You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe
"Oh, look here now--" Randy began impatiently.
"Yes, she did, too! I know what I'm talking about!" he said earnestly. "Here's what you didn't hear--here's what she was working round to all the time--it came out at the end. I don't know who she is, I never heard of her before--but she's a friend of Ted Reeve's wife. And apparently he thinks I put him in the book, and has been making threats that he's going to kill me if I ever go back home."
This was true; Randy had heard it in Libya Hill.
"That's what it was about," George sneered bitterly--"that woman's call. That's what most of the calls are about. They want to talk to the Beast of the Apocalypse, feel him out, and tell him: 'Ted's all right! Now don't you believe all those things, you hear! He was upset at first--but he sees the whole thing now, the way you meant it--and everything's all right.' That's what she said to me, so maybe I'm not the fool you think I am!"
He was so earnest and excited that for a moment Randy did not answer him. Besides, making allowances for the distortion of his feelings, he could see some justice in what George said.
"Have you had many calls like that?" Randy asked.
"Oh"--wearily--"almost every day. I think everyone who has been up here from home since the book was published has telephoned me. They go about it in different ways. There are those who call me up as if I were some kind of ghoul: 'How are you?'--in a small, quiet tone such as you might use to a condemned man just before they lead him to the death chamber at Sing Sing--'Are you all right?' And then you get alarmed, you begin to stammer and to stumble round, 'Why, yes? Yes, I'm fine! Fine, thanks!'--meanwhile, beginning to feel yourself all over just to see if you're all there. And then they say in that same still voice: 'Well, I just wanted to know...I just called up to find out...I hope you're all right.'"
After looking at Randy for a moment in a tormented and bewildered way, he burst out in an exasperated laugh:
"It's been enough to give a hippopotamus the creeps! To listen to them talk, you'd think I was Jack the Ripper! Even those who call up to laugh and joke about it take the attitude that the only reason I wrote the book was to see how much dirt and filth I could dig up on people I didn't like. Yes!" he cried bitterly. "My greatest supporters at home seem to be the disappointed little soda-jerkers who never made a go of it and the frustrated hangers-on who never got into the Country Club. 'You sure did give it to that son-of-a-bitch, Jim So-and-so!' they call me up to tell me. 'You sure did burn him up! I had to laugh when I read what you said about him--boy!' Or: 'Why didn't you say something about that bastard, Charlie What's-his-name? I'd have given anything to see you take him for a ride!'...Jesus God!" He struck his fist upon his knee with furious exasperation. "That's all it means to them: nothing but nasty gossip, slander, malice, envy, a chance of getting back at someone--you'd think that none of them had ever read a book before. Tell me," he said earnestly, bending towards Randy, "isn't there anyone there--anyone besides yourself--who gives a damn about the book itself? Isn't there anyone who has read it as a book, who sees what it was about, who understands what I was trying to do?"
His eyes were full of torment now. It was out at last--the thing Randy had dreaded and wanted to avoid. He said:
"I should think you'd know more about that by this time than anyone. After all, you've had more opportunity than anyone else to find out."
Well, that was out, too. It was the answer that he had to have, that he had feared to get. He stared at Randy for a minute or two with his tormented eyes, then he laughed bitterly and began to rave:
"Well, then, to hell with it! To hell with all of it!" He began to curse violently. "The small two-timing bunch of crooked sons-ofbitches! They can go straight to hell! They've done their best to ruin me!"
It was ignoble and unworthy and untrue. Randy saw that he was lashing himself into a fit of violent recrimination in which all that was worst and weakest m him was coming out--distortion, prejudice, and self-pity. These were the things he would have to conquer somehow or belost. Randy stopped him curtly:
"Now, no more of that! For God's sake, George, pull yourself together! If a lot of damn fools read your book and didn't understand it, that's not Libya Hill, that's the whole world. People there are no different from people anywhere. They thought you wrote about them--and the truth is, you did. So they got mad at you. You hurt their feelings, and you touched their pride. And, to be blunt about it, you opened up a lot of old wounds. There were places where you rubbed salt in. In saying this, I'm not like those others you complain about: you know damn wel! I understand what you did and why you had to do it. But just the same, there were some things that you did not have to do--and you'd have had a better book if you hadn't done them. So don't whine about it now. And don't think you're a martyr."
But he had got himself primed into a mood of martyrdom. As Randy looked at him sitting there, one hand gripping his knee, his face sullen, his head brooding down between his hulking shoulders, he could see how this mood had grown upon him. To begin with, he had been naive not to realise how people would feel about some of the things he had written. Then, when the first accusing letters came, he had been overwhelmed and filled with shame and humility and guilt over the pain he had caused. But as time went on and the accusations became more vicious and envenomed, he had wanted to strike back and defend himself. When he saw there was no way to do that--when people answered his explanatory letters only with new threats and insults--he had grown bitter. And finally, after taking it all so hard and torturing himself through the whole gamut of emotions, he had sunk into this morass of self-pity.
