Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe (6 page)

"Well, what are you going to call it?"
inquired Dr. Cardiac, referring thus, with shocking and medical
coarseness, to this most royal imp.

Eliza was better tuned to cosmic vibrations. 
With a full, if inexact, sense of what portended, she gave to Luck's
Lad the title of Eugene, a name which, beautifully, means "well
born," but which, as any one will be able to testify, does not
mean, has never meant, "well bred."
 
 

This chosen incandescence, to whom a name had already
been given, and from whose centre most of the events in this
chronicle must be seen, was borne in, as we have said, upon the very
spear-head of history.  But perhaps, reader, you have already
thought of that? You HAVEN'T?  Then let us refresh your
historical memory.

By 1900, Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler
had almost finished saying the things they were reported as saying,
and that Eugene was destined to hear, twenty years later; most of the
GreatVictorians had died before the bombardment began; William
McKinley was up for a second term, the crew of the Spanish navy had
returnedhome in a tugboat.

Abroad, grim old Britain had sent her ultimatum to
the South Africans in 1899; Lord Roberts ("Little Bobs," as
he was known affectionately to his men) was appointed
commander-in-chief after several British reverses; the Transvaal
Republic was annexed to Great Britain in September 1900, and formally
annexed in the month of Eugene's birth.  There was a Peace
Conference two years later.

Meanwhile, what was going on in Japan?  I will
tell you: the firstparliament met in 1891, there was a war with China
in 1894-95, Formosa was ceded in 1895.  Moreover, Warren
Hastings had been impeached and tried; Pope Sixtus the Fifth had come
and gone; Dalmatia had been subdued by Tiberius; Belisarius had been
blinded by Justinian; the wedding and funeral ceremonies of
Wilhelmina Charlotte Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach and King George
the Second had been solemnized, while those of Berengaria of Navarre
to King Richard the First were hardly more than a distant memory;
Diocletian, Charles the Fifth, and Victor Amadeus of Sardinia, had
all abdicated their thrones; Henry James Pye, Poet Laureate of
England, was with his fathers; Cassiodorus, Quintilian, Juvenal,
Lucretius, Martial, and Albert the Bear of Brandenburg had answered
the last great roll-call; the battles of Antietam, Smolensko,
Drumclog, Inkerman, Marengo, Cawnpore, Killiecrankie, Sluys, Actium,
Lepanto, Tewkesbury, Brandywine, Hohenlinden, Salamis, and the
Wilderness had been fought both by land and by sea; Hippias had been
expelled from Athens by the AlCésaré and the Lacedé Simonides,
Menander, Strabo, Moschus, and Pindar had closed their earthly
accounts; the beatified Eusebius, Athanasius, and Chrysostom had gone
to their celestial niches; Menkaura had built the Third Pyramid;
Aspalta had led victorious armies; the remote Bermudas, Malta, and
the Windward Isles had been colonized.  In addition, the Spanish
Armada had been defeated; President Abraham Lincoln assassinated, and
the Halifax Fisheries Award had given $5,500,000 to Britain for
twelve-year fishing privileges.  Finally, only thirty or forty
million years before, our earliest ancestors had crawled out of the
primeval slime; and then, no doubt, finding the change unpleasant,
crawled back in again.
 
 

Such was the state of history when Eugene entered the
theatre of human events in 1900.

We would give willingly some more extended account of
the world his life touched during the first few years, showing, in
all its perspectives and implications, the meaning of life as seen
from the floor, or from the crib, but these impressions are
suppressed when they might be told, not through any fault of
intelligence, but through lack of muscular control, the powers of
articulation,and because of the recurring waves of loneliness, 
weariness,depression, aberration, and utter blankness which war
against the order in a man's mind until he is three or four years
old.

