On the Southern Literary Trail discussion

There was lots of discussion on the merits of Wolfe's work when we read Look Homeward Angel as a group read. I've gone on to read some more of his work and thought I'd cast some bread out on the waters: what I liked and what I didn't so much like, so if you're not up to reading the entirety of his 900+ page Of Time and the River, you can dip in a toe here and there (where the bread gathered).

First off, his collection of short stories, From Death to Morning

Wolfe doesn't write short stories. Actually, he doesn't write stories. He writes prose/poem essays, or vignettes, or scenes. When it works, he can remind me of Whitman, among others; when it doesn't, well you won't have to read those parts.

Here, to me, are the keepers of FDTM:

No Door: This is Wolfe, the successful author, who uses a diner-date with a "well-kept" couple as an excuse to write about New York City: "You remember a powerful big horse, slow-footed, shaggy in the hoof, with big dappled spots of iron gray upon it that stood one brutal day in August by the curb. Its driver had unhitched it from the wagon and it stood there with its great patient head bent down in an infinite and quiet sorrow, and a little boy with black eyes and a dark face was standing by it holding some sugar in his hand, and its driver, a man who had the tough seamed face of the city, stepped in on the horse with a bucket full of water which he threw against the the horse's side. For a second, the great flanks shuddered gratefully and began to smoke, the man stepped back on to the curb and began to look the animal over with a keen deliberate glance, and the boy stood there, rubbing his hand quietly into the horse's muzzle, and talking softly to it all the time."

There. If you like that type of writing; if seeing that scene, and knowing it as if you'd been there, is sufficient for your enjoyment of fiction, then Wolfe is the man for you. Because there's no plot any where (there wasn't in Look Homeward, Angel, really), there's just "I saw this and thought is was worth describing and having you read it."

This doesn't always work, IMHO, but that's why I'm reading Wolfe, so you don't have to (as much). Other keepers for me are: The Face of the War (which, if memory serves, re-plows a part of LHA), Dark in the Forest, Strange as Time (our working boy's traveling by train in Germany--Wolfe loves his trains!), The Four Lost Men ("Suddenly, at the green heart of June, I heard my father's voice again." Parts of this remind me of Whitman. This "story" should be taught in American History classes.), and The Web of Earth.

Web is a novella, told almost entirely in his mother's voice, during a visit of her's to "Eugene" in NYC.

"... In the year that the locusts came, something that happened in the year the locusts came, two voices that I heard there in that year.... Child! Child! It seems so long ago since the year the locusts came, and all of the trees were eaten bare: so much has happened and it seems so long ago...."

The two voices she overheard say, "Two ... two," and "Twenty ... twenty."

Then, for ninety pages, Eugene's mother proceeds to tell him what that meant. But each time she starts she diverts herself in tangents on her family, the town, the people there she knows and knew, to cycle back to "two ... two" and "twenty ... twenty" only to be gone again:

Near the end, she tells of an old friend who has gone bankrupt.

"Now, look here, Miller," I said, "you ought to know better than to give in like this. We've both been through the mill, and we've seen some mighty rough times--why, these people that they've got today don't know anything about it, they don't know what hardship is"--why, didn't we both grow old within five miles of each other and don't I remember it all, yes! every minute of it like it was today, the men marchin', and the women cryin', the way the dust rose, the times we went through and the way we had to work, the wool, the flax, the wheel, the things we grew and the things we had to make, and a thousand things you never dreamed or heard of, boy, the summertime, the river and the singin', the poverty, the sorrow, and the pain--we saw and had to do it all--"And you!" I said to Miller Wright. "You! You did it too, I said, "and you remember!"

And finally, she tells Eugene, what "two .. two" and "twenty ... twenty" mean.

Next up, the first part of "Of Time and the River." Chime in to comment, praise, or jeer.

Hey Randall, love your title for this topic. I loved Wolfe when I was young and idealistic, now, not so much. Tried him again a couple of years ago and couldn't finish the book. So I'll just follow this thread instead.

Impressive review.

To Miss Scarlett and Kim, thanks both.

I read Look Homeward, Angel years ago but can't remember too much about it, though I wasn't blown away by it. I do wonder if I'd be more appreciative of it now. I guess he's a bit of a forgotten writer these days.

Randall wrote: "There was lots of discussion on the merits of Wolfe's work when we read Look Homeward Angel as a group read. I've gone on to read some more of his work and thought I'd cast some bread out on the wa..."

Hilarious thread title, Randall!

I've never read any Wolfe but thought maybe I should when I recently came across a character in Provinces of Night using Look Homeward, Angel as a pillow. I looked it up and felt thoroughly intimidated. It's nice to know I can just read him vicariously now. Thanks for taking the pressure off.

Hilarious! Keep us posted. I'm passing on Wolfe.

To all of you just posting: I wouldn't pass on Wolfe entirely. I do think that he's best appreciated by younger people, so if you're coming to him (or revisiting him) in your middle age, you may not be more appreciative of him now. But several writers from the South have a continuing appreciation of his writing, often finding new aspects of his art to champion. The Web of Earth is certainly not long and, being the words of his mother, is free of the "sensitive youth" prose that many oldsters can no longer abide. And, as later posts will reveal, Of Time and the River also has several passages focusing on his family in Altamont that I think are outstanding. Like I said, you can stick your toe in where ever. Get it from your library or find it in a good used book store--buy it for a dollar or two, and cherry pick the best parts.

To anyone going to Asheville at some point, his home there is worth a visit. It burned in a fire a few years ago and was rebuilt, but still portrays his life there exactly. The room where Ben died is especially moving to be in. I still remember his death scene in Look Homeward Angel as one of the most moving things I ever read.

Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth is a doorstop of a book. My second-hand Scribner paperback clocks in at 912 pages. It covers Eugene Gant's life from his leaving Altamont for Harvard to his travels in Europe. Wolfe divided OT&TR eight "books": Orestes: Flight before Fury is about 90 pages and covers Eugene's leave-taking from home, and his visit with his dying father in a sanitarium in Baltimore. Young Faustus covers his time in Harvard, Telemachus, his sojourn back home, and Proteus: The City, his life in New York City. The rest of the book cover's Eugene's travels to and around Europe, ending just as he's boarding a boat for America.

