"You Can't Escape Autobiography": New Letters of Thomas Wolfe

Edited by ROBERT D. MEADE

BETWEEN Julian R. Meade, the late Danville, Virginia, writer, and Tom Wolfe there were ties such as drew Wolfe to few of his younger contemporaries. Julian, a Southerner like Tom, talented and highly sensitive, had attracted much favorable attention by I Live in Virginia, his uncomfortably amusing satire on his native state. But locally there had been enough reaction on the part of those pricked to make him appreciate what Wolfe endured after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel. When in New York on literary business he would see Wolfe at intervals and they would talk far into the night, Meade leaving exhausted. His mother remembers Julian telling her that on one New York trip Tom wanted him to stay in his apartment but that it “was practically empty. Hardly an extra chair and no extra bed.”

Meade was planning a sketch of Wolfe for the Bookman, and the assignment led to the letters which follow. The first in this series was written by Wolfe from 111 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, on February 1, 1932.

DEAR MEADE: —
You ask what answer I have to those who say I did a faithful picture of one city and its people. I should like to avoid this question completely if I could, as well as the other one which asks what answer I have for those who speak of me as an autobiographical writer. I should like to avoid them, Meade, not because I am in any sense afraid of the consequences of answering them as directly as I can, but because these questions have been asked before and my answer, although it seemed perfectly clear to me only led to fresh argument, misunderstanding, and dispute. I think the roots of all creation in writing are fastened in autobiography and that it is in no way possible to escape or deny this fact. I think that a writer must use what is his own, I know of no means by which he can use what is not his own — do you? — nor would I think it desirable that he should. I made once before what seemed to me a very clear and simple statement of this obvious fact — namely, in a short preface to the reader which I wrote at the beginning of “Look Homeward, Angel” and I was accused by several critics, including one or two on the Asheville newspapers, of “evading the issue” and of trying to avoid a direct answer whether my book was about Asheville and its citizens by a clever twist on words. Well, I have been so exasperated by what I considered an unfair and trivial comment that I said I would never attempt to make any answer at all to such criticism but if there are really people who still want to know whether my book is about Asheville, North Carolina, and is a faithful picture of its inhabitants, I will say here and now that it is not about Asheville, North Carolina, and that it is not a faithful picture of the inhabitants of Asheville, North Carolina, or of any other place on earth that I have ever known; and finally, that I do not believe any book ever got written in this way — certainly I could never write anything in this way: that is not the way a writer works and feels and creates a thing — he does not write by calling Greenville Jonesville or by changing the name of Brown and Smith to Black and White: if it’s that easy let’s all start out for the nearest town with a trunk full of note books and pencils and start taking down the words and movements of the inhabitants from the most convenient corner. I could go on with this indefinitely but I get hot under the collar when the word autobiography is mentioned because the way most people use it seems to me to have no sense or meaning whatever.
And yet the whole question of a writer’s use of his material and of his true and essential use of autobiography seems to me an important and a fascinating one and I really believe I could say something about it that would have value if I only had time to set it before you here now because it is a question I have thought about so long, so carefully and so earnestly. But I want to repeat that nowhere can you escape autobiography whenever you come to anything that has any real or lasting value in letters. For example as I walk around my room in the act of dictating this letter the first book my eve falls on is called “The Road to Xanadu”. It was written by my old teacher, Professor John Livingston Lowes at Harvard and in it he attempts to trace the genesis, the sunken and hidden sources of two of the most remarkable poems in the language — “The Rime of the Ancient. Mariner” and “Kubla Khan". Professor Lowes has managed to track down almost all of the obscure and bewilderingly manifold elements which had gone into the making of the Ancient Mariner. He knew, of course, that Coleridge was an enormous reader, that he literally read almost everything and Lowes by plowing through ten thousand forgotten and obscure books has managed to show where almost every line, every image, every sentence in the Ancient Mariner comes from. Coleridge, of course, was not even conscious of the extent to which his own reading had influenced him: he has made use of a thousand elements of apparently unrelated experience to create something that was his own and that was beautiful and real and in the