Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (91 page)

And he would fasten all
the eager innocence of his face into a stare.

"For, after all, the
belly is sometimes more beautiful than the mouth, and far cleaner. 
Or do you believe in the belly-less marriage?  I, for one,"
he went on with proud passion, "do not!  I stand for more
and better Belly-Kissing.  Our wives, our mothers, and our
sisters expect it of us.  It is an act of reverence to the seat
of life.  Nay! it is even an act of religious worship.  If
we could get our prominent business men and all the other
right-thinking people interested in it, it would bring about the
mightiest revolution ever known in a nation's life.  In five
years it would do away with divorce and re-establish the prestige of
the home.  In twenty years it would make our nation the proud
centre of civilization and the arts.  Don't you think so? 
Or do you?"

Eugene thought so. 
It was one of his few Utopias.
 
 

Sometimes, when he was in
a chafed and bitter temper, he would hear a burst of laughter from a
student's room, and he would turn snarling, and curse them, believing
they laughed at him.  He inherited his father's conviction at
times that the world was gathered in an immense conspiracy against
him: the air about him was full of mockery and menace, the leaves
whispered with treason, in a thousand secret places people were
assembled to humiliate, degrade, and betray him.  He would spend
hours under the terrible imminence of some unknown danger: although
he was guilty of nothing but his own nightmare fantasies, he would
enter a class, a meeting, a gathering of students, with cold
constricted heart, awaiting exposure, sentence, and ruin, for he knew
not what crime.  Again, he would be wild, extravagant, and
careless, squealing triumphantly in their faces and bounding along
possessed with goaty joy, as he saw life dangling like a plum for his
taking.

And thus, going along a
campus path at night, fulfilled with his dreams of glory, he heard
young men talking of him kindly and coarsely, laughing at his antics,
and saying he needed a bath and clean underwear.  He clawed at
his throat as he listened.
 
I think
I'm hell, thought Eugene, and they say I stink because Ihave not had
a bath.  Me!  Me!  Bruce-Eugene, the Scourge of the
Greasers, and the greatest fullback Yale ever had!  Marshal
Gant, the saviour of his country!  Ace Gant, the hawk of the
sky, the man who brought Richthofen down!  Senator Gant,
Governor Gant, President Gant, the restorer and uniter of a broken
nation, retiring quietly to private life in spite of the weeping
protest of one hundred million people, until, like Arthur or
Barbarossa, he shall hear again the drums of need and peril.

Jesus-of-Nazareth Gant,
mocked, reviled, spat upon, and imprisoned for the sins of others,
but nobly silent, preferring death rather than cause pain to the
woman he loves.  Gant, the Unknown Soldier, the Martyred
President, the slain God of Harvest, the Bringer of Good Crops. 
Duke Gant of Westmoreland, Viscount Pondicherry, twelfth Lord
Runnymede, who hunts for true love, incognito, in Devon and ripe
grain, and finds the calico white legs embedded in sweet hay. 
Yes, George-Gordon-Noel-Byron Gant, carrying the pageant of his
bleeding heart through Europe, and Thomas-Chatterton Gant (that
bright boy!), and Frané Gant, and Ahasuerus Gant, and Mithridates
Gant, and Artaxerxes Gant, and Edward-the-Black-Prince Gant; Stilicho
Gant, and Jugurtha Gant, and Vercingetorix Gant, and
Czar-Ivan-the-Terrible Gant.  And Gant, the Olympian Bull; and
Heracles Gant; and Gant, the Seductive Swan; and Ashtaroth and Azrael
Gant, Proteus Gant, Anubis and Osiris and Mumbo-Jumbo Gant.
 
 

But what, said Eugene
very slowly into the darkness, if I'm not a Genius?  He did not
ask himself the question often.  He was alone: he spoke aloud,
but in a low voice, in order to feel the unreality of this
blasphemy.  It was a moonless night, full of stars.  There
was no thunder and no lightning.

Yes, but what, he thought
with a livid snarl, but what if anybody else thinks I'm not? 
Ah, but they'd like to, the swine.  They hate me, and are
jealous of me because they can't be like me, so they belittle me if
they can.  They'd like to say it, if they dared, just to hurt
me.  For a moment his face was convulsed with pain and
bitterness: he craned his neck, holding his throat with his hand.

