Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938)

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Book Report: Oliver Cole's a drunk, Eliza Cole's a shrew, they have six kids and she doesn't like him, or childbirth, or poverty, or much of anything else that I can see. Oliver likes his youngest, Eugene, better than any of them (so do I, but that's not sayin' a lot), and spends what tiny about of love Eliza hasn't nagged and bitched and niggled and criticized and belittled out of him on the kid.

Eugene grows up in a boardinghouse called Dixieland in Asheville, North show more Carolina. OOOPSIE! I mean Altamont, Catawba. Wolfe didn't want anyone to know he was writing autobiography, see, so he invented a city and a state! Wow! And then he wrote about the people around him honestly, forthrightly, and in a stream-of-Faulkner style that was then très chic and is even now described as modernistic. EIGHTY PLUS YEARS LATER IT'S NOT EXPERIMENTAL OR MODERN ANYMORE, BOYS AND GIRLS, IT'S PART OF THE TOOLKIT.

Ahem. Sorry.

So Eugene grows up, and we do too, and then leaves home, and we do too, and then everything comes to a screeching halt.

Thank GAWD for small mercies.

My Review: I am no fan of the coming-of-age novel, and I don't often read them. I read this one when I was fifteen, because I wanted to impress a hot boy I was trying to get into my bed, and he thought this was the coolest book ever. I read it every damn day in study hall so he'd notice me, which he did, and we ended up talking about the book for hours.

And that was ALL I got. Yip-yap-yop about Eugene's life and his deepness and ohdeargawdpleasekillmenow stuff about the damn BOOK!!

I don't think I've ever forgiven the book for not getting me laid.

But upon mature reflection, I still dislike the book, for better (more adult, anyway) reasons. One is that even editing legend Max Perkins couldn't give Wolfe a deft enough hand to tell this story in so demanding a style as stream-of-consciousness without it spilling over into self-indulgence and sloppy, untidy, unnecessary sentimentality.

Another is Eugene/Tom's misogyny. I yield to no one in my distaste for the Cult of Female Superiority, whether motivated by “chivalry” or by feminism. Women ain't better than men, but likewise they ain't worse either. Wolfe's woman, mama Eliza, is a horrible gorgon of a vicious emasculating harridan. She has depths to her nastiness and pretension that are entirely credible. What she lacks is the balancing of REASONS for these things. In the first two zillion words, which detail the lives of Eliza and Oliver, Eliza emerges fully formed as a castrating slime. She was born this way? I doubt me much this is true.

Lastly comes Wolfe's conceit. In this Bildungs-barely-roman, he relives the first years of his life...an ordinary, unremarkable one...seemingly in real time. Why? What for? Here is the nub of my objection to coming-of-age stories: We've all come of age, so what makes your story special? In Wolfe's case, I do not see the special. It is entirely possible that I am resistant to his specialness because the story is so boring to me. But I quite simply can not fathom what makes this dreary, low-class, hag-ridden tribe of ciphers anything I should care enough about to do more than put a coin in the charity box to help feed. show less

