THOMAS vlOLFE, I.m: ~LE MŒlF, JJm Im1.m§. THOMAS WOLFE, THE EXILE MC1l'IF, AND THE JEVS .,,

by

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

A thesis submitted to the Faoulty ot Graduate Studies and Reasaroh in partial tulfUl­ ment of the requirements far the degree of Master of Arts.

Departmant or English, l-1cGill University, Montreal, P.Q. April, 1966.

® Barbara. H.. Kay 1966 1ABLE g: CONl'ENl'S

PREFACE • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 111

Chapter

I. THE CHIID AND DREAMER • • • • • • • • • • • 1

II. "WELCOME TO OUR cmn ••• • • • • • • • • • 2$

III. THE WORID OF ESTHER JACK •• • • • • • • • • • 67

IV. THE LAST FAREWELL • • , • • • • • C) • • • • • 98

CONCLUSION • • • • • e • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 127

( BIBLIOGRAPHY • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 129

11 PREFACE

Most readers ot Thomas Volte tend to be extreme in the1r judgemerrlis of him. They become either devotees or violent dissenters

after reading only one novel. Hence it has been ditficuJ.tof4ll"·-thosB

relatively faw critics who have tackled a depth criticism of him to analyze his work objectively. For the man and his art are ot a piecet one is sympa'l;hetie to Eugene-George 's seismic emotionsl oonfrontations

vith ille, or one oonsiders suah intimate confessions a formless

effluvienae of neurotic anguish.

This study attempts to define and articulate the essentially

ordered rhythms of meaning governing 'toTolfe' a quest for paychie fulfillment. It aeoks to explain his significant relationships and

deciaions in terInS of the 'exile motit '. Wolfe 's perennial and heroic ( struggle to overcome the forces of background and temperament, whiCh

made him a stranger and exile, in arder to establish a normal lite

tor himself.

Praotically untouched by Wolte's oritios has been the

enormous impact that oertain New York Jews had on his lite and work. In thé1r insistence upon dealing vith the ultimately irrelevant question

of Woltels anti-Sem1tism, those tew writers who deal exolusively vith

thia area have failed to grasp the importance of Wolte's Jewish oontaots.

The mistake of theae oritics, and of many others dealing with Holfe's

work in general, ia their failure to recognize the patterns of spiritual

growth represented in the novelee This study will, l hope, help to

palliate that tendenoy to underestimate '~olte 's progression to emotional

i11 iv. maturity in his ambitions to understand himself and Amerioa •. l am grateful to Professor Alea Luoas of MoGUl University1s

English Department for his guidance in thia effort, freely and j udi­ oiously given during his sabbatioal yeer. l am grateful, too, for the moral enoouragement l reoeived through his great enthusiasm and sympathy for Thomas lololfe 1s work. And it was the ohild and dreamer that governed his beliet. He belonged, perhape, to an older and s1mpl~r raoe or ment he belonged with the Mythmakers. (From ~ HomewSrd, Angel)

CHAPl'ER ];

It oomas as no great surprise to readers of Thomas Wolfe to learn that his favourite authars, those with whom he liked to associate his Olm writing, are the great Fabulists of western literature: the Mythmakers. He read and relished the works or Homer, Cervantes, Tolsta,y, Sw1f't, Melville, Goethe, Dôstoavsky, Voltaire, Coleridge, Hardy, Joyoe--and the Bible. That these authors represent eight d1f'ferent oultures and span more than 3,000 years of oivilizat10n is sn indioation or Wolte's oatholicity of llteraoy interest. Hovever, it is in their similarities, not their diïferenaea» that we may see the signitioanoe for Wolfe's oun novels. Man Been beyond the limitations of normaloy, transoending the prosa1sm of lite here and nov, making his vay against the àark ourrent of flowing, inexorable Time; man exalted, ooni'ronting the stark, and often tragio, polemios of existenoe; man alone, auraed and threatened by the horrar of solitudes these are the tales of the

Mythmakars. They see, in the lite or one man, the story of the f'ami~, the raoe, and the worlda "Eaoh of us is a11 the sums he bav not ooUDtedc subtraot us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin aga1n in Crete four thoueand years ago the love that ended yesterday 1n Texas."l

1 Thomas Holte, 122! Homeward, tngel (Nev York, 1952), p. 1. Al1 subsequent referenoes sba11 be to t 1e edition and will be im ict.ted ae LHA.

l 2.

There are few themes in Wolfe's novels, and those tend to he quite simple in essence. They have universal applioation, just as his charaoters, while a1most palpably real as individuale, have a legendary, timaless quality about them. They have Homeric epithete attachad to

their naDleS to remind us of their fundamentally stark and synoptio

persona lit1es. Gant in ~ Homeward, Angel ie the "Far-Wanderer," Ben 1e ttthe quiet one," and Eliza bas "the tr:Lbsl look. n The Faust theme in partioular had an intensely personal appeal for Wolte. He himselt Bpent long, tortured years, barning vith a mythia fever to engulf all the world 's knowledge. Ha olaims he tried to read every volume in the Widener Library at Harvard, a vildly impossible soheme, but typical

of Wolfe'a early ambitions. He groaned over his enoHlOUS xœntal

oatalogues of things undone, places unaeen, ~loxœn unloved, and food

untasted. He wept for the laok of communication in his relationships. Once he wrote to his mietreee, Aline Bernstein, "Faust'e own problem touches xœ more than Hamlet's ••• the problem of modern lire ••• to knov everything, to be a God--and he is caught in the terrible net of human inoapaoity.n2 His sympathy for the Faustian legend led Wolfe to inolude it in his vork, but it is not intelleotual omnisoience that taunts the

protagoniste Rather Wolfe attempts to ohronicle the efforts of a modern

Faust to plumb the impossible depths of ~ underatanding, and bring artistio expression to his discoverias. In all his struggles he is nlone. There ia this, the isolation of the seaking individusl; the

2 " Quoted in Riohard s. Kennedy, The W1nd 0\1 .2! Memory (Na\l York, 1962), p. 207. restless and pere~al father searoh; and the now famlliar 'you-oan't­

go-home-again t motit. These few themes dominate and direot the growth or the haro of the four great navela, Eugene Gant-George Webber. While Faust, Telemaohus and Orestes are oonsoions modela

for Wolfe 's protagonièt, he also assumes important aspeots of ma~ other haro arohetypes net speo1fioally alluded to. He 18 Prometheus, bringing understanding and oomfort to man, but tortured and har8ssed by the gods as a punishment for his daring. He is Aohilles, ssaker of glory, and avare of its prioe--death, yet powrlesB to deny himself' this

sole path to ful.flllment. He ia Satan, the fallen angel of Paradise ~, too rebellious and proud to live a "normal" lite--a savage and intrigu1ng ioonoolast. He is Cain, the outoast son, wearing the mark or exile all ( his IDe. He is the Byronio hero: hanàsome, dark, moody, and gullty­ oU1'aed far aoma unutterable sin. And of oourse he is the Wandering Jew, doomed to roam the earth and never find peaoe, rest, ar home. What all thase anti-Christa have in oommon is the destiny of solitude. They are eules, sooial and spiritual par1ahs. They live

on the periphery of sooiety, partly through their own ~1sh or thoir

own aotions, but also beoauae they hava been ostraoized and oondemned

by a "society" that oonnot oamprehend or tolerate their s1ngularity.

That, essentially, is how Wolfe saw himself in his early works.

Tormented by loneliness, frustration and guilt, he reacted te the outside world almost paranoioally at t1mes, as a result or a oonstant feeling of rejeotion in his formative years. On the other hand, Wolfe vas incredibly astute in his insights into his own sufferings. With typical

". 4.

candour, he always ina1sted on his immaturity and the need for emotional

and social growth. And his four major novels are the record of his struggle.

Look Homeward, Angel and the first part of lli ~ ~ ill1!.2,Q!f.

chronicle the childhood, youth and young manhood of atgene Gant and

George (Ymnk) Vlebber. The frame of reference for ~ Homeward, Angel is,

however, a more literal and more interesting account of Wolfe' s development.

Fèmily relationships have Il huge significance in ~ Homewnrd, Angel,

accounting for the major movements in the plot and shape of the novel, while

the environment of ~ ~.2 the ~ has been pared dOVin to accommodate

the symbo1ic force of the story, which i8 iteelf far more fragmented and

episodic than ~ Homeward, Ang~l.

From the outset, ~ Homeward, Angel proposes a broad, sweeping

theme:

Uaked and a10ne we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mo·ther's face; from the pritlOn of her flesh have Via come into the UIlspeakable and incommunica.ble prison of this earth. Which of us has knOVnl hie brother? Which of us hae looked into hie father'e heart? Which of ua hae not remained forever prison-pent? Vlliich of ue is not forever a stranger and alone? (LHA, preface)

Vie are al1 strangers to ourselves and our neighboure, and we are 811

searching for the wlly out of our individua1 prisons. Fear, v/cllkness and

compromise forro Il bridge to temporary comfort for some, but others remain

forever encysted in self, strongers to the wor1d and themselves. This

novel is a otudy in tensions be"tween the otrangers and those who have found

the way out of 10ne1inos8. The story of the tensions begins vath r~iza

and Gant, long before the birth of Eugene.

T Elua and Gant represent the primal, opposing facts of existence. Gant is the stranger, the wandereI'. Elua 10 oommunal,

of the tribe, of the earth. In a sense, they are Everyman and Everyvoman. Every marriage is a compromise or opposite forces; every son and daughter 1s a result and avictim of the union ot opposites, and must choose

his or her Rsiden in the struggle. The sensitive chUd is truq

vict1m1zed, tortured by the neoessity ot choice and paralyzed by the unjust demands imposed upon h1m.

The tension rune daep, and represents more than a sexual oontest for supremaoy. The same struggle exista at the hem ot all

lite, becom1ng ult1mately oosmic in its implications. For \tlolfe, vhat he intuited as a mother-father polem1o in intanoy and youth beoame far more complex later on. He came to see the same tension at work between

the North, and later Germany, the golden lands of his father IS people, and the dark, haunted South of his mother; betveen the man-swarming oitY anà the mountain-girdled town; between Europe and AloorioaJ

betveen the artist and IBOO:!.&ty; between Jew and gentlle. Ha ",aB a

genius, a ohild or dest1D;y in his O'oln eye8 and in the world IS, and oould not assume a loyalty or oommitment to one principle, because,

if only in illuminated snatohes, he saw lite clearly and he sav it vhole. Thus he ws continually wounding and being wounded by people

in his efforts to maintain integrity and independenoe in the faoe of tbose who would dlllDand aU his love. And bis refusal to oommit himself

perpetuated his isolation; contirmed h1m in the role of exile, atranger and outoast.

" 6.

W. O. Gant, the "Far-WaJX1erer,· ia Eugene's gaunt, tall, oraggy father; he is a lltera1 stranger to Altamont, aoming tram the victorious North, a land shrouded in mystery and superstitious belief' by the South. Arriving not very long af'ter the Civil War, he is one

of fell Northerners in what ws then a small town. He has come beoause he is a disUlusioned man, and has given up seeking glory

as a carver of angels. He had become a stone-cutter only to learn how to carve an angel's haad. He did became a fine stone-outterj but that

\laS all. So he has come south. Those looking for golden fulfillment and prond achievement go to the fabled North, as Eugene would later.

Those who must esoape the harsh light of dafeat oOJœ to the South, llhare def'eat has become a virtue, f'abrioated trom the holloll, f'utile wish for soma kind of dignity after the humiliation of the wr.

In ~ HUls Beyond Wolfe describes the demoralizing affect ot the

self-daceit practised by the South~ MIt became a kind of folk-religion. And under its soothing, othar-uorldly spell, the South began to turn

its faoe awy trom the hard and ugly realities of daily living •••••3

Elba Pentland is tho South inoarnate, at least in this sense. Her family, more like a tribe than a group of relatives, are hUl-bound; the y have their heritage in the eartb. If they are strangers

to one another as individuala, they have learned to compensate by a tiercely loyal and defensive tribal unity. Wolfe vas fascinated vith

his mother t s people and knew thoam well through Julia Wolfe fa almost

~homaB Wolfe, Ià!! Hilla. Beyond (New York, 1961), p. 68. Subsequent references will be to thIs edition and will be indicated as ~. 7.

interminable ref'lections about them. She would go on talking of' them

f'or hours, including details only an inoredibly retentive memory (and om that Wolte inherited f'rom her) could recollect. He oonsumed them

voraciously. !!!2 Jlills Beyond, posthumously edited and published, is

only a sketchy outlin9 of' the long chronicle Wolte hoA in mind for hie mother 's family. They vere a kind of' mythic people, "lolte felt. He writes

of' them in the true legeDdary spirit. He revela in the tales of'

"Bear" Joyner, insisting that if they were not true, they should have

been. In his writings, the Joyners (the Pentlands in ~ Home .. ard, Angel), do not unfold as 'noble savages', or homoly, pioua peasants. They are vigourously bawy and a luaty raoe, ignorant "grills,1ft amoral

~ and treméndously self-satisfied. They have made a small world of' 1 their own, enoysted in the mountains, and, turning their baoks to the rest of' the universe, they have created their own peouliar kind ot happiness: "They are olanniah, suspiéious of the strange, world-lost, mistrustful of' the outer warld-conformant, really, in their

non-oonforming. n (~, p. 19) Thair self-oonfidenoe, based on esoapism, is exuberaDt. They nknowedn they were good. Wolfe ws intrigued by wbat he oalls "the oonsciouaness thay had of speoial heritagen (I!m, p. 28);

whenever he met a group of' people vith this kind of' oonsoiousneAs ha ws irresistably dra\m to it, trying to find its souroe and strangth.

It vas this oonfortable baokdrop of olan unity, \~olfe believed, that gave vitallty and meaning to their lives, Just as Eliza 's lite is dcminated and supported by her sense of heritage and privilege as a s.

member of the Pentland olan.

In contrast to the Pentlands, Gantfs isolation and atrangeness are emggerated. They even looked alikea "The Pentlands bore a atrong olan marking ••• They had broad, powerful noses, vith fleshy deeply

soallopped winge, sensual mouths, extraord1narily mixed of delioaoy

and ooarseness, ••• broad intelligent foreheads •••• n (.mA, p. 12)

Olan markings beoome s1gn1fioant in Wolfe fa descriptions of other tribal people; he ofton repeats the epithet "beak-nosedn in desoribing Jews, not beoause he thought all Jeva had hooked noses, but beoause he liked to oonoretize his feeling of their olannishneas, their almost tangible inoongruitl vith the comon man-owarm. The epithet ia a kind of Homerio or Diokensian meohan1sm.

Gant fS introduotion to Elba 's tamily is disquieting and

ominous. He is oomewhat oowed by "Major" Pentland, El~a's father, who has ". • • a patriarohal beard, and the thick, oomplaoent features of his tribe.n (lHA, p. 13) As the family talk, and as he appraises their intimaoy and kinship vith one another, he is d1aoonoerted and depressed, nfor he saw that he must die a stranger-that all, al1 but

these triumphant Pentlands, wo ba~uet~ on death-mœt die." (!&, p. 14) E1iza!.s abaolutely blind to Gant'a deeper, buried lire.

At t,heir firat meeting, he had saia, half-iron!oal~, I1I'm a stranger in a strange land." Her reaction vas to chare him opt1m1stioally, irrelevantlys npshawl • • • You ought to get out and meet more people ••.• " (.Y!!, p. 10) This is Eliza'a tragio flawl her inevitable retreat into a world of meaningless optimism, were oliches assume the

." 9. burden of' truth, and cheertulness beoOIœs a surrogate for courage and honesty. Eliza is a tragic figure because sbe is capable or risiJ\g ab ove the inane pattern of thought she normally enjoys. On the very brink ot horror, death, and partmg,forever, sbe sees the enormous vaste betore her, the lost years ot incommunioable frustration. But by the time she sees, it is too late; nothing more oan be done, though she oan aOO does sutfer with nobUity. And so, she turns her eyes away from the essenoe or Gant, and will not understand him. She alwys oalle him "Mr. Gant,· f'or she cannot bring herself to probe into him, to see the lone1iness at his oore. He is Just as baff'led and oonfused by Eliza'e inflexible, tribal irrationality. Gradually they become eetranged. Gant wearies of his lonely and unfilf'illed lUe, hie abortive efforts at oreativity in the stone ehop; he eiokens and turns inwards, while Eliza fastens her energies upon her home, her tam1J.y, and finally real estate, a Pentland passion. She becomes possessive, falls prey to "the insensate

~hology of hoarding" that Wolfe alwys detested.

Into the arens of the growing tension between Elize. and Gant comes Eugene, the last of' her brood. He is dUferent from the others in the family, and this irJ evident from the hour ot his birth, just as the olassical heroes were recognized for their superiority immadiately they were borne Wolfe imparts a kinà of epio aura to Ellza'B recog­ nition of' the destiny in her ohild's eyesl the hour after his birth she had looked in his dark eyes and seen something that would brood there eternally, she knew, unf'athomable wells of' remote and intangible lonelinessa she knew that in her dark and sorrowf'ul womb a stranger had oome to lUe, f'ed by the lost communications of' eternity, his own ghost, haunter of' his own house, lonely to himBelf and to the world. 0 lost. (~, p~ 85) 10.

Even as a ohild of tvo, Eugene knows instinctively that his vay lies beyond the doar of his mother's house. His first bab.y steps take him to the door of the bouse and outside, as though acknowledging his fate. And groving up, he sees the widening gap betveen himself and the o'tber boys at school. They are child-tribal, While he keeps to himself, guards h1s privacy. He cannot playon a te am, but he laves to tbrov a ball back and forth vith his brother for hOurD at home. Even without his inner convict1on that he 1s dUferent,

Eugene is singlad out, for Eliza grows jealous of him. He 1s her last ch1ld, and she cannot beer to see him grow up and awy trom her. Wolfe ts own mother, Julia Westall Wolfe, freely admitted to keeping Wolfe a baby far as long as possible b.y waning him only at tvo years,

While she kept him sleeping w1 th her until he ws eight. Eugene undergoes the Gama treatment in 'the novel, relating the misery of confinement vith

al1 the power of first-band experience. Eliza would not lat Eugene bave hie hair cut until he vas eigh't: Dabe wouM it &round her linger every morning into little fat Fauntleroy curls: the agony and humiliat10n it caused him was horrible, but she was Wl8ble or unw111ing to understanè it •••• n (.mA, p. 92) Reason w1l1 not preva1l vith her. 'When he explains to her uhy he should hava his bair cut, she only laughs and

croons affeotionately, but vill not answer him. "Suddenly baff'led

bef'are the uny1elding inflex:1b1l1ty of her nature, wh1ch could be dr1ven

to aotion~only after incessant and maddening prDds, Eugene, screaming-mad

w1th helpless fw~y, would understand the cause of Gant's fury." (~, p.93) From El1za and her nmothering,n Eugene develops a horror of possess1ve­

ness of aoy kind, even though he h1mself would Beek on several occasions n. e. repetition of this same childhood pattern. In the end, however, he would shriDk back from the loving embrace of those he cared for most.