Then, as was his custom,
when he had burnt his heart out, he began to look nakedly and
critically at the question.

Well, he went on very
calmly, what if I'm not?  Am I going to cut my throat, or eat
worms, or swallow arsenic?  He shook his head slowly but
emphatically.  No, he said, I am not.  Besides, there are
enough geniuses.  They have at least one in every high school,
and one in the orchestra of every small-town movie.  Sometimes
Mrs. Von Zeck, the wealthy patroness of the arts, sends a genius or
two off to New York to study.  So that, he estimated, this broad
land of ours has by the census not less than 26,400 geniuses and
83,752 artists, not counting those in business and advertising. 
For his personal satisfaction, Eugene then muttered over the names of
21 geniuses who wrote poetry, and 37 more who devoted themselves to
the drama and the novel.  After this, he felt quite relieved.

What, he thought, can I
be, besides a genius?  I've been one long enough.  There
must be better things to do.

Over that final hedge, he
thought, not death, as I once believed--but new life--and new lands.

Erect, with arm akimbo on
his hip, he stood, his domed head turned out toward the light: sixty,
subtle and straight of body, deep-browed, with an old glint of
hawk-eyes, lean apple-cheeks, a mustache bristle-cropped.  That
face on which the condor Thought has fed, arched with high subtle
malice, sophist glee.

Below, benched in rapt
servility, they waited for his first husky word.  Eugene looked
at the dull earnest faces, lured from the solid pews of Calvinism to
the shadowland of metaphysics.  And now his mockery will play
like lightning around their heads, but they will never see it, nor
feel it strike.  They will rush forward to wrestle with his
shadow, to hear his demon's laughter, to struggle solemnly with their
unborn souls.

The clean cuffed hand
holds up an abraded stick.  Their stare follows obediently along
its lustre.

"Mr. Willis?"

White, bewildered,
servile, the patient slave's face.

"Yes, sir."

"What have I here?"

"A stick, sir."

"What is a stick?"

"It's a piece of
wood, sir."

A pause.  Ironic
eyebrows ask their laughter.  They snicker smugly for the wolf
that will devour them.

"Mr. Willis says a
stick is a piece of wood."

Their laughter rattles
against the walls.  Absurd.

"But a stick IS a
piece of wood," says Mr. Willis.

"So is a tree or a
telephone-pole.  No, I'm afraid that will not do.  Does the
class agree with Mr. Willis?"

"A stick is a piece
of wood cut off at a certain length."

"Then we agree, Mr.
Ransom, that a stick is not simply wood with unlimited extension?"

The stunned peasant's
face with its blink of effort.

"I see that Mr. Gant
is leaning forward in his seat.  There is a light in his face
that I have seen there before.  Mr. Gant will not sleep of
nights, for thinking."

"A stick," said
Eugene, "is not only wood but the negation of wood. It is the
meeting in Space of Wood and No-Wood.  A stick is finite and
unextended wood, a fact determined by its own denial."

The old head listens
gravely above the ironic intake of their breath.  He will bear
me out and praise me, for I am measured against this peasant earth. 
He sees me with the titles of proud office; and he loves victory.

"We have a new name
for him, Professor Weldon," said Nick Mabley. "We call him
Hegel Gant."

He listened to their
shout of laughter; he saw their pleased faces turn back on him. 
That was meant well.  I shall smile--their Great Original, the
beloved eccentric, the poet of substantial yokels.

"That's a name he
may be worthy of," said Vergil Weldon seriously.

Old Fox, I too can juggle
with your phrases so they will never catch me.  Over the jungle
of their wits our unfoiled minds strike irony and passion. 
Truth?  Reality?  The Absolute?  The Universal?
Wisdom?  Experience?  Knowledge?  The Fact?  The
Concept?  Death--the great negation?  Parry and thrust,
Volpone!  Have we not words? We shall prove anything.  But
Ben, and the demon-flicker of his smile?  Where now?

The Spring comes back. 
I see the sheep upon the hill.  The belled cows come along the
road in wreaths of dust, and the wagons creak home below the pale
ghost of the moon.  But what stirs within the buried heart? 
Where are the lost words?  And who has seen his shadow in the
Square?
 
 

"And if they asked
you, Mr. Rountree?"

