My Generation (45 page)

T
he shade of Thomas Wolfe must be acutely disturbed to find that his earthly stock has sunk so low. All artists want fame, glory, immortality, yet few were so frankly bent on these things as Wolfe was, and no writer—despite his agonizing self-doubts—seemed so confident that they lay within his grasp. The unabashed desire for perpetuity moves in a rhythmic, reappearing theme through all of his works. In a typically boisterous apostrophe to the power of booze in
Of Time and the River
he chants:

You came to us with music, poetry, and wild joy when we were twenty, when we reeled home at night through the old moon-whitened streets of Boston and heard our friend, our comrade, and our dead companion, shout through the silence of the moonwhite square: “You are a poet and the world is yours.”…We turned our eyes then to the moon-drunk skies of Boston, knowing only that we were young, and drunk, and twenty, and that the power of mighty poetry was within us, and the glory of the great earth lay before us—because we were young and drunk and twenty, and could never die!

But poor Tom Wolfe if not dead is currently moribund, and the matter of his resuscitation is certainly in doubt. The young, one is told, being gland- and eyeball-oriented, read very little of anything anymore, and if they do it
is likely to be Burroughs or Beckett or Genet or a few of the bards of black humor or camp pornography. Of the older writers, Hemingway and Fitzgerald are still read, but Wolfe seldom. When the literary temper of a generation is occult, claustrophobic, doom-ridden, and the qualified snigger is its characteristic psychic response, no writer could be so queer as the shambling, celebratory hulk of Thomas Wolfe, with his square's tragic sense and his bedazzled young man's vision of the glory of the world. What a comedown! In Europe, with the possible exception of Germany, he is not very well known. No, the reputation of Wolfe is in very bad shape; I suppose it was inevitable that, a short time ago, when I asked a college English major what he thought of the work of Thomas (not Tom) Wolfe he actually
did
reply seriously, “You mean the Tangerine Streamlined Whatever-it's-caIled guy?”

Yet it would be hard to exaggerate the overwhelming effect that reading Wolfe had upon so many of us who were coming of age during or just after World War II. I think his influence may have been especially powerful upon those who, like myself, had been reared, as Wolfe had, in a small Southern town or city, and who in addition had suffered a rather mediocre secondary education, with scant reading of any kind. To a boy who had read only a bad translation of
Les Misérables
and
The Call of the Wild
and
Men Against the Sea
and
The Grapes of Wrath
(which one had read at fourteen for the racy dialogue and the “sensational” episodes), the sudden exposure to a book like
Look Homeward, Angel
, with its lyrical torrent and raw, ingenuous feeling, its precise and often exquisite rendition of place and mood, its buoyant humor and the vitality of its characters and, above all, the sense of youthful ache and promise and hunger and ecstasy which so corresponded to that of its eighteen-year-old reader—to experience such a book as this, at exactly the right moment in time and space, was for many young people like being born again into a world as fresh and wondrous as that seen through the eyes of Adam. Needless to say, youth itself was largely responsible for this feverish empathy, and there will be reservations in a moment in regard to the effect of a later rereading of Wolfe; nonetheless, a man who can elicit such reactions from a reader at whatever age is a force to be reckoned with, so I feel nothing but a kind of gratitude when I consider how I succumbed to the rough unchanneled force of Wolfe as one does to the ocean waves.