highest sense of the word original. Lowes goes on to attempt to show that the thing that happened when Coleridge wrote this poem happens when the artist creates anything — in other words, that this use of experience which is sunken in the well of unconsciousness, or which is only half remembered, is a typical use of the creative faculty. Now what is this, Meade, except the most direct and natural use of autobiography, and how could Coleridge have written differently from the way he did write, and how could Joyce have written differently from the way he wrote, and how could Proust have written differently from the way he wrote: Coleridge’s experiences came mainly from the pages of books and Joseph Conrad’s experiences came mainly from the decks of ships, but can anyone tell you that one form of experience is less real and less personal than another, or that Coleridge’s books had less reality for him than Conrad’s ships; and finally, could anyone tell you that Joyce and Proust are either more or less autobiographical than Coleridge or Swift, and if they do tell you so, would you think their words any longer had meaning or were worthy of serious consideration?
You ask again if I look upon writing as an escape from reality: in no sense of the word does it seem to me to be escape from reality, I should rather say that it is an attempt to approach and penetrate reality. This I think is certainly true of such a book as “Ulysses”: the effort to apprehend and to make live again a moment in lost time is so tremendous that some of us feel that Joyce really did succeed, at least in places, in penetrating reality and in so doing creating what is almost another dimension of reality. I certainly think that most writing represents a struggle with reality — that most good writing has been done because the writer was in conflict with the world about him and each writer has had his own way of expressing that conflict.
As to your other questions, Meade: I will have to lump them together now and come to a hasty conclusion. You ask if I write easily or with difficulty. I think I write with the most extreme difficulty: the trouble is not so much a lack of material but an overabundance of it. Condensation and brevity are terribly difficult for me, my manuscripts are hundreds of thousands of words long and almost my whole effort at the present time is to get my book within some reasonable length. 1 have two lives, one which is intensely conscious of the world around me and one which lives with an equal intensity in the past: my memory is a kind of hunger and as I go on my memory seems to get better, or worse, depending on which way you look at it. I am haunted by a sense of time and a memory of things past and, of course, I know I have got to try somehow to get a harness on it.
You ask me if I am still interested in the stage — if you mean by this am I still interested in writing plays, or will I ever write another one, my answer is no. I haven’t the slightest interest in ever making the attempt again although I think a man who is able to write a fine play has done one of the best things in the world.
Finally, you ask me about my literary preferences among living and dead authors: I am afraid that’s too large an order for me to deal with here. For a great many years during my childhood and later when I was at Harvard, I read everything I could lay my hands on, the amount of reading I did was incredible and I can’t attempt to tell you about it here. Upon the top shelf of my bookcase, however, I have attempted to put some of the books which I use all the time and which I am able to read again and again. All I can do is to give you a few of the titles, at any rate it will tell you something of the books I like best. At the present time reading from right to left the books in my top shelf are as follows: my old college edition of “ The Iliad" parts of which I sometimes read; the Bible which I really read a great deal — I mean a few books: Ecclesiastes, the Book of Job, the Song of Solomon, Revelation; Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary which has in it some of the best reading in the world; the plays of Shakespeare; the poems of Coleridge; the poems of John Donne; “The Anatomy of Melancholy”, “Ulysses”, “War and Peace” “The Brothers Karamazov” “Leaves of Grass” “Moll Flanders”; the plays of Molière, the poems of Heinrich Heine and a book of German lyrics. I delight in all manner of anthologies. I can read French and German but these are the only modern languages besides English, that I know anything about.
If you write this piece, Meade, I wish you’d send it to me and let me see it before you show it to anyone else. If it means anything to you ;it all, I am, of course, glad to help as much as I can and, of course, I am pleased and grateful to think that you should want to write a piece about me and that anyone is interested in publishing it. I don’t know, however, if this is really a good time for such an article: I am quite sincere in not being very anxious to got any more publicity at the present time because I think this is the time when I should try to work and produce and I believe your article might have greater value if you let it go until I got at least one more book finished and published.

