Thomas Wolfe

BY MALCOLM COWLEY

DURING his early days in New York, Wolfe used to write in bound ledgers opened on top of the icebox, so that he stood at his work like a factory hand. Later he wrote at a table, using ordinary sheets of manuscript paper, but more of them than anyone else with good eyesight, for ninety of his penciled words filled a sheet. He wrote at top speed, never hesitating for a word, as though he were taking dictation. The moment a sheet was finished, he would push it aside without stopping to read it over or even to number it. In the course of filling thousands of sheets with millions of words, he developed a wart on the middle finger of his right hand “almost as large and hard,” he said in a letter, “but not as valuable, as a gambler’s diamond.”

He was not so much an author of books as a member of that much less familiar species, the writing man, homo scribens. His life was spent in conjugating a single verb in various tenses —scribam, scripsi, scriptum est — with the result that his working habits and problems are even more interesting to study than the works themselves. Indeed, they reveal the works in a rather unexpected light and help to explain why their real virtues were achieved at an inevitable cost to the writing man and his readers.

The first of his problems was how to maintain a steady flow of words from the vast reservoir of his conscious memories to the moving tip of his pencil. Before the flow could be established he would go through weeks or months of self-torture, walking the streets of Brooklyn at night, fleeing to Europe, staying drunk for days on end. Once the flow started, it might continue for months, during which his pencil sprayed out words like water from a hose. “You forget to eat, to shave, to put on a clean shirt when you have one,” says Wolfe’s autobiographical hero George Webber in You Can’t Go Home Again. “You almost forget to sleep, and when you do try to you can’t — because the avalanche has started and it keeps going night and day. . . . You can’t stop yourself — and even if you could you’d be afraid to because there’d be all that hell to go through getting started up again.”

Revision formed part of his system too, but not the usual sort of revision that consists in making interlinear changes, then having the draft retyped. “When he was dissatisfied with a scene or character,” says his friend Edward C. Aswell, who had watched him working, “. . . he would put it aside, and rewrite it some different way from start to finish.” In other words, he had to start the flow over again and continue until he had reached the end of an episode. He would remember new details and incidents the second time, so that his rewritten manuscripts were longer — often several times longer — than the first drafts. After being copied by a typist, they were tied in a bundle and put away in the big pine packing box that stood in the middle of his parlor. Then, in the same frenzy of production, he might go to work on another episode, often one remembered from a different period of his life.

His friends wondered how it was that he could reach into the packing box and, after a little fumbling, produce the desired episode, even if it had been written months or years before. I think the answer must be that he had his own filing system, chronological by subject matter. If the episode belonged to his boyhood, it would go below the episodes relating to his studies at Harvard, which in turn went below his years of teaching at Washington Square College and his love affair with Aileen Bernstein, which went below his struggles to write a second novel. All were parts of “the book” into which he planned to transcribe all his life, his world and time, in a continuous flow of memories. His ambition, announced by George Webber, was “To use myself to the top of my bent. To use everything I have. To milk the udder dry, squeeze out the last drop, until there is nothing left.”

Unfortunately the book of his life was too big to be published or even to be written. His memories would have to be divided into separate books, or novels, and each of these would have to be something more than a chronological series of events; it would also have to possess its own structure and controlling theme. That was the problem of changing flow into form, which always puzzled him and for which he found a solution only in his first novel, as if without trying.

Look Homeward, Angel had a natural unity because, as Wolfe said in a letter to Mrs. Margaret Roberts, his English teacher in Asheville, it was “the story of a powerful creative element” — that is, Eugene Gant, or the author as a boy — “trying to work its way toward an essential isolation; a creative solitude; a secret life — its fierce struggles to wall this part of its life away from birth, first against the public and savage glare of an unbalanced, nervous, brawling family group, later against school, society, all the barbarous invasions of the world.” As always it was a book of memories, but they were shaped and controlled by a theme close to the author’s heart, the familiar theme of the young artist in a hostile environment. It had a natural beginning, which was the artist’s birth, and a natural end, which was his escape from the environment.

