| ◄ BOOK VI. - "I HAVE A THING TO TELL YOU" | You Can't Go Home Again BOOK VII. - A WIND IS RISING, AND THE RIVERS FLOW written by Thomas Wolfe |
| The Sun Dial Press 1942 (pages 705-743) |
The experiences of that final summer in Germany had a profound effect upon George Webber. He had come face to face with something old and genuinely evil in the spirit of man which he had never known before, and it shook his inner world to its foundations. Not that it produced a sudden revolution in his way of thinking. For years his conception of the world and of his own place in it had been gradually changing, and the German adventure merely brought this process to its climax. It threw into sharp relief many other related phenomena which George had observed in the whole temper of the times, and it made plain to him, once and for all, the dangers that lurk in those latent atavistic urges which man has inherited from his dark past.
Hitlerism, he saw, was a recrudescence of an old barbarism. Its racial nonsense and cruelty, its naked worship of brute force, its suppression of truth and resort to lies and myths, its ruthless contempt for the individual, its anti-intellectual and anti-moral dogma that to one man alone belongs the right of judgment and decision, and that for all others virtue lies in blind, unquestioning obedience—each of these fundamental elements of Hitlerism was a throwback to that fierce and ancient tribalism which had sent waves of hairy Teutons swooping down out of the north to destroy the vast edifice of Roman civilisation. That primitive spirit of greed and lust and force had always been the true enemy of mankind.
But this spirit was not confined to Germany. It belonged to no one race. It was a terrible part of the universal heritage of man. One saw traces of it everywhere. It took on many disguises, many labels. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin—each had his own name for it. And America had it, too, in various forms. For wherever ruthless men conspired together for their own ends, wherever the rule of dog-eat-dog was dominant, there it bred. And wherever one found it, one also found that its roots sank down into something primitive in man’s ugly past. And these roots would somehow have to be eradicated, George felt, if man was to win his ultimate freedom and not be plunged back into savagery and perish utterly from the earth.
When George realised all this he began to look for atavistic yearnings in himself. He found plenty of them. Any man can find them if he is honest enough to look for them. The whole year that followed his return from Germany, George occupied himself with this effort of self-appraisal. And at the end of it he knew, and with the knowledge came the definite sense of new direction towards which he had long been groping, that the dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back—but that you can go home again.
The phrase had many implications for, him. You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake, back home to aestheticism, to one’s youthful idea of “the artist” and the all-sufficiency of “art” and “beauty” and “love”, back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
In a way, the phrase summed up everything he had ever learned. And what he now knew led inexorably to a decision which was the hardest he had ever bad to make. Throughout the year he wrestled with it, talked about it with his friend and editor, Foxhall Edwards, and fought against doing what he realised he would have to do. For the time had come to leave Fox Edwards. They bad reached a parting of the ways. Not that Fox was one of the new barbarians. God, no! But Fox—well, Fox—Fox understood. And George knew that whatever happened, Fox would always remain his friend.
So in the end, after all their years together, they parted. And when it was over, George sat down and wrote to Fox. He wanted to leave the record clear. And this is what he wrote:
45. Young Icarus
I have of late, dear Fox [George wrote], been thinking of you very I much, and of your strange but most familiar face. I never knew a man like you before, and if I had not known you, I never could have imagined you. And yet, to me you are inevitable, so that, having known you, I cannot imagine what life would have been for me without you. You were a polestar in my destiny. You were the magic thread in the great web which, being woven now, is finished and complete: the circle of our lives rounds out, full swing, and each of us in his own way now has rounded it: there is no further circle we can make. This, too—the end as the beginning—was inevitable: therefore, dear friend and parent of my youth, farewell.
Nine years have passed since first I waited in your vestibule. And I was not repulsed. No: I was taken in, was welcomed, was picked up and sustained just when my spirit reached its lowest ebb, was given life and hope, the restoration of my self-respect, the vindication of my self-belief, the renewal of my faith by the assurance of your own belief; and I was carried on, through all the struggle, doubt, confusion, desperation, effort of the years that were to follow, by your help and by the noble inspiration of your continued faith.
But now it ends—the road we were to go together. We two alone know how completely it has ended. But before I go, because few men can ever know, from first to last, a circle of such whole, superb finality, I leave this picture of it.
You may think it a little premature of me to start summing up my life at the age of thirty-seven. That is not my purpose here. But, although thirty-seven is not an advanced age at which one can speak of having learned many things, neither is it too early to have learned a few. By that time a man has lived long enough to be able to look back over the road he has come and see certain events and periods in a proportion and a perspective which he could not have had before. And because certain of the periods of my life represent to me, as I now look back on them, stages of marked change and development, not only in the spirit which animates the work I do, but also in my views on men and living, and my own relation to the world, I am going to tell you about them. Believe me, it is not egotism that prompts me to do this. As you will see, my whole experience swings round, as though through a pre-destined orbit, to you, to this moment, to this parting. So bear with me—and then, farewell.
To begin at the beginning (all is clear from start to finish):
Twenty years ago, when I was seventeen years old and a sophomore at Pink Rock College, I was very fond, along with many of my fellows, of talking about my “philosophy of life”. That was one of our favourite subjects of conversation, and we were most earnest about it. I’m not sure now what my “philosophy” was at that time, but I am sure I had one. Everybody had. We were deep in philosophy at Pine Rock. We juggled such formidable terms as “concepts”, “categorical imperatives”, and “moments of negation” in a way that would have made Spinoza blush.
And if I do say so, I was no slouch at it myself. At the age of seventeen I had an A-1 rating as a philosopher. “Concepts” held no terrors for my young life, and “moments of negation” were my meat. I could split a hair with the best of them. And now that I have turned to boasting, I may as well tell you that I made a One in Logic, and it was said to be the only One that had been given in that course for many a year. So when it comes to speaking of philosophy, I am, you see, a fellow who is privileged to speak.
I don’t know how it goes with students of this generation, but to those of us who were in college twenty years ago philosophy was serious business. We were always talking about “God”. In our interminable discussions we were for ever trying to get at the inner essence of “truth”, “goodness”, and “beauty”. We were full of notions about all these things. And I do not laugh at them to-day. We were young, we were impassioned, and we were sincere.
One of the most memorable events-of my college career occurred one day at noon when I was walking up a campus path and encountered, coming towards me, one of my classmates whose name was D. T. Jones. D. T.—sometimes known more familiarly as Delirium Tremens—was also a philosopher. And the moment I saw him approaching I knew that D. T. was in the throes. He came from a family of Primitive Baptists, and he was red-haired, gaunt, and angular, and now as he came towards me everything about him—hair, eyebrows, eyelids, eyes, freckles, even his large and bony hands—shone forth in the sunlight with an excessive and almost terrifying redness.
He was coming up from a noble wood in which we held initiations and took our Sunday strolls. It was also the sacred grove to which we resorted, alone, when we were struggling with the problems of philosophy. It was where we went when we were going through what was known as “the wilderness experience”, and it was the place from which, when “the wilderness experience” was done, we triumphantly emerged.
D. T. was emerging now. He had been there, he told me later, all night long. His “wilderness experience” had been a good one. He came bounding towards me like a kangaroo, leaping into the air at intervals, and the only words he said were:
“I’ve had a Concept!”
Then, leaving me stunned and leaning for support against an ancient tree, he passed on down the path, high-bounding every step or two, to carry the great news to the whole brotherhood.
