The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  There on the corner, empty now except for the fenced basketball court, stood the proud Desha County Bank & Trust Company, red brick turret and tower and battlemented escutcheon with a block of stone deeply engraved “1 8 8 6,” the year that Henry Thane built his romantic “skyscraper,” tallest edifice in town (he would not put up the much bigger courthouse until 1900). Northeastward, toward the end of Front Avenue—not its actual termination so much as the place where it is deflected into a curve by a big house that blocks it—stands the home Henry Thane built for his second wife, Stella, in the newly popular Tudor style of fake half-timbered gables common after World War I. Since the bank was torn down, this house is all that is left of Henry Thane in Arkansas City; he was buried in its yard, but when Stella died in 1974, their son had his body removed to the Trippe Cemetery to join hers.

  The rise and fall of Arkansas City can be measured in the rise and fall of Henry Thane, its self-styled “tycoon.” Faulkner would have loved him; in fact, maybe Faulkner did love him, since Yoknapatawpha is but a buzzard’s short flight across the river into those northwestern counties of Mississippi that provided the mother lode of Faulkner’s fictions, wherein the tycoons are named Sartoris or De Spain or even Snopes, the selfsame ambitious honorable captains of finance or industry or at least striving, who rose, or never ceased trying doggedly despite all obstacles to rise, above the humble beginnings and lack of fortune that heritage or simple genetic ontogeny shackled them with, who fought their way savagely out of the brambles and thickets of the primeval unpitying wilderness and out of the even denser thicker brambles and thickets of their creator’s labyrinthine baroque congested prose style and syntax, not for monetary gain so much as for sheer survival, to keep from being swallowed up, as a town will be swallowed up by the river, into the dark maw and oblivion of that ornate and convoluted reduplication of sentences.

  Henry Thane could not talk like that. Try as he might, he could not think, Yes, even with this golden stud in my collar bobbing up and down with the slow rise and fall of my Adam’s apple I am not able, I am not disposed, to transmute the humble straightforward pedestrian sentiments of my avaricious heart into noble highsounding honorable oratory, not because I am bereft of extraordinary intelligence and lacking in all mellifluousness of utterance but because the people of Arkansas City, if they caught me speaking this way I am thinking, would ship me off to the state lunatic asylum at Little Rock.

  The closest he ever came was when he paid his $100 to Goodspeed for the privilege of having his capsule biography (self-written) and even a capsule autographed portrait printed in the 1890 Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Southern Arkansas, when he was already a tycoon at age forty. The portrait shows his dark handlebar mustache, like a riverboat gambler’s, drooping down both sides of his jowls to points beneath his chin; his eyes large, fierce, and penetrating; and that golden stud in his tieless collar motionless over the unbobbing Adam’s apple in a throat about to utter these words: Let a man be industriously ambitious, and he will rise, whether having the prestige of fortune or the obscurity of poverty.

  But Henry Thane never talked like that. Or ever again wrote like that, either. His surviving writings, other than a piece of paper on which he jotted down his childhood memories for his son, consist of a series of newspaper articles, almost senile ramblings, that he wrote for the local weekly at the age of eighty, after his empire had fallen in the floodwaters of 1927. With titles like “Early Days in Southeast Arkansas,” “The Passing of Chicot City,” “Some Tales I Was Told,” and especially “Arkansas City,” they provide fragmentary information from one man’s imperfect memory of the past, but do very little to explain or even reveal his character.

  The loquacious people who think and speak too much throughout Faulkner were of Scottish descent, or French, or African. Henry Thane was German. Not just of descent: he was born in Prussia, although at the age of two he was brought by his father, Franz, to this country. The romantic name, which suggests the Anglo-Saxon king’s soldier granted land for his military service, coming from the Old English thegn for “freeman” or “warrior” and related to the Germanic thegnaz for “boy” or “man,” has no equivalent in modern German. One thinks, of course, of Macbeth’s reiteration, “I am thane of Cawdor,” and of Lady Macbeth’s babble, “The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?”

