This last August at Long Novel Weekend we discussed Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel and the work was so well liked that quite a few of us put our names on a list to read and get together to discuss more of Wolfe's novels. Here is a very interesting follow up regarding Wolfe's later works.
Crying Wolfe
by
Walter L. Mosley
Time
was when Thomas Wolfe was regarded as the equal of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott
Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. In fact, Faulkner went so far as to
suggest that Wolfe might have been the most gifted of them all. However,
if you seek for Wolfe in The Library of America, that effort to publish
definitive editions of this country’s most important writers, you won’t find
anything. He hasn’t been admitted into that prestigious company.
Why is no secret.
When
Thomas Wolfe submitted the manuscript that would become Look Homeward, Angel to Scribners, it became a
project for Maxwell Perkins, an editor who worked with Scribner’s most
distinguished writers. Perkins saw his task as turning this rhapsodic
family saga into a commercially successful novel, and while eliminating some
60,000 words involved some struggle with the author, he succeeded. He
took such an important role in the development and form of Wolfe’s second book,
The Web and the Rock, that Wolfe published a volume describing Perkins assistance in the
creation of the book (The Story of a Novel). The rumors about Perkins’ role in the
first book became a published confession about his importance to the second,
and Wolfe’s reputation began to be widely questioned.
In
fact, the damage was such that Wolfe, who regarded Perkins as friend and
something of a father figure, felt it necessary to terminate their
relationship. Wolfe moved from Scribner’s to Harper’s where his new
editor was Edward Aswell. Wolfe maintained a voluminous output of prose,
moved by whatever circumstances and events swept him up at the time.
However, he became ill on a trip west and died unexpectedly at the age of
38. Harper’s had given Wolfe advances toward his next book, but had
nothing to show except a mountainous manuscript of various autobiographical
experiences without much organizing principle. Wolfe had settled on a
title, You Can’t Go Home, Again, but Edward Aswell was left to cobble together chunks
of Wolfe’s prose, and, unlike Perkins who never added words of his own or
changed an author’s, Aswell evidently had to build the bridges between them
himself. The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home, Again, which contain
much fine work, finished demolishing Wolfe’s reputation. Aswell’s creativity
justified Harper’s investment in Wolfe, but discredited the author.
Wolfe
was really not a novelist inventing characters and situations, but a passionate
observer of his own life and times, a kind of journalist. He wasn’t
exactly a diarist either, building a private record of his experience. He
might have been a poet, but he was too long winded perhaps. He didn’t fit
easily into any current genre.
Readers interested in pursuing this story might consult the following:
Bruccoli, Matthew J. and Buckner, Park, Editors, To Loot My Life Clean: The Thomas Wolfe--Maxwell Perkins Correspondence (U. of S. Carolina Press: Columbia, SC, 2000).
Donald, David Herbert, Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (Ballantine Books: New York, 1987).
Mitchell, Ted, Editor, Thomas Wolfe: An Illustrated Biography (Pegasus Books: New York, 2006).
