INTRODUCTION

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Background

At Oteen in the North Carolina mountains during the summer of 1937, where he was busily revising a piece for which he had made notebook entries in 1930, Thomas Wolfe started adding fresh material. Pleased with his efforts, despite numerous interruptions from kinfolk and literary lion hunters, Wolfe wrote to his literary agent, Elizabeth Nowell, to report how his work was going:

I have completely rewritten it and rewoven it. It is a very difficult piece of work, but I think it is now a single thing, as much a single thing as anything I’ve ever written. I am not through with it yet. There is a great deal more revision to be done, but I am sending it to you anyway to let you see what I have done, and I think you will be able to see what it may be like when I’m finished with it. (Nowell, ed., The Letters of Thomas Wolfe [New York: Scribner’s, 1956], 651)

The piece was The Party at Jack’s, portions of which have seen print through the efforts of Elizabeth Nowell and Edward Aswell, Wolfe’s editor at Harper’s, who included portions of it in You Can’t Go Home Again.

Just when he first wrote the parts he was now rewriting cannot be fixed precisely. Besides bits of dialogue done as early as 1930, the earliest definite outline of a chronological sequence for the events occurring on the day of the party appeared on a manila envelope dating to the fall of 1932. Here Wolfe scrawled

MORNING: THREE IN A CITY

I    Jacobs-German background-Schoolboy scene

II   Jacobs Awake

III  Esther and the Maid

IV  Jacobs and Esther.

Since Wolfe used such outlines both to show what he wanted to write and to list those pieces already done for some project he had in mind, it is impossible to claim that the present outline launched what he would in time call The Party at Jack’s.

Whatever came first, manuscript drafts of the story as he conceived it or the outline recounting what he had done, papers in the Wisdom Collection in the Houghton Library reveal that he set to work to create accounts of Frederick and Esther Jacobs and one of Esther’s maids, Katy Fogarty. Frederick (Fritz), a German Jew, dreams about his schoolboy days and his return to the Rhineland after becoming fabulously rich in America. He awakens to luxuriate in his princely Park Avenue apartment (bMS Am 1883 [932]). Esther awakens in the tastefully furnished Jacobs household to enjoy her awareness of her body and to chastise Katy for becoming a victim of strong drink. This episode ends with Esther musing further on what she’s made of her life and the wonder she feels about her lot as a beautiful, talented, admired woman (bMS Am 1883 [933]). Following their separate awakenings, Fritz and Esther come together. He proudly reads reviews of her stage designs for an otherwise undistinguished play. Together, they revel in her success. On his way to his office, he thinks about the lies, thefts, and chicanery of his driver, dismissing his behavior as typical of servants. Upon reaching his office, he meets a fellow broker, Rosenthal, who is a bona fide crackpot. Tales of Rosenthal’s crazy behavior are told by his Irish secretary (bMS Am 1883 [934]).

As arranged in the Wisdom Collection, the next manuscript indicates further development of the story.

Synopsis

1. Before sunrise

2. Morning [Jacob’s Dream
[Character of Jacobs The Day
[Jacobs getting up
Mrs. Esther Jacobs
Esther with Jacobs
Esther’s morning-canceled
Esther with Alma, Edith, Freddy
Esther’s morning

3. Noon

4. Afternoon

5. Evening

The chronological scheme set down here would hold throughout Wolfe’s many revisions and provide a classic touch to his use of time, less than twenty-four hours from the awakening scenes to George Webber’s farewell words to Esther Jack. In outline form as Wolfe looked forward to embodying this material in his chronicle of his new protagonist’s (George Webber’s) life, that scheme appears in the William Wisdom Collection of Wolfe manuscripts at the Houghton Library under the index bMS Am 1883 (1336).

Part IV
You Can’t Go Home Again
(1930–1938)
Book
The Party at Jack’s (1930)

Chapters:

Morning

Morning: Jack Asleep

Morning: Jack Erect

Morning: Jack Afloat

Morning: Mrs. Jack Awake

Morning: Mrs. Jack And The Maid

Morning: Jack And His Wife

Morning: The World That Jack Built

The Great Building (April, 1930)

The Elevator Men

Before The Party (Mrs. Jack And The Maids)

Piggy Logan

The Family (Mrs. Jack, Alma, etc.)

The Party Beginning

The Guests Arriving

The Lover

Mr. Hirsch Was Wounded Sorrowfully

Piggy Logan’s Circus

The Guests Departing: The Fire

The Fire: The Outpouring of the Honeycomb

The Fire: The Tunneled Rock

After The Fire: These Two Together

This outline probably reflects the story as Wolfe had shaped it before leaving New York for a speaking engagement at Purdue University in 1938. (It is the basis of our reconstruction of The Party at Jack’s.)

