Look Homeward, Angel - Thomas Wolfe

Look Homeward, Angel
A
Story of the Buried Life

  
Thomas Wolfe
(1929)

TO A. B.

"Then, as all my soules bee,
Emparadis'd in you, (in whom alone
I
understand, and grow and see,)
The rafters of
my body, bone
Being still with you, the
Muscle, Sinew, and Veine,
Which tile this
house, will come againe."

TO THE READER

This is a first book, and in it the author has
written of experience which is now far and lost, but which was once
part of the fabric of his life.  If any reader, therefore,
should say that the book is "autobiographical" the writer
has no answer for him: it seems to him that all serious work in
fiction is autobiographical--that, for instance, a more
autobiographical work than "Gulliver's Travels" cannot
easily be imagined.

This note, however, is addressed principally to those
persons whom the writer may have known in the period covered by these
pages. To these persons, he would say what he believes they
understand already: that this book was written in innocence and
nakedness of spirit, and that the writer's main concern was to give
fulness, life, and intensity to the actions and people in the book he
was creating.  Now that it is to be published, he would 
insist that this book is a fiction, and that he meditated no man's
portrait here.

But we are the sum of all the moments of our
lives--all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. 
If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only
used what all men must, what none can keep from using.  Fiction
is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is
fact arranged and charged with purpose.  Dr. Johnson remarked
that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in
the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to
make a single figure in his novel.  This is not the whole method
but the writer believes it illustrates the whole method in a book
that is written from a middle distance and is without rancour or
bitter intention.
 
 

LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL

PART ONE

. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of 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 loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright
stars on this most 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.
 
 

1
 

A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is
strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and
thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry
of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that
dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.

Each of us is all the sums he has not counted:
subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin
in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in
Texas.

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the
desert, the alex in of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our
lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cut-purse
went unhung.  Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. 
The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every
moment is a window on all time.

This is a moment:

An Englishman named Gilbert Gaunt, which he later
changed to Gant (a concession probably to Yankee phonetics), having
come to Baltimore from Bristol in 1837 on a sailing vessel, soon let
the profits of a public house which he had purchased roll down his
improvident gullet.  He wandered westward into Pennsylvania,
eking out a dangerous living by matching fighting cocks against the
champions of country barnyards, and often escaping after a night
spent in a village jail, with his champion dead on the field of
battle, without the clink of a coin in his pocket, and sometimes with
the print of a farmer's big knuckles on his reckless face. But he
always escaped, and coming at length among the Dutch at harvest time
he was so touched by the plenty of their land that he cast out his
anchors there.  Within a year he married a rugged young widow
with a tidy farm who like all the other Dutch had been charmed by his
air of travel, and his grandiose speech, particularly when he did
Hamlet in the manner of the great Edmund Kean.  Every one said
he should have been an actor.

The Englishman begot children--a daughter and four
sons?lived easily and carelessly, and bore patiently the weight of
his wife's harsh but honest tongue.  The years passed, his
bright somewhat staring eyes grew dull and bagged, the tall
Englishman walked with a gouty shuffle: one morning when she came to
nag him out of sleep she found him dead of an apoplexy.  He left
five children, a mortgage and--in his strange dark eyes which now
stared bright and open--something that had not died: a passionate and
obscure hunger for voyages.

So, with this legacy, we leave this Englishman and
are concerned hereafter with the heir to whom he bequeathed it, his
second son, a boy named Oliver.  How this boy stood by the
roadside near his mother's farm, and saw the dusty Rebels march past
on their way to Gettysburg, how his cold eyes darkened when he heard
the great name of Virginia, and how the year the war had ended, when
he was still fifteen, he had walked along a street in Baltimore, and
seen within a little shop smooth granite slabs of death, carved lambs
and cherubim, and an angel poised upon cold phthisic feet, with a
smile of soft stone idiocy--this is a longer tale.  But I know
that his cold and shallow eyes had darkened with the obscure and
passionate hunger that had lived in a dead man's eyes, and that had
led from Fenchurch Street past Philadelphia.  As the boy looked
at the big  angel with the carved stipe of lilystalk, a cold and
nameless excitement possessed him.  The long fingers of his big
hands closed.  He felt that he wanted, more than anything in the
world, to carve delicately with a chisel.  He wanted to wreak
something dark and unspeakable in him into cold stone.  He
wanted to carve an angel's head.

Oliver entered the shop and asked a big bearded man
with a wooden mallet for a job.  He became the stone cutter's
apprentice.  He worked in that dusty yard five years.  He
became a stone cutter. When his apprenticeship was over he had become
a man.

