The Web and The Root (34 page)

Yet, what are these wretched people to do? Every instant, every deep conviction a man has for a reasonable human comfort is outraged. He knows that every man on earth should have the decency of space—of space enough to extend his limbs and draw in the air without fear or labor; and he knows that his life here in this miserable closet is base, barren, mean, and naked. He knows that men should not defile themselves in this way, so he keeps out of his room as much as possible. But what can he do? Where can he go? In the terrible streets of the city there is neither pause nor repose, there are no turnings and no place where he can detach himself from the incessant tide of the crowd, and sink unto himself in tranquil meditation. He flees from one desolation
to another, he escapes by buying a seat “at some show,” or snatching at food in a cafeteria, he lashes about the huge streets of the night, and he returns to his cell having found no doors that he could open, no place that he could call his own.

It is therefore astonishing that nowhere in the world can a young man feel greater hope and expectancy than here. The promise of glorious fulfillment, of love, wealth, fame—or unimaginable joy—is always impending in the air. He is torn with a thousand desires and he is unable to articulate one of them, but he is sure that he will grasp joy to his heart, that he will hold love and glory in his arms, that the intangible will be touched, the inarticulate spoken, the inapprehensible apprehended: and that this may happen at any moment.

Perhaps there is some chemistry of air that causes this exuberance and joy, but it also belongs to the enigma of the whole country, which is so rich, and yet where people starve, which is so abundant, exultant, savage, full-blooded, humorous, liquid, and magnificent, and yet where so many people are poor, meager, dry, and baffled. But the richness and depth of the place is visible, it is not an illusion; there is always the feeling that the earth is full of gold, and that who will seek and strive can mine it.

In New York there are certain wonderful seasons in which this feeling grows to a lyrical intensity. One of these are those first tender days of Spring when lovely girls and women seem suddenly to burst out of the pavements like flowers: all at once the street is peopled with them, walking along with a proud, undulant rhythm of breasts and buttocks and a look of passionate tenderness on their faces. Another season is early Autumn, in October, when the city begins to take on a magnificent flash and sparkle: there are swift whippings of bright wind, a flare of bitter leaves, the smell of frost and harvest in the air: after the enervation of Summer, the place awakens to an electric vitality, the beautiful women have come back from Europe or from the summer resorts, and the air is charged with exultancy and joy.

Finally, there is a wonderful, secret thrill of some impending
ecstasy on a frozen Winter’s night. On one of these nights of frozen silence when the cold is so intense that it numbs one’s flesh, and the sky above the city flashes with one deep jewelry of cold stars, the whole city, no matter how ugly its parts may be, becomes a proud, passionate, Northern place: everything about it seems to soar up with an aspirant, vertical, glittering magnificence to meet the stars. One hears the hoarse notes of the great ships in the river, and one remembers suddenly the princely girdle of proud, potent tides that bind the city, and suddenly New York blazes like a magnificent jewel in its fit setting of sea, and earth, and stars.

There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride, and exultancy. It lays its hand upon a man’s bowels: he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory; he feels that he can never die.

Jerry Alsop had come to New York straight out of college several years before. Monk knew that he was there, and one day he ran into him. Neither seemed disposed to remember Monk’s apostasy of college days: in fact, Jerry greeted his former protege like a long lost brother and invited him around to his place. Monk went, and later went again, and for a time their relationship was reestablished, on the surface at least, on something of its former footing.

Alsop lived in the same part of town, on a cross street between Broadway and the river, and not far from Columbia University. He had two basement rooms and a dilapidated kitchenette. The place was dark, and he had collected a congeries of broken-down furniture—an old green sofa, a few chairs, a couple of tables, a folding couch or daybed, covered with a dirty cloth, for visitors, another larger bed for himself and a dirty old carpet. He thought it was wonderful, and because he communicated this sense of wonder to all his friends, they thought so, too. What it really represented to him was freedom—the glorious, intoxicating freedom that the city gave to him, to everyone. So seen and so considered, his apartment was not just a couple of dirty, dark, old rooms, filled with a hodgepodge of nondescript furniture, down in the basement of a dismal house. It was a domain, an estate, a private castle, a citadel. Jerry conveyed this magic sense to everyone who came there.