Ultimately he uoulà have to break off all relations with them in order to insure the privacy so insensitively denied him as a child. nAt sohool, he vas a desperate and hunted little animal.

The hard, infallible in its banded instinct, knew at once that a stranger haC! been thrust into it, and it wss meroiless at the hunt." .CliA, p. 9.3) Wolfe refers to the crowd of children as nit.n Crowds, nman-swarms" of any kind are perseoution symbole of a sort to Wolfels hero. Eugene's experiences at sohool here are suggestive of the fear and helplessness he later endures as a teacher in New York,

..mere he is oonvinced that his students are united against h1.m, oonspiratorial in their harassment of h1.m. Lonely and abandonned as a young boy, Eugene's greatest

solace is literat1.U'e. Eugene comas to believe that the magic of 1oIOrds is the key to communication, the clue to "the forgotten language." Moreover, literature is an escape from the reality of bis environment. Literally divided between two homes from the time he is seven, he 1s

foroed to share his mother IS house vith ber boarders, and Eugene

had alwaye echoed his fahterls disguat for a home that 18 invaded by

etrangers. Thus the eituation at "D1xLf.!)land," the boarding house,

further alienates him from home and f~ly.

By twelve, "The prison walls of self had closed entirely around him.n (LHA, p. 212) He lived almost entirely in his inngination,

oreating for himself a beautiful body, a properly heroio spir~t, and 12. aweet damaela in d istress to save trom the evil geniuses he dredged up tor the purpose. For his daily lite vas sordid, paintul, and oontused. He vas tvelve, a gangling adolesoent, and consumed vlth gu1lt tor hls burgeoning sexual "luat." He shrank trom physloal ridioule. And so literature and lts assoo:latlons or an ideal vorld help, him tor a t1me, until his bruta11y oandid impulse tor honesty at all costs holds up to hls imaginatlon the sorry reality or hls appearanoel In all his swarming tantasias Eugene sav himselt .•••.• unbeaten and beloved. But momnts or olear vision returned to him wen all the deteat and mlsery ot hls lite vas revealed. He sav his gangling and absurd tigure, bis remote unpra~ical brooding face, too llke a dark strange flower to arouse any feeling among hle oompanlons and his kin, he thought, but discomfort, bitterness, and mookery. (.mA, p. 215) He part1cularly loved parts or Shakespeare, beoause Shakespearels heroos vere exUea and outcasts as he telt himselt to be. He responds intensely to Edmund la 'Thou, Nature, art my goddess" speech trom~. "It ws a call to the unclassed; it ws a cry tar those beyond the fenoe, tor rebel ange la , and tor a11 the mn who are too tall." (~, p. 329) Wolfe we six teet, tive inohas taU, and although an unusual height tor a man, lt le not abnormal, oertainly not the treaklsh maasurement Wolfe thought lt vas. Clearly he has endoved Eugene vith all the sensltivity to pbysioal isolation that he telt as a youngster.

George Webber, or Monk as he 1s nioknamed, in I!!!! ~ ~

~ Rook, 1e alao dieproportioned. But his physique is truly ridi­ oulous. He 1e short, bow-legged, simian in appearance, vith arma 13.

1 dangling almost to his knees. Wolfe could hardly have picked a more unappealing body for his haro without bordering on the grotesque.

Eugenets transmogririoation to Monk 1s oharaoteristio, thougà, of

~ .l!2.2 .!!!2 ~ Rook as a whole. The story ot Wolfeta early years is retold here, but symholica1ly rathar than l1terally; for no one oould

deny the extraordinary fidelity to reality ot ~ Homeward, Angel. Partly to prove that he oould write a novel that ws not natItobiographioal, n

and partly to illuminate in stark relief the formative influenoes in his

life, Wolfe turned to Monk, the Joyners, and lire in Old Catawba.

The themas tbat have been developed in Look Homeward, Angel

are elaborated and embroidered. Monk 1s once more the enled stranger,

but now litarally an outcast and alone. His mother 1s dead and h1s

father, the 1no~nation of evil to the Joyners, 1s never spoken ot

by his relat1ves who take him in. It lire in the Gant household ws

frustrating and hum1liating at t1mes, lire w1th Aunt Ma\l, an etiolated version or El1za, 1s a hundredtold more so. All or the vital1ty, energy and warmth or the Gant ram1l,. has been reduced to nothingness. Only Aunt Ma", "a rusty crone of fatte," remains, and she has none of the riohness of persona11ty that animates El1za.

Monk ts childhood 1s na dark and melanoholy one.n4 The poor and unwanted

relat1ve of the Joyner olan, he 1s oonsigned to the sad l1ttle frame

cabin behind his unolets ne\l rad briok house. Aunt Ma" presides, a hideous and gloOll\1 mother-subBtitute. The whole atmosphere is ohargad

with Diokensian doam and gloom, and has a somewhat melodramatic ring

for those familiar with the original story.

4rrhomas \oloUe, !llil ~ ~ ~ ~ (Ne~ York, 1939), p. 7. Subsequent referenoee will be to th1s edition and will he indicated as TW&TR. l Nevartheless, Wolfe does oonvey with great oonviotion the brooding presenoe of the Joynera. The Pentlanda, seen in retrospeot, are only embryonio modela far ·the a ombre , ritualistio Joynera. Gothic

detail is evoked to oreate an aura of fear and misery in Monk la relations vith them. The wind howls and moans about the oabin, demonic and furious, as Aunt Maw pours out her gruesome tales of Joyner history. Monk reooila from her "unoeaBing ohroniole of death and doom and terror and lost people in the hills long, long ago." (TW&TR, p. 8) Hia diagust at being a part of thia weird ensemble ia nightmarish in quality; the Joynera assume almoat aupernatural powera in his imagination, alwaya Bomahow related to deatht And they were alwaya right, 1nvincibly rlght, triumphant over death and all·the miseriea they had seen and known, lived and fed upon. And he waB of their blood and bone, and desperately he felt somehow 11lœ lite 's oriminal, some pariah, an outoash to their invinoible rlghtness, their infallible goodness, their unsull1ed integrity. (TW&l'R, p. 9) Fasolnated, yet repelled by the weavlngs of Aunt Mawls memory, Monk begina to think of the Joyners as some mystical, eternal race, above the natural laws of men and timeless as the earth, grasping joylessly at lire, and orowing over the mortals that love lire, yet must die. And he balonged to that fatal, mad, devourlng world trom whose prison there was no escape. He belonged to it, even as three hundred of his blood and bone had belonged to it, and must unweave it !rom his brain, distlll it trom his blood, • • • and esoape vith demonic and exultant joy into his father 'a world, DeW lands and morninga and the ah1n1ng city--or drown lUe a mad dog, die' (TW&TR, p. 83) The signifioance of hie "father'e vorld" ie much clearer

now than in ~ Homeward, Angel. In the latter, it la plain that there ,. ,.. are t'Wo 'Worlds in the Gant oircle: that Gant represents the North, exile, and Olympian passion, 'While Eliza is the brooding South, the tribe, and rock-like inf'lexibUit;y. But now the two worlds are enlarged and sharpl;y dGlineated, openly recognized for what they are. The Joyners are all thiDgs dark, mood;y, death-brooding and death-triumphllnt. Monk's father repreaents a lii'e that ia golden, pure, nomadic. His father ta people are like the cireue crowl individualistic, durerent,

carei'ree, vigorous and lusty. But most 01' all, his father ts land is the ·City." To Monk a11 cities belonged in the "proud, shin1ng" North. In them were realized all the myths and fables and legends that ever

were; the city b&comee na symhol 01' his hope, the image 01' his high

desire, the f~~al crown, the citadel 01' all that he had ever dreamed

of or longed for or imagined that 111'e could bring to him." (~, p. 83) Thua, there is implanted in the boy's hearl and brain the constant will

to leave the land 01' the Joyners before he is irrevocably bound to them. Feeling so strongly as he does about a father that he naver

sees, Monk fastens his affections onto the firet 01' a string 01'

father-substitutes, Nebraska Crane. Much has been made 01' the faet

that Nebraska stands alone in the gallery 01' Wolte's significant characters

inasmuch as he has no kno\lll model in raal 111'e. While this information should go some 'Way in pac11'ying the literary pundits 'Who claim Wolfe could not write out of his "imagination" (J), Nebraska is far more important as a eymhol 01' Monk's unconsciouB ideal construction of a father. l 16.

Nebraska stands opposed to all that ie joyleee and "obscene" in lire, represented by the cowardly group of boys who gang up on Monk as he loUe in hie front yard. When they come a10ng, the y take aU the gold and magic out or a spring day. They were unwho1esome roisterers, they did not move ahead in oomradeship, but soampered lewdly, ragged1y around, as rauoous, hoarse, and mirtbless as a gob or phlegm; there was no warmth, no joy or hope or pleasantness in them; they fiUod the pleasant street vith brutal inso1enoe • • • he knew them instinctively for what they were--the creatures of a joyleee existence, the bearers of the hated names. ( Tl.f&TR, p. :34)

They are pale, repulsive, foul in their thoughts and habits. They are the uncounted swarms of ta1Dted people who would soi1 the lives or those men better than they, men who are ruu of lire, and creative in their use of it. But into their midst strides Nebraska Crane, authoritative, quiet1y unatraid. When they refuse to step aside for him, Bras swinge out with hie baseball bat, solidly and purposofully, conneoting vith an arm aOO breaking it. It oould e8sily have been a head, but Nebraska would not have cared. Having made up his mind to deliver Monk trom their grasp, he attacks effioient1y, ca1m1.y and forthright1y, knowing justice ie on his side. He dces not shrink trc.lm batt1e becauae of moral squeamishneea or fear of adult disapproval. He recognizes the foe in lite and moves to dispatch him. Monk'e admiration and respect for the Cherokee boy are boundloas. Himself crippled by overwhe1m1ng bouts of fear, gui1t and moral equivooations, he ia awed by his triendts monolithic personality. In a larger sense, Nebraska epitomizes all that Monk as a .. writer will hold dear in American lire. His Indian background has given 17.

him a sense ot heritage that most Amerioans laok. He is aloot !rom the petty diff'erences between North and South, and even Negro and white man. He knows who he is. He is !ree to aet, uncluttered by the puritanioal striotures under whieh Monk and the others laboured. He and his f'ather stand tor the most typioal and widely revered rubrlos

of' Ameriean society: the Law and Sport. Bras' f'ather is an iron-willed

policeman, captain of' the foroe. To Monk he is a veritable prodigy

of' strength. Their values are manly and wholesome and olear-eut. They are shaped !rom the epie mold:

he sees the 1JDage of' the brave oampanionship of' Nebraska Crane. What is there to f'ear? • • • Nebraska stands there in his lite like the 1JDage of' that heroie intogrity in lif'e whi~ oannot be touohed or eonquered, whieh is outside a man, and to whioh his own l1fe must be united if he will be saved. (TW&TR, p. 6.3)

If Nebraska assumes an almost sanct1f.ied niohe in the vision of' George Webber, Mrs. Leonard, Eugene's high school teacher, receiv8a much the sarne kind of' reverence !rom him. Entrusted to her

care as an adolescent, Eugene f'inas in her a tlame of' beaut~ and spiritual hunger to matoh his own untutored genius. She is a stranger too, a brooding personality. Her soul has risen above the mundane affairs of' daUy living and the prosaio nature of her husband. Seeing her f'or the f'irst t1me, Eugene recognizes his kinship with her; hearing her voice, he is touched, nand suddenly he knew that all lif'e seemed eternally strange to this woman, that she looked directly ioto the beauty and the mystery and the tragedy in the hearts ot men,

and that he seemed beautiful to her." (~, p. 226) She never tailed him. r 18.

All of his lire, it seemed, his blazing loyalties began with men and ended 1011 th images; the lire he leaned on melted below his weight, and looking down, he saw he clasped a statue; but enduring, a victorious rea11ty amiè h1s shadow-haunted heart, she rema1ned, who first had touohed his blinded eyes vith light, who nested his hooded houseless S)\ù. She remained. (~, p. 228) Another who remained 1s Ben. Eugene grows bored vith his schoolmates, irr1tated vith their pseudo-bravado, their olannish oowardioe. They felt that he vas "queer"--the other boys preached the smug coward10e of the oh1ld-herd, defending themselves, when their perseout10ns were diecovered, by saying they would make a "real boy· of him. But there grew up in him a deep affect10n for Ben who stalked oocas100811y and sof'tly through the house, guarding aven then vith soowling eyes, and surly speeoh, the secret lire. Ben ws a stranger; soma deep 1nst1ct drew htm to his ohild-brother • • • (.Ll!A, p. 85) r. There ie always th1s reoognit10n between aliens, Wolfe felt. the taoit knowledge that there are no words, that one seeks slone the forgotten

language, and "the stone, the lest, the door ••• n Ben ia a creature of the night. Gaunt, UDder-nourished, nicotine-r1dden, he slips away trom the house where he goes unnot10ed, and joins the other night creatures, who feed on strong ootfee, 01garettes, and beafy hamburgers. These are real things to Ben; no talse sentimantality 1ntrudea upon h1s world of darkness.

Ben and E11za are estranged; she understands him no b(~tter than she understands Gant or Eugene. Hia motivating impulses escape her imagination, and Helen's, his s1ater. They watch his silent oourtship of Mrs. Pert, an older woman who boards vith them. She 1s

fat and plain; yet she deals vith Ben honestly and generously. She 1a ~. 19. f But Elba and Helen feel hie turning awy from them and they are wounded at hie choice. Chilléd by rebuffal, they draw together in a timeleee, eilent ehr1nking from his lonelineee and inscrutability.

They thought of eona and loverez they drew closer in their communion, they drank the cup of their Mn elave17 ae they thought of the Gant men who would alvays knov hunger, the strangers of the land, the unknown tarere who had lost their way. 0 lostl (lHA, p. 309) Ben, of aIl of them, has lost hie vay and for Wolfe his loes ie the bittereat to accept, beoause he never had a chance, and he knowe it--a chance in the golden city, the fabled land of

achievement and manly glory. Hie impoverished body reflects his eutfocated spirit; it cannot dtand the strain of the death-in-life hie destiny hae aocorded him. Even hie attempte to join the arlD1,

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 heroic figure he is, long before the others oome to reoognize his true stature. It is Ben who

has given the Gants the semblance of \Dlity they still cling to, but his affection vas eo quiet, his consietent etrength so self-eftacing, they have hardly noticed hie presence in their lives. -He bore encyated in him the evidence of their tragic fault: he walkeà alone in the darknees, death and the dark angele hovered, and no one salol him." (!:!!A, p. U8) Wolfe grante Ben an Olympian seat of honour along with thoee othere he revered and loveda Like Apollo, who did hie penance to the high god, in the sad house of King Admetue, he came, a god with broken feet, into the gray hovel of this world. And he lived here a stranger, trying to recapture the music of the lost uorld, trying to recall the great forgotten language, the loet faces, the stone, the leaf, the door. (~, p. 590) 20.

Benis death is the great watershed in the fortunes of the Gant family. His dying reveals once and for aIl both the nobility

and the pettiness this family was hètr to. It briDgs to a bead am

confronts them vith the1r shared fate of lonely frustration. At first they refuse to accept the inev1tablo. Eliza trias desperately to cover the horror of Ben 's suffering with her usual slick ot cheertul opt1miBm, as she admoniahes Eugene before he goes into the sickrooml "Now, l tell you, son, ••• when you go in there to see bim, don't make out as if you knew he was sick. If l were you, l'd make a big joke or it aIl. l'd 14ugh just aa big es yeu please and say, 'See here, l thought l was coming to see s sick man. Why, pshaw ••• there's nothing wong with you. HaU of it 'a only imagination 1'" (~, p. 573) This, while Ben is drowing in his mm lung congestion in tbe next roanl Yet Eugene understands that this machanical attempt to escape the brutal realities of life and death ie not the best part ot her, not the only Eliza. He con pitY her silent horror when Ben makes it clear that he will not tolerate her in the same room with him. Eugene comforta her and Eliza breaks dowul And El1zaf· stripped suddenly of her pretenses, olung to him, burying her white face in hia coat sle9'Ve, weeping bitterly, helplesely, grievouely, for the aad waste of the irrevocable years--the immortal hours of love that might never be rel1ved, the great evil of forgetfulness and 1ndifferonoe that oould never be righted now. Like a child she vas grateful for his oaresa, and his heart tw1sted in him like a wild and broken thing, • • • (LHA,- p. 577) Helen shows the same kind of ambivalence in her suffering that oharacterizes Eliza. Although her instinots are fiorcely loyal, ..T protective, and generous, and although she would have fought to the 21. death if she thought she could help Ben, she is fi11ed with ~ sense

of her ovn mattyrdom that foc uses the signifioanoe of the oooasion on herself, just as Elizals esoapism tends to illuminate her ovn good oheer rather than Ben's agony. And Helen thrlves on her contdot with death. This is the Pentland (Joyner) impulse in her, although she would deny it a11 along the vay. This is her life: to oare for others and pretend that she is waring herself out. But in tact she gets stronger as her oharge gets weaker. She lives only for Gant's siokness and is hollow and burned-out when he dies. Thus she finds a ohilling satisfaotion in Ben's suffering, for he justifies and vindicates her essentially barren existenoe. "There's one thing sure! l've done everything l could. l havenlt been to bed for two days. Whatever happens, Illl have no regrets on that score." Rer voice was filled with a brooding ugly satisfaotion. (LHA, p. 579) As the others retleot on their ovn injured egos, and plaintively s0ek their own oomfort, Eugene alone faoes the full horror of the situa tion. It is 1!!m who is dying, but to them he mayas well be dead, so much do they dvall on themselves and their righteous suffering. Only Eugene, repelled by this unotuous plety, and disgusted

by the premature post mortema, oan lntuit the unutterable agony of Ben 's passing. Within Eugene, as he paoed restlessly up and down the hall or prmlled through the house asearoh for some entranoe he had never found, a bright and strioken thing kept twisting about like a trapped bird. This bright thing, the cnre of him, his Stranger, kept tWiating ite head about, unable to look at horror, until at length it gazed steadtastly, as if under a dreadful hypnosis, into the eyes of death and darkness. (~, p. 581) 22.

