Of Time and the Writer

One dull gray morning in Manhattan in the 1930s, ThomasWolfe left his tiny 1st Avenue apartment to head downtown, sharing the elevator with a woman and her unruly German shepherd. The dog kept straining at him until her grip broke, then leaped up and planted his paws flat on the chest of the tall and disheveled 6-foot, 6-inch writer with piercing eyes, a sudden celebrity then being assailed all over New York for his notorious first novel, 1929’s “Look Homeward, Angel.” “Wolfe! You great, obnoxious beast!” the woman cried. And thus it was that Thomas Wolfe spent the rest of that day sulking in a blustery rain, devastated that now even complete strangers were denouncing him, loudly and in public.

Douglas Brinkley is professor of history and director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans.

First his debut novel had turned him persona non grata in his beloved Asheville, N.C.; then the acid-tongued critics had soured things further, lampooning his lyrical but expansive and uneven prose as adolescent, self-indulgent and--by far the worst charge--pornographic. An instinctive optimist, yet thin-skinned to the point of neurosis over criticism, Wolfe fell into the grim throes of genuine despair, agonizing as only a true poet could at being so badly misunderstood by the America he adored with such an unrelenting passion. Resorting to drink only added to his paranoia. Sadly, several months passed before the writer, whom novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings later deemed a “meteor in transit,” learned that the German shepherd’s name was Wolf.

But Wolfe had real reasons to feel beleaguered: Since the moment he had burst upon the literary scene with the publication of “Look Homeward, Angel”--his passionate account of a young man’s coming of age in “Altamont,” a fictionalized version of his North Carolina hometown--he had been dogged relentlessly by controversy, mostly stirred up by establishment critics who dismissed his novels as confessional memoirs. He was born in Asheville on Oct. 3, 1900; his father, William Oliver Wolfe--like “Look Homeward, Angel” protagonist Eugene Gant’s father, W.O. Gant--was a stonecutter originally from Pennsylvania, and his mother, Julia Elizabeth Westall Wolfe--the Eliza Pentland Gant of her son’s early novels--hailed from a better-to-do family somewhat prominent in public life. Privately schooled, Wolfe entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at age 16, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1920. After that the young Shakespeare enthusiast enrolled in George Pierce Baker’s renowned playwriting workshop at Harvard, in which he wrote and performed in several one-act plays on his way to earning a master’s in 1922. After traveling throughout Europe, Wolfe was hired as an instructor of English at New York University from 1924 to 1930.

Nevertheless, with his first book, literary critics chose to ignore Wolfe’s top-flight academic background in favor of painting him as an audacious hillbilly wordsmith, some rube from Appalachia whose calling card was florid prose devoid of any saving irony. Real writers, they sniffed, wrote on desks: By contrast Wolfe, who was too big for regular chairs, worked standing up, pages spread on top of his G.E. refrigerator. Although Wolfe had a far better formal education than most other serious novelists of his day--including Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John O’Hara--he complained about being stereotyped as some sort of idiot savant from the Great Smoky Mountains: “[They see me] as a great ‘exuberant’ six-foot-six clod-hopper straight out of nature who bites off half a plug of apple-tobacco, tilts the corn liquor jug and lets half of it gurgle down his throat, wipes off his mouth with the back of one hairy paw . . . and then wads up three hundred thousand words or so, hurls it at a blank page, puts covers on it and says, ‘Here’s my book!’ ” Wolfe bitterly complained. At least F. Scott Fitzgerald admitted publicly that the works of the rawly emotional Wolfe presented a “deeper culture” than other novels of the era, including his own. And Faulkner likewise anointed Wolfe “first” among his literary contemporaries because “he had tried the hardest to say the most.”

The critical assault on Wolfe stemmed from the wild success of “Look Homeward, Angel” and the myth that grew up around how it came to be. The story went that Wolfe’s editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, the now-revered Maxwell Perkins, had taken the young writer’s tattered manuscript, cut a quarter of it and shuffled the rest to streamline the story into a focus on the adolescent longings of Eugene Gant, Wolfe’s alter ego. In this scenario Wolfe was so thrilled to see his work published by such an esteemed New York house that he let Perkins have his way with the manuscript. A story about their historic first encounter is revealing. When Perkins began talking about a brothel scene, Wolfe cut in, “I know you can’t print that. I’ll take it out immediately”--to which the cocksure Perkins replied, “Take it out? Why, it’s one of the greatest short stories I’ve ever read!” Hence was born the notion that Wolfe didn’t even know his good prose from his bad, that he was an undisciplined genius dependent on a stern father-editor.