  A simple solution to avoid the triteness of naming an aspiring metropolis something “City” is to name it simply “Metropolis,” and Franz Thane settled with his wife, Margareth, and son, Henry, on a farm near the ambitious hamlet of Metropolis, Illinois, which never became a metropolis. (The name also conformed to the growing American fad for Greek-sounding places, polis meaning “city,” and metro, “mother,” therefore Mother City, which no American city was ever actually named, though there are an abundance of poleis, including Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and such as Arkopolis, as we shall see.) Henry grew to young manhood tending chickens and living in a one-room log house with a mud chimney in a forest, neighbor to other German immigrants trying to farmstead the American wilderness, not unlike those duped by John Law in 1719 to brave the forests of Arkansas Post.

  At the age of sixteen he left home for better schooling at Warrenton, Missouri. Almost certainly, at such a small place, he knew young John Milton Norris, later of our Cherokee City, who was only one year his senior and enrolled at the same small college: one imagines them talking together of their casual notion for the “cities” they later built, one occupying a position in northwestern Arkansas corresponding diagonally exactly to the position of the other in southeastern Arkansas. But neither man graduated, Norris learning just enough to prevent him from protesting the title “doctor” later attached to him, and Thane so little that he would later claim his only education was in “the school of hard knocks.”

  Dropping out of college during a winter’s blizzard that left him yearning to see the sunny but still-recovering and reconstructing South, he went down the Mississippi to Memphis, where he found a job driving an ice wagon for the marvelous new ice plant that actually manufactured the wonderful stuff. He came to know Mound City across the river and to wonder if a railroad would ever be built to it, for he was newly fascinated with land steam. Water steam, in the form of steamboats, did not captivate him, partly because he had an aversion to water in any form, never having learned how to swim. To cure this phobia, he tried for a while to work as a boom rat or slough pig, the man who maneuvers a raft or boom of timber, acres of free-floating logs held together by an encircling chain of logs down the free ride of the Grandfather. The image of the logger with pike in hand leaping from rolling log to jammed log does not apply: the Mississippi log-rafter was more a boatman than a lumberjack. Still, Henry Thane, being unable to swim and therefore taking extraordinary pains to avoid situations in which he might have to swim, was scared, and soon quit.

  In the fall of 1872, at the age of twenty-two, he “heard of the railroad activity at a new town christened ‘Chicot City,’ some distance below Napoleon.” The latter town would that same winter complete its fall into the river; Chicot City was just beginning, just aspiring to cityhood. Henry Thane took a mail boat there, and found the landing piled high with freight and cotton discharged by the new railroad and waiting for shipment by steamboat down to New Orleans. The town consisted of many cheap buildings being quickly erected, and two railroads in the process of construction. Henry hopped on one of the trains, a few flatcars between a ten-ton locomotive and a caboose, and rode twenty-eight miles into the Arkansas interior, to the end of the line, in the pine forests. Impressed by the timber all along the route, and by the budding railroad, and by the fact that Chicot City had only one large general store, he bought a corner lot there, hurried back to Memphis to settle his affairs and arrange for a stock of goods, then settled into Chicot City, built a store, and became a merchant.

  This beginning, so similar in its details to that of Everard Dickinson starting out in Buffalo City, contained a big differen
ce: Henry Thane was a driven man. It is easy to suppose that part of his motivation came from his correspondence with his college sweetheart back in Warrenton, Miss Fanny Tidswell, a native of London who loved him but hoped he would stop roaming and settle down. There survives a letter written by her father, a Warrenton businessman named Thomas Tidswell, to his son Tom informing him that Henry Thane had suddenly shown up overnight, married Fanny, and taken her back to some eight-hundred-mile-distant terra incognita called Chicot City.

  Fanny was appalled to discover what sort of “city” Chicot turned out to be, but she settled in gamely there and bore a child, a girl. Chicot City grew very quickly to a population of a thousand, and Henry Thane’s mercantile prospered, despite periodic rampages of the Grandfather. One, in 1874, caused a local depression, hard times, and general bankruptcy, and brought Henry his closest experience to drowning; another big flood, in 1876, frightened Fanny and made her homesick for Warrenton. The owners of the railroads in Chicot City were talking of moving the terminus to a different landing. On the nation’s Centennial (he loved the Fourth and would eventually die on it), Henry Thane sold his store for $100 to a man who wanted to move it to a plantation and convert it to a cabin, and he took Fanny and their daughter three miles south to live in Arkansas City.

  His rise thereafter was quick, unrelenting, almost fated: he would not compete with the many merchants already in Arkansas City, but turned instead to law, studying it on his own in what amounted to that day’s equivalent of the quick home-study course. He passed the easy bar examination in time to set himself up as a lawyer for the railroad just as it closed its terminus at Chicot City, killing that town, and opened a new terminus in Arkansas City, booming that town.

  Was it Henry Thane who suggested, as a sort of public-relations gimmick, that the town change its name to Arkopolis? This trendy name, painted in big letters on the roof of the river side of the railroad depot and warehouse, wasn’t inspired by Henry’s origins in Metropolis so much as it was by the same yearning for cosmopolitan elegance that finds today’s insecure “Arkansans” naming their areas Metrocentre Mall and such. Nobody told Henry or whoever that Little Rock itself, the perennial center of that parvenu yearning, had already, back in 1821, tried on the name Arkopolis, but when the fad got out of hand nationally—Missourians attempted unsuccessfully to name their capital Missouropolis—gave up the high-sounding title in favor of the simpler but belittling Little Rock. The citizens of Arkansas City filed an official protest with the post office in favor of retaining their name, and “Arkopolis” was forgotten.

  The same year the railroad abandoned Chicot City in favor of Arkansas City, Henry Thane (who had already gotten himself elected justice of the peace so he could be called “Judge Thane” for the rest of his life) got himself elected mayor at age twenty-eight on the promise of bringing a semblance of law and order to that wild, free “hell of a place.” Before Thane’s mayoralty, according to Goodspeed’s description,

  there was in this county a lawless element, outlaws and ruffians, who secreted themselves in the fastnesses of the great swamps, and at times sallied forth to murder and to pillage. All the current stories of their depredations, and deeds of danger and of strife, if collected, would make a good-sized, if not useful, volume.

  Thane paid Goodspeed to print that he “was the first mayor who succeeded in ridding the town of the lawless element that always infests prosperous river towns.” He also wanted Goodspeed (in 1890) to note that he served as postmaster of Arkansas City “for five years under President Hayes’ and President Arthur’s administrations” and in 1882 was elected to the State Senate for a four-year term. In our victory year of 1886, he mounted a door-to-door campaign to be elected clerk of Desha County. There is, strangely, no mention of his dealings to take over the Desha Bank. In none of his writings about himself, in Goodspeed or in his articles, does he ever mention his banking activity, which was the principal focus of his life. Like Flem Snopes, who rose from obscurity to president of the Jefferson Bank in Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy, Henry Thane may have accumulated a closetful of skeletons. Possibly the picture of himself he wanted the world to see was not the flinthearted usurer, forecloser, moneymonger, but the civic-minded official, jurist, public servant. He was literally a man of different hats: he took off the silk hat he wore to the bank, and wore a fedora to the post office, a homburg to the mayor’s office, a derby to the court, and his favorite, a wide-brimmed white planter’s hat, to take over a farm, buy out a timber spread, gain control of a lumber mill, receiver a store, garnishee a payroll, evict a widow, and meet the Kate Adams when she docked with his latest order of cigars.

  The silk hat made him feel uncomfortable, but in time it was the one he wore most often: he came to control not just the Desha Bank of Arkansas City but the banks at Watson, McGehee, Dermott, Lake Village, Dumas, and Eudora—all the principal towns of both Desha and Chicot counties, which encompassed all of southeastern Arkansas. With that much financial power, he had extravagant political power, too, and his power over the “weaker sex,” as he called them, was unlimited. As “Miss Fanny” approached middle age and devoted herself to her house and daughter, Henry discreetly philandered, not even needing to enforce silence with threats or bribes. All his life, or at least into his eighties, he remained not simply potent and virile but irresistible to women, and not only because of his wealth and power but also because of his endurance in the art and act of love. Here he differed from Flem Snopes, who was impotent.

