Look Homeward

...This is not to suggest that Wolfe's editors performed magic...

...Sorry to be late, Ed,' Wolfe greeted him...

...In 1884, in Asheville, North Carolina, Julia Westall, recently jilted by the love of her life, called on the newly widowed W. O. Wolfe to try to sell him the Golden Treasury of Poetry and Prose...

...There will always, perhaps, be those who fervently disagree: in death as in life, Wolfe is notorious for his ability to polarize readers...

...While reading proofs of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, at Scribner's, he wrote to John Hall Wheelock that "there are moments when I feel that no one else has a quarter of my power and richness .. . that, one way or another, I am a fine young fellow and a great man...

...While deploring the novels' formlessness and bad writing, moreover, Donald applauds Wolfe for his "unforgettable characters," "strong and crisply defined" individual episodes, and above all his "unique literary voice," particularly as manifested in his frequent outbursts of lyricism...

...Turnbull, who was also the author of a- celebrated Fitzgerald biography, often seemed less interested in comprehending Wolfe than in retailing juicy anecdotes...

...It was not alove match, however, but a practical arrangement: W. 0. "needed someone to look after him and to cook for him," and Julia "needed someone to provide for her...

...Likewise, the extreme emotional shifts of his parents and siblings—affectionate toward Tom one minute, cruelly insulting the next—helped give rise to his own considerable talent for mood swings...

...Two interesting facts: Perkins cut a good deal of Marxist rhetoric out of Of Time and the River, Wolfe took the title of You Can't Go Home Again from a remark made at a dinner party by Lincoln Steffens's Communist widow, Ella Winter...

...In 1904 Julia dragged most of her children to St...

...These distinctions impress one as sensible and just...

...Constantly shifted from one room to another, obliged to eat his meals in a little pantry that Julia had scooped out in order to make more room for the boarders in the dining room, Tom was never sure whether his mother would caress him or neglect him...

...When he did express an intellectual opinion, it was an embarrassment...

...The difference between Wolfe and Whitman—both of whom, admittedly, were capable of writing very, very badly—is that, whereas Whitman had an exquisite sense of form (notwithstanding the fact that he usually eschewed conventional forms), and revised his poetry numerous times in an attempt to perfect it formally, Wolfe was incompetent when it came to such things...

...His warmth, candor, and humility—to which many of Donald's sources testify—could turn in a flash to suspicion, hostility, and egotistic rage...

...be sincerely devoted to any political idea...

...Oddly, on the dustjacket of Look Homeward, Gore Vidal writes that "It is Professor Donald's discovery, or insight, that Thomas Wolfe was to prose what Walt Whitman was to poetry, but thanks to two editors, Perkins and Aswell, he was cut up into conventional `novel-length' sections—as if Leaves of Grass had been reshaped by John Greenleaf Whittier...

...D onald does a good job of explain- ing, as far as is possible, how this disorganized, eternally dependent, incredibly puerile individual came into being...

...those of William Faulkner and Willa Cather, for whatever reason, have not...

...So familiar are the general outlines of Thomas Wolfe's life that it is surprising to be reminded that, prior to the publication of Look Homeward, by the distinguished Harvard historian David Herbert Donald, there were only two full-scale biographies of the North Carolina novelist—Elizabeth Nowell's in 1960 and Andrew Turnbull's in 1967...

...As he loved himself, so he loved his own prose: his famous inability to edit himself manifestly derived not only from his lack of discipline and of editorial training but from his mindless adoration of every sentence, good or awful, that came out of him...

...Box 847, Sierra Madre CA 91024-0847 Or call: 202-547-6631...

...Every time he began a revision," writes Donald, "his incredibly tenacious memory recalled every word that he had included in all the previous drafts, and he could not bear to dispense with any of them...

...For the rest of his life he felt obliged to attach himself to a stronger, older, wiser person, on whom he could lean, in order to feel complete...

...David Herbert Donald, in Look Homeward, has chronicled the life behind this legend—in all its craziness, fatuity, and chaos—with admirable intelligence and equipoise...

...Indeed, throughout his life he was fervently anti-intellectual, suspicious of logical, consecutive, coherent thought, convinced that the purest and truest sort of literary artist didn't go in for such things...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 41 Wolfe's oeuvre remains severely flawed...