When Monk first saw him there in all the strangeness of New York, the changes in Alsop’s vision and belief appeared astonishing. Only, however, at first sight. The younger man’s sense of shock, the result of the blinding clarity of his first impression after the years of absence, was only momentary. For Alsop had gathered around him now a new coterie, the descendants of the clique at old Pine Rock: he was their mentor and their guiding star, and his two dark basement rooms had become their club. And so Monk saw that Alsop had not really changed at all, that below all the confusion of outer change his soul was still the same.

One of the chief objects of his hatred at this time was Mr. H. L. Mencken. He had become for Alsop the Beast of the Apocalypse. Mencken’s open ridicule of pedagogy, of Mother-idolatry, of the whole civilization which he called the Bible Belt and which referred to that part of life of which Alsop was himself a member, and, most of all, perhaps, the critic’s open and ungodly mockery of “the greatest man since Jesus Christ,” to whom he referred variously as “the late Doctor Wilson,” or “the martyred Woodrow”—all of this struck with an assassin’s dirk at the heart of all that was near and dear to Alsop, and, it seemed to him, at the heart of civilization itself, at religion, at morality, at “all that men hold sacred.” The result was that this smashing but essentially conservative critic, Mencken, became in Alsop’s eyes the figure of the Antichrist. Month after month he would read the latest blast of the Baltimore sage with the passionate devotion of pure hate. It was really alarming just to watch him as he went about his venomous perusal: his fat and usually rather pale face would become livid and convulsed as if he were in imminent peril of an apoplectic stroke, his eyes would narrow into reptilian slits, from time to time he would burst out into infuriated laughter, the whole proceeding being punctuated by such comment as:

“Well, I’ll be God-damned!…Of all the!…Why, he’s just a damned ass…yes suh!…That’s the only name for him!…A plain damned ass. For God’s sake now, listen to this!” Here his voice
would mount to a choking scream. “Why, he hasn’t got the brains of a louse!”—the whole winding up inevitably with the final recommendation for vindictive punishment: “You know what they ought to do with a man like that? They ought to take him out and——.”

He mentioned this act of mutilation with a hearty relish. It seemed to be the first act of vengeance and reprisal that popped into his head whenever anyone said or wrote or did something that aroused his hatred and antagonism. And it was as if Mr. H. L. Mencken, whom Alsop had never seen, had been a personal enemy, a malignant threat in his own life, a deadly peril not only to himself but to his friends and to the world he had shaped about him.

And yet, all the time Alsop himself was changing. His adaptive powers were remarkable. Like a certain famous Bishop, “he had a large and easy swallow.” And really, what mattered most to him was not the inner substance but the outer show. He would, with no difficulty whatever, have agreed that black was white, or that two and two make four and three quarters, if the prevailing order of society had swung to the belief.

It was only that, in Alsopian phrase, his “sphere had widened.” He had come from the provincial community of the Baptist college to the city. And that staggering transition, so painful, so perilous, and so confusing to so many other men had been for Alsop triumphantly easy. He had taken to the city like a duck to water. And in that complete and rapturous immersion was revealed, along with all that was shapeless in his character, also all that was warm and imaginative and good.

Some come to the city, no doubt, with wire-taut nerves, with trembling apprehension, with a resolution of grim conflict desperate struggle, and the conviction they must do or die. Some, shackled by old fears, still cumbered with the harness of old prejudice, come to it doubtfully and with mistrust. And for them, the city that they find will be a painful one. And some come to it with exultancy and hope, as men rush forward to embrace a beloved mistress, whom they have never seen but of whom they have always known, and it was in this
way that Alsop—Alsop of the bulging belly and the butter-tub of fat—it was in just this way that Alsop came.