George began to talk now about "the artist", spouting all the intellectual and aesthetic small change of the period. The artist, it seemed, was a kind of fabulous, rare, and special creature who lived on "beauty" and "truth" and had thoughts so subtle that the average man could comprehend them no more than a mongrel could understand the moon he bayed at. The artist, therefore, could achieve his "art" only through a constant state of flight into some magic wood, some province of enchantment.
The phrases were so spurious that Randy felt like shaking him. And what annoyed him most was the knowledge that George was really so much better than this. He must know how cheap and false what he was saying really was. At last Randy said to him quietly:
"George, of all the people I have ever known, you are the least qualified to play the wounded faun."
But he was so immersed in his fantasy that he paid no attention. He just said: "Huh?"--and then was off again. Anybody who was "a real artist," he said, was doomed to be an outcast from society. His inevitable fate was to be "driven out by the tribe."
It was all so wrong that Randy lost patience with him:
"For Christ's sake, George, what's the matter with you? You're talking like a fool!" he said. "You haven't been driven out of anywhere! You've only got yourself in a little hot water at home! Here you've been ranting your head off about 'beauty' and 'truth'! God! Why in hell, then, don't you stop lying to yourself? Can't you see? The truth is that for the first time in your life you've managed to get a foothold in the thing you want to do. Your book got some good notices and has had a fair sale. You're in the right spot now to go on. So where have you been driven? No doubt all those threatening letters have made you feel like an exile from home, but hell, man!--you've been an exile for years. And of your own accord, too! You know you've had no intention of ever going back there to live. But just as soon as they started yelling for your scalp, you fooled yourself into believing you'd been driven out by force! And, as for this idea of yours that a man achieves 'beauty' by escaping somewhere from the life he knows, isn't the truth just the opposite? Haven't you written me the same thing yourself a dozen times?"
"How do you mean?" he said sullenly.
"I mean, taking your own book as an example, isn't it true that every good thing in it came, not because you withdrew from life, but because you got into it--because you managed to understand and use the life you knew?"
He was sil
"I don't know what comes over me sometimes," he said. He shook his head and looked ashamed of himself and laughed. "You're right, of course," he went on seriously. "What you say is true. And that's the way it has to be, too. A man must use what he knows--he can't use what he doesn't know...And that's why some of the critics make me mad," he added bluntly.
"How's that?" asked Randy, glad to hear him talking sense at last. "Oh, you know," he said, "you've seen the reviews. Some of them said the book was 'too autobiographical'."
This was surprising. And Randy, with the outraged howls of Libya Hill still ringing in his ears, and with George's outlandish rantings in answer to those howls still echoing in the room, could hardly believe he had heard him aright. He could only say in frank astonishment:
"Well, it was autobiographical--you can't deny it."
"But not 'too autobiographical'," George went on earnestly. "If the critics had just crossed those words out and written in their place 'not autobiographical enough', they'd have hit it squarely. That's where I failed. That's where the real fault was." There was no question that he meant it, for his face was twisted suddenly with a grimace, the scar of his defeat and shame. "My young hero was a stick, a fool, a prig, a snob, as Dedalus was--as in my own presentment of the book I was. There was the weakness. Oh, I know--there were lots of autobiographical spots in the book, and where it was true I'm not ashamed of it, but the hitching-post I tied the horses to wasn't good enough. It wasn't true autobiography. I've learned that now, and learned why. The failure comes from the false personal. There's the guilt. That's where the young genius business gets in--the young artist business, what you called a while ago the wounded faun business. It gets in and it twists the vision. The vision may be shrewd, subtle, piercing, within a thousand special frames accurate and Joycean--but within the larger one, false, mannered, and untrue. And the large one is the one that matters."
He meant it now, and he was down to solid rock. Randy saw the measure of his suffering. And yet, now as before, he seemed to be going to extremes and taking it too hard. In some such measure all men fail, and Randy said:
"But was anything ever as good as it could be? Who succeeded anyway?"
"Oh, plenty did!" he said impatiently. "Tolstoy when he wrote War and Peace. Shakespeare when he wrote King Lear. Mark Twain in the first part of Life on the Mississippi. Of course they're not as good as they might have been--nothing ever is. Only, they missed in the right way: they might have put the shot a little further--but they were not hamstrung by their vanity, shackled by their damned self-consciousness. That's what makes for failure. That's where I failed."
"Then what's the remedy?"
"To use myself to the top of my bent. To use everything I have. To milk the udder dry, squeeze out the last drop, until there is nothing left. And if I use myself as a character, to withhold nothing, to try to see and paint myself as I am--the bad along with the good, the shoddy alongside of the true--just as I must try to see and draw every other character. No more false personal, no more false pride, no more pettiness and injured feelings. In short, to kill the wounded faun."
Randy nodded: "Yes. And what now? What comes next?"
