At morning, in a foreign land, whether upon the mournful plains of Hungary or in some quiet square of Georgian houses, embedded in the immensity of sleeping London, he awakes and thinks of home; or in some small provincial town of France, he starts up from his sleep at night, he starts up in the living, brooding stillness of the night, for suddenly he thinks that he has heard there the sounds of America and the wilderness, the things that are in his blood, his heart, his brain, in every atom of his flesh and tissue, the things for which he draws his breath in labour, the things that madden him with an intolerable and nameless pain.
And what are they? They are the whistle-wail of one of the great American engines as it thunders through the continent at night, the sound of the voices of the city streets — those hard, loud, slangy voices, full of violence, humour, and recklessness, now stronger and more remote than the sounds of Asia — the sounds that come up from the harbour of Manhattan in the night — that magnificent and thrilling music of escape, mystery, and joy, with the mighty orchestration of the transatlantics, the hoarse little tugs, the ferry boats and lighters, those sounds that well up from the gulf and dark immensity of night and that pierce the entrails of the listener.
For this will always be one of the immortal and living things about the land, this will be an eternal and unchanging fact about that city whose only permanence is change: there will always be the great rivers flowing around it in the darkness, the rivers that have bounded so many nameless lives, those rivers which have moated in so many changes, which have girdled the wilderness and so much hard, brilliant, and sensational living, so much pain, beauty, ugliness, so much lust, murder, corruption, love, and wild exultancy.
They’ll build great engines yet, and grander towers, but always the rivers run, in the day, in the night, in the dark, draining immensely their imperial tides out of the wilderness, washing and flowing by the coasts of the fabulous city, by all the little ticking sounds of time, by all the million lives and deaths of the city. Always the rivers run, and always there will be great ships upon the tide, always great horns are baying at the harbour’s mouth, and in the night a thousand men have died while the river, always the river, the dark eternal river, full of strange secret time, washing the city’s stains away, thickened and darkened by its dumpings, is flowing by us, by us to the sea.
He awakes at morning in a foreign land and he thinks of home. He cannot rest, his heart is wild with pain and loneliness, he sleeps, but then he knows he sleeps, he hears the dark and secret spell of time about him; in ancient towns, thick tumbling chimes of the cathedral bells are thronging through the dark, but through the passages of his diseased and unforgetful sleep the sounds and memory of America make way: now it is almost dawn, a horse has turned into a street and in America there is the sound of wheels, the lonely clop-clop of the hooves upon deserted pavements, silence, then the banging clatter of a can.
He awakes at morning in a foreign land, he draws his breath in labour in the wool-soft air of Europe: the wool-grey air is all about him like a living substance; it is in his heart, his stomach, and his entrails; it is in the slow and vital movements of the people; it soaks down from the sodden skies into the earth, into the heavy buildings, into the limbs and hearts and brains of living men. It soaks into the spirit of the wanderer; his heart is dull with the grey weariness of despair, it aches with hunger for the wilderness, the howling of great winds, the bite and sparkle of the clear, cold air, the buzz, the tumult and the wild exultancy. The wet, woollen air is all about him, and there is no hope. It was there before William the Conqueror; it was there before Clovis and Charles “the Hammer”; it was there before Attila; it was there before Hengist and Horsa; it was there before Vercingetorix and Julius Agricola.
It was there now; it will always be there. They had it in Merry England and they had it in Gay Paree; and they were seldom merry, and they were rarely gay. The wet, woollen air is over Munich; it is over Paris; it is over Rouen and Madame Bovary; it soaks into England; it gets into boiled mutton and the Brussels sprouts; it gets into Hammersmith on Sunday; it broods over Bloomsbury and the private hotels and the British Museum; it soaks into the land of Europe and keeps the grass green. It has always been there; it will always be there. His eyes are mad and dull; he cannot sleep without the hauntings of phantasmal memory behind the eyes; his brain is overstretched and weary, it gropes ceaselessly around the prison of the skull, it will not cease.
