It
was 1966. With typical ambition Elaine Zelznick, the young drama teacher
and theater director at Niles West High
School in Skokie, Illinois had
selected a noted Broadway serious
drama as the class play. Look
Homeward, Angel was a bittersweet but lyrical evocation of life in an
early 20th Century small Southern city as seen through the eyes
of a sensitive young man coming of age. Adapted
from a well known novel by Ketti Frings,
the play had earned six Tony Award
nominations and the 1958 Pulitzer Prize
for Drama.
The
leading role of Eugene Gant
naturally went to the school’s acknowledged star Murray Moss, who both he and Miss Zelznick was convinced was the
next Marlon Brando. And he dazzled delivering lines of dialog that
could and did move an audience to awe and tears. I was given a small part as a townsman—so small
that I can’t remember who I was playing.
Certainly less than six lines of dialogue. But I was thrilled to be a part of a project
that everyone involved with took with high minded artistic convictions.
The
Samuel French script from which we
work noted that the play was based on a novel by someone named Thomas Wolfe. I had never heard of him, but I searched
out the fat book. I found a paperback
copy among my mother’s large collection of important or bestselling
novels. One evening I opened it up the
book to the prelude:
. . a stone, a
leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone
we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from
the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable
prison of this earth.
Which of us has
known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us
has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and
alone?
O waste of lost,
in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder,
lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost
lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the
wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
I
was blown away as only a 17 year old can be blown away. Awe struck.
I had never read prose like that.
I read all night getting maybe 200 hundred pages into the thickest novel
I had ever seen. And my life literally changed. I wanted to do that. I wanted more than anything to write with
that kind of power and grandeur. I
wanted to be the next Thomas Wolfe, the next Great American novelist.
I
was not the only one. Wolfe had that effect
on a lot of people, most notably Jack
Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, and Philip Roth each of whom adored
him. Pat Conroy may have summed it up for the rest of them, “My writing
career began the instant I finished Look
Homeward, Angel.”
Of
course I never became a novelist, let alone a great one. But I did spend years writing short stories
that tried to capture that eloquence in a bottle. But no one could match Wolfe, and it was fatal
to try. Would-be lyrical passages were
too often simply florid and excessive.
It took time and a heavy dose of Ernest
Hemingway’s economical and pared down prose to strip the worst of it from
my writing.
But
regular readers of this blog and other scribbling might sometimes detect echoes
of that rich and evocative language.
Forgive me. Like malaria, you never quite get over Thomas
Wolfe.
Wolfe
was born on October 3, 1900 in the North
Carolina Piedmont city of Asheville. He was the youngest of eight children and the
closest sibling to his ambitious and domineering mother, the former Julia Elizabeth Westall. She kept upscale boarding houses and
dabbled, eventually successfully, in real
estate. His father William Oliver Wolfe was already 50
years old when his youngest son was born, a decade older than his wife. He was a stone carver and owned a monument
company. Both of them and his siblings
became key characters in his autobiographical first novel.
The
relationship between his parents had cooled.
When Julia Wolfe returned from a successful stay in St. Louis where she had operated a boarding house serving visitors
to the 1904 World’s Fair, she used
the money she had earned to buy a large new boarding house she named Old Kentucky Home at 48 Spruce Street
in Asheville. Julia moved in there with
young Thomas while his father and the other children stayed in their old home.
The
boy grew up in that house amid the mix of lodgers and visitors and the tension
between his parents. He idolized his
father and his older brothers, particularly Ben, his closest sibling in age who was eight years older. The boy must have been a sponge. He absorbed it all, as well as life in
Ashville and many of the town’s residents.
Wolfe
was precocious enough, and his family prosperous enough, to enroll him at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at the age of 15. Despite his youth he was both a popular
student and an academic stand out. He
was a member of the Dialectic Society
and Pi Kappa Phi fraternity. He was recognized as an outstanding writer as
rose to the editorship of the Daily Tar Heel and was awarded a
prize for philosophic writing for an essay.
After
the trauma of his brother Ben’s early death in 1918, Wolfe enrolled in a play writing class. The future master of descriptive
prose was inspired to become a dramatist.