Among other things, he was the first prose writer to bring a sense of America as a glorious abstraction—a vast and brooding continent whose
untold bounties were waiting every young man's discovery—and his endless catalogues and lyric invocations of the land's physical sights and sounds and splendors (a sumptuous description of the Boston waterfront, for instance, where “the delicate and subtle air of spring touches all these odors with a new and delicious vitality; it draws the tar out of the pavements also, and it draws slowly, subtly, from ancient warehouses, the compacted perfumes of eighty years: the sweet thin piney scents of packing boxes, the glutinous composts of half a century, that have thickly stained old warehouse plankings, the smells of twine, tar, turpentine and hemp, and of thick molasses, ginseng, pungent vines and roots and old piled sacking…and particularly the smell of meat, of frozen beeves, slick porks, and veals, of brains and livers and kidneys, of haunch, paunch and jowl…”) seemed to me anything but prolix or tedious, far from it; rather it was as if for the first time my whole being had been thrown open to the sheer
tactile
and
sensory
vividness of the American scene through which, until then, I had been walking numb and blind, and it caused me a thrill of discovery that was quite unutterable. It mattered little to me that sometimes Wolfe went on for page after windy page about nothing, or with the most callow of emotions: I was callow myself, and was undaunted by even his most inane repetitions. It meant nothing to me that some astonishingly exact and poignant rendition of a mood or remembrance might be followed by a thick suet of nearly impenetrable digressions; I gobbled it all up, forsaking my classes, hurting my eyes, and digesting the entire large Wolfe oeuvre—the four massive novels, plus the short stories and novellas,
The Story of a Novel
, the many letters and scraps and fragments, and the several plays, even then practically unreadable—in something less than two weeks, emerging from the incredible encounter pounds lighter, and with a buoyant serenity of one whose life has been forever altered.

I think it must have been at approximately this moment that I resolved myself to become a writer. I was at college in North Carolina at the time; it was October, Wolfe's natal, favorite, most passionately remembered month, and the brisk autumnal air was now touched, for the first time in
my
life, with the very fragrance and the light that Wolfe's grand hymn to the season had evoked:

October has come again—has come again….The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost
sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again…The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape, the fly gets old and fat and blue, he buzzes loud, crawls slow, creeps heavily to death, the sun goes down in blood and pollen across the bronzed and mown fields of old October…Come to us, Father, while the winds howl in the darkness, for October has come again bringing with it huge prophecies of death and life and the great cargo of the men who will return…

With words like this still vivid in my brain, I gazed at the transmuted tobacco-hazed streets of Durham, quite beside myself with wonder, and only the appearance of a sudden, unseasonable snowstorm frustrated my immediate departure—together with a friend, similarly smitten—for Asheville, over two hundred miles away, where we had intended to place flowers on the writer's grave.

Now thirty years after Wolfe's death, the appearance of Andrew Turnbull's biography marks an excellent occasion to try to put the man and his work in perspective. Turnbull's work is a first-rate study, and not the least of its many worthy qualities is its sense of proportion. Too many biographies—especially of literary figures—tend to be overly fleshed out and are cursed with logorrhea, so that the illustrious subject himself becomes obliterated behind a shower of menus, train tickets, opera programs, itineraries, and dull mash notes from lovelorn girls. I could have done without so many of the last item in this present volume—from Wolfe's paramour Aline Bernstein, who, though by no means a girl, often fell to gushing at inordinate length; but this is a small complaint, since throughout the book Turnbull generally maintains a congenial pace and supplies us with just the proper amount of detail. One of the surprises of the biography is the way in which it manages to be fresh and informative about a person who was probably the most narrowly autobiographical writer who ever lived. The very idea of a life of Thomas Wolfe is enough to invoke dismay if not gentle ridicule, since our first reaction is, “But why? Everything he did and saw is in his books.” Yet Turnbull, clearly with some calculation, has expertly uncovered certain facts having to do with Wolfe's life which, if not really crucial, are fascinating just
because
we realize that we did not know them before. The actual financial situation of Wolfe's family in Asheville, for example, is interesting, since the impression
one gets of the deafening tribe of Gants in
Look Homeward
,
Angel
is that of a down-at-the-heel, lower-middle-class clan which may not have been destitute but which always had a hard time of it making ends meet. The truth of the matter, as Turnbull points out, is that by Asheville standards the Wolfes were literally affluent, belonging to the “top two percent economically.” Likewise it turns out that Wolfe had a touch of the sybarite in him; as an instructor at New York University he chose to live by himself in lodgings that for the time must have been very expensive, rather than share quarters with several others as practically all of the instructors did. Such details would be of little interest, of course, were they not at variance with the portraits of Eugene Gant–George Webber, whose careers in the novels are considerably more penurious, egalitarian, and grubby.

