The Party at Jack's

THE PARTY AT JACK’S

•   •   •

THE PARTY AT JACK’S

•   •   •

THOMAS WOLFE

•   •   •

Edited and with an introduction by

SUZANNE STUTMAN & JOHN L. IDOL, JR.

The University of North Carolina Press

•   •   •

Chapel Hill & London

© 1995 The University of

North Carolina Press and Paul Gitlin, Administrator, C.T.A.,

Estate of Thomas Wolfe.

By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University

Introduction by Suzanne Stutman and John L. Idol, Jr.

© 1995 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Title page illustration by Ed Lindlof

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wolfe, Thomas, 1900–1938.

The party at Jack’s / by Thomas Wolfe; edited and with an introduction by

Suzanne Stutman and John L. Idol, Jr.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-8078-2206-X

1. New York (N.Y.)—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction.

2. Apartment houses—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 3. Entertaining—New York

(N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Fires—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Stutman, Suzanne.

II. Idol, John L. III. Title.

PS3545.O337P37    1995

813′.52—dc2o

94-34179

CIP

99  98  97  96  95      5  4  3  2  1

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED.

FOR LOUIS D. RUBIN, JR.,

keeper of the torch

and

FOR RICHARD S. KENNEDY,

who made it all possible

CONTENTS

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Introduction

Editorial Policy and Text

Acknowledgments

THE PARTY AT JACK’S, by Thomas Wolfe

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

Piggy Logan

The Family

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

Love Is Enough?

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]).