The Web and the Rock

by Thomas Wolfe

  11

  The Priestly One

  GERALD ALSOP, AT THE TIME MONK CAME TO COLLEGE, HAD BECOME A kind of Mother Machree of the campus, the brood hen of yearling innocents, the guide and mentor of a whole flock of fledgeling lives.

  At first sight he looked enormous. A youth of nineteen or twenty at this time, he weighed close to three hundred pounds. But when one really observed him closely, one saw that this enormous weight was carried on a very small frame. In height he could not have been more than five feet six or seven. His feet, for a person of his bulk, were amazingly small, and his hands, had it not been for their soft padding, were almost the tiny hands of a child. His belly, of course, was enormous. His great fat throat went right back in fold after fold of double chins. When he laughed, his laugh came from him in a high, choking, explosive scream that set the throat and the enormous belly into jellied tremors.

  He had a very rich, a very instant sense of humor, and this humor, with the high, choking laugh and the great, shaking belly, had given him among many students a reputation for hearty good nature. But more observant people would find out that this impression of hearty and whole-souted good nature was not wholly true. If Gerald's antagonism and prejudice were aroused, he could still scream with his great fat whah-whah of choking laughter, but this time the laugh had something else in it, for the great belly that shook with such convulsive mirth was also soured with bile. It was a strange and curiously mixed and twisted personality, a character that had much that was good, much that was high and fine, much that was warm, affectionate, and even generous in it, but also much that was vindictive and unforgiving, prejudiced and sentimental. It was, in the end, a character that had too much of the feminine in it to be wholly masculine, and this perhaps was its essential defect.

  Pine Rock--the small Baptist college of red brick, in its setting of Catawba clay and pine--had released him. In this new and somewhat freer world, he had expanded rapidly. His quick mind and his ready wit, his great scream of belly laughter, and something comfortable about him that made him very easy company, also made him a considerable favorite. He came to college in the fall of 1914. Two years later, when Monk joined him there, he was a junior, and well-founded: the ruling member, as it were, of a coterie; the director of a clique; already priestly, paternal, and all-fatherly, the father-confessor to a group of younger boys, most of them freshmen, that he herded under his protective wing, who came to him, as just recently they must have come to mother's knee, to pour out on his receiving breast the burden of their woe.

  Jerry--for so he was called--loved confession. It was, and would remain, the greatest single stimulus of his life. And in a way, it was the perfect role for him: nature had framed him for the receiving part.

  He was always fond of saying afterward that it was not until his second year at college that he really "found" himself; strictly measured, that process of finding was almost wholly included in the process of being confessed to. He was like a kind of enormous, never sated, never saturated sponge. The more he got, the more he wanted. His whole manner, figure, personality, under the inner impulsion of this need, took on a kind of receptive urgency. By his twentieth year he was a master in the art of leading on. The broad brow, the jowled face, the fat hand holding a moist cigarette, the great head occasion ally turned to take a long, luxurious drag, the eyes behind their polished frames of glass a little misty, the mouth imprinted faintly by a little smile that can only be described as tender, a little whimsical, as who should say, "Ah, life. Life. How bad and mad and sad it is, but then, ah, me, how sweet!"--it was all so irresistible that the fresh men simply ran bleating to the fold. There was nothing of which they did not unbosom themselves, and if, as often happened, they had nothing in particular to unbosom themselves of, they invented some thing. In this process of spiritual evacuation, it is to be feared the temptations of carnal vice came first.

  It was, in fact, simply astounding how many of Jerry's freshmen had been sorely tempted by beautiful but depraved women--if the siren was mysterious and unknown, all the better. In one variant of the story, the innocent had been on his way to college, and had stopped over for the night at a hotel in a neighboring town. On his way to his room, a door along the corridor was opened: before him stood a beautiful specimen of the female sex, without a stitch of clothing on, inviting him with sweet smiles and honeyed words into her nest of silken sin. For a moment the freshman was shaken, his senses reeled, all that he had learned, all he had been taught to respect and keep holy, whirled around him in a dizzy rout; before he realized what he was doing, he found himself inside the accursed den of wickedness, half-fainting in the embraces of this modern whore of Babylon.

