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.