Thomas Wolfe: Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe

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СКАЧАТЬ admired beauties he was often tired of, perhaps because he had heard them so often, and it seemed to him, moreover, that Shakespeare often spoke absurdly and pompously when he might better have spoken simply, as in the scene where, being informed by the Queen of the death of his sister by drowning, Laertes says:

      “Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,

       And therefore I forbid my tears.”

      You really can’t beat that (he thought). Aye, Ben! Would he had blotted a hundred! A thousand!

      But he was deep in other passages which the elocutionist misses, such as the terrible and epic invocation of Edmund, in King Lear, drenched in evil, which begins:

      “Thou, Nature, art my goddess,”

      and ends,

      “Now, gods, stand up for bastards.”

      It was as dark as night, as evil as Niggertown, as vast as the elemental winds that howled down across the hills: he chanted it in the black hours of his labor, into the dark and the wind. He understood; he exulted in its evil — which was the evil of earth, of illicit nature. It was a call to the unclassed; it was a cry for those beyond the fence, for rebel angels, and for all of the men who are too tall.

      He knew nothing of the Elizabethan drama beyond Shakespeare’s plays. But he very early came to know a little of the poetry of Ben Jonson, whom Margaret looked on as a literary Falstaff, condoning, with the familiar weakness of the schoolmarm, his Gargantuan excess as a pardonable whimsy of genius.

      She was somewhat academically mirthful over the literary bacchanalia, as a professor in a Baptist college smacks his lips appetizingly and beams ruddily at his classes when he reads of sack and porter and tankards foaming with the musty ale. All this is part of the liberal tradition. Men of the world are broadminded. Witness Professor Albert Thorndyke Firkins, of the University of Chicago, at the Falcon in Soho. Smiling bravely, he sits over a half-pint of bitter beer, in the company of a racing tout, a sway-backed barmaid, broad in the stern, with adjustable teeth, and three companionable tarts from Lisle street, who are making the best of two pints of Guinness. With eager impatience he awaits the arrival of G. K. Chesterton and E. V. Lucas.

      “O rare Ben Jonson!” Margaret Leonard sighed with gentle laughter. “Ah, Lord!”

      “My God, boy!” Sheba roared, snatching the suggested motif of conversation out of the air, and licking her buttered fingers noisily as she stormed into action. “God bless him!” Her hairy red face burned like clover, her veinous eyes were tearful bright. “God bless him, ‘Gene! He was as English as roast beef and a tankard of musty ale!”

      “Ah, Lord!” sighed Margaret. “He was a genius if ever there was one.” With misty eyes she gazed far off, a thread of laughter on her mouth. “Whee!” she laughed gently. “Old Ben!”

      “And say, ‘Gene!” Sheba continued, bending forward with a fat hand gripped upon her knee. “Do you know that the greatest tribute to Shakespeare’s genius is from his hand?”

      “Ah, I tell you, boy!” said Margaret, with darkened eyes. Her voice was husky. He was afraid she was going to weep.

      “And yet the fools!” Sheba yelled. “The mean little two-by-two pusillanimous swill-drinking fools —”

      “Whee!” gently Margaret moaned. John Dorsey turned his chalk-white face to the boy and whined with vacant appreciation, winking his head pertly. Ah absently!

      “— for that’s all they are, have had the effrontery to suggest that he was jealous.”

      “Pshaw!” said Margaret impatiently. “There’s nothing in that.”

      “Why, they don’t know what they’re talking about!” Sheba turned a sudden grinning face upon him. “The little upstarts! It takes us to tell ’em, ‘Gene,” she said.

      He began to slide floorwards out of the wicker chair. John Dorsey slapped his meaty thigh, and bent forward whining inchoately, drooling slightly at the mouth.

      “The Lord a’ mercy!” he wheezed, gasping.

      “I was talking to a feller the other day,” said Sheba, “a lawyer that you’d think might know a LITTLE something, and I used a quotation out of The Merchant of Venice that every schoolboy knows — ‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’ The man looked at me as if he thought I was crazy!”

      “Great heavens!” said Margaret in a still voice.

      “I said, ‘Look here, Mr. So-and-so, you may be a smart lawyer, you may have your million dollars that they say you have, but there are a lot of things you don’t know yet. There are a lot of things money can’t buy, my sonny, and one of them is the society of cult-shered men and women.’"

      “Why, pshaw!” said Mr. Leonard. “What do these little whipper-snappers know about the things of the mind? You might as well expect some ignorant darky out in the fields to construe a passage in Homer.” He grasped a glass half full of clabber, on the table, and tilting it intently in his chalky fingers, spooned out a lumpy spilth of curds which he slid, quivering, into his mouth. “No, sir!” he laughed. “They may be Big Men on the tax collector’s books, but when they try to associate with educated men and women, as the feller says, ‘they — they —’” he began to whine, “‘why, they just ain’t nothin’.’”

      “What shall it profit a man,” said Sheba, “if he gain the whole world, and lose —”

      “Ah, Lord!” sighed Margaret, shaking her smoke-dark eyes. “I tell you!”

      She told him. She told him of the Swan’s profound knowledge of the human heart, his universal and well-rounded characterization, his enormous humor.

      “Fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock!” She laughed. “The fat rascal! Imagine a man keeping the time!”

      And, carefully: “It was the custom of the time, ‘Gene. As a matter of fact, when you read some of the plays of his contemporaries you see how much purer he is than they are.” But she avoided a word, a line, here and there. The slightly spotty Swan — muddied a little by custom. Then, too, the Bible.

      The smoky candle-ends of time. Parnassus As Seen From Mount Sinai: Lecture with lantern-slides by Professor McTavish (D.D.) of Presbyterian College.

      “And observe, Eugene,” she said, “he never made vice attractive.”

      “Why didn’t he?” he asked. “There’s Falstaff.”

      “Yes,” she replied, “and you know what happened to him, don’t you?”

      “Why,” he considered, “he died!”

      “You see, don’t you?” she concluded, with triumphant warning.

      I see, don’t I? The wages of sin. What, by the way, are the wages of virtue? The good die young.

      Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo! Boo-hoo!

       I really feel so blue!

       I was given to crime,

       And cut off in my prime

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