And still I do not laugh at it. We took philosophy seriously in those days, and each of us had his own. And, together, we had our own “Philosopher”. He was a venerable and noble-hearted man—one of those great figures which almost every college had some years ago, and which I hope they still have. For half a century he had been a dominant figure in the life of the entire state. In his teaching he was a Hegelian. The process of his scholastic reasoning was intricate: it came up out of ancient Greece and followed through the whole series of “developments” down to Hegel. After Hegel—well, he did not supply the answer. But it didn’t matter, for after Hegel we had him—he was our own Old Man.
Our Philosopher’s “philosophy”, as I look back upon it, does not seem important now. It seems to have been, at best, a tortuous and patched-up scheme of other men’s ideas. But what was important was the man himself. He was a great teacher, and what he did for us, and for others before us for fifty years, was not to give us his “philosophy”—but to communicate to us his own alertness, his originality, his power to think. He was a vital force because he supplied to many of us, for the first time in our lives, the inspiration of a questioning intelligence. He taught us not to be afraid to think, to question; he taught us to examine critically the most sacrosanct of our native prejudices and superstitions. So of course, throughout the state, the bigots hated him; but his own students worshipped him to idolatry. And the seed he planted grew—long after Hegel, “concepts”, “moments of negation”, and all the rest of it had vanished into the limbo of forgotten things.
It was at about this time that I began to write. I was editor of the college newspaper, and I wrote stories and poems for our literary magazine, The Burr, of which I was also a member of the editorial staff. The war was going on then. I was too young to be in service, but my first literary attempts may be traced to the patriotic inspiration of the war. I remember one poem (my first, I believe) which was aimed directly at the luckless head of Kaiser Bill. It was called, defiantly: “The Gauntlet”, and was written in the style and meter of “The Present Crisis”, by James Russell Lowell. I remember, too, that it took a high note from the very beginning. The poet, it is said, is the prophet and the bard—the awakened tongue of all his folk. I was all of that. In the name of embattled democracy I let the Kaiser have the works. And I remember two lines in particular that seemed to me to ring out with the very voice of outraged Freedom:
- “Thou hast given us the challenge—
- Pay, thou dog, the cost, and go!”
I remember these lines because they were the occasion of an editorial argument. The more conservative members of the magazine’s staff felt that the epithet, “thou dog”, was too strong—not that the Kaiser didn’t deserve it, but that it jarred rudely upon the high moral elevation of the poem and upon the literary quality of The Burr. Over my vigorous protest, and without regard for the meter of the line, the two words were deleted.
Another poem that I wrote that year was a cheerful one about a peasant in a Flanders field who ploughed up a skull, and then went on quietly about his work while the great guns blasted away and “the grinning skull its grisly secret kept”. I also remember a short story—my first—which was called “A Winchester of Virginia”, and was about the recreant son of an old family who recovered his courage and vindicated his tarnished honour in the charge over the top that took his life. These, so far as I can recall them, were my first creative efforts; it will be seen what an important part the last war played in them.
I mention all this merely to fix the point from which I started. This was the beginning of the road.
In recent years there have been several attempts to explain what has happened to me since that time in terms of something that happened to me in college. I believe, Fox, that I never told you about that episode. Not that I was ashamed of my part in it or was afraid to talk about it. It just never came up; in a way, I had forgotten it. But now, at this moment of our parting, I think I had better speak of it, because it is vitally important to me to make one thing clear: that I am not the victim or the embittered martyr of anything that ever happened in the past. Oh, yes, there was a time, as you well know, when I was full of bitterness. There was a time when I felt that life had betrayed me. But that preciousness is gone now, and with it has gone my bitterness. This is the simple truth.
But to get back to this episode I spoke of:
As you know, Fox, when my first book was published, feeling ran high against me at home. Then it was that an effort was made to explain what was called the “bitterness” of the book in terms of my disfranchisement when I was at college. Now, the Pine Rock case is famous in Old Catawba, but the names of its chief actors had been almost forgotten when the book appeared. Then, because I was one of them, people began to talk about the case again, and the whole horrible tragedy was exhumed.
It was recalled how five of us (and God have mercy on the souls of those others who kept silent at the time) had taken our classmate Bell out to the playing-field one night, blindfolded him, and compelled him to dance upon a barrel. It was recalled how he stumbled and toppled from the barrel, fell on a broken bottle-neck, severed his jugular, and bled to death within five minutes. It was recalled, then, how the five of us—myself and Randy Shepperton, John Brackett, Stowell Anderson, and Dick Carr—were expelled, brought up for trial, released in the custody of our parents or nearest relatives, and deprived of the rights of citizenship by legislative act.
All this was true. But the construction which people put upon it when the book appeared was false. None of us, I think, was “ruined” and “embittered”—and our later records prove that we were not. There is no doubt that the tragic consequences of our act (and of the five who suffered disfranchisement, at least three—I will not say which three—were present only in the group of onlookers) left its dark and terrible imprint on our young lives. But, as Randy whispered to me on that dreadful night, as we stood there white-faced and helpless in the moonlight, watching that poor boy as he bled to death:
“We’re not guilty of anything—except of being plain damned fools!”
That was the way we felt that night—all of us—as we knelt, sick with horror, around the figure of that dying boy. And I know that was the way Bell felt, too, for he saw the terror and remorse in our white faces and, dying though he was, he tried to smile and speak to us. The words would not come, but all of us knew that if he could have spoken he would have said that he was sorry for us—that he knew there was no evil in us—no evil but our own stupidity.
We had killed the boy—our thoughtless folly killed him—but with his dying breath that would have been his only judgment on us. And we broke the heart of Plato Grant, our Old Man, our own Philosopher; but all he said to us that night as he turned towards us from poor Bell was, quietly:
“My God, boys, what have you done?”
And that was all. Even Bell’s father said no more to us. And after the first storm had passed, the cry of outrage and indignation that went up throughout the state—that was our punishment: the knowledge of the Done inexorable, the merciless insistence in our souls of that fatal and irrevocable “Why?”
Swiftly people came to see and feel this, too. The first outburst of wrath that resulted in our disfranchisement was quickly over. Even out citizenship was quietly restored to us within three years. (As for myself, I was only eighteen when it happened, and cannot even be said to have missed a legal vote because of it.) Each of us was allowed to return to college the next year after our expulsion, and finish the full course. The sentiment of people everywhere not only softened: the verdict quickly became: “They didn’t mean to do it. They were just damned fools.” Later, by the time of our re-enfranchisement, public sentiment actually became liberal in its tone of pardon. “They’ve been punished enough,” people said by then. “They were just kids—and they didn’t mean to do it. Besides”—this became an argument in our favour—“it cost a life, but it killed hazing in the state.”
As to the later record of the five—Randy Shepperton is dead now; but John Brackett, Stowell Anderson, and Dick Carr have all enjoyed a more than average measure of success in their communities. When I last saw Stowell Anderson—he is an attorney, and the political leader of his district—he told me quietly that, far from having been damaged in his career by the experience, he thought he had been helped.
“People,” he said, “are willing to forget a past mistake if they see you’re regular. They’re not only willing to forgive—on the whole, I think they’re even glad to give a helping hand.”
