The Party at Jack's Read online

  Wolfe’s emphasis on wealth and the power, corruption, and decadence it affords the Jacks and their circle enables him to trace the ignoble use of money and position among the privileged class. While they show themselves to be the apes of fashion—by wanting to see Piggy Logan perform—and tolerant of crimes both petty and major among their servants, they have little genuine interest in promoting art that has stood the test of time and fail to dismiss or prosecute their thieving and conniving servants. All the wrongs and decadence laid bare here add proof that Libya Hill, the microcosm of corrupt economic and cultural life presented early in the Webber cycle, has its sordid counterpart in bustling and greed-driven Manhattan. As an artist, Wolfe wanted to show that he was just as obliged to expose and revile corruption in the nation’s greatest city as he was to set forth the dark deeds of Judge Rumford Bland and others living or working on the square of Libya Hill. His protagonist must assume the role of Hercules, attempting to lead the nation to join him in cleansing this American version of the Aegean stables. To perform that labor meant that his protagonist would arouse the ire of Libya Hillians and New Yorkers. To find the strength, time, and, more important, freedom to combat the forces threatening to undermine the nation, Wolfe asked George Webber to cast aside his hope for fame and love. Speaking the truth carried a heavy price, Webber had learned upon publishing his first novel, and another sacrifice he must make if he is to continue to expose the hypocrisy of the Jacks’ circle is Esther’s love and support. Here, then, is how the episodes making up this work fulfill Wolfe’s plan (expressed in Statement of Purpose for the Webber cycle) of illustrating “essential elements of any man’s progress and discovery of life and as they illustrate the world itself, not in the terms of personal and self-centered conflict with the world, but in terms of ever-increasing discovery of life and the world, with a consequent diminution of the more personal and self-centered vision of the world which a young man has.”

  Here Wolfe tries hard—but not always successfully—to cast off self-centeredness, the Eugene Gant-i-ness of his first two novels. (Something of Eugene Gant remains because portions of the present work come, with little or no revision, from “The October Fair,” that portion of his grand plan for a series of novels treating his love affair with Aline Bernstein, the model for Esther Jack.) An early draft of the farewell scene with Esther Jack has the young hero speaking like some Faustian aesthete—the Jacks and their peers are represented as deadly enemies from whom the artist must escape if he is to render the world at large, the privileged and the wretched of the world, “with a young man’s mind, with that wonderful, active, hungry, flaming, seething mind of a young man.” A later draft portrays a socially conscious artist, one capable of seeing the dross behind the glitter, the self-serving motive underlying a show of compassion, and the moral and intellectual emptiness masked by a push to be up-to-date in everything. To do the job awaiting him as a champion of the working class, he swallowed a bitter pill, a farewell to love, and departed knowing that “there were new lands; dark windings, strange and subtle webs there in the deep delved earth, a tide was running in the hearts of men—and he must go.” As George, he would choose sides with men of the earth and help them reveal the fact that the privileged class merely occupied a structure supported by the sweat, agony, and deprivation of the common men; as Webber he would be the artist helping the common man understand the value of his work, thought, and talents. Ultimately, the party he chose was not one of jack—money and the power and the privileges it brings—but one of honest toil.

  In effect, the opening dream sequence prefigures the many themes that Wolfe presented throughout his entire book-length manuscript. Indeed, it seems as if humanity itself takes a haunted ride down the river of time and memory into its deepest soul to examine the profoundest truths of mankind with Frederick in his moments before awakening. Frederick Jack, and the life he has created, seems to rest like some enfabled city, with which he is so much in tune, on solid ground. Yet in his dream, Frederick is trapped in time suspended. In this nether world of his mind’s creation he has neither power nor control, as past and present surrealistically form their own strange reality. The classmates who taunt him about his Jewishness and who pursue him with a violent anti-Semitism are prophetic of Germany’s hate-filled future, a future that George Webber encounters in the latter portion of You Cant Go Home Again.

  In his dream, Frederick finds that his family treats him as if he were a child, not the adult he has become, and their smothering attention suffocates him, much like the adult Wolfe found himself to be when he returned to Asheville. To assert his power and “manliness,” Frederick recounts his wealth and ownership, much like King Midas counting his gold. Yet the ancient cobbled streets and his connection with the past fill him with exquisite happiness. When he encounters his old schoolmates, whom he feels somehow destined to meet, they are old and battered, and he knows that they have all suffered blows from life. He feels a sense of unity with his enemies and, indeed, with all mankind. He longs to tell them of his life in America after he left Germany, of his loneliness and poverty in his early years, and of his empty success. He yearns to tell them how he gained power yet somehow lost the dream, how like smoke and sand the boy’s dream has vanished.

  Like the characters who come and go at the Jacks’ party that very evening, Frederick has become one of the hollow men, possessing a “suave and kindly cynicism” and “the varnish of complaisance.” Like J. Alfred Prufrock, who lived in the world between the real and the unreal, between imagination and reality—who lived a life stunted and dulled and full of emptiness in that great city London—Frederick Jack stood, in the final moments of his dream, looking toward the water, rocking in time’s harbor and listening to the mermaids sing.

