During that Christmas, I was under the illusion that Thomas Wolfe had written his book solely because he knew that I would one day read it, that a boy in South Carolina would enter his house of art with his arms wide open, ready and waiting for everything that Thomas Wolfe could throw at him. The rhythms of his prose style, oceanic and brimming with strange life, infected the way I wrote and thought with an immovable virus I have never been able to shake. It is a well-known fact that I will carefully select four silvery, difficult-to-digest adjectives when one lean, Anglo-Saxon adjective will suffice. Once I entered into the country of Thomas Wolfe without visa or passport, I never went back to the boy I was before Look Homeward, Angel. Most flaws I have as a man and a writer I can trace directly to the early influence of Thomas Wolfe.
Wolfe’s lunar sway over my writing so polluted the efforts of my high school and college years that they border on parody. I absorbed every bit of Wolfe’s windiness and none of his specialness, his ecstatic singularity. I threw words all over the place and none of them landed right. For a full ten years, the estate of Thomas Wolfe could have sued me for plagiarism with perfect justification. My winds all howled and my rivers all roared out of the high hills, and my boys were all maddened and intoxicated with rich ores of both lust and loneliness, and my women were yolky with desire. Note the word “yolky.” That is not Conroy. That is Thomas Wolfe. Before my complete submersion into the undertow of Wolfe’s work, I wrote like any other normal American kid. After Look Homeward, Angel I wrote like a madman, a fool, and, many times, a nitwit. My love of Wolfe was passionate to the point of lunacy, and, I am afraid, somewhat hormonal in nature. He took my boyhood by storm. I burned and ached and hurt as I read and reread his books.
Mr. Norris was so concerned about Wolfe’s effect on my writing that he gave me a second gift of a book when school was out the following summer. That book was Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. But the gesture was futile. My course had been set inalterably and my prose was a floodplain for dizzying emanations from the snowy high slopes of a natural-born Wolfean. The cool, hard sentences of Hemingway were spare and shapely, but his sentences were trays of ice to me. I never could enroll in that it-is-true-and-good-and-spare-and-fine school of American writing. The language genie found itself stoppered and trapped in the bottle of my deepest self.
I began to call attention to myself. I could not help it. Thomas Wolfe had led me by the hand and introduced me to myself.
I read for fire. I have done so since the first day I read Look Homeward, Angel. Now, at last, I know what I was looking for then. I wanted to be lit up, all the cities and all the hill towns within me sacked and torn to the ground and the crops destroyed and the earth salted. Now, when I pick up a book, the prayer that rises out of me is that it changes me utterly and that I am not the man who first selected that book from a well-stocked shelf. Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst. Tell me everything I must know. Hold nothing back.
I know of a thousand writers who are far better craftsmen than Thomas Wolfe. But few can bring a page to such astonishing life as Wolfe. Critics who do not like Wolfe often despise him, and his very name can induce nausea among the best of them. That is all right. They are just critics, and he is Thomas Wolfe. In my wanderings about this country, I have never left a flower on the grave of a single critic, but I cannot count the number of roses I have left at Wolfe’s grave in Asheville. I always save one for O. Henry, who is buried just down the hill.
Though I have said that my writing was influenced by Thomas Wolfe, that does not quite convey the religious nature of my humiliating devotion to his work. As a senior at Beaufort High School, I harangued a group of Mr. Norris’s almost comatose juniors about the fevers and agues coaxed out of me by the sheer exhilaration of his writing. I throbbed, I writhed, I postured, I intoned, and I was perfectly ridiculous in every way. I cringe as I write to think about the droll figure I cut as the succubus of Thomas Wolfe’s spirit took possession of me.
Here is the first poem I had published at The Citadel. Its title was “To Tom Wolf.” It bothered me greatly that my editors had misspelled Wolfe and had shortened his name to Tom. But I was a plebe at The Citadel and one’s editors were not particularly open to criticisms of their work by freshmen. The poem is painful for me to read now, but I would like you to know the completeness and the eagerness of my immersion into Wolfe’s influence:
O sleep now, Tom, your pen is quelled.
You have a grave to show it.
But I have heard an eagle say
“These mountains need a poet.”
I, of course, had never encountered an eagle who said any such thing, or anything at all. The poem wandered on for three more queasy stanzas until it mercifully ended on a bright, triumphant note of half-baked and completely unearned ecstasy. Not a single member of The Citadel community commented on my feverish ode to Thomas Wolfe, although my mother considered it a work of young, rough genius. It was a stone dropped into The Citadel waters that made not a single ripple. But my second poem, a bit of doggerel I tossed off one night after a sweat party, gave me my first taste of fame as an author and I learned the invaluable lesson that fame could be a killing thing, something I am not sure that my literary hero, Thomas Wolfe, learned in time. For several days, I became the most famous poet in the history of The Citadel when I published these four lines:
The dreams of youth are pleasant dreams,
Of women, vintage, and the sea.