Like LHA, OT&TR alternates between lyricism and realism and satire. Much of the lyricism isn't about the idealism of youth (don't worry, there's still plenty of that--Eugene is Eugene, and Thomas is Thomas) but about America and Americans.

"Orestes" finds Orestes Eugene on the station platform in Altamont, with his mother, Eliza, his sister, Helen, and her husband, Hugh. The Gants are at their dis-functional best. While reading, I thought back to the Web of Earth--Eliza may well be Wolfe's greatest creation and achievement.

The train streams northward: "Toward midnight there is another pause at a larger town .... The traveller gets out, walks up and down the platform, sees the vast slow flare and steaming of the mighty engine, rushes into the station, and looks into the faces of all the people passing with the same sense of instant familiarity, greeting, and farewell,--that lonely, strange, and poignantly wordless feeling that Americans know so well."

(It may well be hard for us today to understand the impact that trains had on the American psyche in the decades before and after the beginning of the 20th century. Such travel, available to just about all social classes, and so frequent and so far--so fast!, was unprecedented. What is a far distance, that can be travelled in one night? What happens when, for the first time, the mass of strangers become as familiar as your family? What is it like to be born where your fathers and grandfathers were born, but to live and die in a place they've never seen?)

On the train Eugene meets some men travelling from Altamont. One of them asks about Ben. Another gasps, "Ben was the one who died." They speak kindly of his memory and Eugene remembers the time Ben gave him a watch.

Ben asks him,

"What is it for?"

"To keep time with," says the boy.

Ben says nothing for a moment, but looks at him.... "That's it. That's what it's for. To keep time with." The weary irony in his voice has deepened to a note of passionate despair. "And I hope to God you keep it better than the rest of us! Better than Mama or the old man--better than me! God help you if you don't!... Now go on home," he says quietly in a moment, "before I kill you."

The next day Eugene gets off at Baltimore. There his father waits. "Nothing was left but his hands. The rest of the man was dead." And in his mind, he's a young boy, and he and his brother are watching the Confederate soldiers--"in their shapeless rags of uniforms, their bare feet wound in rags, their lank disordered hair, sometimes topped by stove-pipe hats which they had looted out of stores"--marching toward Gettysburg. (This was a passage that Maxwell Perkins had reluctantly cut from LHA, and was glad to find it resurrected in OT&TR.)

Eugene visits briefly (he finds his father's condition horrifying) and tells his father he must go. Gant gives his son his blessing. Suddenly animated, he tells his son to see the country of Gant's youth.

"There!" cried Gant strongly now, his eye bright and shining as he followed the direction of his pointed finger. "Do you see, son? ... Pennsylvania ... Gettysburg ... Brant's Mill ... the country that I came from is there! ... Now I shall never see it any more," he said. "I'm an old man and I'm dying.... The big farms ... the orchards ... the great barns bigger than houses.... You must go back, son, someday to see the country you father came from.... I was a boy here," the old man muttered. "Now I'm an old man.... I'll come back no more.... No more ... it's pretty strange when you come to think of it," he muttered, "by God it is!"

Eugene leaves to catch his train for Boston. "At the screen door he paused again and looked back down the porch. His father was sitting there as he had left him, among the other old dying men, his long chin loose, mouth half open, his dead dull eye fixed vacantly across the sun-hazed city of his youth, his great hand of power quietly dropped upon his cane."

Orestes is well worth the read.

Some of the posts on this site are as enjoyable to read as the books they discuss. This was one of them!

I nominate Randall for knighthood. What a service he is performing for the rest of us!

I loved the comment "This is a doorstop
of a book." I once read a similar line about another monster opus: "Some books are hard to put down. This book is hard to pick up."

Diane wrote: "To anyone going to Asheville at some point, his home there is worth a visit. It burned in a fire a few years ago and was rebuilt, but still portrays his life there exactly. The room where Ben died ..."

Good to know Diane!

Relating to Comment 13: A doorstop of a book, not a bookstop of a book. Mental glitch.

Reading book II, Young Faustus, of Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth reminded me of two very different authors, Proust and Dickens. Proust wrote one very long novel, In Search of Lost Time, in six volumes--a long, plotless, biography of its nameless protagonist's life. (I've only read the first volume, Swann's Way.) You've heard the expression, a picture is worth a thousand words: Proust uses every one of those thousand words to describe a pond, a river, and what he sees in a walk through the woods. The prose is exquisite. I found it very easy to wend my way through his long sentences and longer paragraphs (reading Faulkner is good training for Proust), because his words are like butter on pancakes and linen on pillows. You see that pond, that river, and that walk through the woods. And when Wolfe recalls a train ride long through the night, and the villages and towns and farms that stream by, outside his window, seen, or even just sensed, from a compartment or a berth, he's our American Proust.

Dickens, I'll bring up later.

OT&TR is divided up in chapters as well as books, which suits my purpose well. Young Faustus begins with chapter VII. It covers Eugene Gant's time in Boston. Three subjects predominate:

Eugene's studies at Harvard and life in Boston;
Eugene's uncle on his mother's side, Uncle Bascom;
The death of Eugene's father.

Eugene at Harvard and in and around Boston (chapters VII, VIII, X, XII, XV, XVI, XXXV-XXXVIII) were the least successful for me. In chapter VIII he meets Francis Starwick, who, we're told, "was destined to be ... his friend, his brother--and his mortal enemy." So, I'd advise reading chapter VIII because it will become important as the novel proceeds. (Starwick almost immediately brought to my mind the character Steerforth in Dicken's David Copperfield. It was Starwick's native arrogance combined with Eugene's fascination with the man.) Eugene is enrolled in a class for dramatists and several of these chapters are satirical descriptions of the novice playwrights and their plays. These scenes are meant to be comic. Perhaps, in 1935, they were. They read cheap to me--Wolfe is shooting fish in a barrel. He had better things to do.

Interestingly, Wolfe never mentions what Eugene wrote for the class or the reception he received, though chapter XXXVI ends with Eugene practically begging for the approval of a group of local literati--and, in typical fashion for Eugene, insulting them as he does--and being rebuffed with the faintest of praise and criticism, as if his work were only lukewarm.

