Among other things, he was the first prose writer to bring a sense of America as a glorious abstraction—a vast and brooding continent whose untold bounties were waiting every young man's discovery—and his endless catalogues and lyric invocations of the land's physical sights and sounds and splendors (a sumptuous description of the Boston waterfront, for instance, where “the delicate and subtle air of spring touches all these odors with a new and delicious vitality; it draws the tar out of the pavements also, and it draws slowly, subtly, from ancient warehouses, the compacted perfumes of eighty years: the sweet thin piney scents of packing boxes, the glutinous composts of half a century, that have thickly stained old warehouse plankings, the smells of twine, tar, turpentine and hemp, and of thick molasses, ginseng, pungent vines and roots and old piled sacking…and particularly the smell of meat, of frozen beeves, slick porks, and veals, of brains and livers and kidneys, of haunch, paunch and jowl…”) seemed to me anything but prolix or tedious, far from it; rather it was as if for the first time my whole being had been thrown open to the sheer tactile and sensory vividness of the American scene through which, until then, I had been walking numb and blind, and it caused me a thrill of discovery that was quite unutterable. It mattered little to me that sometimes Wolfe went on for page after windy page about nothing, or with the most callow of emotions: I was callow myself, and was undaunted by even his most inane repetitions. It meant nothing to me that some astonishingly exact and poignant rendition of a mood or remembrance might be followed by a thick suet of nearly impenetrable digressions; I gobbled it all up, forsaking my classes, hurting my eyes, and digesting the entire large Wolfe oeuvre—the four massive novels, plus the short stories and novellas, The Story of a Novel, the many letters and scraps and fragments, and the several plays, even then practically unreadable—in something less than two weeks, emerging from the incredible encounter pounds lighter, and with a buoyant serenity of one whose life has been forever altered.
I think it must have been at approximately this moment that I resolved myself to become a writer. I was at college in North Carolina at the time; it was October, Wolfe's natal, favorite, most passionately remembered month, and the brisk autumnal air was now touched, for the first time in my life, with the very fragrance and the light that Wolfe's grand hymn to the season had evoked:
October has come again—has come again….The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again…The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of old October…Come to us, Father, while the winds howl in the darkness, for October has come again bringing with it huge prophecies of death and life and the great cargo of the men who will return…
With words like this still vivid in my brain, I gazed at the transmuted tobacco-hazed streets of Durham, quite beside myself with wonder, and only the appearance of a sudden, unseasonable snowstorm frustrated my immediate departure—together with a friend, similarly smitten—for Asheville, over two hundred miles away, where we had intended to place flowers on the writer's grave.
—
Now thirty years after Wolfe's death, the appearance of Andrew Turnbull's biography marks an excellent occasion to try to put the man and his work in perspective. Turnbull's work is a first-rate study, and not the least of its many worthy qualities is its sense of proportion. Too many biographies—especially of literary figures—tend to be overly fleshed out and are cursed with logorrhea, so that the illustrious subject himself becomes obliterated behind a shower of menus, train tickets, opera programs, itineraries, and dull mash notes from lovelorn girls. I could have done without so many of the last item in this present volume—from Wolfe's paramour Aline Bernstein, who, though by no means a girl, often fell to gushing at inordinate length; but this is a small complaint, since throughout the book Turnbull generally maintains a congenial pace and supplies us with just the proper amount of detail. One of the surprises of the biography is the way in which it manages to be fresh and informative about a person who was probably the most narrowly autobiographical writer who ever lived. The very idea of a life of Thomas Wolfe is enough to invoke dismay if not gentle ridicule, since our first reaction is, “But why? Everything he did and saw is in his books.” Yet Turnbull, clearly with some calculation, has expertly uncovered certain facts having to do with Wolfe's life which, if not really crucial, are fascinating just because we realize that we did not know them before. The actual financial situation of Wolfe's family in Asheville, for example, is interesting, since the impression one gets of the deafening tribe of Gants in Look Homeward, Angel is that of a down-at-the-heel, lower-middle-class clan which may not have been destitute but which always had a hard time of it making ends meet. The truth of the matter, as Turnbull points out, is that by Asheville standards the Wolfes were literally affluent, belonging to the “top two percent economically.” Likewise it turns out that Wolfe had a touch of the sybarite in him; as an instructor at New York University he chose to live by himself in lodgings that for the time must have been very expensive, rather than share quarters with several others as practically all of the instructors did. Such details would be of little interest, of course, were they not at variance with the portraits of Eugene Gant–George Webber, whose careers in the novels are considerably more penurious, egalitarian, and grubby.