He never found it.  He never learned to carve an
angel's head.  The dove, the lamb, the smooth joined marble
hands of death, and letters fair and fine--but not the angel. 
And of all the years of waste and loss--the riotous years in
Baltimore, of work and savage drunkenness, and the theatre of Booth
and Salvini, which had a disastrous effect upon the stone cutter, who
memorized each accent of the noble rant, and strode muttering through
the streets, with rapid gestures of the enormous talking hands--these
are blind steps and gropings of our exile, the painting of our hunger
as, remembering speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten language,
the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, a door.  Where? 
When?

He never found it, and he reeled down across the
continent into the Reconstruction South--a strange wild form of six
feet four with cold uneasy eyes, a great blade of nose, and a rolling
tide of rhetoric, a preposterous and comic invective, as formalized
as classical epithet, which he used seriously, but with a faint
uneasy grin around the corners of his thin wailing  mouth.

He set up business in Sydney, the little capital city
of one of the middle Southern states, lived soberly and industriously
under the attentive eye of a folk still raw with defeat and
hostility, and finally, his good name founded and admission won, he
married a gaunt tubercular spinstress, ten years his elder, but with
a nest egg and an unshakable will to matrimony.  Within eighteen
months he was a howling maniac again, his little business went smash
while his foot stayed on the polished rail, and Cynthia, his
wife?whose life, the natives said, he had not helped to prolong--died
suddenly one night after a hemorrhage.

So, all was gone again--Cynthia, the shop, the
hard-bought praise of soberness, the angel's head--he walked through
the streets at dark, yelling his pentameter curse at Rebel ways, and
all their indolence; but sick with fear and loss and penitence, he
wilted under the town's reproving stare, becoming convinced, as the
flesh wasted on his own gaunt frame, that Cynthia's scourge was doing
vengeance now on him.

He was only past thirty, but he looked much older. 
His face was yellow and sunken; the waxen blade of his nose looked
like a beak. He had long brown mustaches that hung straight down
mournfully.

His tremendous bouts of drinking had wrecked his
health.  He was thin as a rail and had a cough.  He thought
of Cynthia now, in the lonely and hostile town, and he became
afraid.  He thought he had tuberculosis and that he was going to
die.

So, alone and lost again, having found neither order
nor establishment in the world, and with the earth cut away from his
feet, Oliver resumed his aimless drift along the continent.  He
turned westward toward the great fortress of the hills, knowing that
behind them his evil fame would not be known, and hoping that he
might find in them isolation, a new life, and recovered health.

The eyes of the gaunt spectre darkened again, as they
had in his youth.
 
 

All day, under a wet gray sky of October, Oliver rode
westward across the mighty state.  As he stared mournfully out
the window at the great raw land so sparsely tilled by the futile and
occasional little farms, which seemed to have made only little
grubbing patches in the wilderness, his heart went cold and leaden in
him. He thought of the great barns of Pennsylvania, the ripe bending
of golden grain, the plenty, the order, the clean thrift of the
people.  And he thought of how he had set out to get order and
position for himself, and of the rioting confusion of his life, the
blot and blur of years, and the red waste of his youth.

By God! he thought.  I'm getting old!  Why
here?

The grisly parade of the spectre years trooped
through his brain. Suddenly, he saw that his life had been channelled
by a series of accidents: a mad Rebel singing of Armageddon, the
sound of a bugle on the road, the mule-hoofs of the army, the silly
white face of an angel in a dusty shop, a slut's pert wiggle of her
hams as she passed by.  He had reeled out of warmth and plenty
into this barren land: as he stared out the window and saw the fallow
unworked earth, the great raw lift of the Piedmont, the muddy red
clay roads, and the slattern people gaping at the stations--a lean
farmer gangling above his reins, a dawdling negro, a gap-toothed
yokel, a hard sallow woman with a grimy baby--the strangeness of
destiny stabbed him with fear.  How came he here from the clean
Dutch thrift of his youth into this vast lost earth of rickets?

The train rattled on over the reeking earth. 
Rain fell steadily. A brakeman came draftily into the dirty plush
coach and emptied a scuttle of coal into the big stove at the end. 
High empty laughter shook a group of yokels sprawled on two turned
seats.  The bell tolled mournfully above the clacking wheels. 
There was a droning interminable wait at a junction-town near the
foot-hills.  Then the train moved on again across the vast
rolling earth.

Dusk came.  The huge bulk of the hills was
foggily emergent.  Small smoky lights went up in the hillside
shacks.  The train crawled dizzily across high trestles spanning
ghostly hawsers of water. Far up, far down, plumed with wisps of
smoke, toy cabins stuck to bank and gulch and hillside.  The
train toiled sinuously up among gouged red cuts with slow labor. 
As darkness came, Oliver descended at the little town of Old Stockade
where the rails ended. The last great wall of the hills lay stark
above him.  As he left the dreary little station and stared into
the greasy lamplight of a country store, Oliver felt that he was
crawling, like a great beast, into the circle of those enormous hills
to die.