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Asheville reacts to Look Homeward, Angel



An amazing new novel is just off the press which is of great and unique interest to Asheville. This community in fact, is going to be astounded by it. Some few well known residents may be shocked into chills. Others will probably be severely annoyed. Many others will snicker and laugh.

The reason is that the book is written about Asheville and Asheville people in the plainest of plain language. It is the autobiography of an Asheville boy. The story of the first twenty years of his life is bared with a frankness and detail rarely seen in print. The author paints himself and his home circle, as well as neighbors, friends and acquaintances with bold, daring lines, sparing nothing and shielding nothing.

Thomas Wolfe, son of Mrs. Julia E. Wolfe, of 48 Spruce street, wrote the book, the title of which is “Look Homeward Angel.” The novel is just off the press of Scribners. The scene of the work is laid in Asheville with only momentary shifts to Chapel Hill and other cities. The major part of the action takes place in Asheville while virtually all the characters are residents of this city.

Young Wolfe, now 29 years old and a teacher in New York University, covers the first twenty years of his life in this novel. It is the utter frank story of himself, his home, neighbors and people about town. It is quite apparent from the book that the author was not happy. His life here, as he boldly sketches it, was crowded with pain, bitterness and ugliness. While characters in the book are undoubtedly painted true to life, according to the author’s idea of it, the names are changed and juggled around. However, any resident of Asheville who knew this city and its people during the period 1900 to 1920 will not have the slightest trouble in filling in the names of the real persons whom Wolfe made characters in his book. Asheville in this novel goes by the name of Altamount.

The sub-title of the novel terms it “A Story of the Buried Life.” The character and quality of this unusual book is indicated with considerable clearness by an excerpt from a letter by the author which accompanied the manuscript when it was submitted to the publishers:

“The book covers the life of a large family (the Gants of Altamount) for a period of twenty years. It tries to describe not only the visible outer lives of all these people, but even more their buried lives. “This book was written in simpleness and nakedness of soul. When I began to write the book, I got back something of a child’s innocency and wonder. It has in it much that to me is painful and ugly, but, without sentimentality or dishonesty it seems to me that pain has inevitable fruition in beauty. And the book has in it sin and terror and darkness—ugly dry lusts, cruelty—the dark, the evil, the forbidden. But, I believe it has many other things as well and I wrote it with strong joy, without counting the costs, for I was sure at the time that the whole of my intention—which was to come simply and unsparingly to naked life, and to tell all of my story without affectation—would be apparent. “What merit the book has I do not know. It sometimes seems to me that it presents a picture of American life that I have never seen elsewhere.”


Has Real Literary Merit
To the outsider, “Look Homeward Angel” is an outstanding novel possessed of unquestioned literary merit. The portraiture is vivid, the style is incisive, the narrative flows with a freedom that sweeps along the most resisting reader. In the preface, Wolfe raises the question whether the work is really autobiographical and then hastens to beg the question with clever twists of phrases. The net result is that the reader is left to make his own decision and the verdict of the Asheville readers will be unmistakably decisive. The intrinsic proof is overwhelming that Wolfe is relating the story of his own life and of those other lives which interlaced with his own.

This young man who is called Eugene Gant (in reality Thomas Wolfe, the author) is of a highly sensitive nature. He suffers much from misunderstanding at home, at school and in his relations with other boys. This misunderstanding which seems to be his unvarying lot gives to his life all the aspects of a tragedy which culminates in the death of his brother.


Scandal Dragged Forth
Most of the Asheville people who appear in the novel wear their most unpleasant guises. If there attaches to them any scandal which has has enjoyed only a subterranean circulation, it is dragged forth into the light. If they have any weakness which more tolerant friends are considerate enough to overlook, these defects are faithfully described. In describing them, the author must often convey the impression to the unknowing that these weaknesses were the distinguishing characteristics of the persons.

The novel will be acclaimed to literary critics as a work of real distinction. But the suspicion is strong that Asheville people will read it not because of its literary worth but rather in spite of any artistic merit which it may possess. They will read it because it is the story, told with bitterness and without compassion, of many Asheville people. The author of “Look Homeward Angel,” which is his first book. was born in Asheville in 1900. In 1920 he was graduated from the University of North Carolina and three years later received his Master of Arts degree from Harvard University, where he worked with George Pierce Baker in the ‘47 Workshop, following up dramatic experience as a member of the Playmakers at North Carolina.

After leaving Harvard, Wolfe traveled and taught. He adopted the plan of teaching a year and traveling a year. He had traveled extensively in Europe. At New York University he teaches English literature and composition.

