Reactions to Thomas Wolfe are severely divided these days. Elizabeth Hardwick, writing on the occasion of the centennial of his birth in 2000: "He is too much, too many rhapsodies, an inundation. Not a man you'd want to deal with. Drunken pages and drunken he often was as he prowled the midnight city. And yet the mystery of the books is that they are written with a rich, fertile vocabulary, sudden, blooming images, a murderous concentration that will turn everyone he meets into words."
I have always loved Walt Whitman, who if he has written perhaps some of the worst lines of English poetry has also written some of the best. So I'm well prepared to take on Wolfe's linguistic exuberance and fascination with his own powers of perception. Knowing his reputation, I expected the repetitiveness, the snobbery, the offhand racism, the inconsistent characterizations masquerading as something more under a load of narrative and descriptive detail (Gant's mother Eliza suffers the most in this respect).
What I didn't expect was the bitter comic self-consciousness that expresses itself in terms of national identity. Just two examples. First:
Then, for the first time, he thought of the lonely earth he dwelt on. Suddenly, it was strange to him that he should read Euripides in the wilderness.
Around him lay the village; beyond, the ugly rolling land, sparse with cheap farmhouses; beyond all this, America -- more land, more wooden houses, more towns, hard and raw and ugly. He was reading Euripides, and all around him a world of white and black was eating fried food. He was reading of ancient sorceriers and old ghosts, but did an old ghost ever come to haunt this land? The ghost of Hamlet's father, in Connecticut:
'......I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
Between Bloomington and Portland, Maine.'
He felt suddenly the devastating impermanence of the nation. Only the earth endured -- the gigantic American earth, bearing upon its awful breast a world of flimsy rickets. Only the earth endured -- this broad terrific earth that had no ghosts to haunt it.... Nothing had been done in stone. Only this earth endured, upon whose lonely breast he read Euripides. Within its hills he had been held a prisoner; upon its plain he walked, alone, a stranger.
O God! O God! We have been an exile in another land and a stranger in our own. The mountains were our masters: they went home to our eye and our heart before we came to five. Whatever we can do or say must be forever hillbound. Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget. We walked along a road in Cumberland, and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough. And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near. And the old hunger returned -- the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go.
Later, Wolfe describes Gant (modeled on himself): for me, a portrait of the Tea Party voter in an especially depressing election year. Watch the movement from contentment, which first appears to excuse Gant's political ignorance and apathy, to discontent to fantasy to -- the most brilliant move -- fantasy that "found extension in reality":
Yet, Eugene was no rebel. He had no greater need for rebellion than have most Americans, which is none at all. He was quite content with any system which might give him comfort, security, enough money to do as he liked, and freedom to think, eat, drink, love, read, and write what he chose. And he did not care under what form of government he lived -- Republican, Democrat, Tory, Socialist, or Bolshevist -- if it could assure him these things. He did not want to reform the world, or to make it a better place to live in: his whole conviction was that the world was full of pleasant places, enchanted places, if only he could find them. The life around him was beginning to fetter and annoy him: he wanted to escape from it. He felt sure things would be better elsewhere. He always felt sure things would be better elsewhere.
It was not his quality as a romantic to escape out of life, but into it. He wanted no land of Make-believe: his fantasies found extension in reality, and he saw no reason to doubt that there really were 1,200 gods in Egypt, and that the centaur, the hippogriff, and the winged bull might all be found in their proper places. He believed that there was magic in Byzantium, and genii stoppered up in wizards' bottles.
I stayed up late to finish the book, and I'm glad I did: another sleet storm hit around midnight, short but intense, just like the one that caught me today as I biked back home to the NIAS from Leiden. On my slanted skylight window, the noise of the sleet is thunderously beautiful.
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