OF TIME AND THE RIVER

by Thomas Wolfe

  The pictures--cavaliers seducing pretty ladies; one of women half naked embracing pillow--called Le Rêve--People in old French stage-comedies--Then 1000's of La Chimie, La Physique, La Géologie, L'Algèbre, La Géométrie--

  Letters--Morceaux Choisis of XVIII S. All the authors I have never heard of--but that is the same at home.

  Wednesday--December 17, 1924: Today bought books--Bookshop on Rue St. Honoré--Stock's.

  Bought Benda there--Along the river--Tons of Trash--L'Univers--The Miracle of France--4 mos. in the United States, etc. etc.--Les Cicéron, Ovide, Sénèque, etc.

  Bought Confessions of Alfred Musset--Stall at Pont Neuf with dirty books--Journal d'une Masseuse.

  Sadie Blackeyes--Lovers of The Whip--The Pleasures of Married Life--The Galleries of The Palais Royal where the bookshops are--Whole series edited by Guillaume Apollinaire--

  Pictures, stamps, coins--Daumier-like picture of man having tooth pulled--Then the near dirty ones of ladies with silver wings--Silhouette-like--Then the near XVIII Century ones.

  Old Books--Seem to be millions of these too--Essais de l'Abbé Chose sur la Morale, etc.

  The Faustian hell again!

  At la Régence: Semaine de Noël, 1924:

  The people who say they "read nothing but the best" are not, as some people call them, snobs. They are fools. The battle of the Spirit is not to read and to know the best--it is to find it--The thing that has caused me so much toil and trouble has come from a deep-rooted mistrust in me of all cultured authority. I hunger for the treasure that I fancy lies buried in a million forgotten books, and yet my reason tells me that the treasure that lies buried there is so small that it is not worth the pain of disinterment.

  And yet nearly everything in the world of books that has touched my life most deeply has come from authority. I have not always agreed with authority that all the books called great are great, but nearly all the books that have seemed great to me have come from among this number.

  I have not discovered for myself any obscure writer who is as great a novelist as Dostoievsky, nor any obscure poet with the genius of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

  But I have mentioned Coleridge, and although my use of his name will not, I believe, cause any protest, it may cause surprise. Why not Shelley, or Spenser, or Milton?--It is here that my war with Authority--to which I owe everything--begins again.

  There are in the world of my spirit certain gigantic figures who, although great as well in the world of authority, are yet overshadowed, and in some places, loom as enormous half-ghosts--hovering upon the cloudy borderland between obscurity and living remembrance.

  Such a man is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. To me, he is not one of the great English poets. He is The Poet. To me he has not to make obeisance at the throne of any other monarch--he is there by Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser.

  At La Régence: Remembering the prostitute with rotten teeth that I talked to last night on Rue Lafayette:

  My dirt is not as dirty as your dirt. My cleanness is cleaner than your cleanness.

  If I have a hole in my sock that is cunning.

  If you have a hole in your stocking love flies out of the window. Why are we like this? Boredom is the bedfellow of all the Latin peoples--the English, in spite of the phrase "bored Englishman," are not bored.

  The Germans are eager and noisy about everything they are told they should be interested in.

  The Americans are interested in everything for a week--a week at a time--except Sensation: they are interested in that all the time.

  I have heard a great deal of the "smiling Latins," the "gay Latins," etc. I have seen few indications that the Latins are gay. They are noisy--they are really a sombre and passionate people--the Italian face when silent is rather sullen.

  In New York the opportunities for learning, and acquiring a culture that shall not come out of the ruins, but belong to life, are probably greater than anywhere else in the world.

  This is because America is young and rich and comparatively unencumbered by bad things.

  Tradition, which saves what is good and great in Europe, also saves what is poor, so that one wades through miles of junk to come to a great thing.

  In New York books are plentiful and easy to get. The music and the theatre are the best in the world.

  The great trouble with New York is that one feels uncomfortable while enjoying these things--In the daytime a man should be making money. The time to read is at night before one goes to bed. The time to hear music or go to the theatre is also at night. The time to look at a picture is on Sunday.

