The Web and the Rock

by Thomas Wolfe

  Monk never learned where he got this last one, but she was a re markable specimen. She was a voluptuous creature, a woman of such carnal and sensuous magnetism that she could arouse the fiercest intensity of amorous desire just by coming in a room. She was a dark, luscious kind of woman, probably of some Latin or Oriental extraction. She might have been a Jewess, or a mixture of several breeds.

  She pretended to be French, which was ridiculous. She spoke a kind of concocted patter of broken English, interspersed with such classic phrases as "Oo lï lï,"

  "Mais oui, monsieur,"

  "Merci beaucoup,"

  "Par- donnez-moi," and "Toute de suite." She had learned this jargon on the burlesque stage.

  Monk went with Jim to see her play one time when she was appearing at a burlesque house on 125th Street. Her stage manner, her presence, the French phrases, and the broken speech were the same upon the stage as when she visited them. Like so many people in the theatre, she acted her part continually. Nevertheless, she was the best thing in the show. She used her patter skillfully, with sensual and voluptuous weavings of her hips, and the familiar carnal roughhouse of burlesque comedy. She came out and did her strip act while the audience roared its approval, and Jim swore softly under his breath, and, as the old ballad of Chevy Chase has it, "A vow to God made he"--a vow which, by the way, was never consummated.

  She was an extraordinary person, and in the end an amazingly chaste one. She liked all the boys at the apartment and enjoyed coming there. She had them in a state of frenzy. But in the end the result was the same as if they'd been members of her burlesque audience.

  It was the strip act, nothing more.

  Jim also had a nurse who used to come to see him all the time. His struggles with this girl were epic. There was a naked bluntness of approach and purpose in his attack. She was immensely fond of him, and, up to a certain point, immensely willing, but after that he got no further. He used to rage and fume up and down the place like a maddened tiger. He used to swear his oaths and make his vows.

  The others would howl with laughter at his anguish, but nothing came of it.

  In the end it began to be a shoddy business. All of them except Jim began to get a little tired of it, and to feel a little ashamed and soiled by this shoddy community of carnal effort.

  Their life together could not go on forever. All of them were growing up, becoming deeper in experience, more confident and knowing in the great flood of the city's life. The time was fast approaching when each, in his own way, would break loose for himself, detach himself from the fold, assert the independence of his own and separate life. And when that time came, they knew that they would all be lost to Jim.

  It was a fault and weakness of his nature that he could not brook equality. He was too much the king, too kingly Southern, and too Southern for a king. It was the weakness of his strength, this taint of manhood and this faulty Southernness. He was so shaped in the heroic and romantic mold that he always had to be the leader. He needed satellites as a planet needs them. He had to be central and invincibly first in all the life of which he was a part. He had to have the praise, the worship, and the obedience of his fellows or he was lost.

  And Jim was lost. The period of his fame was past. The brightness of his star had waned. He had become only a memory to those for whom he once had been the embodiment of heroic action. His con temporaries had entered life, had taken it and used it, had gone past him, had forgotten him. And Jim could not forget. He lived now in a world of bitter memory. He spoke with irony of his triumphs of the past. He spoke with resentment against those who had, he thought, deserted him. He viewed with bitter humor the exploits of the idols of the moment, the athletic heroes who were now the pampered favorites of popular applause. He waited grimly for their disillusionment, and, waiting, unable to forget the past, he hung on pitifully to the tattered remnants of his greatness, the adoration of a group of boys.

  Besides themselves, he had few intimates, and certainly none with men of his own age. His fierce and wounded vanity now feared the open conflict with the world, feared association with men of his own years, with men of his own or greater capacity. He feared and hated the possibility that he might have to yield to anyone, play second fiddle, admit the superior wisdom or ability of another person. In the whole city's life he had formed only one other intimate acquaintance.

  This was a little man named Dexter Briggs, and Dexter, appropriately enough, was a little, amiably good-natured newspaper drunk who lacked every heroic quality of character or appearance that Jim had, and who, accordingly, adored Jim to the point of idolatry for the possession of them.