Chapter XXXVIII ends Young Faustus--it's a scene of him and Starwick talking: After Starwick is insulted by a self-styled a 'regular guy and hard-working writer,' named Horton, Starwick tells Eugene about his Midwestern upbringing and the time he spoke to his father the day before he traveled East. He also speaks of his limitations and his inability to write the way he insists he must.

"My father was a fine man and we never got to know each other very well. The night before I went away to college he 'took me to the side' and talked to me--he told me how they had their hearts set on me, and he asked me to become a good and useful man--a good American."

"And what did you say Frank?"

"Nothing. There was nothing I could say.... Our house stands on a little butte above the river," he went on quietly in a moment, "and when he had finished talking I went out and stood there looking at the river."

"What river, Frank?"

"There is only one," he answered. "The great slow river--the dark and secret river of the night--the everlasting flood--the unceasing Mississippi.... It is a river that I know so well, with all my life that I shall never tell about. Perhaps you will some day--perhaps you have the power in you-- And if you do--" he paused.

"And if I do?"

"Speak one word for a boy who could not speak against the Hortons of this land, but who once stood above a river--and who knew America as every other boy has known it."

Reading that, I wondered, why not more of stuff like that, and ditch the snark?

Uncle Bascom Pentland and his wife Louise (chapters IX, XI, XIII, XVII, XVIII, XX) are comic characters straight out of Dickens. Bascom is a wordy ex-minister whose pastoral career took him through the entirely of the Protestant firmament only to deposit him on the plain of agnosticism. He shows Eugene his poetry, his creed: they all end with the lines:

"I do not know:
It may be so."

Now Bascom is an attorney and deals in conveyences and titles for a real estate firm. His boss, named Brill, whose three modes of expression are profanity, laughter, and flatulence, teases Bascom daily. But he's also proud of Bascom's learning and tells clients that Bascom knows words that aren't even in the dictionary.

"Why, my dear sir!" Bascom answered in a tone of exacerbated contempt, "What on earth are you talking about? Such a man as you describe would be a monstrosity, a heinous perversion of natural law! A man so wise that no one could understand him:---so literate that he could not communicate with his fellow creatures:--so erudite that he led the inarticulate and incoherent life of a beast or a savage!"--here Uncle Bascom squinted his eyes tightly shut, and laughed sneeringly down his nose: "Phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh! phuh!-- Why, you con-sum-mate fool!" he sneered, "I have long known that your ignorance was bottomless--but I had never hoped to see it equalled--Nay, surpassed!" he howled, "by your asininity."

"There you are!" said Brill, exultantly to his visitor, "What did I tell you?"

Bascom married Louise in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout. --And they've been talking about Jackson ever since the fire went out. Each thinks the other is mad. Aunt Louise tells Eugene not to brood, and that's he's "one of them!--a Pentland."

"Ah-h--you don't know what you're talking about"--thus suddenly in fierce distemper Uncle Bascom. "Scotch! Scotch-Irish! Finest people on earth. No question of it whatever."

"Fugitive ideation! Fugitive ideation," she chattered like a monkey over a nut. "Mind goes off in all diwections. Can't stick to anything five minutes at a time. The same thing that's wrong with the moduhn decadents. Wead Nordau's book, Eugene. It will open yoah eyes," and she whispered hoarsely again: "You're oevah-sexed--all of you!"

"Bosh. Bosh!" growled Uncle Bascom. "Some more of your psychology--the bastard of superstition and quackery: the black magic of little minds--the effort of a blind man (phuh! phuh! phuh!) crawling about in a dark room (phuh! phuh!) looking for a black cat (phuh! phuh!) that isn't there."

And this has gone on long enough. Next time I'll cover Eugene's memory of Ben and the death of his father (chapters XIX, XXI-XXXIV), the most successful part of Young Faustus.

"Like butter on pancakes and linen on pillows" That's a wonderful way to describe somehing, Randall.

Diane wrote: ""Like butter on pancakes and linen on pillows" That's a wonderful way to describe somehing, Randall."

Well, I tried butter on pillows and it didn't work ....

Some of Wolfe's best writing can be found in chapters XIX and XXI-XXXIV of Young Faustus. In his introduction to LHA, Robert Morgan writes that, on re-reading Wolfe, Wolfe's rhapsodies were not as interesting as his realism. These chapters in Young Faustus are Wolfe at his small town, family-life, realistic best. And for those of you who tire of young Eugene's whining, there's an extra bonus: Eugene barely makes an appearance in these pages. He's either up in Boston or on his way back home. It's the rest of the family, mainly his father and mother and his sister Helen, that are center stage.

Chapter XIX is a remembrance of Ben. When Eugene remembers Ben:

"it was like this: he saw his brother in a single image, in some brief forgotten moment of the past, remembered him by a word, a gesture, a forgotten act; and certainly all that could ever be known of Ben's life was collected in that blazing image of lost time and the forgotten moment. And suddenly he would be there in a strange land, staring upward from his bed in darkness, hearing his brother's voice again, and living in the far and bitter miracle of time."

Gene remembers his brother during the World Series. He's sitting at the window of the newspaper office, headphones to his ears, getting the play-by-play. He relays that information by a complex system of placards to the crowd outside. Wolfe describes several people in the crowd, who have chosen their sides, rooting for teams they never have, and most likely never will, see play. And all across America, in thousands of little towns, fans are rooting just like those in Altamont, on a street facing a store-front window, reading the placards, for teams they've never seen play. Finally the game -- the deciding game -- is over.

"And for a moment, when the crowd has gone, Ben stands there silent, lost, a look of bitter weariness, disgust, and agony upon his gray gaunt face, his lonely brow, his fierce and scornful eyes. And as he stands there that red light of waning day has touched the flashing head, the gaunt, starved face, has touched the whole image of his fiercely wounded, lost and scornful spirit with the prophecy of its strange fatality. And in that instant as the boy looks at his brother, a knife is driven through his entrails suddenly, for with an instant final certitude, past reason, proof, or any visual evidence, he sees the end and answer of his brother's life. Already death rests there on his proud head like a coronal. They boy knows in that one instant Ben will die."

And then his father .... Helen can't stand the uncertainty. She pesters their doctor: "How long is he going to last?" The doctor can't tell her. He tells her she can't go on and on and on about her father's health. He tells her she driving herself mad. He tells her she's throwing her life away. She tells him he's got to save her father. "Save him?" he said. "My poor child, I can save no one -- nothing -- least of all myself."

