THOMAS WOLFE, THE EXILE MOI' IF, AND THE JEt.B

by

(Mrs.) Barbara R. Kay, B.A.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulf'ill• ment of the requirements far the degree of Mas ter of Arts.

Department of English, McGill University, Montreal, P.Q. April, 1966. TABLE OF CONI'ENl'S

PREFACE ...... iii

Chapter I. THE CHIID AND DREAME:R ...... l II. "WELCOME TO OUR CITY" • • • • • ...... 2ft III. THE VOR.I.D OF ESTHER JACK • • • 67

IV. THE LAST FAREWELL • ...... • • • . . 98

CONCLUSION ...... 127

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 12!1

ii PREFACE

Most readers of Thomas Wolfe tend to be extrema in their judgements of him. They become either devotees or violent dissenters after reading only one novel. Hence it has been difficult for those relatively few critias who have tackled a depth criticism of him to analyze his work objectively. For the man and his art are of a piece: one is sympathetic to Eugene-George's seismic emotional confrontations with life, or one considera such intimate confessions a formless effluvience of neurotic anguish. This study attempts to define and articulate the essentially ordered rhythms of meaning governing Wolfe 1 s quast for psychic fulfillment. It seeks to explain his significant relationships and decisions in terms of the 'exile motif': Wolfe 's perennial and heroie struggle to overcome the forces of background and temperament, which made him a stranger and exile, in order to establish a normal life for himself. Practically untouched by Wolfe's critias has been the anormous impact that certain New York Jaws had on his life and work. In their insistance upon dealing with the ultimately irrelevant question of Wolfe •s anti-semitism, those few writers who deal exclusively with this area have failed to grasp the importance of Wolfe's Jewish contacts. The mistake of these critics, and of many others dealing with Wolfe's work in general, is their failure to recognize the patterns of spiritual growth represented in the novels. This study will, I hope, help to palliate that tandancy to underastimate Wolfe's progression to emotional

iii iv.

roaturity in his ambitions to understand himself and America.

I am grateful to Professer Alec Lucas of McGUl University•s

English Department for his guidance in this effort, freely and judi­ ciously given during his sabbatical year. I am grateful, too, for the moral encouragement I received through his great enthusiasm and sympathy for Thomas Wolfe 1s work. And it was the child and dreamer that governed his beliet. He belonged, perhap~to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged with the Mythmakers. (From Look Hom.eward, Angel}

CHAPTER 1

It comas as no great surprise to readers of Thomas Wolfe to learn that his favourite authors, those with whom he liked to associate his own writing, are the great Fabuliste of western literature: the Mythmakers. He read and relished the works of Homer, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Swift, Melville, Goethe, ])ostoevsky, Voltaire, Coleridge, Hardy, Joyce--and the Bible. That these authors represent eight different cultures and span more than 3,000 years of civilization is an indication of Wolfe's catholicity of literacy interest. Hovever, it is in their similarities, not their differences, that we may see the significànoe for Wolfe's own novels. Man sean beyond the limitations of normaloy, transoending the prosaism of life here and now, making his way against the dark current of flowing, inexorable Time; man exalted, oonf'ronting the stark, and often tragic, polemics of existence; man alone, cursed and threatened by the horrar of solitude: these are the tales of the

Mythmakers. They see, in the life of one man, the story of the family, the race, and the world: •Each of us is all the sums he bas not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin agaia in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas. 111

l Thomas Wolfe, ~ Homeward, Angel (New York, 1952}, p. 1. All subsequent references shall be to this edition and will be inàicated as -LHA.

1 2.

There are fev themes in Wolfe's novels, and those tend to be quite simple in essence. They have universel application, just as his characters, while almost palpably real as individuels, have a legendary, timeless quality about them. They have Homeric epithete attached to their names to remir.d us of their fundamentally stark and synoptic personalities. Gant in~ Homeward, Angel is the "Far•Wanderer," Ben isnthe quiet one,• and Eliza has •the tribal look." The Faust theme in particular had an intensely personal appeal for Wolfe. He himselt spent long, tortured yeare, burning with a mythic fever to engulf all the world 's knowledge. He claims he tried to read every volume in the Widener Library at Harvard, a wildly impossible schema, but typical of Wolfe 's early ambitions. He groaned over his enormous mental catalogues of things undone, places unseen, wo:men unloved, and food untasted. He wept for the lack of communication in his relationships. Once he vrote to his mistress, Aline Bernstein, "Faust 's ow problem touches me more than Hamlet•s ••• the problem of modern life ••• to know e~rything, to be a God--and he is caught in the terrible net of human incapacity.n2 His sy.mpathy for the Faustian legend led Wolfe to include it in his work, but it is not intellectuel omniscience that taunts the protagonist. Rather Wolfe attempts to chronicle the efforts of a modern Faust to plumb the impossible depths of human understanding, and bring artistic expression to his discoveries. In all his struggles he is alone. There is this, the isolation of the seeking individuel; the

2 Quoted in Richard s. Kennedy, The Window ,2! Memor.z (New York, 1962), P• 207. restless and perennial rather search; and the now familiar •you-can•t• go-home-again' motif. The se few themes domina te and direct the growth of the hero of the four great novels, Eugene Gant-George Webber. While Faust, Telemachus and Orestes are conscious modela for Wolte's protagonist, he also assumes important aspects of many other hero archetypes not specifically alluded to. He is Prometheus, bringing understanding and comf'ort to man, but tortured and harassed by the gods as a punishment for his daring. He is Achilles, seeker of glory, and aware of its price--death, yet powerless to deny himselt this sole path to fulfillment. He is Satan, the fallen angel of Paradise tost, too rebellious and proud to live a "normal" lite--a savage and intriguing iconoclast. He is Cain, the outcast son, wearing the mark of exile all his lite. He is the Byronic hero: handsome, dark, moody, and guilty­ cursed for some unutterable sin. And of course he is the 'Wandering Jew, doomed to roam the earth and never find peace, rest, or home. What all these anti-Christs have in common is the destiny of solitude. They are exiles, social and spiritual pariahs. They live on the periphery of society, partly through their awn wish or their ow actions, but also because they have been ostracized and oondemned by a •society" that connot comprehend or tolerate their singularity. That, essentially, is howWolte saw himself in his early works. Tormented by loneliness, frustration and guilt, he reacted to the outside world almost paranoically at times, as a result at a constant feeling of rejection in his formative years. On the other hand, 1Jolte was incredibly astute in his insights into his own sufferings. With typical 4. candour, he always insisted on his immaturity and the need for emotional and social growth. And his four major novels are the record of his struggle.

~ Homeward, Angel and the first part of The~ and the Rock chronicle the childhood, youth and young manhood of Eugene Gant and

George (Monk) Webber. The frame of reference for Look Homeward, Angel is, however, a more literal and more interesting account of Wolfe1s development.

Family relationships have a huge significance in~ Homeward, .A:n§el, accounting for the major movements in the plot and shape of the novel, while the environment of~ Web~~~ has been pared down to accommodate the symbolic force of the story, which is itself far more fragmented and episodic than ~ Homeward, Angel.

From the outset, Look Homeward, Angel proposes a broad, sweeping theme:

lfaked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother1s 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 father1s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Vf'hich of us is not forever a etranger and alone? (LHA, preface)

We are all etrangers to ours elves and our neighbours, and we are all searching for the way out of our individual prisons. Fear, weakness and compromise form a bridge to temporary comfort for some, but others remain forever encysted in self, strangers to the world and themselves. This novel is a study in tensions between the etrangers and those who have found the way out of loneliness. The stor,y of the tensions begins with Eliza and Gant, long before the birth of Eugene. Eliza and Gant represent the primal1 opposing facts of existence. Gant is the etranger, the vanderer. Eliza 1s communal, of the tribe, of the earth. In a sense, they are Everyman and Everywoman. Every marriage is a compromise of opposite forces; every son and daughter is a result and a victim of the union of opposites, and must choose his or her •side" in the struggle. The sensitive child is truly victimized, tortured by the necessity of choice and paralyzed by the unjust demanda imposed upon him. The tension runa deep, and representa more than a sexual contest for supremacy. The same struggle exista at the heart of all lite, becoming ultimately cosmic in its implications. For Wolfe, vhat he intuited as a mother-father polemic in infancy and youth became far more complex later on. He came to see the same tension at vork betveen the North, and later Germaey, the golden lands of his father•s people, and the dark, haunted South of his mother; betveen the man-svarming city and the mountain-girdled town; betveen Europe and America; betveen the artist and society; betveen Jev and gentile. He vas a genius1 a child of destiey in his ovn eyes and in the vorld's, and could not assume a loyalty or commitment to one principle, because, if only in illuminated snatches, he sav life clearly and he saw it whole. Thus he vas continually wouming and being wounded by people in his efforts to maintain integrity and independance in the face of those who vould demand all his love. And his refusal to commit himself perpetuated his isolation; confirmed him in the role of exile, etranger and outcast. 6.

w. o. Gant, the "Far-Wanderer,• is Eugene•s gaunt, taU, craggy rather; he is a literal etranger to .Utamont, coming from the victorious North, a lanèl shrouded in mystery anà superstitious belief by the South. Arriving not very long after the Civil War, he is one of few Northerners in what was then a small tmm. He bas come because he is a disillusioned man, and bas given up seeking glory as a carver of angela. He bad beccme a stone-cutter only to learn how to carve an angel's head. He did become a fine stone-cutter; but that was all. So he bas come south. 'l'bose looking for golden fulfillment and prouil achievement go t.o the fableèl North, as Eugene would later. 'l'bose who must escape the harsb light of defeat come to the South, where defeat bas become a virtue, fabricated from the hollow, futile wish for some kind of dignity after the humiliation of the war. In lb! Hills Bexond Wolfe describes the demoralizing affect of the self•deceit practised by the South: •rt became a kind of folk-religion. And under its soothing, other-worldly spell, the South began to turn its face away from the hard and ugly realities of daily living •• . .• .3 Eliza Pentland is the South incarnate, at least in this sense. Ber family, more like a tribe than a group of relatives, are hill-bound; they have their heritage in the earth. If they are etrangers to one another as individuals, they have learned to compensate by a fiercely loyal and defensive tribal unity. Wolfe vas fascinated vith his mother •s people and knew them wall through Julia Wolfe 's almost

lrhomas Wolfe, 'l'he Bills Beyond (New York, 1961), p. 68. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be indicated as ~· 7. interminable reflections about them. She would go on talking of them for hours, inclu!ling details only an incredibly retentive memory (and oœ that lfol.f'e inherited from ber) could recollect. He consumed them voraciously. ,Ih! ~ Be:t;ond, posthumously edited and published, is only a sketchy outline of the long chronicle Wolfe had in mind for his mother•s family. They vere a kind of mythic people, Wolfe felt. He 'Wl'ites of them in the true legendary spirit. He revele in the tales of

•Bear• Joyner, insisting that if they were not true, they should have been. In his 'Wl'itings, the Joyners (the Pentlands in~ Homeward,

~), do not unfold as •noble savages', or homely, pious peasants. They are vigourously bawdy and a lusty race, ignorant •grills,• amoral and tremendously self-satisfied. They have made a small world of their own, encysted in the mountains, and, tu:rning their backs to the rest of the universe, they have created their own peculiar kind of happiness: "They are clannish, suspièious of the etrange, warld•lost, mistrustful of the outer world-conformant, really, in the ir non-conforming.• (~, p. 19) Their self-confidence, based on escapism, is exuberant.

They 8 knowed" they were good. Wolfe vas intrigued by what he calle

•the consciousness they bad of special heritage• (~, p. 28); whenever he met a group of people vith this kind of consciousness he vas irresistably drawn to it, trying to find its source and strength. It was this confortable backdrop of clan unity, Wolfe believed, that gave vitality and meaning to their lives, just as Eliza's lite is dominated and supported by ber sense of heritage and privilege as a s. member of the Pentlanà clan.

In contrast to the Pentlands, Gant•s isolation ano strangeness are e:xaggerated. They even looked alike: 11 The Pentlands bore a strong clan marking ••• They had broad, powerful noses, with fleshy deeply scallopped winge, sensual mouthe, extraordinarily mixed of delicacy and coarseness, ••• broad intelligent foreheads •••• • (~, p. 12)

Clan markings became significant in Wolfe 1a descriptions of other tribal people; he often repeats the epithet •beak-nosed" in describing Jews, not because he thought all Jews had hooked noses, but because he liked to concretize his feeling of their clannishness, their almost tangible incongruity with the common man-swarm. The epithet is a kind of Homeric or Dickensian mechanism. Gant 's introduction to Eliza 's family is disquieting and ominous. He is somewhat cowed by "Major• Pentland, Eliza•s rather, who has "· •• a patriarchal beard, and the thick; com.placent features of his tribe." (~, p. 13) As the family talk, and as he appraises their intimacy and kinship vith one another, he is disconcerted and depressed, "for he saw that he must die a stranger-that all, all but these triumphant Pentlands, vmo ba!Xlueted on death--must die. 1 (1&, p. 14) Eliza is absolutely blind to Gant •s deeper, buried life.

At their first meeting, he had said, half-ironicall.1', "I'm a stranger in a strange land.• Her reaction vas to chafe him optimistically, irrelevantly: 8 Pshawl • • • You ought to get out and meet more people ••• ·" (li!, p. 10) This is Eliza•s tragic flaw: her inevitable retreat into a world of meaningless optimism, w.here cliches assume the 9. burden of truth, and cheerfulness becomes a surrogate for courage and honesty. Eliza is a tragic figure because she is capable of rising above the inane pattern of thought she normally enjoys. On the very brink of horror, death, and part:ltlg forever, she sees the enormous vaste bef ore her, the lost years of incommunicable frustration. But by the time she sees, it is too lata; nothing more can be dona, though she can and does suffer vith nobility. And so, she turns ber eyes away from the essence of Gant, and will not und erstand him. She always calls him "Mr. Gant," tor she cannet bring herself to probe into him, to see the loneliness at his care. He is just as batfled and contused by Eliza 's inflexible, tribal irrationality. Gradually they become estranged. Gant wearies ot his lonely and unfiltilled lite, his abortive efforts at creativity in the stone shop; he sickens and turns inwards, while Eliza fast ens her energies upon her home, her family, and finally real estate, a Pentland passion. She becomes possessive, falls prey to "the insensate m;ythology of hoarding" that Wolfe always detested.

Into the arena of the growing tension betwen Eliza and Gant comes Eugene, the last of ber brood. He is different from the ethers in the family, and this is evident from the hour of his birth, just as the classical heroes vere recognized for their superiority immediately they were born. Wolfe imparts a kind of epie aura to Eliza's recog- nition of the destiny in her child's ayes:

the hour atter his birth she had looked in his dark eyes and sean something that would brood there eternally, she knew, untathomable wells of remote and intangible loneliness: she knew that in ber dark and sorrowtul womb a etranger had come to lite, ted by the lost communications ot eternity, his own ghost, haunter of his own bouse, lonely to himself and to the world. 0 lest. (~, p. 85) 10.

Even as a child of two, Eugene knows instinctively that his way lies beyond the door of his mother's house. His first baby steps take him to the door of the bouse and outside, as though acknowledging his fate. And growing up, he sees the widening gap between himself and the other boys at school. They are child-tribal, while he keeps to himself, guaràs his privacy. He cannot play on a team, but he loves to throw a ball back and forth vith his brother for hours at home. Even without his inner conviction that he is different, Eugene is singled out, for Eliza grows j·ealous of him. He is her last child, and she cannot bear to see him grow up and away from her. Wolfe •s own mother, Julia Westall Wolfe, freely admitted to keeping

Wolfe a baby far as long as possible by weaning him only at two years, wh ile she kept him sleeping wi th her until he was eight. Eugene und ergoes the same treatment in the novel, relating the misery of confinement with all the power of first-hand experience. Eliza would not let Eugene have his hair eut until he was eight: "she wound it around her finger every morning into little fat Fauntleroy curls: the agony and humiliation it caused him was horrible, but she was unable or unwilling to understand it ••• ·" (~, p. 92) Reason will not prevail with her. When he explains to her why he should have his hair eut, she only laughs and croons affectionately, but will not answer him. "Suddenly baffled befare the unyielding inflexibility of her nature, which could be driven to action only after incessant and maddening prods, Eugene, screaming-mad with helpless fury, would understand the cause of Gant•s fury.n (1§!, p.93) From Eliza and her "mothering," Eugene develops a horror of possessive­ ness of any kind, even though he himself would seek on several occasions 11· a repetition of this same childhood pattern. In the end, however, he would shrink back from the loving embrace of those he cared for most. Ultimately he would have to break off all relations with them in order to insure the privacy so insensitively denied him as a child. "At school, he was a desperate and hunted little animal. The herd, infallible in its banded instinct, knew at once that a stranger had been thrust into it, and it was merciless at the hunt."

(.Y~A, p. 93) Wolfe refera to the crowd of children as "it." Crowds, "man-swarms" of any kind are persecution symbols of a sort to Wolfe's hero. Eugene's experiences at school here are suggestive of the fear and helplessness he later endures as a teacher in New York, 'Where he is convinced that his students are united against him, conspiratorial in their harassment of him.

Lonely and abandonned as a young boy, Eugene 1s greatest solace is literature. Eugene comas to believe that the magic of words is the key to communication,the clue to •the forgotten language.• Moreover, literature is an escape from the reality of his environment. Literally divided between two hoJœs from the time he is seven, he is farced to share his mother 's bouse with her boarders, and Eugene had always echoed his fahter's disgust for a home that is invaded by etrangers. Thus the situation at "Dixieland,• the boarding house, further alienates him from home and family.

By twelve, "The prison walls af self had closed entirely around hill." (,Y!!, p. 212) He lived almost entirely in his imgination, creating for himself a beautiful body, a properly heroic spirit, and 12. sweet damsels in d istress to save from the evil geniuses he dredged up for the purpose. For his daily lite was sordid, painful, and confused. He was tvelve, a gangling adolescent, and consumed vith guilt for his burgeoning sexual "luat." He shrank from physical ridicule.

And so literature and its associations of an ideal world help him for a time, until his brutally candid impulse for honesty at all costa holds up to his imagination the sorry reality of his appearance:

In all his swarming fantasias Eugene saw hi.mself. • . • • unbeaten and beloved. But moœnts of clear vision returned to him when all the defeat and misery of his lite was revealed. He saw his gangling and absurd figure, his remote unpractical brooding face, too like a dark etrange flower to arouse aey feeling among his companions and his kin, he thought, but discomfort, bitterness, and mockery. (IRA, p. 215)

He particularly loved parts of Shakespeare, because

Shakespeare's heroes were exiles and outcasts as he felt himself to be.

He responds intensely to Edmund •s "Thou, Nature, art J.'ft1 goddess" speech from 1!:!!!:• "It was a call to the unclassec1; it was a cry for those beyond the fence, for rebel angela, and for all the man who are too tall." (~, p. 329) Wolfe was six feet, five inches tall, and although an unusual height for a man, it is not abnormal, certainly not the freakish measurement Wolfe thought it was. Clearly he has endoved Eugene with all the sensitivity to physical isolation that he felt as a youngster.

George Webber, or Monk as he is nicknamed, in .Il!! !!B and 1Ë! Rock, is also disproportioned. But his physique is truly ridi­ culous. He is short, bow-leggec1, simian in appearance, vith arme 1:3. dangling almost to his knees. Wolfe could hardly have picked a more unappealing body for his hero without bordering on the grotesque.

Eugene's transmogrification to Monk is characteristic, though, of

Ià! ~ .!.!!9 ,2 Rock as a whole. The story of Wolfe 1s early years is retold here, but symbolically rather than literally; for no one could deny the extraordinary fidelity to reality of~ Homeward, AAgel.

Partly to prove that he could write a novel that was not •autobiographical,• and partly to illuminate in stark relief the formative influences in his life, Wolfe turned to Monk, the Joyners, and life in Old Catavba.

The themes that have been developed in Look Hoœward, Angel are elaborated and embroidered. Monk is once more the exiled etranger, but now litarally an outcast and alone. His mother is dead and his father, the incarnation of evil to the Joyners, is never spoken of by his relatives who take him in. It life in the Gant household was frustrating and humiliating at times, life with Aunt Maw, an etiolated version of Eliza, is a hundredfold more so. All of the vitality, energy and warmth of the Gant family has been reduced to nothingness. Only Aunt Maw, 11a rusty erone of fate," remains, and she has none of the richness of personality that animates Eliza.

Monk's childhood is •a dark and melancholy one.n4 The poor and un'Wallted relative of the Joynar clan, he is consigned to the sad little frame cabin behind his uncle's new red brick house. Aunt Ma.w presides, a hideous and gloomy mother•substitute. The whole atmosphere is charged with Dickensian doam and gloam, and has a somewhat melodramatic ring far those familiar with the original story.

4rhomas Wolfe, The ~ !nÈ, the !!22! (New York, 19:39), p. 7. Subsequent references will be to this edition and will be indicated as TW&TR. levertheless, Wolfe does oonvey with great conviction the brooding presence of the Joyners. The Pentlands, sean in retrospect, are only embryonic models for the sombre, ritualistic Joyners. Gothie detail is evoked to create an aura ar fear and misery in Monk's relations with them. The wind howls and moans about the cabin, demonic and furious, as Aunt Maw pours out her gruesome tales of Joyner history. Monk recoils from her •unceasing chronicle of death and doom and terrer and lost people in the hills long, long ago. n (TW&TR1 p. 8) His disgust at being a part of this weird ensemble is nightmarish in quality; the Joyners assume almost supernatural powers in his imagination, always somehow related to death: And they were always right, invincibly right, triomphant over death and all the miseries they had seen and known, lived and fed upon.· And he was ar their blood and bona, and desperately he felt somehow like life's criminal, soma pariah, an outcash ta their inrtncible rightness, their infallible goodness, their unsullied integrity. (TW&TR, p. 9) Fascinated, yet repelled by the weavings of Aunt Maw•s memory, Monk begins to think of the Joyners as acme mystical, eternal race, above the natural laws of men and timeless as the earth, grasping joylessly at life, and crowing over the mortals that love life, yet must die. And he belonged to that fatal, mad, devouring world from whose prison there was no escape. He belonged to it, even as three hundred of his blood and bane had belonged to it, and must unweave it from his brain, distill it from his blood, • • • and escape with demonic and exultant joy into his rather 's world, new lands and mornings and the shin:tng city--or drown like a mad dog, dieS (TW&TR, p. 83) The significance of his "father's world• ia much clearer now than in~ Homeward, Angel. In the latter, it is plain that there 15. are two worlds in the Gant circle: that Gant representa the North, exile, and Oly.mpian passion, while Eliza is the brooding South, the tribe, and rock-like inflexibility. But now the two worlds are enlarged and Sharply delineated, openly recognized for what they are. The Joyners are all things dark, moody, death-brooding and death-triumphant.

Monk 1s rather representa a life that is golden, pure, nomadic. His father 1s people are like the circus crowd: individualistic, different, caretree, vigorous and lusty. But most of all, his father 1s land is the •city.n To Monk all cities belonged in the "proud, shining" North. In them were realized all the myths and fables and legenda that ever were; the city becomes •a symbol of his hope, the image of his high desire, the final crown, the citadel of all that he had ever dreamed of or longed for or imagined that life could bring to him." (TW&TR, p. S3) Thus, there is implanted in the boy's heart and brain the constant will to lesve the land of the Joyners before he is irrevocably bound to them. Feeling so strongly as he does about a rather that he never sees, Monk fastens his affections onto the first of a string of father-substitutes, Nebraska Crane. Much has been made of the fact that Nebraska stands alone in the gallery of Wolfe's significant characters inasmuch as he bas no known model in real life. While this information should go some way in pacifying the literary pundits who claim Wolfe could not write out of his "imagination• (J), Nebraska is far more important as a symbol of Monk 1s unconscious ideal construction of a rather. 16.