The Return of Buck Gavin is first one play was one of the first
produced by the newly formed Carolina
Playmakers. The troop also staged
another of his plays, The Third Night.
Wolfe graduated in
1920 and went on to Harvard University
for graduate studies that fall where he studied play writing under George Pierce Baker. Baker’s 47 Workshop, a student theatrical group which mounted plays developed in
his classes, did two separate versions of Wolfe’s The Mountains in 1921.
Wolf
earned his Master’s Degree in June
of 1922. His father died the same month,
another shattering experience for the young man. Despite the loss, he returned to Harvard for
another year of work under Baker. The 47
Workshop produced his most ambitious work yet, a 10 scene Welcome to Our City in
May 1923. The play drew attention beyond
the University community.
In
1923 Wolfe received a modest stipend to go to New York City as a fund raiser for his original alma mater, the University of North
Carolina. The job left plenty of time
for the young writer to try to peddle his plays to producers. He had no luck. In ’24
he took a teaching position at New York
University, which would somewhat sporadically be his academic home for the
next seven years.
For
a short while in 1924 it looked like the Theater
Guild might be willing to produce Welcome
to Our City but it was eventually rejected as too long and unwieldy. Wolfe could not bring himself to cut the
script to a more manageable length.
Somewhat
discouraged in October of ’24 Wolfe sailed for England and the Continent to
expand his provincial horizons and on his writing. He had concluded that his talents lay not as
a playwright, but as a novelist.
Sailing
home to New York in 1925 Wolfe met the beautiful, sophisticated, and intelligent
older “Jewess” who became a
tempestuous lover, muse, mentor. Aline Bernstein was a noted costume
designer for the Theater Guild and the married mother of two. She was 18 years older than her protégée. The relationship was sometimes story
and always intense. But Bernstein
encouraged the writer and promoted his career.
She became the model of Esther
Jack, and important character in Wolf’s last three novels.
With
her encouragement, Wolfe returned to Europe in 1926 where he began work on his
highly experimental first epic novel, O Lost. He completed a draft back in New York. Aline helped get it into the hands Scribner’s, the most important literary
publishing house in the country, already the home of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
His 1,100 page manuscript landed on the desk of the most respected
editor in the business, Maxwell Perkins.
Perking
immediately recognized that the book needed significant paring. Despite Wolfe’s anguish, he cut well over
half of the text, eliminating most of the most experimental elements and
concentrating on the autobiographical character of Eugene Gant. Despite the
ruthless editing, Wolfe grew close to Perkins and came to regard him as a
surrogate father. Perkins returned the
affection and treated Wolfe like a son.
And
not everything cut was lost. Much of the
material became the core of a second novel.
The
book was published under the new title of Look Homeward, Angel just days before the stock market crash of 1929. That might have affected sales. The initial publication was only a modest
commercial success. But it was a
critical triumph. Praise was almost
unanimous and unusually effusive, although some critics like Bernard DeVoto would come to praise
Perkins’s editing over Wolfe’s undisciplined genius. DeVoto later described the book as “hacked and
shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and the
assembly-line at Scribner’s.”
The
publication certainly changed Wolfe’s life.
He was shocked by the angry reaction of his hometown of Asheville where
over 200 of his family members and neighbors recognized themselves as
characters in the novel. Most were not
pleased. It caused a rift in his family,
especially with his prickly mother. Only
one sister remained supportive. He was
the target of such invective that Wolfe was afraid to return to Asheville for
eight years.
He
dedicated the book to Bernstein, but broke off his relationship with her
shortly after it came out. Depressed and
drinking heavily Wolfe left for Europe supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship. There
he found a warmer reception with the public.
The book was a best seller in England
and its dense style meshed with German literary
styles and tastes.
Upon
return using unpublished fragments of the first book and lots of new material,
he produced another massive manuscript The October Fair continuing the
story of Eugene Gant as he establishes a literary career and proximately
featuring Esther Jack. It was an
arduous, four year process. Wolfe worked
in his Brooklyn apartment, writing
long hand on legal tablets standing up and using the top of his refrigerator as
a desk.