"And suddenly she saw that it was true; she saw that he was lost, that he was done for, gone, and that he knew it.... The knowledge of death rested with an unutterable weariness in his burly form, was audible in the short thick labor of his breath.

"The day was a shining one, full of gold and sapphire and sparkle, and in the distance, toward the east, she could see the sweet familiar green of hills. She knew that nothing has been changed at all, and yet even the brightness of the day seemed dull and common to her."

She walks the main street of town, goes into the drugstore to escape the bright light of the day, and watches and listens to the inane talk of the youngsters there.

At night she can't sleep. She hears all kinds of sounds. She hears her father dying and wakes her husband. Is there someone at the door? There isn't. They go back to bed. She hears a distant train, passing by Altamont, its neighborhoods, and then westward, to Tennessee, to Memphis, and then? Perhaps to Kansas City, Denver, and across the Rocky Mountains. She thinks about her town -- she knows everybody in it, and yet she knows none of them and none of them know her. She's nice to those she does not like and snubs those she does. She wants the favor of the local elites, but their favor, if ever given, would gain her nothing. She hears a train again: "My God! My God! What is life about? We are all lying here in darkness in ten thousand little towns -- waiting, listening, hoping -- for what?... Then, as she listened, there was nothing but the huge hush of night and silence, and far away the whistle of a train. Suddenly the phone rang.... But Gant did not die that day. He lived on."

Gant is borne home, full of complaint. He's in a wheel chair. He bleeds profusely. Helen tells him he'll be all right. "Gant covered her fingers with his own great hand and, smiling a little and shaking his head, looked at her, saying in a low and gentle voice: 'Oh, no, baby. I'm dying. It's all right now.'"

Eliza has a theory: Gant has bled the cancer out of his body. He'll be all right now. Helen comes to believe her. She has to. Eliza has to.

Toward the end, Eliza and Gant speak of his father and mother. His father died in the Civil War, and before that "I suppose you might say he was a drinkin' man." Gant's mother told Eliza, "I was left a widow with seven children to bring up, but I never took charity from no one; as I told 'em all, I've crawled under the dog's belly all my life; now I guess I can get over its back."

"And again he was silent, and lay so still and motionless that there was no sound in the room except his faint and labored breathing, the languid stir of the curtains in the cool night breeze, and the punctual tocking of the old wooden clock. And presently, when she thought that he might have gone off to sleep again, he spoke, in the same remote and detached voice as before:

'Eliza,' -- he said -- and at the sound of that unaccustomed word, a name he had spoken only twice in forty years -- her white face and her worn brown eyes turned toward him with the quick and startled look of an animal -- 'Eliza,' he said quietly, 'you have had a hard life with me, a hard time. I want to tell you that I'm sorry.'

"And before she could move from her white stillness of shocked surprise, he lifted his great right hand and put it gently down across her own. And for a moment she sat there bolt upright, shaken, frozen, with a look of terror in her eyes, he heart drained of blood, a pale smile trembling uncertainly and foolishly on her lips."

She speaks her piece to that. They speak their peace. He asks her for some water. As she goes to get it, Gant senses that a child has come into his house: he hears footsteps, "soft but thunderous, imminent." He calls to the child. The child smiles to him at his bedroom door, the footsteps sound closer. Gant cries to his father and his father answers, "My son!"

By the time Eliza rushes back in, Gant already is dead.

***

Then there is chapter XIV, it's closing section, Wolfe's meditation on memory. What we remember "is a face seen once and lost forever in a crowd, an eye that looked, a face that smiled and vanished on a passing train, it is a prescience of snow upon a certain night, the laughter of a woman in a summer street long years ago, it is the memory of a single moon seen at the pine's dark edge in old October -- and all of our lives is written in the twisting of a leaf upon a bough, a door that opened, and a stone. For America has a thousand lights and weathers and we walk the streets, we walk the streets forever ...."

Wolfe describes America as a "place of autumnal moons hung low and orange at the frosty edges of the pines," "the wild and exultant winter's morning and the wind, with the powdery snow, that has been howling all night long," "the place of violence and sudden death; of the fast shots in the night, the club of the Irish cop, and the smell of brains and blood on the pavement," "the place where they like to win always, and boast about their victories; it is the place of quick money and sudden loss," "where bums come singly from the woods at sunset," "the place of the poolroom players and the drug-store boys," "the place that is savage and cruel, but it is also the innocent place," "the place of the fast approach, the hot blind smoky passage," "and always America is the place of the deathless and enraptured moments, the eye that looked, the mouth that smiled and vanished ...."

"It is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the one place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time."

At his best, Wolfe writes the lyrics to Rhapsody In Blue. He is the only writer I know who takes us from the city streets to the train, and to its midnight destinations, the porter with a pipe and paper in his pocket, alone on a platform in the middle of nowhere, of everywhere, because in America the people we know the best are strangers, and there are ten thousand towns all across America, and we know them all like we know our homes.

I love the passages you are choosing to share. That truly is Wolfe at his best and most poetic.

I agree with Diane. So beautifully done.

I'm coming to think that the best way to have edited Wolfe might have been to go short rather than long. The story of Gant's death would have made an excellent novella, much like The Web of Earth is. And the meditation found in chapter XIV would make an excellent "short story" much like The Four Lost Men.

His last manuscript, especially, was all over the place, having been made up of several different projects. Trying to make all those pieces cohere as novels required, IMHO, much too much intrusive editing and allowed too much substandard writing to survive the final cut.

So, weren't his books edited at all? I vaguely remember LHA (the only one I've read) as rambling quite a bit but didn't mind that too much.

What you said about editing small makes me think of Proust; he could have really done with a sensitive editor. Huge chunks of his novel would have and could have been extracted as separate novels & short stories without upsetting the main novel. I wonder if I'd feel the same about TW if I read more.

Wolf's editor was Maxwell Perkins, the man who also edited Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Marjorie Kenan Rawlings, etc. He was probably the most well known and respected editor of his day. A biography of him might give you the answers as to why.

I'm reading You Can't Go Home Again and enjoying his writing immensely. I'll put the book down for quite a while between readings, but when I start it again, I'm always glad. He's able to capture something of the emotion of living in his descriptions, a quality that I don't often find in current authors.