  As for the four youths, the fascination of apartment life in the great city was beginning to wear off. The freedom that had seemed so thrilling and so wonderful to all of them at first now had its obvious limitations. They were not so free as they had thought. They were getting tired of a freedom which always expressed itself in the monotonous repetition of sordid entertainments, of cheap girls or easy girls, of paid women or of unpaid women, of drunk Irish girls or half-drunk Irish girls, of chorines or burlesque queens or trained nurses, of the whole soiled and shoddy business, of its degraded lack of privacy, its "parties," its Saturday-night gin-drinking and love-making, its constant efforts towards the consummation of a sterile and meaning less seduction.

  The rest of them were growing tired of it. There were times when they wanted to sleep and a party would be going on. There were times when they wanted privacy and there was no privacy. There were times when they were so tired and fed up with it that they wanted to clear out. They had begun to get on one another's nerves. They had begun to wrangle, to snap back, to be irritable, to rub one another the wrong way. The end had come.

  Jim felt it. And this final knowledge of defeat embittered him. He felt that all of them had turned against him, and that the last remnant of his tattered fame was gone. He turned upon them. He asserted violently and profanely that the place was his, that he was the boss, that he'd run the place as he pleased, and that anyone who didn't like it could clear out. As for his shoddy girls, he got small pleasure from them now. But he had reached the point where even such poor con quests as these gave some bolstering of confidence to his lacerated pride. So the parties continued, the rabble rout of shabby women streamed in and out. He had gone over the edge now. There was no retreat.

  The end came when he announced one night that he had applied for and had received an appointment from the news agency to one of its obscure posts in South America. He was bitterly, resentfully triumphant. He was going, he said, to "get out of this damn town and tell them all to go to hell." In another month or two he'd be in South America, where a man could do as he blank, blank pleased, without being watched and hindered all the time. To hell with all of it anyway! He'd lived long enough to find out one thing for himself- that most of the people who call themselves your friends are nothing but a bunch of crooked, double-crossing blank, blank, blanks, who stabbed you in the back the moment your back was turned. Well, to hell with 'em and the whole country! They could take it and Bitterly he drank, and drank again.

  About ten o'clock Dexter Briggs came in, already half-drunk. They drank some more together. Jim was in an ugly mood. Furiously he asserted he was going to have some girls. He demanded that some girls be found. He dispatched the others to round up the girls. But even they, the whole shabby carnival of them, had turned on Jim at last. The nurse excused herself, pleading another engagement. The burlesque woman could not be reached. The Brooklyn girls could not be found. One by one the youths made all the calls, exhausted all the possibilities. One by one they straggled back to admit dejectedly their failure.

  Jim raged up and down, while Dexter Briggs sat in a drunken haze above Jim's battered-up old typewriter, picking out upon the worn keys the following threnody: "The boys are here without the girls-- Oh God, strike me dead!

  The boys are here without the girls--

  Oh God, strike me dead!

  Strik
e, strike, strike me dead,

  For the boys are here without the girls-- So, God, strike me dead!"

  Having composed this masterpiece, Dexter removed it from the machine, held it up and squinted at it owlishly, and, after a preliminary belch or two, read it slowly and impressively, with deep earnestness of feeling.

  Jim's answer to this effort, and to the shouts of laughter of the others, was a savage curse. He snatched the offending sheet of paper out of Dexter's hands, crumpled it up and hurled it on the floor and stamped on it, while the poet looked at him wistfully, with an expression of melancholy and slightly befuddled sorrow. Jim assailed the boys savagely. He accused them of betraying and double-crossing him. A bitter quarrel broke out all around. The room was filled with the angry clamor of their excited voices.

  And while the battle raged, Dexter continued to sit there, weeping quietly. The result of this emotion was another poem, which he now began to tap out with one finger on the battered old typewriter, sob bing gently as he did so. This dirge ran reproachfully as follows: "Boys, boys, Be Southern gentlemen, Do not say such things to one another, For, boys, boys, You are Southern gentlemen, Southern gentlemen, all."