Once
again Perking wrestled a single, managed to wrest a single volume, Of
Time and the River. The book was not only a critical success this time,
but a popular one as well. It shot to
the top of the best seller lists in 1936.
Wolfe was acclaimed as one of the great writers of his generation, if
not the greatest. Peers like Sinclair Lewis and William Faulkner joined in the chorus of cheers.
When
the book became a success, Wolfe heard once again from Ashville. It turned out
that people this time felt snubbed that they were left out of the new
book. And there were still whispers that
Perkins was the Svengali behind the
writer.
Despite
their continued personal affection and friendship, this caused a professional rupture. Wolfe abandoned Scribner’s for Harper Bros. and a new editor, Edward Aswell.
While
working on a new manuscript with his autobiographical doppelganger’s name changed to George
Webber, Wolfe returned to Europe, spending significant time in Germany where
his work was especially admired. But on
this trip Wolfe became alarmed by the open persecution of Jews under the Nazi regime.
Unlike
other writers, Wolfe had never been very political, but on his return from
Europe he felt compelled to speak out.
He published a widely read and influential short story I
Have a Thing to Tell You in the mildly leftist The New Republic.
In
1938 Wolfe delivered another huge, amorphous manuscript about George Webber on
Aswell’s desk. He then embarked on a
western train tour that began with a lecture at Indiana University and continued on a long dreamed of tour of
western National Parks and Monuments.
My
friend and fellow worker Utah Phillips quoted
Wolfe’s longings in the spoken word introduction to his railroad song
masterpiece Starlight on the Rails.
Oh, I will go up
and down the country and back and forth across the country. I will go out West
where the states are square. I will go to Boise and Helena, Albuquerque and the
two Dakotas and all the unknown places. Say brother, have you heard the roar of
the fast express? Have you seen starlight on the rails?
It
was a trip of a life time and Wolfe was taking copious notes and writing
sketches for the inclusion in a future book.
But he fell ill with a serious repertory infection and was hospitalized
in Seattle. Pneumonia
filled his lungs and he did not respond to treatment.
His
worried sister Mable closed the
boarding house she was running in Washington
to be with him. She brought him back
across the country for treatment at Johns
Hopkins in Baltimore where
doctors were planning emergency surgery to relieve pressure on the brain from
fluid buildup. Before slipping into a coma Wolfe dictated a last fond message
to Perkins.
The
brain operation reviled significant damage to the right side of the brain from miliary tuberculosis. On September 6, 1938 Wolfe died less than
a month before his 38th birthday. His
body was returned at last to Ashville where it was laid in a family plot beside
his parents and siblings.
At
Harper’s Aswell carved two novels from Wolfe’s final manuscript, The
Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again published in
1939 and ’40 respectively. Both were
critical and popular successes.
Aline
Bernstein also had a large number of Wolfe manuscripts, mostly short stories
and fragments of planned longer works that he had abandoned with her following
their break-up. Much of that material
was published posthumously over the years in various forms.
Despite
the high esteem in which he was held when he died, by the ‘50’s his reputation
was in steep decline with harsh criticism by Hemingway characterizing him as “the
over-bloated Lil Abner of literature.”
Former admirer Faulkner also became critical. Academic writers could not neatly place him
in a continuing tradition, expect acknowledging him as a pioneer of
autobiographical fiction. His elaborate
style seemed passé.
Wolfe
had nearly disappeared from college literature surveys and anthologies.
But
many of us will always love him. And
there are signs of a critical reassessment.
Matthew Bruccoli, best known
as a Fitzgerald Scholar recreated as far as possible from surviving manuscripts
the original version of O Lost, the
book from which Perkins extracted Look
Homeward, Angel. Many now understand
Wolfe’s original vision, and some have even come to consider the sprawling
experiment greater than the familiar novel.
Back
in Asheville, Wolfe’s childhood home, the boarding house his mother called Old
Kentucky Home, is now a state owned monument and museum. A Thomas
Wolfe Society keeps his memory alive in an academic journal, with frequent
conferences, and by making awards for Wolf scholarship.
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