— Learn NC


Thomas Wolfe Of Time and the River



Eugene did not know if their way was a good way, but he knew it was not his…And suddenly the naked empty desolation filled his life again, and he was walking on beneath the timeless sky, and had no wall at which to hurl his strength, no door to enter by, and no purpose for the furious employment of his soul… He felt the slow interminable waste and wear of grey time all about him and his life was passing in the darkness, and all the time a voice kept saying: ‘Why? Why am I here now? And where shall I go?'

The Book: Of Time and the River is a novel I first read twenty-one years ago. It’s so episodic, so packed with rhetoric, description and the kind of sweeping Whitmanesque prose-poetry that Wolfe excelled at writing that I’m not even sure it qualifies to be called a novel in the way we generally understand the term today at all. It might be more accurate to call it – and the same description could easily apply to all of Wolfe’s work – a uniquely North American form of fictionalized autobiography, one writer's attempt to make sense of the world and his time by viewing it through the prism of his own intensely-felt experiences.

Eugene Gant, who was also the central character of Wolfe's first novel Look Homeward, Angel, is a largely undisguised portrait of the novelist himself – a young southerner struggling to find his way as a Harvard student and then as a college graduate, teacher and fledgling writer in the teeming ‘man-swarms’ of Boston and New York City. Wolfe’s passionate, heartfelt style captures all the loneliness, self-obsessiveness and uncertainty of Eugene’s quest to discover some kind of higher purpose to his life, beginning with the death of his father from prostate cancer and ending with him meeting the woman – Esther Jack – who’s destined to become the great love of it (and also the bane of it in many ways) in the tumultuous years ahead. (Eugene/Wolfe's story continues, with his alter-ego now renamed George Webber, in his final two novels, The Web and the Rock and the prophetically titled You Can't Go Home Again.) The book is personal, confessional and, at a whopping 1035 pages (in my Penguin edition anyway), often verbose and, at times, maddeningly self-indulgent. But throughout it all Eugene/Wolfe never ceases to ask himself, and the reader, the same three vitally important questions – ‘Who am I?’, ‘What do I really feel about my life?’ and ‘What should I really be doing with myself?

Although Of Time and the River is written from a young man’s perspective, it’s still capable, seventy-seven years after it was published, of stirring the emotions of anyone who can recall asking the same kinds of questions of life in their own vanished youth. Eugene embodies the in-born urge so many young people seem to have (and generally seem to lose by the time they reach their thirties) to devour everything they feel life owes them in one tremendous gulp. He wants to possess and experience everything and he wants to possess and experience it now, before the river of time sweeps him and the possibility of him ever finding the happiness and glory he feels is his natural birthright away with it forever. Of Time and the River is really the story of a young, emotionally overwrought man learning to come to terms with the idea that 'home' is a place he'll never actually find, that there’s truly no place on earth – the narrow-minded resort town he was so desperate to flee, the cities of Boston and New York, foreign countries like England and France – that can ever match the idealized vision of 'home' he carries round inside his head.

Like so many American novelists of the early to mid-twentieth century, Wolfe was incapable of writing about anything that wasn't somehow connected to or at least partially based upon his own experiences. He possessed no real gift for narrative and almost every character he created was a portrait of someone he personally knew - a habit which often landed him in trouble and made him so unpopular in Asheville, his home town, that he felt uncomfortable about returning there after becoming famous and scrupulously avoided doing so until 1937, the year before his death.

Nor was Wolfe interested, as his more marketable contemporary Ernest Hemingway was, in reducing life to its minimalist, cause and effect essence. His aim as a writer was not to offer the reader neatly packaged slices of life but rather to present them with a picture of life in its entirety - excluding nothing that made it interesting or difficult and including everything that, in his view, did. His work isn't often read these days and that's a shame. His was and is an important voice in American literature, a reminder of a time when people turned to great novels, and the great novelists who wrote them, to help them understand not only how to live but also what they should be living for.

The Author: Thomas Clayton Wolfe, the youngest of eight children, was born in the North Carolina resort town of Asheville in 1900. His father was the local stonecutter, carving tombstones and funeral monuments in between bouts of excessive drinking, while his mother kept the family going by running a successful boarding house and shrewdly buying up much of the town's most valuable real estate as it became available.