Jonathan wrote: "So, weren't his books edited at all? I vaguely remember LHA (the only one I've read) as rambling quite a bit but didn't mind that too much.

They were extensively edited. I would think that LHA was the least edited of them all, and even that was pared down considerably. OT&TR was pared down from a manuscript that rivaled Proust's multivolume "In Search of Lost Time" in length. Several critics began to say that Wolfe was incapable of completing a finished novel on his own, without the help of Perkins.

Wolfe then switched to a different publisher and editor. Wolfe died before he could complete his next novel. His new editor had an unruly manuscript that was really several manuscripts in one: there was stuff left over from LHA and OT&TR and all sorts of new material. His editor called it a "mess." From it he extracted three posthumously published novels. Doing it, he rearranged sections, created at least one new character that Wolfe hadn't (he may have created it out of a composite of several characters in Wolfe's manuscript), and even rewrote Wolfe's prose.

That manuscript, especially, I think would have been better served by carving out all of its separate pieces as novellas and short stories. But that probably would have been the farthest result from Wolfe's intentions.

Wolfe titled book three of Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth, "Telemachus." Eugene is back home from Harvard, having finished his studies. Telemachus begins (chapter XXXIX) with another prose/poem. Eugene is home and he finds it hard to believe his father is dead.

"October had come again, and he would lie there in his mother's house at night, and feel the darkness moving softly all about him, and hear the dry leaves scampering on the street outside, and the huge and burly rushes of the wind. And then the wind would rush away with huge caprice, and he could hear it far off roaring with remote demented cries in the embraces of the trees ...."

Like his sister before him, Eugene hears the trains at night and thinks of them crossing the continent of America. "Field and hill and lift and gulch and hollow, mountain and plain and river, a wilderness with fallen trees across it, a thicket of bedded brown and twisted undergrowth, a plain, a desert, and a plantation, a mighty landscape with no fenced niceness, an immensity of fold and convolution that can never be remembered, that can never be forgotten, that has never been described--weary with harvest, potent with every fruit and ore, the immeasurable richness embrowned with autumn, rank, crude, unharnessed, careless of scars or beauty, everlasting and magnificent, a cry, a space, an ecstasy!--American earth in old October."

Here is Whitman, Kerouac and Ginsberg. Wolfe belongs in that line.

"So, thinking, feeling, speaking, he lay there in his mother's house, but there was nothing in the house but silence and the moving darkness: storm shook the house and huge winds rushed upon them, and he knew then that his father would not come again, and all the life that he had known was now lost and broken as a dream."

Unfortunately, most of the rest of Telemachus is not so memorable. Eugene is waiting for his life to begin. A "magic letter" is to arrive, to tell him that his play is to be produced, and thus will begin his life of fame and fortune. (Wolfe never tells us a thing about this play--what it's about, when he wrote it; whether is was his first--that's not a good sign.) Meanwhile, his siblings wonder when he's going to, well, you know, get off his ass and get a job. His mother tries to be supportive, but nobody in his family really thinks that any member of their family will ever be successful at something so unimaginable as being a "writer."

Meanwhile, the Gants, being the Gants, several family a-dos occur, all about nothing. In one, the family decides to take a ride, for the fresh air, and it takes over three pages to get Eliza in the car....

The letter finally arrives, it isn't magic after all, Eugene's play is rejected. Angst ensues. The family thinks it would do Eugene well to get out of town for a while, and Eugene agrees to take a train to see his other married sister. To get there he has to rent a car to a nearby town for the train to his sister's. Waiting for the train he meets a childhood friend who had studied law in New York. The friend, Robert, had just passed his bar and is celebrating by driving to the same town that Eugene is going to, with two friends and several bottles of booze. So Eugene joins them. The more they drive, the more they drink, and the more they drink, the faster they drive. Of course, they are stopped by the cops, arrested, and thrown in jail. Eugene is the drunkest of them all, and the cops try to put him into a cell with a black man. This being the South, Eugene sees this as a great insult to him and he fights tooth and nail to keep from being put into that cell. The black man somehow gets out of the cell himself, so Eugene finally lets off and allows his incarceration. What follows is a study of privilege frustrated. One of the riders is a relative of a famous automobile manufacturer (Ford?) and tells the cops he'll have them ruined if they don't release him. Robert can't believe that he, a soon-to-be lawyer, has been arrested.... I just didn't find it all that interesting.

His brother Luke gets him out and, in chapter XLV, they go home for Eugene to face the music. Helen says this is what happens when you try to reach too far beyond yourself, and that Eugene must carry the same curse of alcoholism that his father had. Then she softens:

"Well, forget about it. She'll get over it.... You will too.... It's done now, and it can't be helped.... So forget it.... I know, I know," she said with a sombre, weary, and fatal resignation as she shook her head. "We all have these great dreams and big ambitions when we're twenty.... I know.... I had them, too.... Don't break your heart about it Gene.... Life's not worth it.... So forget it.... Just forget about it.... You'll forget." she muttered, "like I did." [Helen, in LOA, had once toured as a professional singer.]

Later he sits alone with his mother. Eugene tells her he'll get a job in New York teaching, or work with a newspaper, that there was good money to made in advertising, or he could edit a magazine, one friend from college had become a librarian, another sold mops and brushes to housewives in the Midwest: he would anything to convince his mother that he would not become a failure.

Eliza sits staring at the fire. At length she speaks:

"I have brought them all into the world," she said quietly, "and seen them all grow up ... and some are dead now ... and some have done nothing with their lives.... You were the youngest, and the last to hope and pray year after year that there would be one of them who would not fail--and now!" her voice rose strongly, and she shook her head with the old convulsive tremor, " to think that you--the one on whom my hope was set--the one who has had the education and the opportunity that the others never had--should go the way that the others went.... It's too bad to bear!"

Eugene sits, "sick with shame, self-loathing and despair" and hears the distant whistle of a train. "It brought to him, as it had brought to him so many times, the old immortal promises of flight and darkness, the golden promises of morning, new lands and shining city." He knew then that he would leave home again, this time for good, for New York City.

The night before he was to leave for good, he "went out and prowled restlessly about the streets of the town until the hour was very late....The Square was bleak and lifeless and deserted, with its hard glare of lights: along the main street of the town a few belated citizens hurried past from time to time, faces and voices he remembered from his childhood, driven by like ghosts. Everything he saw and touched was strange and familiar as a dream--a life which he had known utterly and which now vanished from his grasp whenever he approached it--his forever, buried in his blood and memory, never to be made his own again."

