Of Time and the River
THE MAN of the MONTH
[Scribners, $3.00]
THIS is the long-awaited successor to Mr. Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. In substance it resumes the saga of Eugene Gant (Wolfe himself, of course), covering the years 1920-1925. The book opens as Eugene, now twenty, stands on the station platform in his native Altamont, about to entrain ‘for the proud unknown North,’ for Cambridge and Harvard, where he is to enroll as a graduate student. In the course of the narrative he returns home, sets out once more, — this time for New York, — goes later to Oxford, to Paris, and through the French countryside, to come back home in the end to ‘the huge, single, and incomparable substance of America.’ It teems with characters — many of them but thinly disguised in their identities; there are those whom he knew intimately, those with whom he had the barest acquaintance, and others who were nameless but remembered with his curious flair for remembrance.
It is not the ‘matter’ of Wolfe, however, that is above all interesting, but the ‘manner’ and, behind both of these, the man himself. As in his earlier book, he has in this as well alternated in his structure between purely prosaic narrative — in which nothing is omitted, neither the slightest gesture nor the most trivial inflection — and flights of intense, personal, Whitmanesque poetry. Not that the latter is in any sense formalized verse, of course, but it easily might be, were it only arranged on the page as arbitrarily as most of Whitman’s. Much of it is beautiful, exquisitely beautiful — fullthroated, sonorous, and vital; and much of it is inferior, hyperbolic and adolescent. And so it is an uneven book, and in its excessive length badly proportioned.
I have used the word ‘adolescent.’ As a matter of fact, Of Time and the River is an entire history of late adolescence, of those urgent pangs that are the growing pains of the spirit especially. ‘A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth’ Wolfe has called it. I said, too, that nothing is omitted, for that is Wolfe’s method. But beyond and above all methods there must in any mature work of art be implications that unify the disparate atoms of thought and action and cause their ultimate coherence, implications which constitute some mature and constructive comment on the work’s substance. I find too few of these in the present book; the man, his point of view and its conscious ordering of his materials, seem essentially adolescent, too. There is too much ‘hunger’ here and too little ‘appetite.’
The device Wolfe has adopted of telling his own story in the third person, — always, I think, a difficult and dangerous one, — explains a great deal. Detachment is hard to achieve at any time, but especially so when the subject is oneself. In the latter case the temptation is to dramatize, so that what results is likely to be distortion rather than verisimilitude. This is definitely true in Wolfe’s case. I do not deny his sincerity in regarding and reproducing himself as he does: doubtless he believes in the aberrant enormity that Eugene Gant often is. But, from the reader’s point of view, there is something lacking in that confused and heightened figure — something that is human and universal and immediate, lost in the long transition from ‘I’ to ‘he.’
This distortion, I feel, was considerably less in Look Homeward, Angel, perhaps because the unified experience of childhood and early youth attains completeness more readily than those later years which are still near and therefore closely felt and seen, adhering to the individual although not yet to each other. It may be less again in those four volumes which are still to come in Wolfe’s large series and which, together with these first two, will comprise a far-spread record of American living through a century and a half. But it is not easy, either, to re-create antecedents; there is a tendency to glorify and to disparage, to multiply imaginary distinctions or through shortsightedness to neglect obvious ones. If Wolfe is successful in this further task of his, if the fact and feeling of it are those of assimilation and not the mere sudden jets of an unorganized genius, then his achievement will place him among the foremost, not of Americans only, but of those great world figures who, like Proust, spun and wove the fine fibres of their own lives into enduring fabrics and into patterns of beauty.
PAUL HOFFMAN