Wolfe lived in his mother's boarding house as a boy, where he was exposed to many different types of people from many different walks of life, while the rest of the family continued to share the original family home with his father. Wolfe was to have a lifelong love/hate relationship with Asheville, which he would rename 'Altamont' in his fiction and whose citizens he would often lampoon and criticize in it without making too much effort to obscure their identities. Not that anyone in town would have been rushing to pick a fight with him. He was so physically imposing by the time he reached puberty that he had trouble fitting through doorways and was forced to do all his writing standing up, the top of a refrigerator serving as his makeshift desk.

Wolfe was a talented scholar, able to learn enough Greek and Latin by the age of fifteen to win a scholarship to the University of North Carolina. He edited the college newspaper and decided to become a playwright after taking a drama course which resulted in two of his plays being performed by the college's student theatre company. This encouraged him to apply for a post-graduate course in playwriting being taught at Harvard by Professor George Pierce Baker. (Eugene O'Neill, who was at this time virtually inventing modern American theatre with cutting edge dramas like The Emperor Jones and Anna Christie, was a former pupil of Baker's.) Wolfe was admitted to the course and left for Boston in 1920, where he stayed for the next three years, writing plays that failed to attract the interest of even one Broadway producer.In 1924, realizing that he could better express what he wanted to say about life on the page than the stage, he quit his part-time job as an English instructor at New York University and sailed for Europe with the aim of transforming himself into a novelist.

He remained in Europe for most of 1925, visiting England, France, Switzerland and Germany while frantically compiling material for what, four years later, would become his first published novel. (Wolfe loved Germany and was very disturbed, on his second visit there in 1936, to see what Hitler and his brownshirts were doing to it.) During the voyage back to America, he met and fell in love with Aline Bernstein, a married Jewish woman eighteen years his senior. (She appears, very thinly disguised, as 'Esther Jack' in Of Time and the River.) They had a passionate but stormy affair - Wolfe, like his father before him, was by this time a very heavy drinker - which lasted five years, during which time Aline supported her young lover financially and did everything she could to encourage and promote his writing. Wolfe returned to Europe in 1926, where he began working steadily on the novel he'd now decided to call O Lost. It was this huge unwieldly manuscript which eventually found its way to the publishing house of Charles Scribner and Sons in New York and to the desk of its most astute editor, Maxwell Perkins - the man who had discovered F Scott Fitzgerald and had been responsible for publishing Ernest Hemingway's groundbreaking debut novel The Sun Also Rises.

Perkins soon realized that O Lost was a work of genius but one that would never be commercially successful because it was far too long to appeal to the so-called 'average' reader. He asked Wolfe to cut the novel, which Wolfe did, and went on to publish it in October 1929 under the new, far more evocative title of Look Homeward, Angel.

Following his final break with Aline Bernstein, Wolfe spent the next four years travelling, drinking and writing an even longer multi-volume novel he planned to call The October Fair. Perkins liked the novel but, worried again that it was too long to sell in a market so badly affected by the Depression, again urged Wolfe to pare down his manuscript, which Scribners subsequently published in 1935 as Of Time and the River. Although the book became Wolfe's only American bestseller, it was something of an empty victory for the novelist, who felt that much of his best writing had been needlessly deleted or unnecessarily tampered with by Perkins. This effectively ended their working relationship and saw the novelist leave the house of Scribner to sign a new contract with the rival firm of Harper and Row.

Sadly, Wolfe didn't live long enough to see his third and fourth novels through the presses. (The Web and the Rock appeared in 1939, with You Can't Go Home Again following it into bookstores a year later.) In 1938 he left New York to make his first trip west, giving his manuscripts to his new editor at Harper and Row for safekeeping while he was gone. He caught what was originally diagnosed as bronchial pneumonia in Seattle and spent three weeks in hospital, where his condition was eventually re-diagnosed - correctly this time - as tuberculosis of the brain. Although he was operated on by the best neurosurgeon in the United States it was too late. The disease had spread too far and he died several weeks later without regaining consciousness, although not before Max Perkins received a final heartfelt letter from him in which he acknowledged the vital contributions the editor had made to his life and career.

