You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe

  He thought over a few of them that he had known:

  There was Haythorpe, who when George first knew him was an esthete of the late baroque in painting, writing all the arts, author of one-act costume plays--"Gesmonder! Thy hands pale chalices of hot desire!" Later he became an esthete of the primitives--the Greek, Italian, and the German; then esthete of the nigger cults--the wood sculptures, coon songs, hymnals, dances, and the rest; still later, esthete of the comics--of cartoons, Chaplin, and the Brothers Marx; then of Expressionism; then of the Mass; then of Russia and the Revolution; at length, esthete of homo-sexuality; and finally, death's esthete--suicide in a graveyard in Connecticut.

  There was Collingswood, who, fresh out of Harvard, was not so much the esthete of the arts as of the mind. First, a Bolshevik from Beacon Hill, practitioner of promiscuous, communal love as the necessary answer to "bourgeois morality"; then back to Cambridge for post-graduate study at the feet of Irving Babbitt--Collingswood is now a Humanist, the bitter enemy of Rousseau, Romanticism, and of Russia (which is, he now thinks, Rousseau in modern form); the playwright, next--New Jersey, Beacon Hill, or Central Park seen in the classic unities of the Greek drama; at length, disgusted realist--"all that's good in modern art or letters is to be found in advertisements"; then a job as a scenario writer and two years in Hollywood--all now is the moving picture, with easy money, easy love affairs, and drunkenness; and finally, back to Russia, but with his first love lacking--no sex triflings now, my comrades--we who serve the Cause and wait upon the day lead lives of Spartan abstinence--what was the free life, free love, enlightened pleasure of the proletariat ten years ago is now despised as the contemptible debauchery of "bourgeois decadence".

  There was Spurgeon from the teaching days at the School for Utility Cultures--good Spurgeon--Chester Spurgeon of the Ph.D.--Spurgeon of "the great tradition"--thin-lipped Spurgeon, ex-student of Professor Stuart Sherman, and bearer-onwards of the Master's Torch. Noble-hearted Spurgeon, who wrote honeyed flatteries of Thornton Wilder and his Bridge--"The tradition of the Bridge is Love, just as the tradition of America and of Democracy is Love. Hence"--Spurgeon hences--Love grows Wilder as the years Bridge on across America. Oh, where now, good Spurgeon, "intellectual" Spurgeon--Spurgeon whose thin lips and narrowed eyes were always so glacial prim on Definitions? Where now, brave intellect, by passion uninflamed? Spurgeon of the flashing mind, by emotion unimpulsed, is now a devoted leader of the intellectual Communists (See Spurgeon's article entitled: "Mr. Wilder's Piffle", in the New Masses).--So, Comrade Spurgeon, hail! Hail, Comrade Spurgeon--and most heartily, my bright-eyed Intellectual, farewell!

  Whatever George Webber was, he knew he was not an "intellectual". He was just an American who was looking hard at the life round him, and sorting carefully through all the life he had ever seen and known, and trying to extract some essential truth out of this welter of his whole experience. But, as he said to his friend and editor, Fox Edwards:

  "What is truth? No wonder jesting Pilate turned away. The truth, it has a thousand faces--show only one of them, and the whole truth flies away! But how to show the whole? That's the question...

  "Discovery in itself is not enough. It's not enough to find out what things are. You've also got to find out where they come from, where each brick fits in the wall."

  He always came back to the wall.

  "I think it's like this," he said. "You see a wall, you look at it so much and so hard that one day you see clear through it. Then, of course, it's not just one wall any longer. It's every wall that ever was."

  He was still spiritually fighting out the battle of his first book, and all the problems it had raised. He was still searching for a way. At times he felt that his first book had taught him nothing--not even confidence. His feelings of hollow desperation and self-doubt seemed to grow worse instead of better, for he had now torn himself free from almost every personal tie which had ever bound him, and which formerly had sustained him in some degree with encouragement and faith. He was left, therefore, to rely almost completely on his own resources.

  There was also the insistent, gnawing consciousness of work itself, the necessity of turning towards the future and the completion of a new book. He was feeling, now as never before, the inexorable pressure of time. In writing his first book, he had been unknown And obscure, and there had been a certain fortifying strength in that, for no one had expected anything of him. But now the spotlight of publication had been turned upon him, and he felt it beating down with merciless intensity. He was pinned beneath the light--he could not crawl out of it. Though he had not won fame, still he was known now. He had been examined, probed, and talked about. He felt that the world was looking at him with a critic eye.

  It had been easy in his dreams to envision a long and fluent sequence of big books, but now he was finding it a different matter to accomplish them. His first book had been more an act of utterance than an act of labour. It was an impassioned expletive of youth--something that had been pent up in him, something felt and seen and imagined and put down at white-hot heat. The writing of it had been a process of spiritual and emotional evacuation. But that was behind him now, and he knew he should never try to repeat it. Henceforth his writing would have to come from unending labour and preparation.

