You Can't Go Home Again

by Thomas Wolfe

  The place may seem to you more like a dungeon than a room that a man would voluntarily elect to live in. It is long and narrow, running parallel to the hall from front to rear, and the only natural light that enters it comes through two small windows rather high up in the wall, facing each other at the opposite ends, and these are heavily guarded with iron bars, placed there by some past owner of the house to keep the South Brooklyn thugs from breaking in.

  The room is furnished adequately but not so luxuriously as to deprive it of a certain functional and Spartan simplicity. In the back half there is an iron bed with sagging springs, a broken-down dresser with a cracked mirror above it, two kitchen chairs, and a steamer trunk and some old suitcases that have seen much use. At the front end, under the yellow glow of an electric light suspended from the ceiling by a cord, there is a large desk, very much scarred and battered, with the handles missing on most of the drawers, and in front of it there is a straight-backed chair made out of some old, dark wood. In the centre, ranged against the walls, where they serve to draw the two ends of the room together into aesthetic unity, stand an ancient gate-legged table, so much of its dark green paint flaked off that the dainty pink complexion of its forgotten youth shows through all over, a tier of book-shelves, unpainted, and two large crates or packing-cases, their thick top boards pried off to reveal great stacks of ledgers and of white and yellow manuscript within. On top of the desk, on the table, on the book-shelves, and all over the floor are scattered, like fallen leaves in autumn woods, immense masses of loose paper with writing on every sheet, and everywhere are books, piled up on their sides or leaning crazily against each other.

  This dark cellar is George Webber's abode and working quarters. Here, in winter, the walls, which sink four feet below the level of the ground, sweat continuously with clammy drops of water. Here, in summer, it is he who does the sweating.

  His neighbours, he will tell you, are for the most part Armenians, Italians, Spaniards, Irishmen, and Jews--in short, Americans. They live in all the shacks, tenements, and slums in all the raw, rusty streets and alleys of South Brooklyn.

  And what is that you smell?

  Oh, that! Well, you see, he shares impartially with his neighbours a piece of public property in the vicinity; it belongs to all of them in common, and it gives to South Brooklyn its own distinctive atmosphere. It is the old Gowanus Canal, and that aroma you speak of is nothing but the huge symphonic stink of it, cunningly compacted of unnumbered separate putrefactions. It is interesting sometimes to try to count them. There is in it not only the noisome stenches of a stagnant sewer, but also the smells of melted glue, burned rubber, and smouldering rags, the odours of a boneyard horse, long dead, the incense of putrefying offal, the fragrance of deceased, decaying cats, old tomatoes, rotten cabbage, and prehistoric eggs.

  And how does he stand it?

  Well, one gets used to it. One can get used to anything, just as all these other people do. They never think of the smell, they never speak of it, they'd probably miss it if they moved away.

  To this place, then, George Webber has come, and here "holed in" with a kind of dogged stubbornness touched with desperation. And you will not be far wrong if you surmise that he has come here deliberately, driven by a resolution to seek out the most forlorn and isolated hiding spot that he could find.

  * * *

  Mr. Marple, a gentleman who has a room on the second floor, comes stumbling down the darkened basement stairway with a bottle in his hand and knocks upon George Webber's door.

  "Come in!"

  Mr. Marple comes in, introduces himself, does the right thing with the bottle, sits down, and begins to make talk.

  "Well, now, Mr. Webber, how d'yah like that drink I mixed for yah?"

  "Oh, I like it, I like it."

  "Well, now, if yah don't, I want yah t'come right out an' say so."

  "Oh, I would, I would."

  "I mean I'd like to know. I'd appreciate yah tellin' me. What I mean is, I made that stuff myself from a little private formuler I got--I wouldn't buy no stuff from a bootlegger--I wouldn't take no chance wit' the bastards. I buy the alcohol that goes into that drink from a place I know, an' I always know what I'm gettin'--d'yah know what I mean?"

  "Yes, I certainly do."

  "But I'd like to know what yah think of it, I'd appreciate yah tellin' me."

  "Oh, it's fine, it couldn't be better."

  "I'm glad yah like it, an' you're sure I didn't disturb yah?"

  "Oh, no, not at all."