Exactly how Wolfe arrived at this scheme cannot be precisely traced in surviving versions of the story. The central event, a party and fire at the Park Avenue apartment of Aline Bernstein, his mistress and patron, occurred on 3 January 1930 and was to be included as part of Eugene Gant’s story. But over a period of years, Wolfe added actions and characters, finally reshaping the story to show shifts in characterization, symbolic import, and values (more about these later). Although he had settled on a time scheme, he remained uncertain about whether his fictional surrogate would attend the party and witness the fire. One draft (bMS Am 1883 [985]) follows the storyline from preparation for the party through Piggy Logan’s circus on to the fire and its aftermath. In this version, Esther telephones her lover to report on the party and to tell him about the unexpected fire. With George Webber not on the scene, Stephen Hook figures more prominently here than in the version where Esther’s lover makes a belated appearance at the party. As he filled out the action, Wolfe faced decisions about what his surrogate would do once Wolfe had decided to have him appear. How would he show his resentment that Esther had insisted that he be there? With whom would he converse? How much would he eat and drink? How would he respond to Piggy Logan and his wire circus act? What would he do during the fire and its aftermath? How would he reveal his decision to break with Esther? In one episode involving Esther’s lover—not called George or Eugene—Esther, seeing her lover and Lily Mandell talking together, comes to them, calls them her best friends, and wishes they could know each other better. She senses the raw sexual attraction between Lily and her lover and leads them off to a bedroom, where they become the two-backed animal. This episode (bMS Am 1883 [938]) complicates Esther’s character considerably. Interpreted charitably, it reveals her as someone capable of rising above sexual possessiveness in order to foster friendship. Read uncharitably, it reduces her to a panderer, a wily spider spinning a web of iniquity, showing her to be no better morally than the decadent, privileged crowd she has invited to her party.

Having opted to include Esther’s lover at the party, Wolfe makes him largely a guest among many, many guests until the outbreak of the fire and the hurried departure of most of the other partygoers. Those partygoers and their interactions would come to constitute the central portions of his novel. Their numbers could swell or shrink as Wolfe’s needs and purposes changed. (They could also dwindle—and did—when Elizabeth Nowell and Edward Aswell shaped the material for its appearance in Scribners Magazine and You Cant Go Home Again.) Prominent among those added is Roy Farley, a homosexual, whose mincing ways create laughter and applause. Like Saul Levinson and his wife and a sculptor named Krock, Farley would not survive as a partygoer when Nowell and Aswell edited Wolfe’s various drafts for publication. Cut from the guest list, with some of his traits then assigned to his father, was Freddie Jack, his removal being made with Wolfe’s consent as Nowell began to condense the story for periodical publication. (She later suggested to Aswell that Freddie be restored in order to correct some inconsistencies in Fritz Jack’s character, a suggestion Aswell chose to ignore.)

Wolfe’s potential list of partygoers originated in the guests gathered at Aline Bernstein’s home to enjoy a performance of Alexander Calder’s celebrated wire circus. Excepting such respected persons as Thomas Beer and his sister, Wolfe cast a satiric eye at most of Bernstein’s guests, largely an assemblage of New York’s financial and artistic elite. True to his longtime practice, he sometimes used real names in early drafts, a factor that forced Aswell later to check with Bernstein to learn who could possibly bring a libel suit against Harper’s. Aswell’s concern probably stemmed from conversations with Nowell. She had earlier told Maxwell Perkins that the longer version of the story “may be libelous since it tells the dirt on the private lives of practically every person at the party” (personal letter from Nowell to Perkins, Dec. 1938). However long or short the final list, Wolfe obviously meant to present Esther Jack’s guests, in the main, as privileged, corrupt, decadent, hypocritical, and hostile to the true artist.

A further stage of development, the introduction of working-class characters, first involved two elevator men, one young, the other elderly. The older man, John Enborg (the surname finally chosen), grateful to have a job, defends his privileged employers. His reasons to speak for them are challenged by a third representative of the working class, Hank, who apparently emerged as the voice of organized labor when Wolfe reworked his material at Oteen. In the handwritten pages dating from Oteen and in typed pages done in New York after Wolfe’s return to the city, these working-class men are both individualized and, except for Hank, made more sympathetic. If Wolfe were to have his surrogate cast his lot with the working class, proletarian traits and ideas needed to be understood. To make the proletarian pill less easy to swallow, Wolfe coated Hank with more than a little sourness. If he were to show that old loyalties to the upper classes were no longer fitting in a greedy, corrupt age, he needed someone to provide tough arguments against John Enborg’s nostalgic attachment to such wealthy people as the Jacks.

