Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (90 page)

Sometimes at night he
would rush across the country, beside a drunken driver, to Exeter and
Sydney, and there seek out the women behind the chained lattices,
calling to them in the fresh dawn-dusk of Spring his young goat-cry
of desire and hunger.
 
Lily! 
Louise!  Ruth!  Ellen!  O mother of love, you cradle
of birth and living, whatever your billion names may be, I come, your
son, your lover.  Stand, Maya, by your opened door, denned in
the jungle web of Niggertown.

Sometimes, when he walked
softly by, he heard the young men talking in their rooms of Eugene
Gant.  Eugene Gant was crazy.  Eugene Gant was mad. 
Oh, I (he thought) am Eugene Gant!

Then a voice said: 
"He didn't change his underwear for six weeks. One of his
fraternity brothers told me so."  And another:  "He
takes a bath once a month, whether he needs it or not." 
They laughed; one said then that he was "brilliant"; they
all agreed.

He caught the claw of his
hand into his lean throat.  They are talking of me, of me! 
I am Eugene Gant--the conqueror of nations, lord of the earth, the
Siva of a thousand beautiful forms.

In nakedness and
loneliness of soul he paced along the streets. Nobody said, I know
you.  Nobody said, I am here.

The vast wheel of
life, of which he was the hub, spun round.
 
 

Most of us think we're
hell, thought Eugene.  I do.  I think I'm hell.  Then,
in the dark campus path, he heard the young men talking in their
rooms, and he gouged at his face bloodily, with a snarl of hate
against himself.

I think I am hell, and
they say I stink because I have not had a bath.  But I could not
stink, even if I never had a bath.  Only the others stink. 
My dirtiness is better than their cleanliness.  The web of my
flesh is finer; my blood is a subtle elixir; the hair of my head, the
marrow of my spine, the cunning jointure of my bones, and all the
combining jellies, fats, meats, oils, and sinews of my flesh, the
spittle of my mouth, the sweat of my skin, is mixed with rarer
elements, and is fairer and finer than their gross peasant beef.

There had appeared that
year upon the nape of his neck a small tetter of itch, a sign of his
kinship with the Pentlands--a token of his kinship with the great
malady of life.  He tore at the spot with frantic nails; he
burned his neck to a peeled blister with carbolic acid--but the spot,
as if fed by some ineradicable leprosy in his blood, remained. 
Sometimes, during cool weather, it almost disappeared; but in warm
weather it returned angrily, and he scraped his neck red in an
itching torture.

He was afraid to let
people walk behind him.  He sat, whenever possible, with his
back to the wall; he was in agony when he descended a crowded stair,
holding his shoulders high so that the collar of his coat might hide
the terrible patch.  He let his hair grow in a great thick mat,
partly to hide his sore, and partly because exposing it to the view
of the barber touched him with shame and horror.

He would become at times
insanely conscious of spotless youth: he was terrified before the
loud good health of America, which is really a sickness, because no
man will admit his sores.  He shrank back at the memory of his
lost heroic fantasies: he thought of Bruce-Eugene, of all his
thousand romantic impersonations, and never could he endure himself
with an itching tetter upon his flesh.  He became morbidly
conscious of all his blemishes, real and fancied: for days he would
see nothing but people's teeth--he would stare into their mouths when
he talked to them, noting the fillings, the extractions, the plates
and bridges.  He would gaze with envy and fear at the sound
ivory grinders of the young men, baring his own, which were regular
but somewhat yellowed with smoking, a hundred times a day.  He
scrubbed at them savagely with a stiff brush until the gums bled; he
brooded for hours upon a decaying molar which must one day be
extracted, and, wild with despair, he would figure out on paper the
age at which he might become toothless.

But if, he thought, I
lose only one every two years after I am twenty, I shall still have
over fifteen left when I am fifty, since we have thirty-two,
including wisdom-teeth.  And it will not look so bad, if only I
can save the front ones.  Then, with his hope in futures, he
thought:  But by that time perhaps the dentists can give me real
ones.  He read several dental magazines to see if there was any
hope for the transplanting of sound teeth for old ones.  Then,
with brooding satisfaction, he studied his sensual deeply scalloped
mouth with the pouting underlip, noting that even when he smiled he
barely revealed his teeth.

