Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe
By David Herbert Donald
Little, Brown, 579 pages, $24.95
Thomas Wolfe once remarked to his editor. ”You want to make a perfect thing, but I want to get the whole wilderness of the American continent into my work.” This gargantuan ambition was tempered by a darker vision of loneliness: ”A Stone, a leaf, an unfound door . . . . Naked and alone we came into exile . . . into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.”
Wolfe`s principal literary legacy consists of four enormous works: ”Look Homeward, Angel” (1929), ”Of Time and the River” (1935), ”The Web and the Rock” (1939) and ”You Can`t Go Home Again” (1940). Characterized perhaps best as fictionalized autobiography, these volumes consist of loosely linked fragments snatched from the swift-flowing currents of Wolfe`s intensely lived life.
Wolfe`s creative energies were spent in salvaging the fragments, infusing them often with lyric passion compounded of poignant remembrance and exuberant exclamation: ”O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.” He relied on editors to sift, order and connect the fragments, shaping them into poetic narratives with the power to intoxicate readers, especially the young. Wolfe became a celebrity, but his fame faded after his early death.
David Donald, a Pulizer Prize-winning biographer and Harvard history professor, grew up in the South reading Wolfe`s novels and identifying with their oversized, romantic hero and his colossal appetite for all experience. But he grew out of this early enthusiasm, and did not reread Wolfe until much later. He was surprised to find that Wolfe`s books had a great deal to offer about American life in the early decades of the 20th Century.
But he found also that the lyrical interludes, the ”Whitman-like chants,” still cast their spell. He began writing Wolfe`s biography with the conviction that ”Wolfe deserves to rank among the very great American authors.” If he is right, there is much critical reassessment in order.
Donald`s biography provides the basis for such a reassessment. For the first time we have a candid account of the ”desperately unhappy” members of the Wolfe family, as well as a full portrait of Wolfe`s one great love, Aline Bernstein. And we have a comprehensive review of the entangled and intricately psychological relationship of Wolfe and his editors, vital to any understanding of Wolfe`s creative process.
Wolfe was born in Asheville, N.C., in 1900, the youngest of O. W. and Julia Wolfe`s seven children. O.W. Wolfe was an extravagant, hard-drinking, Shakespeare-quoting tombstone cutter, 49-years-old when his youngest child was born. Julia Wolfe came from a numerous mountain family, teetotaling and penny- pinching. She quickly concluded that O.W.`s periodic binges would not make for a stable, secure household. When Tom was six, she took him with her to set up a boardinghouse in a big Victorian mansion called ”The Old Kentucky Home.”
The older brothers and sisters remained with their father, only a few blocks away. All of Wolfe`s family and almost the entire population of Asheville became characters in his fiction.
From the time his teacher spotted and encouraged him in the sixth grade as talented (”He is a genius!”), Wolfe determined to get an eduction. He begged to be sent to the private school this same teacher was starting. Later he wheedled money from his parents to go to the Unviersity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, followed by three years at Harvard, studying in the famous George Pierce Baker drama workshop which Eugene O`Neill had earlier attended. In New York, Wolfe supported himself by teaching freshman composition at New York University while devoting all the time he could to writing plays. But clearly Wolfe`s expansive imagination was cramped by the time and space restraints imposed by drama. He became sulky or enraged when asked to cut a line or scene.
By 1926 Wolfe found himself involved in a passionate affair with Mrs. Aline Bernstein, a successful New York scene designer. She had a husband and children, and was 18 years older than Wolfe. Mrs. Bernstein was not willing to give up her family for Thomas Wolfe, but she was quite ready to help him financially so he could take leave from his teaching and devote his time to writing a novel he had started. By the middle of 1927, Wolfe completed ”O Lost,” a manuscript of some 330,000 words, running to 1,113 pages.
”O Lost” was rejected by a succession of publishers until, in 1928, it landed on the desk of Maxwell Perkins of Scribner`s, who counted F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway among his friends. Perkins began with Wolfe the most remarkable collaboration of editor and author in American literary history. At first, Perkins made suggestions for cutting and asked Wolfe to provide linking passages to fill the gaps. Wolfe would come back with more words than had been removed. Gradually Perkins took a stronger role in shaping the work, insisting that it focus on the life of Eugene Gant (the Wolfe counterpart) through his growing up in Altamont (Asheville), concluding with his graduation from the university at Pulpit Hill (Chapel Hill). Some 90,000 words were dropped, but ”Look Homeward, Angel” (a new title) was about three times as long as the average novel of the time.
Critical response was intense. There was outright hostility in North Carolina and especially in Asheville, where real individuals were immediately recognized as characters in the novel. But there was high praise in the New York magazines and newspapers. In his euphoria Wolfe made wild plans for many more novels, launching one project after another. He completed none. As months and then years passed, he grew panicky, but he continued to write, accumulating great piles of papers in the large crate where he kept all his work. Finally, he turned to Perkins for guidance. Perkins saw that much of what he had written would make a sequel to his first novel. Under Perkin`s steady hand, ”Of Time and the River” emerged from the crate of manuscripts. The novel appeared in 1935. Wolfe was compared to Dickens, Proust and Joyce, his book called a ”magnificent epic of American life.” Attacks came from the Marxists on the left and the Southern Agrarians on the right, both incensed at Wolfe`s lack of social or political commitment. But the most telling attack was Bernard DeVoto`s ”Genius Is Not Enough” in 1936, charging that ”Mr. Perkins and the assembly line at Scribners”` had been indispensable in shaping Wolfe`s books.
Wolfe`s break with Perkins was perhaps inevitable. After much hesitation, Wolfe took the fateful step of signing on with Harper`s, whose young editor Edward C. Aswell had read all of Wolfe`s books with enthusiasm. Just before setting out on a journey to the west in 1938, Wolfe delivered his crate of manuscripts to Harper`s. He had pulled from it a mass of material to constitute a novel entitled ”The Web and the Rock,” covering the years from 1793-1937.
Wolfe fell ill in Seattle with acute pulmonary tuberculosis which had infected his brain. He was brought back to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where he died Sept. 15, not quite 38 years old.
Wolfe`s will named Perkins his literary executor. Thus Perkins oversaw Aswell`s editing of Wolfe`s posthumous novels. Out of the some 1,500,000 words that Wolfe had assembled to make his new novel, Aswell shaped two works, the first entitled ”The Web and the Rock” and the second ”You Can`t Go Home Again.” They told the story of George Webber, another version of Wolfe himself. Aswell changed names of characters to prevent libel, shifted passages to increase coherence, and even added sentences of his own to provide transitions. Whatever blunders he may have made, Aswell kept faith with the spirit of Wolfe.
Donald`s balanced biography restores the human dimension to the Thomas Wolfe myth. Perhaps it will spark a revival of interest in the powerful poetry of his novels: ”Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?”