  "Because I was on my way in when I sees your light there in the winder, so I says to myself, now that guy may think I've got an orful nerve buttin' in like this but I'm gonna stop an' get acquainted an' ast him if he'd like a little drink."

  "I'm glad you did."

  "But if I disturbed yah I wantcha t'say so."

  "Oh, no, not at all."

  "Because here's the way it is wit' me. I'm interested in youman nature--I'm a great student of psychology--I can read faces the minute I look at a guy--it's somethin' that I always had--I guess that's why I'm in the insurance game. So when I sees a guy that interests me I wanta get acquainted wit' him an' get his reactions to things. So when I sees your light I says to myself, he may tell me to get the hell outa there but there ain't no harm in tryin'."

  "I'm glad you did."

  "Now Mr. Webber, I think I'm a pretty good judge of character----"

  "Oh, I'm sure you are."

  "--an' I been lookin' at yah an' sorta sizin' yah up while yah been sittin' there. Yah didn't know I was sizin' yah up but that's what I been doin' all the time yah been sittin' there because I'm a great student of youman nature, Mr. Webber, an' I gotta size up all grades an' classes every day in my business--you know--I'm in the insurance game. An' I wanna ast yah a question. Now if it's too personal I wantcha t'come right out an' say so, but if yah don't mind answerin' I'm gonna ast it to yah."

  "Not at all. What is it?"

  "Well, Mr. Webber, I already reached my own conclusions, but I'm gonna ast it to yah just t'see if it don't bear me out. Now what I'm gonna ast yah--an' yah don't have to answer if yah don't want to--is--What's your line?--What business are yah in? Now yah don't need to tell me if it's too personal."

  "Not at all. I'm a writer."

  "A what?"

  "A writer. I wrote a book once. I'm trying to write another one now."

  "Well now, it may surprise yah but that's just what I figgered out myself. I says to myself, now there's a guy, I says, that's in some kind of intelleckshul work where he's got t'use his head. He's a writer or a newspaperman or in the advertisin' business. Y'see I've always been a great judge of youman nature--that's my line."

  "Yes, I see."

  "An' now I wanna tell yah somethin' else, Mr. Webber. You're doin' the thing yah was cut out for, you're doin' the thing yah was born to do, it's what yah been preparin' to do all your life sinct yah was a kid--am I right or wrong?"

  "Oh, I guess you're right."

  "An' that's the reason you're gonna be a big success at it. Stick to writin', Mr. Webber. I'm a great judge of youman nature an' I know what I'm talkin' about. Just stick to the thing yah always wanted to be an' yah'll get there. Now some guys never find theirselves. Some guys never know what they wanna be. That's the trouble wit' some guys. Now wit' me it's different. I didn't find myself till I was a grown man. You'd have t'laugh, Mr. Webber, if I told yah what it was I wanted t'be when I was a kid."

  "What was it, Mr. Marple?"

  "Say, Mr. Webber--y'know it's funny--yah won't believe me--but up to the time I was about twenty years old, a grown man, I was crazy to be a railway engineer. No kiddin'. I was nuts about it. An' I'd a-been just crazy enough to've gone ahead an' got a job on the railway if the old man hadn't yanked me by the collar an' told me t'snap out of it. Yah know I'm a Down-Easter by birth--don't talk like it any more--I been here too long--but that's where I grew up. My old man was a plumber in Augusta, Maine. So when I tells him I'm gonna be a locomo
tive engineer he boots me one in the seat of the pants an' tells me I ain't no such thing. 'I've sent yah to school,' he says, 'you've had ten times the schoolin' that I had, an' now yah tell me that you're gonna be a railway hogger. Well, you're not,' the old man says, 'you're gonna be one member of the fambly that's comin' home at night wit' clean hands an' a white collar. Now you get the hell outa here an' hunt yah up a job in some decent high-class business where yah'll have a chanct t'advance an' associate wit' your social ekals.' Jesus! It was a lucky thing for me he took that stand or I'd never a-got where I am to-day. But I was good an' sore about it at the time. An' say, Mr. Webber--you're gonna laugh when I tell yah this one--I ain't actually over the darn thing yet. No kiddin'. When I see one of these big engines bargin' down the track I still get that funny crawly feelin' I usta have when I was a kid an' looked at 'em. The guys at the office had t'laugh about it when I told 'em, an' now when I come in they call me Casey Jones.--Well, what d'yah say yah have another little snifter before I go?"

