Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938)
Life
Thomas Clayton Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, the youngest of eight children of a stonecutter father with a Shakespearean vocabulary and a boardinghouse-keeper mother whose decision to move the children into a separate house from their father split the family for good. He was a tall, restless child — six-foot-six by adulthood — and when his brother Ben died of the 1918 flu pandemic, the loss became the center of gravity for everything he would later write. Grover, the older brother he lost at age four to typhoid fever in St. Louis during the 1904 World’s Fair, became the other center. He spent his whole adult life circling back to the two of them.
He went to the University of North Carolina at fifteen, then to Harvard for a playwriting M.A. that taught him he wasn’t a playwright. He supported himself teaching freshman English at NYU, wrote at night in a Brooklyn room standing up at an icebox — he was too tall for a desk — and produced an enormous first manuscript that his editor Maxwell Perkins (the same editor who shaped Hemingway and Fitzgerald) cut into Look Homeward, Angel (1929). The book made him famous at twenty-eight. He broke with Perkins a few years later over the question of how much editing his work could take, signed with Edward Aswell at Harper’s, and handed over a wooden crate containing a million and a half words of manuscript before leaving for a lecture tour of the West.
He never came back from the tour. He collapsed with what turned out to be miliary tuberculosis of the brain and died at Johns Hopkins in September 1938, three weeks short of his thirty-eighth birthday. Of Time and the River (1935), The Web and the Rock (1939), You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), and the shorter stories in From Death to Morning (1935) — including [[the-lost-boy|The Lost Boy]] — were pulled out of the crate and edited into books by Aswell after he died.
What They Were Doing
Wolfe wrote the opposite of a Hemingway sentence. Where Hemingway subtracted, Wolfe accumulated. His paragraphs sprawl, pile adjective on adjective, stack memory on memory, and strain toward a kind of total recall of the American provinces as they were in the first decades of the century. The subject, always, is time — how it moves, how it doesn’t move, what a person’s relationship to their own past can possibly be after the people who made the past have died. “You can’t go home again” is his coinage and his only real theme.
[[the-lost-boy|The Lost Boy]] is the compressed form of the theme. A short novella in four parts, shifting narrators — Grover himself walking through the town square at eleven and a half, then the mother decades later, then the sister Helen, then finally Eugene, the youngest brother (the Wolfe stand-in), returning as an adult to the St. Louis house where Grover died. Eugene sits on the stairs where Grover died trying to recapture his brother’s presence and discovers that the physical space has outlived the person and cannot give him back. “Here is Absence, Absence in the afternoon; and here in this House, this Absence, is my core, my kernel — here am I!” It is Wolfe’s project at its tightest: the past is irrecoverable; we are structured around its absence; the people who are gone do not come back even when we go to the room where they died.
His method, in the bigger books, is what he called the “river” — a present-tense stream that lets the narrator move through time by association rather than plot. He is a maximalist in the line of Whitman and Melville rather than the minimalism that was winning in his own decade. When it works, it has a cumulative intensity nobody else quite manages. When it doesn’t, it sprawls into sentiment and autobiography undisciplined. Wolfe knew this about himself — the arguments with Perkins were about exactly where the line fell — and he never fully solved it, partly because he died before he could.
Influence
Wolfe’s influence ran sideways rather than forward. Jack Kerouac treated Of Time and the River as a New Testament and wrote On the Road while rereading it; the Beat aesthetic of present-tense ecstatic recall is Wolfe with bop added. Philip Roth has talked about the permission Wolfe gave to write oneself into the book. Pat Conroy, the late William Styron, and a long line of Southern autobiographers are visibly downstream. The minimalist wing of American fiction — Carver, Ford, Didion — defined itself against him, which is still a kind of descent.
Outside literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Wolfe had the most famous writerly argument of the decade, conducted mostly by letter, over whether the “putter-inner” or the “leaver-outer” was the higher model of the novelist. It was a real disagreement about the shape of modernist fiction and it is not yet over. Every young American novelist eventually has to decide which side they’re on.
Connections
- Marcel Proust — the most important precursor. Wolfe is Proust transposed to the American South and the American Northeast, with the madeleines replaced by train whistles, boarding-house food, and the smell of creosote on Appalachian rail ties. The project of involuntary memory as the engine of fiction, the attention to how a physical space can house a vanished time, the recognition that the past is not where you left it — all of it is recognizably post-Proust. [[finding-time-again|Finding Time Again]] and [[the-lost-boy|The Lost Boy]] are doing the same philosophical job with opposite prose temperatures.
- Ernest Hemingway — the contemporary shadow and antagonist. Hemingway subtracts; Wolfe accumulates. [[the-sun-also-rises|The Sun Also Rises]] and Look Homeward, Angel came out within three years of each other and defined the two poles of American modernist prose. Hemingway thought Wolfe was a windbag who couldn’t cut; Wolfe thought Hemingway was a poseur who mistook reticence for depth. They were both right.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald — the third member of the Perkins stable and the other half of the famous letter-argument. Fitzgerald’s “Hemingway put-in, I’m a leaver-outer” letter to Wolfe is one of the canonical exchanges about what a novel should be. Wolfe’s reply — a defense of the putter-inner — is almost a manifesto for his whole method. [[the-great-gatsby|The Great Gatsby]] and Look Homeward, Angel are structured by opposite instincts about how much of the world a novel has room for.
- The Lost Boy — his tightest piece of work and the best single entry point to what he was doing. The short form forced the discipline his big books sometimes lack.
Key Works
- The Lost Boy (1937)
- Look Homeward, Angel (1929)
- Of Time and the River (1935)
- From Death to Morning (1935, stories)
- The Web and the Rock (1939, posthumous)
- You Can’t Go Home Again (1940, posthumous)