Wolfe was a major influence on many of the writers who followed him even though his reputation had begun to go into serious decline by the mid-1940s as the vogue for lyricism gave way to a new, post-war demand for 'unpoetic' realism. All the same, it's doubtful that Jack Kerouac would have written his first novel The Town and The City (1950) or that James Jones would have written his first unpublished novel They Shall Inherit The Laughter (1944-1947) or gone on to publish his bestselling masterpiece From Here To Eternity (1951) had they not had the example of Thomas Wolfe and Look Homeward, Angel to learn from and inspire them. (Jones and Wolfe even shared an editor in Max Perkins before the latter's own untimely death in June 1947.) Wolfe also influenced writers as different from him, and from each other, as Ray Bradbury, Pat Conroy and Betty Smith, author of the popular 1943 novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

— Bentley Rumble


'Del tiempo y el río', de Thomas Wolfe



Stingo es un escritor sureño que llega a Nueva York impelido por esa necesidad impostergable de beberse la vida y luego convertir esa experiencia en la Gran Novela Americana. Stingo conoce a Sophie y Nathan, dos seres heridos por las turbulencias del siglo XX que el destino pone a su alcance para mayor conocimiento de la condición humana. Estoy hablando de La decisión de Sophie, de William Styron, una de las novelas mayores de la narrativa norteamericana del siglo pasado y parte de éste. En 1982, el gran Alan Pakula la llevó al cine con el mismo título. Yo recuerdo ambas, la novela y la película. Quien haya leído la novela o haya visto la cinta, recordará que Stingo lleva consigo un grueso volumen. Se trata de Del tiempo y el río (Of Time and the River), de Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), en la imagen. Es su libro de cabecera. No es extraño que Styron lo incluya en su novela: ¿no es acaso Stingo una réplica de Benjamin Gant, el protagonista de El tiempo…? ¿Y negó alguna vez Styron pertenecer a esa estirpe de la que Wolfe fue uno de sus fundadores: la estirpe de los escritores del sur de los Estados Unidos? De los Warren Penn, Carson McCullers, etc.

Démosle hoy una segunda oportunidad a esa gran novela de Thomas Wolfe: Del tiempo y el río. Volvamos a sus páginas llenas de amor, primavera y desolación: los ingredientes del héroe mítico moderno en busca de su lugar exacto en el mundo. La novela tiene casi mil páginas. Nada extraño en alguien que quiso consignar en ese libro los sonidos de la vida. Thomas Wolfe tuvo siempre que defenderse en vida. Y después de muerto, también. Defenderse del olvido y de la acusación de escritor exuberante. Poco dado a la contención formal, poco austero con el aparato retórico que sostiene su novela, para mí, capital. No sirvió de mucho que William Faulkner dijera de él que era el mejor escritor de su generación.

Wolfe publicó Del tiempo y el río en 1935, tres años antes de su muerte. Impregnada de información autobiográfica, esta novela es la quintaesencia de la novela épica burguesa, que diría Georg Lukacs. Articulada en torno a la figura de Eugene Gant, el relato se propone como una de las mayores metáforas de la sed de absoluto existencial y estético de la narrativa americana contemporánea. Habría que remontarse a Las ilusiones perdidas de Balzac para hacernos una idea de la empresa titánica de nuestro autor. Gant viaja de su pueblo natal a la gran metrópoli de la modernidad, la misma en la que Styron deposita con un propósito parecido a su héroe Stingo. Hablamos de Nueva York. Gant viaja luego a París a cumplir con el sueño de la expatriación. Como Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald y Henry Miller (a quien tanto ha influido, por cierto, Wolfe), Eugene regresa a Estados Unidos, a ese país inmortal, inmenso y cruel como Dios, según se dice en la novela.

Hablemos un poco de su famosa exuberancia estilística. Sobre todo la que rige en Del tiempo y el río. Se habla de hipérboles, de acumulación de lugares descriptos hasta el más obsesivo detalle, adjetivación desbordante. Nada de la maquinaria narrativa escapa de las manos de Wolfe. Nada que le sea útil para la reconstrucción mítica de esa América perdida, “nunca hallada, omnipresente”. Por qué ese mal incurable que lo aleja de la precisión de Flaubert para acercarlo tan gustosamente a la profusión de escenas y caracteres más afines a Dickens, más a Walt Whitman, uno de sus mentores, que a Fitzgerald para lamento de su editor (y amigo) Maxwell Perkins.

El 26 de julio de 1937, Thomas Wolfe escribe una carta desilusionada a su amigo Scott Fitzgerald. Se siente contrariado que el autor de Suave es la noche apele tanto al magisterio de Flaubert para reprocharle su poco aprecio por la escritura monacal, incluso su poca inclinación a dotar de relieve emocional a las cosas. Resulta extraño que un romántico como Fitzgerald no haya reconocido en Wolfe a su hermano, a su semejante. Que no haya encontrado su mismo espíritu nostálgico de una América que probablemente nunca existió. Es cierto que “Del tiempo y el río” es una novela que acierta menos en la estructura equilibrada que en la convicción de un tono y espíritu de búsqueda mítica. Pero es precisamente esto lo que prima y nos interesa hoy: su legado poético, su sentido de la profecía, su dibujo del desarraigo, su atmósfera de incurable exilio interior.