Bickering, tension, and selfishness chate at the family right up to the end. Then Ben 's strength, expiring and passing from them, throvs a balm over the discord and unites them for one moment, as never before, and never again. Then, over the ugly olamer or their dissension, over the rasp and snarl of their norves, they heard the lov mutter of Ben 's exp1ring breath. The light had been re-shadedl he 18y, 11ke his own shadov in aIl his fierce gray lonely beauty. And as they 100ked and sav his bright eyes already blurred vith death, and eav the feeble beating flutter of his poor thin breast, the strange wonder, the dark rich miraole of his lite eurged over them its enormous loveliness. They grev quiet and calm, they plunged belov aIl the splintered wreokage of their lives, they drev together in a euperb communion of love and valiance, beyond horror and confusion, beyond death. (mA, p. 585) Ben accomplished a miracle in death as he never could in lite. Death is the great cammon bond; the vision of the great Unknovn consumes the illusion of lire's empty IIknoving." It stripe them or self, lays bare the quivering, lonely sp1':.'it, selfless and noble in its loneliness, unfolds for a brief moment the forgotten language of universal lovel "they 100ked nov upon his gray deserted shell vith a thr1l1 of awful reoognition, as one who remembers a forgotten and enchanted vord, or as men who look upon a corpse and Bee for the first time a departed god. Il (.YJ!, p. 587) And then once more the famlly drave apart. This time the barr1ers remain. Ben 's funeral assembles the important people in the novel to remind the reader that the gap between them is inevitable and irreparsble, st least in a short liret1me. The Pentlands come, death-triumphant, exuàing a sense of their own well-be1ng and complacency.

There they w~re, smelling of the earth and ParnasBus--that strange clan which met only at weddings or funerals, but which was forever true to itself, indissoluble and forever apart, vith its melanoholia, its madness, its mirth; more enduring than lite, more strong than death. (~, pe 608) ( Gant, too, ie there, morbid vith the knowledge of hie own imminent deatha "And among them, eick and oId, leaning upon hie cane, moved Gant,

the alien, the stranger.n (~, p. 609)

The wole famil,. COIœS unstrung as a reeult of Ben's death. The enormous vaste of it all unnerves them completel,., and the,. fear to look for comf'ort in one another. They siroply fall back into the eecapiet worlds they have created for themselves long ago, but th1e time there 1s no leaving them. Gant muses and broods on his growing cancer; he waits for death. Eliza throws herself into a maze of real estate projects, buy1.ng and selling in a property-hungry frenzy. Symbolically, she sells the old house on Woodson street" whioh Gant had built himself and wh1ch had known the family's happiest memories. And Helen clings

,1" more firmly than ever to Gant 'e sickness, watohing 1t vith tender, hungr,. fascinat1on. For Eugene, Ben's death has a oatalyt10 and wholesome erfect. New the laet t1e vith his family i8 gone. He begins to think of h1maelf as "different" in a health,. and auspicious sense. He has the chance now to make something of himself, escape the morb1d and unhealthy atmosphere of his home. He draws away from thoughts of Altwnont to a creative universe of his own. There comas a burgeoning belief in hie own power to shape and mè>ld a great future for himself. Visions of lite 's fruit y offerings possess him. He sees that lite is dull to most people because they themselves are dull; they do not live up to lite. But those with the passions and energy to meet the demande of the 24.

full lUe and its ohallenges are the ohosen of the earth. From the drab and fearful Jœlanoholy of bis obildhood, Eugene turne to a

potentia'.ly joyous manhood. Not tbat he beoomes immune to the mordant fears of ridioule

and humiliation he endured as a ohild. Yet, eensitive as he is to those who would ohide him for bis unkempt, idiosynoratio vay of lite, he is at least emerging from the humourless, defensive ooooon of his

youth. Nov he assumas a lofty posture of indignation in the faoe of

sooial critioism; he sees h1meelf in a oomio light, or rather Wolfe, reviewing bis egoistio oollege years, has the oandour and perspioaoity

to eet Eugane's righteous indignation in ito proper perspeotive. Wolfe vas not the megalomaniaoal lyri01st that some critios would r make hm. In faot, he vas singularly objeotive about h1meelf, and ....• oould riohly eatirize his yonng hero vhen the situation oalls for it. l think l'm hell, thought Eugene, and they say l stink beoause l have not had a bath. Me 1 Me \ Bruoe­ Eugene, the Soourge of the Greasers, and the greatest fullbaok Yale ever had 1 Marshall Gant, the savior of hie oountry l Aoe Gant, the havk of the sq, the man who brought Riohthofen downl ••• Jesus-cf-Nazareth Gant, mooked, rev1led, spat upon, and imprisoned for the sins of others, but nobly sUent, preferring death rather than oause pain to the women he loves. • • Yes, George-Gordon-Noel-Byron Gant, oarrying the pageant of his bleeding heart through Europe, • • • and Franoois-Villon Gant, and Ahasuerus Gant, and Mithridatos Gant, • • • and Edvard-the-Blaok-Prinoe Gant; • • • and Czar-Ivan-the-Terrible Gant • • • Anubis and Osiris and Mumbo-Jumbo Gant. (y!!, p. 626-7) There is humour then, but beneath the self-mockery ie a very resl conviction of hie euper1ority, encouraged by prote an achieve- ment and campus-wide aocolades aocruing throughout hie college career. 1 He begins to see h:lmself amongst the great men of the earth; he hangs his own portrait alongside Soorates, Caesar, and Shakespeare. He feels a burning need to exeroise his untried intelligence, glut his prodi­

gious memory, feed bis mind vith all of llfe 's pageantry. He paoes the oampus and the streets at night, desperately peering ioto houses vhere there are people and lives he does not know, the buried seorets of mankind. At t:lmes, unab1e to oontrol his fieroe greed for. human oommunioation, he would aot out incredible fantasies. He would knook

at a door, fall into the houae, and demand a glass of vater fram its horr1fied ocoupants. Solicitiously thay would enquire where his friands vere. "FriandsS" he glanced about vildly and darkly. Then, vith a bitter laugh, he said, "Friends' l bave nonel l am a stranger here." Then they would ask him vbat he did. nI am a Carpenter," he vould ansver, smiling strangely. Then they vould ask him vhere he came from. "Far away. Very far, Il he vould say deep1y. IIYou vould not know if I to1d you. ft (1d!A, p. 633).

Again the splendid parody of Eugene 's romantio self­ aggrandizament does not entirely conoeal his very raal absorption vith his own genius. And indeed, the hugs gap between him and his pears oou1d be denied by no one, even his self-centred family. At graduation they are taken aback and saddened by his obvious individua1ity, the intuition that they do not really know him.

They 100ked ~ly at his strange dark faoe, with all its passionate and naive arder, and they felt tenderness and love for his youth and a11 that was unknovn to it. And a great love and pitY velled up in him beoauae of their strange and awkward loneliness, and beoause he felt, through some terrible intuition, that he vas already indifferent to the titles and honors they desired for him, and beoause those which he had come to desire for himaelf vere alDeady beyond the scale of their value. And, before the vision of pitY and 106s and loneliness, he turned avay, clutohing his lean hand into his throat. <'Y!{h p. 635-6) 26.

1 His pain springs from the knowledge that there is no door leading from his varld to theirs. At one time he had aooepted their

sooial standards and had been agonized beoause he oould not live nuplt to them. But nov he realizes that he did not meet them because he ws

alwys beyoDd the only oonoeption they had of happiness and suooess. The vorld beyond the town and the mounta1Ds stretohes betore htm nov. It is full of golden hope, full of na thousand unmet and JDaJJgii'ioont

possibilities. The otrange enohanted ~oasts vere unvisited. He ws young and he could never die." (Y1!, p. 637) It is hard, though, to leave the plaoe vhere he has been

happy. He has had soma idyllio, if oloistered, years at the State university. H,e had done muoh and been popular, for a11 his

idiosyncrasi~s. But it has been an apprentioeship only. Knowing that he must leave this transient haven, he is keenly avare that he is nov more than ever an exile. But as the loet world faded !'rom his sight, Eugene gave a great ory of pain and sadness, for he knev tbat the elf1n door had olosed bobind htm, and tha t he vould never oome baok again. (LHA, p. 639)

The de01sion 1s made: Eugene is to go to Harvard-and the North. The parting with Eliza is bard on both sides. As usual, she does not reoognize the full sign1fioanoe of ,the event untll the end, and then she surfers powrfully, seeing the inveterate wanderlust in him. She knows then that he is as lost to her as Ben is. He oannot begin to tell hoy he feels, hoy he remambers the beauty of their love for eaoh other, always thare beneath the pain and oonfusion of their lives, and hoy he olearly sees nevery step of that terrible voyage 27.

which his incredible memory and intuition took back to the dwelling

of her womb. 11 (.L!!!, p. 651) The last farewell is profoundly symbolic. At the literal crossroads or his lite, he stands in the town square, and there meets the ghost ot Ben; not the dolorous ethereal being of the Elizabethan stage, but Ben as he was, as he always would bes surly, cooky, sardonicallyaloat. He materializes on the poroh ot Ganttsstone shop as ettortle9sly as Homer ts and Virgil's messenger-gods dritted

gracetully from Olympus. And Ben is there tor the SaJœ reason as Meroury or Aphrodites to admonish and guide the child or destiny, who is on the brink of his lite 's adventure, but who hesitates and risks f'ailure. J Ben sternly refutes Eugenets protestations tbat he is merely going to Harvard tor a year. He oonfirms him in the role ot stranger, impresses upon him his enarmous duty, to stay true to his inner 11.ght, to fulfil the lost destiny ot his true brother, to tind

the real, and only world, of Selt. And Eugene has a vision of his thousand selves, "the lost ohild-face below the lumpy ragged cap,

drugged in the image of the unheard musio, listening for the far-forested

horn-note, the speechless almost oaptured pass-word." (~, p. 659)

He sees himselt and "the fierce hl' ight horda of Ben," all lli thousanà moments. He panics; he cannot remember the nlost faces" of thos9 he

knew, but he must, for upon them depends his salvation and tuture glory.

It is here, the village square itselt, that oonstitutes the fablod

visions of his youth~ if he can only oapture it. There ie no Ahappy land," 28.

Ben saye, except' what he maltee of' himfJelt; himself and the village square. But to find the square he must leave Altamont; to f'ind Amerioa, he will go to Europe; and to find peaoe, he will leave the land where he had f'ound peaoe. Fool, Ben oalls him, f'or demanding the world, the opulent oitiee,the faery oountries of wealth and happ1nees. They do not exist. lolhere 1s the vorld, then? ft 'No'Where~' Bon said. 'You are your 'World •• 11

(mA, p. 661) And there is only one haunting voyage, and that is the searoh for the lost self, winking up at him tram a thousand lost faoes.

He stood naked and alons in darkness, far from the lost worln of' the streets and faoes; he stood upon the ramparte of his soul, before the lost world of himself; heard 1nland murmure of' lost seas, the far interj.or musio of' the horns. The last voyage, the longest, the bast. "0 sudden and impalpable faun, lost in the thiokets of' myself, l will hunt you down untU you oease to haunt my eyes with hunger. l sav your shadow 1n old bur1ed 01tiee, l heard your laughter running down a million streets, but l d1d not find you there. And no lear hangs for me in the forest; l shall lift no stone upon the hills; l shall find no door in any oity. But in the oitY of myselt, upon the oontinent of ury soul, l shall find the f'orgotten language, the lost world, a door where l may enter, and musio strange as any sounded; l aball haunt you, ghost, along the laby­ rinthine ways until--until? 0 Ben, my ghost, an answer?n But as he spoke, the phantom yeare sorolled up their vision, and only the eyes ot Ben burned terr1bly in the darkness, without an answer. (!HA, p. 662) It vae not the golden oltY he hBd visloœd os a cb1ld, aDC! the gray reptillan fooe ot tho t bank-nosed Jev did not belong arnong the oompany of tho handsome ••• people thot he had dreemed about, but Abe ws mde 01' Dette!' stutE than moat dreams ore made of • • • and • • • the slght ot hie goad, g~ay ugly faoe oould alwys ovoke for Eusone the vhole wrought tobria of hie lUe in the olty ••• ' (J'rom.2! :rime !!!2 lb! RivS)

ORmER 11

Eugene left Altamont, hls taoe Bet reeolutely tovard the gleaming North, determinod to aorte hie dOBtlny trom -the olty of

Ir\Yaelf, Il and torge trom hie oonsolousnese the man1told Dleaning of

lite. But ha vas not )'et prepared tor thls klnd of spirltual 1ndapen­ danoe and ll\.!lturlty. Firat he had to tind h1mself through the eterml

voyage 01' d1eoovery. meeting and JDaotering olong his Jl\}'thl0 route tho ,ta1aemoll8' or hls personal UndervorlA. AIld toremost amongat the prompt Inge of hie wanderlng heart we the impulse toward the "Olty,.

the rock of the North-and hie tather 'e land. Mosos did not look to the Promieed Land \I1th mare protoU11l3 and unutterabla oxpeotatlon thnn did Eugene the 01ty. AIX! Mosee we

not so boUDdlessly dlel11usloned and defeoted at the ta lIure 01' the

Prom1sed Land to rœter1nllza-for h1m-os VBO Eugene lr.& hls 1n1tiul enoounter vith Nev York Oity. For wo had aval' brought to ona geographlcal location more impossible hopee and dreams? lolbo had ever dared entrust hie lite 'e wols worth and meanlng 1nto the keaping of

00 ungraoloUB and 1nàlrterent 0 bost?

Por Thomas Wolfe, Nev York vao to he an olOl3 to surrarinll.

Q beginning of hnppinees. He had oarried thie vloion of the oitY vith

htm ainoe childhood. For the oppressed ~p1r1t of George Webbar's youth, l 30.

1 the city was the "bad" world of his lost father, standing in shining opposition to aIl that the Joyners repreeented. For Eugene it was the glorious rejection of the South and all its falee sentiment, aIl its

hypocriey, and submerged malevolence. This ws indeed to be the land

of high glory, in spite of Ben 's warning and his awn gooc1 jtlIgement. Anyone coming to Manhattan with haIr the hopes and expectations of Eugene-George would have been doamad to disappointment and bitter awakening. A city man could' have warned h1m; but thon a city man

could not have understood the inoredible sustaining power of belief built up over the years in the imagination of an unhappy country youthl For one like George Webber, born to the obscure village and brought up within the narraw geography of provinoial ways, the city experience ie suoh as no oitY man himBelf can ever know. It is aonoeived in absence and in silence and in youth; it is bu1lt up to the oloud-oapped pinnaoles of a boy's imagin1ngs; it is written l1ke 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 vith a11 the t1meless faery of the magio land. (TW&l'R, pp.222-22:3)

New York, then, ws to be the end of exile, the door, "the lost lana-end into heaven"--peaoe in the long-nwaited promipe or his f'ather's former home. And instead he came to find that the city is

the great "No Home" of earth, a hostile land of inesoapable exile. For months he felt that he was "drowning" daily in the oity, suf/ocsting in the miasma of filth and hate thnt charaoterized the lost tribes of oity people. The proverbial small town youth, f'resh from the provinoes, in his f'iret contact vith the big oit y, is an old legend. The early years ! 31.

[ of the tventieth oentury sav many suoh stories in Amerioan literature, and for several reasons. New York, and other big oities, but espeoially New York,

beoame in the early part of this century a giant oompl.ex of a metropolis. It vas no longer a typioally American oity, formost of 1ts now oitizens vere not "Amer1can"; not yet. Manhattan, Brooklyn,

the Bronx vere swamped by tides of immigrants that almost avernight

ohanged the entire face of the city. "Old America," made up of the early Teutonic settlersa German, soottish, and English, was

disappearing in the svelling flood of "Nev Amerioa"a European, Irish, Jewish, to mention only a fev. Only around 1910 did the flov subside somewhat, and Nev York become a nmelting pot" (the phrase itself originates vith Israel Zangwill, a Jewish playwright), all determined on being "good !merioane. et particularly vigoroue as ethnio groups were both the Irish and the Jevs. Muoh of the better literature and drama of the period foouses on and drave vitality trom their mores.

In eaoh oase, though in dUferent direotions, infiltration of the local oultural soene ves extremely energetio.

The modern oitY writer of that time oould not ignore these great masses of "11ttle people," swarming the streets and forming suoh distinotive--and voluble--ghettoes. They vere rapidly evolving as the

pith and marrow of the oitY itself. Moreover, the literary trend towarde realism and naturaligm, away from the genteel eentimentalism that had

characterized the lntter part of the nineteenth oentury, seized naturally upon the immigrants and the polemics of social change as nev eubjects for exploration. The city, then, aeeumed a new character in literature. No longer vas it the decorouB land of glad tomorrowB as the genteel writers had seen it. It was now dirty, violent, corrupt, soul-consuming-­ and magnificent, of course. It was finally depicted as a place where young men from the country did not always nmake goodnJ where golden opportunities did not lurk arounà every street corner in the best tradition ot American mythologyJ where the city's vealthy people vere

not the cheerful, generous and benevolen~ speoimens of Diokensian stamp. More often than not, young people were awept up in the maelstrom of city lite like so many straws in the wind. Their chastity and honesty, so bruited and praised at home, now beeame ineftectual, meeking, and extraneous oommodities.