“If they see you’re regular!” Without commenting on the meanings of that, I think it sums up the matter in a nutshell. There has not only been no question since about the “regularity” of the other three—Brackett, Anderson, and Carr—but I think any natural tendencies they may have had towards regularity were intensified by their participation in the Pine Rock case. I believe, too, that the denunciations of my “irregularity”, following the publication of my first book, might have been even more virulent and vicious than they were had it not been for the respectable fellowship of Brackett, Anderson, and Carr.
Well, Fox, I have taken the trouble to tell you about this unrecorded incident in my life because I thought you might hear of it some time and might possibly put a strained construction on it. There were those in Libya Hill who thought it offered a reasonable and complete explanation of what had happened to me when I wrote the book. So, too, you might come to believe that it twisted and embittered me and somehow had something to do with what has happened now. With nine-tenths of your mind and heart you understand perfectly why I have to leave you, but with that remaining tenth you are still puzzled, and I can see that you will go on wondering about it. You have, from time to time, tried to reason with me about what you called, half seriously, my “ radicalism”. I don’t believe there is any radicalism in me—or, if there is, it is certainly not what the word implies when you use it.
So, believe me, the Pine Rock case has nothing to do with it. It explains nothing. Rather, the natural assumption, for me as for the others who were involved in it, would be that the experience should have established me in a more staunch and regular conformity than I should otherwise have known.
You have a friend, Fox, named Hunt Conroy. You introduced me to him. He is only a few years my senior, but he is very fixed in his assertion of what he calls “The Lost Generation”—a generation of which, as you know, he has been quite vociferously a member, and in which he has tried enthusiastically to include me. Hunt and I used to argue about it.
“You belong to it, too,” he used to say grimly. “You came along at the same time. You can’t get away from it. You’re a part of it whether you want to be or not.”
To which my vulgar response was:
“Don’t you-hoo me!”
If Hunt wants to belong to The Lost Generation—and it really is astonishing with what fond eagerness some people hug the ghost of desolation to their breast—that’s his affair. But he can’t have me. If I have been elected, it was against my knowledge and my will—and I resign. I do not feel that I belong to a Lost Generation, and I have never felt so. Indeed, I doubt very much the existence of a Lost Generation, except insofar as every generation, groping, must be lost. Recently, however, it has occurred to me that if there is such a thing as a Lost Generation in this country, it is probably made up of those men of advanced middle age who still speak the language that was spoken before 1929, and who know no other. These men indubitably are lost. But I am not one of them.
Although I don’t believe, then, that I was ever part of any Lost Generation anywhere, the fact remains that, as an individual, I was lost. Perhaps that is one reason, Fox, why for so long I needed you so desperately. For I was lost, and was looking for someone older and wiser to show me the way, and I found you, and you took the place of my father who had died. In our nine years together you did help me find the way, though you could hardly have been aware just how you did it, and the road now leads off in a direction contrary to your intent. For the fact is that now I no longer feel lost, and I want to tell you why.
When I returned to Pine Rock and finished my course and graduated—I was only twenty then—I don’t suppose it would have been possible to find a more confused and baffled person than I was. I had been sent to college-to “prepare myself for life”, as the phrase went in those days, and it almost seemed that the total effect of my college training was to produce in me a state of utter unpreparedness. I had come from one of the most conservative parts of America, and from one of the most conservative elements in those parts. All of my antecedents, until a generation before, had been country people whose living had been in one way or another drawn out of the earth.
My father, John Webber, had been all of his life a working man. He had done hard labour with his hands since the time he was twelve years old. As I have often told you, he was a man of great natural ability and intelligence. But, like many other men who have been deprived of the advantages of formal education, he was ambitious for his son: he wanted more than anything else in the world to see me go to college. He died just before I was prepared to enter, but it was on the money he left me that I went. It is only natural that people like my father should endow formal education with a degree of practicality which it does not and should not posssess. College seemed to him a kind of magic door which not only opened to a man all the reserves of learning, but also admitted him to free passage along any high road to material success which he might choose to follow after he had passed through the pleasant academic groves. It was only natural, too, that such a man as my father should believe that this success could be most easily arrived at along one of the more familiar and more generally approved roads.
The road he had chosen for me before his death was a branch of engineering. He stubbornly opposed the Joyner choice, which was the law. The old man had small use for the law as a profession, and very little respect for the lawyer as a man; his usual description of lawyers was “a gang of shysters”. When I went to see him as he lay dying, his last advice to me was:
“Learn to do something, learn to make something—that’s what college should be for.”
His bitterest regret was that the poverty of his early years had prevented him from learning any skill beyond that of a carpenter and a mason. He was a good carpenter, a good mason—in his last days he liked to call himself a builder, which indeed he was—but I think he felt in himself, like a kind of dumb and inarticulate suffering, the unachieved ability to design and shape. Certainly he would have been profoundly disappointed if he could have known what strange forms his own desires for “doing” and for “making” were to achieve in me. I cannot say what extremity—law or writing—would have filled him with the most disgust.
But by the time I left college it was already apparent that whatever talents I might have, they were neither for engineering nor the law. I had not the technical ability for the one, and, in view of what I was to discover for myself in later years, I think I was too honest for the other. But what to do? My academic career, with the crowning disgrace of complicity in the Pine Rock case and temporary expulsion from college, had not been distinguished by any very glittering records in scholarship except that One in Logic. I had failed both my father and the Joyner side of the house in any ambitions they had had for me. My father was dead, and the Joyners were now done with me.
For all these reasons, it was difficult to admit, even to myself, the stirrings of an urge so fantastic and impractical as the desire to write. It would only have confirmed the worst suspicions that my people had of me—suspicions, I fear, which had begun to eat into my own opinion of myself. Consequently, the first admission I made to myself was evasive. I told myself that I wanted to go into journalism. Now, looking back at it, I can see the reason for this decision clearly enough. I doubt very much that I had, at the age of twenty, the burning enthusiasm for newspaper work which I thought I had, but I managed to convince myself of it because newspaper work would provide me with the only means I knew whereby I could, in some fashion, write, and also earn a living, and thus prove to the world and to myself that I was not wasting my time.
To have confessed openly to my family that I wanted to be a writer would have been impossible. To be a writer was, in modern phrase, “nice work if you could get it”. In the Joyner consciousness, as well as in my own, “a writer” was a very remote kind of person. He was a romantic figure like Lord Byron, or Longfellow, or—or—Irvin S. Cobb—who in some magical way was gifted with the power to put words together into poems or stories or novels which got printed in books or in the pages of magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. He was therefore, quite obviously, a very strange, mysterious sort of creature who lived a very strange, mysterious, and glittering sort of life, and who came from some strange and mysterious and glittering world very far away from the life and world we knew. For a boy who had grown up in the town of Libya Hill to assert openly that he wanted to be a writer would have seemed to everyone at that time to border on lunacy. It would have harked back to the days of Uncle Rance Joyner, who wasted his youth learning to play the violin, and who in later life borrowed fifty dollars from Uncle Mark to take a course in phrenology. I had always been told that there was a strong resemblance between myself and Uncle Rance, and now I knew that if I confessed my secret desires, everyone would have thought the likeness more pronounced than ever.
It was a painful situation, and one which is now amusing to look back on. But it was also very human—and very American. Even today I don’t think the Joyners have altogether recovered from their own astonishment at the fact that I have actually become “a writer”. This attitude, which was also my own at the age of twenty, was to shape the course of my life for years.
So, fresh from college, I took what remained of the small inheritance my father had left me, and, with an exultant sense that I had packed my secret into my suitcase along with my extra pants, I started out, boy and baggage, on the road to fame and glory. That is to say, I came to New York to look for a job on a newspaper.