He goes back home. "He turned on the light and for a minute stood looking at the familiar old table with its sheathing of ragged battered zinc, and at the ironing board with its great stack of freshly ironed and neatly folded linen; and he knew that she had worked there late. Suddenly, a desperate rush, an overmastering desire to see her, speak to her, awoke in him."

He knocks at his mother's door. They have a few words, halting and awkward. "And as he turned to kitchen light out, he heard her door close quietly behind him, and the dark and lonely silence of the old house was all around him as he went down the hall. And a thousand voices--his father's, his brothers', and of the child that he himself had been, and all the lives and voices of the hundred others, the lost, the vanished people, were whispering to him as he went down the old dark hall there in his mother's house."

I love reading these passages you choose....... and not having to wade thru the rest of the book to find them.

Book four is titled "Proteus: The City." Eugene has left his home for good, to make his life in New York City. He's gotten a teaching job at a university (Wolfe himself taught at the Washington Square campus of NYU). Wolfe makes much about the large number of Jews in Eugene's classes. Wolfe doesn't denigrate Jews so much as ascribe their characteristics to the "flag and banner" of their race. This, of course, was standard intellectual issue in this country back in the early 1900's, in the academy as well as the street. But among his contemporaries in literature--Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald--Wolfe seems to me to be the most taken with racial explanations of people's traits. Needless to say, it dates him poorly.

"Proteus" is almost 200 pages long. Nothing much happens in these pages. I would say, of all the "books" in this very long novel, this one is the least served by Wolfe's Proustian propensity to write with minimal plot. Eugene's most obnoxious student becomes one of his best (and life-long) friends. Wolfe describes his family. Despite the importance of this character to Eugene, you figure (correctly) that once Eugene leaves NYC, there'll be no more hearing about this friend and his family. So, your interest wanes. They are not interesting enough (read, "eccentric") to keep your interest when you know they are, really, only minor characters.

Robert, the no-goodnic lawyer friend of Eugene (the one who got Eugene thrown in the pokey) also shows up. He's carrying on an affair with a married woman in some mid-western state, and he wants her to run away to him in New York. She does, and again, who cares? This may have been racy stuff back in the 1935 (OT&TR far outsold LHA) but we've all been Payton Placed to death by now. The aggrieved husband does show up to make things interesting: the scene ends up in a hospital. But again, you know, reading all of this, that Robert and his mistress have come and gone, swallowed up and drowned in this giant whirlpool of a novel that, by now, is only about half over.

Proteus ends pretty much as it has proceeded, with a long episode centered on a young friend of Eugene's from their Harvard days. Again, none of the people in this episode are very memorable. The young man comes from a very wealthy family. Eugene visits the ancestral palace and finds everything, at least on the surface, very fascinating. This is the life he'd like to live, if he could: rich and famous from his art. He reads his just-finished play to his friend and her sister. They think it's the best thing, but Eugene already knows: too much of it is derivative, only parts of it capture the original voices from his family and childhood home. When Eugene's friend hears Eugene is planning to go to Europe, but on uncertain funds, the friend offers to finance Eugene's trip. He could come and join Eugene there. They could have a marvelous time.

Eugene turns him down. His friend is a painter, but Eugene comes to believe that his friend will never let his art fight back at him, and frustrate him, and extend himself to his limits. This is what comes from money, or privilege, or ease.

As Proteus closes, Eugene returns to New York City. As he goes to the train station he senses that something new as intruded upon this country of his.

"In the gravelled parking space before the station several cars were drawn up. Their shining bodies glittered in the hot sunlight like great beetles of machinery, and in the look of these great beetles, powerful and luxurious as most of them were, there was a stamped-out quality, a kind of metallic and inhuman repetition that filled his spirit, he could not say why, with a vague sense of weariness and desolation."

Eugene also feels that people have changed too. There was "something new" about people now, that "he had seen everywhere, at a thousand times and places in 'the last few years.'" It was their anonymity, rushing about, "going God knows where," not visible on the streets and sidewalks fronting old buildings, but hidden in their "hot beetles of machinery" on "splendidly desolate 'avenues,' that were flanked upon each side by the cheap raw brick, the gaudy splendor, of unnumbered new apartment houses, the brick and stucco atrocities of of unnumbered new cheap houses, and that cut straight and brutal as a spoke across the labyrinthine chaos of the Brooklyn jungle."

(Wolfe to the new 20th century world: "get off my lawn.")

Eugene is finally on the train. He's surrounded by New Yorkers of various ages, ethnicities, odors, and speech. He describes them all. You're right there with them all. The Jews laugh and the Irish curse the Jews. And he's seen them all before, on trains that cross the state and the country, and "the slant light steepened in the skies, the old red light of waning day made magic fire upon the river, and the train made on forever its tremendous monotone that was like silence and forever." And the river that showed men where to lay their tracks, now bears him "on forever out of magic [all that "he had dreamed of as a child"] to all the grime and sweat and violence of the city, the unceasing city, the million-footed city, and into America."

Thus ends "Proteus," to me the least successful book of OT&TR. The rest of the novel will follow Eugene's travels in Europe.

There is however the very first chapter, chapter XLVI, of Proteus, where Eugene is traveling by train to New York City. And again, there are briefly glimpsed tableaus -- an old man's hand, the young girl with him -- that he will never forget. And to these instances he brings "the whole packed glory of the earth -- the splendor, power, and beauty of the nation.... And finally he brought to it the million memories of his fathers who were great men and knew the wilderness, but who had never lived in cities." They speak. Eugene hears them. They ask who sows the earth, who builds a bridge across it, and they testify to those who died in this land, who hewed their own gravestones, where hair [the grass, the corn and wheat] grows "like April" on their buried bodies.

And past these country voices Eugene passes, and proceeds to the city's voices, snarling and outraged, full of "yoeh's" and "foist's" and "dat duh guy's." Friendly voices. Bragging voices. Full of contest and contention and affection and love. The million city voices that are all one voice.

Read this chapter.

It is from these materials -- snatches and glimpses and whiffs -- that Wolfe would write about this American country. It's the mark of his genius and his failure.