Nebraska stands opposed to all that is joyless and "obscene" in life, represented by the cowardly group of boys who gang up on Monk as he lolls in his front yard. When they come along, they take all the gold and magic out of a spring day. They were unwholesome roisterers, they àid not move ahead in comradeship, but scampereà lewdly, raggedly around, as raucous, hoarse, and mirthless as a gob of phlegm; there was no warmth, no joy or hope or pleasantness in them; they filled the pleasant street with brutal insolence ••• he knew them instinctively for what they were-•the creatures of a joyless existence, the bearers of the hated names. (TW&TR, p. 34) They are pale, repulsive, foul in their thoughts and habits. They are the uncounted swarms of tainted people who would soil the lives of those men better than they, men who are tull of life, and creative in their use of it. But into their midst atrides Nebraska Crane, authoritative, quietly unatraid. When they refuse to step aside for him, Bras swings out with his baseball bat, solidly and purposefully, connecting with an arm and breaking it. It could easily have been a head, but Nebraska would not have cared. Having made up his mind to deliver Monk from their grasp, he attacks efficiently, calmly and forthrightly, knowing justice is on his sida. He does not shrink from battle because of moral squeamishness or fear of adult disapproval. He recognizes the foe in life and moves to dispatch him. Monk's admiration and respect for the Cherokee boy are boundless. Himself crippled by overwhelming bouts of fear, guilt and moral equivocations, he is awed by his friend's monolithic personality. In a larger sense, Nebraska epitomizes all that Monk as a writer will hold dear in Amerioan life. His Indian background has given 17. him a sense of heritage that most Americans lack. He is aloof from the petty differences between North and South, and even Negro and white man. He knows who he is. He is free to act, uncluttered by the puritanical strictures under which Monk and the others laboured. He and his father stand for the most typical and widely revered rubrics of American societys the Law and Sport. Bras' rather is an iron-~~lled policeman, captain of the force. To Monk he is a veritable prodigy of strength. Their values are manly and wholesome and clear-cut. They are shaped from the epie mold: he sees the image of the brave campanionship of Nebraska Crane. What is there to fear? • • • Nebraska stands there in his life like the image of that heroic integrity in life which cannot be touched or conquered, which is outside a man, snd to which his own life must be united if he will be saved. (TW&TR, p. 6.3)

If Nebraska assumes an almost sanctified niche in the vision of George Webber, Mrs. Leonard, Eugene's high school teacher, receives much the same kind of reverence from him. Entrusted to her care as an adolescent, Eugene finds in her a flame of beauty and

spiritual hunger to match his own untutored genius. She is a etranger too, a brooding personality. Her soul has risen above the mundane affaire of daily living and the prosaic nature of her husband. Seeing her for the first time, Eugene recognizes his kinship with her; hearing her voice, he is touched, "and suddenly he knew that all life seemed eternally etrange to this woman, that she looked directly into the beauty and the mystery and the tragedy in the hearts of men, and that he seemed beautiful to her." (~, p. 226) She never failed him.. 18.

All of his lite, it seemed, his blazing loyalties began vith men and ended vith images; the lite he leaned on melted below his weight, and looking down, he saw he clasped a statue; but enduring, a victorious reality amid his shadow-haunted heart, she remained, who first had touched his blinded eyes vith light, who nested his hooded houseless s:ml. She remained. (LHA, p. 228} Another who remained is Ben. Eugene grows bored vith his schoolma.tes, irritated vith their pseuào-bravado, their clannish cowardice. They felt that he was •queer•--the other boys preached the smug cowardice of the child•herd, defending themselves, when their persecutions were discovered, by saying they would make a •real boy• of him. But there grew up in him a deep affection for Ben who stalked occasionally and softly through the house, guarding even then with scowling eyes, and surly speech, the secret life. Ben was a etranger; some deep instict drew him to his child-brother • • • (~, P• 85} There is always this recognition between aliens, Wolfe feltt the tacit knowledge that there are no words, that one seeks alone the forgotten language, and "the stone, the leat, the door ••• n Ben is a creature of the night. Gaunt, under-nourished, nicotine-ridden, he slips away from the house where he goes unnoticed, and joins the other night creatures, who feed on strong coffee, cigarettes, and beefy hamburgers. These are real things to Ben; no false sentimentality intrudes upon his world of darkness. Ben and Eliza are estranged; she understands him no better than she understands Gant or Eugene. His m.otivating impulses escape her imagination, and Helen's, his sister. They watch his silent courtship of Mrs. Pert, an older woman who boards vith them. She is fat and plain; yet she deals with Ben honestly and generously. She is real. 19.

But Eliza and Helen feel his turning away from them and they are wounded at his choice. Chilled by rebuffal, they àraw together in a timeless, silent shrinking from his loneliness and inscrutability.

They thought of sons and lovera: they drew closer in their communion, they drallk the eup of their iwin alavery as they thought of the Gant men who would always know hunger, the etrangers of the land, the unknown tarera who had lost their vay. 0 lost~ (~, P• 309) Ben, of all of them, has lost his way and for Wolfe his losa is the bitterest to accept, because he never had a chance, and he knows it--a chance in the golden city, the fabled land of aohievement and manly glory. His impoverished body reflects his suffocated spirit; it cannot stand the strain of the death-in-life his destiny bas acoorded him. Even his attempts to join the army, an escape into a death where there is some semblance of meaning, eludes him. He is fit for nothing that society values. But Eugene sees him for the heroio figure he is, long befare the others come to recognize his true stature. It is Ben who has given the Gants the semblance of unity they still cling to, but his affection was so quiet, his consistent strength ao self-effacing, they have haràly noticed his presence in their lives. "He bore encysted in him the evidence of their tragic fault: he walked alone in the darkness, death and the dark angela hovered, and no one saw him.• (.LIU, p. 118) Wolfe grants Ben an Olympian aeat of honour along vith those others he revered and loveds Like Apollo, who did his penance to the high god, in the sad bouse of King Admetus, he came, a god vith broken feet, into the gray bovel of this world. And he lived here a etranger, trying to recapture the music of the lost world, trying to recall the great forgotten language, the lost faces, the stone, the leaf, the door. (~, p. 590) 20.

Ben•s death is the great watershed in the fortunes of the Gant family. His dying reveals once and for all both the nobility and the pettiness this family was heir to. It brings to a head and confronta them with their shared fate of lonely frustration. At first they refuse to accept the inevitable. Eliza tries desperately to cover the horror of Ben's suffering with her usual slick of cheerful optimism, as she admonishes Eugene before he goes into the sickroam: •Now, I tell you, son, ••• when you go in tbere to see him, don•t make out as if you knew he was sick. If I were you, I'd make a big joke of it all. I•d laugh just as big as you please and say, 'See here, I thought I was coming to see a sick man. Why, pshaw ••• there's nothing wrong with you. Half of it's only imaginationl'" (~, p. 573)

This, while Ben is drowing in his own lung congestion in the next rooml Yet Eugene understands that this mechanical attempt to escape the brutal realities of life and death is not the best part of ber, not the only Eliza. He can pity her silent horror when Ben makes it clear that he will not tolerate her in the same room with him. Eugene comforts her and Eliza breaks downr And Eliza, stripped suddenly of ber pretenses, clung to him, burying ber white face in his coat sleeve, weeping bitterly, helplessly, grievously, for the sad waste of the irrevocable years--the immortal hours of love that migbt never be relived, the great evil of forgetfulness and indifference tbat could never be righted now. Like a child she was grateful for his caress, and his heart twisted in him like a wild and broken thing, • • • (~, p. 577) Helen shows the same kind of ambivalence in her suffering that characterizes Eliza. Although ber instincts are fiercely loyal, protective, and generous, and although she would have fought to the 21. death if she thought she could help Ben, she is filled vith a sense of ber own martyrdom that focuses the significance of the occasion on herselt, just as Elizats escapism tends to illuminate her own good cheer rather than Ben 1s agony. And Helen thrives on ber contact with death. This is the Pentland (Joyner) impulse in her, although she would deny it all along the way. This is her life: to care for others and pretend that she is wearing herself out. But in fact she gets stronger as her charge gets weaker. She lives only for Gant 1s sickness and is hollow and burned-out when he dies. Thus she fi:r:rls a chilling satisfaction in Ben's suffering, for he justifies and vindicates her essentially barren existence.

"There t s one thing sure 1 I 1ve done everything I could. I haven't been to bed for two daye. Whatever happens, I'll have no regrets on that score.• Ber voice was filled vith a brooding ugly satisfaction. (lHA, p. 579) As the others reflect on their own injured egos, and plaintively seek their own comfort, Eugene alone faces the full horror of the situation. It is Ben who is dying, but to them he may as well be dead, so muoh do they dwell on themselves and the::ir righteous suffering. Only Eugene, repelled by this unctuous piety, and disgusted by the premature~ mortems, can intuit the unutterable agony of Ben's passing. Within Eugene, as he paced restlessly up and dawn the hall or prowled through the house asearch for some entrance he had never found, a bright and stricken thing kept twisting about like a trapped bird. This bright thing, the core of him, his Stranger, kept tnsting its head about, unable to look at horror, until at length it gazed steadfastly, as if under a dreadful hypnosis, into the eyes of death and darkness. (1§!, P• 581) 22.

Bickering, tension, and seltishness chafe at the f'amily right up to the end. Then Ben 's strength, expiring anà_ passing from them, throws a balm over the discord and unites them for one moment, as never before, and never again.

Then, over the ugly clamor of their dissension, over the rasp and snarl of their nerves, they heard the low mutter of Ben•s expiring breath. The light bad been re-shaded: he lay, like his own shadow in all his fierce gray lonely beauty. And as they looked and saw his bright eyes already blurred with death, and saw the feeble beating flutter of his poor thin breast, the etrange wonder, the dark rich miracle of his lire surged over them its enormous loveliness. They grew quiet and calm, they plunged below all the splintered wreckage of their lives, they drew together in a superb communion of love and valiance, beyond horror and confusion, beyond death. (~, p. 585) Ben accomplished a miracle in death as he never could in life. Death is the great common bond; the vision of the great Unknown consumes the illusion of life's empty 11 knowing." It strips them of self, lays bare the quivering, lonely spirit, sel.fless and noble in its loneliness, unfolds for a brief moment the forgotten language of universal love: •they looked now upon his gray deserted shell with a thrill of awful recognition, 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. 11 (.YJ!, p. 587)

And then once more the family draws a part. This time the barriere remain. Ben 's funeral assembles the important people in the novel to remind the reader that the gap betveen them is inevitable and irreparable, at least in a short lifetime. The Pentlands come, death-triumphant, exuèing a sense of their own well-being and complacency. There they were, smelling of the earth and Parnassus--that strange clan which met only at weddings or funerals, but which was f'orever true to itself, indissoluble and forever apart, with its melancholia, its madness, its mirth; more enduring than life, more strong than death. (~, p. 608) Gant, too, is there, morbid with the knowledge of his own imminent death: "And among them, sick and old, leaning upon his cane, moved Gant, the alien, the etranger." (~, p. 609)

The wh ole family comes nnstrung as a result of Ben •s death. The enormous vaste of it all unnerves them completely, and they fear to look for comfort in one another. They simply fall back into the escapist worlds they have created for themselves long ago, but this time there is no leaving them. Gant muses and broods on his growing cancer; he waits for death. Eliza throws herself into a maze of real astate projects, buying and selling in a property-hungry frenzy. Symbolically, she sells the old house on Woodson Street, whieh Gant had built himself and which bad known the family's happiest memories. And Helen elings more firmly than ever to Gant•s siokness, watching it with tender, hungry fascination. For Eugene, Ben•s death bas a catalytio and wholesome affect. Now the last tie vith his family is gone. He begins to think of himself as "different11 in a healthy and auspicious sense. He bas the chance now to mske something of himself, escape the morbid and unhealthy atmosphere of his home. He draws avay from thoughts of Altamont to a creative universe of his own. There comes a burgeoning belief in his own power to shape and :m.Old a great future for himself. Visions of life 's fruity offerings possess him. He sees that life is dull to most people because they themselves are dull; they do not live up to life. But those with the passions and energy to neet the demanda of the full life and its challenges are the chosen of the earth. From the drab and fearful melancholy of his childhood, Eugene turne to a potentially joyous manhood. Not that he becomes immune to the mordant fears of ridicule ana humiliation he elJàured as a child. !et, sensitive as he is to those who would chide him for his unkempt, idiosyncratic way of lite, he is at least emerging from the humourless, defensive coooon of his youth. Now he assumes a lofty posture of indignation in the face of social criticism; he sees himself in a oomic light, or rather Wolfe, reviewing his egoistic collage years, has the candour and perspicacity to set Eugene's righteous indignation in its proper perspective. Wolfe was not the megalomaniacal lyricist that same critias would make him. In fact, he vas singularly objective about himself, and could richly satirize his young hero when the situation calls for it. I think I'm hell, thought Eugene, and they say I stink because I have not had a bath. Me! Me t Bruce­ Eugene, the Scourge of the Greasers, and the greatest fullback Yale ever had l Marshall Gant, the savior of his country l Ace Gant, the havk of the sky, the man 'Who brought Richthofen downl ••• Jesus-of-Nazareth Gant, mocked, reviled, spat upon, and imprisoned for the sins of others, but nob~ silent, preferring death rather than cause pain to the women he loves • • • Yes, George-Gordon-Noel-Byron Gant, carrying the pageant of his bleeàing heart through Europe, • • • and Francois-Villon Gant, and Ahasuerus Gant, anô Mithridates Gant, ••• and Edward-the-Black-Prince Gant; • • • and Czar-Ivan-the-Terrible Gant • • • Anubis and Osiris and Mum.bo-Jumbo Gant. (.tiff!, p. 626-7) There is humour then, but beneath the self-mockery is a very real conviction of his superiority, encouraged by protean achieve- ment and campus-wide accolades accruing throughout his college career. He begins to see himself amongst the great men of the eartb; be bangs his own portrait alongside Socrates, Caesar, and Shakespeare. He feels a burning need to exercise bis untried intelligence, glut bis prodi- gious memory, feed his mind witb all of life's pageantry. He paces the campus and the streets at night, desperately peering into ho uses where there are people and lives he does not know, the buried secrets of mankind. At times, unable to control his fierce greed for bum.an communication, be vould act out incredible fantasias. He vould knock at a door, fall into the bouse, and damand a glass of water from its horrified occupants. Solicitiously they would enquire where his friands vere.

8 Fr1endsl" he glanced about wildly and darkly. Then, vith a bitter laugb, he said, "Friands! I have none! I am a etranger bere.• Then they vould ask him wbat he did. •r am a Carpenter," he would answer, smiling strangely. Then they woul.d ask him where he came from. "Far away. Very far, tt he would say deeply. "Y ou would not know if I told you.n {Y!A, p. 633).

Again the splendid parody of Eugene 1s romantic self- aggrandizement does not entirely conceal his very real absorption vith his own genius. And indeed 1 the buge gap between him and his peers could be denied by no one, even bis self•eentred family. At graduation they are taken aback and saddened by bis obvious individuality, the intuition tbat they do not really know him.. They looked Sh7ly at his strange dark face, vith all its passionate and naive ardor, and they felt tenderness and love for his youth and all that was unknow to it. Anà a great love and pity velled up in him beeause of their strange and awkward loneliness, and because he felt, through some terrible intuition, that he vas already indifferent to the titles and honora they desired for him, and because those vhich he had come to desire for himself were abeady beyond the scale of their value. And, before the vision of pity and loss and loneliness, he turned away, clutching bis lean band into his throat. (.YlA, p. 635-6) 26.

His pain springs from the knowledge that there is no door leading from his warld to theirs. At one time he had accepted their social standards and had been agonized because he could not live •up" to them. But now he realizes that he did not meet them because he was always beyo!ld the only conception they had of ha.ppiness and success. The world beyond the town and the mountains stretches betore him nov. It is full of golden hope, full of •a thousand unmet and mangificent possibilities. The strange enchanted coasts were unvisited. He was young and he could never die.• (1!J!, p. 637) It is hard, though, to leave the place where he bas been

happy. He has had some idyllic, if cloistered, years at the State university. He had done much and been popular, for all his idiosyncrasies. But it has been an apprenticeship only. Knowing that he must leave this transient haven, he is keenly aware that he is nov more than ever an exile. But as the lost world faded from his sight, Eugene gave a great cry of pain and sadness, for he knew that the elfin door had closed behind him, and that he would never come back again. (LHA, p. 639) The decision is made: Eugene 1s to go to Harvard-and the North. The parting with Eliza is hard on both aides. As usu.al, she does not recognize the full significance of the event until the end, and then she suffers pcmer.fully, seeing the inveterate wanderlust in him. She knovs then that he is as lost to her as Ben is. He cannot begin to tell hov he reels, how he remembers the beauty or their love for each other, always there beneath the pain and confusion of their lives, and how he clearly sees •avery step of that terrible voyage 27. which his incredible memory and intuition took back to the dwelling of her womb." (~, p. 651) The last farewell is profoundly symbolic. At the literal crossroads of his life, he stands in the town square, and there meets the ghost of Ben; not the dolorous ethereal being of the Elizabethan stage, but Ben as he was, as he always would be: surly, coc~, sardonically aloof. He materializes on the porch of Gant•sstone shop as effortlessly as Homer's and Virgil's messenger-gods drifted gracefully from Olym.pus. And Ben is there for the saœ reason as Mercury or Aphrodite: to admonish anà guide the child of destiny, who is on the brink of his life's adventure, but who hesitates and risks failure.

Ben sternly refutes Eugene 1s .protestations that he is merely going to Harvard for a year. He confirme him in the role of

Stranger, impresses upon him his enormous dtrliy, to stay true to his inner light, to fulfil the lost destiny of his true brother, to find the real, and only world, of Self. And Eugene has a vision of his thousand selves, "the lost child•face below the lumpy ragged cap, drugged in the image of the unheard music, listening for the far-forested horn-note, the speechless almost captured pass-word." (~, p. 659) He sees himself and •the fierce bright horde of Ben,• allB!! thousand moments. He panics; he cannot remember the "lost faces• of those he knew, but he must, for upon them depends his salvation and future glory.

It is here, the village square itself, that constitutes the fabled visions of his youth, if he can only capture it. There is no •happy land,• 28.

Ben says, except what he makes of himselt; himself and the village square. But to find the square he must leave Altamont; to find America, he will go to Europe; and to find peace, he will leave the land where he had founà peace. Fool, Ben calls him, for demanding the world, the opulent cities,the faery countries of wealth and happiness. They do not exist.

'Wb.ere is the world, then? 11 'Nowherej r Ben said. 'You are your world. 111

(IBA, p. 661) And there is only one haunting voyage, and that is the search for the lost self, winking up at him from a thousand lost faces.

He stood naked and alone in darkness, far from the lost world of the streets and faces; he stood upon the ramparts of his soul, before the lost world of himself; beard inland murmura of lost seas, the far interlor music of the horns. The last voyage, the longest, the best. •o sudden and impalpable faun, lost in the thickets of myselt, I will hunt you down until you cesse to haunt my eyes with hunger. I sav your shadov in old buried cities, I beard your laughter running down a million streets, but I did not find you there. And no leaf bangs for me in the forest; I shall lift no stone upon the hills; I shall find no door in any city. But in the city of myselt, upon the continent of my soul, I shall find the forgotten language, the lost world, a door where I may enter, and music strange as any sounded; I shall haunt you, ghost, along the laby· rinthine ways until--until? 0 Ben, my ghost, an answer?" But as he spoke, the phantom years scrolled up their vision, and only the eyes of Ben burned terribly in the darkness, without an answer. (~, p. 662) It wae not the golden city he had vieioneà a a a ohilà, and the gray rep~S.llan face of that beak•noaeèl Jev did not belong among the company of the handsome ••• people that he bad dreamed about, but Abe vas made of better etutt than most dreams are made ot • • • and • • • the sight or his good, gray ugly face oould always ovoke tor E~ne the whole wrought fabric ot his lite in the city • • .. (l'J'om .Q! U!f ~ !h! R1vtr)

Eugene left Altamnt, his face set resolutely toward the gleaming North, determinod to ca~ him destiny from •the city ot myaelt," and forge from his coneciousness the manUold meaning of lite. But he vas not yet prepnred far this kind of spiritual Udepen­ denoe and maturity. First he had to finô himself through the etvnal voyage of diecovery, meeting and maeter1ng along his mythic route the tdaemonet of his personal Underworld. Anèl foremost amongst the promptinge of his -wandering heart wae the impulse toward the "City,• the rock ot the North-and his tather 's land.

Moses d:l.d not look to the Prood.sed Land with mare protounà and unutterable e:xpectation than did Eugene the City. Anê Moses \ras not so boundlessly dis111us1oned and defeated at the failure of the

Promised Land to materialize--for hlm--as vas Eugene in his initiul encounter vith Nev York City. Far Who had ever brought to one geographioal location more impossible hopee and dreama? 'Who bad ever dared entrust his lite 1s vhole worth and m&aning into the keeping ot so ungracioua and indifferent a host?

Por Thomas Wolfe, New York vas to be an end to suf'fer1ng, a beginning of happiness. He had carried this vision of the city with him since childhood. For the oppressed spirit of George Web ber •s youth1 the city was the "bad" world of his lost rather, standing in shining opposition to all that the Joyners represented. For Eugene it was the glorious rejection of the south and all its false sentiment, all its hypocrisy, and submerged malevolence. This was inàeed to be the land of high glory, in spite of Ben 's warning and his own good ju:ige.œnt. Anyone coming to Manhattan with half the hopes and expectations of Eugene-George would have been doamed to disappointment and bitter awakening. A city man could have varned him; but then a city man could not have understood the incredible sustaining power of beliet built up over the years in the imagination of an unhappy country youth: For one like George Webber, born to the obscure village and brought up within the narrow geography of provincial ways, the city experience is such as no city man himself can ever know. It is conceived in absence and in silence and in youth; it is bu.Ut up to the cloud-capped pinnacles ot a boyrs imaginings; it is written like a golden legend in the heart of youth with a plume plucked out of an angel's wing; it lives and flames there in his heart and spirit with all the timeless faery of the magic lanè. (TW&TR, pp.222-223)

New York, then, was to be the end of exile, the door, •the lost lane-end into heaven"--peace in the long-awaited promise ar his father 's former ho.œ. And insteaè he came to find that the city is the great "No Home" of earth, a hostile land of inescapable exile. For months he felt that he was •drowning" daily in the city, sutfocating in the miasma of filth and hate that characterized the lost tribes of city people. The proverbial sma.ll town youth, fresh from the provinces, in his first contact with the big city, is an old legend. The early years 31.

of the twentieth century saw many auch stories in American literature, and for several reasons. New York, and ether big cities, but especially New York, became in the early part of this century a giant complex of a metropolis. It was no longer a typically American city, for most of its new citizens were not "American"; not yet. Manhattan, Brookl1ll,

the Bronx vere swamped by tides of immigrants that almost overnight

cha:nged the entire face or the city. "Old America," made up of the early Teutonic settlers: German, Soottish, and English, was disappearing in the swelling flood of •New America•: European, Irish, Jewish, to mention only a few. Only around 1910 did the flow subside somewhat, and Nev York become a •melting pot• (the phrase itself originates vith Israel Zangvill, a Jevish playwright), all determined on being "good Americans.• Particularly vigorous as ethnie groups vere beth the Irish and the Jevs. Much of the better literature and drama of the period foouses on and draws vitality from their mores.

In each case, though in different directions, infiltration of the local cultural scene vas extremely energetic. The modern city writer of that time could not ignore these great masses of "little people," swarming the streets and forming such distinctive--and voluble--ghettoes. They vere rapidly evolving as the pith and marrow of the city itself. Mareover, the literary trend towards realism and naturalism, avay from the genteel sentimentalism that had charaoterized the latter part of the nineteenth century, seized naturally upon the immigrants and the polemics of social change as new stibjects for exploration. The city, then, assumed a new character in literature. No longer was it the àecorous land of glad tomorrows as the genteel writers haà seen it. It was now àirty, violent, corrupt, soul•consuming-• and magnificent, of course. It was finally depicteà as a place where young men from the country did not always "malte good"; where golden opportunities did not lurk around every street corner in the best tradition of American mythology; where the city's wealthy people were not the cheerful, generous and benevolent specimens of Dickensian

stamp. More often than not, young people were swept up in the maelstrom of city life like so many straws in the winâ. Their chastity and honesty, so bruited and praiseà at home, now became ineffectual, mocking, and extraneous commodities. The city burgeoned. as a symbol of heartbreak rather than fulfillment; it threatened rather than exalted; it shamed rather than uplifted. Wolfe was sensitive to the chilling oppression and chastening visage of the city. He once wrote: "Why is it that the vastness of nature never humiliates me, but the vastness of a city does?•1 In its very impersonality there was a kiD:i of crowing triumph over the atoms that had made it. It vas, as Wolfe explained to Maxwell Perkins, the terrible angel of "fact• exulting over "ideal belief.n No one had ever weaned Wolfe, in his youth, from his private world of "ideal belier,• which was at the time a necessary defence against the soràid reality of his environs. Rather his favourite people had sustained and encouraged his tendency to live outside of a realistic framework.