  In his effort to explore his experience, to extract the whole, essential truth of it, and to find a way to write about it, he sought to recapture every particle of the life he knew down to its minutest details. He spent weeks and months trying to put down on paper the exactitudes of countless fragments--what he called: "the dry, caked colours of America"--how the entrance to a subway looked, the design and webbing of the elevated structure, the look and feel of an iron rail, the particular shade of rusty green with which so many things are painted in America. Then he tried to pin down the foggy colour of the brick of which so much of London is constructed, the look of an English doorway, of a French window, of the roofs and chimney-pots of Paris, of a whole street in Munich--and each of these foreign things he then examined in contrast to its American equivalent.

  It was a process of discovery in its most naked, literal, and primitive terms. He was just beginning really to see thousands of things for the first time, to see the relations between them, to see here and there whole series and systems of relations. He was like a scientist in some new field of chemistry who for the first time realises that he has stumbled upon a vast new world, and who will then pick out identities, establish affiliations, define here and there the outlines of sub-systems in crystalline union, without yet being aware what the structure of the whole is like, or what the final end will be.

  The same processes now began to inform his direct observation of the life round him. Thus, on his nocturnal ramblings about New York, he would observe the homeless men who prowled in the vicinity of restaurants, lifting the lids of garbage cans and searching round inside for morsels of rotten food. He saw them everywhere, and noticed how their numbers increased during the hard and desperate days of 1932. He knew what kind of men they were, for he talked to many of them; he knew what they had been, where they had come from, and even what kind of scraps they could expect to dig out of the garbage cans. He found out the various places all over the city where such men slept at night. A favourite rendezvous was a corridor of the subway station at Thirty-third Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. There one night he counted thirty-four huddled together on the cold concrete, wrapped up in sheathings of old newspaper.

  It was his custom almost every night, at one o'clock or later, to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, and night after night, with a horrible fascination, he used to go to the public latrine or "comfort station" which was directly in front of the New York City Hall. One descended to this place down a steep flight of stairs from the street, and on bitter nights he would find the place crowded with homeless men who had sought refuge there. Some were those shambling hulks that one sees everywhere, in Paris as well as New York, in good times as well as bad--old men, all rags and bags
and long white hair and bushy beards stained dirty yellow, wearing tattered overcoats in the cavernous pockets of which they carefully stored away all the little rubbish they lived on and spent their days collecting in the streets--crusts of bread, old bones with rancid shreds of meat still clinging to them, and dozens of cigarette-butts. Some were the "stumble bums" from the Bowery, criminal, fumed with drink or drugs, or half insane with "smoke". But most of them were just flotsam of the general ruin of the time--honest, decent, middle-aged men with faces seamed by toil and want, and young men, many of them mere boys in their teens, with thick, unkempt hair. These were the wanderers from town to town, the riders of freight trains, the thumbers of rides on highways, the uprooted, unwanted male population of America. They drifted across the land and gathered in the big cities when winter came, hungry, defeated, empty, hopeless, restless, driven by they knew not what, always on the move, looking everywhere for work, for the bare crumbs to support their miserable lives, and finding neither work nor crumbs. Here in New York, to this obscene meeting-place, these derelicts came, drawn into a common stew of rest and warmth and a little surcease from their desperation.

  George had never before witnessed anything to equal the indignity and sheer animal horror of the scene. There was even a kind of devil's comedy in the sight of all these filthy men squatting upon those open, doorless stools. Arguments and savage disputes and fights would sometimes break out among them over the possession of these stools, which all of them wanted more for rest than for necessity. The sight was revolting, disgusting, enough to render a man forever speechless with very pity.

  He would talk to the men and find out all he could about them, and when he could stand it no more he would come out of this hole of filth and suffering, and there, twenty feet above it, he would see the giant hackles of Manhattan shining coldly in the cruel brightness of the winter night. The Woolworth Building was not fifty yards away, and, a little farther down were the silvery spires and needles of Wall Street, great fortresses of stone and steel that housed enormous hanks. The blind injustice of this contrast seemed the most brutal part of the whole experience, for there, all round him in the cold moonlight, only a few blocks away from this abyss of human wretchedness and misery, blazed the pinnacle of power where a large portion of the entire world's wealth was locked in mighty vaults.

  They were now dosing up the restaurant. The tired waitresses were racking the chairs upon the tables, completing the last formalities of their hard day's work in preparation for departure. At the cash register the proprietor was totting up the figures of the day's take, and one of the male waiters hovered watchfully near the table, in a manner politely indicating that while he was not in a hurry he would be glad if the last customer would pay his bill and leave.

  George called for his check and gave the man some money. He took it and in a moment returned with the change. He pocketed his tip and said: "Thank you, sir." Then as George said good night and started to get up and leave, the waiter hesitated and hung round uncertainly as if there was something he wanted to say but scarcely knew whether he ought to say it or not.

  George looked at him inquiringly, and then, in a rather embarrassed tone, the waiter said:

  "Mr. Webber...there's...something I'd like to talk over with you sometime...I--I'd like to get your advice about something--that is, if you have time," he added hastily and almost apologetically.

  George regarded the waiter with another inquiring look,-in which the man evidently read encouragement, for now he went on quickly, in a manner of almost beseeching entreaty:

  "It's--it's about a story."

  The familiar phrase awakened countless weary echoes in Webber's memory. It also resolved that hard and honest patience with which any man who ever sweated to write a living line and to earn his bread by the hard, uncertain labour of his pen will listen, as an act of duty and understanding, to any other man who says he has a tale to tell. His mind and will wearily composed themselves, his face set in a strained smile of mechanical anticipation, and the poor waiter, thus encouraged, went on eagerly:

  "It's--it's a story a guy told me several years ago. I've been thinking about it ever since. The guy was a foreigner," said the waiter impressively, as if this fact was enough to guarantee the rare colour and fascinating interest of what he was about to reveal. "He was an Armenian," said the waiter very earnestly. "Sure! He came from over there!" He nodded his head emphatically. "And this story that he told me was an Armenian story," said the waiter with solemn emphasis, and then paused to let this impressive fact sink in. "It was a story that he knew about--he told it to me--and I'm the only other guy that knows about it," said the waiter, and paused again, looking at his patron with a very bright and feverish eye.

  George continued to smile with wan encouragement, and in a moment the waiter, after an obvious struggle with his soul, a conflict between his desire to keep his secret and to tell it, too, went on:

  "Gee! You're a writer, Mr. Webber, and you know about these things. I'm just a dumb guy working in a restaurant--but if I could put it into words--if I could get a guy like you who knows how it's done to tell the story for me--why--why"--he struggled with himself, then burst out enthusiastically--"there'd be a fortune in it for the both of us!"

  George felt his heart sink still lower. It was turning out just as he knew it would. But he still continued to smile pallidly. He cleared his throat in an undecided fashion, but then said nothing. And the waiter, taking silence for consent, now pressed on impetuously:

  "Honest, Mr. Webber--if I could get somebody like you to help me with this story--to write it down for me the way it ought to be-I'd--I'd"--for a moment the waiter struggled with his lower nature, then magnanimity got the better of him and he cried out with t he decided air of a man who is willing to make a generous bargain and stick to it--"I'd go fifty-fifty with him! I'd--I'd be willing to give him half!...And there's a fortune in it!" he cried. "I go to the movies and I read True Story Magazine--and I never seen a story like it! It's got 'em all beat! I've thought about it for years, ever since the guy told it to me--and I know I've got a gold mine here if I could only write it down!...It's--it's----"

  Now, indeed, the waiter's struggle with his sense of caution became painful to watch. He was evidently burning with a passionate desire to reveal his secret, but he was also obviously tormented by doubts and misgivings lest he should recklessly give away to a comparative stranger a treasure which the other might appropriate to his own use. I I is manner was very much that of a man who has sailed strange seas and seen, in some unknown coral island, the fabulous buried cache of forgotten pirates' plundering, and who is now being torn between two desperate needs--his need of partnership, of outward help, and his imperative need of secrecy and caution. The fierce interplay of these two powers discrete was waged there on the open battlefield of the waiter's countenance. And in the end he took the obvious way out. Like an explorer who will take from his pocket an uncut gem of tremendous size and value and cunningly hint that in a certain place he knows of there are many more like it, the waiter decided to tell a little part of his story without revealing it.

  "I--I can't tell you the whole thing to-night," he said apologetically. "Some other night, maybe, when you've got more time. But just to give you an idea of what's in it"--he looked round stealthily to make sure he was in no danger of being overheard, then bent over and lowered his voice to an impressive whisper--"just to give you an idea, now--there's one scene in the story where a woman puts an advertisement in the paper that she will give a ten-dollar gold piece and as much liquor as he can drink to any man who comes round to see her the next day!" After imparting this sensational bit of information, the waiter regarded his patron with glittering eyes. "Now!" said the waiter, straightening up with a gesture of finality. "You never heard of anything like that, did you? You ain't never seen that in a story!"

  George, after a baffled pause, admitted feebly that he had not. Then, when the waiter continued to regard him feverishly, with a
look that made it plain that he was supposed to say something more, he inquired doubtfully whether this interesting event had really happened in Armenia.

  "Sure!" cried the waiter, nodding vigorously. "That's what I'm telling you! The whole thing happens in Armenia!" He paused again, torn fiercely between his caution and his desire to go on, his feverish eyes almost burning holes through his questioner. "It's--it's--" he struggled for a moment more, then surrendered; abjectly--"well, I'll tell you," he said quietly, leaning forward, with his hands resting on the table in an attitude of confidential intimacy. "The idea of the story runs like this. You got this rich dame to begin with, see?"

  He paused and looked at George inquiringly. George did not: know what was expected of him, so he nodded to show that his min had grasped this important fact, and said hesitatingly:

  "In Armenia?"

  "Sure! Sure!" The waiter nodded. "This dame comes from over there--she's got a big pile of dough--I guess she's the richest dame in Armenia. And then she falls for this guy, see?" he went on. "He's nuts about her, and he comes to see her every night. The way the guy told it to me, she lives up at the top of this big house--so every night the guy comes and climbs up there to see her--oh, a hell of a long ways up"--the waiter said--"thirty floors or more!"

  "In Armenia?" George asked feebly.