Wolfe was an exasperating man, a warm companion with a rich sense of humor and touching generosity of spirit, and, alternately, a bastard of truly monumental dimensions, and it is a tribute to the detachment with which Mr. Turnbull has fashioned his biography that the good Wolfe and the bad Wolfe, seen upon separate occasions, begin to blend together so that what emerges (as in the best of biographies) is a man—in this case a man more complex and driven even than is usual among those of his calling: obsessively solitary yet craving companionship, proud and aloof but at the same time almost childishly dependent, open-handed yet suspicious, arrogant, sweet-hearted, hypersensitive, swinishly callous, gentle—every writer, that is, but magnified. In his mid-twenties on board a ship returning from Europe, Wolfe met and fell in love with Aline Bernstein, a rich and well-known New York stage designer who was eighteen years older than he was. In the ensuing affair, which was bizarre and tumultuous to say the least, Mrs. Bernstein quite clearly represented a mother figure, an image of the Eliza Gant from whom, in his first two novels, Tom-Eugene is constantly fleeing as from a Fury, and, with cyclic regularity, returning home to in helpless and sullen devotion. (Julia Wolfe nursed her son until he was three and a half and cut off Tom's beautiful ringlets at nine only after he had picked up lice from a neighbor. How Wolfe escaped being a homosexual is a mystery, but no one has ever made that charge.) The same ambivalent feelings he had toward his mother he expressed in his relations with Aline, who, though extremely pretentious and rather silly, did not deserve the treatment she suffered at his hands, which was largely abominable. He was of course capable of great tenderness and it is obvious that they had many happy moments together, but one cannot help feeling anything but rue for the plight of the poor woman, who had to be subjected to interminable grillings by him about her former lovers and who, when circumstances forced them apart, still was made to endure a barrage of letters in which in the most irrational and cruel terms he accused her of betrayal and unfaithfulness. He also shouted at her that she smelled like goose grease, adding the attractive observation that “all Jews smell like goose grease.” It was a hopeless situation, and although it makes for grim reading, the section on Wolfe's stormy time with Aline is one of the most illuminating in the book, revealing as it does so much of the man's puerile inability to form any real attachment to anyone, especially a woman—a shallowness of emotional response, on a certain level at least, which caused him to be in perpetual flight and which may be a key to both his fa
ilings and his strengths as a writer.
There was also, naturally, his editor Maxwell Perkins—still one more relationship filled with Sturm und Drang and, on the part of Wolfe, impositions and demands on another's time and energy so total as to be positively hair-raising. Obviously Perkins was a very fine gentleman, but that a broad streak of masochism ran through his nature there can also be no doubt; only a man born to enjoy terrible suffering could have absorbed the pure fact of daily, committed involvement which Wolfe's tyrannically dependent personality imposed. It was of course untrue, as had been hinted during Wolfe's years at Scribner's, that Perkins wrote any part of Wolfe's books but certainly he was instrumental in putting them together—maybe not quite as instrumental as Bernard DeVoto implied in his famous review of The Story of a Novel but a thoroughly dominating force nonetheless.1 There is no other way that we can interpret the hilarious statement which Turnbull—perhaps with irony, perhaps not—makes in a section on the finishing of Of Time and the River: “Early in December Perkins summoned Wolfe to his office and told him the book was done. Wolfe was amazed.” Yet if it is true that Wolfe wrote the words of the books and if it is also true, as someone said, that the trouble with Wolfe was that he put all of his gigantic struggle into his work and not his art—a nice distinction—it does look as if DeVoto might not have been too far off the mark, after all, in asserting that Perkins caused much of the “art” that exists in the sprawling work of Thomas Wolfe. Which is to say a semblance, at least, of form. And it is the lack too often of an organic form—a form arising from the same drives and tensions that inspired the work in the beginning—which now appears to be one of Wolfe's largest failings and is the one that most seriously threatens to undermine his stature as a major writer. The awful contradiction in his books between this formlessness and those tremendous moments which still seem so touched with grandeur as to be imperishable is unsettling beyond words.