  And then--then--he saw the image of his mother's face, or the features of the pure, sweet girl for whom he was "keeping himself."

  The freshmen of Pine Rock were usually in a careful state of refrigeration--nearly all of them were "keeping themselves" for a whole regiment of pure, sweet girls, to whose virginity they would someday add the accolade of their own penil sanctification. At any rate, during Jerry's regime at Pine Rock the number of lovely but depraved females who were cruising around through the hotel corridors of the state in a condition of original sin and utter nakedness was really astonishing. The census figures for this type of temptation were never before, or after, so high.

  The usual end was well, however: the redemptive physiognomies of the Mother or the Chosen Girl usually intervened fortuitously at the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour--and all was saved. As for Jerry, his final benediction to this triumph of virtue was simply beautiful to watch and hear: "I knew you would! Yes, suh!" Here he would shake his head and chuckle tenderly. "You're too fine a pusson evah to be taken in by anything like that!... And if you had, think how you'd feel now!

  You wouldn't be able to hold yoah haid up and look me in the eye!

  You know you wouldn't! And every time you thought of your Mothah"--(it is impossible to convey within the comparatively simple vocabulary of the English language just quite what Jerry man aged to put into that one word "Mothah"; however, it can be said with out exaggeration that it represented the final and masterly conquest of the vocal chords, beside which such efforts, say, as those of the late Senor Caruso striking the high C seem fairly paltry by comparison)--"Every time you thought of your Mothah, you'd have felt lowah than a snake's belly. Yes, suh! You know you would! And if you'd gone ahead and married that girl--" he pronounced it "gul," with a vocal unction only slightly inferior to this pronunciation of the sainted name of "Mothah"--"you'd have felt like a louse every time you'd look at her! Yes, suh, you'd have been livin' a lie that would have wrecked yoah whole life!... Besides that, boy... you look a-heah, you scannel! You don't know how lucky you are! You keep away hereafter from that stuff! Yes, suh! I know what I'm talkin' about!" Here he shook his big jowled head again, and laughed with a kind of foreboding ominousness. "You might have gone and got yourself all ruined for life!"

  He was preparing himself eventually, he thought, although he later gave up the idea, for the practice of medicine, in which he had already done considerable isolated reading of his own; the chief effects of which, apparently, were now to warn guileless freshmen of the awful con sequences of carnal indulgence. He fairly reveled in this form of grisly description. His descriptions of disease, death, and madness which resulted from stray encounters with unknown females in the corridors of hotels were so graphic and compelling that he had the hair standing up on their young pates "like quills upon the fretful por pentine."

  In Gerald's picture of things as they were, there was no escape, no pardon for the erring. The wages of sin were not only always and inevitably death, but the wages of seduction were inevitably father hood, man's guilty doom, and the utter ruination of another "pure, sweet girl."

  Thus, early, Gerald had formed a picture of the world that was pontifical in its absolute and unquestioning acceptance of all forms of established and respectable authority--not only as they affected
man's civic and political conduct, but as they affected his inner and per sonal life as well. In this scheme of things--call it rather, this mythology -the saintly figure of The Mother was supreme. A female, by virtue of the fact that in the process of lawful matrimony she had created progeny, became, in some divinely mysterious way, not only the author of all wisdom, but the spotless custodian of all morality as well. To have suggested that a woman was not necessarily an incorruptible divinity because she had given birth to a child was a dangerous heresy; to have argued this point doggedly to more far-reaching conclusions would have branded one in Jerry's sight as a dissolute or irresponsible member of society. From that time on, Jerry's hand and his heart would be set stubbornly against the infidel.

