by Thomas Wolfe
The experiences of that final summer in Germany had a profound effect upon George Webber. He had come face to face with something old and genuinely evil in the spirit of man which he had never known before, and it shook his inner world to its foundations. Not that it produced a sudden revolution in his way of thinking. For years his conception of the world and of his own place in it had been gradually changing, and the German adventure merely brought this process to its climax. It threw into sharp relief many other related phenomena which George had observed in the whole temper of the times, and it made plain to him, once and for all, the dangers that lurk in those latent atavistic urges which man has inherited from his dark past.
Hitlerism, he saw, was a recrudescence of an old barbarism. Its racial nonsense and cruelty, its naked worship of brute force, its suppression of truth and resort to lies and myths, its ruthless contempt for the individual, its anti-intellectual and anti-moral dogma that to one man alone belongs the right of judgment and decision, and that for all others virtue lies in blind, unquestioning obedience--each of these fundamental elements of Hitlerism was a throwback to that fierce and ancient tribalism which had sent waves of hairy Teutons swooping down out of the north to destroy the vast edifice of Roman civilisation. That primitive spirit of greed and lust and force had always been the true enemy of mankind.
But this spirit was not confined to Germany. It belonged to no one race. It was a terrible part of the universal heritage of man. One saw traces of it everywhere. It took on many disguises, many labels. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin--each had his own name for it. And America had it, too, in various forms. For wherever ruthless men conspired together for their own ends, wherever the rule of dog-eat-dog was dominant, there it bred. And wherever one found it, one also found that its roots sank down into something primitive in man's ugly past. And these roots would somehow have to be eradicated, George felt, if man was to win his ultimate freedom and not be plunged back into savagery and perish utterly from the earth.
When George realised all this he began to look for atavistic yearnings in himself. He found plenty of them. Any man can find them if he is honest enough to look for them. The whole year that followed his return from Germany, George occupied himself with this effort of self-appraisal. And at the end of it he knew, and with the knowledge came the definite sense of new direction towards which he had long been groping, that the dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back--but that you can go home again.
The phrase had many implications for, him. You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of "the artist" and the all-sufficiency of "art" and "beauty" and "love", back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
In a way, the phrase summed up everything he had ever learned. And what he now knew led inexorably to a decision which was the hardest he had ever bad to make. Throughout the year he wrestled with it, talked about it with his friend and editor, Foxhall Edwards, and fought against doing what he realised he would have to do. For the time had come to leave Fox Edwards. They bad reached a parting of the ways. Not that Fox was one of the new barbarians. God, no! But Fox--well, Fox--Fox understood. And George knew that whatever happened, Fox would always remain his friend.
So in the end, after all their years together, they parted. And when it was over, George sat down and wrote to Fox. He wanted to leave the record clear. And this is what he wrote:
* * *
45. Young Icarus
I have of late, dear Fox [George wrote], been thinking of you very I much, and of your strange but most familiar face. I never knew a man like you before, and if I had not known you, I never could have imagined you. And yet, to me you are inevitable, so that, having known you, I cannot imagine what life would have been for me without you. You were a polestar in my destiny. You were the magic thread in the great web which, being woven now, is finished and complete: the circle of our lives rounds out, full swing, and each of us in his own way now has rounded it: there is no further circle we can make. This, too--the end as the beginning--was inevitable: therefore, dear friend and parent of my youth, farewell.
Nine years have passed since first I waited in your vestibule. And I was not repulsed. No: I was taken in, was welcomed, was picked up and sustained just when my spirit reached its lowest ebb, was given life and hope, the restoration of my self-respect, the vindication of my self-belief, the renewal of my faith by the assurance of your own belief; and I was carried on, through all the struggle, doubt, confusion, desperation, effort of the years that were to follow, by your help and by the noble inspiration of your continued faith.
But now it ends--the road we were to go together. We two alone know how completely it has ended. But before I go, because few men can ever know, from first to last, a circle of such whole, superb finality, I leave this picture of it.
You may think it a little premature of me to start summing up my life at the age of thirty-seven. That is not my purpose here. But, although thirty-seven is not an advanced age at which one can speak of having learned many things, neither is it too early to have learned a few. By that time a man has lived long enough to be able to look back over the road he has come and see certain events and periods in a proportion and a perspective which he could not have had before. And because certain of the periods of my life represent to me, as I now look back on them, stages of marked change and development, not only in the spirit which animates the work I do, but also in my views on men and living, and my own relation to the world, I am going to tell you about them. Believe me, it is not egotism that prompts me to do this. As you will see, my whole experience swings round, as though through a pre-destined orbit, to you, to this moment, to this parting. So bear with me--and then, farewell.
To begin at the beginning (all is clear from start to finish):
Twenty years ago, when I was seventeen years old and a sophomore at Pink Rock College, I was very fond, along with many of my fellows, of talking about my "philosophy of life". That was one of our favourite subjects of conversation, and we were most earnest about it. I'm not sure now what my "philosophy" was at that time, but I am sure I had one. Everybody had. We were deep in philosophy at Pine Rock. We juggled such formidable terms as "concepts", "categorical imperatives", and "moments of negation" in a way that would have made Spinoza blush.