~uoted in Kennedy, !.!!! Window of Memory, p. ll. Margaret Roberts (Mrs. Leonard in~ Hom.eward, ~) and George

Pierce Baker (Professer Hatcher in Of~ ,!!!à ~River) at Harvard: ·they had given him spiritual and intellectual nourishment, but they

bad not told him how he was to live, actually ~·

And so Wolfe was well suited to join the ranks of those

other young authors who protested and excoriated the actualities

of urban existence. He, too, developed in his work the theme of

"persona! dissociation,• which for Wolfe was simply another way of

saying that he was once again in exile, one not of his awn making.

What was particularly disheartening about exile in the city, as

Wolfe came ta feel, was the frustrating proximity of the manswarm,

a million personal contacts every day untapped, abortive through fear, mutual suspicion, and stultified humanity. Neither was there any

cohesive tradition on which the young provincial could depend for

cultural sustenance, he who was so used ta the stability and

permanence of small•town ritualism. Back at the State University,

the young collage boys had been rustic and simple. They were not

sophisticated in any sense of the word, nor were they encouraged

to be by their mentors and peers. They had all come, essentially, from the same semi-rural background. They were all relatively poor,

and they knew who they vere. But here in the city, everyone was at

loose ends; tradition was necessarily shelved for the duration of the

individual's stay, and all sense of community disappeared. Every man,

knowing himself eut off from so much of the mood and meaning of the

city, with nothing in his own isolated self to oppose the impossible 1 complex of life around him, vas but half a man, searching for he knew not what, only knowing that he was lost and doomed to walk forever alone. That is how it was for Thomas Wolfe.

One of the ironies of life in the city that came out in the new fiction was that so many of the young men and women haèl come to New York, or Chicago, looking for •freedom.• But they vere jolted and dismayed to finèl that they had exchanged the bonds of small tow conformity and rigidity for the more insidious and subtle bonds of big city alienation. Ex.ternally the individua.l was dwarf'ed am shamed by the overwhelming maas of the city itself. Internally he was constricted by his own fears and doubts. Any strength of moral purpose he ms.y have come with was drained from him, for no man made his footprint in the pavement, am everyone knew it. If lucky, he found a faw friands, usually of a s:bidlar backgrol.tŒI, and they formed a small town ghetto of their own, a pathetio bulwark against the hostile elements. But even this was pseudo•comfort. Instability was the norm. Yet curiously, the frenzied search for the elusive, but seductive beauty of the city continued in the face of overpowering misery and doubt. The will to call this •No Home• home could not be denied.

The city is the placœ where men are constantly seeking to find their door and where they are doaned to wandering forever. Of no place is this more true than of New York. Hideously ugly for the most part, one yet remembers it as a place of proud and passionate beau:ty; the place of ever• 1 lasting hunger1 it is also the place where men feel their lives will be fulfilled and the ir hunger fed. (TV&l'R, p. 229)

In no other city in the world at that time was there the same incredible flux and variety of mooà as in New York. The constant sense of impermanenee was all the more disconoerting beoause the sense of the city's great history vas palpable, and superfieially made for the illusion of permanence. But even the fabled rich could not slick over the inseourity and transience that infested avery part

No matter what atmosphere of usage, servants,. habitude, ease, and solid establishment there may be, one always has this same feeling that the thing is fraudulent, that the effort to achieve permanence in this impermanent and oonstantly changing life is no more real than the permanence in a theatrical setting; • • • There is an enormous sadness and wistfulness about • • • attempts to simulate an established life in a place where the one permanent thing is change itself'. (TW&TR, p. 2.30)

On the one hand, the mercurial and tenuous nature of the city trustrated Wolfe. On the other band, he himself was a creature of shifting moods anà extremes of temperament. Part of him craved the anonymity and privacy that the city provided. The monolithic character of the small town mentality bad stultified and oppressed him with its clannish opposition to individualism and personal sanctity. Thus the darting, capricious atmosphere of the city had a deep and profound attraction for Wolfe: the city had a peculiar appropriitt.mess to his f_Wolfe •iJ needs. Its cliang:irc and varied panorama seemed to correlate with--just as they also provoked--his volatile and intense moods; and he could use the outer scene to objectity inner states of being. 2

This last is illlportant. For when Wolfe was happy, he loved the city and he exulted in the beatxt7 seemingly reflected in all its streets and buildings and people. When he was unhappy, swimming in his own

2 Blanche Housman Gelfant, ~ American City 1!2!!! (Oklahoma, 1954), P• 98. self-doubts, and brooding over his literary doldrums or his loneliness, he hateà the city and its city-brad people; they became the objective correlative to his feelings like his Jewish students at New York University. When Wolfe first came to New York, he haà much to be unhappy about. There vere all his dreams of the golden city gone up in soot and smoke and grime. His work had come to a halt, and everything for Wolfe depended on how productive he was as a writer. What had seemed powerful and unique to the Ivory Tower boys at Harvard meant nothing to the sophisticated denizens of the Broadway scene. There was little encouragement for him in those quartera. And although he was solitary and lonelier than he had ever been before in his life, he had not even the pride or self-sufficiency, for he still depended on money from home, a source of humiliation and guilt which, in turn, brought more pressure to bear on his literary efforts. Ultimately he was driven to a steaày job, one that he disliked whole­ heartedly in addition to the alreaày negative factor that it was •steady.• Teaching robbed him of the great Inquisitor, Time, which was so vital to him now, and it robbed him emotionally as vell.

Wolfe 's awkwardness in New York and his difficulties in adjusting to his new life sprang from his provincialism and the practical exigenoies already noted, and from the necessity of purging the peculiarly Southern qualities that obscured his vision of this different reality. Most Southerners, Wolfe felt, failed to make the transference of vision from South to North when they came the re. Emotionally they could responà to the essentially healthier atmosphere of the North, but they coulà not expel the crippling values and outdated standards of gentility that Wolfe always associated with his North Carolina background. That he himself managed to cope with and reject the debilitating qualities of antebellum escapism is a credit to him, for there were many of his peers who dià not. Two of these, Gerald Alsop and Jim Randolph, are graphie portraits of this failure.

To Wolfe they were s;ymbols of the kind of peculiarly Southern mentality that cannot meet head-on the polemic of the North and come to grips with it. They are, in fact, representatives of the now fashionably termed •lost generation,• a group with which Wolfe adamantly refused to identify himself. Jim Ranàolph is lost because he yields to the sua.sive glory of a heroism that is no longer credible except in the moribund cloisters of Southern academia. A football hero of the old guard, he does not recognize that the end of an era is at hand. He should have died in the war, Wolfe says, for at its end he is only a vesti­ gial remnant of a dying breed of men.

Gerald Alsop is portrayed as an intellectua.l who is stratified and blurred in his aesthetic judgements, faithful to Southern standards which are long out-m.oèled. Like the South, Alsop is •soft.• He lacks that ge~like perspicacity of the true artist, who ean live best out of the feminine and evasive atmosphere of the South; for art, as Wolfe saw it, is an essentially masculine function and therefore integral to the Northern climate. Alsop is narrow in his world outlook. He can see no farther than that all Southern belles are "pure" and •sweet,• while all •mothahs" are necessarily sacred. And for Alsop, Dickens is the only writer in all of literature who takes "the more wholesome and well•rounded view of life.•

(~, p. 193) Thus, when Goerge Webber champions the profundity and artistic vitality of Dostoevsky, he is isolated and opposed by

Alsop and his disciples. Later, Alsop 1s intellectual role in the North becomes negative and unproductive. He gathers his talents together only to sponsor among his followers a running critique of Mencken. Mencken was, of course, the supreme iconoclast, the great realist, ano a writer whom Wolfe admired for a long time. It is clear, then, that Webber can find neither solace nor direction from his Southern peers. They are truly "lost,• and George must make his way in New York in a vacuum. Eugenets isolation is just as maddening as Webber•s. As if to underscore his solitude and sense of defeat, the Fates provide for him as his first personal contacts in the city a group of Jewish students. Eugene's initial chagrin at this stroke of destiny can be understood in the light of Wolfe's own position at N.Y.U. Wolfe bad not wanted the teaching job; certainly he had no illusions or ideals about the sacred nature of the teaching profession. He only knew that he wanted to write. Anything that interfered with this was that much time irrevocably squandered. Accordingly, he approadhed his classes in a truculent humour at best. That his students were mostly Jewish was an added blow to morale, at least at first. "I teacht I teachl 39••

3 Jews 1 Jews J" Yet before he haè finished with his "little èevils," as he came to call them in affection, he was to find his experience with them one of the most valuable and productive of his life. :tn the beginning, it was difficult for Wolfe to appreciate his students as individuals or even as a normal group of people. He never did come to have a particularly easy relationship with them. For his background in this respect was typically provincial and typically Southern. Every Gentile that grows up in a small town is in some way anti-semitic, to use the formal term. It is inevitable that a group of 11foreigners, • so obviously distinct from the ma.instream of town life, are singled out as curiosities, if nothing else. As is usually the case, traditional superstitions and parochial shibboleths take up where curiosity leaves off. Wolfe was subjecteô, as a child, to the ordinary fare of Shylock-Svengali jokes and the usual allusions to the Jew as an inspired and historie money-maker. This latter impression was confirmed in Wolfe •s mind by the disproportioœte success of his brother•s Jewish workers on the Post staff. They outnumbered the Gentile boys because they were better salesmen. Fundamentally, however, Wolfe consiôered the Jews

11barbarians,• as Eugene calle them in Look Homeward, ~· Eugene and his friands were wont to take part in small-time pogroms for their entertainment, a time-honoured pastime in the history of

3 rrom a letter to Albert Coates, quoted in Kennedy, .Q.E• ill•, p. 88. Judaeo-Christian relations. • ••• they made war upon the negroes and the Jews, who amused them, and upon the Pigtail alley people, whom they hated and despised." (YI!, p. lOO) They made distinctions between the barbarian nature of' thè Jews, though, and the primitive nature of' the "negroes" ( which Wolfe ab·ays spelleà with a small "n"). The Jews they considered odd, but the Negroes they looked upon as •clowns, • born to serve and amuse them. It never occurred to the se boys that the Negro had either the intelligence or the emotional sensibilities of the white man. Rather they interpreted him as bestial, sex-obsessed, and perennially good-humoured--the ~hic savage. Nor did they hate them: clowns are black. They bad learned, as well, that it was proper to cuf'f' these people kindly, ourse them cheerf'ully, feed them magnanimously. Men are kind to a f'ai thf'ul wagging dog, but he must not walk habitually upon two legs. (IHA, p. lOO) The Jews they f'ound hilarious, but rather because of their bizarre appearance and customs than because of' their comic f'amiliarity. They did not pretend to understand the Jews as they thought they understood the Negroes. The boys would wait on the Jews, follow them home shouting •Goose Greasel Goose Greaset• which, they were convinced, was the chief staple of Semitic diet; or with the blind aoceptance of little boys of some traditional, or mangled or imaginary catchword of abuse, they would yell af'ter their muttering and tormented victim: •veeshamadyel Veesbamadyet• confident that they had pronounced the most unspeakable, to Jewish ears, of affronts. (.YIA, p. 100) This is incipient anti-semitisa as opposed to mere prejudice, for the boys were attacking the Jews on irrational grounds, assigning impossible qualities to them out of' fear or cruelty, not through any realistic contact with them. Their prejudice about the Negroes, however, vere founôed on rational beliet, since the only Negroes they knew actually were lazy, ignorant, primitive, and servile. Thus Wolfe never made any real strides toward overcoming his prejudice about

Negroes in general, while the fantastic and incredible beliefs he harboured about the Jews came in for a radical change as soon as he reached the stage of minimal emotional maturity and intellectual independance.

Indeed there are hints in Eugene 1s childhood that the Jews are akin to him in a mysterious way. They too are etrangers in the town; and, he intimates on several occasions, they are "sensitive• or "kind.• Certainly there is nothing in his youth to suggest that he would bear them any actual malice. More often than not, his imagination was captured by the exotic, mythic quality in them. In his Bruce-Eugene fantasy stage, he would picture •a fruity wide-hipped

Jewess• as the reward for his heroisms: that is, if he were feeling particularly vicked and dissipated. When in a humour to be •virtuous,• he would righteously bestow his affections upon the virgin daughter of a poor but honest minister. This -Lillith" application to Jewish women is a common occurrence in the literary fantasias of Gentile writers. In Wolfe it crops up regularly in his sensational fantasias about the Jewish girl students at N.Y.U. The curious episode with Edward Michalove, the Jewish boy in Eugene's class at Mr. Leonard's school, is strangely prophetie for Eugene: of his future triendship vith Starwick, and also of the poignant terminating conditions in his second trip to Germany, which he experienced as George Webber. Edward was a gentle, soft-spoken, but slightly effeminate youth, and was naturally singled out for immediate abuse by the other boys, and even by Mr. Leonard. Edward "was terrified in the company of other boys." (LHA,- P• 247) He would laugh hysterically or burst into tears when ridiculed or threatened. The boys plagued him on account of his coy gestures and mincing, maidenly walk, until

Edward soon turned into a defensive, snarling little animal: "they made him detestable, master and boys alike, and they hated him for what they made of h:t.m.• (.YJA, P• 248) How succinct a history of anti­ Semitismt And the incident was not lost on Eugene, as no incident of any significance ever was ultimately. Eugene could pursue a falsehood only so far before the iniquity of his behaviour would come to haunt him, turn him inwards to the truth wasted on others.

Eugene thought of this young Jew years later with the old piercing shame, with the riving pain by which a man recalls the irrevocable moment of some cowardly or dishonourable act. For not only did he join in the persecution of the boy--he was also glad at heart because of the existence of soma one weaker than himself, some one at whom the flood of ridicule might be directed. Years later it came to him that on the narrow shoulders of that Jew lay a burden he might otherwise have borne, that that overladen heart was swollen with a misery that might have been his. (Yf!, p. 249)

Why, when soma critics are ready to dismiss Wolfe as an anti-semite through and through; why will they not look at a passage such as this, so remarkable in its candour and so perceptive in its judgement? This is not the kind of man Jews have to fear. Why do some critias never give Wolfe credit for the emotional and spiritual growth that he so painstakingly describes?

In coming to New York, Eugene is initially frustrated by the disparity between the Jews that sit before him in his class and 4,3. those mythical euriosities he had invented in his youth. It is difficult for him to come to terms with a situation where the tables are turned. The Jews are now in the majority as far as he is concerned. They sit before him "knowing" (Wolfe's favourite epithet for them), confident, a:nrl dema:nrling, while he is the outsider, the misfit, and the exile. He is unwittingly repelled by the ineluctable fact that he is now serving a race that he had known only in the capacity of second-rate citizens. To his mind they are part of the band of "New America," which he àistrusted,While he, "Old America,• was now sesring his over- tired brain in an effort to plesse these insatiable upstarts. Wolfe ws not alone in his resentment of the Jewish infil- tration of the cultural echelons of America. Before this tiœ when there was no ignoring them even numerically, there had been no resson to pay much attention to the Jew in a literary sense. Until the inroads of the realistic tradition, the Jew had certain predictable qualities in American literature; there was no resson to go beyond the stereotype. If drawn by a Jewish author, his portrait was apt to be self-consciously American and assimilated: a demonstration of the Jew's ability to be as good an Jmerican as anyone else. If by a Gentile, the Jew's image might be a plaster saint or a Shylock figure, depending upon the intellectuel and emotional sympathies of the author. But in the new tradition, the Jews turned up in novels as real human beings, honestly drawn from their proper setting, generally the lower East Side. The trend, almost from the beginning, ran towsrd a fairly benignant treatment of the Jewish situation.4

4rnterestingly, though, Wolfe is one of, if not the first American writer, to treat the Jews as American, and not as Jews or even American Jews. Wolfe and certain other writers of the period, however, fell prey to a kind of artistic jealousy in their observation of Jewish involvement in American letters. It was the same type of jealous7 that touched Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others. For the Jews were not like the rest of the immigrants. They were a cultured people for the most part, many of them from wealthy and even aristocratie backgrounds, which they had been forced to leave through persecution. They were lettered people when they came to America; and their children were aggressively so. For the young people had added incen­ tives in America. There they could better themselves financially and socially as well as satisfy the natural impulse they bad for culture and learning. This unusual eombination of communal poverty with a uniform intellectual drive stymied Wolfe. His contact with the poor mountain folk in !aheville had led him to associate poverty with anti-intellectualism. There was no question but that the Jews were making their mark in the artistic world. Imagine, for instance, the chagrin of

Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson in discovering that the Jews had beaten them to the artiste' quartera in Chicago and New Orleans and New York; or the bitterness of Hemingway and Pound, Eliot and Fitzgerald-­ courageous and pioneering ex-patriates, or ao they thougbt--when they stumbled upon American Jews already cozily ensconsed on the Left Bank. Reactionary and atavistic race pride came unbidden to them. As Fiedler puts it, •theirs was the cultural anti-semitism of the 5 educated bourgeois seeking statua through a career in the arts.•

5Leslie Fiedler, •The Jew as Mythio Amerioan, • Ramparts (Fall, 196.3), ,39. Wolfe must have felt something of the same inarticulate disappointment, the sensation that his heritage, his birthright, haà been snatched from unàer his nose. 1:!!! vork was going nowhere, while their febrile and gluttonous minds promised brilliant achievement. Thus Eugene undergoes an agony of frustration in marking Abe Jones' papers.

Finding them perfect in every way, he cannot bear it; he cannot endure Abe 1s growing success--not under his own aegis, at any rate. OUt of the alarm and restlessness of the Gentile writer came some of the most stunning and honest portraits of Jews in all American literature. Jews themselves were too defensive--or too vindictive-•to portray themselves candidly. No, the compelling images of Jews were maàe by writers who were not merely Gentiles, but anti-semites, interested in resisting this assimilationist impulse, and keeping the Jews Jews. 6 One aspect of the Jew that does not change is his position, uncomfortable at times, of the •mythic American,• as teslie Fiedler calls him. The Jew persiste in the legendary role, stalking literature as he has stalked history, culture-absorbing and time• devouring. And the legend of the Wandering Jew is too close to the truth to be manipulated as though it were a mere literary convention. The fact of Jewish survival and achievement is impressive. And the Christian persistenœ in identifying the Jews of their own day vith those of 2,000 years ago has confirmed in their own minds the agelessness of the Jew. But this principle of historical unity is a concept dear also to the Jewish mentality; it is as comforting to him

6Ibid. as it is disquieting to the Gentile. The intimacy between the Jews of all generations in their history is at the core of Hebrew culture.

And so ~his •mythic" quality sits well on the Jev in America, where even common traditions are tenuous cultural trappings. It is the Jew as the great and perennial Exile that haunted Wolfe 's imagination. They are exiles, and always have been in Western culture; yet they are, too, the most tribal and clannish of people. Communal exile is the historical portion of the Jev, but vithin the community-or ghetto--life is secure for him. Indeed, in many cases the Jews• isolation has been welcomed by them vhen they are living amongst cultural philistines. For the knowledge of his alien character alone has never demoralized the Jev, but strengthened and emboldened him. Integra tion and assimilation vere not always s:>ught­ atter commodities in many European centres for internal reasons, as vell as for the obviating factors originating in the Gentile community.

In America, where they were encouraged to exercise their rights, the tendency to assimilate flourished until nov the American Jews seem more American than any other single group. A cursory glanee at the rossiter of recent American literary heroes confirma this impression.

For Wolfe, the fact of security in exile was the exciting and disturbing principle. In one way he was drawn to know his Jewish students, to find out the secret of their obvious success at internai communication; they had their "door.n And yet he hated their insularity because he vas shut out of it. No Gentile could find it easy to pene­ trate the many paradoxes surrounding the fact of Jewish exile. 47.

The collective experience of the Jews has forgeà their consciousness in exile and has inured them to it, until they thrive on it and even relish it. What a harsh and bitter irony for Wolfe, who lived in an exile not of his ovn making and hated it, seeking always the lost door,and yet having before him these dark and swarthy people who had their door and their exile and the comfort of human intimacy. The Jew is comforted in the knowledge that every land is exile until the ultimate reunion in Israel. Exile becomes a state of mind; the Jews carry their heritage, nurtured in exile, from land to land and century to century, above the terror of those thrust "naked and alone into exile.• For Wolfe they were significant for their ability to reconcile the two great tensions of lite: the "eternal wandering" of man and "the desire of the soul for home.• That they seem to join the two concepts into frietionless cODCcrd ie revealed in an unpublished fragment of Wolfe •s, written on the boat going over to Europe for the first time. In it he ironically describes

•a Jew nameà Greenberg, who made his pile in New York and who now lives in France having changed his name to Montvert, and of course feels no homesickness at all, save what is natural to 4000 years of wandering •••• •7 The Jew is the incarnation of exile reeonciled, but at the same time, he has an ironie and disturbing message for other Americans. That is the futility of trying to achieve in so short a time as the American experience allows the kind of security and harmony the Jews have.

7 Quoted in Kennedy, .2E• .ill·, P• 212. 48.

All flights, the Jewish experience teaches, are from one exile to another; and this Americans have always really known, though they have sometimes attempted to deny it • • • It is the dream of exile as freedom which has made ~erica, but it is the experience of exile as terror that has forged the self•consciousness of Americans.8 Small wonder, then, that the Jews in Wolfe•s class seem to him to be mocking and "knowing.n After all, they are more at home in Wolfe's own country, and certainly in his newly-adopted city, than Wolfe could ever hope to be, and all this without trying to find their •roots" in American soil. The American zeal for the feeling of rootedness is superfluous to the Jewish tradition. This is evident in the Fried episode Eugene witnesses on his first trip abroad. Fried is a Jewish stuàent living at Oxford with several other American students, all Gentile. The Gentile students attempt feverishly to find in their English companions some point of common identity, something that will reveal to them their own origine, even something fam.Uiar to them. But they are only laughed at by the ages-old English students, and of course they are miserable. They have been transplanted to what they naively expected to be •native" soil, and the experience bas been a travesty and a fiasco. But Fried is not miserable. He did not come there with the same expectations. And he is not afraid of these superior English stuàents who mock and torment the Americans. "· •• he firiei/ was the only one who bad maintained his integrity, the only one who did not have a spurious, fearful, uneasily evasive quality, ••• the only

Sp.iedler, .!?B• cit., 41. 49. one who had remained himself.•9 Neither a likeable nor a personable man, he at least does not eare whether the Amerieans or the English like him. He àoes not pander to the false sophistication around him. He does not fawn on the English simply beeause they are English. And for Eugene, he stands out like a well-cut jewel, a symbol of fearless candeur surrounded by cowards of misguided sentiment. None of the Gentile boys will admit that their life at Oxford is wretched and impossible, but Fried concedes willingly that he has no use for it: •and Fried was the only one of them to meet it, to admit it, • • • and to remain hillself against it.• {ar&TR, p. 632) His solid sense of identity, abusive as are its manifestations, is impressive. The ethers reeognize eventually that he is the only one of them who is honest. They resent him for that, and because he is Jewish, yet more sure of his Ameriean identity than they are. Yet in the end they are foreed to respect him. IINone of them liked Fried, they vere ashamed of him, • • • but at the bottom of their hearts they had a etrange, secret, and unwilling respect for him, and finally grew silent and listened when he talkeà." (OT&TR, p. 632) Fried then, is the ultimate irony: the Jewish American who has, through a long history of exile, accepted the impossibility of total geographie rootednass, and made America more of a home for himself than his Ameriean peers; they, feeling somehow that they are rootless, seek their heritage in historieal, rather than psychical, realities. They expect England to give them a feeling of their

9Thomas Wolfe, SJI, Time and the River (New York, 1935), p. 631. Subse­ quent references will be to this edition and will be indicated as OT&TR. 50. original heritage, and of course this is impossible. The sense of heritage is integral and not a patchwork._ of gestures, accents and English mufflers. What the Gentile boys fail to realize is that the trappings of tradition are irrelevant without the inner security and sensation of historical and collective unity. This is a mistake that the Jew, Fried, does not make. He would not aocept the manners and mores of a people that he is merely living amon,g for the motivating forces of his own life. And so, ironicaUy, Fried is the secure and confident American, while the others, caught in the·web of a thousand fears, the meshes of a thousand impossible restraints, trying to maintain their lives, their characters, their native dignities even while they tried to subdue them by a thousand small half-mimicries, to be themselves even while they tried to shape themselves to something else, their characters finally, strained through the impossible weavings of this mad design, teetering frantically to maintain a crazy balance on a thousand wires, were reduced at last to the consistance of blubber••and trying to be everything, they succeeded finally in being nothing. {~, p. 632) Fried was a Brooklyn Jew, an urban creat\ll'e that Wolfe could never properly fathom. While Wolfe •s attempts to cope with the mamm.oth city seemed always to end in maddening frustration, the Jews lived in it and could not conceive of any place else to live. For there is no such thing as a small town Jew--even if he lives in a small town. The nature of Jewish culture and the exigencies of JewiSh history have combined to produce a curiously and perennially urban species. The Jew knows intuitively that his best chance for survival, physically and spiritually, is in the cities of the world. Where oosmopolitanism flourishes, there flourish the arts, intellectual study, economie advantage--and tolerance, always a priceless commodity to1be Jew. 51.