  True, his enmity would be devious. Openly, for Jerry really had a good mind, which was clear enough to see, but not brave enough to confess the falsehood of his sentiment, he would be tolerant--his tolerance consisting of a form of benevolent I-see-your-point-but-then-let's try-to-look-at-all-sides-of-the-question attitude, which was really more intolerant than any form of open bigotry could have been, because it masked the unyielding and unforgiving hostility of his wounded sentimentality. But hiddenly and deviously, his enmity would be bitter and unpardoning from that time on. It would take the form of sly gossip, rumor, whispering, swift mockery masked behind a play of innocence, a sudden twist upon a word, a quick, apparently guileless, misinterpretation of a meaning, the pontifical face schooled in grave and even respectful attentiveness, the whole ending suddenly with the explosion of mirth, the high, choking scream of laughter, which, as anyone who had been its victim could testify, was more devastating and unanswerable than any logic of cold argument could be.

  He was a creature who, first and foremost, above all other things, hated trouble and abhorred pain--as what decent man does not?- except that here, in this great belly of a man, his hatred and abhorrence were so great that he would never face the things he hated. Thus, from an early age, he had learned to wear rose-colored blinders against life, and it was only natural that his own stubborn and unyielding hostility should be turned against anything--any person, any conflict, any situation, any evidence, or any idea--that would tend to take those blinders off.

  In spite of this, in so many rich and wonderful ways Gerald Alsop was an extraordinary man. The thing that was most attractive about him was his genuine and warm humanity. In the most true sense of the word, he was a man who loved "the good things of life'

  '--good food, good conversation, good humor, good fellowship, good books, the whole sound and happy aura of good living. His fault was, he loved them so well that he was unwilling to admit or accept the presence of any conflict that might disturb his own enjoyment of them.

  He was probably wise enough to see, but too sentimental to admit, that his enjoyment of them would have been enriched immeasurably by his recognition of the elements of conflict and denial, even where "the good things of life" were concerned.

  Hence, there was no single virtue of his nature--and his nature was with virtue generously endowed--that was not in the end touched with this taint. He had, for example, a genuine and deep appreciation of good writing, a love of literature, an excellent and discriminating taste; but where his judgement warred with sentiment, his judgment came off second best. The result was chaos. He not only could see no merit in the work of the great Russian writers--Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Turgenev, even Chekhov--he had never even made an effort to understand them. In some strange way, his heart was set against them; he was afraid of them. He had long ago conceived the prejudice that a Russian writer stood for unbroken gloom, grim tragedy, what gradually he began to rationalize in a phrase that he called "the morbid and distorted view of life," in contradistinction to the works of those writers of whom he approved, and who, correspondingly of course, represented "the more wholesome and well-rounded point of view."

  Of this latter kind, Dickens probably stood first and highest in his affections. His knowledge of the works of Charles Dickens was almost encyclopïdic. He had read them all so many times, and with such devotion, that there was scarcely an obscure character in that whole crowded and amazing gallery with which he was not instantly familiar--which he could not instantly tag with the word, quote with the exact and descriptive phrase, with which Dickens himself had tagged him.

  But, here again, the nature of Alsop's fault was evident. Equipped with the intelligence, the knowledge, and the taste to form a true and accurate judgment of the work of a great writer, his sentiment had nevertheless contrived to create a completely false and spurious Dickens, a Dickens world that never was. Dickens himself, in Gerald's view, was a kind of enormous super-Mr. Pickwick; and the world he had created in his books was a Pickwickian world--a jovial world, a ruddy, humorous, jolly, inn-and-tavern sort of world, full of good food and musty ale, full of sunlight and good cheer, of fellowship and love and friendship, of wonderful humorous characters, and of pleasing, some what misty sentiment--a total picture that Gerald had now framed in the descriptive phrase, "the more wholesome and well-rounded view of life." It was a world very much like that depicted in those jolly Christmas cards one sees so often: shining stage coaches loaded with red-checked passengers, bundled in red scarves, dashing up before the gabled entrance of a cheerful inn, mine host with pipe in hand, to greet them, and hollied sprigs above the postern doors.