He asked the medical
students innumerable questions about the treatment or cure of
inherited blood maladies, venereal diseases, intestinal and inguinal
cancers, and the transference of animal glands to men.  He went
to the movies only to examine the teeth and muscles of the hero; he
pored over the toothpaste and collar advertisements in the magazines;
he went to the shower-rooms at the gymnasium and stared at the
straight toes of the young men, thinking with desperate sick pain of
his own bunched and crooked ones.  He stood naked before a
mirror, looking at his long gaunt body, smooth and white save for the
crooked toes and the terrible spot on his neck--lean, but moulded
with delicate and powerful symmetry.

Then, slowly, he began to
take a terrible joy in his taint.  The thing on his neck that
could not be gouged or burnt away he identified with a tragic humor
of his blood that plunged him downward at times into melancholia and
madness.  But there was, he saw, a great health in him as well,
that could bring him back victoriously from desolation.  In his
reading of fiction, in the movies, in the collar advertisements, in
all his thousand fantasies of Bruce-Eugene, he had never known a hero
with crooked toes, a decaying tooth, and a patch of tetter on his
neck.  Nor had he ever known a heroine, whether among the
society women of Chambers and Phillips, or among the great elegants
of Meredith and Ouida, who had borne such a blemish.  But, in
all his fantasies now, he loved a woman with hair of carrot silk and
eyes of a faintly weary violet, webbed delicately at the corners. 
Her teeth were small, white and irregular, and she had one molar
edged with gold which was visible when she smiled.  She was
subtle, and a little weary: a child and a mother, as old and as deep
as Asia, and as young as germinal April who returns forever like a
girl, a mistress, a parent, and a nurse.

Thus, through the death
of his brother, and the sickness that was rooted in his own flesh,
Eugene came to know a deeper and darker wisdom than he had ever known
before.  He began to see that what was subtle and beautiful in
human life was touched with a divine pearl-sickness.  Health was
to be found in the steady stare of the cats and dogs, or in the
smooth vacant chops of the peasant.  But he looked on the faces
of the lords of the earth--and he saw them wasted and devoured by the
beautiful disease of thought and passion.  In the pages of a
thousand books he saw their portraits: Coleridge at twenty-five, with
the loose sensual mouth, gaping idiotically, the vast staring eyes,
holding in their opium depths the vision of seas haunted by the
albatross, the great white forehead--head mixed of Zeus and the
village degenerate; the lean worn head of Caesar, a little thirsty in
the flanks; and the dreaming mummy face of Kublai Khan, lit with eyes
that flickered with green fires.  And he saw the faces of the
great Thothmes, and Aspalta and Mycerinus, and all the heads of
subtle Egypt?those smooth unwrinkled faces that held the wisdom of
1,200 gods.  And the strange wild faces of the Goth, the Frank,
the Vandal, that came storming up below the old tired eyes of Rome. 
And the weary craftiness on the face of the great Jew, Disraeli; the
terrible skull-grin of Voltaire; the mad ranting savagery of Ben
Jonson's;the dour wild agony of Carlyle's; and the faces of Heine,
and Rousseau, and Dante, and Tiglath-Pileser, and Cervantes--these
were all faces on which life had fed.  They were faces wasted by
the vulture, Thought; they were faces seared and hollowed by the
flame of Beauty.

And thus, touched with
the terrible destiny of his blood, caught in the trap of himself and
the Pentlands, with the little flower of sin and darkness on his
neck, Eugene escaped forever from the good and the pretty, into a
dark land that is forbidden to the sterilized.  The creatures of
romantic fiction, the vicious doll-faces of the movie women, the
brutal idiot regularity of the faces in the advertisements, and the
faces of most of the young college-men and women, were stamped in a
mould of enamelled vacancy, and became unclean to him.