Thus, since the earliest days of Galuth (Exile), the Jews have been a sophisticated people, not through preference, but far survival and growth. Even suburban and rural Jews are never too far out of touch with the community, either for purposes of religious convocation or through fear of isolation. So the city holds no real terrors for the Jew. Indeed, the bigger the city, the safer and more confident he feels. Coming for the first time to a new city in a new land, he bas fellow Jews there to initiate him into his adopted life. It is not long before he oan understand and exploit the intangible impulses behind his newly-éliscovered home. That their most eomon experience exposes them to the negative aspects of city lire inures them to the kind of humiliation Wolfe was prey to. As Fiedler says, the Jew is "the metropolitan at home, though expert in the indignities, rather than the amenities of urban life.alO Wolfe's inability to understand his students is natural, considering the gap in background between him and them. But the accompanying guilt he feels in their presence or even when he is thinking about them, is not. It is intelligible only as it is directly related to the guilt he feels in association with his mother world, the Pentland•Joyner tribe. In other words, the Jews represent to Wolfe a recreation of the Joyner myl;h, but seen from an urban pers• pective. Here again, plaguing and confuting him, were the grinning masks of the death•triumphant clan; here again was the knowing insu­ laritJ of the tribe. No ether explanation could account so clearly for

10 Fiedler, .21?• ill•, 40. the enormitr, of the guilt Wolfe experienced in conjunction vith his Jewish students. The sense ar psychological oppression is remarkably similar to the pattern established early in Eugene-George 1s life.

In the Joyner world, George had felt guilty for his desire to escape the gloomy atmosphere ar Aunt Maw•s people. He had wanted to run off to what he was told was the 11bad 11 world of his fathe:r.. Now the situation vas repeating itself. "GloomJ" is Abe Jones' constant epithet. He assumes the symbolic aspect of a warden, checking Eugene in his fierce wish to be alone and write, preferably in Europe, which now takes on the colours of his father 1s land, when New York fails to bring him the anticipated fulfillment. Eugene •a "little Jews• become the culprits; they hold him in thrall.

All this would be so much conjecture were it not for

Wolfe t s startlingly candid confessions in l'.!!! story of .! ~· Here he admits the overwhelming guilt he suffered and which came out in the form of nightmares, years after his teaching days. tt 11 there dwelt forever the fatal knowledge ar my own inexpiable guilt • • • • 11 This guilt is bound up with the question of Time, Tine lost through his teaching responsibilities. For he had been too pressured in his job for muah writing, and this plagued his dreams. But in the recurring nightmares, his Jews acted as judges, the accusing Superego.

He dreamed he was whiling away his time in a drowsy torpor. He was in Europe, in •ancient Gothie towns, 11 a symbolic image of his father•s world, his Germanie heritage. Suddenly, still in the dream, he would

1~homas Wolfe, !!!! Ston of.! !2!!]. (New York, 19.36), p. 64. 53. wake to frenzied consciousness of responsibilities forgotten at home.

He had missed an entire year of classes at N.Y.u., and, flying immediately back to New York, he wotùd find his students waiting for bim in the corridors of the University, patient and silently reproachful. Quietly they surrounded him, along with his colleagues, in the offices of the

English department,

a ring of silent forms • • • not staring, not harsh wi th scorn or anger, and not thrusting close, but just looking at me with the still surveyal of their condemnation. ~ little Jews stood first, their dark eyes fixed on me with a dejected and unwavering reproach, and behind them stood the jury of my peers •••• 12

This passage is, thought for thought, almost identical vdth the other guilt drea.ms of Asheville mentioned in The Story .2f!!:. Novel, and certainly the original motivation for the dream sequence in~ Can 1 t Q2. Home Again, where Monk returns to Libya Hill and experiences a sensationally guilty series of dream visions. In them, he comes back "home, 11 only to be greeted with the sad reproach of a hostile, silent town. Again they were judging him. Again he was isolated and persecuted. In his unconscious mind, the two tribes were one.

Nor can Wolfe 1s terrer of his class be exaggerated when he himsel:f was at such pains to indicate the almost overpowering torture he felt, as Eugene, in connection with his job and the Jews.

At night, when he went to bed in his little cell at the cheap little hotel nearby where he lived, the thought of the class he had to meet the next day fed at his heart and bowels vdth cold poisonous mouths of fear, and as the hour for a class drew nigh he would begin to shake and tremble as if he had an ague; the successive stages of his journey from his room in the Leopold, to the class room at the university a few hun­ dred yards away-from cell to elevator, from the tiled sterility of the hotel lobby to the dusty beaten light and violence of the street outside,thence to the brawling and

12 Thomas Wolfe, The Story of !!:. Novel, p. 71. ugly corridors or the university, which drowned one, body and eoul, vith their swarming, shrieking, shouting tides ot dark amber Jewish fiesh, and thence into the comparative sanctuary of the class room with its smaller horde of thirty or forty Jews and Jewesses ••• thick with their hot and swarthy body-smells • • • the successive stages of this journey were filled with auch dazed numbneas, horror, rear, and nauseous stupefaction as a man might reel in the successive stages of a journey to the gallows, the guillotine, or the electric chair: ••• (~, pp.419-20) There is almost a complete reversion to primitivism in terms ot the imagery here. The Jews are a tthorde• or savages to Eugene; later he compares them to tierce •animals• or great sucking 11maws," an interesting reflection of the Joyner imagery he had previously evoked in The !'l!,2 !!!!91h! ~· The room is filled with shriekings that are incoherent to him, suggestive of a language peculiar to them and untamiliar to Eugene, a kind of primordial outcry. A:nà he, Eugene, is apparently to be same kind or sacrifice to their atavistic appetites. His sense or iminent personal disaster would be ludicrous in this harmless situation, were it not so paintully obvious that this is no affectation on Wolfe 1s part; he really must have telt this way about them. Wolfe is particularly sensitive to what he considera the gross seneuality of the Jewish girls in the class. This is a wild fabrication or his Gentile imagination, a common fantasy, just as JewiSh boys carry in their mind the archetypal Gentile goddess, desirable as a conquest over all other women (Marilyn Monroe perhaps in our generation). Again Wolfe is evoking the •tillith• image or the Jewess as part and parcel of the guilt pattern already established. Curiously, where he sees them first as sirens a:nà erotic temptresses, he later comas to understand them almost as earth goddess figures, perfectly respectable and even 55. e:xalted symbole of the •desire of the soul for home. 11 They have this message for the eternal wnderer, for the Gentile. They come to represent ancient wisdom, the end and sanctuary of frenzied youth.

The Jewish women were as old as nature, and as round as the eartha they had a curve in them. They bad gone to the wailing walls or death and love for sevan thousand years, the strong convulsive faces or the Jews were ripe witb grief and wisdom, and the curve of the Jewish women was still unbroken. Female, fertile, yolky, truitful as the earth, and ready for the plow, they offered to the famished wanderer, the alien, the exile, escape and surcease or the handsome barran women • • • who walked the streets and had no curve or rulness in them • • • the wisdom they gave to him was that he need not etrangle like a mad dog in a barran dusk, nor perish, famished, • • • within the wilderness baside a rusted lance • • • • (OT&TR, p. 480) This more philosophical and prophetie interpretation of his initial fears comes only after shameful am debilitating months of terror and hatred, fears he could not articulate and that humiliated him, but that he could not shake off. And the sense of •drowning daUy in the manswarm" returned again and again to him.

As if to expel from his sickening heart and mind the crippling disgust he feels for himself, and as if to visit upon one city atom all the misery, wretchedness, and lœthing that characterised his first fev months in the city, Wolfe e'Voked the figtn'e of Abraham Jones, the mythic scapegoat for alll his grief. "And the gray-faced Jew beside Eugene made made the weary lights burn àim: he gave a tongue to wearinese, a color to despair. 11 (QI~lh P• 443) And it is througb. this 11 gray-faced Jew," this murky-visioned cipher of modern city knowledge and ancient Hebrew cynicism, that Eugene comes back, first through fear and hatred, and finally through affection, to the better part of himselt, strengthened and cleansed in moral and emotional purpose. Abe is the objective correlative to Eugenets psychical processes; or in more modern terms, he fulfUs a passively therapeutic role. Eugene transfera to him the odious qualities of spirit and mind that he wants to exhume from himself.

Eventually he works the poison out of his mind and comes back to a love of life that is rightfully and typically his. Finally, he comes to identify with Abe and ultimately love him. The cycle completed, he no longer needs Abe, and he can leave New York with a clear conscience.

Abe's initial image, and it must be clear that the reader sees Abe at first only ~hrough Eugene's distorted vision, is that of the inquisitor, the en~. Abe waits for Eugene af'ter class, osten­ sibly to continue the class discussion or make inquiries about his weekly theme, but to Eugene 's twisted mind, :œ is the incarnation of a hostile tate.

Abraham Jones, as relentless as destiny, would be there waiting for Eugene. He waited there, grim, gray, unsmiling, tortured-looking behind an ominous wink of glasses, a picture of Yiddish melancholy and discontent, and as Eugene looked at him his heart went numb and dead; he hated the sight of him. (~, p. 440)

Abe's glasses stay on until his unmasking, soto speak, when he reveals his real humanity, but until they do, they elicit all

Eugene 's pent-up guilt and fear. They demonstrate to him the inscrutability of the Jews: their detached, omniscent quality. "He sat there in the front rows of the class like a nemesis of scorn, a merclless cens or of Eugene 's ignorance and incompetence." ( CJl'&TR, p. 440)

In fact, Wolfe was an excel.JJent teacher. If anything, he went above and beyond the call of duty in his dedication to his responsibilities.

His commenta on weekly themes were wont to run longer than the actual paper in his efforts to explain his criticism and to encourage his 57. aspiring young intellectuals.

But for Eugene, Abe •s papers are a constant trial. They are perfect in grammar, clearly and forcibly written, nuent and graceful, backed up vith sound and extensive knowledge. Yet they frustrate and infuriate Eugene. Abe had "the power of a philosopher, the delicacy of a subtle-souled psychologist," but his various talents madden

Eugene: "and a1l of this was as weeping and wailing and gnashing of teech, because it was so good, and he did not know what was wrong, and he could not endure to read it.• {OI'&TR, p. 441)

The peculiar tension continues, always the same. Eugene feels Abe wants something from him that he cannot produce and he is dissolved in guilt for he knows not what. There develops, in

Eugene's mind only, a kind of master-slave relationship between them:

"he LAb!7 exulted in a feeling of cruel, crowing Jewish mastery over

Eugene •s bent spirit." (OT&!R, P• 444) Finally Eugene turns on him, surprising himself wi th his own courage. He snarls viciously at the boy, pouring out in his wrath all the inchoate frustration and hate he had kept bottled up for months. In his vindictive indictment, he places the onus of Abe's cruelty and the burden of guilt squarely on Abe's

Jewishness:

"I •ve had all I can stand from you • • • Why, you damned dull fellow • • • sitting there and sneering at me day after day with your damned Jew 1s face ••• What are you but a damned dull fellow, anyway? ••• Why, damn you, Jones, you didn•t deserve anyone like me • • • You should get dow on your knees and thank: God you had a teacher half as good as me ••• To hell with youl ••• I never want to see your face again l" (OT&TR, p. 446) ss.

And the spell is broken~. Suddenly, with relief amounting to a physical catharsis, Eugene is better; he has excoriated the humi- listing, feeding guilt that has been pummelling his ragged spirit. He can look at Abe now as an individual, for he has recavered his self-respect. And Abe is happy too, because this recognition of himself as an individual by a teacher that he really respects and likes is good to him.. He takes off his 11 inquisitor •s• glasses and things fall into proper perspective for both of them. His gray ugly face as he stood there polishing his glasses had that curiously naked, inept, f'aded and tired wistf'ul look that is common to pe~le vith weak eyes when they remove their spectacles; it was a good and ugly face, and suddenly Eugene began to like Abe very much. He left h:lm and went up to his roœn vith a feeling of s uch relief, ease and happiness as he had not known for months; and that night, unhaunted, unashamad, unpursœd by fears and furies and visions of his ruin and failure for the first time in many months, he sank dreamlessly • • • into the depths of a profound anà soundless sleep. {~, p. 446) This emotional evisceration on Eugene's part is a tremendously significant episode in his life, and in American letters. It is nothing less tban the case history of a potential anti-Semite, to use the critical term, puhlically confessing and so rejecting the entire phenomenon of guilt transference from his unconscious mind; and this through a mightr impulse to be honest and truthftil vith himself at any coat. This is typical of Wolfe. He could be terrifically unjust and aggressively abusive to people, but it was never a permanent condition. He always bad to come to terms wi th the world and himself again, recognizing and puhlishing the truth in the round, rejecting whatever and whomever was cowardly or false. From the 59- loneliness of his own isolation, he reached across what would have been for another of his background an unbridgeable chasm, and he found affection and fidelity from an unexpected source. 11 And from that moment, through avery change of fortune, • • • this Jew, Abe Jones, the first manswarm atom he bad come to know in all the desolation of the million-footed city--bad been his loyal friand." {~, p. 447) llolfe vent on to explore Abe •s character and enviromnent with a sympathy and intelligence that no American Gentile bas ever e:xhibited, before or since. He probed the nature of Abe's peculiarly urban make-up; "he [Âbi/ was honest, loyal, somehow good and memorable, grained with the life and movement of a thousand streets, seasoned and alert, a living character, a cityman." (Ol'&TR, p. 458) He observed the complex and alien structure of Abe's home life: his immigrant family and their life on the East Sida, the circumstances so poignantly portrayed in Michael Gold's ~ Without Money. And he marvelled at their courage and self-sufficiency. He was especially alert to the keen intellectual orientation of the family, a specifically Jewish feature in domestic life: "And all of them, even the most unlettered, seemed to have a com.pletely natural una!fected interest and respect for the arts, or for scholarly and intellectual attainment.n (OT&TR, P• 497) Sherwood Anderson, fashionably anti-Semitic in his witings, was also astonished, in his contacts with Jews, at the voracious appetite they exhibited for intellectual success, anà the awestruck homage they paid him simply because he was a writer. "Is it not quite amazing? Is it not an amazing race? There is this culture hunger. They have the idea that I am culture. "13

1%herwood Anderson, Letters of Sherwood Anderson (Boston, 1953), p. 111. Eugene warmed toward the rich fabric of Abe•s heritage, yet remained always on its periphery. For he found once more in Abe's family the familiar Pentland-Joyner mystique symbolically recreated. And there, too, he was always on the outside. Abe's position in his own family is not unlike Eugene•s in his. Abe is "one of the youngest• of a large family that is in its attachments "close, complex and passionate" (OT&TR, p. 458), even though there is strife between its individual members. Sylvia, Abe 1s older sister, plays a role startingly like Ben's role in the Gant circle. She too is "lost,n but her potential warmth and vitality and creativity have been vitiated and submerged in the rat race of city lire rather than in the suffocating environment of the small town. Her one straightforward emotion is her fierce and protective love for her brother Abe. And her affection for him is like Ben•s was for Eugene-·surly and tacit, but deeply loyal. It shows itself in gestures of financial assistance;

she pays part of Abe 1s university fees, though Abe's pride forbids her paying the whole. Abe woulà not be beholden to her for favours. "On this score, inàeed, he had the most sensitive and tender pride of any one Eugene had ever known." (OT&TR, p. 463) The irritation of owing one's university education to family bounty was something Wolfe could yell appreciate. Abe's mother is a kind of raritied and mythicized Eliza.

She is unlike Eliza in her personality, but she has the eternal "tribal look" and character, starkly and primitively expressed. She impresses Eugene with her agelessness, with her ancient visage of ingrained 6L

Jewish griefs, as rocklike and imm.ovable as the earth itselt.

• ••• for her, as for the God abe worshipped, the passing of seven thousand years was like the passing of a single day.n (Ol'&rR, p. 492) The rock and centre of ber frunily, abe is untouched by the transience of the city lite around ber, and she provides the necessary sense

of permanence by which the family endures. 11She was the fertile and enduring earth from vhich they sprung." (Ol'&TR, p. 494) This is the impression Wolfe bad of all the women who were significant to bim.

The eartb is the female context anà be was sensitive to women who possessed this granite quality.

Eugene is ultimately ambivalent in his feelings about the

Jones 1 family. On the one banà be is drawn to ~;he finds them warm, vital and interesting individuals. But there is an opposing tension in them as a group which shuts him out of tbeir midst. He is atill the alien, and the final meaning of tbeir intimacy eludes him. When con­ fronted with their clannishnesa, an unconscious drawing togetber on the ir part, be is burt be cause he is so pointedly isolated. He feels bimselt palpably out of their realm, as when he watcbes Abe and one of his sisters enjoying themselves with her piano-playing. Abe listened to the music when she played vith an obscure and murk.y smile: he seemed to know a great deal about music; it awakened a thousand subtle echoes in his Jewish soul, but for Eugene, somehow, the music, am something arrogant, scornful and secretive in their lmowingness toge:iiher with ••• a terrible sensation of thousands of other knowing Jews • • • who were ooming from concerts at that moment, awakened in him vague but powerful emotions of nakedness, rootlessness, futility and misery, which even the glorious memory of the power, exultancy anà joy of poetry could not conquer or subdue. The scene evoked for him suddenly a thousand images of a sterile and damnable incertitude, in which man groped indefinitely along the smooth metallic aides of a world in which tbere was neither warmth, nor depth, nor door to enter, nor walls to shelter him: • • • (~, p. 464) 62 ..

At the very moment Eugene reels incertitude, Abe and the ether Jews are united in ce>Dnon appreciation. Their enjoynent, to

Eugene, 1s a racial phenomenon; they seem to draw upon a vast heritage of musical appreciation and this strengthens their joy and certitude, even as it underscores Eugene•s sense of limho and personal vacuity.

Eugene's awareness of racial character operates even in his observance of the simple joys and accomplishments of the Jews. He finds baffling the subtle and see.m.inglydisrespectful nature of their treatment of one another. The vay they argued amongst themselves was a mystery to him. Their discussions were not straightforward, naive, and impassioned as were Eugene's with his fellow students at the State University. The Absolute Negation of things was not the meat of these students, practised in the subtle weavings of the Law, and interested in the prosaic minutiae of lite here and now. They were concerned with the fine points, the sophisticated trimmings of argument. To Eugene they seem cynical; there was this ancient knowingness and world-weariness in their intellectual ripostes. The ir humour was of the sa.me order. The ir affection seemed to be f'ounded on mutual derision. They were masters of the insult--as they are yet. And they loved it; they vied for top honours in the art of one-upmanship. To Eugene, for whom any form of ridicule was painful in the extreme, this was incredible. But then he had never confronted a group of people whose outlook on life was simply ironie--not •cynical" as he imagined. Essentially the ironie viev of lite is an acknowledgement of the perennial disparity between ideal beliet and the actualities of lite. It is the "humour of exile,• the comedy of endurance: the knowledge that nothing is too low for the human mind to conceive--nor too magnificent. This saves them from either extrema. And Wolfe seems to understand this later on, as he ~ites:

They [the Jewi/ seeœà to have gaineà from life the terrible patience, the olà and crafty skill and caution that came from long enduring of pain: as he lookeà at them he knew that they would never be wild or drunken, or beat their knuckles bloody on a wall, or lie beaten and senseless in the stews, but he knew that with smooth faces they would decant the bottle for some man who did, and that they would read him quietly to his desperate face with their dark, mocking and insatiate eyes. They bad learned that a savage word would break no bonas • • • in the years that followed he saw that physically they were, for the most part, incorrupt, old and cautious, filled with skill and safety--that they bad lived so long and grown so wise ..... tbat their subtle, million­ noteà minds could do without and hold in dark contempt the clumsy imperfections af a fleshly evil·- ••• (OT&TR, P• 481)

There is great bitterness in Wolfe as he ~ites this, for he was one who did beat his knuckles blooày on the wall. For he held the tragic view of life--or elsa he held the comic. But the Jewta history precludes a comic view of life, while he instinctively avoids the suicidal tragic view. Irony is his self-protection, but it is a mystery to those not brad to it. "Irony, then, is an enigma because it transcenda categories of pain or joy; it resolves ambivalence in a mysterious way.n 14

Even though much of Abe •s way of life remains a mystery to Eugene, his intuition that they have much in common is correct. Indeed, at times young Abe reflects to an astonishing degree the youth of

Eugene Gant. The portrait below, unconsciously drawn on Wolfe 'a part, no doubt, could have been Eugene himself back at the State University:

l4 Irving Malin, ~ .!!:.9 Americans (Carbondale, 1965), p. 1.34. At this time Abe was in a state of obscure and indefinable evolution: it vas impossible to say what he would become • • • he was tormented by a dozen obscure desires and purposes and by a deep b'jlt murky emotionalism: his flash was ugly, bowed, and meagre--conscious of a dreary inferiority, ••• but his spirit was sustained by an immense and towering vanity, a gloomy egotism which told him he was not as other men, that his thoughts and feelings were too profound and rare to be understood and valued by the world around him. At the same time he was secretly and fiercely ambitious, although the energy of his ambition was scattered in a half dozen directions and could fasten on no purpose • • • (Ot&TR, p. 467) And so Wolfe found in Abe Jones not only a loyal friand but a kindred spirit. The gray little •pavement cipher• came to represent the most significant aspects of urban life for Eugene. The irony of Abe's symbolic triumph of fact over ideal belief is brought into stark relief by Eugene's visit at the astate of Joel Pierce, ostensibly the best and most appealing product of •old America." His family are the

American aristocracy; their value is the incarnation of all that

Americans hold dear--the triumph of monay. In Eugene 1s fantasias of the golden life in the North, they were his ideal family: people of enormous wealth, living graciously and elegantly in a fine old American mansion on the faery Hudson, and surrounded, of course, with the finest in American culture.

But at close range, Eugene 1s vision is confronted with disillusioning reality. Joel's family are sterile in spite of the appurtenances of a great heritage. Their security is tenuous, and they cling to moribund customs and gestures in order to give meaning to what is in fact meaningless, at least for them. Like all Americans, they have bean tricked into the beliaf that they are the trustees of a long and glorious history, but they are not. The library, filled with the suprame treasures of the world's finest minàs, goes unreaà and unvisited. The Pierce spirit is unàernourished for all its rich boàily trappings. It remains for Eugene, the "son of an unlettered race,• to attempt to reaà avery volume in the library, in the night while veryone else sleeps, and of course it is an impossible task. There is no quick or easy road to culture. The problem is partly summed up when Eugene takes leave of Joel at the station. He is not happy to return to the grime and violence of the city, but he realizes that it is the only honest course, for life on the Hudson is not .!:!!1:· Joel is lost to him; he belongs to the Hudson and another age. Something has come between them: Abe Jones, the new Amerioan, has come between them. Eugene 1 s impulses turn him ever toward the reality principle in life, while Joel's sensibilities shrink avay from the real world, turning baok to the •magic• vorld of the faery Hudson. The doors of the train close and they say good•bye to each other. And at the same moment, as that door swng shut between them, a nd he saw that it could never be opened any more, he felt, with the knowledge of that irrevocable losa, a moment•s swift and rending pity for his friand. For he saw that somehow he vas lost-that there vas nothing for him now but shadows on the vall--circean make-believe--that world of moonlight, magic and painted smoke that •the river people" knew. (~, p. 595) Having been initiated into the mysterious paradoxes of city life, having once and for all understooà that his youthful ideals--and his youthful prejuè1ces--were not as he had conceived them, Eugene is free to prepare for Europe, a confirmed exile once more. But years later Wolfe looked back at this whole period of his life in Manhattan 66 ..

and he was able to write to the Chancellor of N.Y.U.: As time goes on, and I have been able to get more detach­ ment and perspective on my years at New York University, I have realized that being there is one of the most valuable and fruitful experiences of my whole life. I can think of no other way in which a young man, coming to this terrifie city as I came to it, could have had a more comprehensive and stimulating introduction to its swarming life, than through the corridors and classroams of Washington Square • • • • • • anèl it seemed to me that without making comparisons, that whatever happens to our universities in the future, Washington Square was somehow closer to reality than Cambridge.15

15 In a latter from Thomas Wolfe to Henry Woodhouse Chase, The Corres- ponèence .!:! Thomas ~ !E!! ~ Andrew liill (New York, 1954):P. 52. The woman had become a world for him--a kind of New America--and now he lived in it, explored it all the time. (From~ Web and .:!ill!~)

CHAPTER III

Europe vas, not unpredictably, another lost lane-end into exile--not heaven--for Thomas Wolfe and Eugene Gant. Although

Wolfe àid some of his best and most lyrical descriptions of America in the foreign atmosphere of the English countryside and the Roman hills, he never felt more helplessly solitary and uprooted than in the midst of those age-weathered cultures. Unconsciously he had expected, in the first trip abroad, like Fried's companions, sorne mysterious communion to spring up between himself and the Europeans. He believed that his desire alone for the "door" was somehow the key to the secret language uniting these original old Americans.