In the second letter, written from Brooklyn on April 21 of the same year, Wolfe told Meade that his various notes and letters “have haunted my conscience for several weeks” but that “I have literally been too damned busy with the work which I must now complete to attend to correspondence.” Wolfe then continued: —

I really can’t tell you just how I feel about this article of yours for “The Bookman”. I assure you that I would rather see you do it than any one and I have the utmost faith and confidence in your ability to do a good job and not make me sound too foolish. I do have, at the present time, a rather reluctant feeling about publicity. I got so worried and resentful at one time al all this second book business: it seemed to me that I was surrounded by a circle of leering eyes and of people pressing in with a tomahawk in one hand and a bouquet of roses in the other, and ready to throw either. The thing really got on my nerves pretty badly and I deliberately sought out as much obscurity as I could find because it seemed to me the only way a man could live and do his work, and furthermore since I have the material and plan and part of the actual written manuscript, not of one book, but of at least a half dozen al the present time, I had not the slightest intention of allowing myself to be read out of the picture or extravagantly touted upon the basis of the second one and it was for this reason that I felt a kind of unconscious reluctance to get any more publicity.

Everything has started to come with a great rush during the last few months. I now write three or four thousand words a day and I expect to have a completed manuscript within three months and yet this manuscript, confidentially, will only be a small part of the book which I originally planned; it will be complete within itself and a very long book in its own right but it will be only one of four or five volumes to which I propose to give the name “The October Fair" and all of which are related to a single theme. It seems that what I have been doing during the last two or three years, in all of those hundreds of thousands of words which I have written, has been to mix the material and cement for all of these books and suddenly a few months ago when I was at the very bottom of a deep black pit of depression and despair I seemed to get hold of the free end of the knot and to yank it, and since then everything has begun to come. I work now every day as long and as hard as I can and I have very little time for anything else, f have forgotten that horrible sensation of being watched with critical eyes and I have got back the self-confidence which I had almost lost.

GO ahead and write the piece if you like. I wish somehow you could tell in it plainly and simply the real truth about me which is also the best thing about me and the thing I am not ashamed of — namely, that I was a young fellow, swarming with ideas and loaded with material for books he wanted to write, who went through a period of the greatest perplexity and distress, and who has tried with all his might to learn how to work and to learn how to live decently and obscurely and like an artist.

I wish I could tell people what, happens to a man when he begins to write and how the effect his first book has on him and on his readers is entirely different from anything he ever imagined and how even in the very element of success which he dreamed of and wanted there is something terrifying and disquieting which fills his spirit with unrest and perplexity. I think what I am trying to say to you is that a man in his desire to protect his talent and his spirit from a brutal public aggression may get a bit of a chip on his shoulder; he feels mistrustful some times and disturbed even at the praise his work may get however generous it may be and however much his soul may thirst for it and he resolves therefore to put himself in a position to build up a power and strength within himself that will enable him to meet triumphantly not only the clamours and shouts of success but also the contempt and scorn and sudden isolation of failure.

I hope I have not become too involved in this and have managed to indicate a state of perplexity and confusion which I have passed through and finally I want to make it plain that I shall go on writing, that nothing can keep me from it, that I shall not a1low myself to be pushed or goaded so that I feel that my whole life and chance of fulfillment or happiness is made to depend upon a single east of the dice, a turn of mischance or good fortune. Please don’t think that I am speaking ungratefully here of the generous and liberal support which is given so freely to-day to anyone who deserves it in any degree but I have learned to hate with all the intensity of my spirit the God-damned pushing literary racket. I’ll have no part in it and I am not going to let it touch me if I can help it in any way whatever. I will not be driven into some obscene jargon of literary competition against any man or woman living. The only man I will compete with is myself and the only conflict I will record is the conflict of the artist with the world about him and with the elements of confusion and chaos and dissonance in his own spirit.