  Another fault comes from our lack of independence. I am sure some of the most knowing people in the world, about the arts, are in America. I cannot read a magazine like The Dial, or The Nation and The New Republic without getting frightened. One man wrote a book called Studies in Ten Literatures--which, of course, is foolish. We want to seem knowing about all these things because we have not enough confidence in ourselves.

  We have had niggers for 300 years living all over the place--but all we did about it was to write minstrel shows, and 'coon stories, until two or three years ago when the French discovered for us how interesting they are. We let Paul Morand, and the man who wrote Batouala, and Soupault do it for us--Then we began to write stories about Harlem, etc.

  Instead of whining that we have no traditions, or that we must learn by keeping constantly in touch with European models, or by keeping away from them, we should get busy telling some of the stories about America that have never been told.

  A book like Main Street, which made such a stir, is like Main Street. It is like "I've seen all Europe" tourists, who have spent two days in each country in a round-the-town bus.

  In a magazine like The American Mercury the stones are also too much of a pattern--they're all about how the "Deacon Screwed the Methodist Minister's Wife," and how the "Town Prostitute Was Put in Jail for Coming to Church on Sunday and Mixing with the Good Folks."

  When you hear people saying about Babbitt--that it is not the whole story and that much more can be said--you agree with them. Then they begin to talk about "the other side" and you lose hope. You see they mean, by "other side," Dr. Crane and Booth Tarkington.

  So far from these being "the other side," there are a million other sides. And so far from Babbitt being too strong, the stories that may be written about America will make Babbitt an innocent little child's book to be read at the Christmas School entertainment along with The Christmas Carol and "Excelsior." The man who suggests the strangeness and variety of this life most is Sherwood Anderson. Or was. I think he's got too fancy since he wrote Winesburg, Ohio.

  A French writer who said there was no real variety in the life of the French because they all had red wine on the table, sat at little tables in cafés to gossip, and had mistresses, would be called a fool. Yet an American will criticize his country for standardization on no better grounds--namely, that most of them are Methodists or Baptists, Democrats or Republicans, Rotarians or Kiwanians.

  Babbitt is a very interesting book. But I believe it would be possible for a German writer with a talent similar to Sinclair Lewis to write a book called Schmidt or Bauer which would be just as sweeping a portrait.

  Do you want to know what the gentleman looks like? He is much easier to describe than Babbitt.

  Tuesday--December 23, 1924: The mystery explained! Today, at American Library, found out what it is:

  "Time--that dimension of the world which we express in terms of before and after--the temporal sequence pervades mind and matter alike."

  Time the form of the internal sense, and space the form of the external sense.

  Theory of Relativity--the time-units of both time and space are neither points nor moments--but moments in the history of a point.

  W. James--Within a definite limited interval of duration known as the specious present there is the direct perception of the temporal relations.

  After an event has passed beyond the specious present it c
an only enter into consciousness by reproductive memory.

  James--"The Object of Memory is only an object imagined in the past to which the emotion of belief adheres."

  Temporal experience divided into three qualitatively distinct intervals: the remembered past, the perceived specious present, and the anticipated future--By means of the tripartite division we are able to inject our present selves into the temporal stream of our own experience.

  By arrangement of temporal orders of past with temporal orders of future--we can construct a temporal order of our specious presents and their contents.

  Thus time has its roots in experience and yet appears to be a dimension in which experiences and their contents are to be arranged.

  Thus the stuff from which time is made is of the nature of experienced data.

  The Zenonian paradoxes: Achilles cannot catch up with the almost here save by occupying an infinity of positions.

  A flying arrow cannot remain where it is, nor be where it is not.

  These things do not deal with space or time but with the properties of infinite assemblages and dense series (Americana).

  Weber's at midnight: The waiters in Weber's standing in a group in their black coats and white boiled shirts--

  All around the great mirrors reflecting there--for a moment a strange picture I thought of TIME!

  The horrible monotony of the French--Weber's at midnight some Frenchmen in evening dress--the heavy eyelids--the dangling legs--the look of weary vitality--

  Then in come some "Parisiennes"--God! God! All sizes and shapes and all the same--Unfit for anything else in the world, and not good for what they are--The texture of enamelled tinted skin, the hard avaricious noses, the chic style of coats, hair, eyebrows, etc.