The national demand for
white shiny plumbing, toothpaste, tiled lunch-rooms, hair-cuts,
manicured dentistry, horn spectacles, baths, and the insane fear of
disease that sent the voters whispering to the druggist after their
brutal fumbling lecheries--all of this seemed nasty.  Their
outer cleanliness became the token of an inner corruption: it was
something that glittered and was dry, foul, and rotten at the core. 
He felt that, no matter what leper's taint he might carry upon his
flesh, there was in him a health that was greater than they could
ever know--something fierce and cruelly wounded, but alive, that did
not shrink away from the terrible sunken river of life; something
desperate and merciless that looked steadily on the hidden and
unspeakable passions that unify the tragic family of this earth.
 
 

Yet, Eugene was no
rebel.  He had no greater need for rebellion than have most
Americans, which is none at all.  He was quite content with any
system which might give him comfort, security, enough money to do as
he liked, and freedom to think, eat, drink, love, read, and write
what he chose.  And he did not care under what form of
government he lived--Republican, Democrat, Tory, Socialist, or
Bolshevist--if it could assure him these things.  He did not
want to reform the world, or to make it a better place to live in:
his whole conviction was that the world was full of pleasant places,
enchanted places, if he could only go and find them.  The life
around him was beginning to fetter and annoy him: he wanted to escape
from it.  He felt sure things would be better elsewhere. 
He always felt sure things would be better elsewhere.

It was not his quality as
a romantic to escape out of life, but into it.  He wanted no
land of Make-believe: his fantasies found extension in reality, and
he saw no reason to doubt that there really were 1,200 gods in Egypt,
and that the centaur, the hippogriff, and the winged bull might all
be found in their proper places.  He believed that there was
magic in Byzantium, and genii stoppered up in wizards' bottles. 
Moreover, since Ben's death, the conviction had grown on him that men
do not escape from life because life is dull, but that life escapes
from men because men are little.  He felt that the passions of
the play were greater than the actors.  It seemed to him that he
had never had a great moment of living in which he had measured up to
its fulness.  His pain at Ben's death had been greater than he,
the love and loss of Laura had left him stricken and bewildered, and
when he embraced young girls and women he felt a desperate
frustration: he wanted to eat them like cake and to have them, too;
to roll them up into a ball; to entomb them in his flesh; to possess
them more fully than they may ever be possessed.

Further, it annoyed and
wounded him to be considered "queer."  He exulted in
his popularity among the students, his heart pounded with pride under
all the pins and emblems, but he resented being considered an
eccentric, and he envied those of his fellows who were elected to
office for their solid golden mediocrity.  He wanted to obey the
laws and to be respected: he believed himself to be a sincerely
conventional person--but, some one would see him after midnight,
bounding along a campus path, with goat-cries beneath the moon. 
His suits went baggy, his shirts and drawers got dirty, his shoes
wore through--he stuffed them with cardboard strips--his hats grew
shapeless and wore through at the creases. But he did not mean to go
unkempt--the thought of going for repairs filled him with weary
horror.  He hated to act--he wanted to brood upon his entrails
for fourteen hours a day.  At length, goaded, he would lash his
great bulk, lulled in the powerful inertia of its visions, into a
cursing and violent movement.

He was desperately afraid
of people in crowds: at class meetings, or smokers, or at any public
gathering, he was nervous and constrained until he began to talk to
them, and got them under him. He was always afraid that some one
would make a joke about him, and that he would be laughed at. 
But he was not afraid of any man alone: he felt that he could handle
any one if he got him away from his crowd.  Remembering his
savage fear and hatred of the crowd, with a man alone he could play
cruelly, like a cat, snarling gently at him, prowling in on him
softly, keeping cocked and silent the terrible tiger's paw of his
spirit.  All of their starch oozed out of them; they seemed to
squeak and twitter, and look round for the door.  He would get
some loud pompous yokel--the student president of the Y. M. C. A., or
the class president--and bear down on him
with
evil gentle matter-of-factness.

"Don't you think,"
he would begin with earnest piety, "don't you think that a man
should kiss his wife on her belly?"