But what could he do after writing Look Homeward, Angel? “I’ve got too much material,” George Webber tells his friend Randy Shepperton. “It keeps backing up on me . . . until sometimes I wonder what in the name of God I’m going to do with it — how I’m going to find a frame for it, a channel, a way to make it flow. . . . Sometimes it actually occurs to me that a man may be able to write no more because he gets drowned in his own secretions.” Then after a pause George says, “I’m looking for a way. I think it may be something like what people vaguely mean when they speak of fiction. A kind of legend, perhaps.”

IN 1930, the year after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe was looking for a legend into which he could fit everything he had felt and seen after leaving Asheville. Since he was in Europe at the time, and since his strongest emotion, outside of the passionate desire to write another book, was longing for the home he had lost — irretrievably, so he thought, for Asheville people had threatened to lynch him if he came back — he fixed upon the Antaeus legend of the giant born from the marriage of earth and water. He gave the legend a special turn, however, to fit his circumstances. In a letter to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, he explained that the argument of the new book would be:

. . . of the Lybyan giant, the brother of Polyphemus, the one-eyed, and the son of Gaea and Poseidon, whom he hath never seen, and through his father, the grandson of Cronos and Rhea, whom he remembereth. He contendeth with all who seek to pass him by, he searcheth alway for his father, he crieth out: “Art thou my father? Is it thou?” and he wrestleth with that man, and he riseth up from each fall with strength redoubled, for his strength cometh up out of the earth, which is his mother. Then cometh against him Heracles, who contendeth with him, who discovereth the secret of his strength, who lifteth him from the earth whence his might ariseth, and subdueth him. But from afar now, in his agony, he heareth the sound of his father’s foot: he will be saved for his father cometh!

Of course the giant born of earth was Eugene Gant again, or Wolfe in person. His brother Polyphemus was intended to stand for the sterility that hates life; probably he was to be represented by Francis Starwick, the homosexual dramatist who appears in Of Time and the River. Gaea or Earth was to be introduced in the same novel as Mrs. Esther Jack, but the manuscript chapters about her were omitted from the published book and filed away; later they would figure in The Web and the Rock. Heracles the antagonist was to be the city of New York. As for the father, Wolfe’s plan was that he should never be seen. But in a final chapter called “Pacific End" — later Wolfe thought of it as a final complete book, though he never got round to writing it — Antaeus was to hear “the thunder of horses on a beach (Poseidon and his horses); the moon dives out of clouds; he sees a print of a foot that can belong only to his father, since it is like his own; the sea surges across the beach and erases the print; he cries out ‘Father’ and from the sea far out, and faint upon the wind, a great voice answers ‘My Son!'”

It was a magnificent conception, if slightly overblown; the trouble was that Wolfe was psychologically unable to carry it through. Like Eugene Gant he was gripped by an obsessive desire to say everything, with the result that “all ordered plans, designs, coherent projects for the work he had set out to do . . . were burned up in a quenchless passion, like a handful of dry straw.” Soon the Antaeus legend got mixed with others, and the hero — without ceasing to be Thomas Wolfe — was called upon to play the successive parts of Orestes, Faustus the student, Telemachus, Jason, and Faustus in love. The more he worked on the book, the farther he seemed from its “Pacific End.” By the beginning of the fourth year after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, he had written a million new words, on his own estimate, and the great conception was not so much burned up as buried like Herculaneum under a flow of lava. It was Perkins who saved him, by suggesting how he might make a novel out of one segment of the material, saving the rest for other books. Even then almost half the segment had to be pared away before Of Time and the River was published in 912 pages.

