The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  Thomas Wolfe, renaming himself Eugene Gant, made his way through the thicket into situations of surprising privilege. A good scholar, a reader, he would in the manner of small-town history come to the notice of an English teacher in the public schools. The English teacher: in American literary striving she will again and again appear as a creature of fable, or as Daddy Warbucks to a ragtag orphan. A private school was opened in the town and Wolfe was encouraged to enroll. The cost, the cost—at home a squall of thunder and lightning—but the change was accomplished. At the new school he studied Latin, Shakespeare, the classics, and graduated with honors. Since there is never an end to onward and upward, the next hotly disputed step was college, with the scholar dreaming of Princeton or the University of Virginia. It was to be the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Now, I’ve given my word; you’ll go where I send you or you’ll go nowhere at all.” And there he is at the end of Look Homeward, Angel before moving on to Harvard in Of Time and the River.

  •

  Look Homeward, Angel was published when Wolfe was twenty-nine years old. At Harvard he had the fantastic notion that his literary destiny was to be playwriting, a mode crippling to his marathon inclinations. Plays went off to the Theatre Guild, but were not met with approval. Look Homeward, Angel was rejected by three publishers and finally turned up at Scribner’s where it aroused interest and dismay over length and “other problems.” The dismay, already mentioned, the editing, extensive, took on a life of its own, and the book brought Maxwell Perkins into the light with the result that more has been written about his struggle and friendship with Wolfe than about his professional work with Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The reviews of the book were favorable, but they do not bring to memory the affection remembered by those who first came upon it in their youth.

  The phrase “O, Lost” might refer to the intense life in the street, the neighbors, the downtown stores, the undertaker, the lawyer, the fallen girl, the drunken pharmacist, the lewd old man who ran the grocery store—all lost in the present homogenization of the village by way of the malls, the motorcars in every yard, national brand-name establishments to take the place of the local enterprises long in one family. Reading Look Homeward, Angel is today a recovery of time or a visit to the bygone in the manner of nineteenth-century fiction with its blacksmiths, ragmen, people on foot for seven miles after returning from the sea. Even though it is only the 1920s and 1930s, the reading of Thomas Wolfe seems to need a shifting of mood on the part of the reader to accept the extravagant yearnings of Eugene Gant, the obsessive detail of train journeys, and the swarming challenges to the awkward young man from the mountains:

  He wanted opulent solitude. His dark vision burned on kingdoms under the sea, on windy castle crags, and on the deep elf kingdoms at the earth’s core. . . . He saw for himself great mansions in the ground, grottoes buried in the deep heart of a hill. . . . Cool hidden cisterns would bring him air; from a peephole in the hillside he could look down on a winding road and see armed men seeking for him. . . . He would pull fat fish from subterranean pools, his great earth cellars would be stocked with old wine, he could loot the world of its treasures, including the handsomest women, and never be caught.

  Thomas Wolfe is a knight on the road, threatened, but rich in armorial splendor. He will reclaim every step of the journey in book after book, an assertion of primordial selfhood. Yet, along the way, there are others who inflame his imagination as his fictional lust embraces the new private school, the owners, the mathematics teacher, the history teacher, preparation for dead-drunk frat nights at Chapel Hill. And then floating in a balloon of descriptive helium it is always back to Dixieland, “all the comforts of the Modern Jail,” and the roomers with their “blue phthistic hands”; his brothers and sisters, their mates, their misbegotten efforts, illness and deathbeds. And that fellow in the streets, the great lung specialist:

  Dr. Fairfax Grinder, scion of one of the oldest and proudest families in Virginia, drove in viciously from Church Street, with his sinewy length of six feet and eight inches coiled tensely in the deep pit of his big Buick roadster. Cursing generally the whole crawling itch of Confederate and Yankee postwar rabbledom, with a few special parentheses for Jews and niggers, he drove full tilt at the short plump figure of Joe Zamschnick, men’s furnishings (“Just a Whisper Off The Square”).

  The minuteness of the life around him, the voracious particulars, will battle on the pages with a gigantic abstraction, Eugene Gant:

  He felt that, no matter what leper’s taint he might carry upon his flesh, there was in him a health that was greater than they could ever know—something fierce and cruelly wounded, but alive, that did not shrink away from the terrible sunken river of life; something desperate and merciless that looked steadily on the hidden and unspeakable passions that unify the tragic family of this earth.

  Look Homeward, Angel was not written until Wolfe had taken a master’s degree at Harvard, where he studied playwriting with George Pierce Baker, the Romantic poets with John Livingstone Lowes, and other classes with other professors. With recommendations from Baker and Lowes, he was given a position teaching English composition at the Washington Square College of New York University. When the first term ended, yet another journey for a “poor mountain boy”: his mother was somehow persuaded to cough up the money for a trip abroad. England, Paris, Italy, Switzerland for nearly a year: the span to become Of Time and the River. On the boat coming home, he met Aline Bernstein, a successful stage and costume designer in New York who will read her story in The Web and the Rock. With her help, Wolfe was still trying to place his plays; another term of teaching, another trip abroad, paid for by Aline, and at last Look Homeward, Angel was begun. Hope, hysteria; book accepted by Scribner’s, revision, excision, grateful compliance on the author’s part punctuated by savage resistance, a bloody chapter in the history of publishing. John Hall Wheelock, poet and editor at Scribner’s: “I am not aware of any book that has ever been edited so extensively up to that point.”

  The spindly bones of biography cannot explain why Thomas Wolfe with mad conceit and energy began to compose a voluptuous memorial to his own life, beginning with himself as an infant. In London, in New York, in Brooklyn, wherever he may be, he goes ever back to excavate the cemetery of his remains. Look Homeward, Angel, pure in ambition, dressed in the ornaments of his vast reading, rich, almost burdened with a grand style of adjective and metaphor, and homely enough in catching the diction, the pauses, the pretensions and evasions of the strangers and family that explode in the pages. Look Homeward, Angel is a pastoral of memory, a graveyard of youth and not a recording but a strange magnification shaped by an untamed imagination.

  Of Time and the River, almost nine hundred pages, a farewell to home, a brother dead, a father dying, the train chugging north through Confederate states: “nothing by night but darkness and a space we call Virginia through which the huge projectile of the train is hurtling onward in the dark.” Wolfe sees himself always in a humbling shape: awkward, provincial, haunted, too large and cumbersome for his fragile, trembling inner life. Now he is stumbling through the magical doors of the Widener Library at Harvard: “He pictured himself as tearing the entrails from a book as from a fowl,” and claims that “within a period of ten years he read at least 20,000 volumes—deliberately the number is set low—and opened the pages and looked through many times that number.” It is no wonder he piled up manuscript with the same gluttony for numbers. At night through a “hundred streets,” looking into the faces of a “million people”; “rivers, plains, and mountains and 10,000 sleeping towns; it seemed to him that he saw everything at once.” Such is his plot in the novels, himself a numerical grandiosity, at the same time also grossly unhappy, ravenously uncertain and suffering.

  •

  The books are rescued by other people, a great talent for vignette, the novellas within the novel. In Boston Uncle Bascom Pentland-Hawke, a curiosity, a local eccentric in the Dickens mode. Once a minister with
a Harvard theology degree, he is now in a grimy antique of a building as Conveyancer and Title Expert for the Brill Realty Company. A scarecrow, a miser, in old clothes turned green from wear, a food nut eating only chopped-up carrots, onions, turnips, and raw potatoes, daily in an office of colleagues fashioned in a similar peculiarity. At home with Uncle Bascom in a mock rant against women:

  O, I feel so sick! O, dreary me, now! I think my time is coming on again! O, you don’t love me any mo-o-ore! . . . O, I wish you’d bring me something nice from ta-own! O, if you loved me you’d buy me a new hat!

  “A Portrait of Bascom Hawke” was published in Scribner’s Magazine and tied for first place in the $5,000 Short Novel Prize. However, in Of Time and the River Perkins and Wheelock thought it a digression and sliced it into sections interspersed here and there.

  Professor Baker-Hatcher’s playwriting class and student dialogue: “. . . The play is nothing. . . . It’s the sets—the sets are really quite remarkable.” Wolfe’s portrait of the celebrated professor is impudent and never more so than when he is being respectful to a figure he was aching to impress. “All the professors thought he looked like an actor and all the actors thought he looked like a professor.” He would advise the students to brush up on their French and look in on De Musset’s “charming trifle.” Very casually and without pretense, his lectures were enlivened by “The last time I was in London, Pinero and I were having lunch together one day at the Savoy” and “I have a letter here from ’Gene O’Neill which bears on that very point. Perhaps you’d be interested in knowing what he has to say about it.”

  Again, he once came back from New York with an amusing story of a visit he had paid to the famous producer, David Belasco. And he described drolly how he had followed a barefoot, snaky-looking female . . . through seven gothic chambers mystical with chimes and incense. And finally he told how he had been ushered into the presence of the great ecclesiastic who sat at the end of a cathedral-like room beneath windows of church glass.

  Scattered throughout the pages, more novellas trapped between the impassioned trips back to North Carolina for his father’s death and his own drunken nights in Boston. Francis Starwick, an assistant to Professor Baker, invites the bumbling titan Eugene Gant to dinner at the Cock Horse Tavern on Brattle Street. Starwick has the appearance of “those young Englishmen painted by Hoppner and Raeburn”: his speaking voice is refined, free from identifying regionalism. He is a dandy, clever in finding the right place to live: fluent, sophisticated in a way that causes Eugene to see him as a rich boy pampered from birth. It will turn out that Starwick is a self-creation of the accumulated flair that took him away from an ordinary family in Illinois, from humiliation as the teacher’s pet, a local affected “aesthete.”

  Starwick has his secret Italian restaurant, Pothillipo’s, far from Harvard Square, where he negotiates the dinner in restaurant French and Italian with the bowing waiter Nino:

  When this great ceremony was over, Frank Starwick had done nothing more nor less than order the one-dollar table d’hôte dinner which Signor “Pothillippo” provided for all the patrons of his establishment and whose order—soup, fish, spaghetti, roasted chicken, salad, ice-cream, cheese, nuts and bitter coffee—was unchangeable as destiny, and not to be altered by the whims of common men, whether they would or no.

  Years later, after Harvard, the narrator will meet Starwick in the Louvre in Paris and join him and the two attractive Boston women with whom he is traveling for over one hundred pages of youth abroad; their trips, quarrels, sightseeing, money problems, jealousies, and at last a fierce finale. Along the way, Starwick picks up a young Frenchman, Alec, with whom he disappears for days, and also along the way Eugene is seized with recognition of his friend’s nature and falls into an almost biblical rage against the infidel, the faithless enemy. The word, the “foul word was out at last”—“you dirty little fairy.” He catches Starwick by the throat and slams him against “the facade of a building with such brutal violence that Starwick’s head bounced and rattled on the stone”:

  And at that moment, Eugene felt an instant, overwhelming revulsion of shame, despair, and sick horror. . . . He thought he had killed Starwick. . . . Starwick’s frail body retained its langorous dignity and grace . . . the buckling weight of the unconscious figure slumped in a movement of terrible and beautiful repose—the same movement that one sees in a great painting of Christ lowered from the cross. . . . There are some people who possess such a natural dignity of person—such a strange and rare inviolability of flesh and spirit. . . . If such an insult be intended, if such violence be done, the act returns a thousandfold upon the one who does it . . . he will relive his crime a thousand times in all the shame and terror of inexpiable memory.

  Wolfe always remains a yokel despite his travels, his learning; and he will struggle with the common heritage of response, seeming so clear and ordained, the many notions brought from home that will be blurred and challenged by the world his shaky fame will leave on his doorstep.

  2.

  The spectacular, torrential talent races on in Of Time and the River; it is a contest with the impossible flood of experience, the maelstrom years of youth, the overwrought competition to outpace the threatening limits of language. The homeward-bound ship itself, a construction of 60,000 tons, is a dreamlike apparition to be given shape by words: “sucking continents towards her, devouring sea and land; she was made to enter European skies like some stranger from another world . . . to pulse and glow under the soft, wet European sky.”

  Of Time and the River received many favorable notices and many snarls of fatigue, as if reading the crowded, everlasting pages were an overtime, unpaid chore. More travels abroad, lawsuits, the affair with Aline Bernstein, and a break with Scribner’s. Of Time and the River was the last of the long books published in Wolfe’s lifetime. The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again were published from manuscript by Harper’s and edited or pieced together by the editor Edward Aswell. The break with Scribner’s and Maxwell Perkins is a tangle of murky emotions and conditions: no contract for subsequent books, challenged financial terms, and most of all perhaps Wolfe’s chagrin over the gossip that claimed Perkins as the coauthor or at least the instrument by which chaotic, unpublishable pages were shaped into a book. The publication just now of O Lost, the original typescript of Look Homeward, Angel, shows that the editor has not been born who could write a book of this kind; what he could do was to cut it like a tailor.

  The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again, each near to seven hundred pages when published, were left in the hands of Edward Aswell at Harper’s. David Herbert Donald’s 1987 biography of Thomas Wolfe gives an accounting of Mr. Aswell’s exuberant combat with the manuscripts. Aswell’s wife noted, “Theirs was to be the Great Collaboration—Tom’s genius combined with Ed’s power of organization.” The howlings by agents, editors, and reviewers that the books were “too autobiographical” had led Wolfe to transform Eugene Gant into George Webber, as the narrator. A horrible mistake, as Maxwell Perkins noted later.

  Name changes out of fear of libel, constructing “a pastiche out of several drafts, rearranging the episodes in the love story”; transitional passages written by Aswell himself; the inclusion of an introduction to The Web and the Rock taken from a letter written by Wolfe but unfinished and never mailed. In You Can’t Go Home Again, the creation of a character named Randy Shepperton entirely from the brain of Mr. Aswell.

  The biographer’s conclusion: “Aswell moved on to modifying the rhythms of his [Wolfe’s] prose, altering his characterizations, and to cutting and shaping his chapters . . . and his interference seriously eroded the integrity of Wolfe’s text. Far from deserving commendation, Aswell’s editorial interference was, both from the standpoint of literature and of ethics, unacceptable.”

  •

  As a composition, The Web and the Rock is an effort to outwit editorial and critical objections. Halfhearted narrative disguises; George Webber, called Monk i
n youth and persisting; a new family, the Joyners, to replace that of Eliza Gant in the previous books and to avoid the anger of the family and that of certain Asheville citizens. “About 1885, John Webber met a young woman of Libya Hill named Amelia Joyner. . . . In the next fifteen years they had no children, until, in 1900, their son George was born.” So, Eugene Gant has now become an only child. His mother dies and he goes to live with Joyner relatives, to be raised by Aunt Maw, a spinster, “a rusty crone of fate.” Along the many pages, he will attend not Chapel Hill but an “old, impoverished backwoods college” called Pine Rock and mostly interested in the football team. Much was invented, but again living persons saw themselves caricatured in the Eugene Gant-George Webber overwhelming passion to leave a record of the flow of his actual days and nights.

  •

  Before death overtakes, he will have his one love affair to scorch the pages of The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again. Aline Bernstein met Wolfe on the boat coming home from Europe, parted with him at the dock; they united when Wolfe wrote a letter asking to see her again. Aline Bernstein was the daughter of a well-known actor, Joseph Frankau, and had spent her childhood in a theatrical boarding house on West 44th Street. When the meeting took place she was an established costume and set designer, married to a successful stockbroker, the mother of two children, eighteen years older than Thomas Wolfe, and Jewish. She will be Esther Jack in the novels: