by Thomas Wolfe
Ibsen, Shaw, Chekhov, Benavente, Molnar, Toller, Wedekind, the Irish, Pirandello, O'Neill, Sardou, Romains, including others from the Bulgarian, Peruvian, and Lithuanian never heard of. There would also be complete bound editions of Punch, Blackwood's, Harper's Weekly, L'Illustration, The Police Gazette, The Literary Digest, and Frank Ledie's Illustrated Weekly.
Walled by these noble, life-giving books, he would work furiously throughout the day, drawing sustenance and courage, when not reading them, from their presence. Here in the midst of life, but of life flowing in regular and tranquil patterns, he could make his rapid -291
and violent sorties into the world, retiring when exhausted by its tumult and fury to this established place.
And at night again, he would dine with rich hunger and thirst, and, through the hours of darkness, lie in the restorative arms of his beautiful mistress. And sometimes at night when the snow came muffling in its soft fall all of the noises of the earth and isolating them from all its people, they would stand in darkness, only a dying flicker of coal fire behind them, watching the transforming drift and flurry of white snow outside.
Thus, being loved and being secure, working always within a circle of comfort and belief, he would become celebrated as well. And to be loved and to be celebrated--was there more than this in life for any man?
After the success of his first book, he would travel, leaving her for ever steadfast, while he drifted and wandered like a ghost around the world, coming unknown, on an unplanned journey, to some village at dusk, and finding there a peasant woman with large ox eyes. He would go everywhere, see everything, eating, drinking, and devouring his way across the earth, returning every year or so to make another book.
He would own no property save a small lodge with thirty acres of woodland, upon a lake in Maine or New Hampshire. He would not keep a motor--he would signal a taxi whenever he wanted to go any where. His clothing, laundry, personal attentions, and, when he was alone at the lodge, his cooking, would be cared for by a negro man, thirty-five years old, black, good-humored, loyal, and clean.
When he was himself thirty or thirty-five years old, having used up and driven out all the wild frenzy and fury in him by that time, or controlled it somehow by flinging and batting, eating and drinking and whoring his way about the world, he would return to abide always with the faithful woman, who would now be deep-breasted and stead fast like the one who waited for Peer Gynt.
And they would descend, year by year, from depth to depth in each other's spirit; they would know each other more completely than two people ever had before, and love each other better all the time. And as they grew older, they would become even younger in spirit, triumph ing above all the weariness, dullness, and emptiness of youth. When he was thirty-five he would marry her, getting on her blonde and fruitful body two or three children.
He would wear her love like a most invulnerable target over his heart. She would be the heart of his desire, the well of all his passion.
He would triumph over the furious welter of the days during the healing and merciful nights: he would be spent, and there would al ways be sanctuary for him; weary, a place of rest; sorrowful, a place of joy.
So was it with him during that year, when, for the first time and with their full strength, the elements of fury, hunger, thirst, wild hope, and savage loneliness worked like a madness in the adyts of his brain.
So was it when, for the first time, he walked the furious streets of life, a manswarm atom, a nameless cipher, who in an instant could clothe his life with all the wealth and glory of the earth. So was it with him that year when he was twenty-three years old, and when he walked the pavements of the city--a beggar and a king.
Has it been otherwise with any man?
Book IV
THE MAGIC YEAR
With the last remnant of the little money he had inherited on his father's death, George Webber now went to Europe. In the fury and hunger which lashed him across the earth, he believed that he would change his soul if only he could change his skies, that peace, wisdom, certitude, and power would come to him in some strange land. But loneliness fed upon his heart forever as he scoured the earth, and he awoke one morning in a foreign land to think of home, and the hoof and the wheel came down the streets of memory again, and instantly the old wild longing to return came back to him.
So was he driven across the seas and back again. He knew strange countries, countless things and people, sucked as from an orange the juice out of new lives, new cities, new events. He worked, toiled, sweated, cursed, whored, brawled, got drunk, traveled, spent all his money--and then came back with greater fury and unrest than ever be fore to hurl the shoulder of his strength against the world, desiring everything, attempting much, completing little.
And forever, in this fury of his soul, this unresting frenzy of his flesh, he lived alone, thought and felt alone among the manswarm of the earth. And in these wanderings, this loneliness, he came to know, to love, to join no other person's life into his own. But now at last the time for that had come.
17
The Ship
TOWARDS SUNDOWN ON A DAY IN AUGUST 1925, A SHIP WAS APPROACHING the coast of the North American continent at her full speed of twenty knots an hour. She was the Vesuvia, a vessel of thirty thousand tons, of Italian registry, and this was her first voyage.
Now ships, like young men, are amorous of fame: they want to make their mark at their first encounter; they are shy and desperate under the cold eye of the world. And the Vesuvia was making a test run.
There had been doubt that the great ship would reach port on schedule. For five days the sea had thrust and hammered at her plates, for five days the sea had uncoiled its fury, with that mounting endlessness, that increasing savagery, that says to the sick heart: "I am the sea.