It never occurred to him that he might fail. And indeed with faith like his, with such devotion as he brought, the chance of failure was impossible. Other men might rise to greater summit in the city’s life. Other men might rise to greater substance of success, of wealth, of fame, achievement, or reputation. But no man would ever belong more truly to the city, or the city’s life to him, than Gerald Alsop.

He was made for it; it was made for him. Here was a point that he could swim in, a pool where he could fish. Here was the food for all his thousand appetites, the provender for his hundred mouths. Here was living water for the quenchless sponge that was himself: the rumor with the million tongues that could feed forever his insatiate ear, the chronicle of eight million lives that could appease his ceaseless thirst for human history.

Alsop was a man who had to live through others. He was an enormous Ear, Eye, Nose, Throat, and absorptive sponge of gluttonous humanity—he was not a thrust or arm—and in such a way as this, and so perfectly, so completely, the city was his oyster. And in his way he was incomparable. All that was best in him was here revealed. He communicated to everyone around him the contagion of his own enthusiasm, the sense of magic and of rapture which the city gave to him. With him, an excursion of any sort was a memorable event. A trip downtown in the subway, the gaudy lights, the thronging traffics of Times Square, the cut-rate ticket basement of Gray’s Pharmacy, the constant nocturnal magic of the theatres, the cheap restaurants, a cafeteria or a lunchroom, a chop suey place, the strange faces, signs, and lights, the foreign vegetables, the unknown edibles of Chinatown—all this was simply magic. He was living in an enchanted world, he carried it with him everywhere he went.

His was the temper of the insatiable romantic. In no time at all, instantly, immediately, he inherited the city’s hunger for celebrity. If he could not be great himself, he wanted to be near those who were. He
lapped up every scrap of gossip about celebrated people he could read or hear. The records, diaries, comments, observations of the newspaper columnists were gospel to him. The pronouncements of a certain well-known dramatic critic, Cotswold, were like holy writ: he memorized them down to the last whimsical caprice of ornate phrasing. He went religiously to see every play the critic praised. One night he saw the great man himself, a fat and puffy little butter-ball of a man, in the interim between the acts, with another celebrated critic and a famous actress. When Alsop returned home he was transported—if he had seen Shakespeare talking to Ben Jonson, his emotion could not have been so great.

He became a watcher around stage doors. It was the period of the Ziegfeld shows, the glorified chorines, the proud, lavish flesh draped in a fold of velvet. Alsop now was everywhere, he delighted in these glorified carnalities. The girls were famous, he watched till they came out, and, like some ancient lecher, he licked his chops and gloated while the Ziegfeld Beauties and their moneyed purchasers walked away. The meeting of expensive flesh with shirt front, tails, and tall silk hatdom now delighted him. Strange work for old Pine Rock?—By no means: it was enhaloed now, set like a jewel in the great Medusa of the night, privileged by power and wealth and sanctioned by publicity. The aged lecher licking his dry lips and waiting with dead eyes for his young whore of Babylon, delighted Alsop now. He told of such a one: the beauty, already famed in print, came by—the aged lecher fawned upon her—” Oh, for Christ’s sake!” said the beauty wearily, passing on.

“She meant that thing,” said Alsop gloatingly. “Yes, suh! She meant that thing!” His great belly heaved, his throat rattled with its scream of phlegm. “God! The most beautiful damn woman that you ever saw!” said Alsop appetizingly as he shook his great jowled head. “She sure did get him told!” The scene delighted him.