P.S. — Meade, I read the piece Laurence Stallings wrote about the Bascom Hawke in his column in The Sun and I can’t tell you how moved and happy and bucked up I felt about the thing. He is a grand man and really it is for this kind of reward that men work and live and the reason they go through that agony of distilling their blood and marrow out upon a printed page which is known as writing. I wanted to tell you a while ago that we really want fame and love it as in decency we ought but it is not the fame which is given to you by a set of driving and pushing and contriving literary racketeers who will fall upon you and rend you with gleeful howls the moment they think you have stumbled and fallen but it is for the respect and admiration of such people as Stallings and perhaps a dozen more that we sweat and labor. Good words from people like this are sweeter than honey and it seems to me one of the best and highest rewards on earth. As for the other thing the racketing, gossiping, whoop-de-doodle thing, it is a piece of stinking fish and the man who lets himself be seduced by its putrid fragrance deserves everything that he can and undoubtedly will get. So much for that — I forgot to tell you that in this great burst of work I have been enjoying I have written another story of about forty thousand words which Scribner’s have taken and which they are going to publish in July or August if I can take the time off to do the proofs and revision. It is called “The Web of Earth” and Max Perkins says it’s grand. 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. I had the whole spring and source and fountain-head within me. I really believe although this is a terribly boastful thing to say that I knew this old woman better than Joyce knew that woman at the end of Ulysses and furthermore that my old woman is a grander, richer and more tremendous figure than his was. If I haven’t been able to make her seem so the fault is in me and not in the material I had to work with. I wish to God Max Perkins would let me write a whole long book about her. I haven’t used one-tenth of the material I had but he wants me very properly to finish the book I am doing before going on to some of these other ones and of course he is right about it, but 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. I really think it is going to be a good story if they won’t make me cut out some of the things in it. Of course I know a few of the scenes can’t be printed in Scribner’s Magazine but I think that they are wrong, or rather that the world is wrong in this attitude because the only thing that can possibly make for what is revolting and obscene is the intention and it ought to be apparent in the very first paragraph of a good thing that the intention has nothing to do with deliberate profaneness.

The last letter in the series was addressed from Brooklyn on July 7, 1932.

DEAR MEADE: —
I got your letter and enclosed article yesterday. I think you have done a good job of it and I don’t believe there is much I could suggest at present by way of change. I have taken the liberty of making one or two slight changes in things you quote me as saying, although you got it perfectly right and I did say them. On page 7 the phrase “racketing, gossiping, whoop-de-doodle thing” occurs, and I am going to change this for various reasons, chiefly because “whoop-de-docdle” does not belong to my own way of speech and is probably Menckenian. Likewise I am changing the phrase “stinking fish” and the sentence which follows because it also sounds a little awkward to me, although it does represent what I mean.
One possible change or increase in emphasis occurs to me. You mention the fact that I have worked hard in an effort to learn how to use my material in the most effective way. I think you might even somewhat emphasize the fact that a large part of my toil and trouble at present comes from having almost too much material to deal with and the consequent effort it has cost me to find out how to shape and release the units in separate volumes of a readable and publishable length. This has really been a tremendous problem and has cost me terrific labor. Thus, out of all the writing I have done in the past two and a half years — writing which would amount quite easily, I think, to a halfmillion words, it is doubtful if I will be able to use over a third or a fourth of it in my next book. And yet I think that in one way or another I shall eventually use almost all of it. I suppose what I am trying to say to you is that every man has his own special problem and his own conflict with his material and it seems to me that each man has got to learn it in his own way for himself.
I should greatly appreciate it if you will let me know what further progress you make in this piece. Meanwhile with my best wishes for your health and success, I am,
Sincerely yours,
TOM WOLFE