Wolfe 1s passionate longing to fathom the well of their heritage, particularly in England, derived from his long, thus far unchallenged belief in the rock-like stability and uniform wealth of the European cultures. At the State University, he had bemoaned the dearth of a real cultural histary in America. At Harvard, the feeling vas intensified that Europe vas the only creditable place to imbibe a true aesthetic experience. American letters were patronizingly dismissed by his peers as beneath the attention of the confirmed student of literature. And Eugene's friendship vith Starwick stimulated him in his vision of Europe as an escape from the philistinism of the American spirit.

67 68.

Since Starwick was Eugene's only really artistic friend at school and in his life thus far, Eugene accorded him a revered niche in the hierarchy of his dreams of beauty and good. He loyally guarded Starwick's enigmatic mystique in the face of the yahoos around them, echoing Starwick •s assertion that it was the fault of the world, and not his, that he vas not the creative artist he could be. Eugene allowed him this posture of aesthetic martyr, and even revelled in it, for until then no single person had ever brought into his somewhat drab young life auch faery magic as had this elegant and mysterious visitor from sorne foreign sphere of existence. Now, vith Starwick, and for the first time, he felt this magic constantly--this realization of a life forever good, forever warm and beautiful, forever flàshing with the fires of passion, poetry and joy, forever filled with the swelling and triumphant confidence of youth, its belief in new lands, morning, and a shining city, its hope of voyages, its conviction of a fortunate, good and happy life-­ an imperishable happiness and joy--that was impending, that would be here at any moment. (~, p. 274)

An old story with Eugene. Always he would be betrayed by the magnificent possibilities of an ideal life, an ideal person, only to be oonfronted vith the misery and disillusion of hard fact. That is the way it happened with Starwick. Meeting Starwick in Paris was a heaày shock for Eugene; here was the starry creature of his imagination in his rightful setting, or so it should have been. For Paris, the gracions land of Flaubert, was Mecca to the young aesthetes of the Twenties, an oasis of true culture where the flame-like artistic spirit, impoverished and denigrated in America, could come into its own. The impact of the two false visions shattering at once was almost ruinous for Eugene. starwick's ultimate message for Eugene is the futility of trying to bridge a gap that may not even exist in the first place.

Starwick 1s wretchedness in America was a failure in himself to grasp and make his own the American scene; it was there and it was real, but not for one such as Starwick, a star-gazer and a dreamer of false dreams. His physical impotence reflects a psychicàl inability to put his talents to use; they lie still-born. Paris for him is an escape, not from the sterility of American culture, but into the fearful emptiness of self-delusion and meaninglessness.

Eugene 1s rejection of Starwick and Ann, Who loves him, is a healthy and typical impulse on his part. Intuitively he comas to realize, though only after much soul-searching and mental grief, that Starwick and Ann have betrayed the best part of themselves, not only in a sexual sense, but in a pàyohical and intellectual way as well. They serve, in a symbolic sense, as Eugene's perennial

"adversarius, 11 silently exhorting him to the pa th of health and self-fulfillment, away from ali that is unwholesome and tainted with the death-instinct. Starvick is a lost creature with no hope of redemption, but Eugene escapes his kind of fate. Recognizing that he has been duped once more by his chronic inability to face and identify reality, Eugene is assailed by a consuming home-sickness for ali that is real, solid and familiar to him. If he is to endure exile, it should be in a land that he loves, 70. even as its real significance continues to elude him. In Tours he is overcome with a longing for home, with the terrible homelessness of a man who longs for home and has no home--with the • • • hopeless, incurable and unutterable homesiokness of the American, who is maddened by a longing for return, and does not know he oan return • • • who has no goal or ending for hia hunger ••• (OT&TR, p. 857) The trip to Europe bad again brought home with painful clarity Ben's warning that there is no happy land, that loneliness in the child of destiny is an inescapable phenomenon, and the only real voyage ia inward,Ha retreat into discovery of self,n1 rather than outward, into the still more lonely cities of the world beyond America. Once understood, this clarity of preception cannot be avoided. It is an inevitable tension in the heart of man. As Wolfe wrote to his sister in 1933, I can only say that the habit of loneliness, once formed, grows on a man from year to year and he wanders across the face of the earth, and has no home, anà is an exile, and he is never able to break out of the prison of his own loneliness again, no matter how much he wants to.2 The voyage back to America was the beginning of a new plateau of growth in Wolfe's life. There was in him now the added maturity gained through bitter experience, the loss of a loved friand and a golden vision. There was the settled patience of an accepted solitude. But paraooxically the trip home was also a beginning of love, companionship, and real communication, the

~ichard Walser, Thomas Wolfe: An Introduction and Interpretation (New York, 1961), p. 5. -- - 2 $etters of Thomas ~ (New York, 1956), p. 371. 71. beginning of a "period of certitude," which vas to last several years before its inevitable disruption. The aerendipitous meeting vith

Aline Bernstein, Esther Jack in ~ Web and ~ ~ and I2g ~ Qg Home Again, heralds the most peaceful and auspicious time of his life. Like a primitive and mythic ark, the great ship bound for America embraces the people of Eugene's future, the luminous "flower face" in their centre, and the "door• to his past is closeà forever.

And now all the faces pass in through the ship's great side (the tender flower face among them). Proud, potent faces of rich Jews, alive vith wealth and luxury, glow in rich, lighted cabins; the àoors are olosed, and the ship is given to the darkness and the sea. (OT&TR, p.912> Thomas Wolfe's relationship with Aline Bernstein, wealthy and creative matron of New York 1s highest social echelons, is certainly one of the most fascinating in all of literary biography.

Indeed, it is questionable whether Wolfe would have written~ Homevard, Angel as we have it vithout her unfailing help and encouragement. Certainly he woulà not have published it as early as he did, and perhaps not with Scribners and Maxwell Perkins. She is of interest not only for her attachment to Wolfe, though. A fine novelist in her ovn right, she was primarily a vell-known stage designer, and a social intimate of practically all the artistic and financial lions of the day. But for Wolfe she was mentor, mother, and friand, the best he ever had; this he never denied t~~ough all the bitterness and reproach that marred the latter part of their affair. As a literary creation, Esther Jack has an enormous significance in Wolfe's work. It is around her, her work, and her contacts that much af the last two novels revolves, and it is the 72. love affair between ber and George Webber which gives so much of the substance and form to the later years of his productivity. It is hardly too much to say that her influence in Wolfe's writing was as significant as that of the Gant family in ~ Homeward, Angel. Both literally and symbolically, Eugene's initial encounter with Esther is the result of his surreptitious visit to the wide expanse of the first class deck of the boat from his cramped tourist class position, where vision is limited. Their attraction for each other was swift and spontaneous as beth of them tell it. In The Journey Down (1938), Mrs. Bernstein relates that the youth she bad just met on board ship was aggressively attentive to her from their first meeting. From the beginning, he was fascinated with ber life and its golden, glamorous aura of high living, demanding to know the whole of it in one brief evening. He would grasp her by the shoulders, shake ber and' question ber furiously, soliciting the most intimate details of ber background. This may well be an imaginative recreation of what was perhaps only typical Wolfean curiousity, but it is not an exaggerated account of the turn their relationship was to take in New York. Esther Jack's Manhattan was the glamorous world of wealth and fashion, brownstone town bouses, and plum velvet dresses: the Manhattan emblazoned on the heart of every country youth who ever dreamed of the big city. Hers was a city reality, not the sordid, struggling reality of an Abe Jones, but one of dazzling satisfaction in the best that New York bad to offer. And she had everything: 73. great beauty, glowing health, talent, an insatiate curiousity for the life arouno her, the quick and illuminating intelligence of a wise and sympathetic lover. Adoreà by everyone she met, she loved only George Webber, with an unswerving and dedicated loyalty to his as yet unknown genius, the kind of a love avery man dreams of, but that few earn. In the beginning of the affair, Monk was in a state of artistic limbo. He knew that he could not hope to continue writing for the theatre any longer. His creativity oid not lend itself to that medium, and soon he began to think in terms of a great series of novels, covering avery aspect of his own life, and including the lives of practically everyone he had ever known. Nevertheless, he continued to teach at N.Y.U., still driven by the practical exigencies of earning a living. For a time his work proceeded desultorily but happily unàer the new influence of Esther Jack. Inevitably, however, the strain of work and the necessity of seeing her at impractical hours began to tell on his writing. In the second year of their friendship, he had moved into a "studio,n ostensibly taken to satisfy Esther's need for privacy in her work, but tacitly agreed on as a place for Monk to write and be alone with her. None but the most unregenerate of anti-Freudians would deny the obvious "Oedipaln overtones in the relationship. Even in appearance, Mrs. Bernstein bore a striking physical resemblance to

Julia Wolfe. Both were small, vivacious-looking, and "almost childlike in stature,•3 with brown hair shot by streaks of gray. Indeed,most or

3 Elizabeth Norvell, Thomas Wolfe: ! Biography {New York, 1960), P• 25. the women Wolfe admired had this general appearance. There was in Mrs. Bernstein the "limitless energy" and "indomitable will" so typical of Wolfe's mother, and both exercised it in their respective

0 professions, 8 the theatre and the boarding house. Eugene•s feeling that "he hated the jargon of the profession" (1fiA, p. 169) was again to be a prophetie one. Moreover, for long, consecutive periods of time in his life, Wolfe was dependent financially on them; in each case, he harboured fierce resentment at this source of revenue and the kind of nexus it formed. Interestingly, Wolfe 1s will divided his astate, such as it was, between the two women. In the beginning there was a tremendous fascination with Mrs. Bernstein's work. Wolfe always cherished every aspect of theatre production; and his turning away from it and the people associated with it was, one feels, more the result of his being always the outsider looking in, and not the fault of the crowd he identified with it so vitriolically later on. Of course, his very intimacy with Mrs. Bernstein only exacerbated his feeling of exclusion from her world, and this was the principal, if unconsciously sought-after, wound; "the greater his bond to a~one, the deeper the resentment Wolfe could feel •••• n4 The resentment was to come later. First was the elevating and satisfying conviction that he had come back, under Esther's aegis, to his beloved home once more. "Through you, I slid back into America again •••• n5 For she did symbolize a new and wonderful

4 Kennedy, ER• ill•, p. 12.

\uoted in R. Walser, .912.• ill•' P• 6. 75.

America to him. She wae the very incarnation of fin-de-siecle excitement. She had experienced and stored in a memory second in strength only to Wolfe's all the high glory of a world lost to him: the gay, mobile,

and passionate ambience of pre-war Manhattan. She was a child of the city. Unlike Abe Jones, she wae a third-generation American, a native to New York long before the sordid ghettoization of the Lower East Side, and the hostile atmosphere of interracial jealousies. Hers was not the murky doggedness of Abe and his family, determined to make a place for themselves in the crush of the teeming manswarm. Hers was the charming response to a city that was essentially elegant and aesthetic, whose crowds posed no threat to her individuality, whose most exciting and coruscating àenizens were at her feet. She unfolded against this background like a perfect blossom, face turned upwards to the radiance ar a life that never failed to move her, and solicit the best of her character and personality. For Esther the transitory nature of city life was the throb and pulse of life itself. "She loved the unending crowds as a chilà might love a river or tall, blown grass." (TW&TR, p. 381) As countrified as Monk was, Esther was that much an urban creature. "She was the city's daughter just as he had been the proàuct of the town.• As this projection of her world comas into his focus, he clutches at it, realizing that through her, he may come to know New York, and perhaps America, in a way he had never dreamed possible before. 76.

it seemed to him that now at last he had begun to "know" the city. For, in some curious way, the woman had come to represent "the city" to him •••• Hers was not the city of the hameless wanderer, the city of the wretched, futile people living in the roams of little cheap hotels • • • the terrible, lonely, empty city of no doars, and of the homeless, thronging ways. Hers was the city of the native, and now it seemed to him that he was "in." (~, p. 390) The sense of •drowning ,daily in the manswarm" left him. He moved in a world of luxury, ease and warmth, and much as he vilified it later,

"it all seemed wonderful, happy, and inspired to him now. 11 (TW&TR, p. 382) This initial delight with Esther's life and his appreciation of the order and satisfaction she finds in it have a relaxing influence on Monk's frantic concern over time, his perennial enemy. Through ber, he accumulates a vast store of time past. She is a weaver of tales, as Aunt Maw bad been in his youth and Eliza in Eugene 1s. Like so many

Jews, for 'Whom the past is a real and integral part of their lives, she was able to project an image of herself as a constant kaleidscope of events and people. In her and in their relationship, as in Jewish 6 history, "recollection becomes a guiding principle8 ; through her, he regains the time lost to him before his birth. When he cannot capture her mood, when he cannot perceive the wellsprings of her thought, he is morbid and solitary. She is given to deep, primitive reveries that snatch her away from time present. These remain enigmatically inexplicable to Monk's satisfaction and then he regards ber with "jealous curiosity.n From her position as

"the fleshy unity that bound him suddenly to the ghostly past," she slips away and he feels •tricked and cheated and baffled by a elever- ness and subtlety of living that was too old, too wise and crafty, for him to fathom or contend with.n (~, p. 369)

6 rrving Malin, .QE• cit., p. 58. 77.

Although references to any of the new psychoanalytical theories of that time are short and cryptically expressed in Wolfe 1s puhlished work, he was deeply fascinated by its underlying concepts. Mrs. Bernstein was herself psychoanalyzed by a leading doctor of the day, the translater of seme of Jung •s work. During her period of analysis, which lasted seme two years, Wolfe would demand to know exactly what went on in the sessions with Dr. Hinckle. Since most of

Mrs. Bernstein 1s friands were conversant with the new fad, the subject must have been a common tepic in her circ:la. Wolfe was particularly excited by Jung 1s theories of the racial unconscious, the collective intuition of the past. Mrs. Bernstein relates that wrom believed that people knew more than they knew--that is, what their ancestors had known.n7 This accounts in part for Wolfe's frenzied zeal, at one time, to trace back to its origins his father's family tree, and it also helps to explain his attachment to Germany later on as an intimate part of his cultural heritage. Certainly this progressive kind of thinking, encouraged by Mrs. Bernstein, guided him more and more toward the autobiographical appraoch in his novels, especially in

~ Homeward, ~' which ws largely written in the company of Mrs. Bernstein. He must have felt that the closer to reality he came in his work, the more self-knowledge, in the completest sense, he would attain; that the outward projection of self through memory would inevitably lead into the "retreat into discovery of self."

In Esther Jack 1s past, faithfully recreated from Mrs. Bernstein's recollections, Monk finds almost an entire family circle, expressed in

7 Quoted in Kennedy, ~· ~., p. 116. 78. mythic and ideal terms. In her reveries, he comes to fasten on her father as both a spirituel father substitute and a kind of alter ego. The father search was a constant and consciously indigenous theme in

Wolfe 1s work. At first the search developed along the broad, epie lines of a voyage to his father's land, the lost balf of his heart•s home. As the North failed to materialize in terms of his childhood vision, he cast around for something more tangible, some person on whom he might place the burden of his dream. Eventually he would translate the search into the figure of Maxwell Perkins. At Harvard, he placed faith in George Pierce Baker, the great drama teacher and critic, but the relationship was unsatisfying in many ways, particularly because Wolfe was tremendously immature at the time and merely hero--worshipped his teacher. Upon arrival in the cold light of New York's reality, he beoame bitterly disillusioned with Baker and dropped almost all contact with him. In Perkins he was to find a love returned, a respect and fidelity founàed in actuality; Perkins consciously treated him as the son he bad never haà. And his editorial guidance was, of course, far more productive than Baker's bad been. In Joseph Frankau, Joe Linder in the novels, Wolfe found a romantic, etherealized rather figure. Even at the end of Q! Time

~ the River, Esther had said to Eugene: "how like the wild, lost soul of youth you are, how like my wild lost father who will not returnL" (OT&TR,p. 911) Apparently the identification was to be a comforting one on both aides. One wonders how much of Wolfe's chaotic and unpredictable life Mrs. Bernstein oould have endured, 79. were it not for his great similarity to the rather she bad adored and idealized. Mrs. Bernstein's reflections in An Actor's Daughter are al.most exactly as Wolfe developed them in The Web and ~ Rock. At one time, Wolfe had projected a whole novel which was intended to record Esther's life with her rather, to be entitled 1h! ~ Child 's River. In The Web !!!à !!:!! Rock, her stories recall with great clarity a man much like Wolfe and Wolfe' s rather. Joe Linder bad the brooding aura of the eternal etranger, the lost mien of the mythic wanderer, an exile on the face of the earth. It seemed to me that the sense of loneliness and exile, of a brief and alien rest, as if some winged spirit had temporarily arrested flight upon a foreign earth, was more legible on him now than it had ever been. Suddenly I felt all the strangeness of his life and destiny--his remoteness from all the life I knew. I thought of his strange childhood, and of the dark miracle of chance which had brought him to my mother and the Jews--an alien, a etranger, and an exile among dark faces--wi th us but never of us. Am I felt more than ever before a sense of our nearness and farness; I felt at once closer to him than to anyone on earth, and at the same time farther from him. Already his life had something fabulous anà distarit in it; he seemed to be a part of some vanished and irrevocable time. (TW&I.'R, p. 423) This is Esther speaking of her rather, but could she not be speaking of George Webber himself, and could these not be Eliza's thoughts about Gant, coming in a •dark miracle of chance0 to the Pentlanàs? She speaks for all women who have bound themselves to the fate of etrangers on the earth; symbolically she echoes Wolfe's intuition that there is an ineffable tension, mythic and ineluctable, operating in the lives of all people who grapple with life in its broadest implications. 80.

Joe Linder•s life is what might have been Gant•s; they had the same exuberant love for rhetoric and grandiloquence, the same marvellous gusto for life, the same careless affection for their rami­ lies, who adored them in spite of their unreliability and wildness.

In one sequence, sketched but never published, Wolfe portrayed himself as Monkey Hawke, seeking a rather lost in the civil war. Later Monkey marries a Jewish woman who gives him a beautiful daughter, Esther. There are two levels of interpretation operative here. The rather lost in the Civil War is America; Wolfe believed that America had some111here lost her magnificent promise of uniform greatness, and that the losa had oocurred in the great sohism between North and South. Gant is symbolic of the man with pre-war greatness, whose strength and . potential is vitiated by the oonfused and alien values of an essentially non-Amerioan milieu. On the more obvious level, Wolfe is seeking to identify bimself with a tangible vision of his dead rather, and in so doing, grant himself the inheritance he never had: a continuation of Amerioan beauty and produotivity, incarnate in the most perfeot form he had yet encountered. At the same time, Wolfe maintains his own eternal position of the alien and the outsider. Even the name "Esther" is meaningful here. For Esther in the original Biblical story was the most beautiful maiden in the realm. She was chosen to marry Achasuerus, the Gentile king, after all the other lovely women have been reviewed and rejected. Through her and her people, Achasuerus • life is saved, and so are all the Jews of the land. The allegory cannot be stretched too far, but the essential signifioance is apparent. 81.

Wolfe was again on the periphery of a conspicuously Jewish world, but Esther•s Jewishness was of a different sort than Abe Jones', and one that did not evoke the fears and guilt of earlier days. In Abe he had come to terros with the murky, gloomy athos of a Joyner cast. Now he came to know and love the happier and richer elements of the

Jewish mystique. In this new context he associated it with the opulent world of his rather. Esther Jack's environment was a world of luxury, comfort, and easy money; of success,fame, and excitement; of theatres, books, artiats, writers; of delicious food and wine, good restaurants, beautiful fabrics, and lovely women. It was a world of warm, generous and urbane living; • • • (~, p. 382) In his eager exploration of this world, ""lolfe attached great value to what was particularly Jewish in it. He could see that Esther and her friends, whatever faults they had, knew how to enjoy life without stinting themselves, something that Wolfe, through his mother's influence, could not do without puritanicol twinges of conscience.

Nevertheless, he defended and praised their life-affirming joy in the aolid material comforts: One of the finest elements in the Jewish character is its sensuous love of richness and abundanoe: the Jew hates what is savorless and stingy in life, he will not stand for bad food or dreary discomfort, he willnot make jokes about them, or feel it is a fine thing to cheat the senses. He feels there is something mean and degraded about poor living, he loves warmth and opulence, and he is right. (~, p. 364) Wolfe paid tributs to many of Esther's friands whom he admired. He was fascinated with Mr. Rosen, a self-made man of wealth, who had developed his once small shop on Grand Street into a fashionable ladies' wear establishment on Fifth Avenue. Wbat amused and delighted Wolfe was the undisguised pride Mr. Rosen took in the origins of his wealth. 82.

He would not dissociate his private life from the source of his money, as though to earn money in trade were somehow not comme il faut, as many Gentiles felt. }fr. Rosen revelled in hiswalth, and ahrays lived ovcr his store, even on Fifth Avenue. He acted according to the code of American commercialism and made no bones about it. The aristocracy of money, upon which America had become what it was, was not shameful to him. He haà the same kind of honesty that Wolfe admired in Fried at Oxford. Mr. Rosen is described as "a handsome anà powerful man, very Jewish-looking, dark, fiercely Oriental." (TW&TR, p. 437)

His rich heritage is patent in his bearing, which is at all times aristocratie and serene: There was in him a vast pride of race, a vast pride in the teil and intelligence which had brought him his wealth. For this reason, Mr. Rosen had a very princely quality--the princely quality that almost all rich Jews have, and that rew Christians ever get. (TW&TR, p. 438)

This pride of weal th is reflected, 1·!olfe felt, in the generosity and freedom with which Jews spend and eXhibit,it. Thus he scorned the common fallacy that the Jevr is stingy by nature, a myth deriving from the Shylock image which persists in the Christian vision of the Jew. "There is, of course, no greater fallacy than the one about the stinginess of Jews. They are the most lavish and opulent race on earth." Even Esther's Gentile friends are aware of the security and ease surrounding the lives of these rich Jews, unclouded by obscure gnawings of guilt in the elegant trappings of riches. While the wealthy Gentile cannot shake from his unconscious mind the promise that his money will prevent him from a heavenly rewarà, the Jew suffers from no such compunctions. As Tevye the dairyman, Sholem Aleichem's

pristinely Jewish creation, puts it, "It is no sin to be poor--but it is no great honour, eitherl" Stephen Hook, a writer torn by self-doubt and insecurity to the point of physical pain, is drawn to the Jews by just this attitude on their part. He hated the Puritan heritage, whose constraining and terror-ridden strictures had daminated his life.

