You Can't Go Home Again

by Thomas Wolfe

  "You say the younger one was unmarried?"

  "Yes."

  "How old?"

  "Twenty-five."

  "And where did he live?"

  "In the Bronx."

  His tone was so low and sullen that it was hardly more than a mutter, and the policeman lifted his head from the book and rasped out harshly:

  "Where?"

  "The Bronx!" said Henry furiously.

  The man finished writing in his book, put it away into his pocket, then in a tone of casual speculation he said:

  "Well, I wouldn't want to live up there, would you? It's too damn far away."

  "Nah!" snapped Henry. Then, turning impatiently away, he began: "If that's all you want----"

  "That's all," the policeman cut in with brutal and ironic geniality. "That's all, brother."

  And with a hard look of mirth in his cold eyes, he swung his nightstick behind him and watched the retreating figure of the doorman as it went inside and disappeared in the direction of the elevator.

  * * *

  Up in the Jack's living-room, George and Esther were alone together. There was now an air of finality about everything. The party was over, the fire was over, all the other guests had gone.

  Esther gave a little sigh and sat down beside George. For a moment she looked round her with an expression of thoughtful appraisal. Everything was just the same as it had always been. If anyone came in here now, he would never dream that anything had happened.

  "Wasn't it all strange?" she said musingly. "The party--and then the fire!...I mean, the way it happened." Her tone had grown a little vague, as if there was something she could not quite express. "I don't know, but the way we were all sitting here after Mr. Logan's performance...then all of a sudden the fire-engines going past...and we didn't know...we thought they were going somewhere else. There was something so--sort of weird--about it." Her brow was furrowed with her difficulty as she tried to define the emotion she felt. "It sort of frightens you, doesn't it?--No, not the fire!" she spoke quickly. "That didn't amount to anything. No one got hurt. It was terribly exciting, really...What I mean is"--again the vague and puzzled tone--"when you think of how...big...things have got...I mean, the way people live nowadays...in these big buildings...and how a fire can break out in the very house you live in, and you not even know about it...There's something sort of terrible in that, isn't there?...And God!" she burst out with sudden eagerness. "In all your life did you ever see the like of them? I mean the kind of people who live here--they way they all looked as they poured out into the court?"

  She laughed and paused, then took his hand, and with a rapt look on her face she whispered tenderly:

  "But what do they matter?...They're all gone now...The whole world's gone...There's no one left but you and I...Do you know," she said quietly, "that I think about you all the time? When I wake up in the morning the first thought that comes into my head is you. And from that moment on I carry you round inside me all day long--here." She laid her hand upon her breast, then went on in a rapt whisper: "You fill my life, my heart, my spirit, my whole being. Oh, do you think there ever was another love like ours since the world began--two other people who ever loved each other as we do? If I could play, I'd make of it great music. If I could sing, I'd make of it a great song. If I could write, I'd make of it a great story. But when I try to play or write or sing, I can think of nothing else but you...Did you know that I once tried to write a story!" Smiling, she inclined her rosy face towards his: "Didn't I ever tell you?" He shook his head.

  "I was sure that it would make a wonderful story," she went on eagerly. "It seemed to fill me up. I was ready to burst with it. But when I tried to write it, all that I could say was: 'Long, long into the night I lay--thinking of you.'"

  She laughed suddenly, richly.

  "And that's as far as I could get. But wasn't it a grand beginning for a story? And now at night when I try to go to sleep, that one line of the story that I couldn't write comes back to me and haunts me, and keeps ringing in my ears. 'Long, long into the night I lay--thinking of you.' For that's the story."

  She moved closer to him, and lifted her lips to his.

  "Ah, dearest, that's the story. In the whole world there's nothing more. Love is enough."

  He could not answer. For as she spoke he knew that for him it was not the story. He felt desolate and tired. The memory of all their years of love, of beauty and devotion, of pain and conflict, together with all her faith and tenderness and noble loyalty--the whole universe of love which had been his, all that the tenement of flesh and one small room could hold--returned to rend him in this instant.

  For he had learned to-night that love was not enough. There had to be a higher devotion than all the devotions of this fond imprisonment. There had to be a larger world than this glittering fragment of a world with all its wealth and privilege. Throughout his whole youth and early manhood, this very world of beauty, ease, and luxury, of power, glory, and security, had seemed the ultimate end of human ambition, the furthermost limit to which the aspirations of any man could reach. But to-night, in a hundred separate moments of intense reality, it had revealed to him its very core. He had seen it naked, with its guards down. He had sensed how the hollow pyramid of a false social structure had been erected and sustained upon a base of common mankind's blood and sweat and agony. So now he knew that if he was ever to succeed in writing the books he felt were in him, he must turn about and lift his face up to some nobler height.

  He thought about the work he wanted to do. Somehow the events which he had witnessed here to-night had helped to resolve much of his inner chaos and confusion. Many of the things which had been complex before were now made simple. And it all boiled down to this: honesty, sincerity, no compromise with truth--those were the essentials of any art--and a writer, no matter what else he had, was just a hack without them.

  And that was where Esther and this world of hers came in. In America, of all places, there could be no honest compromise with special privilege. Privilege and truth could not lie down together. He thought of how a silver dollar, if held close enough to the eye, could blot out the sun itself. There were stronger, deeper tides and currents running in America than any which these glamorous lives to-night had ever plumbed or even dreamed of. Those were the depths that he would like to sound.

  As he thought these things, a phrase that had been running through his head all evening, like an overtone to everything that he had seen and heard, now flashed once more into his consciousness:

  --He who lets himself be whored by fashion will be whored by time.

  Well, then--a swift thrust of love and pity pierced him as Esther finished speaking and he looked down at her enraptured, upturned face--it must be so: he to his world, she to hers.

  But to-night. He could not tell her so to-night. To-morrow----

  Yes, to-morrow he would tell her. It would be better so. He would tell it to her straight, the way he understood it now--tell it so she could not fail to understand it, too. But tell it--get it over with--to-morrow.

  And to make it easier, for her as well as for himself, there was one thing he would not tell her. It would be surer, swifter, kinder, not to tell her that he loved her still, that he would always love her, that no one else could ever take her place. Not by so much as a glance, a single word, the merest pressure of the hand, must he let her know that this was the hardest thing he would ever have to do. It would be far better if she did not know that, for if she knew, she'd never understand----

  --Never understand to-morrow----

  --That a tide was running in the hearts of men----

  --And he must go.

  They said little more that night. In a few minutes he got up, and with a sick and tired heart he went away.

  * * *

  BOOK III. - AN END AND A BEGINNING

  When a cicada comes out of the ground to enter the last stage of its life cycle, it looks more like a fat, earth-stained grub-worm than a winged thing. Laborio
usly it climbs up the trunk of a tree, pulling itself along on legs that hardly seem to belong to it, for they move with painful awkwardness as though the creature had not yet got the hang of how to use them. At last it stops in its weary climb and clings to the bark by its front feet. Then, suddenly, there is a little popping sound, and one notices that the creature's outer garment has split down the back, as neatly as though it had come equipped with a zipper. Slowly now the thing inside begins to emerge, drawing itself out through the opening until it has freed its body, head, and all its members. Slowly, slowly, it accomplishes this amazing task, and slowly creeps out into a patch of sun, leaving behind the brown and lifeless husk from which it came.

  The living, elemental protoplasm, translucent, pale green now, remains motionless for a long time in the sun, but if one has the patience to watch it further, one will see the miracle of change and growth enacted before his very eyes. After a while the body begins to pulse with life, it flattens out and changes colour like a chameleon, and from small sprouts on each side of the back the wings commence to grow. Quickly, quickly now, they lengthen out--one can see it happening!--until they become transparent fairy wings, iridescent, shimmering in the sun. They begin to quiver delicately, then more rapidly, and all at once, with a metallic whirring sound, they cut the air and the creature flashes off, a new-born thing released into a new element.

  America, in the autumn of 1929, was like a cicada. It had come to an end and a beginning. On October 24th, in New York, in a marble-fronted building down in Wall Street, there was a sudden crash that was heard throughout the land. The dead and outworn husk of the America that had been had cracked and split right down the back, and the living, changing, suffering thing within--the real America, the America that had always been, the America that was yet to be--began now slowly to emerge. It came forth into the light of day, stunned, cramped, crippled by the bonds of its imprisonment, and for a long time it remained in a state of suspended animation, full of latent vitality, waiting, waiting patiently, for the next stage of its metamorphosis.

  The leaders of the nation had fixed their gaze so long upon the illusions of a false prosperity that they had forgotten what America looked like. Now they saw it--saw its newness, its raw crudeness, and its strength--and turned their shuddering eyes away. "Give us back our well-worn husk," they said, "where we were so snug and comfortable." And then they tried word-magic. "Conditions are fundamentally sound," they said--by which they meant to reassure themselves that nothing now was really changed, that things were as they always had been, and as they always would be, for ever and ever, amen.

  But they were wrong. They did not know that you can't go home again. America bad come to the end of something, and to the beginning of something else. But no one knew what that something else would be, and out of the change and the uncertainty and the wrongness of the leaders grew fear and desperation, and before long hunger stalked the streets. Through it all there was only one certainty, though no one saw it yet. America was still America, and whatever new thing came of it would be American.

  George Webber was just as confused and fearful as everybody else. If anything, he was more so, because, in addition to the general crisis, he was caught in a personal one as well. For at this very time he, too, had come to an end and a beginning. It was an end of love, though not of loving; a beginning of recognition, though not of fame. His book was published early in November, and that event, so eagerly awaited for so long, produced results quite different from any he had expected. And during this period of his life he learned a great deal that he had never known before, but it was only gradually, in the course of the years to come, that he began to realise how the changes in himself were related to the larger changes in the world around him.

  * * *

  22. A Question of Guilt

  Throughout George Webber's boyhood in the little town of Libya Hill, when the great vision of the city burned for ever in his brain, he had been athirst for glory and had wanted very much to be a famous man. That desire had never changed, except to become stronger as he grew older, until now he wanted it more than ever. Yet, of the world of letters in which he dreamed of cutting a great figure, he knew almost nothing. He was now about to find out a few things that were to rob his ignorance of its bliss.

  His novel, Home to Our Mountains, was published the first week in November 1929. The date, through the kind of accidental happening which so often affects the course of human events, and which, when looked back on later, seems to have been attended by an element of fatality, coincided almost exactly with the beginning of the Great American Depression.

  The collapse of the Stock Market, which had begun in late October, was in some ways like the fall of a gigantic boulder into the still waters of a lake. The suddenness of it sent waves of desperate fear moving in ever-widening circles throughout America. Millions of people in the far-off hamlets, towns, and cities did not know what to make of it. Would its effects touch them? They hoped not. And the waters of the lake closed over the fallen boulder, and for a while most Americans went about their day's work just as usual.

  But the waves of fear had touched them, and life was not quite the same. Security was gone, and there was a sense of dread and ominous foreboding in the air. It was into this atmosphere of false calm and desperate anxiety that Webber's book was launched.

  It is no part of the purpose of this narrative to attempt to estimate the merits or deficiences of Home to Our Mountains. It need only be said here that it was a young man's first book, and that it had a good many of the faults and virtues of the kind of thing it was. Webber had done what so many beginning writers do: he had written it out of the experience of his own life. And that got him into a lot of trouble.

  He was to become convinced as he grew older that if one wants to write a book that has any interest or any value whatever, he has got to write it out of the experience of life. A writer, like everybody else must use what he has to use. He can't use something that he hasn't got. If he tries to--and many writers have tried it--what he writes is no good. Everybody knows that.