  In the next four chapters, Wolfe sets about establishing his themes and further developing his characterization of Frederick and Esther Jack. Frederick (Fritz) believes that he is in total control of his world. Like a Roman emperor, he sensuously luxuriates in his sumptuous surroundings, narcissistically adoring his own health and vigor. He possesses not only the luxury of wealth but that of time as well, time enough to reflect from his height and distance upon the antlike populace who “swarm” to and fro, both literally and figuratively beneath him. Yet, from the beginning, the almost imperceptible tremor coming from deep within the rock below causes him a vague sense of foreboding and apprehension. The natural world seems overshadowed by the cruel, piercing dominance of these lifeless, monstrous buildings. Indeed, his connection with nature is an artificial one, experienced through the “expensive” sport of golf. He walks upon the “rich velvet of the greens” and “luxuriates” upon the “cool veranda of the club.” Even nature has been tamed for his rich men’s pursuits. The artificiality of the buildings mock the golden light of the day, an imitation of gold and silver: “silver-burnished steel and cliffs of harsh white-yellow brick, haggard in young light,” imagery of false idols, craven images. Indeed, “the immense and vertical shapes of the great buildings … dwindled to glittering needles of cold silver [as] light cut sharply the crystal weather of a blue shell-fragile sky.” Nature seems to bleed, indeed, to face destruction from these needlelike buildings. The creatures of the city seem to be miniature representations of this lifeless creation. Their cabs are like “hard-shelled prehistoric beasts emerging from Grand Central projectile-like in solid beetle-bullet flight.” Mr. Jack has paid for this sense of order and power out of chaos “with the ransom of an emperor.” He has indeed paid dearly, with his very soul. The window of his apartment building is paralleled by the window of his eye from which the narrowness of his vision is reflected. He worships illusion—the illusion of power, the illusion of youth, the illusion of eternal potency—and “in that insolent boast of steel and stone [he sees] … a permanence surviving every danger, an answer, crushing and convulsive in its silence, to every doubt.”

  Frederick is characterized as a hollow man, fragmented and full of self-delusion. In contrast,
Esther is characterized as a woman possessing a sense of oneness, a connectedness with life, past and present, rich and poor, old and young. Through Esther is “always the clear design, the line of life, running like a thread of gold” from childhood to the present. Her beauty is real, not artificial. Her face reveals complex emotions; it is not smooth and controlled as is Frederick’s. Esther is capable of genuine sorrow and depth of feeling. She does not merely take from others, as does Fritz and others like him, for her own gain. She is an artist, a creator. She possesses the ability to create real gold, to transform people and to give them hope. In fact, Esther is like nature herself: “that one deathless flower of a face that bloomed among so many millions of the dead.” Like a fertility goddess, she offers hope in the wasteland of modern society.

  In these chapters, Wolfe satirizes capitalistic waste and greed, tellingly representative of both the privileged class and their poorer counterparts. Both patron and servant are alike, the only difference being the degree of wealth and power each possesses. Above all else, the goal is to win, and corruption trickles down through the hive, the honeycomb. This corruption is represented, respectively, by the relationship between Esther and her maid and between Frederick and his chauffeur. In words reminiscent of a song of the period and used in The Great Gatsby, “the rich get rich and the poor get children.” Within the Jacks’ household, privilege and dishonesty are paralleled within the city at large.

  Wolfe develops a universal theme of blindness and despair in which the false values and self-interest of society at large preshadow, much like the tremor below the earth, the coming apocalypse that Frederick and his united family will experience. The narrator foresees that when financial calamity strikes, Frederick’s “gaudy bubble” will explode “overnight before his eye.” For all his plumpness, ruddiness, and assurance, he will “shrink and wither visibly in three days’ time into withered and palsied senility.”

  Yet another representative of the falsehood and sterility worshiped in this hollow and anchorless society is Piggy Logan. He is contrasted to Esther, Wolfe’s symbol of the “true” artist. His attire and demeanor are artificial, and he is described as being almost inhuman. His round and heavy face smudged darkly with the shaven grain of a thick beard, he seems like the brutal, ignorant characters in the earlier dream sequence. His forehead is “corrugated” and his close-cropped hair is composed of “stiff black bristles, mounting to a little brush-like pompadour” like the lifeless wire dolls he creates. In this upside-down world the real is perceived as artificial and the trivial superb, so that great writers, like Dickens and Balzac, have been found to be “largely composed of straw wadding” by both critics and readers at large. The partygoers, like the people of the wasteland, are indeed people living in a damned world, bored with all of the elements of life. They are bored with love and hate and life and death, but not with Piggy Logan and his wire dolls, at least not so long as his wire circus remains fashionable.

