You Can't Go Home Again (54 page)

“It ought to, Mr. Wakefield.”

“Why, boy,” he said solemnly, “if we ever did a thing like that, there would be a wave of protest—a
wave
of protest”—he cried with a sweeping gesture of the arm, as his voice rose strongly—“from here to Californy!...The people wouldn’t
stand
for it!” he cried. “They’d make
those
fellers back down in a hurry!”

And as George left him, the old man would come with him to the door, shake his hand warmly and, with an eager and lonely look in his old eyes, say:

“Come again, boy! I’m always glad to see you!...I got stuff in here—photygraphs an’ books, an’ such as that about the war—that you ain’t seen yet. No, nor no one else!” he cackled. “For no one else has got ‘em!...Just let me know when you’re comin’ an’ I’ll be here.”

Slowly the years crept by and George lived alone in Brooklyn. They were hard years, desperate years, lonely years, years of interminable writing and experimentation, years of exploration and discovery, years of grey timelessness, weariness, exhaustion, and self-doubt. He had reached the wilderness period of his life and was hacking his way through the jungles of experience. He had stripped himself down to the brutal facts of self and work. These were all he had.

He saw himself more clearly now than he had ever done before, and, in spite of living thus alone, he no longer thought of himself as a rare and special person who was doomed to isolation, but as a man who worked and who, like other men, was a part of life. He was concerned passionately with reality. He wanted to see things whole, to find out everything he could, and then to create out of what he knew the fruit of his own vision.

One criticism that had been made of his first book still rankled in his mind. An unsuccessful scribbler turned critic had simply dismissed the whole book as a “barbaric yawp”, accusing Webber of getting at things with his emotions rather than with his brains, and of being hostile towards the processes of the intellect and “the intellectual point of view.” These charges, if they had any truth in them, seemed to George to be the kind of lifeless half-truth that was worse than no truth at all. The trouble with the so-called “intellectuals” was that they were not intellectual enough, and their point of view more often than not had no point, but was disparate, arbitrary, sporadic, and confused.

To be an “intellectual” was, it seemed, a vastly different thing from being intelligent. A dog’s nose would usually lead him towards what he wished to find, or away from what he wished to avoid: this was intelligent. That is, the dog had the sense of reality in his nose. But the “intellectual” usually had no nose, and was lacking in the sense of reality. The most striking difference between Webber’s mind and the mind of the average “intellectual” was that Webber absorbed experience like a sponge, and made use of everything that he absorbed. He really learned constantly from experience. But the “intellectuals” of his acquaintance seemed to learn nothing. They had no capacity for rumination and digestion. They could not reflect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He always came back to the wall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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