You Can't Go Home Again

by Thomas Wolfe

  "You don't believe that?"

  "Hell, no!"--scornfully. "I'll bet you anything you like that if you could really find out what's going on in old Edison's mind, you'd find that he wished he could stay in bed every day until two o'clock in the afternoon! And then get up and scratch himself! And then lie around in the sun for a while! And hang round with the boys down at the village store, talking about politics, arid who's going to win the World Series next autumn!"

  "Then what keeps him from it, if that's what he wants to do?"

  "Why," he cried impatiently, "laziness! That's all. He's afraid to do it because he knows he's so damned lazy! And he's ashamed of being lazy, and afraid he'll get found out! That's why!"

  "Ah, but that's another thing! Why is he ashamed of it?"

  "Because," he said earnestly, "every time he wants to lie in bed until two o'clock in the afternoon, he hears the voice of his old man----"

  "His old man?"

  "Sure. His father." He nodded vigorously.

  "But Edison's father has been dead for years, hasn't he?"

  "Sure--but that doesn't matter. He hears him just the same. Every time he rolls over to get an extra hour or two, I'll bet you he hears old Pa Edison hollering at him from the foot of the stairs, telling him to get up, and that he's not worth powder enough to blow him sky high, and that when he was his age, he'd been up four hours already and done a whole day's work--poor, miserable orphan that he was!"

  "Really, I didn't know that. Was Edison's father an orphan?"

  "Sure--they all are when they holler at you from the foot of the stairs. And school was always at least six miles away, and they were always barefooted, and it was always snowing. God!" he laughed suddenly. "No one's old man ever went to school except under polar conditions. They all did. And that's why you get up, that's why you drive yourself, because you're afraid not to--afraid of 'that damned Joyner blood in you.'...So I'm afraid that's the way it's going to be with me until the end of my days. Every time I see the Ile de France or the Aquitania or the Berengaria backing into the river and swinging into line on Saturday, and see the funnels with their racing slant, and the white breasts of the great liners, and something catches at my throat, and suddenly I hear mermaids singing--I'll also hear the voice of the old man yelling at me from as far as back as I can remember, and telling me I'm not worth the powder to blow me up. And every time I dream of tropic isles, of plucking breadfruit from the trees, or of lying stretched out beneath a palm-tree in Samoa, fanned by an attractive lady of those regions clad in her latest string of beads--I'll hear the voice of the old man. Every time I dream of lying sprawled out with Peter Breughel in Cockaigne, with roast pigs trotting by upon the hoof, and with the funnel of a beer bung in my mouth--I'll hear the voice of the old man. Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all. I'm lazy--but every time I surrender to my baser self, the old man hollers from the stairs."

  George was full of his own problems and talked about them constantly. Randy was an understanding listener. But suddenly one day, towards the end of Randy's visit, the thought struck George as strange that his friend should be taking so much time off from his job. He asked Randy about it. How had he managed it?

  "I haven't got a job," Randy answered quietly with his little embarrassed laugh. "They threw me out."

  "You mean to say that that bastard Merrit--" George began, hot with instant anger.

  "Oh, don't blame him," Randy broke in. "He couldn't help it. The higher-ups were on his tail and he had to do it. He said I wasn't getting the business, and it's true--I wasn't. But what the Company doesn't know is that nobody can get the business any more. It isn't there, and hasn't been for the last year or so. You saw how it was when you were home. Every penny anybody could get hold of went into real estate speculation. That was the only business they had left down there. And now, of course, that's gone, too, since the bank failed."