Wolfe came to see, as Richard S. Kennedy convincingly argued, that the building in which the workers served the wealthy could be presented as a symbol of the American economic system. Efficient, strong, durable, and secure as it seemed to be, the building was honeycombed with shafts and situated on tunnels connecting it, by rail, to the rest of the nation. Problems in the shafts or tunnels could weaken or undermine it. Without the workers, the building could not operate effectively. The more he became socially and economically aware, the more Wolfe believed he must fashion a story capable of addressing some of the nation’s ills. Thus as The Party at Jack’s evolved from its first drafts through those portions written at Oteen and later in New York, Wolfe was not content to have his surrogate reject Esther’s world because it was artistically decadent and, at bottom, hostile to the creative spirit: Now he would warn his fellow citizens about the callousness, greed, and hypocrisy of the privileged.

His story now had the three unities: a single setting at the Jacks’ Park Avenue apartment, a party interrupted by a fire and its aftermath, and time running from the Jacks’ awakening until their retiring to bed. Until the material could take its place in some work in progress, the narrative of Eugene Gant’s and George Webber’s discoveries and deeds, Wolfe frequently listed episodes and tallied his word count, giving variously 18,000, 35,000, and 60,000, the last a reckoning taken as he recorded pieces completed after 1935 and 1936. The variations perhaps resulted from additions made to the story over the years or possibly, for the lowest number, the maximum that Nowell considered marketable to a periodical. In her effort to help him place the story before he went to Oteen, Nowell trimmed it to 25,000 words. (She later submitted a 26,000-word version to Redbook and after its rejection there slashed more than 10,000 more words to make it acceptable to Scribner’s, where it appeared in May 1939.)

Although Wolfe had participated in trimming the version sent to Redbook, he was by no means ready to put the story aside. Settled in at Oteen, he turned to it once more, restoring text that he and Nowell had sliced for Redbook and adding to it, thinking as he did so that it would be “very long, difficult and closely woven.” He went on to tell Hamilton Basso,

I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but if I succeed with it, it ought to be good. It is one of the most curious and difficult problems I have been faced with in a long time and maybe I shall learn something from it. It is a story that in its essence and without trying or intending to be, has got to be somewhat Proustian—that is to say its life depends upon the most thorough and comprehensive investigation of character—or characters, for there are more than thirty characters in it. In addition, however, there is a tremendous amount of submerged action which involves the lives of all these people and which includes not only the life of a great apartment house but also a fire and the death of two people. I suppose really a whole book could be made out of it but I am trying to do it in a story. (Letters of Thomas Wolfe, 631)

A few days later (29 July 1937) he told Nowell much the same thing and then, sometime in late August, that he was sending the story to her, adding that he now considered it “a single thing” but still in need of revision. Back in New York, he resumed work on it, eventually producing a typescript from which Aswell shaped the portion of You Cant Go Home Again that he called “The World That Jack Built.” From the various drafts in the Wisdom Collection, we have attempted to restore to Wolfe and American literature the “single thing” that Wolfe named The Party at Jack’s.

Themes and Characters

Many filaments in Wolfe’s complex web of themes—those that he spins out time after time—coalesce to make this work one of his richest. Here he spreads before readers a table so groaning with food that both Bacchus and Brueghel would surely rush to pay compliments to Esther and her cook and maids. Here he gives such meticulous attention to clothing, furnishings, and wall hangings that the swankiness of the Jacks’ Park Avenue apartment becomes palpably real, the fullness of Wolfe’s description rivaling his detailing of the Pierces’ luxurious Hudson River mansion. This attention to how well, how sumptuously, and how far above the struggles and worries of the working class the Jacks live affords Wolfe another chance to chronicle life among the privileged class. His account stretches from the dream of wealth, power, and fame of Frederick Jack in Germany through Frederick’s and Esther’s awakening voluptuously in quarters where his dream has become a proud reality. In relation to Wolfe’s thematic interests in the present work and elsewhere in his canon, Frederick’s rise from the status of an immigrant German Jew to his position as a lord of wealth and sophistication invites contrastive and comparative looks at the yearnings of another provincial, George Webber. Comfortable and secure though the Jacks appear in their Park Avenue surroundings, Wolfe provides hints of coming trouble by having trains send tremors through their building. Unlike trains in other passages in his canon, where Wolfe tends to be lyrical about their size and might, trains in this work are associated with the potential collapse of structures that could be taken as symbolic of the nation’s capitalistic economy. More than that, the tracks carrying them beneath the proud towers of Manhattan come to represent here the ties existing between the rich, the poor, and those in between. In a sense, the tracks parallel Herman Melville’s monkeyrope as a symbol of men’s interconnections.

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.