And he is drawn to the gaiety and peace of Esther 1s world. For ten years Hook had turneà more and more to certain Jews in New York for companionship. His mind, with its hunger for the rich and sumptuous, drew back wearily and with disgust from the dry sterility and juiceless quality of his own Puritan inheritance. (~~&!B, p. 476) In this other place of opulence and joy, Hook drew nourishment. UHook was often sarry he had not been born a Jew.n The good life of Esther Jack could not satisfy Monk forever. No one person's ever could unless his own did first, and that kind of spiritual peace lay far in the future. As he tired of the whirlwind activity in her crowd; as his insane jealousy, for he admitted it was,S left him less and less time for any tranquillity in their relationship, and as the old hunger for the great voyage came upon him more and more often, he became disillusioned and bitter. And until a long time later, he could not face the real ressons for his weariness and disgust. He blamed his inner turmoil in her world and its essential corruption--its

Jewish corruption. ~e saw her at the center of a corrupt and infamous world, ~habited by rich, powerful, and cynical people--great, proud, and potent beak-nosed Jews ••• n (TW&TR, p. 539) The old poison was at work in him again: the fear of the tribe, the feeling of his own

~~xwell Perkins claimed Wolfe's jealousy was "pathological." aloneness in the midst of their common understanding, the sense at persecution and martyrdom to their insatiate demanda on him.

Esther herself becames a 1creature apart fron him, remote and wrapped in her racial abstractions. She becomes a mythic, exotic figure, the old Lillith vision of his boyhooà fantasias. Fixed in an arrogant power, her face as he saw it then flamed like a strange and opulent jewel; in his feverish imagination it smouldered drowsily with all the slumbrous and insatiable passion of the East • • • a body to be taken by all men, and never to be possessed by any. (~, p. 547) In his anguish, he assigna her the symholic value of all the rapaèious Jewesses who pace the city, unknown and secretive as the city when he first knew it. And he was all the Gentile men sacrificed to their triumphant embrace: He saw a dark regiment of Jewish women in their lavish beauty • • • seated in power and wealth, and fitly walled by the arrogant and stupendous towers of the city • • • they paced with the velvet undulance of an intolerable sensuality the proud and aplendid chambers of the night. They were the living rack on which the trembling backs of all their Christian lovera had been broken, the living cross on 'Which the flash and marrow of Christian men had been crucified. (TW&T1h p. 547) It is the madness in himself that evokes these lurid images of his "persecutors," just as it was in the crushing horror of his confrontation with the Jewish students, and particularly the girl students, at N.Y.U. Here, too, the husbands and fathers of the Jewish women seem to be looking on their seductions with irony, cynicism, and an awful patience, exactly as the boy students had seemed to in school. And Esther's treatment of Wolfe, now possessive, now neglectful (orso it seemed to him) was too much like his mother's treatment of him not to evoke the same kind of frustration in the relationship. "This identification lay ready-ma.de, then, for him to attach to it the irrationalities that grew from his neurotic anguish.n9 He simply had to get away from her and her clan in order to save

himself from their devouring maw. The pattern is too similar to ignore. The city, too, assumes an insiduous and fearful visage. It

is nowa "trackless jungle,tt inhabited by a whole spectrum of 11 rats,

snakes, vultures. 11 And inside he knows that it is his own lack of productivity, his own fears and self-doubts that drive him to these fits of dark despair. WHe was a hater of living men who saw nothing but death and cold corruption in everything and everyone around

him • • • tt (TVI&TR, p. 555) In the long and painful separating process, Monk and Esther evoke in each other mutual contempt for the forces in background that are coming between them. Esther's innate feelings of racial and social superiority come to confront Monk's latent anti-semitism in a drawn-out period of recrimination and jealous reproach. What they really hate is the differences that must divide them simply because they have that power, and not for what they are in themselves. Each seizes on

the dangerous weapons at hand only to wound the other, and they know it. Monk jeers at her double standards of loyalty, one code for him and one for her family, on whose behalf she is always fiercely defensive.

He laughs at her fine friends in the theatre, uncovering all the tawdry aspects of her career. But Esther' s responses are far more lethal. i'Jhile Monk •s displays of feeling are directed at Jews in general and the more glaring

9 Kennedy, .2.E· oit., p. 168. 86. of their racial idiosyncrasies, Esther cuts to the very quick of Monk's most painful family memories. With unerring aim she attacks the Gentiles in a direct thrust at his ow family.

11God J You Christiane are a charining lot l You talk about the Jevsl Just try to find a Jew that would treat his sister's children in that wayl ••• You•ve reviled and hated all my people--and nov, I ask you, who's stuck by you, who's been your friand? •• ·" (TW&TR, p. 565) In all their repartees, Esther has the most telling responses. If Wolfe vas anti-Semitic, he has. certainly spared the enemy avery chance to avenge themselves. Indeed, as Maxwell Geismar claims, Esther's defence of her people and her treatment of him is anybody's beat refutation of the charge of anti-semitism laid against Wolfe. 10 If Wolfe's vague indictments against the Jews are wounding to Jewish vanity, Esther's against the Gentiles should be salvé enough for the most sensitive critic. The unkindest eut of all is Esther's reference to Monk's rather, the apogee, to her mind, of Gentile negligence in family relations. "You ought to thank him for all he's done for youl Thank him for making you an outcast and a wandererl ••.• Thank him for ma.king you hate yourself and your own life l" (TW&TR, p. 566)

There is no reply to this, orùy a tortured desire to be alone ,.n. th his pain. But as she leaves the apartment, Esther, anguished as she is, recalls herself to life, realizes that she cannot allow herself to sink into the pit of self-torment that leads to Monk •s kind of existence. Monk, too, sees Esther as the life principle, with himself surrounded, Manfred-like, by all the demons of death and darkness. He heaps the blame for the ir misery upon himself, knowing that she is 10 HaX\ve 11 GeJ.smar,• Wr i ters ,!g . Crl.Sl.S . . ( Boston, 19 4 2) , p. 222 • 87.

ultimately right in what she says ta him, and that she is the only true friand he has ever had.

He knew that she was right, and would be right if she went ta her grave with a ourse of wild denial on her lips, because such beauty, courage, love, and youth, and strength as she had known should not grow old, and should never die, and that truth was with her, no matter how inevitable the triumph of this all-devouring, all-victorious enemy. (TW&TR, P• 585) Yet still the debilitating quarrels and insulta continue, bath realizing the end is near, but neither villing ta relinquish the only holà they have left on each other--jealousy and pain. Monk sinks further and further into black dejection, but Esther is capable of maintaining an ironie face in the seriousness of everything, a particularly Jewish irony, which allows her ta appreciate the widening gap between them and its causes with far more clarity than

Monk 1s clouded and tragic perspective will allow. With old Jewish patience and acceptance, as though tried many times in such matters, she watches Monk, and in her musings she strikes ta the heart of Monk's ambivalence and tension.

nNow," she thought, 0 I know exactly what he's thinking •• I am the one he loves, his jolly little Jew that he adores and could devour, and I am also the evil wench vho lies in wait for unsuspecting country boys. I am the joy and glory of his life, and I am also the sinister and corrupt harpy who has been employed by the forces of darkness to kill and destroy his life • • •• The Jews hate the Christians, and they also love them •••• 'Yleave t i.feave t Weave 1 He weaves it day and night out of his crazy and tormented brain until not even Einstein could make head or tail of it--and yet he thinks it all as plain and clear as day l The Jews are the most generous and liberal people on enrth, and have the most wcnderful food upon their tables, but when they invite you ta eat it, they wai t until it gets halfway down your throat and you have a look of pleasure on your face, and then they say something cruel and cunning ta you in arder to make you lose your appetite." (~, P• 595) 88.

Clearly Monk 1s psychic equivocations are a well-known theme to her. And it is no accident that ber musings here and for the following pages dwell on the ltfoodtt aspects of their affair. For food to Wolfe (and to the Jews) was a highly emotionally-charged substance. Indeed, in his relationship with Esther, it takes on the colouring of an almost erotic deviee. Pages and pages are given over to the discussion of Esther's meals that she prepares every noon hot~ in the little studio. The cooking instructions that she relays in minute details are guaranteed to reduce Monk to putty in her bands; and his favourite, most endearing epithete for her are intimately bound up with the culinary world. Critics have declared these passages either repulsively exaggerated, or just plain repetitious, but their symbolic value should not be overlooked. Esther•s expert cooking and ber appreciation for the art of gourmandizing filled a real neeà in Honk •s emotional life. They represent the love and affection that Monk associated with the world of his father, and the rejection of the Pentland-Joyner's stringent worldly appetites. In the fantasy circus world of his father, Monk pictured great, brawny men all sitting down to eat breakfast, the descriptions of which are truly mouthwatering. As Eugene, he attached significance to the fact that his mother was always cooking for the boarding bouse people first, while he had to wait and eat afterwards. In Germany, his father's land, he revelled in the lavish window displays of food, discussed the German eating habits at great length, and complained that he was constantly starving, and could not t'ill himself, no matter how much he ate. There the "food n associations were to harbour startling and significant implications. Thus the Jewish love for good food, and plenty of it, was an extremely attractive aspect of their life in New York, and absolutely integral to his life with Esther. Esther is quick to appreciate this, and humorously envisions life without her as a painful series of dinners in the company of "seme little goy with a hank of yellow hairtt (TW&TR, p. 596), each meal an insipid and disgusting reminder of the good life he had left behind. "I knov nov what she'll give you. I can see itJ Oxtail soup out of a can with al1 the ox left out of it, picked-up codfish with a gob of that horrible, white gooey, Christian sauce, a alice of gluten bread, acido­ philus milk, and a piece ar stale angel cake that the little wench picked up at a bakery on her vay home from the movies." (TW&TR, p. 596)

Flushed vith pride in herself and her race by the end of her fantasy, she crows mentàlly, and vith understandable womanly satisfaction, ltif you forget all the rest of it, you•ll have to think of me each time you put a bite of Christian food into your mouth." (TW&TR, p. 597) But delicious as her food is, Monk is always on the receiving end of it, anà that is hovT their whole relationship seems to have been from the beginning. In everything she is superbly talented and productive, while Monk feels that he is stagnant. No real love could stand the strain of such an imbalance, and Esther •s valiant attempts to impress on him the necessity of turning to use his unlimited potential and will as she has done through the "hatred which she had for failure, her abhorence of indecision and confusion, and the almost material value which she set upon success--on a life and talent wisely used, and on a knowledge always guided by a clear design--" (Trl&TR, p. 598) cannet impose on him what does not come from within. 90.

The real end cames much later, follo~dng a second trip to

Europe and a year of reconciliation. It follows '~he Party at Jack's,n

~ Can•t Qg~ Again's novel within a novel, a brilliant summary of all the best and worst in the Jack universe, though some critics would have it as the worst only. If there are political and social commentaries in the piece, they do not obscure its main purpose, which is to gather together the influential factors in Monk 1s life for the past several years, and purge them emotionally. On the morning of the party, Wolfe takes us into the respective bedrooms of Mr. and !1rs. Jack for an intimate and leisurely character sketch of each. In both cases there is a foil to the main actor. For Mrs. Jack, it is Nora, the maid, and for Mr. Jack, Monk himself is the implied antithesis.

Surprisingly, Mr. Jack is not satirized and parodied within an inch of his life--surprisingly, since \·folfe could be a mas ter satirist, brilliant and merciless when he chose, and surprisingly, inasmuch as the entire party sequence was conceived as a huge satire on the more obvious foibles of the pre-crash Jack types. And yet his portrait of Frederick Jack, though laced with mildly ironie touches, is almost grudgingly admiring and fair. Wolfe is at pains to indicate to what extent l•fonk and Mr. Jack are opposites in temperament--and the burden of criticism more often than not falls on Monk•s shoulders. However, there are several indications of Monk's position as Mr. Jack's victim, a sop to his princely love of subject torture. For MT. Jack loved parties with all their sophisticated repartee, where some youthful 91.

initiate, in his bumbling rusticity, provided the fun for the ethers.

And Mr. Jack could frown patronizingly at the foolish antics of

nthe young Gentile fool, 11 who disturbed his sleep by ringing up his wife at two a.m. in a fit of juvenile jealousy. Frederick Jack is a kinà of businessman •s Aristotle in

Wolfe's eyes. If he is phlegmatic and serena in the face of lifels more lyrical moments, he is not at all indifferent or stupid or bull- headed, the prototypal American businessman. Rather he is simply absorbed in the mechanics of his own universe, circumvallated with steel towers and fortress-like stone walls. 11ithin those walls, Mr. Jack has his own dignity and character. He likes order and harmony and simplicity. He likes the spaciousness and comfort that come with wealth, the health and vigour of material well-being. In fact, Mr. Jack is a wholesame, healthy person. He is sarcastically drawn in part, but the irony doés not obscure the total pioture of dignity and strength. Mr. Jack is kind in a good, old-fashioned sense. He could be modern and sophisticated, but he never lost sight of human values. He liked the social swim, and the presence of the better sort of actors, artists, writers, and wealthy, cultivated Jews around his table. He had a kind heart and a loyal nature. His purse was open to a friand in need. He kept a lavish table and a royal cellar, and his family was the apple of his eye. ll Moderation and ripeness are at the heart of his charaoter. He is one of the tribe who vrill never beat their knuckles bloody on the i·lall. He would not "spend his strength on the impulse of a moment 's wild belier. This was such madness as the Gentile knew.n (YCGHA, p. 159) In short,

11 Thomas v1olfe, X2!:! Can 1t Q2 Home Again (New York, 1940), p. 159. Subsequent references i'lill be to this edition and will be indicated as YCGHA. 92.

Mr. Jack always knows when and where to stop. "His ancient and hebraio spirit was tempered with a classic sense of moderation • • • He knew the value of the middle way.n (YCGHA, p. 159) Mr. Jack's undeviating perseverance along the middle way is, then, according to Wolfe, part of his ancient heritage. This instinct protects him from the extremes of frivolity, any identification with the Piggy Logans of the world and their disciples, but also from the ecstacy of supreme lyrical intensity, Monk's own madness in the blood. Far from being a straw man for satirical purposes, as he may have been intended at one time, Mr. Jack impresses the reader as a rational man. Unlike Monk, he can see his own life in the proper perspective, limited as that persepctive is. mwben he saw a ninety­ story building, he was not one to fall down grovelling in the dust, and beat a maddened brain with fists, and cry out: Woe t 0 woe is mel"

(YCGHA, p. 156)

In the final analysis, Wolfe accords Frederick Jack a good measure of respect, if somewhat qualified by the irony of the personal contrast with himself; but he does not make the mistake of counting him as a good natured buffoon, simply because of his prosaic nature. Wolfe saw him as the scion of a long tradition of sane, and eventually triumphant people: "Perhaps some great inheritance of suffering, the long, dark ordeal of his race, had left him, as a precious distillation, this gift of balanced understanding.n (YCGHA, p. 160)

In one sequence, Wolfe even comes to praise Hr. Jack at Monk 's expanse. The very critical review acclaiming Esther's work, which Monk had once parodied and mocked out of jealousy and petty pride, Fred Jack 93. paroàies out of an affection and belief so deeply felt that he can only express it ironically. Where Monk is emotionally charged and self-absorbed enough to rasent Esther's talent, Frederick Jack is unselfishly delighted with it; it is outside of his own frame of reference and he is unstinting in his admiration. Mockingly, he addresses her in her bedroom before leaving for work as "Miss Esther Jack,n as the newspaper ha.d named her, gaily noting his own effacement from her friands' world with the suggestion that a businessman could not possibly understand it. And yet he appreciates her talent more than a.nyone else, even Monk, who has now come to see her as competition.

J okingly he scolds himself: "He 's nothing but a business mant He can 1t appreciate hart--and all at once, to her amazement, she saw that his eyee were shot with tears, . . .n (YCGHA, p. 1S3) Holfe uas touched by the old fashioned pride Hr. Jack took in his famUy and all that they did: And, strangely, for one who lived among all the constantly shifting visages of a feverish and unstable world, he had always held with tenacious devotion to one of the ancient traditions of his race--a beliet in the sacred and inviolate stability of the family. (YCGHA,- p. 194) During the party, it becomes evident that George Webber is observing carefully, and for the last time, the curious disparity between his own erratio and solitary Gentile nature, and the collectively cool, poised nature of the Jews. For the truly •losttt people at the party, though everyone is in a sense, are the Gentiles. There is a sharp dichotomy between the mien and behaviour of the Jews and Gentiles present.

For one thing, there is a heavy emphasis placed on the urbane sophistication of the Jews. Alma Jack, Estherrs daughter, is "cool, poised, lovely," and Wolfe notes her "polished style, her elegance•;

(~, p. 235) Miss Lily Mandell is poised to the point of other­ worldiness, while her pursuer, Mr. Lawrence Hirsch, is •schooleà in power" and ultra-sophisticated. Roberta Heilprinn, a working Jewess like Esther, •the governing brain of a celebrated art theatre," has "a very handsome and striking appearance," and "the power of her will, and the superior quality of her metal were written plainly upon her." (YCGHA, p. 241) There is Sameul Fetzer, "an eminent theatre director whose life since childhood had been spent in the city, along Broadway and among the most highly polished groups of urban society." (YCGHA, p. 268) Mr. Jack himself is of course the very apogee of ele­ gance and suavity. Finally there is Jake AbramsotJ, who is "old, subtle, sensual, weary ••• {:titi} the face of a vulture. Curiously enough, it was also a strangely attractive." It had in it na kinà of wise cynicism, and a weary humour. n (YCGHA, p. 2.36) All the Jews are suffused with the irony and world-weariness of their ancient urban heritage. They create an ambivalent reaction in the reader; they are not particularly attractive in their own light, but certainly they are far more appealing than the maladjusted lot of Gentiles at the party. Stephen Hook would be likeable, were he not so painfully shy and neurotically constricted. Wolfe calls him a "poor, tormenteà creature," who contemplates suicide because of a pimple on his face. Margaret and John Ettinger are a curious couple who go to all social events with his mistress. They make a tawdry and repulsive trio. Amy Carleton is, of course, a completely disintegrated creature of psychotic leanings, a pitifully sick contrast to Esther's glowing physical and psychical health. The perceptive Stephen Hook, looking at Amy, feels the horror of her splintered mind, and of his own, then compares their lives to the lives of the Jews in the room:

Poor child l Poor child l So quick and short and tem­ poral, both you and I, thought Hook--the children of a younger kind 1 While the sel He looked about him at the sensual volutes of strong nostrils curved with scornful mirth. These ethers of this ancient chemistry--unmothered, reborn, and venturesome, yet wisely mindful of the flame--these ethers shall endurel Ah, Timel (lOGEA, p. 254) Monk is included amongst the alien Gentiles. Mocking both Lawrence Hirsch and himself, Honk watches him pace the room with seeming indifference, noiselessly and patiently stalking the cat-like form of Lily Mandell. Although Hiss 1-fandell snubs him, he is unperturbed and infinitely pleasant, yet always passionately absorbed in the chase. Beneath his sophisticated exterior lurk the untamed instincts of

6Very man. But he is a Jew and he can wait for Miss Mandell 1s faveur.

He is never swayed by the humiliat~ng impulses of madness, "such madness as the Gentile knew,n and the scene is brilliantly outlined with the use of passages from ttThe Song of Songs.• Wolfe loved this particular ancient love call, but in Lawrence Hirsch, its lyrical intensity has only ironie application. He remained himself, the man of many interests, the master of immense authorities. For he could wait. He did not take her aside and say: "Thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair, thou hast dove's eyes." Nor did he say: "Tell me, 0 thou whom my soul loveth, Where thou feedest.n He did not remark to her that she remained as beautiful as Tirzah, or comely as Jerusalem, or terrible as an army with bannera. He did not ask anyone to stay him with flagons, or comfort him with apples, or confess that he was sick of love. And as for saying to her: "Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor; thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies,n tr~ idea had never occurred to him. (YCGHA, p. 271) 96.

The Jews are set apart, by their uniform ability to keep their heads in the midst of internal chaos, and by their immense reserves of vrlll and caution. They are not appalled by the exigencies of life, as is demonstrated by their impassive, but direct action during the fire. And they are together, communicative where the Gentiles are not.

Amy Carleton is almost totally inarticulate. Her speech is constantly punctuated with thrusts such as "I mean!" or "Yeu knowL" when nobody really does. She has lest the secret of communication. And yet Jake Abramsom, discussing a trip abroad with Esther and Roberta Heilprinn, and mentioning the food on board ship, has only to say, "It was fit for nothing but a bunch of goysl" (YCGHA, p. 238) and: This reference to unchosen tribes, with its evocation of humorous contempt, new snapped a connection between these three people, and suddenly one saw them in a new way • One saw now that they really were together, able, ancient, imrnensely knowing, and outside the world, regardant, tribal • • • It passed--the instant showing of their ancient sign. The women just smiled now, quietlys they were citizens of the world again. (YCGHA, p. 238) Thus the idiom of the Jews, depending on the Gentiles at times for effectiveness, draws them together, but further alienates George Webber from them. It is not his "forgotten language"; this is made abundantly clear to him. In effect then, the party serves the same purpose for

George as Ben 1s funeral had for Eugene. It draws together the forces that have been operative in his life, and illuminates the aspects of those forces that make it imperative for the youth to be on his way once more, an exile not of his own accord. In beth cases, though, the conscious 97. excuse for leaving is an intellectual one. In Look,Homeward, Angel, Eugene had felt that he must go away in order to develop himself artistically and intellectually. Now Monk claims that he will never be a great artist unless he leaves Esther's monied rea~-not because she is wealthy and he is poor, since at heart 1·1olfe was no Mar:x:ist and admired what Hrs. Bernstein's wealth had done for her--but beccause, as he claimed, "now he knew that if he was ever to succeed in writing the books he felt were in him, he must turn about and lift his face up to some nobler height." (YCGHA, p. 320) But this is false and hollovr-sounding. He had vœitten ~ Homeward, Angel not only in the midst of her world, but with her complete emotional support. No, the real reason was the necessity of severing a bond that threatened to break his spirit, as his family's had almost done. The mythic voyage beckoned, and he was once more to be alone with his destiny.

And so he burned his bridges behind him--literally, in the apartment fire. America burned its bridges, too, in the great stock crash which followed the party, practically on its heels. Nothing was certain for Monk or for America any longer, except that somehow his country's long road back to home, and the "city of :myself," lay ahead in a new America that he might call his own. "Theref'ore," he thought, "olà master, wizard Faust, old :rather of the ancient and swarm-haunteà minà o:r man, old earth, olà German land wi th all the measure o:r your truth, your glory, beaut y, magic, and your ruin; and àark Helen burning in our blooà, great queen and mistress, sorceress-.. dark land, àark land, old ancient earth I love-farewell!" (From 1.2!! ~_qg ~ Again)

All the old worlàs were deaà. ~ Can •t Q2 1!2!!!! Again, as the title suggests, ohronicles Wol:re 1s leave-takings of all the places and people he had tried to call "home." Each,for all it offereà in the short ~ he would reject rhough a psychical and spirituel inability to identify fu.lly with it, a chronic failure to resolve the strange tension pu.lling him tovard and away from anything or anyboày that he loveà.

In some of the first chapters of the novel, Wol:re recounts the disconcerting awakening he had received on his return to

Asheville (Libya Hill in the book), after many years of absence, and witb a first novel to his credit. Why a man and a writer with the insight of Thomas Wolfe should have faileà to envisage the shock and humiliation his family and friends at home wou.ld suffer from the reve­ lations of~ Homeward, Angel (~ .12 .Q!g Motmtains in the book) remains a mystery to most critias. The change in their attitude to him, wrought through his novel and the ravages of the depression, were heartbreaking for him. Instead of being welcomed home as the prodigal son, a childish fancy he had never really abandonned, he was treated with hostility and suspicion, certainly not as harSh as he made it seem in the novel, but, nevertheless, coldly apparent. In the novel, George Webber suffers a

98 99. series of guilty nightmares, patterned arter those Wolfe describes in The Stor:y ,g! ! !2::!!!; these, in turn, echo the guilt dreams of New York University days. As the only kind of defence he knew, Wolfe painted the town in lurid and corrupt terms, incarnate in the obscene degeneration of Juège Bland. Significantly, the only figure lef't unscarred by Wolte's vengeful pen is Nebraska Crane. His Indian American value of land for its own sake, and not for the sake of money, remains intact, his motives unsullied. Significantly, too, ho'\orever, Nebraska

Crane was wholly a creature of Wolfe ts imagination.

In any event, the visit to Asheville convinced Wolfe of the futility of trying to re-establish a lite there. Manhattan was all that remained for him now. But that ffho.me" disintegrated, too, in the tumbling collapse of the stock market and the world of Aline

Bernstein. His only emotional buffer was the promise of fame and success with the publication of the novel in the fall of 1929, Shortly after the crash. And the book !!! a great success, more than he had dared hope. For the first time in his lite, he was indeed a ramous man.