Lying darkly in his crib, washed, powdered, and fed,
he thought quietly of many things before he dropped off to sleep?the
interminable sleep that obliterated time for him, and that gave him a
sense of having missed forever a day of sparkling life.  At
these moments, he was heartsick with weary horror as he thought of
the discomfort, weakness, dumbness, the infinite misunderstanding he
would have to endure before he gained even physical freedom.  He
grew sick as he thought of the weary distance before him, the lack of
co-ordination of the centres of control, the undisciplined and rowdy
bladder, the helpless exhibition he was forced to give in the company
of his sniggering, pawing brothers and sisters, dried, cleaned,
revolved before them.

He was in agony because he was poverty-stricken in
symbols: his mind was caught in a net because he had no words to work
with.  He had not even names for the objects around him: he
probably defined them for himself by some jargon, reinforced by some
mangling of the speech that roared about him, to which he listened
intently day after day, realizing that his first escape must come
through language.  He indicated as quickly as he could his
ravenous hunger for pictures and print: sometimes they brought him
great books profusely illustrated, and he bribed them desperately by
cooing, shrieking with delight, making extravagant faces, and doing
all the other things they understood in him.  He wondered
savagely how they would feel if they knew what he really thought: at
other times he had to laugh at them and at their whole preposterous
comedy of errors as they pranced around for his amusement, waggled
their heads at him, tickled him roughly, making him squeal violently
against his will.  The situation was at once profoundly annoying
and comic: as he sat in the middle of the floor and watched them
enter, seeing the face of each transformed by a foolish leer, and
hearing their voices become absurd and sentimental whenever they
addressed him, speaking to him words which he did not yet understand,
but which he saw they were mangling in the preposterous hope of
rendering intelligible that which has been previously mutilated, he
had to laugh at the fools, in spite of his vexation.

And left alone to sleep within a shuttered room, with
the thick sunlight printed in bars upon the floor, unfathomable
loneliness and sadness crept through him: he saw his life down the
solemn vista of a forest aisle, and he knew he would always be the
sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that
beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely
passages.  Lost.  He understood that men were forever
strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any
one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life
without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a
stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we
escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may
kiss us, what heart may warm us.  Never, never, never, never,
never.

He saw that the great figures that came and went
about him, the huge leering heads that bent hideously into his crib,
the great voices that rolled incoherently above him, had for one
another not much greater understanding than they had for him: that
even their speech, their entire fluidity and ease of movement were
but meagre communicants of their thought or feeling, and served often
not to promote understanding, but to deepen and widen strife,
bitterness, and prejudice.

His brain went black with terror.  He saw
himself an inarticulate stranger, an amusing little clown, to be
dandled and nursed by these enormous and remote figures.  He had
been sent from one mystery into another: somewhere within or without
his consciousness he heard a great bell ringing faintly, as if it
sounded undersea,and as he listened, the ghost of memory walked
through his mind, and for a moment he felt that he had almost
recovered what he had lost.

Sometimes, pulling himself abreast the high walls of
his crib, he glanced down dizzily at the patterns of the carpet far
below; the world swam in and out of his mind like a tide, now
printing its whole sharp picture for an instant, again ebbing out
dimly and sleepily, while he pieced the puzzle of sensation together
bit by bit, seeing only the dancing fire-sheen on the poker, hearing
then the elfin clucking of the sun-warm hens, somewhere beyond in a
distant and enchanted world.  Again, he heard their
morning-wakeful crowing dear and loud, suddenly becoming a
substantial and alert citizen of life; or, going and coming in
alternate waves of fantasy and fact, he heard the loud, faery thunder
of Daisy's parlor music. Years later, he heard it again, a door
opened in his brain: she told him it was Paderewski's "Minuet."

His crib was a great woven basket, well mattressed
and pillowed within; as he grew stronger, he was able to perform
extraordinary acrobatics in it, tumbling, making a hoop of his body,
and drawing himself easily and strongly erect: with patient effort he
could worm over the side on to the floor.  There, he would crawl
on the vast design of the carpet, his eyes intent upon great wooden
blocks piled chaotically on the floor.  They had belonged to his
brother Luke: all the letters of the alphabet, in bright
multi-colored carving, were engraved upon them.