All others, too: the rumors of a thousand tongues, the fruitage of a thousand whispered gossips: who slept with so-and-so; whose wife was faithless unto Caesar; whose wit had uttered such unprinted jest; what
famous names, what authors, had behaved in such-and-such a way at such-and-such a party, had grown drunk there, had disappeared, had locked themselves in bedrooms with attractive women, gone into bathrooms with them, quarreled, fought with whom: what rather aged actress, famous for her lustihood in roles, had gone with boys of apple-cheeked persuasion; and who the famous fairies were, and the dance halls where they went to dance with one another, and what they said, the mincing syllables of their fond intercourse with one another—here belly heaved and Alsop screamed with choking laughter—such wickedness, together with all whimsicalities, and Morley’s columns in the purest vein of elfin whimsey—“Pure genius! Pure damned elfin genius!”—old London in the byways of New York, Dickensian bylights of the city ways, and the thronging chaoses of Herald Square, Park Row; the grime of unrubbed brasses, never noticed by the man-hordes passing by, but seen now in a certain light, and properly, the true quaintness of the world around him: the shopgirls eating sandwiches of pimento cheese among the drug store slops of luncheon hour were really like the clients of an inn in Eastcheap ninety years ago. So, all together—Ziegfeld, beautiful chorines, and ancient lechers in silk hats; hot gossip of the great, the rumor of drunken riot with the famed and few, what Miss Parker said, and so-and-so: together with the Great of the town, the men in subways and park benches—Lamb redivivus, alive and prowling among unrubbed brass in the quaint byways of Manhattan—all such as this was meat, drink, breath of life to Alsop.

So the food. His taste, like Dr. Samuel Johnson’s, was not fine—he liked abundance and he liked to slop it in. He had a love for Chinatown, chop suey, and the pungent sauce: it was abundant, it was cheap. The strange faces of the Chinks, the moisty vapors, Oriental and somewhat depressant, all delighted him. He loved to go with several other people—one could order several dishes and thus share. When it was over he would call for paper bags, slop the remainders into them, and wheeze and choke with laughter as he did so.

When all this palled, or when he felt the belly hungers for familiar
food—for home to heart and stomach was still very near—he and his cronies would buy up “a mess of stuff.” There were stores everwhere, around the corner in every city block were stores, and the crowded opulence of night, and lighted windows, slanting shelves of vegetables and fruit; and butcher shops, chain groceries, bakeries, every kind of vast provisioning. They would go out upon their errands, they would buy the foods of home: a package of ground hominy—otherwise known as grits; string beans, which really were the same as they had always been, except no one knew how to cook them here, a piece of fat salt port to give them seasoning; flour for gravy and for biscuit dough—for Alsop paled not at such formidable enterprise; steak, no worse if it were cheap and tough, but with the flour gravy and the condiments; bread from the bakery, butter, coffee. Then back to the basement, the two-roomed flat, a chaos of young voices, laughter, humorous, accusal—Alsop chuckling, serious and all-governing, giving directions, bustling about in slippered feet, from whose stale socks protruded the fat hinge of his dirty heels. And then the pungency of native foods again—grits, fried steak with thick brown gravy, string beans savory, deep-hued with fatback, brown-hued biscuits, smoking hot, strong coffee, melting butter. The vigorous confusion of young, drawling voices, excited, Southern, ingrown each to each, tribal and most personal—the new adventure of each daily life told eagerly and to the common mall, with laughter, agreement, strong derision. They appraised the new world where they lived with critic tongue, and often with a strong and disapproving mockery.

They had small thought of ever going home again. At least, they seldom told their love. Their love, in fact, was mainly here—for most of them, like Alsop, were immersed in glamor now, had cottoned to this brave, new world, had taken it for their own domain as only people from the South can take it—some strange and stiff-necked pride kept them from owning it. They lived in legend now: among the thrill of all this present pageantry, they loved to descant on their former glories. “The South”—for in quotation marks they saw it—was now an exiled
glory, a rich way of life, of living, and of human values which “these people up here” could never know about.

Perhaps they set this glory as a kind of reassuring palliative to their shock sense, the thrilling and yet terrifying conflict of the daily struggle. It was an occasional sop to wounded pride. The customs and the mores of the new world were examined critically and came off second best. A chicanery of the Northern ways, the suspicion of the hardened eye, the itching of the grasping palm, the machinations of the crafty Jew—all were observed upon with scorn and frequent bitterness. People in “the South” were not like this. As Alsop said, one had to come “up here” in order to find out just “how fine and swept and lovable” they were.