Wolfe was an exasperating man, a warm companion with a rich sense of humor and touching generosity of spirit, and, alternately, a bastard of truly monumental dimensions, and it is a tribute to the detachment with which Mr. Turnbull has fashioned his biography that the good Wolfe and the bad Wolfe, seen upon separate occasions, begin to blend together so that what emerges (as in the best of biographies) is a man—in this case a man more complex and driven even than is usual among those of his calling: obsessively solitary yet craving companionship, proud and aloof but at the same time almost childishly dependent, open-handed yet suspicious, arrogant, sweet-hearted, hypersensitive, swinishly callous, gentle—every writer, that is, but magnified. In his mid-twenties on board a ship returning from Europe, Wolfe met and fell in love with Aline Bernstein, a rich and well-known New York stage designer who was eighteen years older than he was. In the ensuing affair, which was bizarre and tumultuous to say the least, Mrs. Bernstein quite clearly represented a mother figure, an image of the Eliza Gant from whom, in his first two novels, Tom-Eugene is constantly fleeing as from a Fury, and, with cyclic regularity, returning home to in helpless and sullen devotion. (Julia Wolfe nursed her son until he was three and a half and cut off Tom's beautiful ringlets at nine only after he had picked up lice from a neighbor. How Wolfe escaped being a homosexual is a mystery, but no one has ever made that charge.) The same ambivalent feelings he had toward his mother he expressed in his relations with Aline, who, though extremely pretentious and rather silly, did not deserve the treatment she suffered at his hands, which was largely abominable. He was of course capable of great tenderness and it is obvious that they had many happy moments
together, but one cannot help feeling anything but rue for the plight of the poor woman, who had to be subjected to interminable grillings by him about her former lovers and who, when circumstances forced them apart, still was made to endure a barrage of letters in which in the most irrational and cruel terms he accused her of betrayal and unfaithfulness. He also shouted at her that she smelled like goose grease, adding the attractive observation that “all Jews smell like goose grease.” It was a hopeless situation, and although it makes for grim reading, the section on Wolfe's stormy time with Aline is one of the most illuminating in the book, revealing as it does so much of the man's puerile inability to form any real attachment to anyone, especially a woman—a shallowness of emotional response, on a certain level at least, which caused him to be in perpetual flight and which may be a key to both his failings and his strengths as a writer.

There was also, naturally, his editor Maxwell Perkins—still one more relationship filled with
Sturm und Drang
and, on the part of Wolfe, impositions and demands on another's time and energy so total as to be positively hair-raising. Obviously Perkins was a very fine gentleman, but that a broad streak of masochism ran through his nature there can also be no doubt; only a man born to enjoy terrible suffering could have absorbed the pure fact of daily, committed
involvement
which Wolfe's tyrannically dependent personality imposed. It was of course untrue, as had been hinted during Wolfe's years at Scribner's, that Perkins
wrote
any part of Wolfe's books but certainly he was instrumental in putting them together—maybe not quite as instrumental as Bernard DeVoto implied in his famous review of
The Story of a Novel
but a thoroughly dominating force nonetheless.
¹
There is no other way that we can interpret the hilarious statement which Turnbull—perhaps with irony, perhaps not—makes in a section on the finishing of
Of Time and the River:
“Early in December Perkins summoned Wolfe to his office and told him the book was done. Wolfe was amazed.” Yet if it is true that Wolfe wrote the words of the books and if it is also true, as someone said, that the trouble with Wolfe was that he put all of his gigantic struggle into his
work
and not his
art
—a nice distinction—it does look as if DeVoto might not have been too far off the mark, after all, in asserting that Perkins caused much of the “art” that exists in the sprawling work of Thomas Wolfe. Which is to say a semblance, at least, of form. And it is the lack too often of an organic form—a form arising from the same drives and tensions that inspired the work in the beginning—which now appears to be one of Wolfe's largest
failings and is the one that most seriously threatens to undermine his stature as a major writer. The awful contradiction in his books between this formlessness and those tremendous moments which still seem so touched with grandeur as to be imperishable is unsettling beyond words.