...not above hurling ethnic slurs at her, he brought their final encounter (in 1938) to a close by denouncing the Jews, wishing for them to be "wiped off the face of the earth," and calling for "three cheers for Adolf Hitler...

...If Wolfe had not had the remarkable good fortune to happen upon Maxwell Perkins—whose reshaping of Look Homeward, Angel made it publishable (or, in Donald's view, "transformed it from an imperfectlyexecuted American Ulysses into a first-rate novel about a boy's growing up") and who helped Wolfe carve Of Time and the River out of a mountain of disordered manuscripts—he would almost certainly never have become a published novelist, let alone one of the most celebrated authors of his time...

...Though both of these books were commendable in many ways, both had considerable flaws...

...Promote freedom and traditional values...

...He bragged to his mistress Aline Bernstein that she would be remembered in death because she would be "entombed in his writing" (a favorite image...

...Regarding Nazi Germany, for instance, he said in 1936 that Americans should bear in mind that "in Germany you are free to speak and write that you do not like Jews and that you think Jews are bad, corrupt, and unpleasant people...

...Inthe 1930s, unable to stay off the political battlefield, he spoke up in turn for both German fascism and American Communism, neither of which he understood in the slightest...

...Time and again, one finds oneself reading a painful anecdote that brings to mind Scott Fitzgerald and Delmore Schwartz at their most pathetic...

...And though Donald makes an elaborate case for the influence upon Wolfe of his favorite professors' systems of thought, it is clear that, though he certainly did parrot each of these professors for a time, none of them ever really taught him to think, taught him how to process ideas, helped him develop breadth or subtlety of mind...

...This is especially true of his behavior toward Aline Bernstein, with whom he periodically severed all ties...

...Donald tells us of a Saturday Review of Literature poll conducted in 1935, in which Of Time and the River received the greatest number of votes for both best and worst novel of the year...

...Losing the earth we know for greater knowing, losing the life we have for greater life, and leaving friends we loved for greater loving, men find a land more kind than home, more large than earth...

...Every year, consequently, for what seems the hundredth time, we find ourselves reliving one or another of those tempestuous, tragic lives...

...Though his books are at times charming and mesmerizing, to read them in sequence is, ultimately, to find them childish and tiresome in the extreme...

...she takes care of everything for me...

...His short list of twentieth-century novelists included two names: his own and Hemingway's...

...The Hills Beyond, and Nowell's meticulous condensation of his magazine pieces, America's greatest conservative youth group YOUNG AMERICANS FOR FREEDOM Fight campus communism...

...Indeed, for all of Perkins's reorganization of the first two novels, Aswell's shaping and editing of The Web and the Rock, You Can't Go Home Again, and...

...Donald keeps telling us that Wolfe had "the best formal education of any American novelist of his day" (he attended both Chapel Hill and Harvard), but to my mind Wolfe is vivid proof that there is a difference between going to school and being educated...

...B Wolfe was too full of himself to .1...

...Louis, where she ran a boardinghouse that catered to World's Fair visitors...

...In America you are not free to say this...

...I hadn't meant to do this, but I got something here for your boy for Christmas.' " Essentially, the story of Wolfe's life is a story of excess: too much liquor, too much impersonal sex (among his conquests was the wife of Soviet diplomat Maxim Litvinoff), too much disordered prose poured onto too many blank pages...

...It is pleasant, then, to report that Look Homeward represents a notable improvement over both its predecessors...

...But Donald, though he does take Aswell to task for his high-handedness, never says any such thing...

...Every year the books keep coming: either a new biography of Tom or Scott or Ernest, or a journal by one of them, or a collection of letters, or some sort of book (usually autobiographical) which an immoderately ambitious editor has carved out of the scrap heaps in the Wolfe, Fitzgerald, or Hemingway archives...

...Certainly Wolfe was capable of treating other people—even those closest to him—with remarkable cruelty and utterly unfounded distrust...

...Confront intolerant liberalism...

...Besides, whatever the course of his literary reputation, one has the feeling that the legend of his life is here to stay, a romantic, compelling, strangely resonant chapter in the annals of American literary folklore...

...something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where...

...He admires Wolfe's fiction because "it offers a remarkably full social history of the United States during the first four decades of the twentieth century," and because it is "a barometer of American culture," reflecting the national temper of the twenties and thirties...