"I don't know," he answered frankly. His eyes showed his perplexity. "That's the thing that's got me stumped. It's not that I don't know what to write about.--God!" he laughed suddenly. "You hear about these fellows who write one book and then can't do another because they haven't got anything else to write about!"
"You're not worried about that?"
"Lord, no! My trouble's all the other way round! I've got too much material. It keeps backing up on me"--he gestured round him at the tottering piles of manuscript that were everywhere about the room--"until sometimes I wonder what in the name of God I'm going to do with it all--how I'm going to find a frame for it, a pattern, a channel, a way to make it flow!" He brought his fist down sharply on his knee and there was a note of desperation in his voice. "Sometimes it actually occurs to me that a man may be able to write no more because he gets drowned in his own secretions!"
"So you're not afraid of ever running dry?"
He laughed loudly. "At times I almost hope I will," he said. "There'd be a kind of comfort in the thought that some day--maybe after I'm forty--I would dry up and become like a camel, living on my hump. Of course, I don't really mean that either. It's not good to dry up--it's a form of death...No, that's not what bothers me. The thing I've got to find out is the way!" He was silent a moment, staring at Randy, then he struck his fist upon his knee again and cried: "The way! The way! Do you understand?"
"Yes," said Randy, "I think I do. But how?"
George's face was full of perplexity.. He was silent, trying to phrase his problem.
"I'm looking for a way," he said at last. "I think it may be something like what people vaguely mean when they speak of fiction. A kind of legend, perhaps. Something--a story--composed of all the knowledge I have, of all the living I've seen. Not the facts, you understand--not just the record of my life--but something truer than the facts--something distilled out of my experience and transmitted into a form of universal application. That's what the best fiction is, isn't it?"
Randy smiled and nodded encouragement. George was all right. He needn't have worried about him. He would work his way out of the morass. So Randy said cheerfully:
"Have you started the new book yet?"
He began to talk rapidly, and again Randy saw worried tension in his eyes.
"Yes," he said, "I've written a whole lot. These ledgers here"--he indicated a great stack of battered ledgers on the table--"and all this manuscript"--he swept his arms in a wide gesture round the room--"they are full of new writing. I must have written half a million words or more."
Randy then made the blunder which laymen so often innocently make when they talk to writers.
"What's it about?" he said.
He was rewarded with an evil scowl. George did not answer. He began to pace up and down, thinking to himself with smouldering intensity. At last he stopped by the table, turned and faced Randy, and, with the redemptive honesty that was the best thing in him, bluntly said:
"No, I haven't started my new book yet!...Thousands of words"--he whacked the battered ledgers with a flattened palm--"hundreds of ideas, dozens of scenes, of scraps, of fragments--but no book!...And"--the worried lines about his eyes now deepened--"time goes by! It has been almost five months since the other book was published, and now"--he threw his arms out towards the huge stale chaos of that room with a gesture of exasperated fury--"here I am! Time gets away from me before I know that it has gone! Time!" he cried, and smote his fist into his palm and stared before him with a blazing and abstracted eye as though he saw a ghost--"Time!"
His enemy was Time. Or perhaps it was his friend. One never knows for sure.
Randy stayed in New York several days, and the two friends talked from morning till night and from night till morning. Everything that came into their heads they talked about. George would stride back and forth across the floor in his restless way, talking or listening to Randy, and suddenly would pause beside the table, scowl, look round him as though he were seeing the room for the first time, bring down his hand with a loud whack on a pile of manuscript, and boom out:
"Do you know what the reason is for all these words I've written? Well, I'll tell you. It's because I'm so damned lazy!"
"It doesn't look like the room of a lazy man to me," said Randy, laughing.
"It is though," George answered. "That's why it looks this way. You know"--his face grew thoughtful as he spoke--"I've got an idea that a lot of the work in this world gets done by lazy people. That's the reason they work--because they're so lazy."
"I don't follow you," said Randy, "but go on--spill it--get it off your chest."
"Well," he said, quite seriously, "it's this way: you wor
Randy laughed again. He had to--it was so much like George--no one else could have come out with a thing like that. And what made it so funny was that he knew George saw the humour of it, too, and yet was desperately in earnest. He could imagine the weeks and months of solemn cogitation that had brought George to this paradoxical conclusion, and now, like a whale after a long plunge, he was coming up to spout and breathe.
"Well, I see your point," Randy said. "Maybe you're right. But at least it's a unique way of being lazy."
"No," George answered, "I think it's probably a very natural one. Now take all those fellows that you read about," he went on excitedly --"Napoleon--and--and Balzac--and Thomas Edison"--he burst out triumphantly--"these fellows who never sleep more than an hour or two at a time, and can keep going night and day--why, that's not because they love to work! It's because they're really lazy--and afraid not to work because they know they're lazy! Why, hell yes!" he went on enthusiastically. "I know that's the way it's been with all those fellows! Old Edison now," he said scornfully, "going round pretending to people that he works all the time because he likes it!"