And if I do say so, I was no slouch at it myself. At the age of seventeen I had an A-1 rating as a philosopher. "Concepts" held no terrors for my young life, and "moments of negation" were my meat. I could split a hair with the best of them. And now that I have turned to boasting, I may as well tell you that I made a One in Logic, and it was said to be the only One that had been given in that course for many a year. So when it comes to speaking of philosophy, I am, you see, a fellow who is privileged to speak.
I don't know how it goes with students of this generation, but to those of us who were in college twenty years ago philosophy was serious business. We were always talking about "God". In our interminable discussions we were for ever trying to get at the inner essence of "truth", "goodness", and "beauty". We were full of notions about all these things. And I do not laugh at them to-day. We were young, we were impassioned, and we were sincere.
One of the most memorable events-of my college career occurred one day at noon when I was walking up a campus path and encountered, coming towards me, one of my classmates whose name was D. T. Jones.
D. T.--sometimes known more familiarly as Delirium Tremens--was also a philosopher. And the moment I saw him approaching I knew that D. T. was in the throes. He came from a family of Primitive Baptists, and he was red-haired, gaunt, and angular, and now as he came towards me everything about him--hair, eyebrows, eyelids, eyes, freckles, even his large and bony hands--shone forth in the sunlight with an excessive and almost terrifying redness.
He was coming up from a noble wood in which we held initiations and took our Sunday strolls. It was also the sacred grove to which we resorted, alone, when we were struggling with the problems of philosophy. It was where we went when we were going through what was known as "the wilderness experience", and it was the place from which, when "the wilderness experience" was done, we triumphantly emerged.
D. T. was emerging now. He had been there, he told me later, all night long. His "wilderness experience" had been a good one. He came bounding towards me like a kangaroo, leaping into the air at intervals, and the only words he said were:
"I've had a Concept!"
Then, leaving me stunned and leaning for support against an ancient tree, he passed on down the path, high-bounding every step or two, to carry the great news to the whole brotherhood.
And still I do not laugh at it. We took philosophy seriously in those days, and each of us had his own. And, together, we had our own "Philosopher". He was a venerable and noble-hearted man--one of those great figures which almost every college had some years ago, and which I hope they still have. For half a century he had been a dominant figure in the life of the entire state. In his teaching he was a Hegelian. The process of his scholastic reasoning was intricate: it came up out of ancient Greece and followed through the whole series of "developments" down to Hegel. After Hegel--well, he did not supply the answer. But it didn't matter, for after Hegel we had him--he was our own Old Man.
Our Philosopher's "philosophy", as I look back upon it, does not seem important now. It seems to have been, at best, a tortuous and patched-up scheme of other men's ideas. But what was important was the man himself. He was a great teacher, and what he did for us, and for others before us for fifty years, was not to give us his "philosophy"--but to communicate to us his own alertness, his originality, his power to think. He was a vital force because he supplied to many of us, for the first time in our lives, the inspiration of a questioning intelligence. He taught us not to be afraid to think, to question; he taught us to examine critically the most sacrosanct of our native prejudices and superstitions. So of course, throughout the state, the bigots hated him; but his own students worshipped him to idolatry. And the seed he planted grew--long after Hegel, "concepts", "moments of negation", and all the rest of it had vanished into the limbo of forgotten things.
It was at about this time that I began to write. I was editor of the college newspaper, and I wrote stories and poems for our literary magazine, The Burr, of which I was also a member of the editorial staff. The war was going on then. I was too young to be in service, but my first literary attempts may be traced to the patriotic inspiration of the war. I remember one poem (my first, I believe) which was aimed directly at the luckless head of Kaiser Bill. It was called, defiantly: "The Gauntlet", and was written in the style and meter of "The Present Crisis", by James Russell Lowell. I remember, too, that it took a high note from the very beginning. The poet, it is said, is the prophet and the bard--the awakened tongue of all his folk. I was all of that. In the name of embattled democracy I let the Kaiser have the works. And I remember two lines in particular that seemed to me to ring out with the very voice of outraged Freedom:
"Thou hast given us the challenge--
Pay, thou dog, the cost, and go!"
I remember these lines because they were the occasion of an editorial argument. The more conservative members of the magazine's staff felt that the epithet, "thou dog", was too strong--not that the Kaiser didn't deserve it, but that it jarred rudely upon the high moral elevation of the poem and upon the literary quality of The Burr. Over my vigorous protest, and without regard for the meter of the line, the two words were deleted.
