Thomas Wolfe remains one of my most admired authors and You Can't Go Home Again, despite problematic authenticity and editor interference, was like a sledgehammer cracking open my skull.
The phrase had many implications for, him. You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of "the artist" and the all-sufficiency of "art" and "beauty" and "love", back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."
Wolfe, like pretty much anyone on the planet, is a much smarter person than me. But there are still some similarities I see between us: he felt alone as a kid, and there's this quote I can never find but distinctly remember from one of his biographies about how people expected him to be some larger-than-life caricature of a person, swigging booze and whatnot, but he's really just an average dude who is a little tall and would prefer to not be noticed as he paces, paces, paces, and tries to figure out the next scene in his story, trying to find a way to properly fictionalize things so the real people won't be offended.
A few biographies and a recent documentary or two on him have been pretty enlightening, as well as pushed him back onto my 'to-read' list (my copy of Of Time and the River has to be replaced—the first looked like the last owner decided to slice pages up with a box cutter or something).
His youth growing up in the boarding house (Old Kentucky Home, now the aptly-named Thomas Wolfe House) played a major role in inspiring his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. This was originally titled O Lost (the angel on this cover, unfortunately, looks like it's either constipated or was dropped on its head a few times as a child), and the manuscript was restored and released January 1, 2000, per GoodReads. The process of chopping down the massive manuscript Wolfe brought in, written in longhand I believe, was a result of teamwork between Wolfe and the editor Maxwell Perkins.
As far as editors go, Perkins is a bit like Ron Burgundy: kind of a big deal. Wolfe was not the only client represented by him (although they had a parting of the ways after Of Time and the River* and Wolfe left to work with editor Edward Aswell, who would take his unfinished manuscripts and shape them into Wolfe's posthumous releases, including You Can't Go Home Again). F. Scott Fitzgerald (helped critique and improve The Great Gatsby), Ernest Hemingway (took a risk with The Sun Also Rises and helped with editing A Farewell to Arms), Marjorie K. Rawlings (The Yearling is on my MegaLit book list and apparently the book he helped her with editing), and others whose names do not ring any bells off the top of my head.
The movie Genius, with Colin Firth as Perkins and Jude Law as Wolfe, focuses a lot on the relationship between the two men (but as any Hollywoodified shit, takes liberties; Wolfe was temperamental and could be a real wild card, but I don't recall him coming across as a gleefully cruel dickhead on purpose like he comes across in the film), but falls short. And the mischaracterization is understandable in the sense that the source material is a biography of Perkins, not Wolfe.
Returning to Look Homeward, Angel, it can be primarily slotted into two categories: roman à clef and a bildungsroman. For those who chose a better major than English literature, that means the book is based on true events, but overlaid to make it appear fictional.
We know this is the case for Look Homeward, Angel because Altamont is Asheville, North Carolina; Dixieland is the Old Kentucky House (Thomas Wolfe House now). And though fictionalized, barely, the people could recognize themselves in the stories and rumors from around town—this led to outrage, threats of lawsuits (and some more mischievous people who wrote him to say, "Boy, I had a nugget you could've included if you'd reached out..."), and ultimately, he did not return to his hometown for the better part of a decade (1937), when tempers had cooled. Even his family, while standing behind him in public, were baffled and frowned on Thomas' choice in private.
The other term, bildungsroman, refers to the inner psychological growth of a character. A bit like Betty Smith's phenomenal A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, we are invited along Eugene's (Thomas') growth from a sensitive, thoughtful, and lonely boy into a solitary and intellectual man. Growing up in a boarding house, he didn't have much to call his own: he liked the boarders and the guests, he liked reading, but what he didn't like was his mother's miserly insistence on money first and foremost, to his and the family's detriment.
No seats for a boarder in the dining room? Move over, Thomas, go find somewhere else.
Someone wants the room that's usually yours? Tough shit, Tommy boy.
The angel of the title has a few quirky tidbits about it as well: in the story, as in real life I believe, Wolfe's father was a stonecutter and quite talented—but carving an angel eluded him. So he ordered one in to put in front of his shop as an advertisement, and it served to kinda drive him up the wall with the tormented thought of what he hadn't been able to accomplish, despite his best efforts.
Now, Wolfe released a short story, I believe it's an excerpt from the book but could be remembering wrong, where he describes it as decorating the grave of a local working girl, which caused a bit of a scandal because the actual angel was purchased by a minister for his wife's grave, not by a madam for a street-walkin' cheetah.
In the story, however, the character of Ben, one of Eugene's/Thomas' twin brothers, represents the angel.** Gruff and a bit boorish with words, Ben comes across as the tough love type—but ultimately, he's arguably the character who looks out for Eugene and has his best interests at heart the most. When he passes, the other characters reflect on "the strange flitting loneliness of his life" how he "walked through their lives like a shadow" and reflect on him "as one who remembers a forgotten and enchanted word, or as men who look upon a corpse and see for the first time a departed god."
As one lecture I watched on Wolfe put it, it is the death of Ben that ultimately releases Eugene to leave home and seek his own way—spelled out in the book as well. On his deathbed, Ben wants nothing to do with his mother and pushes her away until he is too weak and on the threshold of death, then she rushes to him to "repossess the flesh to which she had given life." Eliza comes across as a mother who sees her children not as individuals with their own thoughts, souls, and feelings, but as extensions of herself who are beholden to her and are not considered worthy of their own autonomy.
I knew a mother like that.
Both of Eugene's parents act in a manner I find quite familiar when it comes to Ben's prolonged illness in terms of money, too. His father complains he doesn't "know where the money's to come from" and his mother arouses his horror by throwing a grand funeral, which Eugene perceives as "an effort to compensate carrion death for the unpaid wage of life—love and mercy."
As sister Helen drills mother Eliza on: "You've done this to him. You're the one that's responsible. If you hadn't pinched every penny he'd never have been like this."
Eliza, along with Ben's death, also contribute to Eugene's final decision to splinter off from his family and go his own way:
"And as the wind howled in the bleak street, and Eliza wove a thousand fables of that lost and bitter spirit, the bright and stricken thing in the boy twisted about in horror, looking for escape from the house of death. No more! No more! (it said). You are alone now. You are lost. Go find yourself, lost boy, beyond the hills."
Hard not to find the thematic, poetic line referred to throughout the book also carries a trace of Ben: "O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again." Thomas clearly held his brother Ben in high regard, and Ben had a lasting influence on his life.
This has been discursive and tangential and there's a lot more to say about Wolfe—especially since I opened with a quote from a book I barely touched on (You Can't Go Home Again) but a man like Wolfe deserves the space he would've taken up if he was writing about someone else. Given my own feelings of alienation from my hometown and family, I suppose the theme of that underpinning his life is something I can associate with.
“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.
Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen."
—
*For some reason, I associate the book title Of Time and the River with the Dennis Wilson song 'River Song,' the first track on Pacific Ocean Blue.
**Wolfe's older twin brothers were, I shit you not, Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland Wolfe. There's a joke in the book about them being named after the candidates and both became presidents (Cleveland, as trivia aficionados may know, is currently our only president who served a 'donut shift,' or non-consecutive terms).
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