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.

Images

EDITORIAL POLICY AND TEXT

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To present The Party at Jack’s as Wolfe left it in the hands of his new editor at Harpers’s, Edward Aswell, we had two major questions to answer: What material should we include? What kinds of textual flaws should we silently correct? Otherwise, we intended to reproduce Wolfe’s words as we found them. Although Wolfe thought of this work as his “most densely woven piece of writing” (Letters of Thomas Wolfe, 653), it has never been published in its entirety. The piece by that title appearing in Scribners Magazine (May 1939) was trimmed to fewer than 17,000 words by his agent, Elizabeth Nowell, and Aswell used a truncated version in You Can’t Go Home Again.

Our silent corrections cover such typographical errors as transposed letters, missing letters, and the typists’ failure to include opening or closing quotation marks. We silently corrected misspelled words (e.g., ecstasy for ecstacy) and changed commas to semicolons if, in our judgment, a comma splice created a misreading. We added capitals to proper nouns where lower-case letters appeared; we italicized the titles of books; we changed Jacobs to Jack and Alice to Esther in accordance with Wolfe’s decision to use a different surname and given name in those instances where that change had not been made in the text; we added accent marks to foreign words and phrases as required by convention; we marked an ellipsis by three spaced periods instead of following the inconsistent practice of Wolfe’s typists in their use of two to ten unspaced periods or two or more widely spaced hyphens; we added terminal periods that had not been typed, and we supplied, as needed, commas before nouns of direct address. Although the name of the Jacks’ maid sometimes appeared as Katy, we used Molly throughout in accordance with Wolfe’s greater frequency of use of the latter. After debating whether to hold to the name Will for the elevator operator that the Jacks attempt to have carry them to safety, we decided to use John in accordance with Wolfe’s statement that elevator operators named John and Herbert had died during the fire.

Our most substantial editorial act was to delete repetitive passages occasioned by Wolfe’s practice of rewriting an episode or section as he added fresh material. Our guide through a maze of drafts was Wolfe’s outline as given in the Introduction. That outline, we are convinced, forms the basis of the “single thing” Wolfe came to see as he reworked the piece.

We incorporated Wolfe’s handwritten corrections and followed his directions for inserting additional handwritten or typed material, with one exception. At the end of the typescript where Wolfe had changed Mr. Jack to Mrs. Jack, and the pronouns accordingly, we left the wording as it appeared in the typescript. From Nowell’s notes to Aswell, we knew that Wolfe’s changes there were prompted by his hope of cutting the piece for Redbook. Restoring the passage to its original state has the added advantage of giving the piece the powerful thematic closure that Wolfe intended.

Manuscript copy in the Wisdom Collection, some of it perhaps dating as early as 1930, begins with a draft of Frederick Jacobs’s dream of his boyhood days in Germany (bMS Am 1883 [932]) and continues through fifteen additional sets (933–49), ending with lists of characters attending the party, notes on the tunnels and cellars beneath the solid-looking building on Park Avenue, and a page narrating Mrs. Jack’s emergence from her room to see whether everything is ready for her party. Most of these hundreds of manuscript pages were later given to typists. Where typists mistakenly read a word or phrase, Wolfe made corrections. On these typewritten pages he sometimes added text interlinearly or in the margins. Occasionally, he struck out words or sentences.