Thomas Wolfe fue el héroe en la adolescencia de Philip Roth. En cierta manera, su protagonista Zuckerman parece amasado con ese torrente de tristeza y recuerdos, con esa necesidad casi animal de realidad. Quien lea Del tiempo y el río, podrá corroborar aquella sabia sentencia de Faulkner que nada tiene de boutade: “Thomas Wolfe es el mejor fracaso de la literatura norteamericana de nuestros días”. Efectivamente, nadie ha fracaso tan magistralmente como él.

J. Ernesto Ayala-Dip
— Blogs El País


Resurrecting Thomas Wolfe



When Thomas Wolfe died of tubercular meningitis on September 15, 1938, his literary reputation was equal in the United States to that of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. In the sixty plus years since, his artistic reputation has been all but destroyed. With the exception of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, he is read less and less often, and the academics who design anthologies and teach influential college courses routinely dismiss his work. So on the 100th anniversary of his birth, we are compelled to ask, Who killed Thomas Wolfe?

By far the most common image of Wolfe is that of a bloated, self-obsessed Romantic, whose emotions are so intense and whose rhetoric is so inflated that critics assume he must have had almost no artistic or self-control. And indeed, from his earliest success with Look Homeward, Angel (published in October 1929), Wolfe was an easy figure to satirize. First, there is the writing itself. As David Donald wrote in introducing his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, "Thomas Wolfe wrote more bad prose than any other major writer I can think of". Further, there was the man's life, certainly no more dramatic than that of Hemingway but somehow tainted in the public eye by the "autobiographical controversy" that haunted Wolfe. Wolfe's height (and in later years his girth); his family, straight out of Dickens; his truly gargantuan love for alcohol and food as well as books and art; his tendency toward manic depressive behavior--all worked their way into the novels and contributed to the myth of raw, unpolished genius run amok.

So who, then, murdered his literary reputation? Let us first round up the usual suspects. As early as April 25, 1936, Bernard DeVoto used the excuse of reviewing Wolfe's The Story of a Novel to blast Wolfe in a cutting essay entitled "Genius Is Not Enough." DeVoto paid a passing compliment to The Story of a Novel (written by Wolfe as an exploration of how Of Time and the River was created) and then went on to write that Wolfe "has mastered neither the psychic material out of which a novel is made nor the technique of writing fiction. DeVoto attributed the success of Look Homeward, Angel to editor Max Perkins and the Scribner's' "assembly line". DeVoto's essay wounded Wolfe more deeply than he would at first admit and may have contributed to his eventual break with Perkins. Even more significantly, however, it set the tone for critics ever since who wished to establish their own intellectual superiority by attacking Wolfe in print. More recent comments in the same vein include those by no less a cultural heavyweight than Harold Bloom, who wrote in reviewing Donald's biography that "there is no possibility for critical dispute about Wolfe's literary merits; he has none whatsoever. Open him at any page, and that will suffice". Most all of these attacks flow out of the original notion that Wolfe was forever what Wright Morris described as a "raw young giant" who produced literally crates of prose but who had no notion of how to produce a "well-made" book from those crates.

I believe, however, that Wolfe's critics, no matter how strident, could never have so reduced his reputation had not the author himself contributed to the undoing. In fact, the true culprit may well be a creature of Wolfe's own making. Consider for a moment Thomas Wolfe in his late twenties as like another young, ambitious genius in love with his own generative power--Victor Frankenstein. And just as Frankenstein produced his monster, so Wolfe did as well: the autobiographical monster Eugene Gant, the protagonist of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, the only two novels published during Wolfe's lifetime. In short, Wolfe's reputation was murdered by his own brainchild. Wolfe's readers often fall in love with Eugene when they first encounter him, but he grew into something Wolfe could never have foreseen: not just the prototypical Wolfe character but the only Wolfe character. This confusion has become true to the extent that even now, over seventy years after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Eugene Gant has all but become the author. In Victor Frankenstein's case, the obsessive, young genius made the creature that destroyed the creator. In Thomas Wolfe's case, literary history has very nearly repeated itself.