  Like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Esther has within her an ability to bring people together into a magical confluence, a “wonderful harmony.” Indeed, the party seems to take on its own separate life, creating a world of enchantment in which all assembled seem like creatures from a land where only wealth, joy, and beauty reside. Esther’s heart and soul infuse her world with splendor: “the warm heart and the wise, the subtle childlike spirit that was Mrs. Jack.” She is able to do what few others in her world—or any—are able to do: to create unity out of chaos. The characters in this dramatic sequence—for the party scene is dramatic in form—are introduced almost as through a receiving line, like the characters in a play. It is her very humanity that saves Esther from the death-in-life surrounding her in this Wolfean version of wasteland. She possesses “the common heart of life” and thus can associate easily with the wealthy and celebrated as well as with her servants and co-workers. She escapes the sterile and limited lives of her family and guests by unifying all classes, all time. She remembers the sorrow of her youth, and her recollections enrich her. Yet, she is still part of this world and is corrupted by it, so that she is unable to reject the hollowness at its core.

  It remains for her lover, George Webber, to view the party and the behavior of her guests from the perspective of an observer. He can see what she will not, or cannot, see. George moves in and out of the activities of the party, but ultimately he is more clearly a Proustian onlooker than a participant. He penetrates the surface glitter of this wealthy, sophisticated gathering and sees Esther’s guests as they really are. His growing awareness of the guests’ corruption—and of his own potential for being swept down into their moral cesspool—enables him, finally, to leave this illusory world, even though he must sacrifice his love for Esther in going his own way. He now perceives that he faces the disillusionment of youth and the aching knocks of experience: “To see the starred face of the night with a high soul of exaltation and of noble aspiration, to dream great dreams, to think great thoughts. And in that instant have the selfless grandeur turn to dust, and to see great night itself, a reptile coiled and waiting in the nocturnal blood of life.” In lifting the veil and seeing the ugliness and inherent danger of this world, George catches more than a glimpse of the serpent in Esther’s paradise of love and chooses to cast himself out while he still has the will to do so.

  George’s keen vision helps readers see each character with penetrating awareness: The beautiful and seductive Lily Mandell is “corrupt and immodest.” Stephen Hook, damned and tormented, assumes a mask of disdain and boredom and is too self-conscious to allow himself to respond honestly to Esther’s delight and gratitude at his generous gift of a book of Brueghel’s drawings. Roberta Heilprinn is cool and manipulative, acting not spontaneously but out of some planned strategy to exert her control over others. Even Esther, George notes, like her friend and counterpart, Roberta, manipulates others with her deceptive innocence. It is Amy Van Leer who symbolizes the tragic waste and corruption of this decadent age, her broken and fragmented speech and consequent inability to communicate except by frenzied, half-articulated phrases personifying a corruption and impending decay almost as old as civilization itself: “her life seemed to go back through aeons of iniquity, through centuries of vice and dissipation … [like] the dread Medusa … some ageless creature, some enchantress of Circean cunning whose life was older than the ages and whose heart was old as Hell.” Wolfe leaves no doubt that the serpent has wholly claimed this wastelandish flapper.

  He worked tirelessly on the chapter entitled “Mr. Hirsch Was Wounded Sorrowfully,” creating several variants until he was satisfied with his cutting counterpoint depicting the tired lust and bored ennui of the partygoers. The social chatter of the rich whose indiscriminate lust for wealth and power creates the misery of the poor rings with “political correctness.” Only Mr. Robert Ahrens is depicted as a genuine human being. He does not engage in empty conversation and refuses to be baited by Lily Mandell when she asks him about the writer Beddoes. Ahrens’s knowledge is real, not a contrived pastiche like that of Lawrence Hirsch. Amidst the glitter and meaningless chatter, he moves quietly, not engaging in conversation but actually browsing through books in Esther’s library, in contrast to Piggy Logan, who pulls volumes from the shelves and hurls them to the floor.

  Young and old, man and woman, they were an ark of lost humanity drifting, doomed, toward some eventual disaster:

  Well, here they were then, three dozen of the highest and the best, with shimmer of silk, and ripple of laughter, with the tumultuous babel of fine voices, with tinkle of ice in shell-thin glasses, and with silvern clatter, in thronging webs of beauty, wit and loveliness—as much passion, joy, and hope, and fear, as much triumph and defeat, as much anguish and despair and victory, as much sin, viciousness, cruelty and pride, as much base intrigue and ignoble striving, as much unnoble aspiration as flesh and blood can know, or as a room can hold—enough, God knows, to people hell, inhabit heaven, or fill out the universe—were all here, now, miraculously
composed, in magic interweft—at Jack’s.

  As Piggy Logan prepares his wire circus, his admiring claque of socialites rudely enters the Jacks’ apartment. Amy, offended by their slight of her beloved Esther, utters her only complete sentences of the evening: “Six little vaginas standing in a row and not a grain of difference between them. Chapin’s School last year. Harvard and their first—this! All these little Junior League bitches.” Piggy Logan’s circus is a grotesque parody of art. His “celebrated sword swallowing act” is a brutal display of ignorance, obscene in its banality. Indeed, the guests themselves seem to be little more than hollow dummies: the young society girl speaking through motionless lips; Krock, the depraved sculptor, making crudely aggressive sexual advances; and even Esther herself forcing George and her closest friend upon each other and enticing them to engage in sexual promiscuity. Finally, the depravity of the partygoers becomes too much for George to endure. He understands that if he remains in this jaded world of illusion and glitter, he too will be destroyed.