The city burgeoned as a symbol of heartbreak rather than fulfillment; it threatened rather than exalted; it shamed rather than uplifted. Wolfe ws sensitive to the chUling oppression and ehastening visage of the city. He once wrotea ~y is it that the vastness ot nature never humiliates me, but the vastness of a oitY does?"l In its very imper sona lity there vas a kind of crowing triumph over the atOlllB that had made it. It was, as Wolfe explained to Maxwell Perkine, the terrible angel of "fact" exulting over "Ideal belief." No one had ever veaned Wolfe, in his youth, from his private warld of nideal belief," vhieh vas at the time a necessary defence against the sordid reality of his environs. Rather his favourite people had Bustainad and encouraged his tendenoy to live outside or a realistio framework.

lQuoted in Kennedy, ~ Window of Hemory, p. li. 1 Margaret Roberts (Mrs. Leonard in ~ Homewrd, Angel) and George

Pierce Baker (Professor Hatohor in Q! ~ ~ ~ River) at Harvarda they had given him spiritual and intelleotual nourishment, but they

bad not ta1d him ho'W he was to live, aotually ~. And so Wolfe ws liall suited to jo1n the ranks of those

other young au.thors who protestad and exooriated the aotunlities

of urban existence. He, too, developed in his work the theme of "porsona1 dissooiation,n whioh for Wolfe was simply anQther vay of

say1ng that he vas onoe age.in in exile, one not of his mm making.

What vas particularly disheartening about exile in the city, as

\oloUe oruœ to feel, vas the f'rustrating prox1m1ty of the manswo.rm,

a million personal contaots every day untappeci, abortive through f'ear, mutual suspioion, and stult1fied humanity. Neither was thera any

oohesive tradition on whioh the young provinoial oould depend for

oultural sustenanoe, he who WH so used to the stabil1ty and

permanenoe of small-'town ritualisme Baok st the state University, the young oollege boys had beon rustio and simple. They were not

sophistioated in any sense of the ward, ner wero they enoouraged

to be by their mentars and paars. They had al1 oome, essent1ally, fram the 6Bme semi-rural baokground. They were al1 relatively poor,

and they knew who they \l8re. But here in the oitY , everyone \lSS at locse ende; tradition vas noo8ssari1y shelved for the duration of the individua1 's stay, and al1 sense of oomunity disappeared. Every man,

knowing himself eut off from 80 mueh of the mood and maaning of the oity, with nothing in his own isolated self to oppose the impossible { complex of lite around h:lm, vas but haU a man, eearching for he knew not what, only kncwing that he ws lost and doœœd to wlk forever

alone. That is hov it vas for Thomas Wolfe.

One of the ironies ot lite in the city tbat came out in the

new fiction \las that so many of the young men and voman had come to Nev York, or Chicago, looking for -treedom.n But they vere jolted

and dismayed to find that they had exchanged the bonds of smll tow conf'ormity and rigidity tor the more insidious and subtle bonds ot

big city alienation. Externally the individual \lBS dwarted and shamed by the over\lhelming mss ot the city itseU. Internally he ws

constricted by hie otm tears and doubts. Any strength of moral purpose he may have come vith \las dra1ned trem h:lm, for no man made

( his tootprint in the pavement, and everyone knew it. If luoky, ho found a few friends, usually of a s,mf]ar background, and they f'ormed

a small town ghetto of their ow, a pathetic bulW8rk against the

hostile , elements. But aven this \las pseudo-comfort. Instability ws the norm. Yet curiously, the trenzied search for the elusive,. but

seduotive beauty ot the oitY oontinu.ed in the faoe of overpowering misery and doubt. The will to oa11 this nNo Hema" home could not be denied.

The oitY is the placa vhere men are constantly seeking to find their door and where they are doamed to wandering forever. Of no place is this more trUB than of New York. Hideously ugly for the most part, one yet reroembere it ae a place of proud and passionate beauty; the place of ever­ lasting hunger, it ia alao the place where men teel their lives will be fulf'illed and their hunger ted. (TW&!l'R, p. 229)

In no other city in the world at that time vas there the

sarne incred'.ble flux and variety of mood as in New York. The constant , senae of impermanence wss all the more disoonoerting beoause the sense of the oity's great history was palpable, and superfic1ally

made for the illusion of p~rmanence. But even the fabled rich could not sliok over the inseo ur ity and transienoe that infested every part

of it. No matter what atmosphere of usage, servants, ~bitude, ease, and solid establishment there may be, one alvays has this same feeling that the thing is fraudulent, that the effort to aohieve permanence in this impermanent and oonstantly ohanging l11'e is no more real than the permanence in a theatrioal setting; • • • There is an enormous sadness and wistfulness about • • • attempts to s1mulate an established lire in a plaoe where the one permanent thing 1s change itselt. (~, p. 230)

On the one hand, the merourial and tenuous nature of the oitY frustrated "Iolte. On the other hand, he himself wss a creature

~ .. of shifting moods and extremes of temperament. Part of him craved : the anonymity and privaoy that the oitY provided. The monolithic oharaoter of the small town mentality had stultified and oppressed

h1m vith its clannish opposition to individualism and personal sanotity. Thus the darting, oaprioioUB atmosphere of the oitY had a deep and profound attraction for Wolfe: the city had a peculiar appropr.ii1tmess te his fjolfe'iI needs. Its c}jang!ng and val'ied panorama seemed to correlate vith-Just ae they also provoked--his volatile B,nd intense moods; and he oould use the outer soene to objecjtify inner states of being. 2

This last 1s 1lDportant. For wen Wolfe vas happy, he loved the city and he exulted in the beauty seemingly refleoted in all its streets

and buildings and people. When he vas unhappy, swimming in his own

2 Blanche Housman Gelfant, !h2 Amerioan City ~ (Oklahoma, 1954), p. 98. self'-doubts, and brooding over his literary doldrtmls or his loneliness, he hated the city and its city-bred people; they became the objeotive

correlative to his feelings like hie Jewish students at Nev York University.

When Wolfe first oame to Nev York, he had muoh to be

urihappy about. There were all his dreams of the golden oitY go ne up

in soot and smoke and grime. His work had coma to a halt, and everything for Wolfe depended on hov productive he wss as a writer.

~1hat had seemed powerful and unique to the Ivory Tower boys at Harvard Iœant nothing to the sophistioated denizens of the Broadwy scene. Thore vas little encouragement for him in those quartera. And

although he wss solitary and lonelier than he had ever been before in l his lire, he had not aven the pride or selt-sufrioienay, for he still depended on money !rom home, a source of humiliation and guUt whiah,

in turn, brought more pressure to beer on his literary efforts. Ultimately he was driven to a steady job, one that he disliked whole­ heartedly in addition to the already negative faator that it ws nsteady." Teaohing robbed him of the great Inquisitor, Time, which

ws ao vital to him nov, and it robbed him emotionally as welle

Wolfe fa awkwardneas in New York and his difficulties in

adjusting to his nev lire sprang fl-om his provincialism and the practioal

exigenoiee alrea~y noted, and from the neoessity of purging the

peouliarly Southern qualities that obso~lred hie vision of this different

reality. Most Southerners, Uolfe felt, failed to make the transference

of vision from South to North when the y came thera. Emotionally they 37. could respond 'to the eesentially healthier atmosphere of the Nor'th, but they could not expel the crippling values and outdated standards of gent ility that Wolfe always assooiated with his North Carolina background. That he himself managed to cope with and reject the debilitating qualities of antebellum escapiem is a credit to him, for there were ma.ny of his paers who did note Two of these,

Gerald Alsop and Jim Randolph, are graphic portraits of this tailure.

To Wolfe they were symbols of the kind of peculiarly Southern mental1ty that cannot meet head-on the polemic of the North and come to gr1ps with 1t. They are, in tact, representatives of the nov fashionably termed alost generation,a a group with which Wolfe adamantly refused to ide ntit y himself. Jim Randolph is lost becauae he yields to the sU8sive glory of a heroiem that is no longer credible except in the moribund cloieters of Southern academia. A football hero of the old guard, he does not recognize that the end of an era is at band. He should have died in the war, Wolfe says, for at ite end he is only a vesti- gial remnant of a dying breed of men.

Gerald Alsop 1s portrayed as an intellectual Who ie stratified and blurred in his aesthetic judgemente, faithful to Southern standards which are long out-moded. Like the South, Alsop is nsoft." He lacks that ge~l1ke perspioacity of the true artist, who oan live best out of the feminine and evaeive atmosphere of the South; for art, as Wolfe saw it, is an essentially masouline tunotion and therefore integral to the Northern olimate. Alsop is narrow in 1" .:" his world outlook. He can see no farther than that all Southern belles are "pure" and Rsveet," while all Dmothahsn are necessarily saored. And for Alsop, Dickens is the only writer in all of 11tarature

who takes "the more wholesome and well-rounded vie", of lire. n (TWB4'R, p. 193) Thua, when Goerge Webbar ohampions the profund1ty

and artist1c v ita lity of Dostoevsky, he is isolated and opposed by Alsop and his disciples. tater, Alsop's intellectual role in the North beoomes negative and unproduotive. He gathers his talents together only to sponsor among his followers a running oritique of

Menoken. Menoken was, of oourse, the eupreme ioonoolast, the great realiet, and a writer whom Wolfe admired for a long ttme. It ie clear, then, that Webbar oan find neither salace nor direction from his Southern peers. They are truly "lost," and George must malte ( hie way in New York in a vaouum. Eugenels isolation is just as maddening as Webbar's. Ae

if to undersoore his solitude and sense of defeat, the Fates provide for htm as his firet personal contacts in the city a group of Jewish

students. Eugene's initial chagrin at this stroke of destiny oan be understood in the light of Wolfe's own position at N.Y.U. Wolfe had not wanted the teaohing job; certa1nly he had no illusions or ideals about the saored nature of the teaohing profession. He only knew that he wanted to write. Anything that interfered vith this was that much time irrevocably squandered. Accordingly, he approaChed his classes in a truculent humour at best. That his students were mostly Jew1sh waB an added blow to morale, et least at first. "I teacht l teachl .~ .. . -,' -,, .... Jewl Jevsl,,3 Yet before he had finished with his nllttle devils,"

as he came to caU them in affection, he WBS to find his experience

vith them one of the most valuable and productive of his lire. In the beginn1ng, it vas dirficult for Wolfe to appreciate

his students as individuals or even as a normal group of people. He never d1d come to bave a particularly easy relationship with them.

For his background in this respect ws typically provincial and

typically Southern. Every Gentile that grova up in a small town is in some vay anti-Semitic, to use the formal terme It 1s inevitable that a group

of "f'oreigners," so obviously distinct !rom the mainstream of town life, are singled out as curiosities, if nothing else. As is usually

the case, traditionsl superstitions and perochial shibboleths take

up vhere curiosity leaves off. Wolfe WBS subjected, as a child, to

the ordinary fare of Shylook-Svengali jokes and the usual allusions

to the Jew as an inspired and historie money-maker. This latter impression vas oonf'irmed in Wolfe 's mind by the disproportionate

success of' his brother's Jev1sh vorkers on the ~ staff. They outnumbered the Gentile boys becauae they vere better salesmen. Fundamentally, however, Wolfe oonsidered the Jevs

"barbariane,1t as Eugene calle them in ~ Homeward, Angel. Eugene and his friends vere vont to take part in small-time pogroms for their entertainmeDt, a time-honoured pastime in the history of

3from a letter to Albert Costes, quoted in Kennedy, !œ. ill., p. 88. 1 JudËieo-Christian relations. ft ••• they made war upon the negroes and the Jews, who amused them, and upon the Pigtail alley people, 'Whom they hated and desp1aed." (mA, p. lOO) They made distinctioma between the barbarian nature of thà Jevs, though, and the primitive nature of the "negrees" (which WoU'e always spelled with a small "n"). The Jevs they considered odd, but the Negroes they looked upon as

"olowns, ft born to serve and amuse them. It never ooourred to these boys that the Negro hsd either the intelligenoe or the emotional sensibilities of the white man. Rather they interpreted him as

bestial, sex-obsessed, and perennially good-humoured--the ~hio savage. Nor did they hate them: clowns are black. They had learned, as well, that it 'Was proper to curf these people kindly, ourse them cheerfully, feed them magnan1mously. Men are kind to a faithful wsgging dog, but he must not walk ., . habitually upon two legs. (!HA, p. 100) i The Jewe they found hilarious, but rather because of their bizarre appearance and customs than because of their comio familiarity. They did not pretend to understand the Jevs as they thought they understood the Negroes. The boys would wait on the Jevs, follow them home shouting "Goose Greaset Goose Grease'. which, they ware convinoed, vas the chief staple of Semitic diet; or with the blind aoceptance of little boys of some traditional, or mangled or imaginary catchvord of abuse, they would yell after the1r muttering and tormented victims ttveeshamadyel Veeshamadyeln confident that they had pronounced the most unspeakable, to Jevish ears, of affronts. (.mA, po 100) This is incipient anti-5emitism as opposed to mere prejudice, f.or the boys vere attacking the Jevs on irrational grounds, assigning impossible qualities to them out of fear or cruelty, not through any realistic contact with them. Their prejudioe about the Negroes, however, 4!L. vere founded on rational beliet, since the only Negroes they knew actually vere 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 beliers he harboured about the Jewa came in fer a radical change as soon as he reached the stage of minimal emotionsl maturity and intellectual independence.

Indeed there are hints in Eugene 1s childhood that the Jewa are akin to him in a mysterious vay. They too are strangers in the tOWD; and, he intimates on several occasions, they are "sensitive" or "kind." Certainly there is nothing in his yo~h to suggest that he would bear them any actuel malice. More often than not, his imagilllltion was captured by the exotio, mythio quality in them. In his Bruoe-Eugene fantasy stage, he would pioture na fruity wide-h1pped

Jewess" as the revard tor his heroisms: that 1s, if he vere feeling particularly wicked and dissipated. \Illen in a humour to be .virtuous, ft he vould righteously bestow his nrfeotions upon the virgin daugbter of a poor but honest minister. This nLillithn application to JewiSh women is a common occurrence in the literary fantasies of Gentile writers. In Wolfe it orops up reglÙarly in his sensationsl fantasies about the Jewish girl students at N.Y.U. The ourious episode vith Edward Michalove, the Jew1sh boy in Eugenels oless at Mr. Leonardls school, is strangely prophetie for Eugens& of his futuro :t.r1endship with Starwick, and also of the poignant terminating conditions in his second trip to Germany, which he experienced as George Webber. Eduard was fi gentla, soft-spoken, but slightly effeminate youth, and vas naturally singled out for immediate

abuse by the other boys, and even by Mr. Leonard. Edward "vas terrified in the oompan;y of other boys." (Y!A, p. 247) He \lould laugh h,.sterioally or burst into tears when ridiouled or threatened. The boys plagued him on aooount of his ooy gestures and minoing, maidenly valle, until

Edward soon turned into a defenslva, snarling little animall "they made him detestable, master and boys al1ke, and they hated him for what

they made oi him. ft (~, p. 248) How suocinot a history of antl-

Semitieml And the incident was not lost on Eugene, as no incident of any significance ever was ultimately. Eugene oould puraue a falsehood

only so far baiora the ln1qulty of his behaviour would oome to haunt him, turn him inwards to the truth wasted on others.

"'", Eugene thought of this young Jew years later vlth the old j pteroing shame, with the riving pain by whioh a man reoalls t~le irrevooable moment of soma oowardly or dishonourable act. For not only d1à he join ln the perseoution oi the boy--he ws also glad at heart because of the existence of soma one veaker than himself, some one at whom the flood of ridioule might be direoted. Years later it oame to him that on the narrow shoulders of that Jev 1ey a burden he might othervise have borne, that that overladen heart was swollen vith a misery tbat migbt have been his. (WA, p. 249) Why, vhen some 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 oandour and so perceptive in its judgement? This

is not the kind of man JevB have to fear. Why do soma critics never give Wolfe oredit for the emotional and spiritual growth that he so painatakingly deaorlbea?

In oomlng to New York, Eugene ie initially frustrated by

the disparity between the Jeve that ait befor4~ him in his closs and 43. those mythical curios1ties he had invented 1n his youth. It is difficult for h1m to come to terms vith a situation vhere the tables are turned. The Javs are now in the majority as far as he is concerned. They sit before h1.m Itknowing" (Wolfe 's favourite epithet for them), oonfident, and demanding, lIhile he 1s the outsider, the misfit, and the exile. He is unwittingly repelled by the 1neluctable faot that he is nov serving a race that he had known only in the capacity of seoond-rate oitizens. To his miDd they are part of the band of "Nev America," vhich he d1strusted,~ile he, "Old America," vas nov searing his over­ tired brain in an effort to please these insatiable upstarts. Wolfe was not alons in his resentment of the Jewish infil- tration of the oultural eohelons of Amerioa. Before this time vhen there vas no ignoring them even numerioally, there hadbeen no reason to pay much attention to the Jev in a literary sense. Until the inroads of the realistic tradition, the Jav had oertain predictable qualities in Amerioan literaturo; there vas no reason to go beyond the stereotype. If drawn by a Jevish author, his portrait vas apt to be self-oonsciously Amerioan and aesimilatedz a demonstration of the

Jev's ability to he as good an Amerioan as anyone else. If by a

Gentile, the Jav's image might be a plaster saint or a Shylook figure, depending upon the intelleotual and emotional sympathies of the author. But in the nev tradition, the Jews turned up in novels as real human beings, honestly drawn from their proper setting, generally the lover East Side. The trend, almost from the beginning, ran toward a fairly benignant treatment of the Jevieh situat1on.4

4Interestingly, though, Wolfe is one of, if not the firet Amarican writer, to treat the Javs as American, ~~d not as Jeve or even American Jews. l Wolfe and certain other writers of the period, hovever, fell prey to a kind of artistic jealousy in their observation of Jewish

involvement in American letters. It was the same type of jealousy that touched Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others. For the Javs vere not like the rest of the immigrants. They vere a cultured people for the most part, many of them from vealthy and even aristocratie backgrounds, vhich they had been forced to leave through perseoution. They vere lettered people when they came to America; and their children vere aggressively so. For the young people had added incen- tives in Amerioa. There they could botter themselves financially and sccially as vell as satisfy the natural impulse they had for oulture and learning. This unususl ccmbination of communal poverty ( vith a uniform intellectual drive stym1ed Wolfe. His contact vith the poor mountain folk in Asheville had lad him to associate poverty vith anti-intellectualism. There vas no question but that the Jews vere making their mark in the artistic vorld. Imagine, for instance, the chagrin of Dreiser and Shervood Anderson in disccvering that the Javs had beaten them to the artists' quarters in Chicago and New Orleans and Nev York; or the bitterness of Hemingway and Pound, Eliot and Fitzgerald-- courageous and pioneering ex-patriates, or so they thought--vhen they stumbled upon American Jevs already cozily ensconsed on the Laft Bank. Reactionary and ctavistic race pride came unbiddon to them. As Fiedler puts it, "theirs was the cultural anti-semitism of the 5 educated bourgeois seeking status through a career in the arts."