Another poem that I wrote that year was a cheerful one about a peasant in a Flanders field who ploughed up a skull, and then went on quietly about his work while the great guns blasted away and "the grinning skull its grisly secret kept". I also remember a short story--my first--which was called "A Winchester of Virginia", and was about the recreant son of an old family who recovered his courage and vindicated his tarnished honour in the charge over the top that took his life. These, so far as I can recall them, were my first creative efforts; it will be seen what an important part the last war played in them.
I mention all this merely to fix the point from which I started. This was the beginning of the road.
In recent years there have been several attempts to explain what has happened to me since that time in terms of something that happened to me in college. I believe, Fox, that I never told you about that episode. Not that I was ashamed of my part in it or was afraid to talk about it. It just never came up; in a way, I had forgotten it. But now, at this moment of our parting, I think I had better speak of it, because it is vitally important to me to make one thing clear: that I am not the victim or the embittered martyr of anything that ever happened in the past. Oh, yes, there was a time, as you well know, when I was full of bitterness. There was a time when I felt that life had betrayed me. But that preciousness is gone now, and with it has gone my bitterness. This is the simple truth.
But to get back to this episode I spoke of:
As you know, Fox, when my first book was published, feeling ran high against me at home. Then it was that an effort was made to explain what was called the "bitterness" of the book in terms of my disfranchisement when I was at college. Now, the Pine Rock case is famous in Old Catawba, but the names of its chief actors had been almost forgotten when the book appeared. Then, because I was one of them, people began to talk about the case again, and the whole horrible tragedy was exhumed.
It was recalled how five of us (and God have mercy on the souls of those others who kept silent at the time) had taken our classmate Bell out to the playing-field one night, blindfolded him, and compelled him to dance upon a barrel. It was recalled how he stumbled and toppled from the barrel, fell on a broken bottle-neck, severed his jugular, and bled to death within five minutes. It was recalled, then, how the five of us--myself and Randy Shepperton, John Brackett, Stowell Anderson, and Dick Carr--were expelled, brought up for trial, released in the custody of our parents or nearest relatives, and deprived of the rights of citizenship by legislative act.
All this was true. But the construction which people put upon it when the book appeared was false. None of us, I think, was "ruined" and "embittered"--and our later records prove that we were not. There is no doubt that the tragic consequences of our act (and of the five who suffered disfranchisement, at least three--I will not say which three--were present only in the group of onlookers) left its dark and terrible imprint on our young lives. But, as Randy whispered to me on that dreadful night, as we stood there white-faced and helpless in the moonlight, watching that poor boy as he bled to death:
"We're not guilty of anything--except of being plain damned fools!"
That was the way we felt that night--all of us--as we knelt, sick with horror, around the figure of that dying boy. And I know that was the way Bell felt, too, for he saw the terror and remorse in our white faces and, dying though he was, he tried to smile and speak to us. The words would not come, but all of us knew that if he could have spoken he would have said that he was sorry for us--that he knew there was no evil in us--no evil but our own stupidity.
We had killed the boy--our thoughtless folly killed him--but with his dying breath that would have been his only judgment on us. And we broke the heart of Plato Grant, our Old Man, our own Philosopher; but all he said to us that night as he turned towards us from poor Bell was, quietly:
"My God, boys, what have you done?"
> And that was all. Even Bell's father said no more to us. And after the first storm had passed, the cry of outrage and indignation that went up throughout the state--that was our punishment: the knowledge of the Done inexorable, the merciless insistence in our souls of that fatal and irrevocable "Why?"
Swiftly people came to see and feel this, too. The first outburst of wrath that resulted in our disfranchisement was quickly over. Even out citizenship was quietly restored to us within three years. (As for myself, I was only eighteen when it happened, and cannot even be said to have missed a legal vote because of it.) Each of us was allowed to return to college the next year after our expulsion, and finish the full course. The sentiment of people everywhere not only softened: the verdict quickly became: "They didn't mean to do it. They were just damned fools." Later, by the time of our re-enfranchisement, public sentiment actually became liberal in its tone of pardon. "They've been punished enough," people said by then. "They were just kids--and they didn't mean to do it. Besides"--this became an argument in our favour--"it cost a life, but it killed hazing in the state."
As to the later record of the five--Randy Shepperton is dead now; but John Brackett, Stowell Anderson, and Dick Carr have all enjoyed a more than average measure of success in their communities. When I last saw Stowell Anderson--he is an attorney, and the political leader of his district--he told me quietly that, far from having been damaged in his career by the experience, he thought he had been helped.
"People," he said, "are willing to forget a past mistake if they see you're regular. They're not only willing to forgive--on the whole, I think they're even glad to give a helping hand."
"If they see you're regular!" Without commenting on the meanings of that, I think it sums up the matter in a nutshell. There has not only been no question since about the "regularity" of the other three--Brackett, Anderson, and Carr--but I think any natural tendencies they may have had towards regularity were intensified by their participation in the Pine Rock case. I believe, too, that the denunciations of my "irregularity", following the publication of my first book, might have been even more virulent and vicious than they were had it not been for the respectable fellowship of Brackett, Anderson, and Carr.