  The great myth that the Latins are romantic people. The Latins have qualities and standards that we do not possess--Hence we overvalue them.

  There are many places in the world where life attains a greater variety, interest or profundity than in Paris (viz., New York, London, Vienna, Munich). Yet a great many Americans make their homes in Paris because they are sure it is the centre of the world's intellectual and cultural reputations.

  It is easier for a writer to secure a reputation in France than in any other country. Many French writers have very respectable reputations who would be laughed at in other countries. For example, Henri Bordeaux--Some Americans who study French literature think he is a distinguished writer. His name has a solid, respectable sound to it. On the cover of all his books is printed "Member of the French Academy." But you could hardly find an intellectual in America who would say a kind word for Harold Bell Wright. Yet Harold Bell Wright--poor as he may be--is a better writer than Henri Bordeaux. If you don't believe it, read them. Americans are very unfair about this.

  The way things go: At 6.10 A.M. the street lights of Paris go off. I sit at a little all-night café in Grand Boulevard opposite Rue Faubourg de Montmartre and watch light widen across the sky behind Montmartre. At first a wide strip of blue-grey--a strip of violet light. You see the line of the two clear and sharp. The paper trucks of Hachette, Le Petit Parisien, etc., go by.

  In the bar a rattling of leaden, holey coins--the five-, ten- and twenty-five-centime pieces. Taxi-drivers drinking café rhum, debating loudly in hoarse sanguinary voices. A prostitute, the blonde all-night antiquity of the Quarter streets, drinking rich hot chocolate, crunching crusty croissants at the bar. The veteran of a million loves, well known and benevolently misprized, hoarse with iniquity and wisdom. A pox upon you, Marianne: You have made Monsieur le Président très triste; the third leg of the Foreign Legion wears a sling because of you!

  A swart-eyed fellow, oiled and amorous, sweetly licks with nozzly tongue his prostitute's rouge-varnished face: with choking secret laughter and with kissy, wetty talkie he cajoles her; she answers in swart choked whisperings with her sudden shrill prostitute's scream of merriment.

  A morning rattle of cans and ashes on the pavements. With rich jingle-jangle and hollow clitter-clatter a Paris milk wagon passes. Suddenly, a screak of brakes: all over the world the moaning screak of brakes, and racing, starting motors.

  Across the street in faint grey-bluish light the news kiosk is opening up.

  "Est-ce que vous avez Le New York 'Erald?"

  "Non, monsieur. Ce n'est pas encore arrivé."

  "Et Le Tchicago Treebune?"

  "Ça pas plus, monsieur. C'est aussi en retard ce matin."

  "Merci. Alors: Le Matin."

  "Bien, monsieur."

  Passage of leaden sous: the smell of ink-worn paper, dear to morning throughout the world. A big Hachette truck swerves up, an instant halt, the flat heavy smack of fresh-corded ink-warm paper on the pavement, a hoarse cry and instant loud departure!

  Ça aussi, monsieur. Sing ye bi-i-i-rds, sing! Light up your heart, O son of man!

  Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, with charm of earliest birds!

  Some things will never change: some things will always be the same: brother we cannot die, we must be saved; we are united at the heart of night and morning.

  A good time now, just before dawn and morning. Surfeit of sterile riches: harvests of stale bought love: the burnt-out candle-end of night, the jaded blaze of crimson light, in shattered bars; numb weary lust--which one? which one?

  The prostitutes at daybreak, the dead brilliance of electric smiles.

  Tired, tired, tired.

  Tuesday: Woman who sang tonight at Concert Mayol--She was near 50--magnificent teeth--so good they made me uneasy--Those things in her head--but how? They keep them so. This comes to me--that they spend all their time looking after them: there is something filthy about this.

  On the Boulevards--3.20 du matin. Reading the Sourire for strumpet-house items--I want to find me a Ballon of Champagne--First of all--préservatif right to my left around corner Rue Faubourg de Montmartre; all-night pharmacy.