I picture Thomas Wolfe as a precocious 15-year-old kid on the playground, carrying around a 2000-page magnum opus in his lunch pail and shoving other kids aside as he surveys vast soccer fields, and watches clumsy Philistines dangling like cherubs from the monkey bars.
Fast forward a few years, and he's found a generous and encouraging editor, he's traveled widely, dabbled in play writing, and now carts around a wheelbarrow with his unpublished masterpiece balanced like a paper pyramid, still show more observing the human beings in his vicinity critically and sniffing out myths and legends, legacies and crumbling empires, between the close-printed lines of newspaper articles...
Look Homeward, Angel was a very powerful book. It influenced me at the time I read it. I felt myself utterly convinced by Wolfe's skewed Romanticism. Right away, You Can't Go Home Again comes off as the same kind of novel, or possibly, another chapter from the same vast novel.
This novel encapsulates Wolfe's mind, or seems to, in all of its labyrinthine wanderings. This book is an especially good example of his eccentricities. The characters are downright caricatures, cartoonish, amusing mash-ups. George Webber, the protagonist, is no less vain or self-serving at times. He fritters away countless hours scaling the obelisks of his imagined destiny. The scenes are transparently autobiographical, or attain that effect through manipulation.
Luckily, there are many side characters, all of them charming, each exemplifying a certain downfall of forthright American monsters. Nonetheless, the texture that is woven through these absurd descriptions and even absurder soliloquies was almost painfully beautiful to me at times. I don't easily tire of Wolfe's sprawling nature.
Reading his books is like sailing a sea. You glimpse glittering treasures beneath the surface, and legions of sea monsters, but the tides carry you along and you must leave them behind.
So you see this brilliant America vanishing as you turn the pages. If you look up from the words, true life appears all of a sudden bland. There is a certain mesmerism at work in the rhythm of his words, perhaps, unlike anything else in literature. At least, you won't easily find a book so captivating, in such a plethora of ways, so angelically bound by its own laws of passion, that it sabotages your sense of proportion and glues your eyes to the page. show less

Alone. This is a difficult concept to consider when thinking about the greatness both in size and content of Thomas Wolfe's first novel, Look Homeward Angel. The inclusion of so much of the world and so many other voices almost drowns out the voice of Eugene Gant, the narrator of this immense and impressive novel. But perhaps we should begin a consideration of this novel with the question of destiny. This is what we read in the first paragraph:
"A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch show more 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 smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world."

Is this destiny that of Eugene as well? And is it mere chance or will Eugene have a will to make his way in this world? This shows the direction of the story and, as it expands to take in the Gant family of Father, Mother, and siblings in Altamont, I was impressed with the translation of a country's manifest destiny into a town's and into a family's and beyond that the personal story and destiny of one Eugene Gant.

This translation of destiny is a story of coming of age told in what we today might call a "mash-up" of styles that leave the reader looking for structure among the historical commentaries, classical allusions, family rows, and soaring beauty of many more lyrical passages. The last of these alone made the book worth reading. Yes, it is worth persevering the Whitmanesque size of the narrative for some further passages of the beauty in the world that destiny had bequeathed to young Eugene Gant. While he is young and pursuing an education that seems unconventional, in spite of his attendance at the traditional schools, he is living a life of isolation from most of the world around him. There are exceptions, his relationship with his brother Ben is particularly poignant; yet there is a yearning for escape, from family and from Altamont to a world where Eugene may not feel quite so alone.

His estrangement from his own family is both exacerbated and caused by unlikable qualities from his father's boorish drunkenness to Steve's abusive behavior to his mother Eliza's self-centeredness. She is focused on a miserliness that builds a material fortune but does nothing for Eugene. With all his struggles Eugene remains detached from family and home; he seeks some solace with another family, the Leonards, and finds an "angel" in Margaret Leonard. But the stone angels outside his home remain a symbol that has warmth only in an ironical sense.

Wolfe writes near the end of the book that Eugene "stood for the last time by the angels of his father's porch . . . like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he has left, yet does not say 'The town is near,' but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges" (p 508). This is where his true destiny lies. This, perhaps, is a place where he will no longer feel the pangs of isolation or, perhaps, it is merely a dream of a destiny denied as yet. For this reader it is not unlike the statement of another young man, Stephen Dedalus, who at the end of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man says, "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." show less

[Look Homeward, Angel] by Thomas Wolfe
[Max Perkins, Editor of Genius] by A. Scott Berg

“No leaf hangs for me in the forest; I shall lift no stone upon the heels; I shall find no door in any city. There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only one.”

Reading Thomas Wolfe is to mourn anew, each and every time. Forget the recent movement to abuse his writing as indulgent and overblown. Forget the neo-literary community, perched on a corpse they declare bloated, all the while picking and show more tearing with sour beaks. Attacking our heroes is the newest fad, and a distasteful one. And Wolfe isn’t the only classic that has suffered at the hands of revisionary criticism. Hemingway is now all too often considered boring and over simple and stereotypically uber-masculine; Fitzgerald’s work superficial and derivative, perhaps even plagiarized from his wife.