But fame, that "Fair Meàusa• of Wolfe 1 s imagination, was not as he had fancied her. Innocently, he had featured himself the centre of all America 's glad acclaim and disinterested praise. Instead, he found himself besieged by social climbers, lion hunters--every sort of opportunist. They brought him nothing but vapid cocktail parties, meaningless and short-lived affaira, and law suits, Wolfe 's peculia.r

~ noire in his la.ter years. He could no longer work in pesee.

He spent his time in beating the lion hunters from his d oor, the lOO. critics' words of damnation (or so it seemed to Wolfe, 'although his press was exceedingly good on the whole) from his ears, and the world from his spirit.

It was to Brooklyn, then, that he went for a new fonn of exile, 1 11 endless Brooklyn, a city eo desolate as to be unbelievable." Its very desolation, though, attracted Wolfe at this particular juncture in his career. 11To this place !fie cami! deliberately, driven by a resolution to seek the most forlorn anO. isolated hiding spot that he could find."

(YOGHA, p. 401) In a sense, he was hiding from the world and its demande in order to work at his secor~ novel; but Brooklyn was to be much more than an escape. It was to be an affirmative gesture on Wolfe1s part in his struggle to come to terms with America. As time went on, four years in all, the search was to take on an almost religious significance.

His very dwelling was monastic in appearance and in the Spartan comfort it afforded.

The place may seem to you more like a dungeon than a room that a man would voluntarily elect to live in. It is long and narrow, running parallel to the hall from front to rear, and the only natural light that ent ers i t comes through two small windows rather high up in the wall, facing each other at the opposite ends and these are heavily guarded with iron bars, placed there by the owner of the house to keep the South Brooklyn thugs from breaking in. (YOGHA, p. 400)

In this ndungeon," Wolfe slaved and prayed, alone, over his personal, and jealous, heathen deity--writing and more writing. His only contact with the outside world was Maxwell Perkins, with whom he took long wa.lks a.lmost wery night in order to discuss the progress of his new book. Every day he swea.ted, wrote, and observed the raw

1 T.o. Pollock and Oscar Oargill, Thomas Wolfe !:i Washington Square (New York, 1954), p. 119. 101. jungle in which he had made his home. Out of this self-imposed exile came emotional maturing am oreative productivity. Out of :it, too, came a new ability to see America in broader, more social, terms. It was during this period that1he impact of the depression became a real and loathsome experience to Wolfe. Actu.ally watching the bums of

Brooklyn digging in garbage pails for their dinner, cr sleeping in latrines so filthy that their stench turned away even Wolfe (a man of abnormally indifferent sensibilities to the amenities of :hhe creature comforts), imposed a greater understanding of America 1s sorry plight on his mind and heart. He began to see loneliness and suffering on the faces of people around him, not only on his own. He shared

America's torment and waxed indignant--not righteously, but objectively, a new sensation for him. Now he abjured the amorphous emotional out- pourlngs of earlier days; he sought the actuality of things as they were.

He wanted to capture the "look and feal of an iron raU, n or "the partioular shade of rusty green with which so many things are painted in America.• (YCGHA, p. 412) It was a process of discovery in its most naked, literal, and primitive terms. He was just beginning really to see thousands of things for the first time, • • • He was like a scientist in some new field of chemistry who for the first time realizes that he has stumbled upon a vast new world, and who will then pick out identities, establish affiliations, • • • without yet being aware what the structure of the whole is like, or what the final end will be. (YCGHA, p.~2)

He began to write, not of men, but of man. Where before he had envisioned abstract man only in terms of himself, he tried now to conceptualize him in the broadest philosophical sense. And like the great writer of Ecclesiastes, whose wisdom he so em.ulated, he saw man 102. as a cosmos of good and evil. ttres, this is man, and it is impossible to say the vorst of him; n (YCGHA, p. 4.3.3) but he found, too, that it vas impossible to express his grandeur, this •moth of time," hurling himself against the forces in life tbat seek to destroy him, body and soul. The fighting instinct in man, the will to live in spite of the horrors of existence, is his redeeming quality, and the key to his goodness. "Man loves life, and loving life, hates death, and be cause of this he is great, he is glorious, he is beautiful, and his beauty is everlasting." (.IQQ:!!!., p. 4.36) Loneliness comes not only to poets, but to Everyman, and ever y American in particular.

Where, then, lies America•s greatness over all other nations? Wolfe looked about him nov to find her promise in the most obscure reaches of the land, in places he would not have dreamed of some years earlier. He :round it in "a Negro boy, and, seeker, he is burning in the night•; (YCGHA, p. 507) he found it in "that lean and tan-faced boy," who lived in "the clay-baked piedmont of the South";

(YCGH!, p. 507)

Or there again, in the East-Side Ghetto of Manhattan, two blocks avay from the East River, • • • shut in his sweltering cell, • • • celled there away into a little aemblance of privacy and solitude from all the brawling and vociferous life and argument of his family and the seething b.ive around hill,the Jev boy sits and pores upon his book • • • • And for what? For what this ago~ of concentration? For what this hell of effort? • • • Because, brother, he is burning in the night. He sees the class, the lecture room, the shining apparatus of gigantic laboratories, the open field of scholarship, and pure research, certain knowledge, and the world distinction of an Einstein name. {YCGHA, p. 50S)

Commitment to individuality and the right tc excel-"this, seeker, is the promise of America." (YCGHA, p. 50S). 10.3.

A critical objectivity in his observance of individuals

~ccompanied Wolfe's evolution into spiritual awareness. Even the great and all-knowing l.faxwell Perkins fell under his careful scrutiny.

And violfe concluded, after a long and unusual intimacy with him, that

Perkins' vision vas lacking in hope. In Foxhall Edwards, vTolfe explores Perkins' character and personality. Through the Fox 1s reading of the news at breakfast, Wolfe hints at the limitations in Perkins which helped to create the tension and eventual rupture in their relationsbip. The news contains a story of an 11 unindentified man,"

C. Green, who has jumped from a hotel window to dash out bis brains on the sidewalk below. While c. Green is representative to Wolfe of a lost America, driven to despair by the loneliness and lack of purpose in bis wretcbed and futile existence, the Fox sees bim only as a city ciph8.l', :'lriven beyond the limits of buman help, and tberefore a lost cause. Fox does not apprehend the kind of thinld.ng tbat strives for a world beyond despair, beyond the limita of hnman action--the heroic vision--although Fox understands a great many other things in life. "Fox bas no hope, really; he is beyond despair." (IDGHA, p •.491) Fox•s way is to murmur •passionate regret,n but he will not move to take action in ending America's suffering. He accepte ber fate as pligbted, inevitable. This ecope of vision is too narrow for George Webbar, ultimately, and a tension oreeps into their relationship, although the actual process of estrangement is not mentioned. The hardly disguised references to Wolfe's Marxist tbinking are not the real issue, though.

Again, it was simply a difference in temperament and Weltanschauung that Wolfe was striking out against. He could not tolerate a polemic in thought between himself and his various mentors, since it disrupted 104. the process of identification so necessary to him. For this and other typically Wolfean ressons, a breach in the friendship was inevitable. In 1934, Holfe came out of his Brooklyn exile. He left its solitary desolation as easily and completely as if he bad been released from a prison sentence or absolved from priestly vows. His second book almost finished, he vent to Europe once again, this time vith a new perspective and sobriety. He spent his time in England, observing the "real" people of London: Daisy Purvis, whom most critics consider tao cozily and e:xaggeratedly English to be real, and the "Little People." England did not impress Wolfe now as a cultural monolith, an abstract and charming ideal. Rather he was disgusted by the crusty mores of a country, who se masses walked the streets wretched and hung:ry, while its "betters• lived off this suffering, oblivious to the foundations of the ir comfort. So engraved on the minds of all the hopeless lower class vere the iron social laws of the land, that none of them dared think things could be, or should be, any different.

Once George Webber recognizes the actuality of the situation, he cannat see or love England as he had before. The revelation comes ta him of a sudden, and it is an •astounding discovery.• It was like a kind of terrible magic to realize suddenly that he had been living in this English world and seeing only one part of it, thinking it was the whole. It was not that the Little People were few in number. Once he saw them, they seemed ta be almost the whole population. They outnumbered the Big People ten to one. And after he saw them, he knew that England could never look the same ta him again, and that nothing he might read or hear about the country thereafter would make sense to him if it did not take the Little People into account. (YCGHA, p. 531) Idol and ideal, one after the other, was crumbling for Wolfe at this time. The last, the greatest disillusion, was yet to come, in 105.

Germany, land of his ancestors. But now there was disillusion with

England--and with Sinclair Lewis, fi.ctionally recreated as IJ.oyd McHarg.

Sinclair Lewis, who in 1930 had seized the occasion of his Pulitzer

Prize acceptance speech to speak, not of himself, but of the rising young generation of novelists, Wolfe among them, represented Fame and Success in writing to Thomas Wolfe. What be did with it--and did not do with it--was a stunning disappointment to the yotmger man.

Wolfe's brUliant, but àevastating portrait of McHarg in ill Can•t fig Home Again is a testimor.ry to the shock and bitterness Wolfe must have felt in their eventua.l meeting. Yet Lewis did a real service to

Wolfe--the same kind that Starwick, in all his neurotic failure, had done. Levis demonstrated ta vlolfe in graphie terms wbat could happen to a writer who bas lost the way, who never round himself amidst the accolades of the public. He served as a warning that Wolfe did not ignore.

McHarg had thought fame would show him the way. He had used a mere symbol of his own success as the prize itself, and in sa à oing bad dissipated his talent and moral purpose. He bad stood before the assembly of well-wishers, acknowledging their praise and gratitude--and then it was gone before he had it firmly in his grasp.

Then, of course, he toOk the inevitable next step. With a mind surcharged with fire, with a heart thirsting for some impossible fulfillment, he took his award, and copies of all the speeches, programs, and tributes, sailed for Europe, and began ta go from place ta place, looking for something that he bad no name for, soething that existed somewhere, perhaps--but where he did not know. (YCGHA, p. 561)

George 'a car ride with McHarg through the dementèd, star~ night in the wilds of Surrey is richly symbolic. Far into the night 106. they ramble, surrounded by eery, chilling fog, lost and directionless. McHarg slips into a state of comatose drunkenness, while George is left alone to guide the terrified driver to some mysterious destination. When they finally do arrive at the home of McHarg's friend, an English country house, hal.f' hidden from the main road, George must take charge of his unconscious companion, see that he is put to bed, and assume all the duties of an agreeable guest, though his hosta are complete etrangers to him. This he does with good cheer. He spends a cbar.m!Dg and intimate evening vith the Rickenbach Reades, bat finds that by the next morning he has made some surprising discoveries. He knows by then the truth about McHarg, if only intuitively: that the man is lost and desperate, his ultimate destination as lost and unknovable as he is. For the Reades, McHarg's hospitable and appealing friands, are as foggy in their vision and escapist in their predilections, as is their friand. They have chosen to live away from the life and centre of England because they cannot face up to the truth at life's heart. They live in a moribund English world of neat cliches and unchallenged, lordly serenity-·a pseudo-calm, because they have carefully banished all threats from the world outside. For Rickenbach Reade, George began to see after a while, vas one of those men who are unequal to the conditions of modern :}.ife, and who have accordingly retreated from the tough realities which they could not face. The pheno- menon vas not a new one to George • • • • One found a surprising number of them in America • • • • (~, p. 605) Wolfe scof'fed at ex-patriates now, who claizœd to have found a better world than home beyong their native shores, though he had sympathized vith them in his youth. With a conscience adjusted to 107. maturity of persone.lity and character, he was able to see them and his younger self in the cold light of critical objectivity. He realized that flight tram one's country, like flight from self, is a sign of weakness, not courage. "They fled a vorld they vere not strong enough to meet.n (YCGHA, p. 611)

And so McHarg is a painful, but valuable experience for

George Vebber. Through the older man, he confronta and comes to grips with an old truth, ta.ngibly expressed. "For something bad begun 'Which nov vas finished •••• n (YCGHA, p. 618) Another "home" had come and gone.

In the spring of 1935, Wolfe returned to Nev York and completed the giant manuscript of his second novel. He bad not

•frozen up,n as Lewis had warned he might, a common occurrence after publication of one 's tiret novel. But he was exhausted. He did not want to wait for the reviews, and even the possible glory. He had ha.d enough of lion hunters and opportuniste, and law-suits; "suàdenly he thought of Germany • • • • tt (YCGHA, p. 620)

Wolfe 's long and painful involvement with the German mystique has been misunderstood by many critics and readers of his novels.

Just as 'Wolfe 1s feelings for the Jews should never be criticized in the light of whether he was or was not an anti-Semite, so his experiences in Germany should not be read as an indication tha t he was or was not pro-Fascist. In both cases, lrlolfe 's sensibilities functioned on a deeper, ~ic level. To label Wolfe either sociologically or politically is to give him lesa than his due, both as a writer and as a man. 108.

Wolfe•s "prejudices" formed the basis of his earliest feelings for Germacy; he had always thought Of tbat country as his paternal home, his own cultural inheritance, and in more exa.lted terms, the ttother half of my heart •s home.• Acooréling to his belief in the mystio intuition of the racial past, his conviction that "people knew more than they knew,n Germany was indeeél the fountainhead of his character. It was the "light" half of his heritage, the masculine principle standing in opposition to the darkly feminine enigm.a of the South anél his mother 's people.

In more philosophical terms, l-tolfe ta swift and fervent intoxication with Germany may be explained as an inner response to a kindreél Weltanschauung, a shareél affinity with the Germans for what

Bella Kussy calls the WVitalist Philosophy,• in her penetrating article on that subject.2 She defines this philosophJ as a beliet in lite as the all•pervasive force in man ar.d his supreme value.

Morality is a thing apart from it; only a powerful expression of the lite force, whether expressed in politics or literature, is its signature. Real life, as the vitaliste have it, is an intensive, and even painf'ul experience. Most mortals mrely exist under the orélinary law ar nature, the "struggle for existence," but the vitaliste rise above this mini:mal plane of being to grapple with the ttwUl to power.•

In people of extraordinary power anél energy, the natural and even exa.lteél tendency is for the lite force to overflow into dangerous,

2sella Kussy, •The Vitalist Trend and Thomas Wolfe,• The World of Thomas ~' ed. C.H. Holman (New York, 1961), pp. 101-lll. - 109. unrestraineà dynamism, unguided by ethical or huma.ne impulse. Wolfe 1s instincts, one feels, closely fit this description, especially as he reveals them in his fictional creations. When he wants to demonstrate an individual's force of personality, he does so in exaggerated physical and emotional terms, suggesting that people like these are too f'uD. of lite 1s energies to exist under normal conditions. Gant is like thatr a man so packed with energy, vitality, and turbulent emotion that he can only express himself in boaming rhetorical outbursts, ar in great leaping fires, or in mountainous piles of food loadeà upon the family table. The fires and the heaped-up foodstuffs seem a very extension of the man. The reader 's impression tha.t Gant is larger than life is what Wolfe wanted to achieve. Esther Jack's energy is described to create the same affect. Her body is almost palpably alive on the pages, Dglowing" vith an inner fire that threatens to burst the confines of its too small vassel. She speaks in forceful, spasmodic bursts of enthusiasm, as though everything she thinks and reels is too mueh to express, too overwhelming to recreate in mere speech. Constantly àle pounds her fist into her chest, cr)1Wng that she has knovledge unutterable "in here.•

And Wolfe himself, in his various guises, is vitalism embodied. Always he is "furious", dominated and buffeted by his own emotions, as though the m_rthic vinds of Aeolus are housed in his body, straining to be set free, and contained only by the fiercest of disciplines. According to the vitalist philosophy, the earth·itself shares the same impulses that drive men, except that "the earth alone endures, and it endures forever.• Nevertheless, it is a receptacle of the fury llO.

in men•s lives, passing on to the next generation the sto~ energy of the one gone. Those who stem from a long, fairly pure racial stock, are more fortunate than others with no real inheritance, like Americans, who are forever a nomad race, forever wandering up and down their great, unknown continent. The Germans derived a mystical kind of strength, Wolfe felt, from the centuries of Germanie blood in their veina, both as individuals and --en masse; this is 'What makes them so terri.fyingly vital. This, too, is the source or the exceptional

Jevish vitality, which so fascinated Wolfe, a contrast to the

11 juiceless" qualities he ascribes to the Gentiles.

The actual experience of pure sensation, no matter whether it is eostacy or agony, beoomes ali-important in Wolfe 1s work. Human values are easily muàdled and obscured by the overwhelming significance of surging internal power. Motœnts of supreme sensation assume an exaggerated meaning; they tend to vinàicate the individual's meanness or cruelty in petty daily affaira. In Wolfe, physical, tangible experience can beoome obsessive at times. George Webber 1s "squeal," the outward and vocal expression of his inner dynamism, is a valuable, al.most a sacred thing to him; Esther, a sympathizer in Monk' s value schema, can easily commiserate vith him wben he loses it. This parti- cular sequence may seem f'arcical am meaningless to an "ordinary11 person, but to a vitalist, it is a sombre occasion, not to be taken lightly.

The 11will for power" inevitably resulta in coru. usion and disaster. It needs weaker individuals for exercise, soon extending to a 8 wish to overthrow"; essentially, it is a sick, death-oriented instinct.

It seeks the death of' lasser beings, ultimately seeking its ovn as the 111. supreme sensation. In Wolfe, there are figurative "deaths" of those

~om he considered weak, and offensive because of their weakness. Time and again, he would take vengeance on those whom he called the pseudo-people: artists, critics, lawyers, dentiste--or the manswarm. In Germany, the ultimate expression of vitalism was to be somewhat more literal--and thorough. ~ere the real weakness lies is obvious. But Wolfe took some time in discovering this; the Germans did not find out until it was too lata. The religion of the life force, evocatively outlined in

Nietzschets famous doctrine of the superman, is at the heart of the German mystique. Small wonder that their great heroes are men who destroy themselves through a too f'aithful devotion to its principles, auch as Faust, who was willing to accept death and eternal damnation f'or twenty-four years of omniscience. But all the great heroes are in some wise akin to Faust; Wolfe admitted a curious affinity for his dilemma, which he had always incorporated in his work. There is, as Wolfe was to discover, soma of this kind of' sickness, for he came to admit it !!! a sickness, in all men, only more concentrated in the Teutonic spirit. And Wolfe, partly German himself, was more susceptible than most people to the blandishments of the Faustian creed. Heroism or genius was inconceivable to him without the over­ tones of self-destruction. He could not envision a rational hero; this was one reason why he could not maintain Perkins as a haro in his mind. Perkins refused to cross the line from sanity to suicidal despair. 112.

Intellectualism in general is inimical to the life force, and Wolfe was always anti-intellectual in some degree. Intelligence plots a reasonable course at its best, and vitalism is not reasonable.

Emotional response alone encourages development of the vitalistic impulse.

Stirred by this tacit1y kindred feeling in the German atmosphere, Wolfe was ripe to fall passionatel.y in love wi th Thea Voelcker, EJ..se von Kohl er

1 11 in You Can t .2:2, Home Af>ain, "a perfect type of the Narse Vallcy'rie - a perfect opposite to Esther Jack. For Wolfe, Thea was everything

German in i ts most primordial implications. Their relationship was violently physical, bordering on the uncivilized. Their happiest hours were spent awey from the city, high up in primitive mountain country.

Even in appearance, blond, tall, and unmistakably Nordic, Thea was a total departure from Aline Bernstein and the other women who had meaning in Wolfe's life. For Thea was representative of a reality that evoked a long-suppressed aspect of Wolfe's character, an aspect ~œs. Bernstein had recognized and fought bitterly against. This wa.s the 11 poison11 in

George Webber 1s mind that Esther Jack feared and lamented. It wa.s indeed a poison, but its initial effects were exa.lting: "The girl became for George the ultimate reality underlying everything he thought and felt and was during tha.t glorious and intoxicating period of his life. 11 (YCGHA, p. 625)

Germany, then, lay rea~-made for a spontaneous identification on Wolfe 1s part with its people and cult~e. On his first trip there, he was smi tt en wi th everything good and glorious that he saw. The

Germans could do no vvrong. On one occasion, he wrote to Maxwell Perkins,

"I wa.nt to tell you thut I do not see how anyone • • • could possibly 113. fail to love the country •• ·" and he called the Germans themselves "one of the most ohild-like, kindly and susceptible people in the world.•3 Absurd an observation as this seems in retrospect, it is also true. No other paradox oould account for the unprecedented amorality tbat seized such a great part of this nation in ,ears to come. The Germans would have to be "child-like" and eagerly obedient; or else they would have to be a nation of sadists. As Ben Recht once wrote, the Germans make wonderful soldiers-anêl wonderful waiters. Their submissive delight in taking any kind of orders and fulfilling them meticulously is now legion. And yet this very pragmatism of theirs bas earned them a false reputation for unimaginativeness and coldness of temperament. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as Wolfe was to discover, first to his joy, and then chagrin. The French, for all their bruited •romanticism,n Wolfe found to be shre~, self-defensive, and chillingly meroenary. The Germans, on the other band, are the most romantic people in the world, and their literature and music confirme this. Withal, it is a bhild-like romantioism, that delights in gloo~ fairy tales with mysterious enchanted foreste. And that is Wolfe, too, lost child that he was. Their curiously mixeà temperament ar sensuality, melancholy, and fundamental prudishness is very close to Wolfe •s own. In Germany, he found appetitu to match his. Wolfe identified vith some real-life German heroes, Beethoven and Goethe in particular. He visited Goethe's old home, oarefully enshrined by the Germans, inspecting his belongings with reverence an3

3 T. Wolfe, Letters, p. 460. 114. fascination; but he felt a special kinship vith Beethoven. He likened Beethoven 's deafness to his own defect, his unusual height. He even spent a week with his ears stuffed with cotton in order to understand the feeling of deafness. In fact, Wolfe believed that greatness vas inèvitably accampanied by some physical defor.mity, a belief far removed from the American dream of youth and beauty as the proper accoutrements of success. When Wolfe was an undergraduate at Chapel Hill, he, too, had fancied himself becoming a moàel of physical perfection to complement his genius. But then, deeply affected by Ben' s dea th, and roused to the knovledge thàt he would always be "abnormal,• he came to see the matter of health and beauty in a new light:

Thus, through the death of hi~ brother, and the sickness that was rooted in his own flesh Lthe Pentland "tetter!?, Eugene came to know a deeper and darker wisdom than he bad ever known before. He began to see that what was subtle and beautiful in human life vas touched vith a divine pearl­ sickness. Health was to be found in the steady stare of the cats and dogs, or in the smooth vacant chops of the peasant. But he looked on the faces of the lords of the earth--and he sav them wasted and devoured by the beautiful disease of thought and passion. (~, pp. 622-623)

Deafness and respiratory ailments were Wolte 1s •~avourite" ailments. Aline Bernstein and Maxwell Perkins both suffered from slightly defective hearing, and Wolfe used to like the "listening" look in Mrs. Bernstein 's face when she talked to people. Beethoven he admired, for by his very deafness "this man was a world complete unto himself. n4 Other people in his life bad lung diseases. His father's first wife bad died of consumption, and w.o. Wolfe feared he would succumb to it, tao, although he ultimately died of cancer. Julia Wolfe, though,

