rebel angels, and for all
of the men who are too tall.

He knew nothing of the Elizabethan drama beyond
Shakespeare's plays.  But he very early came to know a little of
the poetry of Ben Jonson, whom Margaret looked on as a literary
Falstaff, condoning, with the familiar weakness of the schoolmarm,
his Gargantuan excess as a pardonable whimsy of genius.

She was somewhat academically mirthful over the
literary bacchanalia, as a professor in a Baptist college smacks his
lips appetizingly and beams ruddily at his classes when he reads of
sack and porter and tankards foaming with the musty ale.  All
this is part of the liberal tradition.  Men of the world are
broadminded. Witness Professor Albert Thorndyke Firkins, of the
University of Chicago, at the Falcon in Soho.  Smiling bravely,
he sits over a half-pint of bitter beer, in the company of a racing
tout, a sway- backed barmaid, broad in the stern, with adjustable
teeth, and three companionable tarts from Lisle street, who are
making the best of two pints of Guinness.  With eager impatience
he awaits the arrival of G. K. Chesterton and E. V. Lucas.
 
 

"O rare Ben Jonson!" Margaret Leonard
sighed with gentle laughter. "Ah, Lord!"

"My God, boy!" Sheba roared, snatching the
suggested motif of conversation out of the air, and licking her
buttered fingers noisily as she stormed into action.  "God
bless him!"  Her hairy red face burned like clover, her
veinous eyes were tearful bright. "God bless him, 'Gene! 
He was as English as roast beef and a tankard of musty ale!"

"Ah, Lord!" sighed Margaret.  "He
was a genius if ever there was one."  With misty eyes she
gazed far off, a thread of laughter on her mouth.  "Whee!"
she laughed gently.  "Old Ben!"

"And say, 'Gene!" Sheba continued, bending
forward with a fat hand gripped upon her knee.  "Do you
know that the greatest tribute to Shakespeare's genius is from his
hand?"

"Ah, I tell you, boy!" said Margaret, with
darkened eyes.  Her voice was husky.  He was afraid she was
going to weep.

"And yet the fools!" Sheba yelled. 
"The mean little two-by-two pusillanimous swill-drinking
fools--"

"Whee!" gently Margaret moaned.  John
Dorsey turned his chalk-white face to the boy and whined with vacant
appreciation, winking his head pertly.  Ah absently!

"--for that's all they are, have had the
effrontery to suggest that he was jealous."

"Pshaw!" said Margaret impatiently. 
"There's nothing in that."

"Why, they don't know what they're talking
about!"  Sheba turned a sudden grinning face upon him. 
"The little upstarts!  It takes us to tell 'em, 'Gene,"
she said.

He began to slide floorwards out of the wicker
chair.  John Dorsey slapped his meaty thigh, and bent forward
whining inchoately, drooling slightly at the mouth.

"The Lord a' mercy!" he wheezed, gasping.

"I was talking to a feller the other day,"
said Sheba, "a lawyer that you'd think might know a LITTLE
something, and I used a quotation out of The Merchant of Venice that
every schoolboy knows--'The quality of mercy is not strained.' 
The man looked at me as if he thought I was crazy!"

"Great heavens!" said Margaret in a still
voice.

"I said, 'Look here, Mr. So-and-so, you may be a
smart lawyer, you may have your million dollars that they say you
have, but there are a lot of things you don't know yet.  There
are a lot of things money can't buy, my sonny, and one of them is the
society of cult-shered men and women.'"

"Why, pshaw!" said Mr. Leonard.  "What
do these little whipper-snappers know about the things of the mind? 
You might as well expect some ignorant darky out in the fields to
construe a passage in Homer."  He grasped a glass half full
of clabber, on the table, and tilting it intently in his chalky
fingers, spooned out a lumpy spilth of curds which he slid,
quivering, into his mouth. "No, sir!" he laughed. 
"They may be Big Men on the tax collector's books, but when they
try to associate with educated men and women, as the feller says,
'they--they--'" he began to whine, "'why, they just ain't
nothin'.'"

"What shall it profit a man," said Sheba,
"if he 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 é
      
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 out a beautiful suit at Moale's Christmas.  He went down
to Daisy's for Christmas and put them on. I bought him a cheap pair
at the Racket Store for every-day wear. He can save the good ones for
Sunday.  Your mother has let the Old Barn to Mrs. Revell until
she gets back.  I went in the other day and found it warm for
the first time in my life.  She keeps the furnace going and
she's not afraid to burn coal.  I hardly ever see Ben from one
week to another.  He comes in and prowls around in the kitchen
at one and two o'clock in the morning and I'm up and gone hours
before he's awake.  You can get nothing out of him--he never
says a half-dozen words and if you ask him a civil question he cuts
you off short.  I see him down-town late at night sometimes with
Mrs. P.  They're thick as thieves together.  I guess she's
a bad egg.  This is all for this time.  John Duke was shot
and killed by the house detective at the Whitstone hotel Sunday
night.  He was drunk and threatening to shoot every one. 
It's a sad thing for his wife.  He left three children. 
She was in to see me to-day.  He was well-liked by every one but
a terror when he drank.  My heart bled for her.  She's a
pretty little woman.  Liquor has caused more misery than all the
other evils in the world put together.  I curse the day it was
first invented.  Enclosed find a small check to buy yourself a
present.  God knows what we're coming to.
Aff. 
Your Father,
W. O. Gant."