I did look for the job, but not too hard, and I didn’t find it. Meanwhile I had enough money to live on and I began to write. Later, when the money ran out, I condescended to become an instructor in one of the great educational factories of the city. This was another compromise, but it had one virtue—it enabled me to live and go on writing.
During the first year in New York I shared an apartment with a group of boys, transplanted Southerners like myself, whom I had known in college. Through one of them I made the acquaintance of some artistic young fellows who were living in what I swiftly learned to call “The Village”. Here, for the first time, I was thrown into the company of sophisticated young men of my own age—at least they seemed very sophisticated to me. For instead of being like me, an uncouth yokel from the backwoods, all rough edges, who felt within himself the timid but unspoken flutterings of a desire to write, these young gentlemen had come down from Harvard, they had the easy manner of men of the world, and they casually but quite openly told me that they were writers. And so they were. They wrote, and were published, in some of the little experimental magazines which were springing up on all sides during that period. How I envied them!
They were not only able to assert openly that they were writers, but they also asserted openly that a great many other people that I had thought were writers—most dismally were not. When I made hesitant efforts to take part in the brilliant conversation that flashed around me, I began to discover that I would have to be prepared for some very rude shocks. It was decidedly disconcerting, for example, to ask one of these most superior young men, so carelessly correct in their rough tweeds and pink cheeks: “Have you ever read Gals-worthy’s Strife?”—and to have him raise his eyebrows slowly, exhale a slow column of cigarette smoke, slowly shake his head, and then say in an accent of resigned regret: “I can’t read him. I simply can’t read him. Sorry——” with a rising inflection as if to say that it was too bad, but that it couldn’t be helped.
They were sorry about a great many things and people. The theatre was one of their most passionate concerns, but it seemed that there was hardly a dramatist writing in those days who escaped their censure. Shaw was amusing, but he was not a dramatist—he had never really learned how to write a play. O’Neill’s reputation was grossly exaggerated: his dialogue was clumsy, and his characters stock types. Barrie was insufferable on account of his sentimentality. As for Pinero and others of that ilk, their productions were already so dated that they were laughable.
In a way, this super-criticality was a very good thing for me. It taught me to be more questioning about some of the most venerated names and reputations whose authority had been handed down to me by my preceptors and accepted by me with too little thought. But the trouble with it was that I soon became involved, along with the others, in a niggling and over-refined aestheticism which was not only pallid and precious, but too detached from life to provide the substance and the inspiration for high creative work.
It is interesting to look back now and see just what it was we believed fifteen years ago—those of us who were the bright young people of the time and wanted to produce something of value in the arts. We talked a great deal about “art” and “beauty”—a great deal about “the artist”. A great deal too much, in fact. For the artist as we conceived him was a kind of aesthetic monster. Certainly he was not a living man. And if the artist is not first and foremost a living man—and by this I mean a man of life, a man who belongs to life, who is connected with it so intimately that he draws his strength from it—then what manner of man is he?
The artist we talked about was not such a man at all. Indeed, if he had any existence outside of our imagination he must have been one of the most extraordinary and inhuman freaks that nature ever created. Instead of loving life and believing in life, our “artist” hated life and fled from it. That, in fact, was the basic theme of most of the stories, plays, and novels we wrote. We were forever portraying the sensitive man of talent, the young genius, crucified by life, misunderstood and scorned of men, pilloried and driven out by the narrow bigotry and mean provincialism of the town or village, betrayed and humiliated by the cheapness of his wife, and finally crushed, silenced, torn to pieces by the organised power of the mob. So conceived, the artist that we talked about so much, instead of being in union with life, was in perpetual conflict with it. Instead of belonging to the world he lived in, he was constantly in a state of flight from it. The world itself was like a beast of prey, and the artist, like some wounded faun, was for ever trying to escape from it.
It seems to me now, as I look back on it, that the total deposit of all this was bad. It gave to young people who were deficient in the vital materials and experiences of life, and in the living contacts which the artist ought to have with life, the language and formulas of an unwholesome preciosity. It armed them with a philosophy, an aesthetic, of escapism. It tended to create in those of us who were later to become artists not only a special but a privileged character: each of us tended to think of himself as a person who was exempt from the human laws that govern other men, who was not subject to the same desires, the same feelings, the same passions—who was, in short, a kind of beautiful disease in nature, like a pearl in an oyster.
The effect of all this upon such a person as myself may easily be deduced. Now, for the first time, I was provided with a protective armour, a glittering and sophisticated defence to shield my own self-doubts, my inner misgivings, my lack of confidence in my power and ability to accomplish what I wanted to do. The result was to make me arrogantly truculent where my own desires and purposes were concerned. I began to talk the jargon just as the others did, to prate about “the artist”, and to refer scornfully and contemptuously to the bourgeoisie, the Babbitts, and the Philistines—by which all of us meant anyone who did not belong to the very small and precious province we had fashioned for ourselves.
Looking back, in an effort to see myself as I was in those days, I am afraid I was not a very friendly or agreeable young man. I was carrying a chip on my shoulder, and daring the whole world to knock it off. And the reason I so often took a high tone with people who, it seemed to me, doubted my ability to do the thing I wanted to do, was that, inwardly, I was by no means sure that I could do it myself. It was a form of whistling to keep one’s courage up.
That was the kind of man I was when you first knew me, Fox. Ah, yes, I spoke about the work I wished to do in phrases of devotion and humility, but there was not much of either in me. Inside, I was full of the disdainful scorn of the small and precious mob. I felt superior to other people and thought I belonged to a rare breed. I had not yet learned that one cannot really be superior without humility and tolerance and human understanding. I did not yet know that in order to belong to a rare and higher breed one must first develop the true power and talent of selfless immolation.
46. Even Two Angels Not Enough
Since childhood [George wrote to Fox] I had wanted what all men want in youth: to be famous, to be loved. These two desires went back through all the steps, degrees, and shadings of my education; they represented what we younglings of the time had been taught to believe in and to want.
Love and Fame. Well, I have had them both.
You told me once, Fox, that I did not want them, that I only thought I did. You were right. I wanted them desperately before I had them, but once they were mine, I found that they were not enough. And I think, if we speak truth, the same thing holds for every man who ever lived and had the spark of growth in him.
It has never been dangerous to admit that Fame is not enough—one of the world’s greatest poets called it “that last infirmity of Noble mind”—but it is dangerous, for reasons which everybody understands, to admit the infirmity of Love. Perhaps Love’s image may suffice some men. Perhaps, as in a drop of shining water, Love may hold in microcosm the reflection of the sun and the stars and the’heavens and the whole universe of man. Mighty poets dead and gone have said that this was true, and people have professed it ever since. As for that, I can only say that I do not think a frog pond or a Walden Pond contains the image of the ocean, even though there be water in both of them.
“Love is enough, though the world be a-waning,” wrote William Morris. We have his word for it, and can believe it or not as we like. Perhaps it was true for him, yet I doubt it. It may have been true at the moment he wrote it, but not in the end, not when all was said and done.
As for myself, I did not find it so.
For, even while I was most securely caught up and enclosed within the inner circle of Love’s bondage, I began to discover a larger world outside. It did not dawn upon me in a sudden and explosive sense, the way the world of Chapman’s Homer burst upon John Keats:
- “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
- When a new planet swims into his ken.”