Thankfully, A. Scott Berg, with his [Editor of Genius], saw these men through the eyes of Max Perkins, the man who discovered them and midwifed their work. As the title suggests, Perkins saw them all as geniuses, particularly Wolfe. The editor had an intimidating task in distilling Wolfe’s mammoth text. Recent critics have tried to debunk the story about the manuscript’s delivery, but Berg quotes Wolfe’s agent, Madeline Boyd, requesting a truck to pick up the full work. As Perkins read, he was enchanted by the poetic and epic book. Working closely with the author, he reorganized and whittled, often foiled by Wolfe’s ability to replace several pages of new writing for the one or two cut. In the end, the book was an epic coming of age Southern tale. While the story still sags occasionally, the pay off in the last chapter is worth the effort. Eugene is ushered through his transformed hometown by the ghost of his deceased brother, assured that his journey is the only journey in life. It is easily one of the most perfect passages ever written.

Reading Berg’s history along with Wolfe’s debut, [Look Homeward, Angel] is a revelation. Seeing a photo of Wolfe standing next to a crate, filled with loose paper reaching up to knee-height, with a caption noting it’s one of three crates containing a manuscript, give Perkins’ the credit he’s due for translating the Wolfe’s beasts. But Wolfe is revealed, too. [Look Homeward, Angel]’s hero, Eugene Gant, is Wolfe himself – introverted, bookish, out of place in every circumstance except with a pen in his hand; overshadowed by a large and eccentric Southern family but a keen observer. In fact, the book was banned from Wolfe’s hometown after it was published because people were so angry with their fictionalized treatment. Reading about Gant’s youth and transformation into a writer is echoed in Perkins’ biography.

The most affecting passages in the biography are the ones detailing Perkins and Wolfe’s relationship. With five daughters, Perkins found the son he’d always wanted in Wolfe. And Wolfe had found a supportive and loving father. W.O. Gant, the substitute in [Look Homeward, Angel] for Wolfe’s real father, is an acerbic drunk with a piercing tongue. Nothing is ever good enough for W.O., and he casts himself as the eternal victim of the world’s conspiracies. Wolfe flourished under Perkins’ encouraging, and the two were easily one of the most creative partnerships ever seen.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald are showcased in Perkins’ story, as well. Not only the pugilistic bombast and the petulant child that have been substituted for their names over the years. But the secret creative zeal they both harbored, and the fragile egos that refuted the desperate need to create. Hemingway and Fitzgerald reacted in two very different ways during these battles. At one point in Perkins’ story, Fitzgerald is confined to bed with ‘grippe,’ sick to the bone over his financial situation, criticism of his work, and the progress of his next writing project. His treatment was to write about the illness, penning an article about all his daily aches and pains. Hemingway, on the other hand, was constantly on the defensive, raging against the world. Berg recounts him stringing up a tuna he’d caught and using it as a punching bag after someone told him tuna fishing was easy.

Given the genius Perkins corralled in just these three, it’s hard to believe he also edited Ring Lardner, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, James Jones, and Taylor Caldwell. And the biography is a rich source for other authors to seek out: Nancy Hale, Marcia Davenport, Martha Gellhorn, Will James, Etta Shiber, and Christine Watson – many would never have been known without Perkins’ eye for talent.

Though Perkins and Wolfe were estranged toward the end of Wolfe’s life, their love and admiration for one another never faltered. Wolfe’s last writing was a note from his deathbed remembering a climb to the top of a tall building with Perkins, the power and glory of life laid out before them. Perkins believed Wolfe was lost to the world much too early – and reading these two books is a testament to that obvious truth.

Bottom Line: The epitome of literary classics.

5 bones!!!!!
All time favorites. show less