So powerful was this creation--the character that became the author --that as late as September 1935, when Wolfe wrote to Perkins about his plans for "The Book of Night" (later The Hound of Darkness), he admitted he was locked in combat with the autobiographical monster. In this new book, Wolfe wrote, America would not be seen by a

definite personality, but haunted throughout by a consciousness of personality. In other words, I want to assert my divine right once and for all to be the God Almighty of a book--to be at once the spirit to move it, the spirit behind it, never to appear, to blast forever the charge of autobiography while being triumphantly and impersonally autobiographical.

Perhaps in the naked fury of that letter, we can sense both the mortal nature of the struggle and, perhaps, why it is so tempting to say that he lost it. Why it is so tempting to say that Wolfe never wrote successfully about any subject other than himself.

If this is true, if Thomas Wolfe and Eugene Gant have become so conflated in the literary consciousness, the consequences are several. First of all, because Eugene is such an unabashed and often unselfconscious Romantic, he and his creator are increasingly vulnerable to the sharp wits and even sharper pens of contemporary intellectuals. Second, because Eugene Gant was a creature of large appetites and even larger emotions, he is often associated with Wolfe's own intense desires, desires too often expressed in an ungovernable flow of words. Thus, Wolfe's books (or do they belong to Eugene?) are stereotypically assumed to be the least "well-made" of the great modernist classics. For this reason, as we come to the end of Wolfe's century, we have to ask whether he will be read at all in the next.

What I have come to believe is that in the years between 1930 and 1938, Wolfe held his own against the autobiographical monster, and it is high time that we as readers finish the job of resurrecting his reputation. When we read the mature Wolfe, we discover that: 1) his best work is most often his short work; 2) his best work tends to be dominated by points of view distant from his own; 3) his short fiction, when it is autobiographical, is rigorously controlled; and 4) his best work often features multiple, even choral, points of view. In other words, in the short fiction he wrote during the nine brief years between the publication of Look Homeward, Angel and his death, Wolfe managed to turn almost all of the critical stereotypes about his work inside-out.

As proof, we should examine eight separate pieces of evidence: eight works by Thomas Wolfe that should remain in print, that should be anthologized, that should be taught, that should be read through this century and into the next. First, however, we should examine the argument that Wolfe's short fiction is in many instances his best fiction. In a typically thoughtful essay, C. Hugh Holman introduced the 1961 Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe by arguing that "the intrinsic qualities of the short novel [15,000-40,000 words] were remarkably well adapted to Wolfe's special talents and creative methods". This volume contains five novellas (three of which are discussed here), and in justifying their collection and publication Holman says:

Upon these . . . short novels Wolfe had expended great effort, and in them he had given the clearest demonstrations he ever made of his craftsmanship and his artistic control. Each of these . . . novellas is marked in its unique way by a sharp focus and a controlling unity, and each represents a serious experiment with form. Yet they have been virtually lost from the corpus of Wolfe's work, lost even to most of those who know that work well.

Holman admits that one of the reasons even the short novels are not known is "the nature of Wolfe's work and his attitude toward it" (xvii): in other words, the long, often autobiographical fiction that Wolfe continued to attempt during the 1930s. Even after 1935, when Wolfe was less concerned with his own life and more with the interconnected lives of others, his reputation for artistic excess ruled the public discourse about his work. In 1935, when Of Time and the River appeared, The Saturday Review of Literature published a wonderful cartoon showing New York's book reviewers picketing the front door of Scribner's, protesting the sheer length of Wolfe's books. And as David Donald notes, Scribner's Book Store on Fifth Avenue turned the tables by enlarging the cartoon to poster size and displaying it over a small mountain of the novels in its storefront window. Thus, Wolfe the man, even Wolfe the artist, was being replaced by Wolfe the myth.

My antidote to this case of cultural mythmaking is to cite those works of Wolfe's that capture his mature craft, especially his sense of authorial distance and editorial control. Even as early as 1929, in Look Homeward, Angel, there is evidence that Wolfe was willing and able to look beyond his own experience for the raw material of his work and to express that material in a voice other than his own. In Chapter Seven, "Gant the Far Wanderer," W. O. Gant, Eugene's father, returns home from a cross-country trip. During a trolley ride from the train station into town, the narrative shifts suddenly from third-person omniscient into a Gantian interior monologue:

There was a warm electric smell and one of hot burnt steel.
But two months dead! But two months dead! Ah, Lord! So it's come to this. Merciful God, this fearful, awful, and damnable climate. Death, death! Is it too late? A land of life, a flower land. How clear the green clear sea was. And all the fishes swimming there. Santa Catalina. Those in the East should always go West. How came I here? Down, down--always down. . . .