It did not come like that at all. It came in on me little by little, almost without my knowing it.
Up to that time I had been merely the sensitive young fellow in conflict with his town, his family, the life around him—then the sensitive young fellow in love, and so concerned with his little Universe of Love that he thought it the whole universe. But gradually I began to observe things in life which shocked me out of this complete absorption with the independent entities of self. I caught glimpses of the great, the rich, the fortunate ones of all the earth living supinely upon the very best of everything and taking the very best for granted as their right. I saw them enjoying a special privilege which had been theirs so long that it had become a vested interest: they seemed to think it was a law ordained of nature that they should be for ever life’s favourite sons. At the same time I began to be conscious of the submerged and forgotten Helots down below, who with their toil and sweat and blood and suffering unutterable supported and nourished the mighty princelings at the top.
Then came the cataclysm of 1929 and the terrible days that followed. The picture became clearer now—clear enough for all with eyes to see. Through those years I was living in the jungle depths of Brooklyn, and I saw as I had never seen before the true and terrifying visage of the disinherited of life. There came to me a vision of man’s inhumanity to man, and as time went on it began to blot out the more personal and self-centred vision of the world which a young man always has. Then it was, I think, that I began to learn humility. My intense and passionate concern for the interests and designs of my own little life were coming to seem petty, trifling, and unworthy, and I was coming more and more to feel an intense and passionate concern for the interests and designs of my fellow-men and of all humanity.
Of course I have vastly oversimplified the process in my telling of it. While it was at work in me I was but dimly aware of it. It is only now, as I look back upon those years, that I can see in true perspective the meaning of what was happening to me then. For human nature is, alas, a muddy pool, too full of sediment, too murky with the deposits of time, too churned up by uncharted currents in the depths and on the surface, to reflect a sharp, precise, and wholly faithful image. For that, one has to wait until the waters settle down, It follows, then, that one can never hope, however much he wishes that he could, to shed the old integuments of the soul as easily and completely as a snake sloughs off its outworn skin.
For, even at the time when this new vision of the outer world was filtering in and making its strange forms manifest to me, I was also more involved than I had ever been before with my inner struggle. Those were the years of the greatest doubt and desperation I had ever known. I was wrestling with the problems of my second book, and I could take in what my eyes beheld only in brief glimpses, flashes, snatches, fragments. As I was later to discover, the vision etched itself upon some sensitive film within, but it was not until that later time, when the second book was finished and out of the way, that I saw it whole and knew what the total experience had done to me.
And all the while, of course, I was still enamoured of that fair Medusa, Fame. My desire for her was a relic of the past. All the guises of Fame’s loveliness—phantasmal, ghostwise, like something flitting in a wood—I had dreamed of since my early youth, until her image and the image of the loved one had a thousand times been merged together. I had always wanted to be loved and to be famous. Now I had known Love, but Fame was still elusive. So in the writing of my second book I courted her.
Then, for the first time, I saw her. I met Mr. Lloyd McHarg. That curious experience should have taught me something. And in a way I suppose it did. For in Lloyd McHarg I met a truly great and honest man who had aspired to Fame and won her, and I saw that it had been an empty victory. He had her more completely than I could ever hope to have her, yet it was apparent that, for him, Fame was not enough. He needed something more, and he had not found it.
I say I should have learned from that. And yet, how could I? Does one ever really learn from others till one is ready for the lesson? One may read the truth in another’s life and see it plain and still not make the application to oneself. Does not one’s glorious sense of “I”—this wonderful, unique “I” that never was before since time began and never will be again hereafter—does not this “I” of tender favour come before the eye of judgment and always plead exception. I thought: “Yes, I see how it is with Lloyd McHarg, but with me it will be different—because I am I.” That is how it has always been with me. I could never learn anything except the hard way. I must experience it for myself before I knew.
So with Fame. In the end I had to have her. She was another woman—of all Love’s rivals, as I was to find by a strange paradox, the only one by women and by Love beloved. And I had her, as she may be had—only to discover that Fame, like Love, was not enough.
By then life’s weather had soaked in, although I was not fully conscious yet what seepings had begun, or where, in what directions, the channel of my life was flowing. All I knew was that I was exhausted from my labour, respiring from the race, conscious only, as is a spent runner, that the race was over, the tape breasted, and that in such measure I had won. This was the only thought within me at the time: the knowledge that I had met the ordeal a second time and at last had conquered—conquered my desperation and self-doubt, the fear that I might never come again to a whole and final accomplishment.
Then the circle went full swing, the cycle drew to its full close. For several months, emptied, hollow, worn out, my life marked time while my exhausted spirit drew its breath. But after a while the world came in again, upon the flood tide of reviving energy. The world came in, the world kept coming in, and there was something in the world, and in my heart, that I had not known was there.
I had gone back for rest, for recreation, for oblivion, to that land which, of all the foreign lands that I had visited, I loved the best. Many times during the years of desperate confinement and labour on the book I had thought of it with intense longing, as men in prison, haltered to all the dusty shackles of the hour, have longed for the haunted woods and meadows of Cockaigne. Many times I had gone back to it in my dreams—to the sunken bell, the Gothic towns, the plash of waters in the midnight fountain, the Old Place, the broken chime, and the blonde flesh of secret, lavish women. Then at last came the day when I walked at morning through the Brandenburger Tor, and into the enchanted avenues of the faery green Tiergarten, and found that Fame had come to me. It was May, and I walked below the blossoms of the great horse-chestnut trees, and felt like Tamerlane, that it was passing fine to be a king and move in triumph through Persepolis—and be a famous man.
After those long and weary years of labour, and the need of proof to give some easement to my tormented soul, this was the easement I had dreamed of, the impossible thing so impossibly desired, now brought magically to fulfilment. And now it seemed to me, who had so often gone a stranger and unknown to the great cities of the world, that Berlin was mine. For weeks there was a round of pleasure and celebration, and the wonderful thrill of meeting in a foreign land and in a foreign tongue a hundred friends, now for the first time known and captured. There was the sapphire sparkle in the air, the enchanted brevity of northern darkness, the glorious wine in slender bottles, and morning, and green fields, and pretty women—all of these were mine now, they seemed to have been created for me, to have been waiting for me, and to exist now in all their loveliness just for my possession.
The weeks passed so—and then it happened. Little by little the world came in. At first it sifted in almost unnoticed, like dark down dropped in passing from some avenging angel’s wing. Sometimes it came to me in the desperate pleading of an eye, the naked terror of a startled look, the swift concealment of a sudden fear. Sometimes it just came and went as light comes, just soaked in, just soaked in—in fleeting words and speech and actions.
After a while, however, in the midwatches of the night, behind thick walls and bolted doors and shuttered windows, it came to me full flood at last in confessions of unutterable despair. I don’t know why it was that people so unburdened themselves to me, a stranger, unless it was because they knew the love I bore them and their land. They seemed to feel a desperate need to talk to someone who would understand. The thing was pent up in them, and my sympathy for all things German had burst the dam of their reserve and caution. Their tales of woe and fear unspeakable gushed forth and beat upon my ears. They told me stories of their friends and relatives who had said unguarded things in public and disappeared without a trace, stories of the Gestapo, stories of neighbours’quarrels and petty personal spite turned into political persecution, stories of concentration camps and pogroms, stories of rich Jews stripped and beaten and robbed of everything they had and then denied the right to earn a pauper’s wage, stories of well-bred Jewesses despoiled and turned out of their homes and forced to kneel and scrub off anti-Nazi slogans scribbled on the pavements while young barbarians dressed like soldiers formed a ring and prodded them with bayonets and made the quiet places echo with the shameless laughter of their mockery. It was a picture of the Dark Ages come again—shocking beyond belief, but true as the hell that man forever creates for himself.