—
Rereading Wolfe is like visiting again a cherished landscape or town of bygone years where one is simultaneously moved that much could remain so appealingly the same, and wonderstruck that one could ever have thought that such-and-such a corner or this or that view had any charm at all. It is not really that Wolfe is dated (I mean the fact of being dated as having to do with basically insincere postures and attitudes: already a lot of Hemingway is dated in a way Wolfe could never be); it is rather that when we now begin to realize how unpulled-together Wolfe's work really is—that same shapelessness that mattered so little to us when we were younger—and how this shapelessness causes or at least allows for a lack of inner dramatic tension, without which no writer, not even Proust, can engage our mature attention for long, we see that he is simply telling us, often rather badly, things we no longer care about knowing or need to know. So much that once seemed grand and authoritative now comes off as merely obtrusive, strenuously willed, and superfluous. Which of course makes it all the more disturbing that in the midst of this chaotically verbose and sprawling world there stand out here and there truly remarkable edifices of imaginative cohesion.
Wolfe's first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, withstands the rigors of time most successfully and remains his best book, taken as a whole. Here the powers of mind and heart most smoothly find their confluence, while a sense of place (mainly Altamont, or Asheville) and time (a boy's life between infancy and the beginning of adulthood) lend to the book a genuine unity that Wolfe never recaptured in his later works. Flaws now appear, however. A recent rereading of the book caused me to wince from time to time in a way that I cannot recall having done during my first reading at eighteen. Wolfe at that point was deeply under the power of Joyce (whom Wolfe, incidentally, encountered years later on a tour of Belgium, Turnbull relates in an engaging episode, but who so awed him that he was afraid to speak to the great Irishman) and if the influence of Ulysses can be discerned in the book's many strengths it can also be seen in its gaucheries. An otherwise vivid passage like the following, for example (and there are many such in the book), is diminished rather than reinforced by the culminating Joyce-like allusion:
Colonel Pettigrew was wrapped to his waist in a heavy rug, his shoulders were covered with a gray Confederate cape. He bent forward, leaning his old weight upon a heavy polished stick, which his freckled hands gripped upon the silver knob. Muttering, his proud powerful old head turned shakily from side to side, darting fierce splintered glances at the drifting crowd. He was a very parfit gentil knight.
But Look Homeward, Angel can be forgiven such lapses precisely because it is a youthful book, as impressive for its sheer lyricism and hymnal celebration of youth and life as is the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, from which we do not expect profundities, either. In addition, the novel is quite extraordinarily alive—alive in the vitality of its words (Wolfe wrote many bad sentences but never a dead one), in its splendid evocation of small-town sights and sounds and smells, and above all and most importantly, in the characters that spring out fully fleshed and breathing from the pages. The figures of W. O. and Eliza Gant are as infuriatingly garrulous and convincing now as when I first made their acquaintance, and the death of the tragic older brother Ben is fully as moving for the simple reason that Wolfe has made me believe in his existence. With all of its top-heaviness and the juvenile extravagances that occasionally mar the surface of the narrative, Look Homeward, Angel seems likely to stand as long as any novel will as a record of early-twentieth-century provincial American life.