4Nowell, .2E· ill•, p. 120. 115. seems to have instilled a fear of lung diseases in Yolfe, though the topic may bave arisen naturally from the fact that Asheville was a popular resort for ailing consumptives and there were many of them in the boarding bouse. Mrs. Robert was a consumptive; her wasted body had always seemed to Wolfe to add to her spiritual and ethereal look. Mrs. Bernstein's rather died of some lung disease. But it was Ben, whose early, tragic death from pulmonary pneumonia, who convinced Wolfe of the greatness that accompanies disease and physical tragility. Ironically, Wolfe himself died of tuberculosis of the brain, which bad begun in his lungs. Several times, his friends have recorded, he complained of eome mysterious lung weakness, but if he had actual medical cause to worry before his fatal illness, no one ever knew it. One telling example of Wolfe's faséination with the subjeot, though, is his moving portrait of the hero in "Dark in the Forest, strange as Time,n a short story including most of Wolfe's favourite themes. The hero, a German Jew dying of tuberoulosis, seems to be a composite of Joe Linder and Gant, and perhaps Wolfe himself. The piece is lyrically written, the man's wasted, dying visage evocatively and sensitively described. In any event, Wolfe seems to have round in the German heroes men after his ovn heart. And in the German countryside, he found what he felt must be 11 the happy land" of his youthful imagination. It was all so different from the landscape of America, yet it was strangely familiar to him from the beginning. As he sat by train windows, rushing through timeless, elfin foreste and soaring, ghostly mountains, he seemed to recognize and understand the enchanged mystery brooding over 116. this Germanie eartht And what are we? We are the naked men, the lost Americans. Immense anà lonely skies bend over us, ten thousand men are œrching in our blood. Where does it come from-the sense of' strangeness, instant recognition, the dream-haunted, almost captured, memory? Where does it come from, the constant hunger and the rending lust, and the music, dark and solemn, elf'ish, magic, sounding through the wood? How is it that this boy, who is Amarican, has known this etrange land from the first moment that he saw it? 5 There were two trips to Germany and two kinds of' experience. The f'irst was recorded in almost wholly sensual terms. Wolfe had come to Germ.any and f'ound it a delight, f'illed with beauty and variety enough to seduce the most jaded appetite. There, he did not feel like some monstrosity of nature as he had in France and in America. The Germans were big people, as he recalled them, and they enjoyed his bigness. In fact, his f'irst recollections were that they dwarf'ed him, an unlikely possibility. "He felt a little as Gulliver must have felt among the Brobdingnagians." (TW&TR, P• 654) Wolfe devoted many pages to lengthy discussions of the "food" aspects of' the country, a topic that was later to take on great signi- f'icance. He f'elt he could never get enough to eat, although "The quantity of' meat they consume is enormous • • • the air is f'illed with the death-squeals of butchered swine. ,.6 Billotted at Fraulein Bahr 's pension in Munich, George Webber is always ravenous. He envisages the entire boarding house as hunger-dominated people, who spend their Whole day waiting for the next meal, yet walking away from each meal unsatisfied. This same insatiate hunger follows him everywhere, no matter how much he

5 T. Wolfe, "Dark in the Forest, strange as Time, n From~ ]!ll Morning~(NewYork, 19.35), p.l06. 6 Let ter to Aline Bernstein, Letters, .2E· ill•, p. 141. 117. eats. And it is, he intuits correctly, as much a hunger of the spirit as of the belly. A raging hunger and a quenchless thirst was gnawing at him, and no matter what he ate or drank he could not get enough. It cannot be told about, it can never be described, it cannot be called a name. It was appalling, it was revolting, it was loathsome and disgusting. It was a hunger thst was no hunger, it was a thirst that was no thirst, it was a hunger and a thirst that grew from everything they fed upon. It consumed him even as he tried to feed it and conquer it. It was like some enormous consumption of the soul and body for whioh there is no cure, for which there is no end. (TW&!l'R, PP• 658-9) The mwthic tensions were at work in Wolfe again. That they were violently expressed in his physical appetites was only natural in a country where sensation is so tangible an articulation of inner dynamism, and which encouraged the same response in one kinàred in spirit. Something in Wolfe leaped to embrace all at once the whole German ethos ancl make it his; his instincts told him it belonged to him. But as ever, something drew him back at the same time as he reached out. What repulsed him was a dawning perception of German barbarism, glimpsed through the mountains of food, the great dra.f'ts ot toaming dark beer, and all the faery enchantment. Those who condemn Wolfe for bis seeming insensibility to the political machinery of this pre-war period in Germany cannot have read Wolfe•s novels witb attention or sympathy. Wolfe was not a political creature, it is true. For most of his life, he scarcely read a newspaper, and then usually for the baseball scores. Indeed, Maxwell Perkins' reservations about Wolfe 's enthusiastically burgeoning political interests in his later years appearing in his work were 118.

vell-founded. Pure politics vas out of Wolfe 1s realm. His genius waa suited to personality exploration, insights into the heart of man, and not the civilized manifestations of it. But vhat Wolfe did see demonstrated his "almost terrifying clairvoyancen7 into the motivating behaviour of the Gern:ans. What began as pure, unqualified belief in their "child-like" response to life quickly changed to dismay at the implications it harboured. Beneath the fey exterior, he uncovered a frighteningly amoral puissance from vhiCh only brutality and barbarie force could issue. This he sav clearly even from the Germans' obsession

vith food. In the beginning, he svayed between his fundamental love for the people and the unoomfortable knowledge of what they could become. This is the real Germany Lihe Oktoberfes]7--it is impressive and po\terful, and yet, after a time, I dislilœ it. Neverthe­ leas, I think this country interests me more than any in Europe-oan you explain this enigma? Here is this brutal, beer-svllling people, and I d oubt if there is as much that is spiritually grand in any ether people in Europe as in this one. Later in the same letter, Wolfe went on: you cone to the heart of Germany • • • to i ts real heart. It is one enormous belly. They eat and drink themselves into a state of bestial stupefaction • • • • You feel that vithin these oircles is somehow the magic, the essence of the race •••• 8

Re~erences to these disturbing implications are everyvhere

scattered throughout this section of The~~ the ~· Wolfe himself, falling under the hypnotic sway of the Oktoberfest 's primitivism, became drunk. from the unusually powerful beer, and got involved in a violent fight tbrough no fault of his ovn, àuring vhich he almost killed a man, himself ending up in a Munich hospital vith a concussion and a broken nose.

7Franz Schoenberner in The Enigma ,!?!. Thomas Wolfe, p. 296. 8 tetter to Aline Bernstein, Letters, ~· cit., p. 141. 119.

He could see very clearly new the malevo1ent energies that lay submerged in this culture, and more significantly, in his own deepest self. He would be scarred for life from this encounter vith the German "magic," literally and symbolical1y. But even before the Oktoberfest, Wolfe bad begun to recognize in bimself the ugly bestiality of the savage that bad come to the surface in this "familiar" country. Disgusted by his insatiate appetite, George Web ber was starting to ba te himself for this uncontrollable swinisbness. He loatbed the hunger that consumed him. He hated the food of which be ate because he eould not eat all that he wanted of it. He hated the family of the earth to vhich he himself belonged because he bimeelf belonged to it, because its b1ood vas in him, his in it, because twin demons of his soul divided him in unending varfare. He bated the face of the great svine, the creased neck of the unsated beast, because he felt himself the hunger of the beast•s never--ending lust, and could find no end of it. There were in him tvo powers discrete, tvo forces of the soul and of inheritance, and nov they waged contention daily in his 1ife upon a battlefield where tbere could never be a victor, , ••• He understood it all so well, because he bad himself created it •••• He hated it so much because he bad such deep and everlasting love for it. He fled from it and knew he could never escape. (TW&TB, p. 661)

The •tvo forces• are Germany and America. But the love-r~te syndrome is a famUiar part of Wolfe. He loves the Jews and be bates them. He hates the city and he loves it. He hates his mother and he loves his father--there is no cure for it. As vith all the other objecta in his life upon which he fastened the burden of his love-hate, there was to be a criais demanàing a commitment of some kind from him. In all the other instances, he bad fled the tension--not vithout some maturity gained--but into new exiles nevertheless. Germany was to pose the biggest, and the most unsettling criais of all. This was not a person or a thing or place he bad now to contend vith. It was bis very life•blood, his special heritage, his father 1s promise. At the end of 120. the firat trip, Wolfe resolved the problem in a typiaally escapist way. He le:rt Germany after he got well, but only to return to America and a grudging reconciliation with Mrs. Bernstein. He did not need two "homes" at once, and the question of Germany lay unresolved in the back of his mind for some years. When Wolfe returned to Germany in 19.36, his circumstances were radically altered, as were Germany's. He knew before sailing exactly what the situation was there: the spectacular rise of the Nationalist Socialist party with its "comic-opera" leader, the storm ';roopers, the "vork camps," the literary censorship. He knew it, just as the whole world knew it, and he did not want to believe it--as the whole world did not want to believe it. In his case, though, there were special reasons for his turning a deaf ear, even if for a very short time, to the approaching Armageddon.

For one thing, \~olfe could œver really appreciate a situation unless he had experienced it at first band. "I could never learn any­ thing except the hard way. I must experience it myself before I knew.n9 But there were blandishments set in his way that would be difficult for anyone to resist. Wolfe had never realized just how sensational a suocess he had become in Germany. His Look Homeward, Angel vas acclaimed by the German press with unqualified praise as a great novel; he himself vas hailed as a virtual hero in the country. Fame and glory came to him there just when he had reached a peak of irritation and exhaustion in

America. He had come to Germany, because, as he said, 11 I am tired of

9Quoted in Nowell, .2E• ill·, p. 325. 121. myself ••• of beiilg with myself, I am surfeited. n10 He bad not even e vaited for the revievs of his second book before sailing to Europe, since he did not want a repeat performance of the angllish he bad gone through vith the first. Even though the book vas a great success in America, critically and popularly, he knew nothing of this, for he had refused to have reviews and press clippings sent to him. And nov he stepped suddenly into a golden spotlight of fame and admiration, the kind he bad dreamed of, but never realized, in America. "I bad gone back for rest, for oblivion to that land ••• I have loved best . . . 11 and no man ever bad a happier or more fortuitous return. 0 His youthful fantasy bad materialized; and now he "felt, like Tamerlane, that it was passing great to be a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis--and be a famous man.n12

No note of adverse criticism marrèd the glamour of his acceptance there. Not only were the Germans exuberant over the quality of his work, for Wolfe 's partiŒO.ar style translates beautifully into German, but, unlike the Americans, they were delighted vith its anor­ mous bulk. And yet there was more to their enthusiasm than mere appre- cia tion. Thomas Wolfe vas one of the few people in Germany, in the summer of 19.36, who bad some literary stature. Martha Dodd, daughter of the then American Ambassador in Berlin, and herself a journalist of note, wrote a book about ber family's experiences in pre•war

German;y, Throueh Embassy Ezes (1939). In it, she explains that for several years previous to Wolfe's visit, there bad been a steady drain

10 Ibid., P• 268. 11Ibid., p. 2h9. 12Thid., p. 2!70. 122. of German culture through suppression, by the Nazis, of' acything offen- sive or contraversial. Most of the eminent writers had either left Germany in exile, or had gone into foroed retirement, while all their publications were banned. People aocepted the situation. Even the Dodds, proteoted from many of the Nazi striotures through diplomatie immunity, were foroed to invite to their social gatherings only those people app+oved by the authorities, at the risk of danger to their friends. Miss Dodd relates that their parties, once the soul of cultivated wit and gaiety, were now drab, meaningless affaira, attended by an ever-diminishing number ar talented or interesting individuals. Into the dying cultural atmosphere of Nazi Germany swept Thomas Wolfe like a breath of clean, fresh air. Once more the people gathered in Berlin's outdoor cafes, so long deserted, to hear Wolfe hold forth in his mangled, but enthusiastic German, on everything and acything that ocourred to him. A Titan of energy and vitality, Wolfe remindeà the Germans of their glorious past, 11when great writers were 13 great men.n And the Germans felt as muoh a kinship with him as he with them: "there aotually seemed to be something Germanie about him which they all could claim."l4 Adulation followed him everywhere in Berlin; his hotel room was deluged with flowers and love notes from adoring women. Overpowered by the unexpeoted windfall of attention, Wolfe enjoyed it to the full

13Martha Dodd, Through Embassy !l!.! (New York, 1939), p. 91. l4rbid., p. 90. for some weeks. It was, atter all, "the triumphant and glorious vindi­ oation of all that I thought my life could be • • , or art aohieve.•15 · Not that his German friands did not reveal in private what they were atraid to mention in publio. Again Wolfe knew, but he avoided the

inevitable awakening. Frightened by what he heard, he refused to take a tour of a German work camp, lœowing that once he.!!!! Naziism at work, all the good things would end for him. Then, when the initial thrill of joy and gratification wore off, he saw without prodding what he had so long evaded-3Ild then he saw more than anyone else. Illuminated by

Wolfe's awesome powers of perception, a siokening pioture of the old German barbariam swam into foous fram the murky depths below its surface brillianoe.

It was a picture of the Dark Ages come again •••• and I recognized at last, in all its frightful aspects, the spiritual disease whioh was poisoning unto death a noble and a .mighty people. 16· Unlike so many German apologiste who sought to lay the blame for Naziism on historical accident, or economie duress, or Hitler's freakish, unabetted rise to power, Volfe did not hesitate, though he loved this

country as though it were his own, to indict the entire nation and race for eruelty and unspeakable inhumanity. George began to realize now the tragedy tbat lay behind such things. There was nothing political in any of it. The roots of it were muoh more sinister and deep and evil than politics or even racial prejudice could ever be. For the f:lrst time in his life he bad come upon something full of horror that he had never known before--something that made all the swift violence and passion of America, the gangster compacts, the sudden killings, the barshness and corruption that infested portions of American business and public life, seem innocent baside it. What George began to see was a picture of a great

l5Quoted in Nowell, .212· ill•, P• 270. 16Ibid., p. 333. J.24.

people who had been psychically wounded and were now desperately ~ ill with some dread malady of the soul. Here was an entire nation, he n~ realized, that was infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It was a kind of creeping paralysie which twisted and blighted all human relations. The pressures of. a constant and infamous compulsion had silenced this whole people into a sweltering and malignant secrecy until they had become spiritually septic with the distillations of their own self-poisons, for which now there was no medicine or release. (YCGHA, PP• 630-631) These are harsh words, and once published, irrevocable. Wolfe knew that, and he knew, too, that they would obviate any further contact wi th the German people und er this government, not even through his novels, which he realized would be banned immediately, as they were upon publication as a magazine article of •r Have a Thing to Tell You• when Wolfe returned to New York. Never before in his life had commitment to some kind of affirmative action been so necessary, and never before bad the stakes been so high. All former leave-takings of all the old e "hames" had come about through accumulated pressure from within, fomenting an emotional rebellion and a grudging break. Now evidence of the necessity for an abrupt decision lay all around him at a time when Wolfe himself was still very much involved with Germany, and wben, so far as he knew, no better home lay ahead. Thus his decision to leave Germany, and to publish the truth of what he had seen there, called for maturity and courage on his part. Those who have raad "I Have a Thing to Tell

You," later incorporated in I2Y ~ Qg 1!2!! A.gain, will testify that Wolfe rose magnificently to the occasion. As though to confirm Volfe in the wisdon of his decision, the fates threw in his path, literally at the last moment of his visit to Germany, on the border itself between Germany and freedom, a stunning example of all that he was abandonning, in an incident so swift and quiet, 125.

only Wolfe and a few others realized it was happening. One of the people in Wolfe •s train compartment, heading for France, was a little German Jew, although his travelling companions were unaware of him as anything but a sma.ll German business man on a selling trip to Paris. When he asked Wolfe to hold some extra money for · him until they had crossed the border, Wolfe assumed he was merely trying to smuggle a few extra Marks ab0\19 the allotted ten one was permitted to take out of Germany, and readily agreed to help him. At the Belgian border, when the train did not leave on sèhedule, Wolfe began to suspect something was wrong. In a moment, he had witnessed German officials carrying the little Jew off the train, questioning him beside the rails. It was quickly apparent that the Jew had no chance; the officials bad him. They had him, all right. The officers surrounded him • • • • And the men in uniform said nothing. They had no need to speak. They had him. They just stood and watched him, each with a faint suggestion of that intolerable slow smile up on his face. (YCGHA, p. 699) Wolfe's painftù decision to leave Germany was not, then, to be a matter of conscience alone. The incident, so ironical and cqinci- dental that it seemed to have been staged for Wolfe's benefit, left a permanent emotional scar on the writer as vell. As the train finally pulled away, they passed the little Jew and his captors on the platform. As the car in Yhich he had been riding slid by, he lifted his pasty face and terror-stricken eyes, and for a moment his lips vere stilled of their anxious pleading. He looked once, directly and steadfastly at his former companions, and they at him. And in that gaze there was all the unmeasured weight of man's mortal anguish. George and the ethers felt somehow naked and ashamed, and somehow guilty. They all felt that they were saying farewell, not to a man, but to humanity; not to some pathetic stranger, some chance acquaintance of the voyage, but to mankind; not to some nameless cipher out of lite, but to the fading image of a brother's face. (~, p. 699) 126.

The voyage had come full circle. As the train picked up speed, and Germany was left behind, there was only the memory of the Jew's terror-stricken look--and the coins he had given 'Wolfe, greasy in his pocket from the little man's sweat. Here was his dead "brother,• here was Edward Michalove, and Starwick, and all the lost, desperate people

in his life. And yet he himself was free, He was "out11 of that land of nameless evil, which had been •so much more to him than land, so much more than place. It had been a geography of heart•s desire; • . . ." (!QQ!!!, P• 703) This was the last farewell, and the last beginning. From

Asheville's town square, he had come a long way, and if he had not yet fully fathomed nthe city of myself," he had made heroic strides toward that ultimate goal. The years of doubt, fury, and brooding had borne fruit for Wolfe. From almost absolute egoism, he had come to a deep sympathy for the "vide world of all humanity." Through despair he had found hope: hope for America, which was "lost," but which he believed would be found; hope for himself, for whom the process of healthy growth had never really stopped; and hope far the world, •--Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending--a wind is rising, and the rivera flow.• (YCGHA, p. 743) Thomas Wolfe was on his vay home. CONCWSION

A colleague and friend of Thomas Wolfe in his teaohing years at New York University wrote that, had Wolfe lived, he never would have enjoyed the maturity he predicted for himself; that, in fact,

11emotional maturity would have been the death of him." I thought he would have gone insane. I thought that because to the day of his death, so far as I know, he had not been able to understand ànd discipline the tyrannical emotions in him that made him a wanderer among men.l Like Lord Byron, Wolfe may have fallen unoonsciously under the sway of the myth that he had himself developed in his art. But others who knew Wolfe write that he was just coming into a heritage of peace, so long promised and so urgently sought, when death overcame him two weeks before his thirty-eighth birtbàay. The question is moot.

In any event, those ~mo allege that Wolfe •s capacity for spiritual growth and understanding was negligible have failed to appreciate Wolfe's ehronicle in all its rich and profound wisdom. These are critias like Harold Ribalow, who carps over the question of wbether Wolfe was anti•Semitic, failing to go below the most super­ ficiel level of the novels in support of his claims. In his indictment, he is prey to the subjectivity and defensiveness that Wolfe could inspire in many people. Ribalow claims that Wolfe 's characters are all 11 maladjusted" or "queer, tt but he does not point out that i·lolfe ts

Gentile characters are also 11maladjusted 11 and 11queer. 11 Indeed, Wolfets Jewish figures are the sanest, most down-to-earth and generously endowed

1vardis Fisher, "My Experiences with Thomas Wolfe, 11 Thomas Wolfe ~ Washington §g,uare, op. oit., p. 133.

127 128.

of all Wolfe's creations. Specious half-truths like Ribalowts mar

many oî the critiques on Wolîe. Parochial in thought and vision, these writers are like tiny parasites who attach themselves to a giant host, unaware of the mass of weight that looms above them, so intent are they on their immediate sphere of interest. Seen in perspective, Wolfe can never be adjudged a static writer or thinker. The learning process never stopped for a moment in his life; the world was his classroom. To understand Wolfe is to affirm him; it is to hope that his death was not the tragedy for him that it must be to those who love his work, and that his heroic vision of a place he might call home, an end to exile, bas come to pass: ttTo lose the earth you know, for greater YJaowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friands you loved, for greater loving; to find a lani:l more kind than home, more large than earth-·0

e. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Thomas Wolfe:

.L.291ç Home'WI'd, A!!œl, Scribner •s. New York. 1952.

Of~~ the~· Scribner 1s. New York. 1935.

1:'!.2m Death To Morni.pg. Scribner 1s. New York. 1935.

The Stor:y .2f. ,!! Novel. Scribner 1s. New York. 1936.

~ ~ and the ~· Harper and Bros. New York. 1939.

~ ~ Q.2 ~ !gain. Harper and Bros. New York. 1940. Letters to His Mother. ed. John s. Terry, Scribner •s. New York. 1943. The Letters of Thomas Wolfe. ed. Elizabeth Nowell, New York. 1956.

!h2 ~ Novels !4. Thomas Wolfe. ed. q.H. Holma.n, Scribner 1s. New York. 1961.

The~ Bexond. Harper and Row. New York. 1964.

The Corresponrlence of Thomas~~ Homer Andrew~· ed. Oscar Cargill and Thomas Clark Pollock. New York University Press. 1954.

Selected Secondary Sources:

Andersol'l, Sherwood. Letters ..Q! Sherwood Anderson. ad. H.M. Jones. Little, Brown & Co. Boston. 1953.

Bernstein, Aline. ~ ~ ~· Equino:x Cooperative Press. New York. 1933.

----· lli Journey Down. Alfred A. Knopf. New York. 1938. ----· An Acter 's Daughter. Alfred A. Knopf. New York. 1941. Blachford, Janet. Studies .!!:! the Novels of Thomas Wolfe. McGill University Thesis. 1963.

Brown, E.K. "Thomas Wolfe: Realist and Symbolist, 11 University 2f. Toronto Quarterly, X (194û-41), 153-166.

Cowley, Malcolm, ed. ~ ~ Genteel Tradition. Southern Illinois University Press. 1964.

Dodd, Martha. Through Embass:y ~· Harcourt, Brace & Co. New York. 1939.

129 130.

Fiedler, Leslie. "The Jew as Mythic American," Ramparts (Fall, 1963), 39-51.

Frohock, W.M. Strap.gers .I.E~ Ground. Southern Methodist Univ. Press. Dallas. 1961. Geisma.r, Maxwell. Writers 1.B Criais. Houghton Mifflin. Boston. 1942.

----· American Moderns: ~Rebellion to Conformity. W.H. Allen. London. 1958.

Gelfant, Blanche Housman. ~ American City Novel. University of Oklahoma Press. 1954.

Gold, Michael. ~ Without Monay. Horace Liveright. New York. 1930.

Goldhurst, William. I• Scott Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries. World Publishing Co. Cleveland and New York. 1963.

Holman, C. Hugh. The World of Thomas Wolfe, ed. Martin Steinmann, Jr. Scribner"'i"8. New York. 1962. --

Johnson, Edgar, ed. "Thomas Wolfe and the American Dream,•! Treasury ~ Satire. Simon and Schuster, Inc. New York. 1945. PP• 741-754·

Johnson, Elmer D. .Qf. ~ !Ef! Thomas l·Tolfe: ! Bibliography ~! Character e Index .2! His ~· The Searecrow Press, Inc. New York. 1959. Johnson, Pamela H. Thomas Wolfe: ! Critical Study. Wm. Heinemann Ltd. London. 1947. Kennedy, Richard s. The Window of Memory. University of Carolina Press. Chapal Hill. 1962.

Malin, Irving. Jews and Americans. Southern Illinois University Press. 1965. Mersand, Joseph. Traditions !E American Literature. Modern Chapbooks. New York. 1939.

Muller, Herbert J. Thomas ~· New Direction Books. Norfolk. 1947.

Norwood, Hayàen. ~ Marble ~ Wi.fe. Scribner•s. New York. 1947.

Nowell, Elizabeth. Thomas \~olfe: ! Biography. Doubleday and Co. New York. 1960.

Pollock, Thomas Clark and Oscar Cargill. Thomas Wolfe At Washington Square. New York University Press. 1954.

Ribalow, Harold U. "Of Jews and Thomas Wolfe,• Chicago Jewish ~ (Winter, 1954), 89-99. 131 •

Rosenberg, Edgar. From Shylock to Svengali. Stanford University Press. • 1960. Rosenberg, Stuart E. America is Different: The Search for Jewish Identity. Thomas Nelson ~ SonS: New York. 1964.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of His Youth. Louisiana State University Press. 1955. ----

Samuel, Maurice. You Gentiles. Harcourt, Brace & Co. New York. 1924.

Spitz, Leon. ttwas Wolfe an Anti-Semite?• American Hebrew. CLVIII (1948), 5.

Walser Richard, ed. ~ Enigma of Thomas ~· Harvard University Press. 1953.

----· Thomas Wolfe: An Introduction and Interpretation. Barnes and Nobles. New York. 1961.

Hatkins, Floyd C. Thomas Holfe's Characters. University of Oklahoma Press. 1957.

1-1heaton, Mabel Wolfe. Thomas Wolfe and His Family. Doubleday & Co. New York. 1961 •

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