Great Paper: You Can Never Go Home Again By Thomas Wolfe
~ The Fire and the Fox~
1st person MC narrator George Webber wonders verbosely about most things throughout the book “You can never go home again” by Thomas Wolfe. In the passage, he is thinking to himself about a particular agent to the book company he has sent his recently finished book off to(he’s an author). Over the past week he has come to get to know this agent and his employer very well from repetitive contact through both business and personal reasons. He silently reminisces about the reading agent Otto Hausman, and his employer, the head editor of the publishing company George has sent his book off to, Fox Edwards. The problems that they face as a publishing company in a world that will put mediocrity before genius, and smother the fires of revelation before giving them their necessary coxing. All because the world of the "published" publicity is run by the mundane, and not the brilliant.
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“It was not until George Webber had become well acquainted with both men that he began to penetrate the mystery. Foxhall Edwards and Otto Hauser -- to know them both, to see them working in the same office, each in his own way, was to understand them both as perhaps neither could have been understood completely by himself . Each man, by being what he was, revealed to George the secret springs of character which had made the two of them so much alike -- and so utterly different. There may have been a time when an intense and steady flame had been alive in the quiet depths of Otto Hauser’s spirit. But that was before he knew what it was like to be a great editor. Now he had seen it all for himself, and he wanted none of it. For ten years he had watched Fox Edwards and well knew what was needed: the pure flame living in the midst of darkness; the constant, quiet, and relentless effort of the will to accomplish what the pure flame burned for, what the spirit knew: the unspoken agony of that constant effort as the world's blind and brutal force of ignorance, hostility, prejudice, and intolerance which were opposed to it -- the fools of age, the fools of prudery, the fools of genteelness, fogyism, and nice-nellyism, the fools of bigotry, philistinism, jealousy, and envy, and, worst of all, the simple, utter, sheer damn fools of nature!
Oh, to burn so, so to be consumed, spent by the passion of this constant flame! And for what? For What? And Why? Because this obscure kid from Tennessee, some tenant farmer’s son from Georgia, or some country doctor’s boy in North Dakota -- Untitled, unpedigreed, unhallowed by fools standards -- had been touched with genius, and so had striven to give a tongue to the high passion of his loneliness, to wrest from his locked spirit his son’s language and a portion of his of the tongue of his unuttered brothers. To find a channel in the blind immensity of this harsh land for the pent tides of his creation, and to make perhaps, in this howling wilderness of life some carving and some dwelling of his own -- all this before the world’s fool-bigotry, fool ignorance, fool cowardice, fool-faddism, fool-mockery, fool styilism, and fool hatred for anyone who has not been corrupted, beaten, and a fool had either quenched the hot, burning passion with ridicule, contempt, denial, and oblivion or else corrupt the strong will with the pollutions of fool success. It was for this that such as fox must burn and suffer -- to keep that flame of agony alive in the spirit of some inspired and stricken boy until the world of fools had taken it into their custody and betrayed it!
Otto Hauser had seen it all.
And in the end what was the reward for such a one as fox? To achieve the lonely and unhoped for victories one-by-one, and to see the very fools who had denied them to acclaim them as their own To lapse again to search, to silence, and to waiting while fools greedily pocketed as their own coin of one man's spirit, proudly hailed as their discovery the treasure of another's exploration, loudly celebrated their own vision as they took unto themselves the fulfillment of another's prophecy.
Ah the heart must break at last -- the heart of Fox, as well as the heart of genius, the lost boy; the frial, small heart of a man must falter, stop at last from beating; the the heart of folly would beat on forever. So Otto Hauser would have none of it.
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