  "And do you mean to say," George commented, speaking the words slowly and with emphasis--"do you mean to say that Merrit seized that moment to throw you out on your ear? Why, the dirty----"

  "Yes," said Randy. "I got the sack just a week after the bank closed. I don't know whether Merrit figured that was the best time to get rid of me or whether it just happened so. But what's the difference? It's been coming for a long time. I've seen it coming for a year or more. It was just a question of when. And believe me," he said with quiet emphasis, "I've been through hell. I lived from day to day in fear and dread of it, knowing it was coming and knowing there wasn't anything I could do to head it off. But the funny thing is, now it's happened I feel relieved." He smiled his old clear smile. "It's the truth," he said. "I never would have had the guts to quit--I was making pretty good money, you know--but now that I'm out, I'm glad. I'd forgotten how it felt to be a free man. Now I can hold my head up and look anybody in the eye and tell the Great Man, Paul S. Appleton himself, to go to the devil. It's a good feeling. I like it."

  "But what are you going to do, Randy?" asked George with evident concern.

  "I don't know," said Randy cheerfully. "I haven't any plans. All the years I was with the Company I lived pretty well, but I also managed to save a little something. And, luckily, I didn't put it in the Citizens Trust, or in real estate either, so I've still got it. And I own the old family house. Margaret and I can get along all right for a while. Of course, jobs that pay as well as the one I had don't turn up round every corner, but this is a big country and there's always a place for a good man. Did you ever hear of a good man who couldn't find work?" he said.

  "Well, you can't be too sure of that," said George, shaking his head dubiously. "Maybe I'm wrong," he went on, pausing and frowning thoughtfully, "but I don't think the Stock Market crash and the bank failure in Libya Hill were isolated events. I'm coming to feel," he said, "that we may be up against something new--something that's going to cut deeper than anything America has experienced before. The papers are beginning to take it seriously. They're calling it a depression. Everybody seems to be scared."

  "Oh, pshaw!" said Randy with a laugh. "You are feeling low. That's because you live in New York. Here the Stock Market is everything. When it's high, times are good; when it's low, they're bad. But New York is not America."

  "I know," said George. "But I'm not thinking about the Stock Market. I'm thinking about America...Sometimes it seems to me," he continued slowly, like a man who gropes his way in darkness over an unfamiliar road, "that America went off the track somewhere--back round the time of the Civil War, or pretty soon afterwards. Instead of going ahead and developing along the line in which the country started out, it got shunted off in another direction--and now we look round and see we've gone places we didn't mean to go. Suddenly we realise that America has turned into something ugly--and vicious--and corroded at the heart of its power with easy wealth and graft and special privilege...And the worst of it is the intellectual dishonesty which all this corruption has bred. People are afraid to think straight--afraid to face themselves--afraid to look at things and see them as they are. We've become like a nation of advertising men, all hiding behind catch phrases like 'prosperity' and 'rugged individualism' and 'the American way'. And the real things like freedom, and equal opportunity, and the integrity and worth of the individual--things that have belonged to the American dream since the beginning--they have become just words, too. The substance has gone out of them--they're not real any more...Take your own case. You say you feel free at last because you've lost your job. I don't doubt it--but it's a funny kind of freedom. And just how free are you?"

  "Well, free enough to suit me," said Randy heartily. "And, funny or not, I'm freer than I've ever been before. Free enough to take my time and look round a bit before I make a new connection. I don't want to get in with another outfit like the old one. I'll land on my feet," he said serenely.

  "But how are you going to do it?" asked George. "There can't be anything for you in Libya Hill, with the bottom dropped out of everything down there."

  "He
ll, I'm not wedded to the place!" said Randy. "I'll go anywhere. Remember, I've been a salesman all my life--I'm used to travelling round. And I have friends in the game--in other lines--who'll help me. That's one good thing about being a salesman: if you can sell one thing, you can sell anything, and it's easy to switch products. I know my way round," he concluded with strong confidence. "Don't you worry about me."

  They said very little more about it. And when Randy left, his parting words at the station were:

  "Well, so long, fellow! You're going to be all right. But don't forget to kill that wounded faun! As for me, I don't know just what the next move is, but I'm on my way!"

  With that he got aboard his train, and was gone.

  But George wasn't too sure about Randy. And the more he thought about him, the less sure he became. Randy had certainly not been licked by what had happened to him, and that was good; but there was something about his attitude--his cheerful optimism in the face of disaster--that seemed spurious. He had the clearest head of anybody George knew, but it was almost as if he had shut off one compartment of his brain and wasn't using at. It was all very puzzling.