"We"ve all been Peyton Placed to death", is a great line, Randall. Mind if I steal it?

Diane wrote: ""We"ve all been Peyton Placed to death", is a great line, Randall. Mind if I steal it?"

I'll give it to you. If I ever use it again, I'll attribute it to you.

"Jason's Voyage" is book V. Eugene is in Oxford. I don't know why -- the whole time there he's homesick. He sees that the locals have something he doesn't: the familiar ways of a culture centuries older than his. Somehow -- that door he could never find and enter? -- they had their own door, had entered it, and it was far less accessible to Eugene than his American door. In Europe he didn't even have his struggle to find his hidden door, he'd left it behind in America.

Jason's Voyage shares the basic problem as Proteus: the characters Eugene meets are minor characters. We see them for a chapter or two, and then they're gone. There's little plot, so the reader is left with but a single hope -- that these are really interesting characters. They aren't. They really don't have time to be. LHA derives much of its interest in the fact that there are several major characters -- Eugene's family. They have to stick around because Eugene is too young yet to leave them. That gives LHA a unity that OT&TR lacks.

Eugene decides to go to Paris. There he has the same problems: confronted by an alien culture that is too old for him to grasp, he flails about in his homesickness. He tries to experience everything all at once, to "know" everything, just like he did in America, but he knows it's an even more hopeless task than it was in Boston and New York. He writes fragmented notes to himself in a vain attempt to capture it all, and shares several pages of them with the reader. I found myself wanting to shout across time and distance to him: "Go home Eugene! Go home!"

His descriptions, to me, are telling. "The narrow streets, narrow sidewalks, the great buses, taxis, autos, bicycles, trucks and the catty people jabbering and squalling got me in a stew." Compare that to the description of the horse in New York that I quoted in my very first post in this thread. You could see that horse. Wolfe knew it. But he doesn't seem to know the streets of Paris quite as well. In Paris, his descriptions don't have the same visual power as they have in America.

Fortunately for him, and the reader, he runs into his old Harvard friend, Francis Starwick. Starwick is the only character outside his family in this whole novel that could be called a major character. Starwick is living in Paris in the company of two women, Elinor, who has left her husband and daughter in the states to tour France with Starwick, and Ann, who is rich, unmarried, and who accompanied her friend Elinor to Europe. Eugene makes the threesome a foursome, and when Starwick picks up a strange Frenchman one night while touring the cafes during one of their nightly debauches, the foursome becomes a quintet. The women don't like this new addition, not one bit, but Starwick is adamant, so there you go.

This must have been pretty strong stuff to Wolfe's readers in 1935. The modern reader is astonished too ... to find the development of a plot. (view spoiler)[ Eugene falls in love with Ann. One night, the inconvenient Frenchman ditched, and Starwick and Elinor off on a walk somewhere, Eugene and Ann find themselves alone. Eugene tries to seduce Ann, with predictable method (he praises her beauty and calls her a "stupid b***h" all at the same time) and predictable results. He finally gets her to confess -- she's in love with another man, and so she could never feel romantic towards Eugene. The other man, of course, is Starwick. Ann knows her hopes are in vain. Eugene knows his are too. He blames Starwick, and in a climatic scene he confronts Starwick, calls him a "dirty little fairy", tells him he's his life-long enemy, and knocks Starwick's head against the wall, causing him to fall into Eugene's arms unconscious. (hide spoiler)]

The only person who comes out of all this with any sympathy is Starwick. He tells Eugene he doesn't know what he's done to earn his enmity, but that he's sorry for it. He also tells Eugene he envies his passion, and even his frustrations, because they are evidence of a creative depth that Starwick feels that he, himself, lacks. Faced with this, Eugene remains unrepentant. Starwick will always be his enemy, because he has taken from Eugene something he thought was rightfully "his."

This is one thing about Wolfe: he's not at all wary of making his alter-ego Eugene look bad. Though out OT&TR, Eugene is callow, inarticulate, self-absorbed, and, in this instance, pretty hateful. And Wolfe is aware of all this. He has his other characters let Eugene have it, and here, he has Starwick taking the high road to Eugene's low.

Jason's Voyage ends with Eugene leaving Starwick, Elinor, and Ann, and Paris, to travel to the south of France. (I couldn't help but think that, compared to Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald, Wolfe/Eugene sure wasted his time in Paris.)

All in all, Jason's Voyage is much like Proteus, the two weakest books in the novel. But the surprise appearance of a plot gives Jason's Voyage an element of interest that Proteus lacks.

The last three books of Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth are "Antaeus: Earth Again," "Kronos and Rhea: The Dream of Time," and "Faust and Helen." These are the shortest books in the novel, none much over 50 pages.

In "Antaeus" and "Kronos," Eugene travels throughout France, staying clear of Paris. In Orleans he falls in with a con woman, the Countess, who trades on her dubious aristocratic past. She passes Eugene off as a journalist from the New York Times who has come to write about the town, whose articles will make everybody famous and bring in hoards of tourists and make everybody rich. Eugene protests. She shrugs: he is a writer isn't he? He could one day write for the New York Times, couldn't he? He could, then, write about Orleans then, couldn't he? Eugene protests again, but still allows himself to be used by her for access to a succession of lunches and receptions, with Eugene in tow. Finally, he gets fed up and leaves Orleans.

But that's not so important. That's only the plot. What's important, what's written the best and is the most interesting, in chapter XCI of Antaeus, is the sound of a Frenchman's voice, a fellow traveller with Eugene on the train to Orleans, as he good-naturedly taunts and jibes people at the successive stations they pass. "[T]here was in the tone and texture of the Frenchman's voice--at once so actual, living, and familiar in its high, sanguinary energy, and so foreign, alive, and troubling to a stranger's ear--the whole warmth and vitality of centuries of living, a quality which brought the ancient past of Europe, and of France, to life, as the pages of history could never do."

"In the same way, the boy [Eugene] had long ago discovered that a single tone or shading in his mother's or his father's voice could touch the lost past of America--the past of the Civil War, the strange mysteries of Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes, which is, for most Americans, more far and strange in time than the Crusades--and bring it instantly into life."

[Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes are the "Four Lost Men" of Wolfe's story in From Death to Morning that I recommended way back in my first post to this thread. I recommend it again, highly, especially to those who like Whitman.]