I have no end or limit. There is no shore, no coast, no harbor at the end. This voyage will never finish--there is no end to weariness, to sickness, to the sea."
Since the great ship had strode calmly from the bay of Naples at night, lit by the last lights of Europe, that with the strong glint of sparkle, of bright glimmering, winked up and down the magic coasts, the seas had mounted day by day in power and tumult, until the memory of earth grew dear and incredible, as strange as a memory of life and flesh must be to spirits. A long swell from the Gulf of Lyons took the ship as she came out below Sardinia, and she lunged down upon Gibraltar with a heavy swinging motion. There was a breathing spell of peace late in the night as, steadily, on even keel, the ship bore through the straits, and people lying in their berths felt a moment's hope and joy. They thought: "Is it over? Is the sea calm at last?" But soon there was a warning hiss and foam of waters at her sides again, a big wave jarred her with a solid blow, and tons of water broke across her thousand little windows. The ship steadied for a moment, trembling and still, while the long waters foamed and coiled along her sides: then slowly she swept forward into the limitless and plangent deep, heaving steadily and majestically up and down like some proud caracoling horse.
Then, for the first time, many people lying in that ship's dark hull felt the power and the terror of the sea. The ship, spruce and limber as a runner's sinew, gave lithely to the sea, creaked softly with oiled ease and suppleness, dipped and plunged gracefully with a long and powerful movement, rose and fell slowly in the sea's plangent breast.
Then many men lying in their berths knew the sea for the first time: in the dark, the sea was instantly revealed to them. The experience is one that can never be imagined and never forgotten. It comes but once to the sons of earth, but wherever it comes, though they be buried in some ship's dark hold, they know that they have met the sea. For it is everything that the earth is not, and in that moment men know the earth as their mother and friend; they feel the great hull in the dark plunge down into the heaving waste, and instantly they feel the terrible presence of miles of water below them, and the limitless, howling, mutable desert of the sea around them.
The great ship, as if
pressed down by some gigantic finger from the sky, plunged up and down in that living and immortal substance which gave before it, but which gave like an infinite feel of mercury, with no suggestion of defeat, giving to itself and returning to itself unmarred, without loss or change, with the terrible indifference of eternity. The great ship rose and fell upon the sinister and unrelenting swell like some frail sloop that leans into the wind. Men felt those thirty thousand tons of steel swing under them like ropes, and suddenly that great engine of the sea seemed small and lonely there, and men felt love and pity for her. Their terror of the ocean was touched with pride and joy--this ship, smelted from the enduring earth, this ship, wrought and riveted from the everlasting land, this ship, ribbed and hinged and fused and delicately balanced by the magic in the hands and heads of men, would bring them through the awful seas to safety on strange shores.
They believed in that ship, then, and suddenly they loved her. They loved her delicate, bending strength, her proud undulance that was like the stride of a proud, beautiful woman. They loved the quiet song, the healthful music, of her motor's thought; among the howling and unmeted desolation of the ocean, it was there like reason on the waters.
They loved her because she filled their hearts with pride and glory: she rode there on the deep an emblem of the undying valiance, the unshaken and magnificent resolution of little man, who is so great because he is so small, who is so strong because he is so weak, who is so brave because he is so full of fear--man, that little match-flare in the darkness, man, that little, glittering candle-end of dateless time who tries to give a purpose to eternity, man, that wasting and defeated tissue who will use the last breath in his lungs, the final beating of his heart, to launch his rockets against Saturn, to flash his meanings at unmindful stars. For men are wise: they know that they are lost, they know that they are desolate and damned together; they look out upon the tumult of unending water, and they know there is no answer, and that the sea, the sea, is its own end and answer.
Then they lay paths across it, they make harbors at the end, and log their courses to them, they believe in earth and go to find it, they launch great ships, they put a purpose down upon the purposeless waste. Their greatness is a kind of folly, for with wisdom in their hearts they make merry--their sketches, books, constructions, their infinite, laborious skill, are a kind of merriment, as soldiers seize each possible moment to carouse and whore before going into battle, nor do they want to talk of death or slaughter.
The brain, the old, crafty, wearing brain, that had conceived this ship, that had, out of a fathomless knowledge of ships, foreseen her lines, given balance to her hull, gauged her weights and ten thousand interwoven proportions, was the brain of an old man dying of cancer.
That subtle mind that made no error in its million calculations, that shell of eaten fibre, forever cut off now from voyages, chained to a few tottering steps and a quiet room in a small German town, had yet foreseen each movement of this ship upon the water, and had seen great waves storming at her plates. That princely craft that had shaped and launched all this now sat in a chair with rugs about its knees, and drooled porridge from its flaccid mouth, wept with a senile quaver, nagged querulously at children or servants, was pleased and happy as a baby in moments of warmth and case, wet itself and had to be cleaned, was lost and broken, gabbling now of childhood in Silesia, again of romance with some fat, blowzy waitress of his student days at Bonn.
And yet this rotting core could lift itself out of its decaying infancy and flicker into fire and craftiness again, and make a ship!