5Leslie Fiedler, "The Jev as Mythic Amarican,n Ramparts (Fall, 1963), 39. f Wolfe must have felt something of the same inarticulate disappointment, the sensation that his heritage, his birthright, had been snatched from under his nose. .!!!!! vork was going nowhere, while their febrile and gluttonous minas promised brilliant achievement. Thus Eugene

undergoes an agony of frustration in marking Abe Jones' pepers. Finding them parfeot in every vay, he cannot bear it; he cannot endure Abe's growing success-not under his own aegis, at any rate.

OUt of the alarm and restlessness of the Gentile witer

came soma of the most stunning and honest portraits of Jevs in all American literature. Jews themselves were too defensive-or too vindiotive-to portray themselves cand1dly. No, the compelling images of Jews were made by writers who were not merely Gentiles, but anti-semites, interested in resiating this assimilationist impulse, and keeping the Javs Jsva. 6 One aspeot of the Jew that does not change is his position, unaomfortable st times, ot the nmythio Amerioan," as Laslie Fiedler calle him. The Jev persists in the legendary role, stalking

literature as he has stalked history, culture-absorbing and timaw devouring. And the legend of the Wandering Jew is too close to the truth to be manipulated as though it were a mero literary convention.

The fact of Jewish survival and aohievement is impressive. And the

Christian persistenœ in identifying the Jevs of their own day wi th

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 intimaoy between the Java of all generations in their history is at the oore of Hebrew oulture. And so this "mythio" qUlllity sits well on the Jew in Amerioa, where , even oommon traditions are tenuoUB oultural trapp1ngs. It i6 the Jew as the great and perennial Exile that haunted Wolfe's imagination. They are exiles, and always have been in Western oulture; yet they are, too, the most tribal and olannish of people. Communal. exile is the historio!ll portion of the Jew, but within the oommuni ty-or ghetto--life 1s seoure for him. Indeed, in many oases the Jews' isolation has been weloomeà by them when they are living amongst oultural philistines. For the knowledge of his alien oharaoter alone has never demoralized the Jew, but strengthened and emboldened him. Integration and assimUation vere not a1w8ys mught­ arter oammodities in many European oentres for internal reasons, as well as for the obviating faotors originating in the Gentile oommunity.

In Amerioa, where they were enoouraged to exeroise their rigbts, the tendenoy to ase1m1late flourished until now the Amerioan Jews seem more Amerioan than any other single group. A oursory glanee at the rossiter of reoent American literary heroes oonfirms this impression.

For Wolfe, the faot of eeourity in exile ws the exoiting and disturbing prineiple. In one loIay he ws draw to know his Jewish

students, to find out the seoret of their obvious suooese st internal

oommunication; they had their "door." And yet he hated their insularity beoauee he was ahut out of it. No Gentile could find it essy to pene­ trate the many paradoxes surrounding the faot of Jewieh exile. 47.

1 The collective experience of the Jews has forged their conscioueneee in exile and hae inured them to it, until they thrive on it and aven relieh it. llhat a hareh and bitter irony for Wolfe, wo lived in an exile not of his own making and hated it, seeking

always the lost door,8!Xl yet having before him these dark and ewarthy

people who had their door and their exile and the comfort of human intimacy. The Jew ie comforted in the knowledge that every land is exile until the ultimate reunion in Israel. Exile becomes astate

of m1nd; the Jews oarry their heritage, nurtured in exile, from land to land and century to centur,y, above the terror of those thrust

"naked and alone into exile.n For Wolfe they were signiticant for

their ability to reoonolle the two great tensions of lite: the "eterMl

..r wanderingn of man and "the desire of the soul for home. ft That they seem to join the two concepts into frictionless concord ia revealed

in an unpublished fragment of Woltets, written on the boat going

over to Europe for the firet time. In it he ironioally describea

"a Jew named Greenb6rg, who made his pile in New Yark and who now lives in France having ohanged hie name to Montvert, and of couree feela no homesickness at all, save what ie natural to 4000 years of wandering •••• n7 The Jev ie the incarnation of exile reconoiled, but at the sama time, he has an ironic anddisturbing message for other Americans. That, is the futility of trying to ach1eve in so short a

t1me as the Amer1can experience allows the kind of secur1ty and hermony the JewB have.

7Quoted in Kennedy, .2E. ,2,!!., p. 212. 48.

f All flights, the Jewish experienoe teaohes, are from one exile to another; and this AmerioBns have always really known, though they have sometimes attempted to deny it • • • It is the dream of exile as freedom which has made Amerioa, but it is the experie~oe of exile as terror that has forged the seU-oonsoiousness of Amerioans. 8

Small wonder, then, that the Jews in Wolfe IS o18ss seem to him to be

mouking and "knowing." A.tter a1l, they are more at home in WoUe IS

own oountry, and oertainly in his newly-adopted oity, than VoUe could ever hope to be, and all this without trying to find their Itroots" in Amerioan soil. The Amerioan zeal for the feeling ot rootednes8 is superfluous to the Jewish tradition. This is evident in the Fried episode Eugene witnesses on his first trip abroad. Fried is a Jewish student living at Oxford with several other Amerioan students, all Gentile. The Gentile ( students attempt feverishly to find in their Engllsh oompanions soœ point of oommon identity, something that will reveal to them their own origina, even something fam11'àr to them." But they are only laughed at by the agas-old English students, and of oourse they are miserable. They have been tranaplanted to what they naively expeoted to be Itnative" soU, and the experienoe has been a trav8ety and a fiasoo. But Fried is not miserable. He did not oome there wi.th the same expeotations. And he is not afraid of these superior English students who mock and torment the Amerioans. " ••• he /JrIeiJ was the only one wo had maintained his IntegrIty, the only one who did not have a spurious, fearful, uneasily evasive quallty, ••• the only

8rIedler, .2E. ill. ~ 41. 49. l one who had remained himself.n9 Neither a likeable nar a personable man, he at least does not care 'llhether the Amerioans or the English like him. He does not pander to the talse sophistioation around him. He does not faw on the English simply beoause they are Englieh. And tar Eugene, he stands out like a wall-cut jewel, a symbol of faarase

oandour surrounded by cowards of misgu1c3ed sentiment. None of the Gentile boys will admit tha t tbeir lire at Oxford is wretohed and

impossible, but Fried conoedes willingly that he has no use for ita

wand Fried 'Was the only one of them to roset it, to admit it, • • •

and to romain h1mself against it.n (~, p. 632) His solid sense of identity, abusive as are its manifestations, is impreseive. The others recognize eventually that he ie the only one of them who r is honest. They resent him for that, and because he ie Jewish, yet more sure of his Amerioan identity tban they are. Yet in the end they are foroed to respeot him. "None of them lilœd Fried, they vere

ashamed of him, • • • but at the bottan of their hearte they had a strange, secret, and unwilling respect for him, and finsUy grew sUent and lietened when he talked.n (OT&'l'R, p. 632) Fr1ed then, is the ultimate ironya the Jewish Amerioan Ybo has, through a long history of exile, aocepted the impossibility

of total geographio rootedness, and made Amerioa more of a home for

htmself th~n his Amerioan peers; they, feeling somehow thnt they are rootless, Beek their heritage in historioal, rather than payohioal, realities. They expeot England to give them a feeling of their

9Thomas Wolfe, .QI. ~ !ru! lli River (New York, 1935), p. 631. Subse­ quent referenoes will be to thie edltion and will be indicated 8S OT&TR. 50. original heritage, and or course this is :impossible. The BenBe of heritage is integral and Dot a patchwDr~: of geeturee, accents and English mufflers. What the Gentile boys rail to realize ia that the trappings of ~·l'adition are irrelevant without the inner security and sensation of historical and colleotive unity. This is a mietake that the Jew, Fried, does not make. He would not aeoept the manDers and mores or a people that ha ie merely living among for the motivating forces of his own lite. And so, ironicaUy, Fried is the seeure and confident Amerioan, while the others, oaught in the· web of a thousand fears, the Jœshes of a thoueand impossible restraints, trying to maintain their lives, thair characters, their native dignities even while they tried to subdua them by a thousand small half-mimicries, to be themselves aven while they tried to Shape themselves to something else, their characters finally, Btra1ned through the impossible weavings of this mad design, teetering frantioally to maintain a crazy balance on a thousand wires, were roduced at last to the consistence of blubber~and trying to be everything, they sucoeeded finally in being nothing. (OT&TB, p. 632)

Fried ws a Brooklyn JEnl, an urban oreature that Wolfe oould never p]~operly fathom. While Wolfe IS attempts to oope with the mammoth city seemed alwys to end in maddening frustration, the Jews lived in it and could not oonceive of' any place else to live. For there is no suoh thing as a omall town Jew--even if he lives in a emall town. The nature of Jewish culture and the exigencies of JewiSh hietory have comhined to produce a curiously and perennially urban species. The Jev knows intuitively that hie best chance for survival, physically and spiritually, is in the citioe of the \lorld. Where cosmopolitanism flourishes, there flourish the arts, intellectual study, economic advantage--and tolerance, alvays a pricelese commodity to1he Jew. Thua, since the earl1est days of Galuth (Exile), the Jewa have been a sophisticated people, not through preferenoe, but far survival and

growth. Even suburban and rural Jevs are never too far out of touoh

vith the oommunity, either for purposes of religioUB convocation or

through fear of isolation. 50 the oitY holds no real terrors for the Jev. Indeed, the bigger the oity, the safer and more confident he

feels. Coming far the first time to a nev o1ty in a ne", land, he has fellow Jevs there to initiate him into his adopted lire. It is not long before he can understand and explo1t the intangible impulses babind his ne\orly-discovered home. That their most common experience exposes them to the negative aspeots of city lire inm'es them to the kind of humiliation Wolfe vas prey to. As Fiedler says, the Jew is "the metropolitan at home, though expert in the indign1ties, rather than the amenities of m'ban lire.nlO Wolfe's inability to understand his students is natural,

oonsidering the gap in baokground betwean him and them. But the aooompanying guilt he feels in their presenoe or even when he is thinking about them, is note It iB intelligible only as it is direotly related to the guilt he feela in assooiation vith his mother

vorld, the Pentland-Joyner tribe. In other vorda, the Jeva represent

to Wolfe a recreation of the Joyner myth, but sean from an urban pers- peotive. Here again, plaguing and oonfuting him, vere the grinn1ng

masks of the death-triumphant clan; here aga1n vas the know1ng insu­

larity of the tribe. No other explanation could account 60 clearly for

la :) Fiedler, ~. cit., 40. T . 1 .à, the enormity. of the guilt Yolfe experienced in oonjunction with his

Jewish students. The sense or psychologie al oppression is remal4 kably s1milar to the pattern established early in Eugene-George's lire.

In the Joyner world, George had felt guilty for his desire

to esoape the gloomy atmosphere of Aunt Mavis people. He had wnted

to run off to wbat he ws told was the "bad" world of his fathel'~ New the situation was repeating itself. "Gloany" is Abe Jones' oonstant

epithet. He assumes the symbolie aspeot ot B warden, oheoking Eugen.

in his fieree wieh to be alone and write, preferably in Europe, whiob

now takes on the colotn"s of his father 's land, when New York tails

to bring him the aDtioipnted fultillment. Eugene's "little Jeve" beoome the culprits; they hold bim in thrall.

All this would be so much oonjeoture were it not tor

Wolfe 1 s startlingly eandid oontessions in!!!! stor:y .2f. ! ~. Hare he admits the overwhelming guilt he sutfered and whieh oame out in the form of nightmaree, years after his teaohing daya. " ••• 11 there dwelt torever the fatal knowledge or my Olln inexpiable ~ • • • .n ThiB guUt is bound up with the question of T1me, T1me lest through his teaohing rosponsibUities. For he had been too pressured in his

job for muoh \4"iting, and this plagued his dreams. But in the recurring nightmares, his Jews acted as judges, the accus1ng Superego. He dreamed he ws whiling away his time in a drowsy torpor. He was

in Etn"ope, in "ancient Gothie towns," a symbolie image of his father's

world, his Germanie heritage. Suddenly, still in the dream, he would

~homas Wolfe, The story of ! ~ (New York, 1936), p. 64. ) 530

wake to frenzied consciousness of responsibil~ties forgotten at home. -~ .. He had missed an entire year of classes at N.Y.U., and, flying immediately

baclt to New York, he would find his students wuiting for him in the

corridors of the University, patient and silently reproachful. Quietly

they surroundod him, along \Vith his colleagues, in the offices of the

English depurtmcnt,

a ring of silent forme ••• not sturing, not hursh with scorn or anger, and not thrusting close, but just looking at me with the still surveyal of their condemnation. ~ little Jmvs stood first, their dark eyes fixed on me with a dejected and unwavering roproach, and behind them stood the jury of ~ peers • • •• 12

This passage is, thought for thought, almost identical vii th the other

guilt dreams of Asheville mentionod in The StOry .2! ~ Novel, and certainly

the original motivation for the dream sequence in !2.!! Can't Q2. ~ Again,

where Monk returns to Libya Hill and experiences a sensationally guilty

series of' dream visions. In them, he comes back "home," only to be

greeted with the sad reproach of a hostile, silent town. Again thoy were

judging him. Aguin he was isolated and persecuted. In his unconscioua

mind, the two tribes were one.

Nor cau Wolfels terror of his class be exaggerated when he

himself was ut such pains to indicate the almoat overpowering torture he

felt, as Eugene, in connection vdth his job and the JeVis.

At night, whon he Vient to bed in bis little coll at the cheap little hotel nen.rby where he lived, the thought of the cluss he had to meet the next day fed at his heurt anù bowels with cold poisonous moutha of feur, anù aa the hour for a cluss drew nigh he would begin to shako and tremble as if he !lad an ague; the successive stages of his journey from his room in the Leopold, to the class room at the university a ffNl hun­ dred yords awo.y-from cell to elevator, from tho tiled sterility of tho hotel lobby to the dusty beaten light and violence of the street outside,thence to the brawling and

12 Thomas Wolfe, ~ StOry .2! ~ Novel, p. 71. ugly corridors of the university, vh1ch drowned one, body and soul, vith their swarming, shrieking, shouting tides bf dark amber Jewish fiesh, and thence into the comparative sanctuary of the c18ss roam vith its smaller horde or thirty or fortY Jevs and Jevesses • • • thick vith their hot and svarthy body-smells • • • the suocessive stages or th1s journey vere filled vith suoh dazed numbness, horror, fear, and nauseous stupefaction as a man might feel in the successive stages or a journey to the gallows, the guillotine, or the electric chair: • • • (or&TR, pp.4l9-20) There 1s almost a complete reversion to pr1m1tiv1sm in terme of the imagery here. The Javs are a "horde" of savages to Eugene; later he:.'compares them to fierce "animls" or great auoking "maws," an intereating refleotion of the Jo,yner imagery he had previously evoked in The Web and the Rock. The room is filleé.l vith shriekings --~-- that are incoherent te him, suggestive of a language peculiar to them and unfamUiar to Eugene, a kind of pr:lmordial outcry. And he, Eugene, is ..pparently to be soma kind or sacrifice to their atavistic appetites. His sense or imminent personal disaster vould be luàloroua in this harmless situation, vere it not so painfully obvious that this is no affectation on Wolfe 's part; he really must have felt thie vay about them. Wolfe ie particularly sensitive to what he oonsidera the gross eensuality of the Jevish girls in the class. This is a vild fabrication of his Gentile imagination, a comon fantasy, Just as Jevish boys carry

in their mind the archetypal Gentile goddess, desirable as a conquest over all other vomen (Marilyn Monroe perhaps in our generation). Again "Iolfe ia evoking the "LUlithn image or the Jewess ss part and parcel of the guilt pattern already established. Curiously, where he Bees them tirst as Birens and erotic temptresses, he later comas to understand

\ ) them almost as earth goddess figures, parfectly respeotable and aven emlted symbols of the "desire of the soul Eor home." They have th1B message Eor the eternal wanderer, for the Gentile. They come to represent ancient wisdom, the end Md sanctuary of frenzied youth.