The plan he evolved for a third novel was less Wagnerian. As he described the book in a letter to Aswell, who had become his editor after Wolfe left Scribner’s, “It is about one man’s discovery of life and the world, and in this sense it is a book of apprenticeship.” The hero’s name would be changed from Eugene Gant to George Webber, and his height would shrink from six feet five to five feet nine; Wolfe was looking for a protagonist whose angle of vision didn’t quite duplicate the author’s, so that his world could be treated more objectively. Webber would be the eternal innocent on his painful way to knowledge — another Candide or Wilhelm Meister — and the lessons he learned in a succession of adventures would be summed up in the title, You Can’t Go Home Again.

It was a conception better suited to Wolfe’s writing habits than that of his second novel had been, for it was loose enough so that one episode after another could be fitted into the scheme. But already, as he worked on it, the episodes had proliferated and some of them had grown almost to the length of separate books. His immense store of memories was imposing its pattern on the narrative, or its lack of pattern. The bandylegged figure of George Webber was being presented less and less objectively until it became indistinguishable from the author’s figure; George seemed to grow taller as one looked at him. By the spring of 1938 Wolfe had once again written more than a million words, which he turned over to Aswell before leaving for the West. Most of the words — too many of them — were published in three volumes after his death. No one can say how Wolfe himself would have finished the novel, or group of novels, or in how much time, or how and whether, if he had lived, he could have brought himself to relinquish all that private wealth of words.

But although he was incapable of solving the larger problem of form, he did solve a lesser problem in a way that is often overlooked. Wolfe’s unit of construction was the episode, not the scene or chapter or novel. He always had trouble connecting the episodes, many of which were complete and strikingly effective in themselves. Two of the best are “The Web of Earth” and “A Portrait of Bascom Hawke‚” both of which were printed in Scribner’s Magazine, although the “Portrait” was afterward taken apart and fitted into Of Time and the River. Other fine episodes are the long passage about the death of Old Gant, written for inclusion in the same novel while Wolfe and Perkins were revising it; the account of the students in Professor Hatcher’s (or Baker’s) famous course in the drama; the disintegration of Francis Starwick; the story of Nebraska Crane (partly in The Web and the Rock and partly in You Can’t Go Home Again); and the visit to Nazi Germany called “I Have a Thing to Tell You.” If these had been published separately, from the text of the original manuscripts — as The Story of a Novel was published — Wolfe might have gained a different reputation, not as an epic poet in prose, but as the author of short novels and portraits, little masterpieces of sympathy and penetration. But with his mania for bigness, one can’t be sure that he would have enjoyed that other kind of fame.

MOST of Wolfe’s faults as a writer were closely and fraternally connected with his virtues; both resulted from his method of composition. Take for example the fault most frequently and justifiably urged against him: that he was unable to criticize his own work, that he couldn’t distinguish what was good in it from what was absurd or pretentious, and that he wouldn’t take criticism from others. Wolfe acknowledged the fault even when he was a very young man; at twenty-two he said in a letter to George Pierce Baker, “I admit the virtue of being able to stand criticism. Unfortunately it is a virtue I do not happen to possess.” It wasn’t that he was lacking either in humility or in critical talent. One couldn’t talk with him about books for ten minutes without finding that he was perceptive and discriminating about other people’s work, if he had read it. He didn’t apply that sort of discrimination to his own work not through inability to do so, as he sometimes said, but chiefly as a matter of policy.

In a sense he chose to be only half of an author. The usual author is two persons or personalities working in partnership. One of them says the words to himself, then writes them down; the other listens to the words, or reads them, and then silently exclaims, “This is good, this is what you wanted to say. but this! Can’t you say it again and say it better?” A result of the dialogue between the writer and the reader within is that the usual manuscript moves ahead spasmodically — a sentence or two, a pause while another sentence is phrased and rejected and rephrased, then a rapidly written paragraph, then another pause while reader and writer argue silently (or even aloud) about what has been said, then the sound of a page crumpled and dropped into the wastebasket, then a day’s interval, perhaps, then another page that goes better. . . .