The years are walking in his brain, his father’s voice is sounding in his ears, and in the pulses of his blood the tom-tom’s beat. His living dust is stored with memory: two hundred million men are walking in his bones; he hears the howling of the wind around forgotten eaves; he cannot sleep. He walks in midnight corridors; he sees the wilderness, the moon-drenched forests; he comes to clearings in the moonlit stubble, he is lost, he has never been here, yet he is at home. His sleep is haunted with the dreams of time; wires throb above him in the whiteness, they make a humming in the noonday heat.
The rails are laid across eight hundred miles of golden wheat, the rails are wound through mountains, they curve through clay-yellow cuts, they enter tunnels, they are built up across the marshes, they hug the cliff and follow by the river’s bank, they cross the plains with dust and thunder, and they leap through flatness and the dull scrub-pine to meet the sea.
Then he awakes at morning in a foreign land and thinks of home.
For we have awaked at morning in a foreign land and heard the bitter curse of their indictment, and we know what we know, and it will always be the same.
“One time!” their voices cried, leaning upon a bar the bitter weight of all their discontent. “One time! I’ve been back one time — just once in seven years,” they said, “and Jesus! that was plenty. One time was enough! To hell with that damned country! What have they got now but a lot of cheap spaghetti joints and skyscrapers?” they said. “If you want a drink, you sneak down three back-alleyways, get the once-over from a couple of exprize-fighters, and then plank down a dollar for a shot of varnish that would rot the stomach out of a goat! . . . And the women!”— the voices rose here with infuriated scorn —“What a nice lot of cold-blooded gold-digging bastards THEY’VE turned out to be! . . . I spent thirty dollars taking one of ’em to a show, and to a night-club afterward! When bedtime came do you think I got anything out of it? . . . ‘You may kiss my little hand,’ she says. . . . ‘You may kiss my little — that’s what you may do,’” the voices snarled with righteous bitterness. “When I asked her if she was goin’ to come through she started to yell for the cops! . . . A woman who tried to pull one like that over here would get sent to Siberia! . . . A nice country, I don’t think! . . . Now, get this! ME, I’m a Frenchman, see!” the voice said with a convincing earnestness. “These guys know how to LIVE, see! This is my country where I belong, see! . . . Johnny, luh même chose pour mwah et m’seer! . . . Fill ’em up again, kid.”
“Carpen-TEER!” the voices then rose jeeringly, in true accents of French pugnacity. “Sure, I’m a Frenchman — but Carpen-TEER! Where do yuh get that stuff? Christ! Dempsey could ‘a’ took that frog the best day that he ever saw! . . . An accident!” the voices yelled. “Whattya mean — an accident? Didn’t I see the whole thing with my own eyes? Wasn’t I back there then? . . . Wasn’t I talkin’ t’ Jack himself an hour after the fight was over? . . . An accident! Jesus! The only accident was that he let him last four rounds. ‘I could have taken him in the first if I wanted to,’ Jack says to me. . . . Sure, I’m a Frenchman!” the voice said with belligerent loyalty. “But CarpenTEER! Jesus! Where do you get that stuff?”
And, brother, I have heard the voices you will never hear, discussing the graces of a life more cultured than any you will ever know — and I know and I know, and yet it is still the same.
Bitterly, bitterly, Boston one time more! the flying leaf, the broken cloud —“I think,” said they, “that we will live here now. I think,” they said, “that we are running down to Spain next week, so Francis can do a little writing. . . . And really,” their gay yet cultivated tones continued, “it’s wonderful what you can do here if you only have a little money. . . . YES, my dear!” their refined accents continued in a tone of gay conviction. “It’s really quite incredible, you know. . . . I happen to know of a real honest-to-goodness chateau near Blois that can be had for something less than $7000! . . . It’s all rather incredible, you know,” those light, half-English tones went on, “when you consider what it takes to live in Brookline! . . . Francis has always felt that he would like to do a little writing, and I feel somehow the atmosphere is better here for all that sort of thing — it really is, you know. Don’t you think so?” said those gay and cultivated tones of Boston which you, my brother, never yet have heard. “And after all,” those cultivated tones went on in accents of a droll sincerity, “you see all the people here you really CARE to see, I MEAN, you know! They all come to Paris at one time or another — I MEAN, the trouble really is in getting a little time alone for yourself. . . . Or do you find it so?” the voices suavely, lightly, asked. . . . “Oh, look! look at that — there!” they cried with jubilant elation, “I mean, that boy and his girl there, walking along with their arms around each other! . . . Don’t you just a-do-o-re it? . . . Isn’t it too MA-A-RVELLOUS?” those refined and silvery tones went on with patriotic tenderness. “I mean, there’s something so perfectly sweet and unselfconscious about it all!” the voices said with all the cultivated earnestness of Boston! “Now WHERE? — where? — would you see anything like that at home?” the voices said triumphantly.