—
It is when we run into Of Time and the River and its elephantine successors, The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again, that the real trouble begins. One of the crucial struggles that any writer of significance has had to endure is his involvement in the search for a meaningful theme, and Wolfe was no exception. The evidence is that Wolfe, though superbly gifted at imaginative projection, was practically incapable of extended dramatic invention, his creative process being akin to the settling into motion of some marvelous mnemonic tape recorder deep within his cerebrum, from which he unspooled reel after reel of the murmurous, living past. Such a technique served him beautifully in Look Homeward, Angel, unified as it was in time and space, and from both of which it derived its dramatic tension; but in the later works as Tom-Eugene-George moved into other environments—the ambience of Harvard and New York and, later, of Europe—the theme which at first had been so fresh and compelling lost its wings and the narrator became a solipsistic groundling. Certainly the last three books are still well worth reading; there is still the powerful, inexorable rush of language, a Niagara of words astonishing simply by virtue of its primal energy; many of the great set pieces hold up with their original force: old Gant's death, the Oktoberfest sequence in Munich, the apartment-house fire in New York, the portraits of Eugene's Uncle Bascom, Foxhall Edwards, the drunken Dr. McGuire—there are many more. These scenes and characterizations would alone guarantee Wolfe a kind of permanence, even if one must sift through a lot of detritus to find them. But there is so much now that palls and irritates. That furrow-browed, earnest sense of discovery in which the reader participates willingly in Look Homeward, Angel loses a great deal of its vivacity when the same protagonist has begun to pass into adulthood. In Of Time and the River, for example, when Eugene has become a student at Harvard, we are introduced to a young student named Francis Starwick:
He spoke in a strange and rather disturbing tone, the pitch and timbre of which it would be almost impossible to define, but which would haunt one who had heard it forever after. His voice was neither very high nor low, it was a man's voice and yet one felt it might also have been a woman's; but there was nothing at all effeminate about it. It was simply a strange voice compared to most American voices, which are rasping, nasal, brutally coarse or metallic. Starwick's voice had a disturbing lurking resonance, an exotic, sensuous and almost voluptuous quality. Moreover, the peculiar mannered affectation of his speech was so studied that it hardly escaped extravagance. If it had not been for the dignity, grace a
nd intelligence of his person, the affectation of his speech might have been ridiculous. As it was, the other youth felt the moment's swift resentment and hostility that is instinctive with the American when he thinks someone is speaking in an affected manner.
In the first place, his voice wouldn't “haunt one who had heard it forever after.” This exaggerated sensibility, this clubfooted, gawky boy's style, becomes increasingly apparent throughout all of Wolfe's later work, in which the author-protagonist, now out in the world of Northern sophisticates, falls unconsciously into the role of the suspicious young hick from Buncombe County, North Carolina. In the passage just quoted the reader, Starwick—indeed, everyone but Eugene Gant—is aware that Starwick is a homosexual, but these labored and sophomoric observations have so begun to dominate Wolfe's point of view that much later on in the book, when Starwick's homosexuality is revealed, Eugene's chagrin over that belated knowledge fills the reader with murderous exasperation. The same passage illustrates another trait which crops up increasingly in the later books, and that is a tendency to generalize promiscuously about places and things which demand, if anything, narrow and delicate particularization—especially about a place as various and as chaotically complex as America. The part about voices, for instance. Most American voices, though sometimes unpleasant, are not generally “rasping, nasal, brutally coarse or metallic”; forty or fifty million soft Southern voices alone, including presumably Wolfe's, are—whatever else—the antithesis of all those careless adjectives. Nor is it at all accurate to proclaim either that “the American”—presumably meaning all Americans—feels resentment and hostility at affected speech or that the reaction is peculiarly American. Many Americans are simply tickled or amused by such speech, while at the same time it is surely true that if resentment and hostility are felt, they can be felt by the French over French affectations as well. Wolfe's writing is filled with such silly hyperbole. Similarly, a statement such as “we are so lost, so naked, and so lonely in America”—a refrain that reappears over and over again in Wolfe's work—seems to me the worst sort of empty rant, all the more so because Wolfe himself surely knew better, knew that lostness, nakedness, loneliness are not American but part of the whole human condition.
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