Thus it was that the corruption of man’s living faith and the inferno of his buried anguish came to me—and I recognised at last, in all its frightful aspects, the spiritual disease which was poisoning unto death a noble and a mighty people.
But even as I saw it and knew it for what it was, there came to me, most strangely, another thing as well. For while I sat the night through in the darkened rooms of German friends, behind the bolted doors and shuttered windows—while their whispered voices spoke to me of the anguish in their hearts, and I listened, stricken in my chair to see the tears and the graven lines of mortal sorrow form on faces which only a short time before, in the presence of others, had been masked in expressions of carefree unconcern—while I heard and saw these things my heart was torn asunder, and from its opened depths came forth into my consciousness a knowledge that I had not fully known was there. For then it was, most curiously, that all the grey weather of unrecorded days in Brooklyn, which had soaked through into my soul, came flooding back upon me. Came back, too, the memory of my exploration of the jungle trails of night. I saw again the haggard faces of the homeless men, the wanderers, the disinherited of America, the aged workers who had worked and now could work no more, the callow boys who had never worked and now could find no work to do, and who, both together, had been cast loose by a society that had no need of them and left to shift in any way they could—to find their food in garbage cans, to seek for warmth and fellowship in foul latrines like the one near New York’s City Hall, to sleep wrapped up in old newspapers on the concrete floors of subway corridors.
It all came back to me, all the separate fragments of the vision I had seen, together with the sinister remembrance of that upper world of night, glittering with its riches, and its soft, sophisticated pleasures, and its cold indifference to the misery and injustice on which its very life was founded. It all came back, but now it was an integrated picture.
So it was, in this far place and under these profoundly moving and disturbing alien circumstances, that I realised fully, for the first time, how sick America was, and saw, too, that the ailment was akin to Germany’s—a dread world-sickness of the soul. One of my German friends, Franz Heilig, later told me this same thing. In Germany it was hopeless: it had already gone too far to be checked now by any measures short of death, destruction, and total ruin. But in America, it seemed to me, it was not mortal, not incurable—not yet. It was desperate, and would become more desperate still if in America, as in Germany, men became afraid to look into the face of fear itself, to probe behind it, to see what caused it, and then to speak the truth about it. America was young, America was still the New World of mankind’s hope, America was not like this old and worn-out Europe which seethed and festered with a thousand deep and uncorrected ancient maladies. America was still resilient, still responsive to a cure—if only—if only—men could somehow cease to be afraid of truth. For the plain and searching light of truth, which had here, in Germany, been darkened to extinction, was the remedy, the only one, that could cleanse and heal the suffering soul of man.
After such a night of seeing whole at last, day would come again, the cool glow of morning, the bronze gold of the kiefern-trees, the still green pools of lucid water, the enchanted parks and gardens—but none of it was the same as it had been before. For now I knew that there was something else in life as new as morning and as old as hell, a universal ill of man seen here in Germany at its darkest, and here articulated for the first time in a word, regimented now in a scheme of phrases and a system of abominable works. And day by day the thing soaked in, and kept soaking in, until everywhere, in every life I met and touched, I saw the ruin of its unutterable pollutions.
So now another layer had been peeled off the gauzes of the seeing eye. And what the eye had seen and understood, I knew that it could nevermore forget or again be blind to.
47. Ecciesiasticus
Now I have told you [George wrote to Fox] some of the things that have happened to me and the effect they had upon me. But what has all of this to do with you?—you may ask. I am coming to that now.
In the beginning I spoke about my “philosophy of life” when I was a student in college twenty years ago. I didn’t tell you what it was because I don’t think I really had one then. I’m not sure I have one now. But I think it is interesting and important that I should have thought I had one at the age of seventeen, and that people still talk about “a philosophy of life” as though it were a concrete object that you could pick up and handle and take the weight and dimensions of. Just recently I was asked to contribute to a book called Modern-Day Philosophies. I tried to write something for it but gave it up, because I was unwilling and unready to say that I had a “modern-day philosophy”. And the reason that I was unwilling and unready was not that I felt confusion and doubt about what I think and now believe, but that I felt confusion and doubt about saying it in formalistic and final terms.
That was what was wrong with most of us at Pine Rock College twenty years ago. We had a “concept” about Truth and Beauty and Love and Reality—and that hardened our ideas about what all these words stood for. After that, we had no doubt about them—or, at any rate, could not admit that we did. This was wrong, because the essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man-Alive, and his “philosophy” must grow, must flow, with him. When it does not, we have—do we not?—the Unfixed Man, the Eternal Trifler, the Ape of Fashion—the man too fixed to-day, unfixed to-morrow—and his body of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations.
I cannot attempt, therefore, to define for you your own “philosophy”—for to define so is to delimit the “closed” and academic man, and you, thank God, are not of that ilk. And to define so would be to call upon me once again your own and curious scorn, your sudden half-amused contemptuousness. For how could anyone pin down neatly the essence of your New Englandness—so sensitively proud, so shy, so shrinking and alone, but at bottom, as I think, so unafraid?
I shall not define you, then, dear Fox. But I may state, may I not? I may say how “it seems to me”?—how Fox appears?—and what I think of it?
Well, first of all, Fox seems to me to be Ecclesiasticus. I think that this is fair, and, insofar as definition goes, I think you will agree. Do you know of any definition that could possibly go further? I do not. In thirty-seven years of thinking, feeling, dreaming, working, striving, voyaging, and devouring, I have come across no other that could fit you half so well. Perhaps something has been written, painted, sung, or spoken in the world that would define you better: if it has, I have not seen it; and if I did see it, then I should feel like one who came upon a Sistine Chapel greater than the first, which no man living yet has heard about.
So far as I can see from nine years of observing you, yours is the way of life, the way of thought, of feeling, and of acting, of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. I know of no better way. For of all that I have ever seen or learned, that book seems to me the noblest, the wisest, and the most powerful expression of man’s life upon this earth—and also earth’s highest flower of poetry, eloquence, and truth. I am not given to dogmatic judgments in the matter of literary creation, but if I had to make one I could only say that Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting and profound.
And I should say that it expresses your own position as perfectly as anything could. I have read it over many times each year, and I do not know of a single word or stanza in it with which you would not instantly agree.
You would agree—to quote just a few precepts which come to mind from that noble book—that a good name is better than precious ointment; and I think you would also agree that the day of death is better than the day of one’s birth. You would agree with the great Preacher that all things are full of labour; that man cannot utter it; that the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. I know you would agree also that the thing that hath been, is that which shall be; and that that which is done, is that which shall be done: and that there is no new thing under the sun. You would agree that it is vexation of spirit to give one’s heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly. I know you would agree—for you have so admonished me many times—that to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; all is vanity.” You would agree with him in that; but you would also agree with him that the fool foldeth his hands together and eateth his own flesh. You would agree with all your being that “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”
Is this abridgement and this definition just, dear Fox? Yes, for I have seen every syllable of it in you a thousand times. I have learned every accent of it from yourself. You said one time, when I had spoken of you in the dedication of a book, that what I had written would be your epitaph. You were mistaken. Your epitaph was written many centuries ago: Ecclesiastes is your epitaph. Your portrait had been drawn already in the portrait the great Preacher had given of himself. You are he, his words are yours so perfectly that if he had never lived or uttered them, all of him, all of his great and noble Sermon, could have been derived afresh from you.