Eugene leaves Orleans at the end of "Antaeus." "Kronos" begins, with chapter XCVI, with a nice passage of prose ("Play us a tune on an unbroken spinet ... ") about the strangeness of the past that we should like to recapture and understand, that we should make ours--so "the cry of the wolf would always be the same; the sound of the wheel will always be the same; and the hoof of the horse on the roads of every time will be the same."

"But there are times that are stranger yet, there are times that are stranger than the young knights and the horses, and the sounds of the eating taverns. That far time is the time of yesterday: it is the time of early America, it is the voices of the people on Broadway in 1841, it is the sounds of the streets in Des Moines in 1887, it is the engines of the early trains at Baltimore in 1853, it is the faces and voices of the early American people, who are lapped up in the wilderness, who are hid from us, whose faces are in mystery, whose lives are more dark and strange than the lives of the Saxon thanes."

In Tours, an "astounding" thing happens. Eugene begins to write. So absorbed, he loses track of time and money. Broke, he beats it back to Orleans, to look up the Countess and scrounge up some money while he waits for a check from home.

Finally, the money from home comes, and Eugene resumes his travels. No matter where he goes, he thinks of home. These chapters in Kronos, XCIX through CI, are in my opinion, Wolfe's best writing about Europe. And it's all about the moment, the glimpse, the ineffable ... thing ... so tantalizingly (just!) beyond our reach.

"A shining river, emerald green, and magic with its Alpine prescience of spring, of known, undiscovered loveliness; the noble cooking of Mother Guy and Mother Filliou; a pulse in the throat of an unknown girl that beat its slow, warm promise of fulfilled desire--these, of a town of more than six hundred thousand lives and faces, were all that later clearly would remain.

"The rest was smoke and silence--some faces here and there, a scheme of streets, an enormous square, a hill crowned with a pilgrim's church, a priest, broad-hatted, with slit mouth and gimlet eyes, some museum relics of ancient Gaul--all fugitive and broken, gone like smoke."

"And again, he was hurtling southward on a train."

Eugene is in Dijon. He watches the workers go to their homes for their noon-day meal. The scene reminds him of his home in Altamont, and of the "lost America"--before the onset of the "mechanic life," the increase "of its furious, ever-quickening and incurable unrest", and the "flood-tide horror of gray, driven faces, stolid eyes, starved, brutal nerves, and dull, dead flesh."

In that little square in far-off (from America) France, separated not just by miles, but by centuries of a foreign history and foreign tongues and ways, Eugene still feels closer to the American world of his mother and father than he ever could in the "savage new America." Yet, still, "[h]e thought of home." His time in Europe, he understands, has come to its end.

"Faust and Helen" is just one chapter, CII. Eugene is watching the boat on which he will return to home. ("In this soft, this somewhat languid air, the ship glowed like an immense and brilliant jewel. All of her lights were on, they burned row by row straight across her 900 feet of length, with the small, hard twinkle of cut gems: it was as if the vast, black cliff of her hull, which strangely suggested the glittering night-time cliff of the fabulous city that was her destination, had been sown with diamonds.")

There on the dock the passengers assemble. Among them are two women in conversation. One of them laughs--her name is Esther--and yet her laugh (Eugene can tell this!) is "pierced again by the old ache of wonder, the old anguish of unspoken desire." She sees "the many men, so lonely, silent, and intent, the ship immense and sudden there above her in old evening light, and so--remembering, 'Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?'--[she] was still with wonder."

This is Esther Jack, the woman that would be Wolfe's Gant's greatest love of his life. "He turned, and saw her then, and so finding her, was lost, and so losing self, was found, and so seeing her, saw for a fading moment only the pleasant image of the woman that perhaps she was, and that life saw."

And thus ends OT&TR. But I want to go back to chapter XCVI in "Kronos." Eugene is writing. "In his mind there swarmed various projects, cloudy, vague, and grandiose in their conception, of plays, books, stories, essays he must write .... [But what he produced were a] few impatient, fragmentary beginnings, the opening pages of a story, the beginning speeches of a play--all crumpled in a wad ...."

He gathers some shards and fragments in chapter XCVII. I recommend that you read it. But, beyond the prose, which in my opinion is very good, here is Wolfe's method, his purpose, and his failure. Much earlier in this thread I compared Wolfe to Proust, and while Proust is regarded by far as the greater writer, I think Wolfe's aspiration surpassed Proust's (insofar, at least, as I can discern it from reading just the first volume of Prout's masterpiece). Proust aimed for a personal salvation through the recapturing of his past through his art. That art was very autobiographical. So was Wolfe's as we have it now. But Wolfe had wanted to do so much more. He wanted to write a history not just of himself, or his family, but a history of an old America that he thought had been lost and thus, was stranger to his audience than even the medieval era of Europe. I think this was his ambition at least from as early as when he began to write the manuscript that would be pared down to become LHA.

And how to recapture the totality of this strange and lost America? Through a gesture, through the speech of his parents, through Ben's sour look ... through all the fleeting moments--a hand on an arm glimpsed on a passing train--that meant more to Wolfe than any Great Event if one was to know this America in a way that "the pages of history could never do."

Wolfe's goal was grandiose. But his method was microscopic. No wonder his manuscripts were (according to his second editor) "a mess" of bits and pieces and stops and starts. This was the source of his failure, because he never wrote, and certainly never had published, a book that realized his ambition. (Perhaps he came closest with his original manuscript for LHA, O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life). Maybe, if Wolfe had lived longer, he would have found his open door to a bridge that could connect these fleeting moments to the monument that he envisioned.

So, I've read all of Wolfe (published by Scribner) so you don't have to. But you should read some of the good parts. You owe it to yourselves.

Congratulations, Randall. Reading all of Wolfe is a gargantuan achievement, an American "Remembrance of Things Past', so to speak. Thanks for taking us on the journey with you.

Diane wrote: "Congratulations, Randall. Reading all of Wolfe is a gargantuan achievement, an American "Remembrance of Things Past', so to speak. Thanks for taking us on the journey with you."

You're welcome. (Right now I'm reading Gilead, about as opposite a work from Wolfe's, in terms of style, that could be imagined. On the other hand, in the scenes invoking post-Civil War America, it covers that period of America that inspired Wolfe's best writing.)