  Of the other Dickens--the greater Dickens--the Dickens who had seen so much sin and poverty and misery and oppression, who had been moved to deep compassion for the suffering and oppressed of life, and who had been roused to powerful indignation at the cruelty and injustice in the life he knew--Gerald knew almost nothing, or, if he did know, he had refused to see it as it was, had closed his heart against it, because it was unpleasant and distasteful to him, and because it did not fit in with his own rosy vision of "the more wholesome and well-rounded view of things."

  The result was chaos. It might be likened, rather, to a few chips of truth swimming around in a sea of molasses. Alsop could grow lyrical in discussing and estimating the prodigious beauties of John Keats, of Shelley, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Kit Marlowe; but he could also grow lyrical and ecstatic in the same way and to the same degree in estimating the prodigious beauties of Winnie the Pooh, Don Marquis, F. P. A., last night's moving picture show, and the whimsical little Lamb-kills of a man named Morley: "Sure damn genius--yes, suh!--sheer, damn, elfin, whimsical genius!" Here, he would read some treasured bit, cast his jowled head upward until light shimmered on the glasspoints of his misty eyes, and, with a laugh that was half-sob, and all compact of wonder and the treacle of his own self-appeasement, he would cry: "Lord God!

  Lord God--it's sure damn elfin genius!"

  Even in these early days of his apprenticeship at college he had begun to accumulate a library. And that library was an astounding picture of his mind and taste, a symbol of his inner chaos all congealed in the soothing and combining solvent of his own syrup: It contained a large number of good books--books that one liked, others of which one had heard and would like to read, books that had been preserved and saved with the intelligence of a good mind and a discriminating taste. Alsop was a voracious reader of novels, and his bookshelves even at that Baptist college showed selective power, and an eager curiosity into the best of the new work that was being produced. It was astonishing in a man so young, and in such a place.

  But his library also included a world of trash: towering stacks of newspapers, containing morsels of choice taffy that had appealed to him; great piles of magazines, containing pieces of whimsey or of sentiment that were preserved in the mothering fullness of his bosom; hundreds of newspaper clippings, embalming some sentiment that was particularly dear to him; as well as many other things which were really valuable and good, and showed a welter of bewildering contradictions--a good mind and a keen and penetrating sense of judgment swimming around upon a sea of slop.

  Brought down to simple fact, "the more wholesome and well rounded view of things" r
esolved itself into an utter acceptance of things as they were, because things as they were, no matter how ugly, wasteful, cruel, or unjust, were "life"--hence, inevitable, once one understood them "in their full perspective" and saw "how essentially fine and sweet" (a phrase that did him valiant service) "life" was.

  Thus Jerry Alsop became the devoted champion of the conventions, the accepted and established scheme of things. If a picture could have been made of his mind during the war and post-war years, it would have revealed the following record of faith and of belief: The President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, was not only "the greatest man since Jesus Christ," but his career and final martyrdom--for so did Alsop speak of it--were also closely comparable to the career and martyrdom of Christ. The President had been the perfect man, pure in conduct, irreproachable in wisdom, and faultless in his management of affairs. He had been deceived, tricked, and done to death by villains--by unscrupulous and contriving politicians in his own land, jealous of his fame, and by the unprincipled charlatans of diplomacy in others.

  "The second greatest man since Jesus Christ" was the president of the college, a tall, pale man with a pure and suffering face, who got up in Chapel and agonized over his boys, making frequent use of such words as "service,"

  "democracy," and "ideals of leadership"--all popular evidences of enlightened--nay, inspired!--thought, in the jargon of the time. What it all meant, reduced to concrete terms of conduct, was a little puzzling. "Character,"