The Jev1sh women vere as old as nature, and as round as the earth. they had a curve in them. They had gone to the wUing walls of death and love for seven thousand years, the strong convulsive faces of the Jevs vere ripe vith grief and w1sdom, and the cu:rve of the Jewish vcmen was still unbroktm. Female, fertUe, yolq, fruitful as the earth, and ready for the plow, they offered to the famished wanderer, the al1en, the exile, escape and surcease of the handscme barren woman • • • who walked the streets and had no curve or fulness in them • • • the visdom they gave to him ws that he need not strangle like a mad dog in a barren dusk, nor perish, famiehed, ••• vithin the lolilderness beside a rusted lance • • •• (OT&TR, p. 480) This more phUosophical and prophetic interpretation of his initial fears comas only afier shamef'ul aM debUitating months of terror and hatred, fears he could not articulate and that humUiated him, but that he could not shake off. And the sense of "drowning daUy in the manswarmlt returned again and again to him. As lE to expel from his sickening heart and miM the crippling disgust he feels for himself, and as if to visit upon one city atom a11 the misery, wretchedness, and lœthillg that characterised his first fev months in the city, Wolfe evoked the figure of Abraham Jones, the mythic scapegoat for alll his grief. "And the gray-faced Jew beside Eugene made made the weary lights burn dima he gave a tongue to wear1nese, a color to despair. 1I (~, p. 443) And it iB through this "gray-faced Jew," this murky-visioned cipher of modern city knowledge and anc1eDt Hebrev cyn1cism, that Eugene comes back, first through fear and hatred, and finally through affection, to the better part of himBelf, strengthened and oleansed in moral and emotiona1 purpose. Abe ls the objective '7 '.i correlative to Eugenets psychical prooesses; or in more modern terms, he fulfUs a paesively therapeutio role. Eugane transf'ers to h1m the odious qualities of spirit and mina that he wants to exhume t'rom himaelt. Eventually he works the poison out or his mind and comes back to a love ot lUe that is righttully and typically hie. Finally, he oomes to

identUy with Abe and ultimately love him. The cyole oœnpleted, he no longer needs Abe, and he oan leave New York vith a olear oonsoience. Abets initial image, and it must be olear that the roader

sees Abe at· tirst only ~hrough Eugene's distorted vision, is that ot the inquisitor, the eDem,y. Abe waits tor Eugene alter olass, oeton­ sibly to continue the olass discussion or make inquir1es about his weekly theme, but to Eugene ts tvisted mina, œ is the inoarnation or a hostile tate. Abraham JODeS, as releutless as destiny, woula be ther's vaiting for Eugene. He vaited there, grim, gray, unsmiling, tortured-looking behind an ominOUB wink ot glasses, a picture ot Yiddish melancholy and disooutent, and as Eugene looked at him h1s hem vent numb and dead; he hated the sight ot h1m. (~, p. 440) Abe's glasses stay on until his UDmasking, BO to speak, ",hen he reveàl.s his real humanity, but until they do, they elioit all Eugene's pent-up guilt and tear. They demonstrate to h:l.m the insorutabillty or the Jews: their detaohed, omnisoent quality. "He sat

there in the tront rows of the ClaSB like a nelD8sie or Boorn, a mercUesEi oensor or Eugene's ignoranoe and incompetenoe." (C7r&TR, p. 440) In taot, Wolfe ws an exoelJ1ent teaoher. It anything, he vent above

and beyond the oall of dutY in his dedioation to his reaponsibilities. His oomments on veekly themes vere vont to run longer than the aotual paper in his etforts to explain his oritioism and to enoourage his 'Yi. aspiring young intellectuals. But far Eugene, Abe fa papers are a constant trial. They are peri'ect in grammar, clearly and i'orcibly written, nuent and graoei'ul, baoked up with soWld and extensive knowledge. Yet they i'rustrate and

1nfuriate Eugenat, Abe had "the power of a phUosopher, the delioacy of a subtle-souled psyohologist, If but his varioUB talents madden

Eugen~u "and all of this was as weeping and wUing and gnashing oi' teeoh, because it wa so good, and he did not know what ws wrong, and he could not endure to read it." (or&I'R, p. 44L) The peculiar tension continues, alwys the same. Eugene i'eels Abe wnts somathing !'rom him that he cannot produce and he is disaolved in guilt i'or he knows not what. There develops, in Eugeœ ta mind only, a kind of maater-slave relationship between theml "he f}.biJ exulted in a i'eeling of cruel, orowing Javish maatery over

Eugeneta bent spirit.a (OT&TR, p. 444) F1œl~ Eugene turns on him, surpriaing himself vith his own oourage. He anarls vioiously at the boy, pouring out in his wrath aIl the inohoate i'rustration and bate he had kept bottled up for months. In his vindiotive indictment, he places the onus oi' Abets oruelty and the burden oi' guilt aquarely on Abets Jevishnessl nI fve had all l can stand !rom you • • • Why, you damned dull i'ellow • • • sitting there and sneering at me day ufter day vith your damned Javls i'ace ••• What are you but a damned dull fellow, anyway? ••• Why, damn you, Jones, you didn ft deserve anyone like me • • • You ahould get down on your kneea and thank God you had a teaoher half as good aa me ••• To hell vith youl ••• l never \.tant to see your i'aoe again lH (m,m, p. 446) 58.

And the spell is broken,. Suddenly, vith relief amounting to a physical catharsis, Eugene ia better; he has excor1ated the hum!-

listing, feeding guilt that has been pummelling his ragged spirit. He can look at Abe novas an individual, for he has reoovered his

self-respeot. And Abe is happy too, beoause this reoognition of himaelf' as an individusl by a teaoher that he raally respeots and

likes is good to him. He takes off his "inquisitor 's" glasses and things fall into proper perspeotive for both of them. His gray ugly face as he stood there polishing his glasses had that ouriously naked, inept, taded and tired wistful. look that is oommon to people vith veak 6yes when they remove their opectacles; it vas a good and ugly face, and suddenly Eugene began to like Abe very much. He left him and vent ·up to his roam vith a feeling of such relief, esse and happiness as he had not known for monthsJ and' that night, unhaunted, unashamed, unpursued by fears and furies and visions of his ruin and fa:l.lure for the tiret r time in many monthe, he sank dreamlessly ••• into the depths ot a protound and soundless sleep.

entire phenomenon of guilt transterence trom his unooDsoious mind; .

and this through a might,. impulse to be honest and truthful vith

himaelf at any oost. This is typical of Wolfe. He oould be

terrifioally unJust and aggressively abusive to people, but it vas never a permanent condition. He al\O'8Ys bad to oome to terme vith the world and himself again, reoognizing and pubIiehing the truth in the round, rejecting whatever and whomever vas cowardly or false. From the loneliness of his own isolation, he reached aoross wbat would have

been for another of his background an unbridgeable ohasm, and he, found affection and fidelity trom an unexpected SOlU'ce. "And from that moment, through every change or fortune, • • • this Jev, Abe Jones,

the first manawarm atom he had oome to know in aIl the deaolation of the million-footed eity--had been his loyal friend." (m:m, p. 447) Wolfe went on to explore Abe fS oharaeter and environment vith a sympathy and intelligenoe that no Amerioan Gentile has ever exhibited, before or sinee. He probed the nature of Abefs peouliarly urban make-up; "he fAbil vas honeat, loyal, somehov good and memorable, grained vith the lire and movement of a thousand streets, seBsoned and alert, a living charaeter, a cityman." (,mm, p. 458) .. He observed the complex and alien structure of Abels home lirel his iJmn1grant famUy and their lire on the East Side, the oircUlllBtances

so poignantly portrayed in Michael Gold's ~ Without~. And he marvelled at their oourage and self-suffioienoy. He ws espeeially alert to the keen intelleotual orientation of the family, a specifioally Jewish feature in domestic lire: "And all of them, even the most unlettered, seemed to have a completely natural unaffeoted interest and respeot

for the arts, or for scholarly and intellectual attainment." (ar&TR, p. 497)

Shenrood Anderson, fashionably anti-Semitio in his writings, \lBS alao astonished, in his oontaots vith Jevs, at the voraoious appetite they exhibited for intellectual suooess, and the awestruck homage they paid

him simply beoauae he vaa a writer. "Is it not quite amazing? ra it not an amazing raoe? There ia thia oulture hunger. They have the idea that l l am culture.n13 13sherwood Anderson, Lettera ~ Sherwood Anderson (Boston, 1953), p. Ill. 60.

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 myst~ue symbolically recreated.

And there, too, he was always on the outside. Abels 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 strite between its individual members. Sylvia, Abels 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 oreativity have been vitiated and submerged in the rat race of city lite rather than in the suffocating enviromnent of the small tmm. Her one straightfonrard 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 taoit, but deeply loyal. It shows itself in gestures of financial assistanoe; she pays part or Abe's university fees, though Abels pride forbids her paying the whole. Abe would not be beholden to her for favours. nOn this score, indeed, he had the most sensitive and tender pride of any one Eugene had ever know.n (.QIT41!, p. 463) The irritation or owing onels university education to family bounty vas something Wolfe could weIl appreciate. Abels mother is a kind of raritied and mythicized Eliza. She ia unlike Eliza in her personality, but she has the eternal "tribal look" and character, starkly and primitively ooq>reaaed. She impresses Eugene with her agelessness, vith her ancient visage of ingrained 6L r Jewish griefs, as rooklike and immovable as the earth itself.

n ••• for her, as for the Gad she worshipped, the passing of seven

thousand years ws like the passing or a single day." (ar&rR, p. 492) The rocle and centre of her famUy, she is tmtouched by the transience

of the oitY lire nround her, and she provides the neceseary sense or permanenoe by wh10h the family endures. nShe was the fertile

and enduring earth from wich they sprung. ft (Œm, p. 494) This is

the impression llolfe had of all the women who were significant to him.

The earth is the female context and he ws sensitive to "omen wo

possessed this granite quality.

Eugena is ultimately ambivalent in his feelings about the

Jones 1 family. On the one hand he is drawn to 1il:aJç he finds them warm,

vital and interasting indiv1duals. But there 1s an oppos1ng tension

in them as a group whioh shuts him out of their midst. He io 'still the

alien, and the final meaning of their intimacy eludes h1m. When con­

fronted with their clannishness, an unoonaoious drawing togather on

their part, he ia hurt because he is so pointedly isolated. He feols

himself palpably out of their realm, as when he watohas Abe and one

of his sisters enjoying themselves with her p1ano-playing. Abe listened to the musio when she played with an obscure and murky smile: he seemed to know a great deal about music; i t awakened a thousand subtle eoboes in his Jewish soul, but for Eugene, somahow, the music, and something arrogant, scornful and secretive in their lmowingness together with ••• a terrible sensation of thousands of other knowing Jews • • • who were coming !rom ooncerts at that moment, awakened in him vague but powerful emotions of nakedness, rootlessness, futility and misery, whioh even the glor10us memory of the power, exultanoy and joy or poetry could not conquer or subdue. The scane evoked for him soodenly a thousam images of a sterile ànd damnable incertitude, in which man groped inrlefinitely along the smooth matallio sides of a world in whioh there was neither warmth, nor depth, nor door to enter, nor walls to shelter himz • • • (~, p. 464) 62.

T 1 At the very moment Eugene feels incertitude, Abe and the 1. other Jewa are united in cœmnon appreoiation. Their enjoymnt, to

Eugene li is a raoial phenomonon; they seem te> draw upon a vast heritage of musical appreoiation and this etrengthens their joy and certitude, aven as it undersoores Eugene'8 sense or limbo and personal vacuity. Eugene fS awareness of raoial character operates aven in his observanoe of the simple joys and accamplishments of the Jewa.

He finds baffling the subtle and see~disrespeotf\Ù nature of their treatment of one another. The way they argued amongst themselves wes a mystery to him. Their discussions were not stra1ghtforward, naive, and 1mpassioned as vere Eugenefs vith his fellow atudents at the state University. The Absolute Negation of things wes not the meat of these students, practised in the subtle weavings of the Law, and interested in the prosaic minutiae of lire here and now. They vere concerned \l1th the fine points, the sophistioated trimmings of argument.

To Eugene they seem cynical; there wes this anoient knowingness and

world-weariness in their intellectual ripostes. Their humour wes of the same order. The ir affection seemed to be founded on mutuel derision. They were masters of the ins\Ùt--as they are yet. And they loved it; they v1ed for top honours in the art of one-upmanship. To Eugene, for ",hom any form of ridicule was painful

in the extrema, this was incredible. But then he had nover confronted a group of people whose outlook on lire vas s1mply ironic--not "cynical" as he imagined. Esaentially the ironie view of lite is an acknowledgement of the perennial disparity between idesl belief and the actualities of l lite. It iB the "humour of exile," the comedy of enduranoea the knowledge that nothing is too low for the human mind to oonoeive--nor too magnifioent. This saves them !rom either extreme. And Wolfe seems to understand this later on, as he writesl They Lihe Jevil seeJœd to have gained from lire the terrible patienoe, the old am oratty skill and oaution that oame from long emuring of pain: as he looked at them he knew that they would naver be wild or drunken, or beat their knuokles bloody on a wall, or lie beaten and sense1ess in the stews, but he knew that vith smooth faoes they would deoant the bottle for some man who did, and that they would read him quiet1y to his desperate faoe with their dark, mooking and insatiate eyes. They had learned that a savage ward would break no bones • • • in the years that follôwd he saw that physioal1y they were, for the most part, inoorrupt, old and oautioue, fi1led with skill and safety--that they had lived so long and grown 50 wise •••• that their subt1e, million­ noted minds oould do without and hold in dark oontempt the olumsy imperfeotions of a flesh1y evil-- • • • (OT&TR, p. 481) There is great bitterness in Wolfe as he writes this, for he ws one who did beat his knuok1es bloody on the wall. Far he held the tragio view of life--or else he held the oomio. But the Jew'e hietory preoludes a oomio view of lire, while he instinotively avoids the suicida1 tragio view. Irony is his self-proteotion, but it is a mystery to those not bred to it. "Irony, thon, is an enigma beoause it transcends oategories of'pain or joy; it resolves ambivalenoe in a mysterioUB way.u 14 Even though muoh of Abe'e way of lite remains a mystery to Eugene, his intuition that they have muoh in oommon is correot. Indeed, at times young Abe retleots to an astonishing degree the youth of Eugene Gant. The portrait be1ow, unconsoiouely drawn on Wolfe 's part, no doubt, oould havo been Eugene himself baok Dt the state University:

14 r Irving Malin, ~ ~ Amaricans (Carbondale, 1965), p. 134. At this t1me Abe \las in a state of obsoure and indefinable evolution: it \las impossible to say \lbat ha \lould beoame • • • he \oISS tormented by a dozen obsoure desires and purposes and by a deep bJIt mtn'ky emotionalisma his flash \oISS ugly, bowd, and meagre--oonsoious of a àreary inferiorlty, ••• but his spirit ws sustained by an immense and towering vanity, a gloomy egotism which told him he ws not as other men, tbat his thoughts and feelings \lere too profound and rare to be understood and valued by the \lorld around him. At the sama t1me he ws secretly and fiercely ambitious, although the energy ot his ambition ws soattered in a haIt dozen direotions and could fasten on no purpose • •• (Ot&TR, p. 467) And so Wolfe tound in Abe Jones not only a loyal friend but a kindred spirit. The gray little ·pavement oipher" came to represent the most sign1ficant aspeots of urban lire for Eugene. The irony of Abels symbolic triumph ot faot over Ideal baliet ia brought into stark relief by Eugene's viait at the astate ot Joel Pieroe, ostens!bly the best and most appeal1ng produot of "old America. n His fam1ly are the American aristocracy; their value 1s the incarnation or all tbat

Americans hold dear--the triumph of money. In Eugene's fantasies of the golden life in the North, they \lere his Ideal familya people of enormous vealth, living graciously and elegantly in a fine old American mansion on the taery Hudson, and surrounded, ot oourse, \lith the finest in American culture. But nt close range, Eugene's vision is confronted \lith disillusioning reality. Joel's family are sterile in apite ot the appurtenanoes of a great heritage. Their seourity is tenuous, and they cling to moribund oustoms and geatures in order to glve meaning to what la in faot meaningless, at leaat for them. Like aIl Amerioans, the y have been tricked into the belief that they are the trustees of a long and glorious hiatory, but the y are note The library, filled with the supreme treasures of the worldrs fineet minds, goes unread and unvisited. The Pierce spirit is undernouriahed for all its rich bodily trappinga. It remains for Eugene, the "son of an unlettered race," to attempt to

read every volume in the library, in the night while veryone else sleepa, and ot oourse it is an impossible taek. There ie no quick or eaay road to culture. The prob1em is partly summed up when Eugene takea 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 oourse, for

lite on the Hudson is not~. Joel is lost to him; he be10ngs to the Hudson and another age. Something has come between themz Abe Jones, the nEN Amerioan, has come betwen them. Eugene 's impulses turn him ever toward the rea1ity principle in lire, whi1e Joel 's sensibilities shrink away from the real wrld, turning back to the "magic" liI'orld of the faery Hudson. The doors of tbe train olose and tbey say good-bye to eaoh other. And at the sarne moment, as that doar swung shut betwen tbem, a nd he Bay that i t oould never be opened any more, he felt, vith the knowledge of that irrevocable lOBS, a moment.s swift and rending pitY for his friend. For hEI sav tbat somehov he ws lost-that there vas nothing for him now but shadovs on the va1l--Ciroean make-believe--that vor1d of moonlight, magic and painted smoke that "the river people" knew. (~, p. 595) Having been initiated into the myeterious paradoxes of city lire, having once and for all understood that his youthful ideals--and bis youthful prejudioes--were not as he had conceived them, Eugene 1s free to prepare for Europe, a confirmad exile onoe more. But years

1ater Wolfe 100ked back at this vho1e period of his lire in V~nhattan l and he was able to wr1te to the Chanoellor of N.Y.U.z As time goes on, and l have been able to get more detaoh­ ment and perspeot1ve on my years at New York Un1versity, l have rea11zed that be1ng there 1s one of the most valuable and fru1tful exper1enoes of my who le lire. l oan think of no other vay 1n vh10h a young man, ooming to th1s terrif10 01ty as l cama to 1t, could have had a more oomprehens1ve and st1mu1at1ng introduot10n to 1ts svarming lire, than through the oorridors and olassroams of Wash1ngton Square • • • • • • and 1t taemed to me that vith out making oomparisons, that whatever happens to our univers1t1es 1n the future, Washington Square vas somehow oloser to rea11ty than Cambr1dge.15

(

15 In a latter trom Thomas Holle to Henry \oloodhouse Ohase, The Correa- ponàence ~ Thomas ~ and Homer Anèrev ~ (New York, 1954):-P. 52. The woman had become a world for him--a kind of ~aw Amerioa--and now he lived in it, explored it all the time. (From~ ~ ~ ~~)

CHAPTER III

Europe was, not unpredictably, another lost lane-end into exile--not heaven--for Thomas Wolfe and Eugene Gant. Although Wolfe did some of his best and most lyrioal desoriptions of Amerioa 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 oultures. Unconsciously he had

expected, in the first trip abroad, like Friedls companions, some 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.

l~olfe IS passionate longing to fathom the weIl of their heritage, particularly in England, derived from his long, thUG far unohallenged belief in the rock-like stability and uniform wealth

of the Europe~n cultures. At the state University, he had bemoaned the dearth of a real cultural histary in Amerioa. At Harvard, the feeling wes intensified that Europe was the only creditable place to imbibe a true aesthetic experience. American letters were patronizingly dismissed by his paers as beneath the attention of the oonfirmed student of literature. And Eugene's friendship with Starwick stimulated him in his vision of Europe as an escape from the philistinism of the Amerioan spirit. r 67 68.