With time always pressing him, Wolfe couldn’t afford to stumble ahead by a process of inner dialectic. There had to be that uninterrupted flow of memories from mind to paper; if he once questioned the value of the memories or changed the words that came to him, the flow halted for the day or night or perhaps for weeks. The solution he found instinctively, but later supported with arguments, was to suppress the critical side of his nature, or at least to keep it silent until an episode was finished; then if the inner critic objected to what he had written, he would do it over from the beginning, again without allowing the critic to interrupt. It was an effective system for producing words — very often accurate and truly inspired words — but it involved a great deal of wasted effort for the writer and wasted time for the reader of his published work.

Another fault urged against him is his use of formulas, including stock phrases, paired nouns or verbs where only one is needed (“grief and anguish,” “sneered at and derided”), as well as the inevitable and therefore useless epithet. Here again the fault results from his system of writing and is closely connected with virtues that it helped him to achieve. Wolfe composed his novels, or rather the episodes that went into his novels, much as ancient bards, standing before a company of warriors, composed their epic poems. Like them, if for different reasons, he had to maintain an unbroken flow of words, with the result that there had to be moments when his pencil moved automatically while his mind was preparing the next powerful effect.

I couldn’t help thinking of Wolfe when reading a passage in Moses Finley’s illuminating book, The World of Odysseus:

The repeated formula [Finley says] is indispensable in heroic poetry. The bard composes directly before his audience; he does not recite memorized lines. In 1934, at the request of Professor Milman Parry, a sixty-year-old Serbian bard who could neither read nor write recited for him a poem of the length of the Odyssey, making it up as he went along, yet retaining meter and form and building a complicated narrative. The performance took two weeks, with a week in between, the bard chanting for two hours each morning and two more in the afternoon.

Such a feat makes enormous demands in concentration on both the bard and his audience. That it can be done at all is attributable to the fact that the poet, a professional with long years of apprenticeship behind him, has at his disposal the necessary raw materials: masses of incidents and masses of formulas, the accumulation of generations of minstrels who came before him.

Wolfe was perhaps the only American author of this century who could have duplicated the feat of the Serbian bard. That was because he had the same sort of equipment: partly an enormous store of characters and incidents (drawn from his own experience, not from the traditions of the race), and partly a supply of epithets, metaphors, and synonyms (remembered from his early reading) that could be applied to any human situation. His writing was a sort of chant, like the declamation of a Homeric bard.

POETRY of a traditional sort can be written faster than prose, and Wolfe kept falling into traditional poetry. His books, especially Of Time and the River, are full of lines in Elizabethan blank verse:

Page after page falls into an iambic pattern, usually a mixture of pentameters and hexameters. Other passages — in fact there is a whole book of them called A Stone, A Leaf, A Door, selected from Wolfe’s writing by John S. Barnes — are a rather simple kind of cadenced verse:

Often there are internal rhymes and halfrhymes: “October is the season for returning: the bowels of youth are yearning with lost love. Their mouths are dry and bitter with desire: their hearts are torn with the thorns of spring.” Again there are phrases almost meaningless in themselves, but used as musical themes that are stated and restated with variations, sometimes through a whole novel. “A stone, a leaf, a door” is one of the phrases; others are “O lost” and “naked and alone,” in Look Homeward, Angel, and “of wandering forever and the earth again,” repeated perhaps a hundred times in Of Time and the River. All these patterns or devices — cadence, meter, rhyme, assonance, refrains — are those into which the language naturally falls when one is trying to speak or write it passionately and torrentially. They are not the marks of good prose — on the contrary — and yet in Wolfe’s case, as in that of a few other natural writers, they are the means of achieving some admirable effects, including an epic movement with its surge and thunder. They also help Wolfe to strike and maintain a tone, one that gives his work a unity lacking in its structure, a declamatory tone that he needs for his effort to dignify a new race of heroes and demigods, to suffuse a new countryside with legend, and to bring new subjects into the charmed circle of those considered worthy to be treated in epic poems.

