(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.