After the party, the noises of the great city once again enter the Jacks’ apartment; the cause is the outbreak of a fire in the building. Almost immediately the intimate little group remaining with Esther undergoes some frenzy when it hears the sirens and smells smoke, but eventually everyone joins the “ghostly” procession and leaves the building. The honeycomb of the apartment building takes on an atmosphere of unreality as the dim lights and thick, acrid smoke cast a haze over this world. Wolfe makes this frightening ordeal of escape a kind of hell. From this strange world, a “tide of refugees … marched steadily” out of the building. It seems as if, the old order destroyed as in Frederick’s dream, all humanity comes together in “an extraordinary and bizarre conglomeration—a parade of such fantastic quality as had never been witnessed in the world before.” The lover is moved by this “enormous honeycomb of life,” young and old, rich and poor, speaking together a babel of languages representative of all the languages of mankind. Indeed, the apartment building itself seems a little world representative of the larger world of the city, “with a whole universe of flesh, and blood, a world incarnate with all the ecstasy, anguish, hatred, joy, and vexed intrigue that life could know.” Only a great writer or painter like Shakespeare or Brueghel (or Wolfe perhaps) can present the enormity of such a spectacle. George realizes that this great event unraveling before him, this symphonic sweep of brotherhood and humanity, seems to take on the majesty of a vision, and he notes as well a sense of prophetic doom. For this mass of humanity gathered before him seems like victims of some great shipwreck, like the Titanic, “all the huge honeycomb of life … assembled now, at this last hour of peril, in a living fellowship—the whole family of earth, and all its classes, at length united on these slanting decks.” Man is indeed united in the vast honeycomb of life, and every action is ineluctably interwoven.

Eventually the fire is brought under control and the crowd is dispersed, but there is a sense of foreboding within the small group taking refuge in a little drugstore nearby. These “lords and masters of the earth” have for a moment relinquished the illusion of control to which they have become accustomed. They are like “shipwrecked voyagers … caught up and borne onwards, as unwitting of the power that ruled them as blind flies fastened to the revolutions of a wheel.” Like Hemingway’s ants upon a burning log, Wolfe’s inhabitants are little more than insects blinded to the larger world beyond their small realities and propelled from life to death by forces greater than their own.

The various cells in which concurrent action is taking place are exposed for us to see. For example, in the vast hive of the tunnels beneath the apartment building decisions are being made that will affect the lives of 500 train passengers traveling outward to their individual destinies, and some design begins to formulate itself: “lights changed and flashed … poignant as remembered grief, burned there upon the checkerboard of the eternal dark.” As the men in the train tunnel work to restore “order,” firemen free the bodies of two trapped elevator operators whose deaths will be noted by a hardened reporter in the few lines he files with his newspaper.

Faced with a common danger, these Park Avenue apartment dwellers and their high-society guests had mingled with maids, butlers, cooks, and other workers and had briefly felt a common bond of humanity. With the all-clear signal, the privileged class returns to the building with the assorted retainers. The old order is quickly reestablished. Nothing has really changed; the sense of brotherhood, indeed, the prophetic hope for the future, has vanished like smoke from the extinguished fire, as the old “ordered formality” and “cold restraint” once more prevail. Class animosity boils up again when Esther feels bruised by Henry’s cold and unyielding lack of response. She longs for what she will probably never again have, the cordial and familiar humanity of someone like John Enborg and Herbert Anderson.

Like her lover, Esther is aware that something great and perilous has happened, something that somehow threatens their very lives: “When you think of how sort of big—things have got— … And how a fire can break out in the same building where you live and you won’t even know about it—I mean, there’s something sort of terrible about it, isn’t there?” She is aware as well of the greatness of the spectacle in which both she and George have been participants and observers. But when she attempts to return the world to just the two of them, to the fantasy of the “good child’s” dream, George realizes that he has already left her behind.

George now knows that his allegiances lie elsewhere. George must search for that vaster world, the world of fellowship, deprivation, and social injustice awaiting an articulate voice. Esther is indeed noble and worthy of his love if viewed in isolation from her class, but she is doomed like the others; and if George stays, he too will perish. Two good men have already perished, their deaths the direct result of their eagerness to serve the class that the Jacks represent. “The dark green wagon … with a softly throbbing motor” that removes the bodies of the dead is reminiscent of the earlier imagery of automobiles, vehicles associated with the frenzied life of a money-grubbing city. As Mr. Jack prepares for sleep, he feels that peace has been restored. “It was so solid, splendid, everlasting and so good. And it was all as if it had always been—all so magically itself as it must be saved for its magical increasements, forever.” Yet the reader, remembering the tremors that Frederick has felt before and now senses again, understands that all is not the same. The world that Jack has built, the world of moneyed luxury and power, is an endangered world, precipitously resting on a foundation now cracking apart.

In The Party at Jack’s, Thomas Wolfe conceived and wrought to a virtually complete state a social fable of universal proportions, a work prefiguring other socially conscious themes and images in the Webber cycle, a work offering powerful and prophetic testimony of the writer he was striving to become.