"I'd have told the
truth," said Mr. Rountree, removing his glasses.

"But they had built
a good big fire, Mr. Rountree."

"That doesn't
matter," said Mr. Rountree, putting his glasses on again.

How nobly we can die for
truth--in conversation.

"It was a very hot
fire, Mr. Rountree.  They'd have burned you if you hadn't
recanted."

"Ah.  I'd have
let them burn," said the martyred Rountree through moistening
spectacles.

"I think it might be
painful," Vergil Weldon suggested.  "Even a little
blister hurts."

"Who wants to be
burned for anything?" said Eugene.  "I'd have done
what Galileo did--backed out of it."

"So should I,"
said Vergil Weldon, and their faces arched with gleeful malice over
the heavy laughter of the class.

Nevertheless, it moves.
 
 

"On one side of the
table stood the combined powers of Europe; on the other stood Martin
Luther, the son of a blacksmith."

The voice of husky
passion, soul-shaken.  This they can remember, and put down.

"There, if ever, was
a situation to try the strongest soul.  But the answer came like
a flash.  Ich kann nicht anders--I can't do otherwise.  It
was one of the great utterances of history."

That phrase, used now for
thirty years, relic of Yale and Harvard: Royce and Munsterberg. 
In all this jugglery, the Teutons were Weldon's masters, yet mark how
thirstily the class lap it up.  He will not let them read, lest
some one find the rag-quilt of his takings from Zeno to Immanuel
Kant.  The crazy patchwork of three thousand years, the forced
marriage of irreconcilables, the summation of all thought, in his old
head.  Socrates begat Plato. Plato begat Plotinus. 
Plotinus begat St. Augustine. . . .  Kant begat Hegel. 
Hegel begat Vergil Weldon.  Here we pause.  There's no more
to beget.  An Answer to All Things in Thirty Easy Lessons. How
sure they are they've found it!

And to-night they will
carry their dull souls into his study, will make unfleshly
confessions, will writhe in concocted tortures of the spirit,
revealing struggles that they never had.  "It took
character to do a thing like that.  It took a man who refused to
crack under pressure.  And that is what I want my boys to do! 
I want them to succeed!  I want them to absorb their negations. 
I want them to keep as clean as a hound's tooth!"

Eugene winced, and looked
around on all the faces set in a resolve to fight desperately for
monogamy, party politics, and the will of the greatest number.

And yet the Baptists fear
this man!  Why?  He has taken the whiskers off their God,
but for the rest, he has only taught them to vote the ticket.

So here is Hegel in the
Cotton Belt!

During these years Eugene
would go away from Pulpit Hill, by night and by day, when April was a
young green blur, or when the Spring was deep and ripe.  But he
liked best to go away by night, rushing across a cool Spring
countryside full of dew and starlight, under a great beach of the
moon ribbed with clouds.

He would go to Exeter or
Sydney; sometimes he would go to little towns he had never before
visited.  He would register at hotels as "Robert Herrick,"
"John Donne," "George Peele," "William
Blake," and "John Milton."  No one ever said
anything to him about it.  The people in those small towns had
such names.  Once he registered at a hotel, in a small Piedmont
town, as "Ben Jonson."

The clerk spun the book
critically.

"Isn't there an h in
that name?" he said.

"No," said
Eugene.  "That's another branch of the family.  I have
an uncle, Samuel, who spells his name that way."

Sometimes, at hotels of
ill-repute, he would register, with dark buried glee, as "Robert
Browning," "Alfred Tennyson," and "William
Wordsworth."

Once he registered as
"Henry W. Longfellow."

"You can't fool me,"
said the clerk, with a hard grin of disbelief. "That's the name
of a writer."

He was devoured by a vast
strange hunger for life.  At night, he listened to the
million-noted ululation of little night things, the great brooding
symphony of dark, the ringing of remote churchbells across the
country.  And his vision widened out in circles over
moon-drenched meadows, dreaming woods, mighty rivers going along in
darkness, and ten thousand sleeping towns.  He believed in the
infinite rich variety of all the towns and faces: behind any of a
million shabby houses he believed there was strange buried life,
subtle and shattered romance, something dark and unknown.  At
the moment of passing any house, he thought, some one therein might
be at the gate of death, lovers might lie twisted in hot embrace,
murder might be doing.