  "Thanks, I'd like to, but maybe I'd better not. I've still got a little work I ought to do before I turn in."

  "Well now, Mr. Webber, I know just how it is. An' that's the way I had yah sized up from the first. That guy's a writer, I says, or in some sort of intelleckshul occupation where he's got to use his head--was I right or wrong?"

  "Oh, you were right."

  "Wel!, I'm glad to've metcha, Mr. Webber. Don't make yourself a stranger round here. Yah know, a guy gets sorta lonely sometimes. My wife died four years ago so I been livin' upstairs here ever sinct--sorta figgered that a single guy didn't need no more room than I got here. Come up to see me. I'm interested in youman nature an' 1 like to talk to people an' get their different reactions. So any time yah feel like chewin' the rag a bit, drop in."

  "Oh, I will, I will."

  "Good night, Mr. Webber."

  "Good night, Mr. Marple."

  Good night. Good night. Good night.

  Across the basement hall, in another room similar to George Webber's, lived an old man by the name of Wakefield. He had a son somewhere in New York who paid his rent, but Mr. Wakefield rarely saw his son. He was a brisk and birdy little man with a chirping, cheerful voice; and, although he was almost ninety, he always seemed to be in good health and was still immensely active. His son had provided him with a room to live in, and he had a little money of his own--a few dollars a month from a pension--enough to supply his meagre wants; but he lived a life of utter loneliness, seeing his son only on the occasion of a holiday or a rare visit, and the rest of the time living all by himself in his basement room.

  Yet he had as brave and proud a spirit as any man on earth. He longed desperately for companionship, but he would have died rather than admit he was lonely. So independent was he, and so sensitive, that, while he was always courteous and cheerful, his tone when he responded to a greeting was a little cold and distant, lest anyone should think he was too forward and eager. But, once satisfied of one's friendliness, no one could respond more warmly or more cordially than old man Wakefield.

  George grew fond of him and liked to talk with him, and the old man would invite him eagerly into his part of the basement and proudly display his room, which he kept with a soldierlike neatness. He was a veteran of the Union Army in the Civil War, and his room was filled with books, records, papers, and old clippings bearing on the war and on the part his regiment had played in it. Although he was alert and eager towards the life round him, and much too brave and hopeful a spirit to live mournfully in the past, the Civil War had been the great and central event in old man Wakefield's life. Like many of the men of his generation, both North and South, it had never occurred to him that the war was not the central event in everyone's life. Because it was so with him, he believed that people everywhere still lived and thought and talked about the war all the time.

  He was a leading figure in the activities of his Grand Army Post, and was always bustling about with plans and projects for the coming year. It seemed to him that the Grand Army organisation, whose thinning ranks of old and feeble men he still saw with the proud eyes of forty or fifty years before, was the most powerful society in the nation, and that its word of warning or stern reproof was enough to make all the kings of the earth quake and tremble in their boots. He was bitterly scornful and would bristle up immediately at mention of the American Legion: he fancied slights and cunning trickery on the part of this body all the time, and he would ruffle up like a rooster when he spoke of the Legionnaires, and say in an angry, chirping voice:

  "It's jealousy! Nothing in the world but sheer tar-nation jealousy--that's what it is!"

  "But why, Mr. Wakefield? Why should they be jealous of you?"

  "Because we reely did some soldierin'--that's why!" he chirped angrily. "Because they know we fit the Rebels--yes! and fit 'em good--and licked 'em, too!" he cackled triumphantly--"in a war that was a war!...Pshaw!" he said scornfully, in a lowered voice, looking out the window with a bitter smile and with eyes that had suddenly grown misty. "What do these fellows know about a war?--Some bob-tail--raggedy--two-by-two--little jackleg feller--of a Legionnary!" He spat the words out with a malignant satisfaction, breaking at the end into a vindictive cackle. "Standin' to their necks all day in some old trench and never gettin' within ten miles of the enemy!" he sneered. "If they ever saw a troop of cavalry, I don't know what they'd make of it! I reckon they'd think it was the circus come to town!" he cackled. "A war! A war! Hell-fire, that warn't no war!" he cried derisively. "If they wanted to see a war, they should've been with us at the Bloody Angle! But, pshaw!" he said. "They'd a-run like rabbits if they'd been there! The only way you could a-kept 'em would've been to tie 'em to a tree!"