(Seldom in Brookline, lady. Oh, rarely, seldom, almost never in the town of Brookline, lady. But on the Esplanade — did you ever go out walking on the Esplanade at night-time, in the hot and sultry month of August, lady? They are not Frenchmen, lady: they are all Jews and Irish and Italians, lady, but the noise of their kissing is like the noise the wind makes through a leafy grove — it is like the great hooves of a hundred thousand cavalry being pulled out of the marshy places of the earth, dear lady.)
“ . . . I MEAN— these people really understand that sort of thing so much better than we do. . . . They’re so much SIMPLER about it. . . . I mean, so much more graceful with that kind of thing. . . . Il faut un peu de sentiment, n’est-ce pas? . . . Or do you think so?” said those light, those gay, those silvery, and half-English tones of cultivated Boston, which you, my brother, never yet have heard.
(I got you, lady. That was French. I know. . . . But if I felt your leg, if I began by fondling gracefully your leg, if in a somewhat graceful Gallic way I felt your leg, and said, “Chérie! Petite chérie!”— would you remember, lady, this is Paris?)
Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston one time more: their silvery voices speak an accent you will never know, and of their loins is marble made, but brother, there are corn-haired girls named Neilsen out in Minnesota, and the blond thighs of the Lundquist girl could break a bullock’s back.
Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston one time more: the French have little ways about them that we do not have, but, brother, they’re still selling cradles down in Georgia, and in New Orléans their eyes are dark, their white teeth bite you to the bone.
Oh, bitterly, bitterly, Boston, one time more, and of their flesh is cod-fish made. Big brother’s still waiting for you with his huge, red fist, behind the barn up in the State of Maine, and they’re still having shotgun marriages at home.
Oh, brother, there are voices you will never hear — ancestral voices prophesying war, my brother, and rare and radiant voices that you know not of, as they have read us into doom. The genteel voices of Oxenford broke once like chimes of weary, unenthusiastic bells across my brain, speaking to me compassionately its judgment on our corrupted lives, gently dealing with the universe, my brother, gently and without labour — gently, brother, gently, it dealt with all of us, with easy condescension and amused disdain.
“I’m afraid, old boy,” the genteel voices of Oxenford remarked, “you’re up against it over th?h. . . . I really am. . . . Th?h’s no peace th? faw the individual any longah,”— the genteel voice went on, unindividual brother. “Obviously,” that tolerant voice instructed me, “obviously, th?h can be no cultuah in a country so completely lackin’ in tradition as is yo?hs. . . . It’s all so objective — if you see what I main — th?h’s no place left faw the innah life,” it said, oh, outward brother! “ . . . We Europeans have often obs?hved (it’s VERY curious, you know) that the AMERican is capable of any real feelin’— it seems quite impawsible faw him to distinguish between true emotion an’ sentimentality — an’ he invayably chooses the lattah! . . . CURIOUS, ISN’T IT? — or do you think so, brother? Of co’se, th?h is yo?h beastly dreadful sex-prawblem. . . . Yo?h women! . . . Oh, deah, deah! . . . Perhaps we’d bettah say no moah . . . but, th?h you AH!”— right in the eye, my brother. “Yo?h country is a matriahky, my deah fellah . . . it really is, you know.” . . . if you can follow us, dear brother. “The women have the men in a state of complete subjection . . . the male is rapidly becomin’ moah sexless an’ emasculated”— that genteel voice of doom went on —“No! — Decidedly you have quite a prawblem befoah you. . . . Obviously th?h can be no cultuah while such a condition puhsists. . . . THAT is why when my friends say to me, ‘You ought to see AMERICA, . . . you really ought, you know.’ . . . I say, ‘No, thanks. . . . If you don’t mind, I’d rathah not. . . . I think I’ll stay at home . . . I’m sorry,’” the compassionate tones of Oxenford went on, “but that’s the way I feel — it really is, you know. . . . Of co’se, I know you couldn’t undahstand my feelin’— faw aftah all, you ah a Yank — but th?h you ah! Sorry!” it said regretfully, as it spoke its courteous but inexorable judgments of eternal exile, brother, and removed for ever the possibility of your ever hearing it. “But that’s the way I feel! I hope you don’t mind,” the voice said gently, with compassion.
No, sir, I don’t mind. We don’t mind, he, she, it, or they don’t mind. Nobody minds, sir, nobody minds. Because, just as you say, sir, oceans are between us, seas have sundered us, there is a magic in you that we cannot fathom — a light, a flame, a glory — an impalpable, indefinable, incomprehensible, undeniable something or other, something which I can never understand or measure because — just as you say, sir — with such compassionate regret, I am-I am-a Yank.
’Tis true, my brother, we are Yanks. Oh, ’tis true, ’tis true! I am a Yank! Yet, wherefore Yank, good brother? Hath not a Yank ears? Hath not a Yank lies, truths, bowels of mercy, fears, joys, and lusts? Is he not warmed by the same sun, washed by the same ocean, rotted by the same decay, and eaten by the same worms as a German is? If you kill him, does he not die? If you sweat him, does he not stink? If you lie with his wife or his mistress, does she not whore, lie, fornicate and betray, even as a Frenchman’s does? If you strip him, is he not naked as a Swede? Is his hide less white than Baudelaire’s? Is his breath more foul than the King of Spain’s? Is his belly bigger, his neck fatter, his face more hoggish, and his eye more shiny than a Munich brewer’s? Will he not cheat, rape, thieve, whore, curse, hate, and murder like any European? Aye — Yank! But wherefore, wherefore Yank — good brother?
Brother, have we come then from a fated stock? Augured from birth, announced by two dark angels, named in our mother’s womb? And for what? For what? Fatherless, to grope our feelers on the sea’s dark bed, among the polyped squirms, the blind sucks and crawls and sea-valves of the brain, loaded with memory that will not die? To cry our love out in the wilderness, to wake always in the night, smiting the pillow in some foreign land, thinking for ever of the myriad sights and sounds of home?
“While Paris Sleeps!”— By God! while Paris sleeps, to wake and walk and not to sleep; to wake and walk and sleep and wake, and sleep again, seeing dawn come at the window-square that cast its wedge before our glazed, half-sleeping eyes, seeing soft, hated foreign light, and breathing soft, dull languid air that could not bite and tingle up the blood, seeing legend and lie and fable wither in our sight as we saw what we saw, knew what we knew.
Sons of the lost and lonely fathers, sons of the wanderers, children of hardy loins, the savage earth, the pioneers, what had we to do with all their bells and churches? Could we feed our hunger on portraits of the Spanish king? Brother, for what? For what? To kill the giant of loneliness and fear, to slay the hunger that would not rest, that would not give us rest.
Of wandering for ever, and the earth again. Brother, for what? For what? For what? For the wilderness, the immense and lonely land. For the unendurable hunger, the unbearable ache, the incurable loneliness. For the exultancy whose only answer is the wild goat-cry. For a million memories, ten thousand sights and sounds and shapes and smells and names of things that only we can know.
For what? For what? Not for a nation. Not for a people, not for an empire, not for a thing we love or hate.
For what? For a cry, a space, an ecstasy. For a savage and nameless hunger. For a living and intolerable memory that may not for a second be forgotten, since it includes all the moments of our lives, includes all we do and are. For a living memory; for ten thousand memories; for a million sights and sounds and moments; for something like nothing else on earth; for something which possesses us.
For something under our feet, and around us and over us; something that is in us and part of us, and proceeds from us, that beats in all the pulses of our blood.
Brother, for what?
First for the thunder of imperial names, the names of men and battles, the names of places and great rivers, the mighty names of the States. The name of The Wilderness; and the names of Antietam, Chancellorsville, Shiloh, Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Cold Harbour, the Wheat Fields, Ball’s Bluff, and the Devil’s Den; the names of Cowpens, Brandywine, and Saratoga; of Death Valley, Chickamauga, and the Cumberland Gap. The names of the Nantahalahs, the Bad Lands, the Painted Desert, the Yosemite, and the Little Big Horn; the names of Yancey and Cabarrus counties; and the terrible name of Hatteras.
Then, for the continental thunder of the States: the names of Montana, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, Maryland, Virginia, and the two Dakotas; the names of Oregon and Indiana, of Kansas and the rich Ohio; the powerful name of Pennsylvania, and the name of Old Kentucky; the undulance of Alabama; the names of Florida and North Carolina.
In the red-oak thickets, at the break of day, long hunters lay for bear — the rattle of arrows in laurel leaves, the war-cries round the painted buttes, and the majestical names of the Indian nations: the Pawnees, the Algonquins, the Iroquois, the Comanches, the Blackfeet, the Seminoles, the Cherokees, the Sioux, the Hurons, the Mohawks, the Navajos, the Utes, the Omahas, the Onondagas, the Chippewas, the Crees, the Chickasaws, the Arapahoes, the Catawbas, the Dakotas, the Apaches, the Croatans, and the Tuscaroras; the names of Powhatan and Sitting Bull; and the name of the great Chief, Rain–In-The–Face. Of wandering for ever, and the earth again: in red-oak thickets, at the break of day, long hunters lay for bear. The arrows rattle in the laurel leaves, and the elm-roots thread the bones of buried lovers. There have been war-cries on the Western trails, and on the plains the gun-stock rusts upon a handful of bleached bones. The barren earth? Was no love living in the wilderness?
The rails go westward in the dark. Brother, have you seen starlight on the rails? Have you heard the thunder of the fast express?
Of wandering for ever, and the earth again — the names of the mighty rails that bind the nation, the wheeled thunder of the names that net the continent: the Pennsylvania, the union Pacific, the Santa Fé, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Chicago and Northwestern, the Southern, the Louisiana and Northern, the Seaboard Air Line, the Chicago, Milwaukee and Saint Paul, the Lackawanna, the New York, New Haven and Hartford, the Florida East Coast, the Rock Island, and the Denver and Rio Grande.
Brother, the names of the engines, the engineers, and the sleeping-cars: the great engines of the Pacific type, the articulated Mallets with three sets of eight-yoked driving-wheels, the 400-ton thunderbolts with J. T. Cline, T. J. McRae, and the demon hawk-eyes of H. D. Campbell on the rails.
The names of the great tramps who range the nation on the fastest trains: the names of the great tramps Oklahoma Red, Fargo Pete, Dixie Joe, Iron Mike, The Frisco Kid, Nigger Dick, Red Chi, Ike the Kike, and The Jersey Dutchman.
By the waters of life, by time, by time, Lord Tennyson stood among the rocks, and stared. He had long hair, his eyes were deep and sombre, and he wore a cape; he was a poet, and there was magic and mystery in his touch, for he had heard the horns of Elfland faintly blowing. And by the waters of life, by time, by time, Lord Tennyson stood among the cold, grey rocks, and commanded the sea to break — break — break! And the sea broke, by the waters of life, by time, by time, as Lord Tennyson commanded it to do, and his heart was sad and lonely as he watched the stately ships (of the Hamburg–American Packet Company, fares forty-five dollars and up, first-class) go on to their haven under the hill, and Lord Tennyson would that his heart could utter the thoughts that arose in him.