  "There are tides in the affairs of men," George thought musingly--"definite periods of ebb and flow...And when they come, they come, and can't be held back by wishing."

  That was it, perhaps. It seemed to George that Randy was caught in the ebb and didn't know it. And that was what made it so queer and puzzling--that he, of all people, shouldn't know it.

  Also, he had spoken about not wanting to get mixed up with another outfit like the old one. Did he think the fearful pressures he had been subject to were peculiar to the company he had been working for, and that their counterparts existed nowhere else? Did he suppose he could escape those conditions just by changing jobs? Did he believe it was possible by such a shift to enjoy all the glorious advantages he had ever dreamed of as a bright, ambitious youth--high income and good living far beyond what most men are accustomed to--and to do it without paying the cost in other ways?

  "What will you have? quoth God; pay for it, and take it," said Emerson, in that wonderful essay on "Compensation" that every American ought to be required by law to read...Well, that was true. One always paid for it...

  Good Lord! Didn't Randy know you can't go home again?

  The next few years were terrible ones for all America, and especially terrible for Randy Shepperton.

  He didn't get another job. He tried everything, but nothing worked. There just weren't any jobs. Men were being let off by the thousands everywhere, and nowhere were new ones being taken on.

  After eighteen months his savings were gone, and he was desperate. He had to sell the old family house, and what he got for it was a mere pittance. He and Margaret rented a small apartment, and for another year or so, by careful management, they lived on what the house had brought them. Then that, too, was gone. Randy was on his uppers now. He fell ill, and it was an illness of the spirit more than of the flesh. At last, when there was nothing else to do, he and Margaret moved away from Libya Hill and went to live with the older sister who was married, and stayed there with her husband's family--dependents on the bounty of these kindly strangers.

  And at the end of all of this, Randy--he of the clear eyes and the quick intelligence--he who was nobody's fool--he who thought he loved the truth and had always been able to see straight to the heart of most things--Randy went on relief.

  And by that time George thought he understood it. Behind Randy's tragedy George thought he could see a personal devil in the form of a very bright and plausible young man, oozing confidence and crying: "Faith!" when there was no faith, and dressed like a travelling salesman. Yes, salesmanship had done its job too well. Salesmanship--that commercial brand of special pleading--that devoted servant of self-interest--that sworn enemy of truth. George remembered how Randy had been able to look at his alien problem and see it in the abstract, whole and clear, because there was no self-interest to cast its shadow on his vision. He could save others--himself he could not save, because he could no longer see the truth about himself.

  And it seemed to George that Randy's tragedy was the essential tragedy of America. America--the magnificent, unrivalled, unequalled, unbeatable, unshrinkable, supercolossal, 99-and-44-one-hundredths-per-cent-pure, schoolgirl-complexion, covers-the-earth, I'd-walk-a-mile-for-it, four-out-of-five-have-it, his master's-voice, askthe-man-who-owns-one, blueplate-special home of advertising, salesmanship, and special pleading in all its many catchy and beguiling forms.

  Had not the real rulers of America--the business men--been wrong about the depression from the start? Had they not pooh-poohed it and tried to wipe it out with words, refusing to see it for what it was? Had they not kept saying that prosperity was just round the corner--long after "prosperity", so-called, had vanished, and the very corner it was supposed to be round had flattened out and bent into a precipitate downward curve of hunger, want, and desperation?

  Well, Randy had been right about the wounded faun. For George knew now that his own self-pity was just his precious egotism coming between him and the truth he strove for as a writer. What Randy didn't know was that business also had its wounded fauns. And they, it seemed, were a species that you could not kill so lightly. For business was the most precious form of egotism--self-interest at its dollar value. Kill that with truth, and what would be left?

  A better way of life, perhaps, but it would not be built on business as we know it.