Since starwiok was Eugene's only really artistic friend at school and in his lire thus far, Eugene accorded him a revered niche

in the hierarchy of his dreams of beauty and good. He loyally guarded

Starwick's enigmatic ~st1que in the face of the yahOOB around them, echoing Starwick's assertion that it was the fault of the warld, and not his, that he wes 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 lite such faery magic as had this elegant and mysterioUB visitor from some foreign sphere of existence. Now, with Starwick, and for the first time, he felt this magic constantly--this realization of a lire forever good, forever werm and beautiful, forever flashing with the fires of passion, poetry and joy, forever filled with ( the swelling and triumphant confidence of youth, ite belief in new lands, morning, and a shining city, its hope of voyages, ite conviction of a fortunate, good and happy life-­ an imperiehable happiness and joy--that was impending, that would be here at any moment. (OT&TR, p. 274)

An old story wi th Eugene. Always he would be betrayed by

the magnificent possibilities of an ideal life, an ideal person, only to be confronted vith the misery and disillusion of hard facto That is the vay it happened with Starwick. Meeting Starwick in Paris was a heady shock for Eugene; here was the starry creature of his imagination in his rightful

setting, or so it Bho~d have been. For Paris, the gracious land of Flaubert, was Meoca to the young aesthetes of the T\-lenties, an oasis of true culture where the flame-like artistic spirit, impoverished and denigrated in America, oould come into its own. The impact of the two

T... 69.

false visions shattering at once was almost ruinous for Eugene. Starwiok's ultimate message for Eugene is the futility of trying to bridge a gap that may not even exist in the first plaoe. Starwiokls wretchednees in Amerioa vas a failure in himself to

grasp and make his own the Amerioan scene; it was there and it·.:was real, but not far one such as Starvick, a star-gazer am a dreamer of false dreams. His physical impotence reflects a p'èyahioaJ. inabil1ty to put his talents to use; they lie still-borne Paris for him is an escape, not from the sterility of American culture, but into the fearful emptiness of self-delusion and meaninglessness. Eugene's rejeotion of starwiok and Ann, who loves him, is a healthy and typical impulse on his part. Intuitively he comes to realize, though only after muoh soul-searching and mental grief, that Starw10k and Ann have betrayed the best part of themselves, not

only in a sexuel sonse, but in a p'àychical. and intellectual way as

weIl. They serve, in a symbolic sense, as Eugene's perennial "adversarius," sllently exhorting him to the path of health and self-fulfillment, away from a11 that is unwholesome and tainted vith

the death~instinct. Starvick is a lost creature with no hope of redemption, but Eugene escapes his kind of fate. Reoognizing that he has been duped once more by his chronic inability to faoe and 1dentify reality, Eugene is assailed by a consuming home-sickness for a11 that 18 real, solid and familiar to him. If he ie to endure exile, it should be in a land that he loves,

,r 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 homes1cknoss of the Amer1can, who 1s maddened by a longing for return, and dces not know he can return • • • vho has no goal or ending for h1s hunger • • • (OT&TR, p. 857) The trip to Europe had aga1n brought home with paintul

olarity Ben's warning that there is no happy ~nd, that loneliness in the ohild of destiny is an inescapable phenomenon, and the only real voyage is inward,US retreat into discovery of self,n1 rather than outward, into the still more lonely oities of the wor1d beyond Amerioa. 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, l can only say that the habit of lonaliness, once formed, grows on a man from year to year and he vanders across the face of the earth, and has no home, and 1s an exile, and he is never able to break out of the prison of his own lone1iness again, no matter how much he vants to.2 The voyage back to America was the beginning of a new

plateau of growth in Wolfe 1 s life. There vas in him now the added maturity gained through bitter experience, the 106s of a loved friend and a golden vision. There was the settled patience of an aocepted solitude. But paradoxically the trip home wss also a beginning of love, companionship, and real communication, the

~ichard Walser, Thomas ~I ill! Introduction am Interpretation (New York, 1961), p. 5. 2 $etters of Thomas Wolfe (New York, 1956), p. 371. 71.

beginning of a "period of certitude," which was to last several years before its inevitable disruption. The serendipitous- meeting with

Aline Bernstein, Esther ~aok in ~ ~ !E2 ~ ~ ,and !2Y Can't Qg

~ Again, heralds the most p9aoeful and auspicious t1me of his lire. 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 "doora to his past is closed forever. And now aIl the faces pass in through the ship's great side (the tender flower faoe among them). Proud, potent faces of rioh Javs, alive with walth and lu.xury, glow in rich, lighted cabins; the doors 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's highest social echelons, is

certainly one of the most fascinating in aIl of literary biography.

Indeed, it ia questionable whether Wolfe would have written~

Homeward, Angel as WB have it without her unfailing help and enoouragement. Certainly he would not have published i t as early as he did, and perhaps not with Scribners and Maxwell Perkins. She is

of interest not only for her attaohment to Wolfe, though. A fine novelist in her own right, she vas primarily a well-known stage designer, and a sooial intimate of practically aIl the artistic and financial lions of the day. But for Wolfe she was mentor, mother, spd friend, the best he ever hadj this he never denied through aIl the bitterness and reproach that marred the latter part of their affair. As a literary oreation, Esther Jaok has an enormous significance in Wolfe's work. It 1s around her, her work, and her r contaots that much of the last tvo novels revolves, and 1t 1s the 72.

love affair between ber and George Webber which giV9s so much of the substance and form to the later yeara of his produotivity. It is

hardly too muoh to say that her influence in Wolfe IS writing ws as

signirioant as that of the Gant family in ~ Homeward, Angel. Both literally and symbolioally, Euganels initial enoounter with Esther is the result of his surreptitious visit to the vide expanse of the first olass deok of the boat from his oramped tourist olass position, where vision is 11m1ted. Their attraction for eaoh

other was swift and spontaneous as both of them tell it. In The

Journey ~ (1938), Mrs. Bernstein relates that the youth she had Just met on board ship was aggressively attentive to her from their first meeting. From the beginning, he was fasoinated with her lire and its golden, glamorous aura of high living, demanding to know the 1 whole of it in one brief evening. He would grasp her by the shoulders, shake her and question her furiously, solioiting the most intimate details of her background. This may well be an imaginative reoreation of what ws perhaps only typical Wolfe an curiouaity, but it is not an exaggerated account of the turn their relationship was to take in New York. Esther Jackls Manhattan was the glamorous world of wealth and fashion, broWDstone town houses, and plum velvet dresses: the Manhattan emblazoned on the heart of evory 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 had to offer. And she had everything: 73.

great beauty, glowing health, talent, an ineatiate curiousity for the lire arounà her, the quiok and 1l1uminating intelligence of a wise and sympathetic lover. Adored by everyone ehe met, ehe loved only George '''ebber, with an unewerving and dedicated loyalty to hie ae yet unknown genius, the kind of a love every man dreame of, but that few earn.

~ the beginning of the affair, Monk ws in a state of artietio limbo. He knew that he could not hope to oontinue writing for the theatre any longer. His creativity did not lend itself to that medium, and soon he began to think in terme of a great seriee of no'V'els, oovering every aspeot of his own life, and inoluding the lives of praotioally everyone he had ever known. Neverthelees, he oontinued to teach st N.Y.U., still driven by the practioal exigenoies of earning a living. For a time his york prooeeded

deeultorily but happily under the new influence of Esther Jack. Inevitably, however, the strain of york and the neoessity of

BeBing her st ,impractioal houre began to tell on his writing. In the second year of their friendship, he had moved into a "studio," osteneibly taken to eatisfy Esther's need for privaoy in her work, but taoitly agreed on ae a place for Monk to write and be alone with her. None but tho most unregenerate of anti-Freudians yould deny the obvious "Oedipal" overtonas in the relationship.Even in appearanoe, l11's. Bernstein bore a striking physical reeemblance to Julia \Iolfe. Both were small, vivacious-looking, and "almost chUdlike in stature,"3 with brown hair shot by streake of gray. Indeed,DDet of

1 3Elizabeth Norvell, Thomas Wolfes A Biography (New York, 1960), p. 25. 74. the women Wolfe admired had this general appearance. There was in Mrs. Bernstein the Itlimitless energytt and "indomitable will" so typical of \-Tolfe fS mother, and both exercised it in their respective "professions," the theatre and the boarding house. Eugene's feeling that "he hated the jargon of the profession" (~, p. 169) was again to be a prophetie one. Moreover, for long, oonsecutive periods of time in his lire, Wolfe was dependent financially on them; in each case, he harboured fieroe resentrnent at this source of revenue and the kind of nexus it formed. Interestingly, Wolfefs will divided his estate, suoh as it was, between the two women.

In the beginning there was a tremendous fasoination with Mrs. Bernsteinls work. Wolfe always cherished every aspeot of thoatre produotion; and his turning away trom it and the people associated with it uas, one ~eels, more the result of his being always the outsider looking in, and not the fault of the orowd he identified with it so vitriolioally later on. Of oourse, his very intimaoy with Mrs. Bernstein only exaoerbated his feeling of exclusion from her world, and this was the prinoipal, if unconsciounly sought-after, wound; "the greater his bond to anyone, the deeper the resentment Wolfe could feel • • . .n4 The resentment was to come later. First was the elevating and satisfying oonviction thnt he had come back, under Estherfs aegis, to bis beloved home once more. "Through you, l slid baok into America again •••• nS For she did symbolize a new and wonderful

4 Kennedy, ,2B. ill., p. 12.

5Quoted in ROI Walser, .2E.. ill., p. 6. 75. [ America to him. She was the very incarnation of !!e-~-sieole exoitement. She had exper1enced and stored in a memory second in strength only to Wolte's all the high glory or a world lost to h1m: the gay, mobile, and passionate ambienoe or pre-war Manhattan. She wss a ohild of the oity. Unlike Abe Jones, she was a third-generation American, a native to New York long before the sordid ghettoization of the Lover East Side, and the hostile atmosphere or interracial jealousies. Hers was not the murky doggedness or Abe and his family, determined to make a plaoe for themselves in the crush of the teeming manawarm. Hers vas the charming response to a oitY that wss essentially elegant and aesthetio, whose crowds posed no threat to her individuality, wose most exoiting and coruscating denizens were at her feet. She UDtolded against this background like a perfeot blossom, face tl1rned upwards to the radianoe or a life that never failed to mave her, and solioit the best of her oharacter and personality. For Esther the transitory nature of oitY lire ws the throb and pulse of lire itselt. "She loved the unending orows as a ohild might love a river or tall, blown grass." (TW&TR, p. 381) As oountriried as Monk was, Esther ws that muoh an urban creature. "She vas the oityls daughter just as he had been the product of the town." As this projeotion of her world comes into his rooua, he clutches at it, realizing that through her, he may come to knov New York, and perhaps America, in a vay he had never dreamed possible before. r 76.

it seemed to him that now at last he had begun to "know" the city. For, in soxœ ourious way, the woman had oome 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 rooms of little cheap hotels • • • the terrible, lonely, empty oitY of no doore, and of the hoxœless, thronging ways. Hers was the city of the nativet and now 1t seemed to him that he was "in." (TW&TR,- p.' 390) 'l'he sense of ndrowning daily in the manswarm" left him. He moved in a world of luxui';y, 1 ease and warmth, and muoh as he viUfied it later, "it all seemed wonderful, happy, and insp:lred to him now." (TW&TR, p. 382) This initial del1ght with Esther's lire and his appreoiation

of the order and satisfaotion abe finds in it have a relaxing influenoe

on Monk's frantic concern over time, ohis perenriial en~. Through her,

he acoumulates a vast stor~ of time pasto She is a weaver of tales,

as Aunt Maw had been in his youth and Eliza in Eugene's. L1ke so many ( Jews, for whom the past is a real and integral part of their lives, she

wes able to project an image of herself as a constant kaleidscope of avents and people. In her and in the1r relationship, as in Jewish history, "recolleotion beoomes a gu1ding principleftj6 through her, he regains the t1me lost to him before hià birth. When he cannat capture her mood, when he cannot perceive the wellsprings of her thought, he ls morbid and solitary. She is given to deep, pr1m1tive reveries that snatch her away from time present. These remain enigmatically inexplicable to Monk's satisfaction and then he regards her with "jealous curiosity." From her position as "the fleshy unit Y that bound him suddenly to the ghostly past," she slips away and he feels "tricked and cheated and baffled by a clever­

nase and subtlety of living that \laS too old, too wise and crafty, far him ta fathom or contend with." (TWŒlh p. 369)

6 Irving Malin, .2,E. ill .. , p. 58. 77.

Although references to any of the new psychoanalytical theories of that time are short and oryptioally expressed in Wolfe's published work, he vas deep1y fasoinated by its under1ying concepts. Mrs. Bernstein was herself psyohoanalyzed by a 1eading doctor of

the day, the translator of soma of Jung IS work. During her period

of aoo1ysis, which lasted some two years, l-ToIfe would demand to know exaot1y what went on in the sessions with Dr. Hinokle. Since most of Mrs. Bernstein's friends were conversant with the new fad, the subjeot must have been a common topic in her oirc1a. Wolfe was partioular1y excited by Jung's theories of the racial unooneoious, the collective intuition of the past. Mrs. Bernstein relates that "Tom 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 baok to its origine his father's family tree, and it also

helps to explain his attaohment to Germa~ later on as an intinate part of his oultural heritage. Certainly this progressive kind of thinking, enoouraged by Mrs. Bernstein, guided him more and more towsrd the alltobiographical appraooh in his novels, espeoially in

~ Homeward, ~, which ws largely writtan in the oompa~ of Mrs. Bernstein. He must have felt that the closer to reality he came

in his work, the more self-knowledge, in the completest senee, he would attain; that the olltward projeotion of self through memory would inevitably lead into the "retreat into discovery of self." In Esther Jaok's past, faithfully reoreated trom Mrs. Bernsteinlo recollections, Honk finds aImost an entire family circle, expressed in

7 Quoted in Kennedy, ~. ~., p. 116. 78.

mythic and ldeal terms. In her reveries, he cames ta fasten on her father as bath a spiritual father sUbstitute and a kind of alter ego. The father searoh wes a constant and consciously indigenoUB theme in 'tololfe 's \lork. At first the search developed along the broad, epic lines of a voyage to his father's land, the lost bal! of his heartts home. As the North failed to materialize in terme of his ohildhood vision, he cast around for something more tangible, some

person on whom he might place the burden of his dream. Eventually he \lould translate the search into the figure of Maxwell Perkins. At Harvard, he placed faith in George Pierce Baker, the great drame. teaoher and oritic, but the relationship was unsatiafying in many \lays, partioularly beoause Wolfe ws tremandously immature at the time and merely hero-worshipped his teaoher. Upon arrival in the cold light of Ne\l York's reality, he beoame bitterly disillusioned with Baker and dropped almost all contaot with him. In perkins he ws to find a love returned, a respect and fidelity founded in act ua lity; Perkins consciously treated him as the son he had never had. And his editorial guidance \las, of oourse, far more produotive than Baker's had been. In Joseph Frankeu, Joe Linder in the novels, Wolfe found

a romantic, etherealized father figure. Even at the end of Of ~

~ the ~, Esther had said to Eugene: "ho\l like the wild, lost soul of youth you are, how like my vild lost father who vill not

return tU (~,p. 911) Apparently the identification was to be a comforting one on both sides. One \londers how much of Wolte's chaotic and unprediotable lire Mrs. Bernstein could have endured, 79.

f lorere it not for his great simi1arity to the father she had adored

and idea1ized.

Nrs. Bernstein 's ref1eotions in AI! Act,or 's Daughter are

almost exact1y as Wolfe deve10ped them in ~ .H2È ~ ~ ~. At one time, Wolfe had projected a wo1e nove1 which was intended

to record Esther's lire with her father, to be entit1ed !à! ~

Child 's~. In.'r!:!2 ~ !.!!! ~ !!.22!, her stories recaJ.1 vith great olarity a man much 1ike Wolfe and Wolfe 's father. Joe Linder

had the brooding aura of the eterna1 stranger, the 10st mien of the

mythic wanderer, an exile on the face of the earth.

It seemed to me that the sense of 10ne1iness and exile, of a brief and a1ien rest, as ir some winged spirit had temporari1y arrested fl1ght upon a foreign earth, wes more 1egible on him now than it had ever been. Suddenly l fe1t a11 the strangeness of his lire and destiny--his remoteness from a11 the lire l knew. l thought of his strange childhood, and of the dark miracle of chance whioh had brought him to my mother and the Jews--an a1ien, a stranger, and an exile among dark faoes--wi th us but naver of us. Am l fe1t more 'than ever before a sense of our nearness and farnass; l fe1t at onoe oloser to him than to aoyone on earth, and at the same time farther from him. Already his lire had something fabulous and distant in it; he seemed to be a part of some vanished and irrevocab1e time. (TW&TR, p. 423) This is Esther speaking of her fathar, but could she not be speaking

of George Webber himself, and could these not be E1iza's thoughts

about Gant, coming in a "dark mirao1e of ohancen to the pent1ands? She speaks for a11 women Who have bound themse1ves to the fate of

strangers on the earth; symbo1ica11y she echoes Wolfe's intuition that

there is an ineffable tension, mythic and ine1uctable, operating in

the lives of a11 people who grapp1e with lire in its broadest implications. J '" 80.

Joe Linder's life is what might have been Gant's; they had the sarne exuberant love for rhetoric and grandiloquence, the sarne marvellous gusto for lire, the same cereless affection for their fami- lies, who adored them in spito of t}wir unrel iability and wildness.