In later years the august name of Perkins became synonymous with great editing; after all, it was this rather donnish New Englander who got Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wolfe into print in the first place. He was a master at finessing criticism, always knowing when to telephone authors or prod them to work harder or visit them in some exotic locale. Now, however, Arlyn Bruccoli, an independent scholar, and her husband, Matthew J. Bruccoli, a professor of English at the University of South Carolina and biographer of Fitzgerald, have published the original, unabridged version of “Look Homeward, Angel”--under its original title, “O Lost”--to commemorate the centenary of Wolfe’s birth. They see Perkins as less than the “Editor of Genius” his biographer A. Scott Berg has dubbed him and more as the mangler of “O Lost,” which they consider a prose treasure. The Bruccolis make their point by presenting the evidence, reinstating the text Perkins cut, excavated from the handwritten-in-pencil pages of Wolfe’s original “O Lost” manuscript, housed at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. “This overdue edition is not a sentimental exercise for the enjoyment of Thomas Wolfe buffs,” the Bruccolis state in their introduction. “It is an act of resurrection and restoration that intends to position ‘O Lost’ safely among the masterpieces of American fiction.”

Precisely why Perkins excised so many marvelous Wolfean passages about Harvard fools, the Battle of Gettysburg and the failures of the Democratic Party plus a priceless parody of T.S. Eliot as “Mose Extinct,” to give just a few examples, is difficult to fathom. More troubling is the revelation that the somewhat prudish editor axed nearly all of the richest satire and lustiest humor from Wolfe’s book. Scenes of a boy exposing his genitals, a bestiality episode involving a chicken and a song about Canadian whores were censored. Though it is true that, unedited, the author’s neatly presented 1,100-page typescript of “O Lost” would have run 852 printed pages instead of the 626 pages that “Look Homeward, Angel” filled, Margaret Mitchell’s publisher released her “Gone With the Wind” at 1,037 pages, and it remains one of the best-selling books of all time, bested only by the Bible. “He strikes me as a man who should be let alone as to length,” Fitzgerald warned Perkins in September 1930, “if he has to be published in five volumes.”

The likeliest rationale for Scribner’s actions is, of course, the bottom line. Perkins deserves credit for recognizing Wolfe’s talent in the first place, but at heart he was a company man, anxious to please his superiors by keeping costs down. At face value, there is nothing wrong with this: Publishing is, after all, a business aimed like any other at making a profit. But certainly Perkins should not be accorded historical accolades for “inventing” Thomas Wolfe. “O Lost” published unedited would still have been an explosive authorial debut. And, in fact, Perkins neither line-edited nor proofread what would become “Look Homeward, Angel,” leaving the grunt work to the underrated John Hall Wheelcock--to whom a frustrated Wolfe would gripe: “You want to make a perfect thing, but I want to get the whole wilderness of the American Continent into my work.”

To their credit, the Bruccolis’ main point in granting “O Lost” superiority over “Look Homeward, Angel” is not to diminish Maxwell Perkins but to exalt Thomas Wolfe. Far from being a rumpled bumpkin, Wolfe offered through his novels, letters and journals a wide-ranging and insightful social history of the 1920s and 1930s. And happily for Wolfe’s reputation, Matthew J. Bruccoli, with the help of his associate, Park Bucker, also compiled the complete decade-long correspondence between Perkins and Wolfe and edited it into the elegant volume “To Loot My Life Clean.” These letters--two-thirds of them previously unpublished and some written to members of the Scribner’s staff--clearly indicate that Wolfe had his own artistic vision and consciously grappled to get every character and scene just right. Just as clearly, Wolfe’s letters show that he deeply valued Perkins’ judgment as a literary agent, business advisor and occasional sorely needed sober-minded muse--as when Wolfe would go back to edit a chapter down and wind up trying to add to it instead. “I know what I know,” Wolfe wrote Perkins in December 1930. “The people in North Carolina have the same wonderful qualities as the tobacco, the great juicy peaches, melons, apples, the wonderful shad and oysters of the coast, the rich red clay, the haunting brooding quality of the earth. They are rich, juicy, deliberate, full of pungent and sardonic humor and honesty, conservative and cautious on top, but at bottom wild, savage and full of the murderous innocence of the earth and the wilderness.”