If I could, therefore, define your own philosophy—and his—I think I should define it as the philosophy of a hopeful fatalism. Both of you are in the essence pessimists, but both of you are also pessimists with hope. From both of you I learned much, many true and hopeful things. I learned, first of all, that one must work, that one must do what work he can, as well and ably as he can, and that it is only the fool who repines and longs for what is vanished, for what might have been but is not. I learned from both of you the stein lesson of acceptance: to acknowledge the tragic underweft of life into which man is born, through which he must live, out of which he must die. I learned from both of you to accept that essential fact without complaint, but, having accepted it, to try to do what was before me, what I could do, with all my might.
And, curiously—for here comes in the strange, hard paradox of our twin polarity—it was just here, I think, where I was so much and so essentially in confirmation with you, that I began to disagree. I think almost that I could say to you: “I believe in everything you say, but I do not agree with you”—and so state the root of our whole trouble, the mystery of our eventual cleavage and our final severance. The little tongues will wag—have wagged, I understand, already—will propose a thousand quick and ready explanations (as they have)—but really, Fox, the root of the whole thing is here.
In one of the few letters that you ever wrote to me—a wonderful and moving one just recently—you said:
“I know that you are going now. I always knew that it would happen. I will not try to stop you, for it had to be. And yet, the strange thing is, the hard thing is, I have never known another man with whom I was so profoundly in agreement on all essential things.”
And that is the strange, hard thing, and wonderful and mysterious; for, in a way the little clacking tongues can never know about, it is completely true. Still, there is our strange paradox: it seems to me that in the orbit of our world you are the North Pole, I the South—so much in balance, in agreement—and yet, dear Fox, the whole world lies between.
’Tis true, our view of life was very much the same. When we looked out together, we saw man burned with the same sun, frozen by the same cold, beat upon by the hardships of the same impervious weathers, duped by the same gullibility, self-betrayed by the same folly, misled and baffled by the same stupidity. Each on the opposing hemisphere of his own pole looked out across the spinning orbit of this vexed, tormented world, and at the other, and what each saw, the picture that each got, was very much the same. We not only saw the stupidity and the folly and the gullibility and the self-deception of man, but we saw his nobility, courage, and aspiration, too. We saw the wolves that preyed upon him and laid him waste—the wild scavangers of greed, of fear, of privilege, of power, of tyranny, of oppression, of poverty and disease, of injustice, cruelty, and wrong—Land in what we saw of this as well, dear Fox, we were agreed.
Why, then, the disagreement? Why, then, the struggle that ensued, the severance that has now occurred? We saw the same things, and we called them by the same names. We abhorred them with the same indignation and disgust—and yet, we disagreed, and I am making my farewell to you. Dear friend, the parent and the guardian of my spirit in its youth, the thing has happened and we know it. Why?
I know the answer, and the thing I have to tell you now is this:
Beyond the limits of my own mortality, the stern acknowledgment that man was born to live, to suffer, and to die—your own and the great Preacher’s creed—I am not, cannot be, confirmed to more fatality. Briefly, you thought the ills which so beset mankind were irremediable: that just as man was born to live, to suffer, and to die, so was he born to be eternally beset and preyed upon by all the monsters of his own creation—by fear and cruelty, by tyranny and power, by poverty and wealth. You felt, with the stern fatality of resignation which is the granite essence of your nature, that these things were doomed to be, and be for ever, because they had always been, and were inherent in the tainted and tormented soul of man.
Dear Fox, dear friend, I heard you and I understood you—but could not agree. You felt—I heard you and I understood—that if old monsters were destroyed, new ones would be created in their place. You felt that if old tyrannies were overthrown, new ones, as sinister and evil, would reign after them. You felt that all the glaring evils in the woad around us—the monstrous and perverse unbalance between power and servitude, between want and plenty, between privilege and burdensome discrimination—were inevitable because they had always been the curse of man and were the prime conditions of his being. The gap between us widened. You stated and affirmed—I heard you, but could not agree.
To state your rule and conduct plainly, I think I never knew a kinder or a gentler man, but I also never knew a man more fatally resigned. In practice—in life and conduct—I have seen the Sermon of the Preacher work out in you like a miracle. I have seen you grow haggard and grey because you saw a talent wasted, a life misused, work undone that should be done. I have seen you move mountains to save something which, you felt, was worth the effort and could be saved. I have seen you perform prodigies of labour and patience to pull a drowning man of talent out of the swamp of failure into which his life was sinking; and at each successive slipping back, so far from acknowledging defeat with resignation and regret, you made your eyes flash fire and you will toughen to the hardness of forged steel as I saw you strike your hand upon the table and heard you whisper, with an almost savage intensity of passion: “He must not go. He is not lost. I will not, and he must not, let it happen!”
To give this noble virtue of your life the etching of magnificence it deserves, it is your due to have it stated here. For, without it, there can be no proper understanding of your worth, your true dimension. To describe the acquiescence of your stern fatality without first describing the inspired tenacity of your effort would be to give a false and insufficient picture of the strangest and the most familiar, the most devious and the most direct, the simplest and the most complex figure that this nation and this generation have produced.
To say that you looked on at all the suffering and injustice of this vexed, tormented world with the toleration of resigned fatality without telling also of your own devoted and miraculous effort to save what could be saved, would not do justice to you. No man ever better fulfilled the injunction of the Preacher to lay about him and to do the work at hand with all his might. No man ever gave himself more wholly, not only to the fulfilment of that injunction for himself, but to the task of saving others who had failed to do it, and who might be saved. But no man ever accepted the irremediable with more quiet unconcern. I think you would risk your life to save that of a friend who put himself uselessly and wantonly in peril, but I know, too, that you would accept the fact of unavoidable death without regret. I have seen you grow grey-faced and hollow-eyed with worry over the condition of a beloved child who was suffering from a nervous shock or ailment that the doctors could not diagnose. You found the cause eventually and checked it; but I know that if the cause had been fatal and incurable, you would have accepted that fact with a resignation as composed as your own effort was inspired.
All of this makes the paradox of our great difference as bard and strange as the paradox of our polarity. And in this lies the root of trouble and the seed of severance. Your own philosophy has led you to accept the order of things as they are because you have no hope of changing them; and if you could change them, you feel that any other order would be just as bad. In everlasting terms—those of eternity—you and the Preacher may be right: for there is no greater wisdom than the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, no acceptance finally so true as the stern fatalism of the rock. Man was born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must, dear Fox, deny it all along the way.
Mankind was fashioned for eternity, but Man-Alive was fashioned for a day. New evils will come after him, but it is with the present evils that he is now concerned. And the essence of all faith, it seems to me, for such a man as I, the essence of religion for people of my belief, is that man’s life can be, and will be, better; that man’s greatest enemies, in the forms in which they now exist—the forms we see on every hand of fear, hatred, slavery, cruelty, poverty, and need—can be conquered and destroyed. But to conquer and destroy them will mean nothing less than the complete revision of the structure of society as we know it. They cannot be conquered by the sorrowful acquiescence of resigned fatality. They cannot be destroyed by the philosophy of acceptance—by the tragic hypothesis that things as they are, evil as they are, are as good and as bad as, under any form-they will ever be. The evils that we hate, you no less than I, cannot be overthrown with shrugs and sighs and shakings of the head how, ever wise. It seems to me that they but mock at us and only become more bold when we retreat before them and take refuge in the affirmation of man’s tragic average. To believe that new monsters will arise as vicious as the old, to believe that the great Pandora’s box of human frailty, once opened, will never show a diminution of its ugly swarm, is to help, by just that much, to make it so for ever.
