Creating the Great American Novelist

...The writer's reluctance to have his book sent to the printer, it was assumed, was due only to a psychological unwillingness to turn loose the manuscript...

...In fact, he really created both books...

...And now it has been further substantiated by Richard S. Kennedy's brilliant The Window of Memory: The Literary Career of Thomas Wolfe...

...But his editing ought to have been confined to grouping obviously related material together, and publishing it in that form...

...Nor has he overlooked those documents Wolfe left behind which have been previously slighted or ignored by other scholars...

...Wolfe, if not Perkins, recognized that the book needed more pruning, and that the romantic posturing and agonies of Eugene Gant in Europe should have been greatly trimmed...

...He then proceeded to try to write the Great American Novel, and instead produced three large works containing many fine passages and sequences, though none of them wholly successful as a novel...

...Apparently, then, Wolfe's much publicized break with Scribner's was due not so much to his need to show that he could stand on his own without Perkins, as critics have supposed, but more to his feeling that Perkins had forced publication of his novel prematurely...

...In the end this will probably mean relegating the novels Aswell edited to the status of anthologies, to be given no more credence than the late 17th and early 18th century editions of Shakespeare...

...He feels that The Web and the Rock comes out a pretty good novel, finding Aswell's labors here more successful than not...

...They pleaded with him to give his work coherence and form...

...The answer is obvious: No matter how fine Aswell's intentions— and clearly he meant well—as an editor he had no right to do what he did...

...author, "Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth" A kind of revolution is going on in the study of Thomas Wolfe...

...Professor Kennedy's new book not only confirms all these suspicions, but convincingly pieces together a picture of Wolfe that is completely at odds with the customary view...

...Two were published while he was living...

...In short, according to many critics, Wolfe was a victim of his own appetite for bigness...

...These men, and particularly Perkins, were supposed to have labored mightily, though with only partial success, to persuade Wolfe to trim down his expansive rhetoric and design...

...The first hint of this came with the publication of Elizabeth Nowell's The Letters of Thomas Wolfe (Harper's, 1956...

...When Miss Nowell's volume of Wolfe's letters came out, it revealed for the first time the details of his relationship with his editors...

...More than 20 years after the novelist's death, it is becoming evident that many critics and literary historians have made certain assumptions about Wolfe and his work which, if not altogether false, are surely dubious...

...Wolfe had written them over an entire decade, and had left only a vague outline to go by...

...Yet even of this book Kennedy says that "Editorial doctoring was badly needed...

...It picked up momentum with Professor C. Hugh Holman's critical introduction to his edition of The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe (Scribner's, 1961...

...Wolfe himself had indicated as much in his memoir, The Story of a Novel (1936), though what he wrote at the time was interpreted as meaning that Perkins had merely gone ahead and begun the publication process on a manuscript that was essentially ready for it...

...Indeed it was—if one accepts the idea that an editor's job is to take a huge mass of a dead author's formless material and, with the aid of only a very hazy outline of ultimate intentions, produce a novel...

...He used letters that Wolfe had written and made them part of the manuscript...

...The common notion of Wolfe has it that he wrote one excellent novel, Look Homeward, Angel (1929), a book about his childhood in Asheville, North Carolina...

...in fact, he had an obligation not to do so...

...The novel should not have been published in its present form...

...As an editor, Perkins' job was to encourage Wolfe to work at the short novel, locating and realizing his art within its true bounds...

...But his talent was such that he could not heed their good advice, and the result was work that was often shapeless, overgrown and even choatic...

...the second might have included all the material about Esther Jack and Wolfe's great romance with the city...

...And he did so without indicating on the title page of either that anything had been done to the manuscripts, thus leaving the impression that they were being published exactly as Wolfe had originally written them...

...He altered sequences from first to third person...

...In what is perhaps the most thoroughgoing work of historical scholarship produced on an American writer in our time, Kennedy has taken a close look at the Wolfe manuscripts at the Widener Library at Harvard, combed through other sources, and interviewed those who knew the author and his relationship with his editors...

...But until this has been done, there clearly can be no such thing as a final evaluation of Thomas Wolfe's work...

...Professor Holman's introduction to the short novels makes clear another important point about Wolfe's work that the early critics had largely ignored: Essentially, Wolfe wrote short "units," not vast chronicles, and he intended these units to stand alone...

...Deeply imbedded in this view of Wolfe are what have long been thought to be his relations with his two editors—Maxwell E. Perkins of Scribner's, who edited the first two novels...

...He failed because what he attempted—to "get the whole wilderness of the American continent into my work"—was too enormous a task for any writer...

...Instead, he encouraged the writer to think of himself as the Great American Novelist, which helped bring out the worst aspects of Wolfe's art and personality...

...Among other things, it began to appear that it was not Wolfe but Perkins who was responsible for Of Time and the River (1935) being published in the shape it was...

...the others, left in manuscript at his death in 1938, were brought out posthumously...

...Would an editor, for example, have been justified in collecting enough of Hawthorne's letters, sketches, unpublished stories and the like, and supplementing them with his own writing in order to "complete" the novel Septimius Felton...

...Yet, as his letters show, Wolfe had been deeply disturbed by Perkins' action...

...Thus, except for Look Homeward, Angel, all these years we have been dealing with published texts so corrupt as to give an entirely misleading idea of how Wolfe wrote...

...The Window of Memory points up the need for a complete re-editing of all of Wolfe's writing from Time and the River onward...

...The Web and the Rock, for example, should rightly have been two books: The first George Webber's childhood in Libya Hill, with the additional material on the Webber family later used in The Hills Beyond (1941...

...Aswell changed characters' names...

...Putting together the two novels could not, as Aswell had once intimated, have been merely a job of grouping and coordinating the old manuscripts...

...He took material more appropriate to the Eugene Gant of Look Homeward, Angel and adapted it to the George Webber of Wolfe's later years—often quite inappropriately...

...and Edward Aswell, then of Harper's, who edited the last two...

...Beyond question, this should be done with the posthumously published works...

...He is less favorably disposed toward the job done on You Can't Go Home Again, which he compares to "George Kaufman's doctoring of a faulty script for the stage...

...It is on these four novels that Wolfe's reputation depends...

...In all, Wolfe wrote four novels...

...He tampered with Wolfe's style to make it more uniform...

...Reading through Of Time and the River, one can hardly help agreeing with Wolfe...

...They vary widely in approach and quality, but because the last three share a common form— or, more accurately, lack of form— the tendency has been to assign a rather rigid view to his talent...

...But if Wolfe's real talent was for short novels, then one must inevitably conclude that Perkins was amiss in insisting that they not be published separately but bunched together in one large novel (Holman does not say this explicitly, but it is clearly implied in his book...

...Kennedy is perhaps more charitable about Aswell's "editing" than he ought to be...

...A significantly different light was cast on just what that relationship really was...

...Had Wolfe listened to them, the theory runs, he would have been a much more successful novelist...

...As a result of his exhaustive research, Kennedy is able to demonstrate that both Wolfe's posthumously published novels, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940), were actually put together by Edward Aswell from an incredibly disordered mass of manuscripts...

...True, Aswell should have edited the manuscripts Wolfe left at his death...

...He was convinced that his book was not ready for publication...

...Or, again, if Mark Twain had died in 1882, would, say, William Dean Howells have been justified in taking excerpts from Twain's letters and his sketches of Mississippi life, adding to them the completed chapters of an unfinished novel, and publishing it as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn...

...He actually wrote whole passages by himself...

...The work of combining them into longer works was for the most part done by his editors...