  "Don't you think they could have beaten the Rebels, Mr. Wakefield?"

  "Beat 'em?" he shrilled. "Beat 'em! Why, boy, what are you talkin' about?...Hell! If Stonewall Jackson ever started for that gang, he'd run 'em ragged! Yes, sir! They'd light out so fast they'd straighten out all the bends of the road as they went by!" cried old man Wakefield, cackling. "Pshaw!" he said quietly and scornfully again. "They couldn't do it! It ain't in 'em!...But I'll tell you this much!" he cried suddenly in an excited voice. "We're not goin' to put up with it much longer! The boys have had just about as much of it as they can stand! If they try to do us like they done last year--pshaw!" he broke off again, and looked out the window shaking his head--"Why it's all as plain as the nose on your face! It's jealousy--just plain, confounded jealousy--that's all in the world it is!"

  "What is, Mr. Wakefield?"

  "Why, the way they done us last year!" he cried. "Puttin' us way back there at the tail-end of the pee-rade, when by all the rights--as everybody knows--we should've come first! But we'll fix 'em!" he cried warningly. "We've got a way to fix 'em!" he said with a triumphant shake of the head. "I know the thing we're goin' to do this year," he cried, "if they try another trick like that on us!"

  "What are you going to do, Mr. Wakefield?"

  "Why," he cackled, "we won't pee-rade! We simply won't pee-rade! We'll tell 'em they can hold their derned pee-rade without us!" he chirped exultantly. "And I reckon that'll fix 'em! Oh yes! That'll bring 'em round, or I miss my guess!" he crowed.

  "It ought to, Mr. Wakefield."

  "Why, boy," he said solemnly, "if we ever did a thing like that, there would be a wave of protest--a wave of protest"--he cried with a sweeping gesture of the arm, as his voice rose strongly--"from here to Californy!...The people wouldn't stand for it!" he cried. "They'd make those fellers back down in a hurry!"

  And as George left him, the old man would come with him to the door, shake his hand warmly and, with an eager and lonely look in his old eyes, say:

  "Come again, boy! I'm always glad to see you!...I got stuff in here--photygraphs an' books, an' such as that about the war--that you ain't seen yet. No, nor no one else!" he cackled. "For no one else has got 'em!...Just let me know when you're comin' an' I'll be here."

  Slowly the years crept by
and George lived alone in Brooklyn. They were hard years, desperate years, lonely years, years of interminable writing and experimentation, years of exploration and discovery, years of grey timelessness, weariness, exhaustion, and self-doubt. He had reached the wilderness period of his life and was hacking his way through the jungles of experience. He had stripped himself down to the brutal facts of self and work. These were all he had.

  He saw himself more clearly now than he had ever done before, and, in spite of living thus alone, he no longer thought of himself as a rare and special person who was doomed to isolation, but as a man who worked and who, like other men, was a part of life. He was concerned passionately with reality. He wanted to see things whole, to find out everything he could, and then to create out of what he knew the fruit of his own vision.

  One criticism that had been made of his first book still rankled in his mind. An unsuccessful scribbler turned critic had simply dismissed the whole book as a "barbaric yawp", accusing Webber of getting at things with his emotions rather than with his brains, and of being hostile towards the processes of the intellect and "the intellectual point of view." These charges, if they had any truth in them, seemed to George to be the kind of lifeless half-truth that was worse than no truth at all. The trouble with the so-called "intellectuals" was that they were not intellectual enough, and their point of view more often than not had no point, but was disparate, arbitrary, sporadic, and confused.

  To be an "intellectual" was, it seemed, a vastly different thing from being intelligent. A dog's nose would usually lead him towards what he wished to find, or away from what he wished to avoid: this was intelligent. That is, the dog had the sense of reality in his nose. But the "intellectual" usually had no nose, and was lacking in the sense of reality. The most striking difference between Webber's mind and the mind of the average "intellectual" was that Webber absorbed experience like a sponge, and made use of everything that he absorbed. He really learned constantly from experience. But the "intellectuals" of his acquaintance seemed to learn nothing. They had no capacity for rumination and digestion. They could not reflect.