  This effort, which Dexter appropriately entitled "Southern Gentle men All," he now removed from the typewriter, and, when a lull had come in their exhausted clamor, he cleared his throat gently and read it to them with deep and melancholy feeling.

  "Yes, sir," said Jim, paying no attention to Dexter. He was now standing in the middle of the floor with a gin glass in his hand, talking to himself. "Three weeks from now I'll be on my way. And I want to tell you all something--the whole damn lot of you," he went on dangerously.

  "Boys, boys," said Dexter sadly, and hiccoughed.

  "When I walk out that door," said Jim, "there's going to be a little sprig of mistletoe hanging on my coat-tails, and you all know what you can do about it!"

  "Southern gentlemen, all," said Dexter sadly, then sorrowfully belched.

  "If anyone don't like my way of doing," Jim continued, "he knows what he can do about it! He can pack up his stuff right now and cart his little tail right out of here! I'm boss here, and as long as I stay I'm going to keep on being boss! I've played football all over the South! They may not remember me now, but they knew who I was seven or eight years ago, all right!"

  "Oh, for God's sake!" someone muttered. "That's all over now!

  We're tired hearing of it all the time! Grow up!"

  Jim answered bitterly: "I've fought all over France, and I've been in every state of the Union but one, and I've had women in all of 'em, and if anyone thinks I'm going to come back here now and be dictated to by a bunch of little half-baked squirts that never got out of their own state until a year ago, I'll damn soon teach 'em they're mistaken! Yessir!" He wagged his head with drunken truculence and drank again. "I'm a better man right now--physically--" he hic coughed slightly"mentally---".

  "Boys, boys," Dexter Briggs swam briefly out of the fog at this point and sorrowfully began, "Remember that you're Southern---"

  "--and--and--morally--" cried Jim triumphantly.

  "--gentlemen all," said Dexter sadly.

  "--than the whole damn lot of you put together--" Jim continued fiercely.

  "--so be gentlemen, boys, and remember that you're gentlemen.

  Always remember that--" Dexter went on morbidly.

  "--so to hell with you!" cried Jim. He glared around fiercely, wildly, at them, with bloodshot eyes, his great fist knotted in his anger. "The hell with all of you!" He paused, swaying for a moment, furious, baffled, his fist knotted, not knowing what to do. "Ahhh!" he cried suddenly, high in his throat, a passionate, choking cry, "To hell with everything! To hell with all of it!" and he hurled his empty gin glass at the wall, where it shivered in a thousand fragments.

  "--Southern gentlemen all," said Dexter sadly, and collapsed into his cups.

  Poor Jim.

  Two of them left next day. Then, singly, the others went.

  So all were gone at last, one by one, each swept out into the mighty flood tide of the city's life, there to prove, to test, to find, to lose him self, as each man must--alone.

  16

  Alone

  GEORGE WENT TO LIVE BY HIMSELF IN A LITTLE ROOM HE RENTED IN A house downtown near Fourteenth Street. Here he worked feverishly, furiously, day by day, week by week, and month by month, until another year went by--and at the end of it there was nothing done, nothing really accomplished, nothing finished, in all that plan of writing which, begun so modestly the year before, had spread and flowered like a cancerous growth until now it had engulfed him. From his childhood he could remember all that people said or did, but as he tried to set it down his memory opened up enormous vistas and associations, going from depth to limitless depth, until the simplest incident conjured up a buried continent of experience, and he was over whelmed by a project of discovery and revelation that would have broken the strength and used up the lives of a regiment of men.

