Of Time and the River & Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe
He began to whine with laughter.
“Why, the rascal,” he said. “That little shaver.”
“How old are you, boy?” she asked.
“I’ll be twelve next month,” he said.
“Well, what do you know about that!” she said wonderingly. “I tell you what, though,” she continued. “We’ve got to get some meat on those bones. You can’t go around like that. I don’t like the way you look.” She shook her head.
He was uncomfortable, disturbed, vaguely resentful. It embarrassed and frightened him to be told that he was “delicate”; it touched sharply on his pride.
She took him into a big room on the left that had been fitted out as a living-room and library. She watched his face light with eagerness as he saw the fifteen hundred or two thousand books shelved away in various places. He sat down clumsily in a wicker chair by the table and waited until she returned, bringing him a plate of sandwiches and a tall glass full of clabber, which he had never tasted before.
When he had finished, she drew a chair near to his, and sat down. She had previously sent Leonard out on some barnyard errands; he could be heard from time to time shouting in an authoritative country voice to his live stock.
“Well, tell me boy,” she said, “what have you been reading?”
Craftily he picked his way across the waste land of printery, naming as his favorites those books which he felt would win her approval. As he had read everything, good and bad, that the town library contained, he was able to make an impressive showing. Sometimes she stopped him to question about a book — he rebuilt the story richly with a blazing tenacity of detail that satisfied her wholly. She was excited and eager — she saw at once how abundantly she could feed this ravenous hunger for knowledge, experience, wisdom. And he knew suddenly the joy of obedience: the wild ignorant groping, the blind hunt, the desperate baffled desire was now to be ruddered, guided, controlled. The way through the passage to India, that he had never been able to find, would now be charted for him. Before he went away she had given him a fat volume of nine hundred pages, shot through with spirited engravings of love and battle, of the period he loved best.
He was drowned deep at midnight in the destiny of the man who killed the bear, the burner of windmills and the scourge of banditry, in all the life of road and tavern in the Middle Ages, in valiant and beautiful Gerard, the seed of genius, the father of Erasmus. Eugene thought The Cloister and the Hearth the best story he had ever read.
The Altamont Fitting School was the greatest venture of their lives. All the delayed success that Leonard had dreamed of as a younger man he hoped to realize now. For him the school was independence, mastership, power, and, he hoped, prosperity. For her, teaching was its own exceeding great reward — her lyric music, her life, the world in which plastically she built to beauty what was good, the lord of her soul that gave her spirit life while he broke her body.
In the cruel volcano of the boy’s mind, the little brier moths of his idolatry wavered in to their strange marriage and were consumed. One by one the merciless years reaped down his gods and captains. What had lived up to hope? What had withstood the scourge of growth and memory? Why had the gold become so dim? All of his life, it seemed, his blazing loyalties began with men and ended with images; the life he leaned on melted below his weight, and looking down, he saw he clasped a statue; but enduring, a victorious reality amid his shadow-haunted heart, she remained, who first had touched his blinded eyes with light, who nested his hooded houseless soul. She remained.
O death in life that turns our men to stone! O change that levels down our gods! If only one lives yet, above the cinders of the consuming years, shall not this dust awaken, shall not dead faith revive, shall we not see God again, as once in morning, on the mountain? Who walks with us on the hills?
17
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,”