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

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      Eugene spent the next four years of his life in Leonard’s school. Against the bleak horror of Dixieland, against the dark road of pain and death down which the great limbs of Gant had already begun to slope, against all the loneliness and imprisonment of his own life which had gnawed him like hunger, these years at Leonard’s bloomed like golden apples.

      From Leonard he got little — a dry campaign over an arid waste of Latin prose: first, a harsh, stiff, unintelligent skirmishing among the rules of grammar, which frightened and bewildered him needlessly, and gave him for years an unhealthy dislike of syntax, and an absurd prejudice against the laws on which the language was built. Then, a year’s study of the lean, clear precision of Cæsar, the magnificent structure of the style — the concision, the skeleton certainty, deadened by the disjointed daily partition, the dull parsing, the lumbering cliché of pedantic translation:

      “Having done all things that were necessary, and the season now being propitious for carrying on war, Cæsar began to arrange his legions in battle array.”

      All the dark pageantry of war in Gaul, the thrust of the Roman spear through the shield of hide, the barbaric parleys in the forests, and the proud clangor of triumph — all that might have been supplied in the story of the great realist, by one touch of the transforming passion with which a great teacher projects his work, was lacking.

      Instead, glibly, the wheels ground on into the hard rut of method and memory. March 12, last year — three days late. Cogitata. Neut. pl. of participle used as substantive. Quo used instead of ut to express purpose when comparative follows. Eighty lines for tomorrow.

      They spent a weary age, two years, on that dull dog, Cicero. De Senectute. De Amicitia. They skirted Virgil because John Dorsey Leonard was a bad sailor — he was not at all sure of Virgilian navigation. He hated exploration. He distrusted voyages. Next year, he said. And the great names of Ovid, lord of the elves and gnomes, the Bacchic piper of Amores, or of Lucretius, full of the rhythm of tides. Nox est perpetua.

      “Huh?” drawled Mr. Leonard, vacantly beginning to laugh. He was fingermarked with chalk from chin to crotch. Stephen (“Pap”) Rheinhart leaned forward gently and fleshed his penpoint in Eugene Gant’s left rump. Eugene grunted painfully.

      “Why, no,” said Mr. Leonard, stroking his chin. “A different sort of Latin.”

      “What sort?” Tom Davis insisted. “Harder than Cicero?”

      “Well,” said Mr. Leonard, dubiously, “different. A little beyond you at present.”

      “— est perpetua. Una dormienda. Luna dies et nox.”

      “Is Latin poetry hard to read?” Eugene said.

      “Well,” said Mr. Leonard, shaking his head. “It’s not easy. Horace —” he began carefully.

      “He wrote Odes and Epodes,” said Tom Davis. “What is an Epode, Mr. Leonard?”

      “Why,” said Mr. Leonard reflectively, “it’s a form of poetry.”

      “Hell!” said “Pap” Rheinhart in a rude whisper to Eugene. “I knew that before I paid tuition.”

      Smiling lusciously, and stroking himself with gentle fingers, Mr. Leonard turned back to the lesson.

      “Now let me see,” he began.

      “Who was Catullus?” Eugene shouted violently. Like a flung spear in his brain, the name.

      “He was a poet,” Mr. Leonard answered thoughtlessly, quickly, startled. He regretted.

      “What sort of poetry did he write?” asked Eugene.

      There was no answer.

      “Was it like Horace?”

      “No-o,” said Mr. Leonard reflectively. “It wasn’t exactly like Horace.”

      “What was it like?” said Tom Davis. “Like your granny’s gut,” “Pap” Rheinhart toughly whispered.

      “Why — he wrote on topics of general interest in his day,” said Mr. Leonard easily.

      “Did he write about being in love?” said Eugene in a quivering voice.

      Tom Davis turned a surprised face on him. “Gre-a-at Day!” he exclaimed, after a moment. Then he began to laugh.

      “He wrote about being in love,” Eugene cried with sudden certain passion. “He wrote about being in love with a lady named Lesbia. Ask Mr. Leonard if you don’t believe me.”

      They turned thirsty faces up to him.

      “Why — no — yes — I don’t know about all that,” said Mr. Leonard, challengingly, confused. “Where’d you hear all this, boy?”

      “I read it in a book,” said Eugene, wondering where. Like a flung spear, the name.

      — Whose tongue was fanged like a serpent, flung spear of ecstasy and passion.

      Odi et amo: quore id faciam . . .

      “Well, not altogether,” said Mr. Leonard. “Some of them,” he conceded.

      . . . fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

      “Who was she?” said Tom Davis.

      “Oh, it was the custom in those days,” said Mr. Leonard carelessly. “Like Dante and Beatrice. СКАЧАТЬ