  The thing that drove him on was nothing new. Even in early child hood some stern compulsion, a burning thirst to know just how things were, had made him go about a duty of observing people with such fanatical devotion that they had often looked at him resentfully, wondering what was wrong with him, or them. And in his years at college, under the same relentless drive, he had grown so mad and all-observing that he had tried to read ten thousand books, and finally had begun to stare straight through language like a man who, from the very fury of his looking, gains a superhuman intensity of vision, so that he no longer sees merely the surfaces of things but seems to look straight through a wall. A furious hunger had driven him on day after day until his eye seemed to eat into the printed page like a ravenous mouth. Words--even the words of the greatest poets--lost all the magic and the mystery they had had for him, and what the poet said seemed only a shallow and meager figuration of what he might have said, had some superhuman energy and desperation of his soul, greater than any man had ever known or attempted, driven him on to empty out the content of the ocean in him.

  And he had felt this even with the greatest sorcerer of words the earth has ever known. Even when he read Shakespeare, that ravenous eye of his kept eating with so desperate a hunger into the substance of his lives that they began to look grey, shabby, and almost common, as they had never done before. George had been assured that Shakespeare was a living universe, an ocean of thought whose shores touched every continent in the world, a fathomless cosmos which held in it the full and final measure of all human life. But now it did not seem to him that this was true.

  Rather, as if Shakespeare himself had recognized the hopelessness of ever putting down the millionth part of what he had seen and known about this earth, or of ever giving wholly and magnificently the full content of one moment in man's life, it now seemed that his will had finally surrendered to a genius which he knew was so soaring, so far beyond the range of any other man, that it could overwhelm men with its power and magic even when its owner knew he had shirked the desperate labor of mining from his entrails the huge sub stance of all life he really had within him.

  Thus, even in the great passage in Macbeth in which he speaks of time-

  .... that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We'd jump the life to come....

  -in this tremendous passage where he mounts from power to power, from one incredible magic to another, hurling in twenty lines at the astounded earth a treasure that would fill out the works and make the fame of a dozen lesser men--it seemed to George that Shakespeare had not yet said the thousandth part of all he knew about the terror, mystery, and strangeness of time, dark time, nor done more than sketch the lineaments of one of time's million faces, depending on the tremendous enchantments of his genius to cover the surrender of his will before a labor too great for human flesh to bear.

  And now as time, grey time, wore slowly, softly, and intolerably about him, rubbing at the edges of his spiri
t like a great unfathomable cloud, he thought of all these things. And as he thought of them, grey time washed over him, and drowned him in the sea-depths of its unutterable horror, until he became nothing but a wretched and impotent cipher, a microscopic atom, a bloodless, eyeless grope-thing crawling on the sea-floors of the immense, without strength or power ever to know a hand's breadth of the domain in which he dwelt, and with no life except a life-in-death, a life of drowning horror, as he scuttled, headless, eyeless, blind and ignorant and groping, his way to the grey but merciful extinction of death. For, if the greatest poet that had ever lived had found the task too great for him, what could one do who had not a fraction of his power, and who could not conceal the task, as he had done, behind the enchantments of an overwhelming genius?

  It was a desperate and lonely year he lived there by himself. He had come to the city with a shout of triumph and of victory in his blood, and the belief that he would conquer it, be taller and more mighty than its greatest towers. But now he knew a loneliness unutterable. Alone, he tried to hold all the hunger and madness of the earth within the limits of a little room, and beat his fists against the walls, only to hurl his body savagely into the streets again, those terrible streets that had neither pause nor curve, nor any door that he could enter.

  In the blind lashings of his fury, he strove with all the sinews of his heart and spirit trying to master, to devour, and utterly to possess the great, the million-footed, the invincible and unceasing city. He almost went mad with loneliness among its million faces. His heart sank down in atomic desolation before the overwhelming vision of its immense, inhuman, and terrific architectures. A terrible thirst parched his burning throat and hunger ate into his flesh with a vulture's beak as, tortured by the thousand images of glory, love, and power which the city holds forever to a starving man, he thought that he would perish--only a hand's breadth off from love if he could span it, only a moment away from friendship if he knew it, only an inch, a door, a word away from all the glory of the earth, if he only knew the way.