HIS persistent immaturity — still another fault that is often urged against him — was not so much a weakness of character as it was a feature of his literary policy. He had to play the part of an innocent in the great world. He had to have illusions, then lose them painfully, then replace them with others, because that repeated process was the story he wanted to tell. He had to be naïve about his emotions in order to feel them more intensely and in order to convey the impression — as he does in his best work — that something as commonplace as boarding a train or writing a book is being experienced not only for the first time in the author’s life but for the first time in history. If he had learned from the experience of others, he would have destroyed that sense of uniqueness. If he had said to himself with the wisdom of middle age, “There must be a catch somewhere,” in his exultation, or, “You’ll feel better about it tomorrow,” in his bottomless despair, he would have blunted the edge of both feelings and made them less usable as memories.

God said in the proverb, “Take what you want and pay for it.” That might have been the motto and moral of Wolfe’s collected works and of his private life as well. Determined as he was to find words for every experience, he denied himself many of the richest experiences because they might have interfered with his writing, or simply because he had no time for them. I le never had a real home after he was seven years old; He never owned so much as a square foot of the earth he loved (even his grave is in a family plot); he never planted a tree or a garden, never married, never fathered a child. Much as he loved good company, he spent most of his time alone in dingy lodgings or roaming the streets at night, He played no games, took part in no sports, displayed no social accomplishments. Indeed, he had few amusements: eating and drinking were the first two, and afterward came travel, making love, and conversation, in about that order of importance. He didn’t enjoy music, or much enjoy art (except the paintings of Breughel and Cranach); he stopped going to the theatre after his quarrel with Mrs. Bernstein; and though he liked to talk about books, I suspect that he did comparatively little reading after he left Harvard. His real avocation was the physical act of writing; his one preoccupation was preparing for the act. He said in a letter to Mrs. Roberts, written a few months before his death:

. . . there is no rest, once the worm gets in and begins to feed upon the heart — there can never after that be rest, forgetfulness, or quiet sleep again. . . . After this happens, a man becomes a prisoner; there are times when he almost breaks free, but there is one link in the chain that always holds; there are times when he almost forgets, when he is with his friends, when he is reading a great book or poem, when he is at the theatre, or on a ship, or with a girl — but there is one tiny cell that still keeps working; even when he is asleep, one lamp that will not go out. . . .

As far as I am concerned, there is no life without work — at least, looking back over my own, everything I can remember of any value is somehow tied up with work.

The price Wolfe paid in his life was not the price of his debauches, which were intense while they lasted, like all his other activities — once he landed in jail and another time in a German hospital with a broken head, richly deserved — but which were occasional or intermittent. He paid more for his one great virtue than for all his vices. He paid for his hours of steady writing, for his sleepless nights, for his efforts to remember and interpret everything that happened, to find a key to it all, to give form to his memories. The price was partly in terms of health, for he was drawing sight drafts against his constitution without stopping to ask whether there was still a credit balance.

But there was also a price in mental health that most of his critics have been too considerate to mention, even long after his death. His alternating moods of exuberance and despair became more extreme; especially the periods of despair were longer and deeper. Many physicians would say that in his last years he was a victim of manic-depressive psychosis.