And Gant is off into a rambling spiel of modified interior monologue that Wolfe wove into the next two pages of dialogue and description. This passage is both a funny and fascinating study of Gant's personality and is so well integrated into the movement of the chapter that most of us never notice that Wolfe has adopted an entirely different voice for an extended period. Look Homeward, Angel is neither short nor rigorously controlled, but this one interesting passage does suggest that even in his early work Wolfe has the capacity for adopting points of view removed from his own and for capturing those points of view in dramatic narrative voices. Published in October 2000, O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life, the original typescript for Look Homeward, Angel, makes it even more apparent that Wolfe was interested in multiple points of view, even in his first novel.

The second piece of evidence is the short novel that first appeared in Scribner's Magazine in July 1932 and was later included in From Death to Morning. This novella, evocatively titled "The Web of Earth," is narrated by a garrulous old woman who is visiting her son in New York. It captures in the narrative voice of Eliza Gant--Eugene Gant's mother in Look Homeward, Angel--all the complex and mysterious interweavings of Wolfe's best work, and yet achieves this complexity in a fundamentally spare narrative. Wolfe's letters from the period repeatedly cite Perkins' praise of the story and in one instance describe his method:

It is different from anything I have ever done; it's about an old woman, who sits down to tell a little story, but then her octopal memory weaves back and forth across the whole fabric of her life until everything has gone into it. It's all told in her own language. . . . That story about the old woman has got everything in it, murder and cruelty, and hate and love, and greed and enormous unconscious courage, yet the whole thing is told with the stark innocence of a child.

"Web of Earth" is significant here because it represents Wolfe's growing ability to capture a point of view decidedly not his own. Interestingly, this long story contains a listener as well as a teller. Eliza Gant's long, earthy meditation is delivered in a dramatic context, with her son as audience. And yet, even though Eugene Gant is present during the delivery of his mother's dramatic monologue, Wolfe does not allow Eugene's presence to intrude on the telling of the story. "The Web of Earth" belongs entirely to the voice that tell it. And, as Monica Melloni has pointed out, that is the source of its greatness. The plot, the setting, the characters of Eliza's reminiscence are all an organic part of the web spun by her voice. Compare it to Gant's interior monologue from Chapter Seven of Look Homeward, Angel, and immediately one sees how much more complex and compelling is Eliza's voice in "The Web of Earth." This complexity alone suggests that the voice telling the story is significantly different from that of Wolfe's mother and represents all the more significant an artistic achievement.

No less an authority on the narrative arts than Wallace Stegner noticed Wolfe's growing ability to create a compelling voice not his own. In his introduction to several of Wolfe's stories in the 1965 anthology, American Literary Masters, Stegner wrote:

Fiction is a combination of the objective world and the eye that sees it. Though Thomas Wolfe was more powerful and more passionate, as a general rule, when he wrote through a Eugene Gant or a George Webber [a later protagonist], both essentially himself, he did in a handful of stories invent sensibilities not his own, and tell stories through them. "Web of Earth" . . . [and] "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" demonstrate that on occasion he was capable of the objectivity that his critics said he did not possess.

It may well be, however, that Stegner understated the case and that Wolfe was "more powerful and more passionate" when he did adopt "sensibilities not his own," or at least more successful in creating a similar passion in his reader.

Perhaps none of Wolfe's narrative adoptions was more unlike his native voice than the voice that narrates his 1935 story "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn":

Dere's no guy livin' dat knows Brooklyn t'roo an' t'roo, (only the dead know Brooklyn t'roo and t'roo) because it'd take a guy a lifetime just to find his way aroun' duh goddam town. . . .

So like I say, I'm waitin' for my train t' come when I sees dis big guy standin' deh--dis is duh foist I eveh see of him. Well, he's lookin' wild, y'know, an' I can see dat he's had plenty, but still he's holdin' it; he talks good an' is walkin' straight enough. So den, dis big guy steps up to a little guy dat's standin' deh, an' says, "How d'yuh get t' Eighteent' Avenoo an' Sixty-sevent' Street?" he says. "Jesus! Yuh got me chief," duh little guy says to him.


What follows is one of the most fascinating stories in the entire Wolfe canon: in part because of the ambiguity around just who is narrating the story and just what part of Wolfe's own half-drunk, map-obsessed personality is represented by "duh big guy." As in "The Web of Earth," Wolfe's own persona is present in the story, and yet the story finally is not about Eugene Gant or "duh big guy"; rather, it is about the voice that is struggling to make sense out of reality by giving faithful directions --in other words, by telling the tale itself. One idea at the core of Wolfe's work from this period is that all storytelling is in a sense about the desire to "give good directions"--whether to Red Hook (the destination in the story) or to some other destination as profound as understanding itself.