  Along the quais again this afternoon to the bookstalls--Made afraid by the junk--Bought a dozen books or so, but no "prints" or "etchings"--Countless old-fashioned prints--pictures of Versailles--the Palais Royal, the Revolution--Sentimental and cheap pictures--Florid ones--"La Courtisane Passionnée," etc. Stage-coach pictures, etc. Works of Eugène Scribe--The little books bound or tied, so you can't look--nothing in them--Vie à la Campagne--countless cheap books--ah, I have a little of it all!--Strasbourg.

  Christmas Week--Colmar, Alsace-Lorraine--Written on the Spot.

  The Isenheimer Altar of Mathias Grünewald in the Cloisters of the Unterlinden Museum at Colmar:

  There is nothing like it in the world. I have spent over 4 months getting here--it is much more wonderful than one imagines it will be. The altar is set up not in one piece but in three sections in a big room with groined ceilings, a long groined room like a Dominikaner Cloister.

  The first two "volets" of the altar--Everything is distorted and out of perspective. The figure of the Christ is twice as big as the other figures--the pointing finger of Saint Antoine is much too big for his body--but everything in this figure points along the joints and elbows of that arm and ends in the pointing finger.

  The Lamb with its straight brisk feet, its dainty right foreleg bent delicately about the Cross and red blood spouting from its imperturbable heart into a goblet of rich gold, is a masterpiece of symbolic emotion that strikes far beyond intelligence.

  The body of Christ, and its agony, are indescribable. The hands and the feet are enlarged to meet the agony--the hands are tendons of agony, the feet are not feet but lengths of twisted tendons driven through by a bolt and ending in bent, broken, bleeding toes. A supernatural light falls upon the immense twisted length of the body (a grey-white-green) and yet completely solid light--you can count the ribs, the muscles (the head falling to the right), full of brutal agony--it is crowned with long thorns and rusty blood--it droops over, it is too big, Christ is dead.

  The great figure of the woman in white comes up and breaks backward at the middle and
is caught in the red arms of the pitiful Saint. The fingers of the Magdalen are bent in eloquent supplication.

  The blackness of hell's night behind--the unearthly greenish supernatural light upon the figures--on Christ's dead, sinewed, twisted, riven gigantic body and on the living flesh of the other figures.

  The sly face of the Virgin in the wing of the Annunciation--the eyes slanting up under lowered lids in a sly leer--the fat loose sensual mouth half open, with the tongue visible--a look of sly bawdiness over all.

  The enormous and demoniac intelligence that illuminates the piece in Grünewald's Altar--the angels playing instruments in "La Vierge Glorifiée par les Anges"--the faces have a sinister golden light--an almost unholy glee. You can hear mad heavenly music. This is not true with Italians--syrup and sugar.

  This is the greatest and also the most "modern" picture I have ever seen.

  Christmas Week--1924: Returning to Paris from Strasbourg: The approach to Paris through the Valley of the Marne--Winter--The very magnificent rainbow--the rocking clacketing train.

  The suburbs of Paris--Dark--The little double-deckers rattling past loaded with people--The weary approaches to a great city--Endless repetition--monotonous endlessness--The sadness of seeing people pass you in a lighted train or subway. Why is this?

  PARIS: There is nothing that I do not know about Paris--That sounds like the foolishest boast but that is true--I am sitting on the terrace of the Taverne Royale--Rue Royale--It is winter--it is cold--but it is the same--to one hand the Madeleine--to the other the Place de la Concorde--to the right that of the Champs-Elysées--the Arc--the Bois--the fashionable quarters--the strumpet-houses of that district--the rue--the Troc--the Tower--the Champs-de-Mars--the Montparnasse section--the Latin Quarter--the bookshops--the cafés--the Ecole--the Institut--the St. Mich--the Ile--the Notre Dame--The Old Houses--the Rue de Rivoli--the Tour St. Jacques--the Carnavalet--the Hugo--Vosges--the Bastille--the Gare de Lyon--the Gare de l'Est--du Nord--the Montmartre--the Butte--the cafés--houses--the Rue Lepic--the Port Clignancourt--the La Villette--The Parc Monceau--the Bois--Great circle, unending universe of life, huge legend of dark time!