  The years Faulkner would have chosen to present Henry Thane were those before World War I, around 1910-14, when Thane was in his early sixties and at the height of his political, financial, and sexual powers, and Arkansas City had crested upon its boom. The population was a stable twelve hundred, excluding the floating (both literally and figuratively) population who came on excursion boats, show boats, house boats. Henry Thane outfitted luxuriously a couple of large houseboats, the freshwater equivalent of yachts, one for his own use, one as a wedding gift to his daughter, Nellie, to live on it with her husband, George Reeze, who managed Thane’s sawmill. Reeze will have to be a principal character in our Faulknerian drama. Another character will have to be the young Scottish physician, Vernon McCammon, whose name sounds right out of the Yoknapatawpha saga. Dr. McCammon’s beautiful wife, Mattie, has to have a minor part, too, threatening to become major. Other actors in the story will have to include J. L. Parker, president of the rival Bank of Arkansas City; Sophia Furlong, proprietress of the Commercial Hotel; and Bill Reitzammer, who runs the corner store and newsstand. Our heroine will have to be, not Mattie McCammon, but Stella Maynard, who is the niece of Fanny Thane, recently deceased.

  Thirty years younger than her aunt and her uncle Henry, Stella will have come each spring or late winter from Warrenton, Missouri, when it is still in the grips of chill, to visit Arkansas City, watch the greening of the grass that covers the levee, and stay until the first magnolia blooms. She alone will have to know the extent of Uncle Henry’s involvement with Mattie McCammon. Henry Thane will have to have imported the young Scotsman, fresh out of medical school, to compete with old Doc Cotesworth P. Smith, whom Thane did not like, and Henry Thane will have to have fallen, as any man would, for Vernon McCammon’s lovely wife. Stella will have to have a powerful crush on the young doctor, and will have to be hoping that her uncle Henry will steal the doctor’s wife and leave him available to Stella.

  J. L. Parker’s bank will have to be only half as big as Henry’s, but J.L. will have to be even more ambitious than Henry once had been while building his empire, and J.L. will have to concentrate on cotton and let Henry have the lumber. Cotton will have to be thriving; lumber will have to be dwindling. J.L. will have to escort Stella a couple of times to the opera house to see the popular melodramas, Sweetest Girl in Dixie and Cow Puncher, and he will have to be close enough to Stella to be on the verge of learning what she knows about Henry’s cuckoldry of Vernon McCammon. The opera-house plays, trying out here befo
re moving on to Little Rock, always will have to have a villain played by the most handsome, dashing actor in the company, and J.L. will always identify with this figure. He, not Henry Thane, will have to be our villain. But Henry Thane cannot be our full hero; that role will have to be reserved to Vernon McCammon.

  Like the Snopes saga, our Arkansas City tale will have to have three separate narrators. There will be likable Bill Reitzammer, the grocer and newsdealer, good-natured, witty, self-educated, shrewd, and given to long-winded philosophizing about the goings-on around him. If he reminds us of V. K. Ratliff, so much the better. Then, for a kind of counterpoint, there will have to be the narration of George Reeze, Henry’s son-in-law and manager of the sawmill, crude, rough, foul-mouthed, earthy, sardonic, cynical, direct. He will have to have special reasons for hating both J. L. Parker and his father-in-law, and from earliest childhood he will have to have been the bitterest enemy of good Bill Reitzammer.

  Finally, there will have to be the narration of Stella Maynard herself, in a cultivated, poetic, nearly lyrical voice, omniscient and with a wisdom tainted by her innocence and good intentions, for though she will have to love Vernon McCammon and will have to hope her uncle Henry will steal Mattie McCammon, she will have to be extremely devoted to her uncle Henry, who has always been good to her.

  What will happen? Given the setting, in Arkansas City, and the time, the carefree days before World War I, and these people, these basically good but ambitious and grasping characters, anything could happen, and anything will, and always will have to: Kim on the levee imagines this story still going on, without resolution or climax, the plots thickening in a perpetual coagulation of incidents, narrative thread stretching infinitely toward a perpetual horizon.