Last night I dreamt I was a dog
Who found an upperclassman tree.
Upperclassmen from all four battalions were kind enough to visit me to discuss my poetry in depth. Not a single one asked me about Thomas Wolfe, but all expressed curiosity at my desire to urinate on them. They encouraged my passion for poetry by making me do push-ups until I dropped into a pool of my own vomit. My squad sergeant and I engaged in a brief, illuminating discussion of my theory of poetics. A man of few words, he made the eloquent gesture of urinating on my back while I was doing push-ups for him. I was barely eighteen, and as Thomas Wolfe had warned would be required of me, I had already suffered for my art.
My Wolfe fixation continued through my Citadel years and I delivered a paper on his writings to the Calliopean Literary Society in the spring of my senior year. My writing teacher, Captain C. F. Bargainnier, announced to my classmates that he would cheerfully shoot the teacher who had introduced me to the writing of Thomas Wolfe. My stories and poems all remained fiercely Wolfean in nature, if not stature. Many of my splendid professors at The Citadel tried to dam the rising tide of language as my prose began to strut its stuff in the throes of an uncontrollable delirium. They offered me a different path to knowledge and suggested that I heed their gentle urging and concentrate on the elegance of simplicity. Simplicity, Herr Professors? Me? A Thomas Wolfe fanatic? A devotee? I did not listen to a single one of them, and my writing continued to set their teeth on edge.
When people do not like the writing of Thomas Wolfe, their dislike can assume a pure form of hatred. When Bernard DeVoto and Wright Morris attacked Wolfe’s writing, they took a personal offense at his work and could not have been more brutally dismissive or insulting in their withering appraisal of his novels. Wolfe offends the sensibility of a certain kind of reader who prizes restraint, formality, a subtle and withholding eye, economy of style, and discretion of craft. There is nothing wrong with this species of reader, but it certainly leaves no room for appreciation of Wolfe’s peculiar talent. If you love the couplet and the haiku, you might not be ready for the flood tides of Wolfe’s oceanic magnitude. He demands that you must accede to richness and ful
lness and amplitude taken to their absolute extremes. Wolfe can do almost anything to the English language except hold back. His art is a shouted thing. He did not need a pulpit; Wolfe required a mountaintop so he could fling words like thunderbolts out toward the cold vestigial stars. He inhabits every line he writes and a little of Wolfe goes a long way for many readers. I know a novelist who believes Wolfe is the worst writer ever published in our republic, and he cannot think of whom he would put in second place.
I can turn to the first page of the first book, Look Homeward, Angel, that Thomas Wolfe published and give you examples of the two warring impulses always contained in his writing—both the good Thomas Wolfe, who can transfix a reader with an exuberant liveliness of style, and the bad Thomas Wolfe, whom critics ridicule for his windiness and the groping, hair-pulling abstractions he would turn to when trying to describe the unnameable, the very thing that tortured him, and, I think, tortures many of us. Among all the writers who ever lived, Wolfe provides the most fearless lesson plan in the dangers of trying to bring order out of chaos by putting down the unsayable thing. Though he gropes for exactitude, there are times when Wolfe is caught with his pants down, wallowing in a sinkhole of language. This exhausts some, offends others, nauseates many, and thrills me.
Wolfe’s courage lay in the fact that he did not renounce that part of his work. He kept the howlings and incoherences and bawlings, these hymns of tongueless, inchoate madness that rise up in nightmare, in the moonless wastelands of sleep when the ores of greatness move through the soft cells of all artists, then disappear when the full light of day is upon us and we blush at the ravings and lunacies of our deepest selves. No one suffered more from the judgment of critics than Thomas Wolfe, yet he never once pulled back or tailored himself to fit the harshness of their theories.
I think he would have pulled his art together had he lived his full life as a writer. There are signs that he was beginning to gather the forces of his profligate talent when he died tragically, at thirty-seven years old, in Baltimore. I think the novels of his fifties and sixties would have been masterpieces. Time itself is a shaping, transfiguring force in any writer’s life. Wolfe’s best novels sleep in secret on a hillside in Asheville—beside him forever, or at least, this is what I believe.
Listen to the good Wolfe:
A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.
Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.
The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.