One of the unfortunate characteristics of Wolfe's early work--notably the more autobiographical work associated with Eugene Gant--is that it is tainted by racial stereotype and, on occasion, by outright racial prejudice. This element has precipitated several important essays and one significant book-length study, Paschal Reeves' Thomas Wolfe's Albatross: Race and Nationality in America. Those commentators who have read Wolfe most carefully, however, agree that his attitude toward his black and Jewish characters shifted considerably during the 1930s. I would argue that as Wolfe became less interested in his own history during the early 1930s and more interested in the history of others, he naturally grew more sympathetic to the social and cultural plight of others. As his writing became less autobiographical, and so less self-centered, so did his social and cultural point of view. The most remarkable evidence of this change is a story Wolfe wrote after visiting Germany in 1936. The narrative concerned a young Jew who is traveling by train with the narrator but who is removed forcefully at the German border by Nazi guards. Wolfe had long regarded Germany as his spiritual home, and the incident upset him terribly. On the back of a postcard he sent to Elizabeth Nowell from Paris in September, he wrote:

I've written a wonderful piece--after it gets published I won't be able to go back to the place where I'm liked best and have more friends than anywhere in the world--but I'm going to publish it (or what's a heaven for?)--I'm going to call it (for various reasons) "I Have A Thing To Tell You"--which may not be so foolish as it sounds. W.

Wolfe's growing sympathy for the oppressed did exact a personal cost in this instance. When, after vigorous advocacy and equally vigorous editing by Nowell, the story appeared in The New Republic (March 10, 17, and 24, 1937), Wolfe's books were banned in Germany, and he was never able to return there. Wolfe did not himself consider "I Have a Thing to Tell You" a political statement but a human one. He later wrote to Nowell that "its greatest value, it seems to me, lies in the fact--that I wrote it as I write all my other stories about a human situation and living characters". It may well be that Wolfe's narrative skills had to mature in order to encompass his growing sensitivity to the emotional and spiritual lives of others. This symbiotic evolution of his sensibility and his craft would soon be seen in other work from the period.

Wolfe finally went back to Asheville in the spring and summer of 1937, having been banned from his hometown for eight years by the public outcry against Look Homeward, Angel. Much biographical speculation has resulted from the long summer visit--Wolfe's apparent ability to go home again--but the fact remains that he found it very difficult to work there, even in the isolated Oteen cabin where he stayed, because of the constant interruptions from local fans. Furthermore, Wolfe himself was a changed man, having in some sense outgrown his thirty-year love-hate relationship with the town. This growth can be seen in the material he was working on during his visit home--the complex manuscript he called "Party at Jack's." Esther Jack was the fictional name Wolfe had assigned the character he based on Aline Bernstein, his mistress of some years; the story is about a young author who attends an elegant party at the Park Avenue apartment of the Jacks, Esther and her husband. The autobiographical monster looms. But, in fact, Wolfe again places Eugene (by now renamed Monk Webber) firmly in the background, and as the story unfolds, even Esther Jack becomes only a single figure in a rich social fabric.

Wolfe's stated purpose in writing "The Party at Jack's" was not to revisit through his art a complex time in his life when he was in love with Aline Bernstein. Rather, he used the historical setting of an actual party he attended at the Bernsteins' as an artistic jumping-off place for pointed social commentary. During the period he was in Asheville, he corresponded with his agent, Elizabeth Nowell, about the difficulties he faced in weaving together all the story's elements:

My plan when I get thru is to have a complete section of the social order, a kind of dense, closely interwoven tapestry made up of the lives and thoughts and destinies of thirty or forty people and all embodied in the structure of the story. It is an elaborate design, it has to be. . .

Thus the Bernsteins' apartment building becomes a symbol of America's stratified society, with the rich and sophisticated partygoers at the top, supported by the working class cooks, maids, and elevator operators working to make the rich tapestry of the party possible. The whole structure is literally hollow at the core, with the subway tunnels deep under the building causing the building to be fundamentally unsound:

Therefore, it happened sometimes, that dwellers in this imperial tenement would feel a tremor at their feet as something faint and instant passed below them, and perhaps remember that there were trains, far, far below them in these tunneled depths. Then all would fade away into the riddled distances of the tormented rock. The great building would grow solidly to stone again, and people would smile faintly, knowing that it was enduring and unshaken, now and forever, as it had always been.[...]

Terry Roberts
— The Southern Literary Journal