Holding them clumsily in his tiny hands, he studied
for hours the symbols of speech, knowing that he had here the stones
of the temple of language, and striving desperately to find the key
that would draw order and intelligence from this anarchy.  Great
voices soared far above him, vast shapes came and went, lifting him
to dizzy heights, depositing him with exhaustless strength.  The
bell rang under the sea.

One day when the opulent Southern Spring had richly
unfolded, when the spongy black earth of the yard was covered with
sudden, tender grass, and wet blossoms, the great cherry tree seethed
slowly with a massive gem of amber sap, and the cherries hung
ripening in prodigal clusters, Gant took him from his basket in the
sun on the high front porch, and went with him around the house by
the lily bed, taking him back under trees singing with hidden birds,
to the far end of the lot.

Here the earth was unshaded, dry, clotted by the
plough.  Eugene knew by the stillness that it was Sunday:
against the high wire fence there was the heavy smell of hot
dock-weed.  On the other side, Swain's cow was wrenching the
cool coarse grass, lifting her head from time to time, and singing in
her strong deep voice her Sunday exuberance.  In the warm washed
air, Eugene heard with absolute clearness all the brisk backyard
sounds of the neighborhood, he became acutely aware of the whole
scene, and as Swain's cow sang out again, he felt the flooded gates
in him swing open.  He answered "Moo!" phrasing the
sound timidly but perfectly, and repeating it confidently in a moment
when the cow answered.

Gant's delight was boundless.  He turned and
raced back toward the house at the full stride of his legs.  And
as he went, he nuzzled his stiff mustache into Eugene's tender neck,
mooing industriously and always getting an answer.

"Lord a' mercy!" cried Eliza, looking from
the kitchen window as he raced down the yard with breakneck strides,
"He'll kill that child yet."

And as he rushed up the kitchen steps--all the house,
save the upper side was off the ground--she came out on the little
latticed veranda, her hands floury, her nose stove-red.

"Why, what on earth are you doing, Mr. Gant?"

"Moo-o-o!  He said 'Moo-o-o!'  Yes he
did!"  Gant spoke to Eugene rather than to Eliza.

Eugene answered him immediately: he felt it was all
rather silly, and he saw he would be kept busy imitating Swain's cow
for several days, but he was tremendously excited, nevertheless,
feeling now that that wall had been breached.

Eliza was likewise thrilled, but her way of showing
it was to turn back to the stove, hiding her pleasure, and saying: 
"I'll vow, Mr. Gant.  I never saw such an idiot with a
child."

Later, Eugene lay wakefully in his basket on the
sitting-room floor, watching the smoking dishes go by in the eager
hands of the combined family, for Eliza at this time cooked
magnificently, and a Sunday dinner was something to remember. 
For two hours since their return from church, the little boys had
been prowling hungrily around the kitchen: Ben, frowning proudly,
kept his dignity outside the screen, making excursions frequently
through the house to watch the progress of cookery; Grover came in
and watched with frank interest until he was driven out; Luke, his
broad humorous little face split by a wide exultant smile, rushed
through the house, squealing exultantly:
 

    
"Weenie, weedie, weeky,
     
Weenie, weedie,
weeky,
     
Weenie,
weedie, weeky,
     
Wee,
Wee, Wee."
 

He had heard Daisy and Josephine Brown doing César
together, and his chant was his own interpretation of César brief
boast: "Veni, Vidi, Vici."

As Eugene lay in his crib, he heard through the open
door the dining-room clatter, the shrill excitement of the boys, the
clangor of steel and knife as Gant prepared to carve the roast, the
reception of the morning's great event told over and over without
variation, but with increasing zest.

"Soon," he thought, as the heavy food
fragrance floated in to him, "I shall be in there with them." 
And he thought lusciously of mysterious and succulent food.