OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  "Ah, my boy," the old "Major" would answer sorrowfully--"it is a grievous charge you make against us--but I fear--I fear," here his voice would sink to a dejected whisper--"I fear that it is just."

  In this way, a telling and satiric irony was derived from this scene, which was well handled and might have been effective on the stage.

  But the most effective scene of all, perhaps, was in the prologue of this play: here the scene was really splendid, thrilling in its dramatic pageantry, and undoubtedly would have been a very good and moving one upon a stage. The scene was on a hill and showed the building of the great white house--really the founding of a whole society. Before the unfinished house, a gun held cocked and ready in his hands, was standing the stern and silent figure of its founder. And before him, up and down the hill, and in and out of the unfinished house, and past its great unfinished columns, were moving two silent and unceasing files of slaves, powerful black men stripped naked to the waist, bearing upon their heads the heavy burdens of material that would go into the house. And from the house there comes a sound of constant hammering, and night comes, there are the flares of watchfires and the swift and cat-like passing of the great black forms. A moment's flare of insurrection, the spring of a great negro at the stern and lonely figure of the man, the flash of a knife, and the rebel falls, knocked senseless by a blow from the stock of the master's gun.

  Then, another white man from the neighbouring town--the minister: the minister's low persuasive voice urging the man to see the crime of slavery, quoting the Scriptures with a telling aptness, urging him to repent, to join the life of town and church, to "come to God" . . . And the quiet and inflexible answer of the master: "I must build my home."

  And nothing finally but night and dullness; the great figures of the slaves pad past in darkness, as noiseless as cats, and from the mystery of night there rises now the wailing chant of all the jungle, the lamentation of man's life of toil and grief and bitter labour, the chant of the slave.

  This was a fine scene, and should have been beautiful and moving on a stage.

  From this description it will be seen how the young man's play was made up both of good and bad, how strongly it was marked by the varied influence of his reading and idolatry--by Shakespeare, Chekhov, Shaw, Rostand, the Bible--and how he had also already begun to use some of the materials of his own life and feeling and experience, how even in this groping and uncertain play, some of the real grandeur, beauty, terror, and unuttered loneliness of America was apparent.

  Thus the play, with all its faults and imitations, really did illustrate, as few things else could do, the confused incertitude and the flashes of blind but powerful intuition, which mark the artist's early life here in America, and for this reason chiefly the play was interesting.

  And feeling this incertitude as he sat down to read the play--that feeling mixed of hope, of fear, of quivering apprehension which the artist feels when for the first time he releases his work from the lonely prison of creation and lets it go then, irrevocably, to stand upon its own feet, meet the naked eye of the great world without protection, and stand or fall upon its own merits--feeling this fatality of release, this irrevocable finality of action, he began to read the play in a halting, embarrassed, and almost inaudible tone, full of the proud and desperate hope, the trembling apprehension, the almost truculent hostility towards imaginary detractors which every young man feels at such a time.

  He sensed quickly that his fears were groundless. No man ever had a more generous, enthusiastic and devoted following than he had that morning in the presence of these two fine young people--Joel Pierce and his sister Rosalind.

  He saw--or rather felt at once--their rapt and fascinated attentiveness. Joel sat, his gaunt figure hinged forward on his knees, in an attitude of tense, motionless and utterly silent interest: from time to time as the young dramatist glanced up from his great sheaf of written manuscript he could see Joel's lean gaunt face fixed on him, uplifted, with its strangely pure and radiant eagerness, and Rosalind, her warm and strong young hands clasped quietly, folded in her lap, her warm and lovely face flushed with excitement, her eyes luminous, vague and tender, as if she were really in a theatre seeing the figures in the play pass before her invested in all the magic that the stage could give to them, displayed an interest that was more relaxed and more abstracted than her brother's, but none the less absorbed.

  The sense and sight and assurance of these things acted like a powerful and gloriously intoxicating liquor on his heart and mind and spirit. He felt an overpowering surge of warm affection, proud and tender gratefulness towards Joel and his sister. It seemed to him that they were the finest people he had ever known--the most generous, the truest, highest, and the loyalest--and the knowledge that they liked his play--were in fact conquered and possessed, brought out of themselves and laid under the play's power and magic--his own power and magic--overwhelmed him for a moment with a feeling of the purest, highest, and most glorious happiness that life can yield--the happiness that is at once the most selfish and the most selfless--the happiness of the artist when he sees that his work has been found good, has for itself a place of honour, glory, and proud esteem in the hearts of men, and has wrought upon their lives the spell of its enchantment. At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being--the reward he seeks--the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity. This is the reason that the artist lives and works and has his being: that from life's clay and his own nature, and from his father's common earth of toil and sweat and violence and error and bitter anguish, he may distil the beauty of an everlasting form, enslave and conquer man by his enchantment, cast his spell across the generations, beat death down upon his knees, kill death utterly, and fix eternity with the grappling-hooks of his own art. His life is soul-hydroptic with a quenchless thirst for glory, and his spirit tortured by the anguish of possession--the intolerable desire to fix eternally in the patterns of an indestructible form a single moment of man's living, a single moment of life's beauty, passion, and unutterable eloquence, that passes, flames and goes, slipping for ever through our fingers with time's sanded drop, flowing for ever from our desperate grasp even as a river flows and never can be held. This is the artist, then--life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave--and to do these things, to get the reward for which he thirsts, with his own immortality to beat and conquer life, enslave mankind, utterly to possess and capture beauty he will do anything, use anything, destroy anything--be ruthless, murderous and destructive, cold and cruel and merciless as hell to get the thing he wants, achieve the thing he values and must do or die.