He also developed paranoid symptoms, as manic-depressives often do. There were ideas of reference and delusions of persecution and grandeur. At times he thought the whole literary world was leagued in a conspiracy to keep him from working. “As for that powerful and magnificent talent I had two years ago,” he wrote to Perkins in January, 1937, “ — in the name of God is that to be lost entirely, destroyed under the repeated assaults and criminalities of this blackmail society under which we live? Now I know what happens to the artist in America.” His farewell letter to Perkins was a magnificent piece of sustained eloquence — 130 of his manuscript pages — but in places it was a crazy man’s letter. One fine sentence is often quoted: “And I shall wreak out my vision of this life, this way, this world and this America, to the top of my bent, to the height of my ability, but with an unswerving devotion, integrity and purity of purpose that shall not be menaced, altered or weakened by any one.” But the following sentences, which reveal his state of mind, are usually slurred over:

I will go to jail because of this book if I have to. I will lose my friends because of it, if I will have to. I will be libeled, slandered, blackmailed, threatened, menaced, sneered at, derided and assailed by every parasite, every ape, every blackmailer, every scandalmonger, every little Saturday Reviewer of the venomous and corrupt respectabilities. I will be exiled from my country because of it, if I have to. . . . But no matter what happens I am going to write this book.

That is impressive as eloquence, but not as a statement of the facts. Wolfe was planning to write a book that might have hurt a few persons, notably Mrs. Bernstein and some of the staff at Scribner’s, but not so much as some of his neighbors in Asheville had been hurt by Look Homeward, Angel. Nobody was trying to keep him from writing it. For the author it would involve absolutely no danger of prison, blackmail, ostracism, or exile, “I am a righteous man,” he said in the letter, with an undertone of menace, “and few people know it because there are few righteous people in the world.” There are many with delusions of righteousness, which they use as an excuse for being unjust to others. Wolfe was becoming one of them, as he must have realized in part of his mind — the Dr. Jekyll part, as he sometimes called it. At this point, as at some others, he was losing touch with reality.

It had better be made clear that his fits of despair were not the “down” phase of a manicdepressive cycle. There was no loss of appetite or vigor, no moping in silence; on the contrary there were quarrels, broken furniture, and a torrent of spoken and written words. The fits did not recur at regular intervals and they were not induced by mere pretexts; on the contrary they had understandable causes, usually connected with his work. As Wolfe said to Alfred S. Dashiell of Scribner’s Magazine in one of his many letters of apology:

The effort of writing or creating something seems to start up a strange and bewildering conflict in the man who does it, and this conflict at times almost takes on physical proportions so that he feels he is struggling not only with his own work but also with the whole world around him, and he is so beset with demons, nightmares, delusions and bewilderments that he lashes out at everyone and everything, not only people he dislikes and mistrusts, but sorrowfully enough, even against the people that he knows in his heart are his friends.

I cannot tell you how completely and deeply conscious I have been of this thing and how much bloody anguish I have sweat and suffered when I have exorcised these monstrous phantoms and seen clearly into what kind of folly and madness they have led me.

It had all started so boyishly and admirably with his gift for feeling joys and sorrows more deeply than others. He chose to cultivate the gift because it helped him in his writing, and gradually it had transformed his character. At first he was proud, if in a rather sheepish fashion, of sometimes losing control of himself. He wrote to his sister Mabel in May, 1929, “Don’t be afraid of going crazy — I’ve been there several times and it’s not at all bad.” It was indeed an almost normal state for a romantic artist forcing himself, provoking himself, beyond the natural limit of his emotions. Soon he began to feel the sort of dismay he expressed in the letter to Dashiell, but it was becoming too late to change his professional habits. There were always occasions in the literary life for those fits of manic exultation and, increasingly, of despair — the sense of loss on publishing a book, the insults of a few reviewers (notably Bernard DeVoto), the strain of getting started again, the fatigue that followed months of steady writing, the disappointment when Perkins felt that his latest work wasn’t quite his best, the injustice of a suit against him for libel — and all these hurts became more painful as he brooded over them in solitude or drank to forget them, until at last he couldn’t help interpreting them as signs that his talent was threatened by a vast conspiracy. His psychosis, if we call it that, was not organic or toxic, nor was it functional in the usual sense of being an illness due to unsolved emotional conflicts. Like the oversized wart on the middle finger of his right hand, it was a scar he had earned in combat, a professional deformation.