By the waters of life, by time, by time: the names of the mighty rivers, the alluvial gluts, the drains of the continent, the throats that drink America (Sweet Thames, flow gently till I end my song). The names of the men who pass, and the myriad names of the earth that abides for ever: the names of the men who are doomed to wander, and the name of that immense and lonely land on which they wander, to which they return, in which they will be buried — America! The immortal earth which waits for ever, the trains that thunder on the continent, the men who wander, and the women who cry out, “Return!”
Finally, the names of the great rivers that are flowing in the darkness (Sweet Thames, flow gently till I end my song.)
By the waters of life, by time, by time: the names of great mouths, the mighty maws, the vast, wet, coiling, never-glutted and unending snakes that drink the continent. Where, sons of men, and in what other land will you find others like them, and where can you match the mighty music of their names? — The Monongahela, the Colorado, the Rio Grande, the Columbia, the Tennessee, the Hudson (Sweet Thames!); the Kennebec, the Rappahannock, the Delaware, the Penobscot, the Wabash, the Chesapeake, the Swannanoa, the Indian River, the Niagara (Sweet Afton!); the Saint Lawrence, the Susquehanna, the Tombigbee, the Nantahala, the French Broad, the Chattahoochee, the Arizona, and the Potomac (Father Tiber!)— these are a few of their princely names, these are a few of their great, proud, glittering names, fit for the immense and lonely land that they inhabit.
Oh, Tiber! Father Tiber! You’d only be a suckling in that mighty land! And as for you, sweet Thames, flow gently till I end my song: flow gently, gentle Thames, be well-behaved, sweet Thames, speak softly and politely, little Thames, flow gently till I end my song.
By the waters of life, by time, by time, and of the yellow cat that smites the nation, of the belly of the snake that coils across the land — of the terrible names of the rivers in flood, the rivers that foam and welter in the dark, that smash the levees, that flood the lowlands for two thousand miles, that carry the bones of the cities seaward on their tides: of the awful names of the Tennessee, the Arkansas, the Missouri, the Mississippi, and even the little mountain rivers, brothers, in the season of the floods.
Delicately they dive for Greeks before the railway station: the canoe glides gently through the portals of the waiting-room (for whites). Full fathom five the carcass of old man Lype is lying (of his bones is coral made) and delicately they dive for luncheon-room Greeks before the railway station.
Brother, what fish are these? The floatage of sunken rooms, the sodden bridal-veils of poverty, the slime of mined parlour plush, drowned faces in the family album; and the blur of long-drowned eyes, blurred features, whited, bloated flesh.
Delicately they dive for Greeks before the railway station. The stern, good, half-drowned faces of the brothers Trade and Mark survey the tides. Cardui! Miss Lillian Leitzell twists upon one arm above the flood; the clown, half-sunken to his waist, swims upward out of swirling yellow; the tiger bares his teeth above the surges of a river he will never drink. The ragged tatters of the circus posters are plastered on soaked boards. And delicately they dive for Greeks before the railway station.
Have we not seen them, brother?
For what are we, my brother? We are a phantom flare of grieved desire, the ghostling and phosphoric flicker of immortal time, a brevity of days haunted by the eternity of the earth. We are an unspeakable utterance, an insatiable hunger, an unquenchable thirst; a lust that bursts our sinews, explodes our brains, sickens and rots our insides, and rips our hearts asunder. We are a twist of passion, a moment’s flame of love and ecstasy, a sinew of bright blood and agony, a lost cry, a music of pain and joy, a haunting of brief, sharp hours, an almost captured beauty, a demon’s whisper of unbodied memory. We are the dupes of time.
For, brother, what are we?
We are the sons of our father, whose face we have never seen, we are the sons of our father, whose voice we have never heard, we are the sons of our father, to whom we have cried for strength and comfort in our agony, we are the sons of our father, whose life like ours was lived in solitude and in the wilderness, we are the sons of our father, to whom only can we speak out the strange, dark burden of our heart and spirit, we are the sons of our father, and we shall follow the print of his foot for ever.