  He is at once life's monstrous outcast and life's beauty-drunken lover, man's bloody, ruthless, pitiless and utterly relentless enemy, and the best friend that mankind ever had: a creature compact of the most selfish, base, ignoble, vicious, cruel and unrighteous passions that man's life can fathom or the world contain, and a creature whose life with all its toil and sweat and bitter anguish is the highest, grandest, noblest, and the most unselfish, the most superbly happy, good and fortunate life that men can know, or any man attain. He is the tongue of his unuttered brothers, he is the language of man's buried heart, he is man's music and life's great discoverer, the eye that sees, the key that can unlock, the tongue that will express the buried treasure in the hearts of men, that all men know and that no man has a language for--and at the end he is his father's son, shaped from his father's earth of blood and sweat and toil and bitter agony: he is at once, therefore, the parent and the son of life, and in him life and all man's nature are compac
t; he is most like man in his very differences, he is what all men are and what not one man in a million ever is; and he has all, knows all, sees all that any man on earth can see and hear and know.

  This knowledge came to him that morning as he read the play that he had written to his two friends: as he went on with his reading, and felt with a proud triumphant joy and happiness the sense of their devotion, his voice grew strong and confident, the scenes and words and people of the play began to flame and pulse and live with his own passion--the whole play moved across his vision in flaming images of beauty, truth and loveliness, his spirit rose on the powerful wings of a jubilant conviction, a tremendous happiness, his heart beat like a hammer-stroke and seemed to ring against his ribs with every blow the music of this certitude.

  It took him about two hours to read the play: when he finished he felt a sense of triumphant finality, an immense and joyful peace within him, and he waited for them to speak. For a moment there was utter stillness: Joel sat bent forward in the same position, his head supported by his lean hand; Rosalind sat quietly; neither moved an inch. In a moment Joel spoke, nodding his head and speaking with a kind of matter-of-fact assertiveness that was far more wonderful and thrilling than any idolatrous warmth of praise could have been:

  "Yes," he whispered, nodding his head thoughtfully,--"it's as good as The Cherry Orchard--I like it better, myself--but it's as good." His manner now did take on an electric energy: he straightened sharply, and speaking almost sternly, with a blazing earnestness of conviction, he looked his friend in the eyes, and cried: "Eugene! . . . It's simply magnificent! . . . It's easily the greatest play anyone in this country ever wrote. . . . There's nothing else to touch it . . . it's miles ahead of O'Neill . . . it's . . . it's as good as Cyrano, and you've got to admit," he said, nodding his head decisively, ". . . that's pretty great. . . . Cyrano's pretty swell," he whispered, ". . . And those scenes between the boy and the old 'Major' . . . they're simply grand," he whispered. "I mean, I didn't know you had it in you . . . that kind of writing, the satiric kind. . . . But it's . . . it's," his face flushed, he nodded his head doggedly, and almost grimly, as if willing to stand up for his conviction against the whole world, "it's . . . it's as good as Shaw!" And he laughed suddenly his radiant, soundless laugh and whispered drolly, ". . . And when I say anything's as good as Shaw . . . you've got to admit that's going pretty far for me. . . . Ros'," he said quietly, turning to the girl, "what do you think? . . . Don't you think it's pretty grand?"

  For a moment she did not answer; her eyes were luminous as stars and far away.

  "Oh," she said presently in her low and sweet and lovely young voice, "it's wonderful. . . . It's the most gloriously beautiful thing I ever heard. . . . Darling," she said, and took his hand between her strong, warm and living hands, as she had done the night before, ". . . you are a great man . . . a great writer. . . . I am so proud and happy to have known you . . . to be allowed to hear your play."

  He felt the overpowering, thrilling happiness and joy, the blind speechless gratefulness, and the helpless and agonizing embarrassment that a young man feels at a moment like this. He did not know what to say, what to do, how to express the gratefulness, the affection, the tenderness that he felt towards them; he turned to Joel, his mouth moving wordlessly and helplessly, and could say nothing, he made a baffled and inarticulate movement of the hands, and ended up by putting his arms around Rosalind and hugging her in a clumsy, helpless fashion, which was perhaps as good a thing as he could do, and said all he wished to say.