  So Webber had drawn upon the experience of his own life. He had written about his home town, about his family and the people he had known there. And he, had done it in a manner of naked directness and reality that was rather rare in books. That was really what caused the trouble.

  Every author's first book is important. It means the world to him. Perhaps he thinks that what he has done has never been done before. Webber thought so. And in a way he was right. He was still very much under the influence of James Joyce, and what he had written was a Ulysses kind of book. People at home, whose good opinion he coveted more than that of all the rest of the world combined, were bewildered and overwhelmed by it. They, of course, had not read Ulysses. And Webber had not read people. He thought he had, he thought he knew what they were like, but he really didn't. He hadn't learned what a difference there is between living with them and writing about them.

  A man learns a great deal about life from writing and publishing a book. When Webber wrote his, he had ripped off a mask that his home town had always worn, but he had not quite understood that he was doing it. Only after it was printed and published did he fully realise the fact. All he had meant and hoped to do was to tell the truth about life as he had known it. But no sooner was the thing done--the proofs corrected, the pages printed beyond recall--than he knew that he had not told the truth. Telling the truth is a pretty hard thing. And in a young man's first attempt, with the distortions of his vanity, egotism, hot passion, and lacerated pride, it is almost impossible. Home to Our Mountains was marred by all these faults and imperfections. Webber knew this better than anybody else, and long before any reader had a chance to tell him so. He did not know whether he had written a great book--sometimes he thought he had, or at least that there were elements of greatness in it. He did know that it was not altogether a true book. Still, there was truth in it. And this was what people were afraid of. This was what made them mad.<
br />
  As the publication day drew near, Webber felt some apprehension about the reception of his novel in Libya Hill. Ever since his trip home in September he had had a heightened sense of uneasiness and anxiety. He had seen the boom-mad town tottering on the brink of ruin. He had read in the eyes of people on the streets the fear and guilty knowledge of the calamity that impended and that they were still refusing to admit even to themselves. He knew that they were clinging desperately to the illusion of their paper riches, and that madness such as this was unprepared to face reality and truth in any degree whatever.

  But even if he had been unaware of these special circumstances of the moment, he would still have had some premonitory consciousness that he was in for something. For he was a Southerner, and he knew that there was something wounded in the South. He knew that there was something twisted, dark, and full of pain which Southerners have known with all their lives--something rooted in their souls beyond all contradiction, about which no one had dared to write, of which no one had ever spoken.

  Perhaps it came from their old war, and from the ruin of their great defeat and its degraded aftermath. Perhaps it came from causes yet more ancient--from the evil of man's slavery, and the hurt and shame of human conscience in its struggle with the fierce desire to own. It came, too, perhaps, from the lusts of the hot South, tormented and repressed below the harsh and outward patterns of a bigot and intolerant theology, yet prowling always, stirring stealthily, as hushed and secret as the thickets of swamp-darkness. And most of all, perhaps, it came out of the very weather of their lives, out of the forms that shaped them and the food that fed them, out of the unknown terrors of the skies above them, out of the dark, mysterious pineland all round them with its haunting sorrow.

  Wherever it came from, it was there--and Webber knew it.

  But it was not only in the South that America was hurt. There was another deeper, darker, and more nameless wound throughout the land. What was it? Was it in the record of corrupt officials and polluted governments, administrations twisted to the core, the huge excess of privilege and graft, protected criminals and gangster rule, the democratic forms all rotten and putrescent with disease? Was it in "puritanism"--that great, vague name: whatever it may be? Was it in the bloated surfeits of monopoly, and the crimes of wealth against the worker's life? Yes, it was in all of these, and in the daily tolling of the murdered men, the lurid renderings of promiscuous and casual slaughter everywhere throughout the land, and in the pious hypocrisy of the Press with its swift-forgotten prayers for our improvement, the editorial moaning while the front page gloats.