You and the Preacher may be right for all eternity, but we Men-Alive, dear Fox, are right for Now. And it is for Now, and for us the living, that we must speak, and speak the truth, as much of it as we can see and know. With the courage of the truth within us, we shall meet the enemy as they come to us, and they shall be ours. And if, once having conquered them, new enemies approach, we shall meet them from that point, from there proceed. In the affirmation of that fact, the continuance of that unceasing war, is man’s religion and his living faith.
48. Credo
I have never before made a statement of belief [George wrote in his conclusion to Fox], although I have believed in many things and said that I believed in them. But I have never stated my belief in concrete terms because almost every element of my nature has been opposed to the hard framework, the finality, of formulation.
Just as you are the rock of life, I am the web; just as you are Time’s granite, so, I think, am I Time’s plant. My life, more than that of anyone I know, has taken on the form of growth. No man that I have known was ever more deeply rooted in the soil of Time and Memory, the weather of his individual universe, than was I. You followed me through the course of that whole herculean conflict. For four years, as I lived and worked and explored the jungle depths of Brooklyn—jungle depths coincident with those of my own soul—you were beside me, you followed, and you stuck.
You never had a doubt that I would finish—make an end—round out the cycle—come to the whole of it. The only doubt was mine, enhanced, tormented by my own fatigue and desperation, and by the clacking of the feeble and malicious little tongues which, knowing nothing, whispered that I would never make an end again because I could not begin. We both knew how grotesquely false this was—so false and so grotesque that it was sometimes the subject of an anguished and exasperated laugh. The truth was so far different that my own fears were just the opposite: that I might never make an end to anything again because I could never get through telling what I knew, what I felt and thought and had to say about it.
That was a giant web in which I was caught, the product of my huge inheritance—the torrential recollectiveness, derived out of my mother’s stock, which became a living, million-fibred integument that bound me to the past, not only of my own life, but of the very earth from which I came, so that nothing in the end escaped from its inrooted and all-feeling explorativeness. The way the sunlight came and went upon a certain day, the way grass felt between bare toes, the immediacy of noon, the slamming of an iron gate, the halting skreak upon the corner of a street car, the liquid sound of shoe leather on the pavements as men came home to lunch, the smell of turnip greens, the clang of ice-tongs, and the clucking of a hen—and then Time fading like a dream, Time melting to oblivion, when I was two years old. Not only this, but all lost sounds and voices, forgotten memories exhumed with a constant pulsing of the’brain’s great ventricle, until I lived them in my dreams, carrying the stupendous and unceasing burden of them through the unresting passages of sleep. Nothing that had ever been was lost. It all came back in an endless flow, even the blisters of the paint upon the mantelpiece in my father’s house, the smell of the old leather sofa with my father’s print upon it, the smell of dusty bottles and of cobwebs in the cellar, the casual stomping of a slow, gaunt hoof upon the pulpy lumber of a livery stable floor, the proud lift and flourish of a whisking tail, and the oaty droppings. I lived again through all times and weathers I had known—through the fag-ends of wintry desolation in the month of March and the cold, bleak miseries of ragged red at sunset, the magic of young green in April, the blind horror and suffocation of concrete places in mid-summer sun where no limits were, and October with the smell of fallen leaves and wood smoke in the air. The forgotten moments and unnumbered hours came back to me with all the enormous cargo of my memory, together with lost voices in the mountains long ago, the voices of the kinsmen dead and never seen, and the houses they had built and died in, and the rutted roads they trod upon, and every unrecorded moment that Aunt Maw had told me of the lost and obscure lives they led long, long ago. So did it all revive in the ceaseless pulsings of the giant ventricle, so did the plant go back, stem by stem, root by root, and filament by filament, until it was complete and whole, compacted of the very earth that had produced it, and of which it was itself the last and living part.
You stayed beside me like the rock you are until I unearthed the plant, followed it back through every fibre of its pattern to its last and tiniest enrootment in the blind, dumb earth. And now that it is finished, and the circle come full swing—we, too, are finished, and I have a thing to say:
I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me—and I think for all of us——not only our own hope, but America’s everlasting, living dream. I think the life which we have fashioned in America, and which has fashioned us—the forms we made, the cells that grew, the honeycomb that was created—was self-destructive in its nature, and must be destroyed. I think these forms are dying, and must die, just as I know that America and the people in it are deathless, undiscovered, and immortal, and must live.
I think the true discovery of America is before us. I think the true fulfilment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land, is yet to come. I think the true discovery of our own democracy is still before us. And I think that all these things are certain as the morning, as inevitable as noon. I think I speak for most men living when I say that our America is Here, is Now, and beckons on before us, and that this glorious assurance is not only our living hope, but our dream to be accomplished.
I think the enemy is here before us, too. But I think we know the forms and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope. I think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the brutal power of his blind grab. I do not think the enemy was born yesterday, or that he grew to manhood forty years ago, or that he suffered sickness and collapse in 1929, or that we began without the enemy, and that our vision faltered, that we lost the way, and suddenly were in his camp. I think the enemy is old as Time, and evil as Hell, and that he has been here with us from the beginning. I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. I think he took our people and enslaved them, that he polluted the fountains of our life, took unto himself the rarest treasures of our own possession, took our bread and left us with a crust, and, not content, for the nature of the enemy is insatiate—tried finally to take from us the crust.
I think the enemy comes to us with the face of innocence and says to us:
“I am your friend.”
I think the enemy deceives us with false words and lying phrases, saying:
“See, I am one of you—I am one of your children, your son, your brother, and your friend. Behold how sleek and fat I have become—and all because I am just one of you, and your friend. Behold how rich and powerful I am—and all because I am one of you—shaped in your way of life, of thinking, of accomplishment. What I am, I am because I am one of you, your humble brother and your friend. Behold,” cries Enemy, “the man I am, the man I have become, the thing I have accomplished—and reflect. Will you destroy this thing? I assure you that it is the most precious thing you have. It is yourselves, the projection of each of you, the triumph of your individual lives, the thing that is rooted in your blood, and native to your stock, and inherent in the traditions of America. It is the thing that all of you may hope to be,” says Enemy, “for”—humbly—“am I not just one of you? Am I not just your brother and your son? Am I not the living image of what each of you may hope to be, would wish to be, would desire for his own son? Would you destroy this glorious incarnation of your own heroic self? If you do, then,” says Enemy, “you destroy yourselves—you kill the thing that is most gloriously American, and in so killing, kill yourselves.”
He lies! And now we know he lies! He is not gloriously, or in any other way, ourselves. He is not our friend, our son, our brother. And he is not American! For, although he has a thousand familiar and convenient faces, his own true face is old as Hell.
Look about you and see what he has done.
Dear Fox, old friend, thus we have come to the end of the road that we were to go together. My tale is finished—and so farewell.
But before I go, I have just one more thing to tell you:
Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where. Saying:
"To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth——
“—Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, towards which the conscience of the world is tending—a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.”