  It was not what these two young people had said to him that gave the moment a strange imperishable loveliness. Even in the blind surge of joy and happiness that swept over him and made him passionately want to believe that his play was as good as Joel and his sister said it was, that he was really the great man, the great writer they had called him, a grain of judgment remained and saved him from an utter self-deception. And curiously, for that very reason, his joy was somehow greater, his feeling of triumphant happiness sweeter than if what they had said were true. For in the very idolatry of their devotion, the enthusiastic exaggeration of their praise, there was all the blind but noble loyalty of youth, the beautiful and generous admiration of youth, that is so fine, so good, so high, so proud with faith and confidence and loyalty, and because of this, so right. It was for this reason that, even after years had passed and he had perhaps accomplished better work, earned more valid praise, he would yet remember that morning with a peculiar sense of proud and tender gratefulness. It brought back to him, as nothing else on earth could do, the beauty and the innocence of youth, the extravagance of its blind devotion that is so mistaken and so wonderful, the generous enthusiasm of its loyal faith that is so wrong and yet so right, its noble sincerity that burns brightly even in its grievous error, and that is somehow more true than fact, more real than glory, and more lasting and more precious than man's fame.

  LXIII

  When they came out on the verandah, Joel's mother, Howard Martin, and Joel's cousin, Ruth, had just driven up before the entrance and were getting out. They had been to the swimming pool--a small but delightful one a half-mile away in a green hollow, tree-embowered--and all three were in bathing costume. Howard Martin trod gingerly across the drive and on to the warm brick flooring of the porch, on white, wincing, well-kept feet; Mrs. Pierce and the girl wore light bathing-robes and walked firmly, with assurance. Mrs. Pierce's figure was as slender and as well-conditioned as the girl's--her ankles and her legs were wonderfully graceful, strong and slender--but in comparison to her niece's black and white voluptuousness--her dark and sullen, almost brooding, face and her swelling creamy thighs, her lavish belly and her melon-heavy breasts--the figure of Mrs. Pierce was lacking in seduction: it had the strength and slenderness of youth without youth's warmth and freshness; it had, like everything about her, a chilled and glacial perfection that spoke of stern regimen, grim watchfulness, and unflagging effort--"keeping fit."

  As the two young men came up, Mrs. Pierce turned gracefully, her hand upon the screen-door, and with a smile awaited them. Her teeth were so solid, white, and perfect in their alignment that it was difficult to see where they joined together, and they sometimes suggested twin rows of solid gleaming ivory more than individual teeth: this circumstance also contributed to the glacial, detached and almost inhuman quality of her smile. She greeted her son's friend with a kindly but detached "Good morning," and without altering the rigid brilliance of her smile a jot, turned to her son and said:

  "I thought you were coming to the pool. What happened to you and Ros'?"

  These words were spoken quietly and matter-of-factly: nevertheless, the suggestion of strong displeasure and annoyance was somehow unmistakable.

  Joel answered quickly, whispering a swift concerned explanation, his thin figure slightly bent forward, his gaunt face lifted, eagerly, radiantly concerned, in that attitude of devoted and solicitous respect that characterized his relations with every woman, but that was extremely marked when he spoke or listened to his mother:

  "I know, Mums," he whispered swiftly, apologetically,--"I'm terribly sorry--but he promised to read his play to us and that took all morning. . . . Mums!" he went on in his astounded and enthusiastic whisper, "it's simply magnificent--I wish you could have been there to hear it."

  "Oh," said Mrs. Pierce quietly, and turning, for a moment she regarded her son's friend with that glacially brilliant smile of her thin and faintly carmined lips that never changed or altered in expression by an atom. "Oh," she said, "I should like to--perhaps you will read it to me some time."

  "Simply superb," Joel whispered, "it really is."

  "And now you boys had better get ready for lunch," she said in a more warm and friendly tone. "You know how Granny hates it if people get there late."

  With these words she went into the house and mounted the stairs. The young men followed her: at the foot of the stairs Joel turned and said to his visitor:

  "Look--I'd hurry a
s much as I could! . . . We've only twenty minutes: you've just got time to bathe and dress."

  Bathe and dress! The youth looked at his young host with a bewildered, uncomprehending face, and with a sinking feeling in his heart. What did they expect him to do--what, according to the formula of these strange rare people, was one supposed to do when one was invited out to lunch? He had bathed that morning when he got up, it seemed to him that he must still be very clean, and as for dressing, he had just one suit of clothes in all the world, and that was the suit he was wearing at that moment. And just one day before, when he had left New York to come to this magical, unbelievably glorious place, he had thought, in his miserable naïve ignorance, that this one suit of clothes, three shirts, three pairs of socks, and a change of underwear were abundantly sufficient to all the demands that fashion and a week-end visit could possibly make on him. At that moment, as he stared at his friend with a gaping mouth, unable to reply, the terrific impact of this new world which had stunned him the night before with its magnificence and beauty exploded in his brain in a flare of stars and rockets. And for a moment now he felt a lost, sickening desperate terror, and curiously, a feeling of blind resentment against his friend. For a moment he felt tricked and deceived--deceived by Joel's modesty, his exquisite humility, by the frayed and shabby clothes he had worn in Cambridge and New York, by the over-refinement of his breeding, which had caused him to conceal utterly his true state of life, never to suggest by a word or reference the kind of life that he came from, the wealth, the luxury, the magnificence of the world in which he had been born and lived.

  "D-d-dress! . . . But . . . how--," his face reddened, he craned his neck doggedly, and suddenly blurted out: