FASHI ONS,ASPEORTS r 2 4
SUN DAY
MAGAZ IN E
Sunday, April 17, 1955 ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN PAGE ONE
Painted Words of Thomas Wolfe
By ROY AKERS
CARSON McCULLERS once wrote a
book entitled, "The Heart Is A Lonely
Hunter." And, although the novel had
nothing whatsoever to do with another
Southern writer-Thomas Wolfe-the
title, when taken out of the context of
its purpose, is perhaps the most accurate,
if inadvertant, observation ever made re-
garding the emotional make-up of one
of the greater of America's major novel-
ists,
For within the proud and massive chest
of Thomas Wolfe there did indeed throb
a heart that was a lonely hunter.
This brash young man from the Pied-
mont cried so nobly and wept so majes-
tically for the place called home that the
reading people of the world sat up and
listened with an ear enraptured. Tom
Wolfe did not write words; he painted
them, and in each syllable of the oils he
used were to be found the pigments of
the joy and misery of the human soul.
He laughed words and he cried them. He
shouted words and he whispered them.
He was the Muse of the Lonely South-
ern Hills.
Wolfe dissected Asheville, North Caro-
lina, into raw and naked open wounds
and, by so doing, created it into one frag-
mented yet immortal whole. With his
first published work his own family prob-
ably felt like disowning him, and the
citizenry of Asheville threatened to lynch
him. But in losing family and friend alike
he had, at the same time, gained them
forever. For wounds do heal and people,
no matter how good or bad they might
be, eventually come to love themselves
on paper.
He left a lusty hill boy singing, and re-
turned a lonely hill man-dead. But one
need saunter only through the streets of
Asheville today to learn that Thomas
Wolfe never 'really died. For he was too
full of life and the love of living and the
gift of God creative to depart without
leaving the Smokies masked forever in
a breathing legend.
SOME of the natives say they have seen
him walking at night-a grotesquely
tall man, whom people once laughed at-
taking great strides along the mountain
tops bathed in the smile of the moon.
And others swear that in the long lost
nights of Dixie the Southern winds play
music through the limbs of the high-
borne trees for these the words of his:
" ... a stone, a leaf, an unfound door:
of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the
forgotten faces.
"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.
"Which of us has known his brother?
Which of us has looked into his father's
heart? Which of us has not re ained
forever prison-pent? Which of us is not
forever a stranger and alone?
"O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost.
among bright stars on this most weary
unbright cinder, lost! 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."
THOMAS WOLFE emerged upon the
literary scene with the publication of
"Look Homeward, Angel" by Scribner's
just one week before the Great Depres-
sion of 1929. It was a massive book al-
most as ponderous as the Will O' The
Wisp nightmares of ticker tape that were
soon to nearly shatter the Great Ameri-
can Dream. The writing of the "Angel"
was a test of artistry and human endur-
ance, and its editing still stands as a
tribute to the consummate skill and God-
given patience of the late Maxwell Per-
kins.
Muse of Lonely
Southern Hills
Aswell, from an enormous pile of manu-
script, after Wolfe's death.
THE FIRST of these, "The Web And
The Rock," involves Eugene-his name
now changed to George "Monk" Webber-
in his strange and demused fascin-ion
with the steel-ribbed and cemented can-
yons of the great and fabulous city. This
is his first introduction to the glitter, and
sometimes dowdy emptiness, of urbane
sophistication. Manhattan here becomes
something more than just another 0'-
Henry story, and the bums and the cops
the arty artist and the dissipating social-
ite; the doorman and the ambulance
driver are subjected to the scrutiny of
a pair of eyes behind which there lurked
a mind that never forgot a detail.
It is in the "Web And The Rock," too,
that "Monk" meets and falls in love with
the beautiful and very talented stage de-
signer, Esther Jack. This unique love
affair illustrates pointedly, and some-
times very poignantly, some of the joy
and tragedy involved when two artists
fall in love. But, more than this, it is a
highly skillful contrast between a man
from an almost primitive culture and a
woman reared in an urban society. For
"Monk" Webber and Esther Jack are
symbols, above all things else, of the
mountain provincial and the Park Ave-
nue dowager.
-YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN," this
is the titled declaration and the con-
cluding volume of Tom Wolfe's great tet-
ralogy. It is something else, too; some-
thing that is so rarely found in the hidden
pages of literature, and that is an account
of what a writer-and a very fine writer,
at that-found at the bitter and fabled
end of the rainbow. A few fragments,
taken from the context of "The Quest of
the Fair Medusa," which is the preface
to Book IV of "You Can't Go Home
Again," tells it so beautifully in Wolfe's
own language. The words can stand-
either as a warning signal or a beckon-
ing finger-to those misguided souls who
are either foolish enough, or courageous
enough, to spend the all too few years of
this life's journey in quest of the elusive
quill.
"George took Randy's advice and mov-
ed-for four years he lived in Brooklyn,
and four years in Brooklyn are a geo-
logic age-a single stratum of gray time.
They were years of poverty, of despera-
tion, of loneliness unutterable. All about
him were the poor, the outcast, the ne-
glected and forsaken people of America,
and he was one of them. But life is strong,
and year after year it went on around
him in all its manifold complexity, rich
with its unnoticed and unrecorded little
happenings. He saw it all, he took it all
in hungrily as part of his experience, he
recorded much of it, and in the end he
squeezed it dry as he tried to extract its
hidden meanings . ,
. . And by his side was that stern
friend, the only one to whomhe spoke
what in his secret heart he most desired.
To Loneliness he whispered, "Fame!"-
and Loneliness replied, "Aye, brother,
wait and see."
THOMAS WOLFE, since the first pub-
lication of his creative toil, has re-
mained one of the most controversial of
America's writers. The reader and the
critic alike are either attracted to his
writing, as by a magnet, or else are pushed
away from it in a tidal wave of confusion,
Few there are, among literate readers,
who stand with an "I don't really care"
attitude in the common boundaries of a
middle ground. They either like Wolfe
or they don't.
A work of art, the critics say, should be
able to stand or fall on its own as an
entity absolute. But, in a world devoid
of perfection, things as they should be
are not so easy to come by. It is neve
See TH10MAS, Page 7
.. LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL
For it was "Look Homeward, Angel"
that made of Wolfe an established writer
and of Perkins an accepted literary
legend
The "'Angel" was not only the first in
the gigantic Wolfe tetralogy of huge
books, but it is also the best known, and
will probably remain as the most lasting
of his creations. The volume traces the
arrival of Oliver Gant upon the Southern
scene from Pennsylvania; his subsequent
marriage with Eliza, a daughter of the
Pentland clan, and the rearing of their
strange but, somehow, wonderful family.
Oliver Gant, the stone-cutter father,
with his soaring rhetoric and uninhibited
gift for invective, is the towering charac-
ter of this book, but it is really the history
of a family-a family that found itself
caught between the impregnable doors of
love and hate, and generosity and avarice.
And, of course, the novel is most of all a
vehicle for introducing the principal
character of the tetralogy, Eugene Gant.
and carrying the boy through the painful
veil of growing up and leaving him, at
the end of the book, a graduate of the
state university ready to depart for Har-
vard.
THE SECOND NOVEL "Of Time And
The River" appearing for publication
some six years later-and again edited
by Max Perkins-recounts Eugene's Har-
vard years and the drama within a drama
of 'his apprenticeship in the late Prof.
George Pierce Baker's 47 Playwriting
Workshop. An account is given that be-
gins and encompasses the Starwick epi-
sode that ends so bitterly on Eugene's first
voyage to Europe. This book contains the
incidence of Eugene's teaching experience
at the School for Utility Cultures, intro-
ducing his first actual contact with the
thinking of the urban intellectual. And.
"Of Time And The River," also brings in
the ghastly and cancerous details, both
physical and spiritual, of old Oliver
Gant's death in what will probably re-
main as the greatest and 'most moving
death scenes in all fiction.
And, here, our hero changes in more
ways than one. Wolfe, while writing "The
Story of a Novel"-certainly the most
touching personal tribute ever paid to an
editor, or to few other people on the
earth, for that matter-makes his pain-
ful, final break with the great and legen-
dary Perkins. He takes his writing to
Harper's; acquiring a new editor, in the
person of Edward C. Aswell, for guidance.
And the last two volumes of the tetral-
ogy are later edited and published by