When I was a professor of American literature, one of the novels I most enjoyed teaching was Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. It’s one of the few classic American novels that isn’t pessimistic. Wolfe embraced everything in life, its tragedies as much as its triumphs, managing to find all of it ennobling. The epigraph to the novel (I’m condensing it somewhat) announces its theme.
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….
… 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.
Judged only on its tone, this passage might not seem optimistic, but in the context of the book it is powerfully so. Wolfe says that we existed in another state before we were born. It’s not such a radical idea. Plato had several things to say about this. So do most Eastern religions. We come into exile (birth) and spend the rest of our lives trying to remember where we came from (“the lost lane-end into heaven”). Anything in this existence (“a stone, a leaf”) is worthy of study because it might be the trigger that frees our repressed memory and allows us to recall the perfect existence from which we were separated. If we’re alert, we should always be looking for the unfound door that will take us back to where we began. The “angel” of the title is our soul. The “home” it is looking for is the ideal existence above this illusory physical one. From that ideal world we once knew, something calls to us, our ghost, our spirit, to return: “by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”
I find this theme eerie and profound. It addresses the loneliness that even the most optimistic of us feel. At the same time it gives us an answer to that loneliness by urging us to grasp every aspect of life, no matter how insignificant something might seem or how painful it might be, because all experience leads to an understanding that takes us to a higher level and an even higher one after that, eventually to the perfection from which we came. That’s a hard notion—to accept the grief that comes our way. Lord, do I know. But I keep thinking of that universal spiritual force I mentioned earlier, the overwhelming transcendental spirit that Emerson and Thoreau wrote about and that van Gogh depicted in his paintings. Whitman said it well:
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women, And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere, The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, And if ever there was it led toward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it…
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed.
Whitman’s words are basically what Look Homeward, Angel is about. Life doesn’t begin and end. Like energy, it only changes its form. In the years after Matthew’s death, constantly remembering my vision of the fireflies, I have come to think of life at its ultimate as a speeding point of light and that Matthew has been translated into one of those points. Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But one of the lessons I took away from this horrid experience is that as long as I refused to accept Matthew’s death, my mind and my body rebelled. Oh, I admitted that he was dead, but I kept fixating on the past, on events before he died, telling myself how wonderful life had been before he got sick. And life indeed was wonderful back then, by virtue of being life. But my refusal to put my mind in the present was a form of denying that he was dead. Another American novel I enjoyed teaching (this one pessimistic) is John Barth’s The End of the Road. In it, a character observes that reason and logic can’t account for the world. There’s no ultimate reason for Cleveland Stadium to seat a specific number of spectators. That number could have been more or less. The number it does seat just happens to be the way things are. “There’s no reason in the long run why Italy shouldn’t be shaped like a sausage instead of a boot, but that doesn’t happen to be the case. The world is everything that is the case, and what the case is is not a matter of logic.” Why is gold yellow? Why is there one moon? Why are there two sexes? No necessary reason. Things just turned out that way. Why is Matthew dead? Same answer. But as long as I refused to accept what was the case, I was in terrible shape. One day, about four years after his death, I surrendered. I stopped dwelling on the past. I accepted the present, the after-Matt present. The day I came to terms with the fact that life would never be as it was, that it had changed and transformed—that was the day I began to heal. Because I came to believe in what Wolfe and Whitman had written about. “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,/And to die is different from what any one supposed.” E=mc2.
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But I had another reason for thinking about Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. Its hero is Eugene Gant, a version of Wolfe. The novel depicts his preadult experiences, including the death of his brother Ben (one of the most famous deaths in American fiction). In the book’s climax, Eugene is about to leave his hometown of Altamont, North Carolina (in real life, Asheville), and to embark on the continuing great adventure of his life (Wolfe’s point is that every life, its pain and glory, is an adventure). Eugene stands to the side of the town square and has a kind of mystical vision in which he sees himself in the equivalent of a filmic double exposure multiplied by thousands. Every version of himself at every age crisscrosses the square. To Eugene’s continuing astonishment, multiple versions of his dead brother also appear, chronicling Ben’s life in the square. Eugene rushes to him and calls him a ghost, which Ben denies. “But I saw you die,” Eugene objects. Ben replies that he isn’t dead, that he isn’t a ghost. “Then what are you?” Eugene insists, adding, “You are dead…. Or do men die?” It’s a Whitmanlike moment, followed by Ben’s asking Eugene what he expects to find by going away. Eugene’s answer is, “Myself.” He says that he hopes to find himself in the larger world. But where is the world? he wonders, to which Ben replies, “Nowhere…. You are your world.” A new significance of the title now presents itself. “Look homeward” now means to look inward as well as outward, that the inside and the outside reflect on each, both leading us to the ideal otherworld from which we came.
These thoughts were on my mind when, after Matthew’s death, my wife and I started having multiple-exposure visions similar to what Eugene saw in the town square. To us, Iowa City was so synonymous with Matthew that virtually every street and principal building reminded us of him, gave us images of him. The library, the record stores, the movie theaters, the ice cream shop, the pizza parlors, the grade school down the street, the junior high a few blocks away. I can still see him coming down the steps of that school, where I picked him up to drive him to the hospital for more chemotherapy. In spirit, he peopled the area, but the memories were a bittersweet refusal to accept the after-Matt present, to deal with what was the case; so finally, in 1992, Donna and I decided that we had to move on. Iowa City had been a wonderful home for twenty-two years. We had raised a family there. We had also lost a son there. The city represented a lifetime. Now, somewhere else, we were going to attempt a new one. Look homeward, angel.
But where to go? One thing was certain—the landscape would have to be different from the lush rolling hills of Iowa. Ocean or mountains were obvious alternatives. By chance, we watched a PBS show called This Old House, which depicted the distinctive adobe pueblo architecture of Santa Fe, New Mexico. I later wrote about this moment in a novel, Extreme Denial (an appropriate title, given my former psychological state). The flat-roofed, sprawling houses with their thick walls, deeply recessed windows, and rounded corners were so unusual that we felt we were looking at buildings in another country. Their clay-colored stucco blended wonderfully with the orange, red, and yellow of their high-desert surroundings. Mountain
foothills were covered with junipers and piñon trees. The mountains themselves were rich with aspen.
Those mountains called to us. In April, on my forty-ninth birthday (which, symbolically, I thought of as my fiftieth), we spent a long weekend there. We found ourselves so captivated by the area’s mixture of Hispanic, Native American, and Anglo cultures that four months later, in the most impulsive decision of our lives, Donna and I moved to Santa Fe, where, as Donna described it, we began Act Three. In an amazing spiritual setting (the northern New Mexico light has long been a favorite of painters), we learned to look inward and outward while, equally important, living now. Matt is still with us. Literally. Just before leaving Iowa City, we went to the mausoleum, asked the superintendent to unscrew the glass plates that sealed Matthew’s urn in its niche (the memory of the dove was certainly with me that day), and drove home with the urn in Donna’s arms. He and three cats made the thousand-mile car trip with us. He’s on a book-shelf in a small office off the living room. Sometimes, sentimentally, I put on a Jimi Hendrix CD for him. But it’s a good kind of sentiment, not a looking back but an accepting—just as I look fondly and not painfully at the beautiful white acoustic-electric guitar we gave him shortly before he died and that he was never able to play. It’s in a corner of the TV room. I often put my hand on it as I go past, just as I touch Matt’s urn when I’m near it in the office. Having made peace with Matt’s death, feeling him with us, Donna and I move on.
There’s a lot to move toward. After working as a book publicist, Sarie eventually married. She has a daughter, age four—which, in case you miss the point, means that we’re grandparents. What a delightful child Natalie is. (But then that’s one of the themes of this book—all children are delightful; adults sometimes need to be reminded of that.) How I worry that something might happen to her. But that’s out of my control, just as Matthew’s cancer was. Everything’s an act of faith. We have to accept what is the case. Take the bad with the good, load it all aboard, and do our damnedest to move on. A hard lesson. But I’ve had a lot of years to learn it, and I learn it anew with each passing day.
Look homeward, angel.
January 1999
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series, Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette convertible traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.
In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph. D. in American literature. There, he also met the esteemed science-fiction writer William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a ground-breaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-trauma stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.
That “father” of modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them international bestsellers, including the classic spy trilogy, The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries broadcast after the Super Bowl), The Fraternity of the Stone, and The League of Night and Fog.
Eventually wearying of two professions, Morrell gave up his academic tenure in order to write full time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character lost a son.
“The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of thirty-two books, including such high-action thrillers as Creepers, Scavenger, and The Spy Who Came for Christmas (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). Always interested in different ways to tell a story, he wrote the six-part comic-book series, Captain America: The Chosen. His writing book, The Successful Novelist, analyzes what he has learned during his almost four decades as an author.
Morrell is a co-founder of the International Thriller Writers organization. Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. He is also an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association of Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and defensive/offensive driving, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. To research the aerial sequences in his latest novel, The Shimmer, he became a private pilot.
Morrell is a three-time recipient of the distinguished Bram Stoker Award, the latest for his novel Creepers. The International Thriller Writers organization gave him its prestigious Thriller Master Award. With eighteen million copies of his work in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages.
Fireflies: A Father's Classic Tale of Love and Loss Page 18