This is imaginative narrative of a very high order, gathered up by an intelligence as keen and original as has ever appeared in American letters. When Wolfe wrote this page, his was a singular and thrilling new voice out to define a universe that looked different to him than to anyone else. His prose style was charged, poetic—each sentence a mule train loaded with too much meaning and arid beauty at the same time. It set Wolfe up for both praise and mockery and both came at him in a rush. As for me, I would cut off the top knuckle of my little finger to have written those words.
Yet, on the facing page of this splendid first page of his first book, Wolfe offers us a disembodied grouping of words, floating like some renegade constellation outside the range of any pull of gravity or control. Those of us who love him understand that he is always capable of breaking out in these uneasy anthems that scream the most intimate anguish of the troubled, desperado heart of a mountain boy.
Here is what the bad Wolfe sounds like, the writer who can send his most ardent critics backflipping out of their chairs:
… 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 remained 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.
Admittedly, this writing is not for everybody. He makes demands on the language that seem to bring it to the breaking point. Wolfe often gives you too much of too much and then, just as you reach your interior point of surrender, he gives you more. Quite possibly, his style can be the worst influence on a young writer’s life and work.
After my introduction to his work, I read every book, every essay, every play, and every letter that Wolfe ever wrote. I devoured—Ah! there it is again. (“Devoured” is a pure Wolfean word; he did not just eat, he devoured; he did not just read a book, he devoured it. Wolfe did not just enter a room, he devoured it and everything inside it, gorged himself on every image he encountered.) I became his acolyte and his eternal flame and devoured the biographies that described his tortured peripatetic life and learned everything about him I could gather. Thomas Wolfe provided me with a blueprint on how even a boy like me could prepare myself to live a writer’s life. By following the lead of this gargantuan, word-haunted man, I could force my way into a life of art. I was in the middle of a half-Southern boyhood, as lonely as an earthworm, moving with my family from base to base around the South with my mother standing in for the friends I never made. When I found out that Thomas Wolfe had died in 1938, I was almost inconsolable, for I had planned to find him and apprentice myself to him and clean his house and type his manuscripts and live my life to serve him. What the critics loathed most, I loved with all the clumsiness I brought to the task of being a boy. “He’s not writing, idiots,” I wanted to scream at them all. “Thomas Wolfe’s not writing. Don’t you see? Don’t you understand? He’s praying, you dumb sons of bitches. He’s praying.”
In my own writing, I return to my mother frequently because I keep discovering parts of her that she managed to hide from me when I was her worshipful child. I think it marvelous that she discussed her reading life with me, but from the beginning, her relationship with Look Homeward, Angel was different from her relationship with most other books. She and I regarded both the families Wolfe and Gant as extensions of our own. In depth, we discussed the various members of the Gant family and both of us were shocked when we discovered the literal nature of Wolfe’s artistry after reading Elizabeth Nowell’s biography (and yes, there is a stone, a leaf, and what I suppose to be an unfound door on the book’s jacket). I longed to have a brother like Ben Gant and my mother could sympathize with W. O. Gant’s raging tantrums because of my father’s legendary temper. Like good students of literature, we began to make the comparisons and reach the conclusions that would both enrich and complicate our lives.
The book made areas accessible to us that had carried the impediment of taboo before. We began to talk more freely about my father’s violence and how that family secret had exacted a price from us. It was Thomas Wolfe’s father who opened that door of conversation in my hurt, traumatized family. I believed then, and still believe, that W. O. Wolfe was a violent man who beat his wife and his older sons. My mother totally disagreed and thought that Wolfe’s father was a figure of high comedy. In my own time as a child, I took
seriously the rampages of drunken men assaulting the peaceable kingdoms of sleeping families. The father in Look Homeward, Angel gave my mother and me an oblique way of approaching the one great forbidden subject that lay between us. It was the year of the last and most severe beating my father ever gave me, and the year I grew into my own body and into the young man strong enough to give pause even to the Great Santini. Because I could feel the overwhelming love that Wolfe experienced when he wrote about his maddening and outrageous father, he handed me the means to begin the long, excruciating process of learning how not to hate my own. Literature can do many things; sometimes it can even do the most important things.
The summer after my first encounter with Thomas Wolfe, Gene Norris proved that he was far more than just a great English teacher. He drove me to the boardinghouse in Asheville where Wolfe had grown up and that he had written about in Look Homeward, Angel. When I got out of the car, I realized that every step I took would be retracing the steps of Wolfe himself.
Mr. Norris walked me up the front stairs to the sitting porch and ordered me to sit in a rocking chair. Then he said, “The boarders would come out here after dinner to gossip and watch the sun go down.”
I sat and rocked in a chair on the porch of the house where Thomas Wolfe had grown up, and I thought at that moment I was the happiest boy on earth.