The ship was a token of her nation's pride, a great panther of the sea, a proud, swift cat of Italy. Her engines, it is true, were Swedish.
Her plates had been forged of British steel upon the Clyde. Her super structure was the work of Scottish engineering. A German had designed her. Her plumbing was American. And all the rest of her--rich upholstery, murals, the golden chapel where Holy Mass was celebrated, the Chinese Room where one drank drinks, the Renaissance Room where one also drank drinks and smoked, the Pompeian Room where one danced, the English Grill, paneled with oak and hung with sporting prints--all of this was the product of the art of many nations, but the ship unquestionably was Italian.
She was a mighty ship. Each day the master and the crew and all the passengers measured up the record of her deeds. They exulted in her speed. They boasted of her endurance. They watched her proud undulance and her balanced rhythm in the waters. She was their darling and their joy, and they loved her. The officers walked along her decks talking in low, excited voices. Sometimes one could see them alone together, gesticulating, debating passionately, pausing in silence to observe the ship again, then continuing with more vehemence and pride than before.
And the ship plunged forward through the storm, trembling like a cat. They watched her swing and dip into the mountainous waters.
They saw the smoky mother of the waves boil up across her bows and whip along the decks in sheets of spray that cut like lashes: they felt the ship pause under them, as she got ready for her plunge, or as she rose with proud and dripping head. Then a thousand tons of water smote against her plates, she shuddered like a boxer who has had a body blow, then steadied once again and plunged ahead into the mountainous welter of sea and sky that besieged her like a howling beast.
There was no distance and no horizon; there was only this howling welter of sea and sky in which that ship was struggling like an alien presence--in a hell of waters that smoked and boiled, and sent her into deep valleys and rushed down upon her terribly from great heights, that poised her on the Alpine peaks of waves, then fell away below her with the speed of an express train, as if the bottom had fallen from the universe and the sea was plunging down through space. The water was thick and green, and hissing with sheets of foam; and farther off it was grey-black and cold and vicious, and the tops of waves exploded into windy white. The clouds were thick and grey and joined the sea smokily in a living, savage element.
As day followed day, and the storm mounted in violence and fury, and the great ship lengthened to its stride, meeting its first test grandly and surpassing itself, the suppressed and nervous manner of the officers was supplanted by an air of open jubilation. There were great sudden bursts of laughter among them. They began to look at the stormy sea with insolence and indifference. When questioned about the weather by the passengers, they affected a tone of cool unconcern: Oh yes, it wasn't bad; there was a bit of a storm on, but they only wished there was some really savage weather so that the ship could show what she could do.
And this ship was the latest of them all upon the timeless seas. She set a day, and fixed a mark on history. She was the child of all other ships that had made their dots of time and that had brought small, vivid men and all their history upon the water--the Greeks, and the Phïnician traders, the wild, blond Norsemen with their plaited hair, the hot Spaniards, the powdered Frenchmen with their wigs, and the bluff English, moving in to close and board and conquer. These men were lords and captains on the sea, and they had given mortal tongue, and meters of mortal time, to timelessness. Yes! they made strong clocks strike sweetly out upon the ocean; they took the timeless, year less sea and put the measure of their years upon it; they said, "In such and-such a year we made this sea our own and took her for our ship and country."
This was the ship, and she was time and life there on the ocean. If from sea-caves cold the ageless monsters of the deep had risen, the polyped squirm and women with no loins and seaweed hair, they could have read her time and destiny. She cared for none of this, for she was healthy with the life of man, and men care little for the sea cave cold. In their few million years what do they know of the vast swarming kingdoms of the sea, or of the earth beyond their scratchings on it?
The storm had reached the peak of its fury on the fifth day out, and then subsided quickly. Next morning the sun shone full and hot, and the great ship had settled down to a gentle rocking motion.
A little befor
e noon that day, the third-class smoking room was crowded with a noisy throng of card players, on-lookers, talkers, and pre-luncheon drinkers. At one of the tables in a corner a young man was reading a letter. What he read apparently did not please him, for he scowled morosely, stopped abruptly, and impatiently thrust the letter back into his pocket. And yet, that battered document seemed to have a gloomy fascination for him, too, for presently he took it out again, opened it, and again began to read, this time more intently, with a kind of concentrated bitterness which indicated that his former mood was now tempered by a spirit of truculent denial. And this display of hos tile feeling would have seemed doubly curious to an observer had he known that the passage which most aroused the reader's ire was an apparently innocent remark about the color of the sod.
The letter had been written by his uncle. And the sentence that the young man could not quite get over, that stuck there in his craw like a distressful fish bone every time he came to it, ran as follows: "You've been over there a year, and by this time you must have found out that the wherewithall don't grow on bushes. So if you've seen enough of it, my advice to you would be to come on back home where the grass is green.
"Where the grass is green." This pastoral phrase, with all its implications, was the thing that rankled and hurt. The youth's face darkened with a look of bitter irony as he reflected that his uncle had imputed to the grass--to the American grass--the very quality in which, by comparison with its European equivalent, it was most lacking.