Perkins, in fact, became Wolfe’s greatest defender during the cultural skirmishes of the 1930s, despite their differing tastes. For although Wolfe was blessed with a poet’s uncommon sensitivity to the voices and images of America, his unbounded lyricism came under harsh attack mostly because it rejected the fashionably stark modernism of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot in favor of 19th century Romanticism as exemplified in the works of Henry Fielding, Charles Dickens, Thomas DeQuincey and Sir Walter Scott. Wolfe regarded the minimalism of his day as a phony European avant-gardism and held an open contempt for “Lost Generation” expatriates who esteemed Swiss Alps, Paris cafes and Greek isles above Brooklyn row houses or Yellowstone scenery, blind to the “new magic in a dusty old world” that the United States offered. Much of what Perkins cut from “O Lost” was Wolfe’s sarcasm puncturing East Coast elitist snobbery, the sort he railed against in a letter to Perkins denouncing Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and their ilk as so many “sniffers, whiffers and puny, poisonous apes.” Contemptuous of what he derided as New York’s “sterility crowd,” Wolfe insisted he wrote “books” not “novels” and took great pleasure in including sexual passion in his prose to frighten the frigid.

The circumspect Perkins, who championed many of these writers, had to wonder whether Wolfe wasn’t also assailing him as too effete in spirit. But the editor understood that this one young writer was fixed on romanticizing his beloved America’s common folk and what they cared about, from the smell of White Pines along a Virginia dirt road to the awe-striking sight of the rock sculptures in Utah’s Zion National Park. As the New York Herald once noted, “Thomas Wolfe is his own river and Max Perkins is his levee.” The marvel is that the two men continued their cordial relationship even after Wolfe broke with Scribner’s in 1937. “My friendship with Tom,” Perkins wrote to Wolfe’s family after the author’s death from tuberculosis in Baltimore a year later, “was one of the greatest things in my life.”

Because Wolfe was essentially non-ideological, refusing to side with either the right or the left, his works were savaged by both sides. Beginning in 1935, after the publication of his sprawling novel “Of Time and the River,” it seemed that everybody was gunning for Wolfe. The arch-critic-historian Bernard DeVoto--himself a terribly failed and frustrated novelist--led the charge in a scathing review of Wolfe’s long essay “The Story of a Novel.” Denouncing Wolfe for his “raw gobs of emotion” and “meaningless jabber,” DeVoto squawked that it took Scribner’s assembly line approach of editing to cobble something coherent together before “Look Homeward, Angel” and “Of Time and the River” were ready for publication. The left, meanwhile, claimed the bourgeois Tar Heeler had no social conscience, for his nearly all-white characters wanted no more than to live, work and die in the United States of America. Why, these critics asked (before the outcome of the Cold War made such questions look naive), was the sophomoric Wolfe so afraid of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky?

While easily dismissing the liberal DeVoto as “one of the little men,” Wolfe was pained to the quick that leftist journals such as New Masses and Modern Monthly deemed him--the product of solidly working-class stock--a capitalist toady. “My father was a stonecutter, his father before him a farm laborer,” Wolfe pleaded of his proletarian origins. Meanwhile, the New Deal era’s growing black activist groups, such as the NAACP, began going after Wolfe for his supposedly contemptuous treatment of African Americans in lines like “little nigger servant girl” and “their faces split by enormous ivory grins.” He faced similar charges of anti-Semitism on the grounds that his protagonist in “Of Time and the River” blanched at encountering Jews upon arriving in New York.

Even though Wolfe’s patron and lover Aline Bernstein was Jewish and Perkins rallied to defend him as having “no anti-Semitic leaning,” the charge stuck, and with some justification. Among the reasons Wolfe is seldom taught at today’s universities is his crude stereotyping of people of ethnic backgrounds other than his own, describing Jews as “beak-nosed,” the Irish as “simian-faced” and African Americans as having “great black paws.”

The right, on the other hand, denounced Wolfe as a drunken and debauched smut peddler, as evidenced by his “obscene” penchant for writing about brothels, red-light districts and sex outside marriage. The harshest of such criticisms, in Wolfe’s eyes, were to come from the so-called Nashville Agrarians, a group that published The Fugitive magazine out of Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University. Just months after “Look Homeward, Angel” was published, this group, including Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, John Donald Wade and Stark Young, issued a manifesto defending “a Southern way of life against what may be called the American prevailing way.”

