Gulliver Without Boswell
FERGUSON, DELANCEY
Gulliver Without Boswell Thomas Wolfe: A Biography. By Elizabeth Nowell. Doubleday. 456 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by DeLancey Ferguson Author, "Mark Twain, Man and Legend," "Pride and Passion: Robert...
...The originals of most of his characters were easily recognizable...
...Everything that ever happened to him was material for the endless stream of consciousness from which, with Perkins' help, he dipped bucketsful to be sent into the world as separate volumes...
...We have enough knowledge, now, of the man and the sources of his work...
...Except for Maxwell Perkins, Aline Bernstein and—for a few pages—Thea Voelcker, we scarcely ever find Wolfe in the company of other people who are recognizable as individuals...
...Earlier, in one of the moments when he realized that Look Homeward, Angel was going to hurt a lot of people in Asheville, Wolfe had tried to explain himself: "I wrote this book in a white heat . . . with no idea of being either ugly, obscene, tender, cruel, beautiful, or anything else—only of saying what I had to say because I had to...
...His imagination might suddenly take flight into fantasy...
...We are told by their friends that they are witty and charming, but the anecdotes offered in support of the claim make them sound boorish, if not slightly demented...
...Wolfe had meant to transmute beyond recognition what he had reported, but too often what he regarded as transmutation was introducing Maxwell Perkins into the narrative under the name of Foxhall Edwards...
...What is needed is a full-scale study of the work itself...
...The only morality I had was in me...
...But when he came to put his NYU experience into Of Time and the River he made the place an anteroom of hell...
...Some of her readers may agree with Perkins...
...Of Wolfe's methods of writing, of his personality and neuroses...
...We have to remind ourselves that a writer incapable of self-criticism, like Whitman or Mark Twain, may nevertheless be great...
...A contributing factor in his ultimate break with Perkins and the Scribner firm was Perkins' warning that if Wolfe put the Scribner staff into a book he would probably have to resign...
...Hilaire Belloc was such a person...
...His circle included no Boswells, so we must take the charm of his midnight conversation mainly on faith...
...As a critical interpretation of Wolfe's work, however, it never gets off the ground...
...A considerable part of Miss Nowell's task, therefore, was to weigh his narratives against the contemporary evidence of his letters and the recollections of his associates...
...Yet Wolfe's eccentricity surpassed even Whitman's, and along with moments of almost blinding insight he carried ignorance of the commonest features of his beloved America...
...Wolfe's was one of the most powerful creative talents of the century, but his machine had no brakes...
...the marvel was that only once was he sued for libel...
...Reviewed by DeLancey Ferguson Author, "Mark Twain, Man and Legend," "Pride and Passion: Robert Burns" IT IS UNLIKELY that any reviewer of Elizabeth Nowell's book will fail to quote Maxwell Perkins's remark to her in 1935: "If there ever was a writer who didn't need a biographer, that writer is Thomas Wolfe...
...Then he was surprised that his book was "received with incredulity, astonishment, anger, and grief at Washington Square...
...the only master I had was in me and stronger than me___" If the mark of the great artist is his control of his material...
...Tell me, please," he said to Anne Armstrong the year before his death, "which is goldenrod...
...His material dominated him...
...By his exuberance, as well as his 6'6" stature, Wolfe dominated most gatherings...
...Miss Nowell's book is a sufficient account, despite a tendency to overstress such cant terms as "father image...
...Wolfe was scarcely an artist at all...
...Instructors, he said, "sweltered with hate and fear against the professors who employed them...
...Though he usually apologized later for his outbursts, that prospect can have done little to abate the tension he created at the time...
...I have never known...
...But though all his work was autobiographical in origin, it does not follow that every episode really happened...
...There are personalities which it is difficult to convey in words...
...At no time in his career was Wolfe capable of realizing his effect on other people for more than a fleeting moment...
...real events might appear as enormously magnified specters of themselves...
...He does the same here...
...Wolfe was another...
...At worst he was a drunken brawler, moody, suspicious and truculent...
...One seldom encounters a biography in which the subject seems to live so completely in a social vacuum...
...He had the capacity—or the drawback—of total recall...
...They smiled and sneered at one another with eyes that glittered with their hate: they never struck a blow but they spoke lying words of barbed ambiguity, they lied, cheated, and betrayed...
...One such moment came when, with his application for an instructorship at New York University, he warned Homer Watt, Chairman of the English Department, that he looked no more mature than his actual 23 years, and that his towering height frequently startled people...
Vol. 43 • October 1960 • No. 38