  * * *

  BOOK IV. - THE QUEST OF THE FAIR MEDUSA

  George took Randy's advice and moved. He did not know where to go. All he wanted was to get away as far as possible from Park Avenue, from the aesthetic jungles of the lion hunters, from the half-life of wealth and fashion that had grown like a parasite upon the sound body of America. He went to live in Brooklyn.

  He had made a little money from his book, so now he paid his debts and quit the job he held as a teacher at the School for Utility Cultures. From this time on, he earned his precarious living solely by what he wrote.

  For four years he lived in Brooklyn, and four years in Brooklyn are a geologic age--a single stratum of grey time. They were years of poverty, of desperation, of loneliness unutterable. All about him were the poor, the outcast, the neglected and forsaken people of America, and he was one of them. But life is strong, and year after year it went on round him in all its manifold complexity, rich with its unnoticed and unrecorded little happenings. He saw it all, be took it all in hungrily as part of his experience, he recorded much of it, and in the end he squeezed it dry as he tried to extract its hidden meanings.

  And what was he like inside while these grey years were slipping by? What was he up to, what was he doing, what did he want?

  That's rather hard to tell, because he wanted so many things, but the thing he wanted most was Fame. Those were the years of his concentrated quest of that fair Medusa. He had had his little taste of glory, and it was bitter in his mouth. He thought the reason was that he had not been good enough--and he had not been good enough. Therefore he thought that what be had had was not Fame at all, but only a moment's notoriety. He had been a seven-day wonder--that was all.

  Well, he had learned some things since he wrote his first book. He would try again.

  So he lived and wrote, and wrote and lived, and lived there by himself in Brooklyn. And when he had worked for hours at a stretch, forgetting food and sleep and everything, he would rise from his desk at last and stagger forth into the night-time streets, reeling like a drunkard with his weariness. He would eat his supper at a restaurant, and then, because his mind was feverish and he knew he could not sleep, he would walk to Brooklyn Bridge and cross It to Manhattan, and ferret out the secret heart of darkness in all the city's ways, and then at dawn come back across the Bridge once more, and so to bed in Brooklyn.

  And in these nightly wanderings the old refusals dropped away, the old avowals stood. For then, somehow, it seemed to him that he who had been dead was risen,
be who had been lost was found again, and be who in his brief day of glory bad sold the talent, the passion, and the belief of youth into the keeping of the fleshless dead, until his heart was corrupted and all hope gone, would win his life back bloodily, in solitude and darkness. And be felt then that things would be for him once more as they had been, and he saw again, as be bad once seen, the image of the shining city. Far-flung, and blazing into into tiers of jewelled light, it burned forever in his vision as he walked the Bridge, and strong tides were bound round it, and the great ships called. So he walked the Bridge, always be walked the Bridge.

  And by his side was that stern friend, the only one to whom be spoke what in his secret heart he most desired. To Loneliness he whispered: "Fame!"--and Loneliness replied: "Aye, brother, wait and see."

  * * *

  27. The Locusts Have No King

  The tragic light of evening falls upon the huge and rusty jungle of South Brooklyn. It falls without glare or warmth upon the faces of all the men with dead eyes and flesh of tallow-grey as they lean upon their window-sills at the sad, hushed end of day.

  If at such a time you walk down this narrow street, between the mean and shabby houses, past the eyes of all the men who lean there quietly at their open windows in their shirt-sleeves, and turn in at the alley here and follow the two-foot strip of broken concrete pavement that skirts the alley on one side, and go to the very last shabby house down at the end, and climb up the flight of worn steps to the front entrance and knock loudly at the door with your bare knuckles (the bell is out of order) and then wait patiently until someone comes, and ask whether Mr. George Webber lives here, you will be informed that he most certainly does, and that if you will just come in and go down this stairway to the basement and knock at the door there on your right, you will probably find him in. So you go down the stairway to the damp and gloomy basement hall, thread your way between the dusty old boxes, derelict furniture, and other lumber stored there in the passage, rap on the door that has been indicated to you, and Mr. Webber himself will open it and usher you right into his room, his home, his castle.