Great Paper: "You Can Never Go Home Again" By Thomas Wolfe ~The Charming Abode of Mr.Webber~

Great Paper: You can never go Home Again By Thomas Wolfe

~The Charming Abode of Mr.Webber~

Two things that i think Thomas Wolfe is unparalleled at doing in his writing; his dynamic viewpoints from which he writes to tell the story, and the overflowing amount of detail that he puts into describing the setting in which the story takes place. A great combo, that which while reading, gives the feeling of being personally walked through the pages of the book. The words filled with personality and style almost seem to rise up into your eyes and paint for you a fully animated image, like you are watching a motion picture with every unique detail perfectly in place in your imagination. This piece i believe, has both those elements well established. At the start of the chapter in the start of the second half of the book Thomas Wolfe introduces the reader to the new living quarters of the Main Character, who has moved from his wealthy condo in Manchester, to a small tenement in Brooklyn in order to get away from Newspaper journalists and magazine critics. Wolfe, takes the reader on a personal hypothetical tour of Mr.Webber’s habitat, and gives the reader all they need to know to understand how his Main Character is fairing. Take a look... 

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The tragic light of evening falls upon the huge and rusty jungle of South brooklyn. It falls without glare or warmth upon the faces of all the men with dead eyes and flesh of tallow gray as they lean upon their window sills at the sad, hushed end of the day.   

If at such a time you walk down this narrow street, between the mean and shabby houses, past the eyes of all the men who lean their quietly at their open windows in their shirt sleeves, and turn in at the alley here and follow the two-foot strip of broken concrete pavement that skirts the alley on one side, and go to the very last shabby house down at the end, and climb up the flight of well worn steps to the front entrance, and knock loudly at the door with your bare knuckles(the bell is out of order), and then wait patiently until someone comes, and ask whether Mr. George Webber lives here, you will be informed that he most certainly does, and that if you will just come in and go down this stairway to the basement and knock at the door there on your right, you will probably find him in.  

So you go down the stairway to the damp and gloomy basement hall, thread your way between the dusty old boxes, derelict furniture, and other lumber stored there in the passage, rap on the door that has been indicated to you, and Mr.Webber himself will open it and usher you right into his room, his home, his castle. 

The place may seem to you more like a dungeon than a room that a man would voluntarily elect to live in. It is long and narrow, running parallel to the hall from front to rear, and the only natural light that enters it comes through two small windows rather high up in the wall, facing each other at opposite ends, and these are heavily guarded with iron bars, placed there by some past owner of the house to keep the south Brooklyn thugs from breaking in. 

The room is furnished adequate but not so luxuriously as to deprive it of a certain functional and Spartan simplicity. In the back half there is an iron bed with sagging springs, a broken-down dresser with a cracked mirror above it, two kitchen chairs, and a steamer trunk and some old suitcases that have seen much use. At the front end, under the yellow glow of an electric light suspended from the ceiling by a cord, there is a large desk, very much scarred and battered, with the handles missing on most of the drawers, and on the front of it there is a straight backed chair made out of some old, dark wood. In the center, ranged against the walls, where they serve to draw the two ends of the room together into aesthetic unit, stand an ancient gate-legged table, so much of its dark green paint flaked off that dainty pink complexion of its forgotten youth shows through all over, a tier of book-shelves, unpainted, and two large crates or packing cases, their thick top boards pried off to reveal great stacks of ledgers and of white and yellow manuscript within. On the top of the desk, on the table, on the book-shelves, and all over the floor, are scattered, like fallen leaves in autumn woods, immense masses of loose paper with writing on every sheet, and everywhere are books, piled up on the sides and leaning crazily against each other. 

This dark cellar is George Webber's abode and working quarters. Here, in the winter, the walls, which sink four feet below the level of the ground, sweat continuously with clammy drops of water. Here, in summer, it is he who does the sweating. 

His neighbors, he will tell you, are for the most part Armenians, Italians, Spaniards, Irishmen, and Jews. In short, Americans. They live in all the shacks, tenements, and slums in all raw, rusty streets and alleys of South Brooklyn.
And what is it you smell? 

 Oh, that! Well, you see, he shares impartially with his neighbors a piece of piece of public property in the vicinity; it belongs to all of them in common, and it gives to South Brooklyn its own distinctive atmosphere. It is the old Gowanus Canal, and that aroma you speak of is nothing but the huge symphonic stink of it, cunningly compacted of unnumbered separate purefections. It is interesting sometimes to try to count them. There is in it not only the noisome stenches of stagnant sewer, but also the smells of melted glue, burned rubber, and smoldering rags, the odors of a boneyard horse, long dead, the incense of putrefying offal, the fragrance of decaying cats, old tomatoes, rotten cabbage, and prehistoric eggs. And how does he stand it?

Well, one gets used to it.  

One can get used to anything, just as all these other people do. 

They never think of the smell, they never speak of it, they'd probably miss it if they moved away.        To this place, then, George Webber has come, and here "holed in" with a kind of dogged stubbornness with a touch of desperation.    

And you will be not far wrong if you surmise that he has come here deliberately, driven by a resolution to seek out the most forlorn and isolated hiding spot that he could find.  

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The place Mr.Thomas Wolfe is describing sounds in all his literacy like the worst place on earth. But with the all the character-ability that he goes on telling about it, as a reader you can almost wish that you lived there yourself, instead of his novelty Main C, George Webber, who is holed up in the bottom of this apartment building cellar like a mad scientist working on some wild crazy experiment. I defiantly do, as both a writer and a lover of odd habitats. I'm sure many other people would as well.