...Later that same year, he described himself in a letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, as a "Revolutionary," "a brother to the workers," and proclaimed his apparently newfound belief "that this system that we have is evil, that it brings misery and injustice not only to the lives of the poor but to the wretched and sterile lives of the privileged classes who are supported by it...

...Lively yet thoughtful, scholarly yet lucid, Donald's book strikes an admirable balance between attention to the life and to the work, between an ironic and a deferential attitude toward its subject...

...And of course Vidal is all wrong about Wolfe being another Whitman, or Perkins and Aswell being Philistines who mangled his beautiful work...

...perhaps Wolfe was identifying with his father, a carver of gravestones...

...But both man and dog were in horrible condition: "Gift-wrapped when Wolfe bought it, [the stuffed dog] had been used to wipe up the bars he had visited...

...His latest book is The Contemporary Stylist (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...

...And what a subject: a highly regarded American writer whom John Dos Passos described as "a gigantic baby," whom Hemingway called "a glandular giant with the brains and the guts of three mice"--a man whose self-absorption rendered him so incapable of functioning like a normal adult that his publisher was forced to handle his money for him, so cowardly that he brought his mother north to help him dump his mistress, so irresponsible that when one of his bed partners informed him that she was pregnant, he told her, "Why don't you telephone Miss Nowell: she's my agent...

...The lives and personalities of Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald have long since become a cherished part of American literary folklore...

...Interestingly, literature figured in his parents' first meeting...

...As for his literary taste, he was indifferent at best to the work of Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and Proust, but loved Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson...

...Young Americans for Freedom P.O...

...the wrappings had come off, the box had disintegrated, and the tail was attached by only a few threads...

...Early on Christmas morning of 1937, for example—having recently left his beloved editor, Max Perkins of Scribner's, for Edward Aswell of Harper & Brothers—Wolfe arrived at Aswell's home with a large stuffed toy dog for Aswell's little boy...

...For the most part, Donald does not make excessive claims for Wolfe's writing...

...two years later, back in Asheville, she opened a boardinghouse called "The Old Kentucky Home" a few blocks from the Wolfe residence and took Tom to live with her there, leaving the other children with W. 0. "For Tom," writes Donald, the move . . . marked a recognition that the turbulent disorganization of his family was not some transient phase but a permanent condition...

...Nowell, a fine writer who had been Wolfe's agent, was too close to her subject...

...Just as he loved America (of which, until the last years of his life, he actually saw very little) largely for its great size, and was very impressed by his own mammoth physical dimensions, so he seemed to regard sheer bulk as the prime characteristic of a great work of literature...

...Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...

...You weren't a great writer, he believed, unless you produced a big, hefty book...

...Indeed, it doesn't seem too much of an exaggeration to suggest that, for Americans of a literary bent, the lives of Tom, Scott, and Ernest are (for better or worse) our great national legends—our answer, if you will, to the Greek myths, the Icelandic sagas, and Beowulf—which, partly for inspirational and partly for cautionary purposes, we feel religiously compelled to rehearse periodically, the way Jews, each spring, recite among themselves the story of Passover...

...Growing up as an appendage to Julia, he did not develop a full sense of autonomy, the feeling that he was an independent person in his own right...

...Curiously, after strongly denying (on page xvii) that Wolfe was "a literary naif," Donald (on page 399) uses precisely that phrase to describe him...

...One of his countless lady friends observed (with a rather Wolfean wordiness) that "he didn't really care about and care for other human beings LOOK HOMEWARD: A LIFE OF THOMAS WOLFE David Herbert Donald/Little, Brown/$24.95 Bruce Bawer 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 in the way that most of us as human beings do...

...In the end, however, his systematic alienation of everyone who cared for him hurt Wolfe more than anybody, and one cannot help but feel sorry for him...

...The two fell into a literary discussion, a friendship developed, and within the year they were married...

...After all, for all the tons of chaff in Wolfe's novels, one cannot h p but be moved by occasional lyric ..1 passages such as the following (wh ch Aswell placed at the end of the posthumously published You Can't Go Home Again, and which affirms that the most felicitous influence upon Wolfe's style was the King James Bible): "Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapersof the waning year...

...As it turned out, though, Julia was the sort who liked to fend for herself, and Tom (born in 1900), the youngest of her seven children, grew up with both an unromantic image of marriage and an unusually chaotic view of family life...

...In order for the words that he poured out in torrents to find any shape at all, he desperately needed an editor...

...Join us in time to attend our national convention in Washington this August...