From the outset the Nashville Agrarians tried to link Wolfe into their group, asking him to pen a short story for their new Southern Review’s first issue. Wolfe--who disdained regional intellectuals who wore Dixie on their sleeves--promised to cough up something suitable but never did. When he finally encountered some of their members at a University of Virginia conference, the gregarious Wolfe immediately befriended the Agrarians, swapping yarns and drinking with them until dawn, confidently believing that he had made some new friends. Instead, he had incited a fresh round of jealous gibes. Taking turns like a pack of malicious hunters at a county fair shooting gallery, the forgettable Caroline Gordon called Wolfe “drunk and dumb,” and the pious Tate claimed he “did harm to the art of the novel” and “moral damage to the readers.” Stark Young went so far as to claim that Wolfe was “scarcely Southern,” as he came from “a German family from Pennsylvania transplanted to North Carolina on the wrong side of the tracks.” When Warren launched the Kenyon Review, he commissioned John Peale Bishop to slam Wolfe in the inaugural issue, in which Bishop described “Of Time and the River” as “febrile and empty.”

Deeply hurt and unsure how best to counterpunch, Wolfe expressed his anguish to critic Van Wyck Brooks, claiming the Nashville Agrarians were not only “lily-handed intellectuals” but pathetic fascists hellbent on restoring a phony “aristocratic South that, as everybody knew, had actually despised the artist and writer.” In the end he opted to save his best shots for his (posthumous) 1939 novel, “The Web and the Rock,” in which Wolfe denounced the group as a gang of “refined young gentlemen of the New Confederacy” who, after failing in the North, “retire hauntingly into the South, to the academic security of a teaching appointment at one of the universities from which they could issue, in quarterly installments, very small and very precious magazines which celebrated the advantages of an agrarian society.” He, on the other hand, would continue to publish big, realistic, romantic novels resonant with the great sweep of all of America, as he wrote in “You Can’t Go Home Again,” the “[i]mmense and cruel skies bend over us, and all of us are driven on forever and we have no home.”

Unfortunately, even with the landmark publications of “O Lost” and “To Loot My Life Clean” by the University of South Carolina Press, Thomas Wolfe’s literary stock continues to plummet. The sad cliche that clings to Wolfe is that he is worth reading only if you are a teenager. Like broken records, contemporary critics ridicule his gigantism, formlessness and rhetorical extravagance, saying that his unwieldy novels lack compactness of statement and artistic organization. Tragically, historian David Herbert Donald failed to capture the soulfulness of the rapturous Wolfe in his otherwise first-rate Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “Look Homeward.” Meanwhile, The Modern Library judges snubbed Wolfe when compiling the top 100 novels of the 20th century and Harold Bloom of Yale University holds him in such deep contempt that he refuses to even utter his name. Other persnickety scholars claim that Wolfe’s only contemporary relevance is that he influenced the overrated Jack Kerouac, whose breathless first novel, “The Town and a City,” is badly derivative of “Look Homeward, Angel.”

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Today, in fact, most people confuse the long-dead Thomas Wolfe with the very much alive Tom Wolfe, the dazzling author of such fine realist novels as “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full.” And if all of this weren’t embarrassment enough, his two biggest literary boosters now are no longer Faulkner and Fitzgerald but Robert James Waller, who praises him by name in “The Bridges of Madison County,” and Pat Conroy, who has been pleading with Paramount Pictures to embrace his screenplay of “Look Homeward, Angel.”

Yet just because Wolfe’s stock is down does not mean his star has lost its radiant glow. True, the interstate has destroyed the charms of Old Asheville, an arsonist tragically burned Wolfe’s boyhood home to cinder in July 1998, the House of Scribner on 5th Avenue at 48th Street is a Benetton store with Perkins’ fifth-floor office now assigned to a sock salesman and MTV’s Beavis and Butthead have replaced Eugene Gant as coming-of-age role models, but Wolfe’s poetic vision still lingers. There are no moving pictures or newsreels of Wolfe in existence, nor even an audio recording of his rhapsodic voice. But the lovely music of his prose still echoes in our culture from the majestic ranges of the Smokies to the thousands of Altamont-like provincial towns that dot our nation.

Luckily, the ghost of Thomas Wolfe will always haunt American literature, for he was that rare writer who knew how to cast a magical spell on the reader, to make one feel as well as think. The soulfulness of Wolfe doesn’t disappear with the postmodern fashion of the day: He was authentic, not contrived, and his romantic agony and beautiful sadness tug at our collective memories like some long-ago October dusk when time stood still. As Wolfe wrote in “You Can’t Go Home Again,” “We are so lost, so naked and so lonely in America, but I believe we shall be found. . . . I think the true discovery of America is before us.” For those who haven’t had the pleasure of discovering Wolfe’s lush prose poetry about growing up in this vast and glorious and complicated continent of ours, “O Lost” is a soaring place to start.