In one sequence, sketched but never published, vlolfe portrayed himself as Monkey HaWke, seeking a father lost in the civil var. Later Monkey marries a Jewish woman who g1ves him a beautiful daughter, Esther. There are two levels of interpretatlon operative here. The father lost in the Civil VIer is America; Wolfe believed that America had some,there lost her magnificent promise of unirorm greatness, and that the loss had occurred in the great sohism between North and South. Gant is symbolio of the man with pre-war greatness, whose strength and potentiel is vitiated by the oonfused and alien values of an essentially non-Amerioan milieu. On the more obvious level, Wolfe is seeking to identiry himself vith a tangible vision of his dead father, and in so doing, grant himself the inheritance he never had: a continuation of Amerioan beauty and product ivity , incarnate in the most perfect form he had yet encountered. At the sarne time, Wolfe maintains his oYD eternal position of the ailen and the outsider. Even the name nEsther" is meaningful here. For Esther in the original Biblioal story was the most beautiful maiden 1n the realm. She was chosen to marry Aohasuerus, the Gentile king, after all the other lovely womon have been reviewed and rejected. Through her and her people, Achasuerus' lire 1s saved, and so are all the Jews of the land. The allegory cannot be stretched too far, but the essential significance is apparent. 81. i.. Wolfe was again on the periphery of a conepicuously Jewish world, but Esther's Jewishness was of a different eort than Abe Jonee', and one that did not evoke the fears and guilt of earlier days. In Abe

he had coma to terms with the murky, gloomy e~hoe of a Joyner cast. Now he came to know and love the happier and richer elemente of the

Jewish mystique. In this new context he associated it with the opulent world of his father. Esther Jack's environment wes a vorld of luxury, comfort, and easy money; of success,fame, and excitement; of theatres, books, artists, writers; of delicioUD food and wine, good restaurants, beautiful fabrios, and lovely women. It was a world of warm, generous and urbane living; • • • (~, p. 382) In his eager exploration of this world, "1olfe attached great value to what wee particularly Jewish in it. He could see that Esther and her friends, whatever faults they had, knew how to enjoy lire

without stinting themselvee, something ~at Wolfe, through his mother1s influence, could not do without puritanical twinges of conscience. Nevertheless, he defended and praised their lire-affirming joy 10 the solid rnaterial comfortss One of the finest elements in the Jew1sh character ie ite sensuous love of richness and abundance: the Jew hates what ie savorless and stingy in lire, he will not stand for bad food or dreary discomfort, he willnot make jokee about them, or feel it is a fine thing to cheat the senses. He feele there is something mean and degraded about poor livings he lovee warmth and opulence, and he is right. (~, p. 364) Wolfe paid tributs to many of Estherls friends whom he admired.

He was fascinated with Hr. Roeen, 0 self-made man of wealth, "/ho hod daveloped his once sma11 shop on Grand street into a fashionable ladies' wear establishment on Firth Avenue. What amused and delighted Wolfe was the undisguised pride Mr. Rosen toOk in the origins of his wealth. 82.

He "/ould not dissociate his private life from the source of his money,

as though to earn money in trade were somehow not comme 1!~, as

many Gentiles felt. Mr. Rosen revelled in his~alth, and always livad ovor his store, aven on Fifth Avenue. He acted according to the code of American commercialism and made no borms about it. The aristocracy of money, upon which America had become what it was, was not shameful

to him. He had the sama Idnd of honesty that l'lolfe admired in Fried at Oxford. Mr. Rosen is described as "a handsome and powerful man, very Jewish-looking, dark, fieroely Oriental." (TU&TR, p. 437)

His rich heritago is patent in his bearing, which ia at all times aristocratie and serene:

There was in him a vast pride of race, a vast pride in the toil and intelligence which had brought him his wealth. For this reason, Mr. Rosen had a very prinoely quality--the prinoely quality that almost a1l rich Jews have, and that fow Christians ever get. (TW&TR, p. 438) This pride of wealth is refleoted, Holfe felt, in the generosityand freedom with which Jews spend and exh1blt.it. ThUe he scorned the common fallacy that the Je\-, is stingy by nature, a myth deriving from the Shylock image whioh persizts in the Christian vision

of the Jew. ~There is, of course, no greater fallacy than the one about the stingiXloss of Je",s. 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 gna"tings of guilt in the elegant trappings of riches. l-1hile

the wealthy Gontile cannot shake from his unconscious mind the promise

,.~'~ thl3.t his money will prevent him from a heavenly reward, the Jew suffers from no such compunctions. As Tf1VYe the dairyman, Sholem Aleichem's pristinely Je"rish creation, puts it, nIt is no sin to be poor--but it i6 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 lire. And he is drawn to the gaiety and peace of Esther 's world. For ten years Hook had turned more and more to certain Jews in New York for oompanionahip. 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 inheritanco. (~, p. 476) In this other place of opulence and joy, Hook drew noqrishment. "HoOk

W8S often sorry he had not been born a Jew." The good lire of Esther Jack could not satiafy Monk forever. No one person '6 ever could unless his own did first, and that kind of spiritual peace lay far in the future. As he t:l.red 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 tranqu1llity in their relationahip, 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 roal reasons for his weariness and disgust. He blamed his inner turmoil in her world and its essential corruption--its Je\.rish corruption. "He saw her at the center of a corrupt and infamoUB world, inhabited by rich, powerful, and cynical peop1e--great, proud, and potent beak-n?sed Jews ••• " (~, p. 539) The old poison ,-ras at work in him agnin: the fcar of the tribe, the feeling of his o"m

~1a.xwell Perkins claiIœd Wolfe' s jealousy waa Itpathological." aloneness in the midst of thair common understanding, the sense of persecution and martyrdom to their insatiate demands on him. Esther herself becomes a creature apart from him, remote and wrapped in her racial abstractions. She becomes a mythic, exotic figure, the old Lillith vision of his boyhood fantasies. Fixed in an arrogant paver, her face as he saw it then flamed like a strange and opulent jevel; in his feverish imagination it smouldered drowsily with all the slumbrous and insatiable passion of the East • • • a body to he taken by all men, and never to be possessed by arry. (~, p. 547) In his anguish, he assigns her the symbolic value of all the rapaâioUB Jewesses who paoe the city, unknown and secretive as the oitY when he first knew it. And he '.las all the Gentile men saorifioed to their triumphant embracet He saw a dark regiment of Jewish women in their lavish beauty • • • seated in pover and wealth, and fitly walled by the arrogant and stupendous towrs of the oitY • • • they paced with tbe velvet undulance of an intolerable aensuality the proud and aplendid ohambers of the night. Tbey were the living raok on which the trembling baoks of all tbeir Christian lovers bad been broken, the living oross on \àliob the flesh and marrow of Christian men had been crucified. (TW§sTR, p. 547) It ia tbe madness in bimself that evokes tbese lurid imagos of bis "peraecutora," just as it was in the crushing borror of his confrontation with tbe Jewish students, and particularly the girl studenta, at N.Y.U. Here, too, tbe husbands and fathers of the Jewisb women seem to be looking on tbeir seductions with irony, cynicism, and an awful patienoe, exactly as the boy students had seemed ta in school. And Esther '5 treatment of vlolfe, now possessive, nov negleotful (or so it seemed to him) \las tao much like his motber 's treatment of him not to evoke the same kind of frustration in the 85.

relationship. "This ident1r.ication lay ready-made, then, for him to

attach to it the irrationalities that grew from his neurotic ang1.lish.,,9

He simply bad to get away trom her and her clan in order to save

himself from their devouring maw. The pattern 1s too similar to ignore.

The city, too, assumes an insiduous and fearful visage. It is now a "trackless jungle," inhabited by a who le speotrum of nrats,

snakes, vulturea." And inside he knows that it is his own lack of

produotivity, his own fears and self-doubts that drive him to these

fits of dark despair. "He was a hater of living men who saw nothing

but death and oold corruption in everything and everyone around

him ••• n (~, p. 555)

In the long and painful separating process, Monk and Esther

evoke in each other mutual contempt for the foroes in background that

are coming between tham. Esther's innate feelings of racial and sooial

superiority come to confront Monk 's latent anti-Sem1tism in a drawn-out

period of reorimination and jealous reproach. What they really hate

ia the differences that must divide them aimply beoauae they have

tbat power, and not for wbat they are in themselves. Each seizes on

the dangerouB wapons at hand only to wound the other, and they know

it. Honk jeers at ber double standards of loyalty, one code for him

and one for her family, on whose bebalf she 1s always f1ercely defens1ve.

He laughs at her fine friends in the theatre, uncovering all the tawdry

aspects of her career.

But Esther 1 8 responses are far more lethal. ~lhile Honk '8

displays of feeling are direoted at Jmls in general and the more glaring (-" \ 9 Kennedy, ,2,E. ill., p. 168. 86. r of their raoial idiosyncrasies, Esther outs to the very quick of

Monk 's most painful family memories. lUth unerring aim she attaoks

the Gentiles in a direot thrust at his own famUy.

"God J You Christiane are a oharming lot 1 You talk about the Javal Just try to find a Jew that woula treat his sister's children in that wayl ••• You've reviled and hated all my people--and now, l ask you, '\o,ho 's stuok by you, who 's been your friend? ••• n (TW&TR, p. 5(5)

In all their repartees, Esther has the most telling responses. If

vlolfe \o,as anti-Semitio, he has, certainly spared the enemy ~ery chance

to avenge themselves. Indeed, as Maxwell Geismar claims, Esther 's

defence of her people and her treatment of him is anybody's best

refutation of the charge of anti-Semitism laid against Wolfeo lO If , '~olfe 's vague indictments against the Jews are wounding to Je'Wish

va nitY , Esther's against the Gentiles shoula be salve eno~l for the

most sensitive critic.

The unkindest cut of all is Esther 's reference to Monk's

father, the apogee, to her mind, of Gentile negligenoe in family

relations. ''You ought to thank him for all he's done for you' Thank

him for making you an outoast and a \o/anderer 1 •.•.• Thank him for

making you hate yourself and your own lire ln (TW&TR, p. 566)

There ia no reply to this, only a tortured desire to be alone \oTith

hia pain. Dut as she leavea the apartment, Esther, angu1shed as she is, recalls herself to lire, renlizes that she cannot allow herself

to sink into the pit of self-torment that lends to Monk's kind of

existence. Monk, too, Boes Esther as the life principle, with himself

surrounded, Hanfred-like, by all the demons of deo.th and darkness. T L He heaps the blame for their misery upon himself, knowing that she is 10 Hax\lell Geismar, Hriters .lli Crisis (Boston, 1942L p. 222. ~.

1 ultimately right in whnt she says to hiJn, and that she 1s the only true friend he has ever had. He knew that she ws right, and would be right if she went to her grave with a ourse of wild denial on her l1ps, because such beauty, courage, love, and youth, and strongth as she had known ehould not grow old, and ehould never die, and that truth wae with her, no matter how 1nev1table the triumph of this a11-devouring, al1-viotorious enemy. (~, p. 585) Yet still the debilitating quarre1s and insulte oontinue, both realizing the end 1s near, but neither willing to relinquieh the only hold they have left on eaoh other--jealousy am pain. Monk sinks further and further into black de ject ion, but Esther is capable of maintaining an ironio face in the seriousnesB of everything, a particularly Jewish irony, whioh allows her to appreciate the widening gap between them and ite oauses with far more olarity than MOnk'B clouded and tragio perspeotive will allow. With old Jewish patienoe and acoeptanoe, ae though tried many timee in Buch mattere, ehe watohee Honk, and in her musings she strikee to the heart of Monk's ambivalence and tension. "Now," she thought, "I know exaotly what he's th1nking •• l am the one he loves, his jolly little Jew that he adoree and oould devour, and l am also the evi1 rlenoh vho lies in wait for unsuspecting oountry boys. l am the joy and glory of his lire, and l am also the sinister and oorrupt harpy who hae been employed by the foroes of darkness to kill and destroy his life • • • • The Jews hate the Chrietiane, and they a1so love them •••• Heave t "1eave 1 Weave 1 He weaves it day and night out of his orazy and tormented brain until not even Einstein oould make head or taU of it--and yet he thinks it aIl as plain and clear as day' The Jews are the most generous and liberal people on earth, and have the most wonderfu.l food upon their tables, but when they invite you to eat it, they uait until it gets halfway down your throat and you have a look of pleasure on your face, and then they say someth1ng cruel and cunning to you in order to make you lose your appetite." (~~R, p. 595) 88.

Clearly Monk's psychie equivocations are a well-known theme to her. And it is no accident that her musings here and for the following poges dwell on the "food" aspects of their affaire 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 device. Pages and poges are given over to the discussion of Esther's meals that she prepares every noon hour in the little studio. The cooking instruotions that she relays in minute details are guaranteed to reduce Monk to puttY in her bands; and his favourite,. most endearing epithets for her are intimately bound up with the culinary world. Critics have deolared these possages either repulsively exaggerated, or Just plain repetitioue, but their symbolie value should not be overlooked. Esther's expert cooking and her appreciation for the art of gourmandizing filled a real need in Monk's emotional lire. They represent the love and affection that Honk associated with the \-forld of his father, and the rejection of the Pentland-Joyner's stringent worldly appetites. In the fantasy oiroue world of his father, Honk pictured great, brawny men all sitting down to eat breakfast, the descriptions of which are truly mouthwatering. As Eugone, he attached significance to the fact that his mother ...1as

always cooking for the boarding house people first, while he had to wait and eat afterwards. In Germony, hic father'o land, he revelled in the

lavish window displays of food, discussed the German eating habits at great length, and oomplained that he ...ras constantly starving, and could not fill himself, no matter how much he ate. There the "food" associations were to harbour stortling and significant implications. 89.

Thus the Jewish love for good food, and plenty of it, was an extremely attractive aspect of their lire in New York, and absolutely integral to his lire with Esther. Esther is quiok to appreoiate this, and humorously envisions lire without her as a painful series of diMers in the oompany of "some little goy with a harùt of yellow hair" (TW&!l'R, p. 596), each meal an insipid and disguating reminder of the good lire he had left behina. "1 know now what shelll give you. l oan see itJ Oxtail soup out of a can with al1 the ox left out of it, picked-up codfish with a gob of thet horrible, white gooey, Christian sauce, a slice of gluten bread, acide­ philus milk, and a piece cf stale angel cake that the little wench picked up at a bakery on her way home from the movies." (TVl8lrR, p. 596)

Flushed with priae in herself and her race by the end of her fantasy, she crows mentàlly, and with understandable womanly satisfaction,

"If 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 i8 always on the receiving end of it, and that is hoy, their ",hole relationship seeme to have been from the beginning. In everything she ia superbly talented and productive, while HOlÙt feels thnt he ia stagnant. No real love

could stand the atrain of such an imbalance, and Esther's valiant attempts to impresa on him the necessity of turning to use his unlimited potentia1 and will as she has done through the "hatred which she had for failure, her abhorence of indecision and confusion, and the almoat material value which she set upon auooess--on a life and talent visely

used, and on a knouledge always guided by a clear design--" (TV1&TR, p. 598) l cannot impose on him uhat does not come from \-lithin. 90.

1 The real end comes much later, following a second trip to Europe and a year of reconcUiation. It follows "The Party at Jackls,"

~ aanlt Q2 ~ Againls novel within a novel, a br1l1iant summary of all the best and worst in the Jack universe, though sorne critics

would have it as the warst 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 Monkls lire for the past several years, and purge them emotionally.

On the morning of the party, vlolfe takes us into the respective bedrooms of Nr. and Hrs. Jack for an intiJM.te and leisurely character sketch of each. In both oases there is a foil to the main

aotor. For Mrs. Jack, it i5 Nora, the maid, and for Mr. Jaok, Monk himself is the implied antithesis.

Surprisingly, Mr. Jack is not satirized and parodied within an inch of his life--surprisingly, since Holfe could be a !Mster satirist, brilliant and merciless when he chose, and surprisingly, inasmuch as the entire party sequence ws conceived as a huge satire on the more obvioUB foibles of the pre-crash Jack types. And yet his portrait of Frederick Jack, though laeed with mildly ironie touches, is almost grudgingly admiring and fair. Holfe is at pains to indicate

to what extent }!onk and Mr. Jack arc opposites in temperament .... and the burden of criticism more often than not falls on Monk's shoulders.

HO\o/ever, there are several indications of Monk 's position as Mr. Jaok lB

victim, a sop to his princely love of subjeot torture. For ~~. Jack loved parties with all their sophisticated repartee, \-Ihere some youthful

f.\ 91.

1 initiate, in his bumbling rustioity, provided the fun for the othera. And Mr. Jack could frown patronizingly at the foolish antios of nthe young Gentile fool,n who disturbed his sleep by ringing up his

wife at two a.m. in a fit of juveni1e jealousy.

Frederick Jaok'ia', 's ldnd of businessman 'a Aristotle in

Wolfe 's eyes. If' he is phlegmatio and serene in the face of lire 1s 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 mechanios of his own universe, oiroumvallated with steel towera and fortress-like stone walls. Within those walla,

Mr. Jaok has his own dignity and charaoter. He likes order and harmony and simp1icity. He llkes the spaciouaness and comfort that come with wealth, the health and vigour of material well-being. In fact, r, . Mr. Jack is a wholesame, healthy person. He is saroastically drawn

in part, but the irony does not obsoure the total pioture of dignity and strength. Mr. Jaok is kind in a good, old-faehioned sense. He oould be modern and Bophisticated, but he never lost sight of human values. Heliked the sooial awim, and the presence of the better sort of aotors, artists, writers, and wealthy, oultivated Jews around his table. He had a kind heart and a loyal nature. His purse was open to a friend in need. He kept a 1avish table and a royal oel1ar, and his fami1y was the app1e of his eye. 11 Hoderation and ripeness are at the heurt of his character. He is one of the tribe who \Till naver beat their knuckles bloody on the "la11. He \lould not Itspend his strength on the impulse of a rnornent's wild belief. This was suoh madness as the Gentile knew. n (YCGHA, p. 159) In short,

11 Thomas Holfe, You Can 't Qg ~ Aga!n (New York, 1940), p. 159. Subsequent reforences ,dll be to this edit ion 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 knell the value of·the midd1e way.n (YCGHA, p. 159)

Mr. Jack's undeviating perseverance along the midd1e 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 alao !rom the

ecstacy of supreJœ lyrical inteneityi Honk's own madness in the blood. Far !rom being a straw man for satirical purposes, as he may

have been intended at one time, Mr. Stick impresees the reader as a rational man. Un11ke Monk, he can see hie own 1ife in the proper perspeotive, limited as that persepotive is. ttwhen he saw a ninety­

( story building, he \oras not one to fa11 down grove11ing in the dust, and beat a maddened brain with fists, and ory outl 'Woe \ 0 woe is me!" (EGnA, p. 156) In the final ana1ysie, Vlolfe accords Frederick Jack a good measure or respeot, if somewhat qua1ified by the irony of the pereona1 contraet with himsolf; but he does not make the mistake of counting him ae a good natured buffoon, simp1y because of his prosaic ns.ture. 'Wolfe saw him ae the eoion of a long tradition of sane, and eventua1ly triumphant people: "Perhaps eome great inheritance of suffering, the long, dark ordeal of his race, had 1eft hiru, ae a precioUB distillation, this gift

of balanced understanding." (IQQ!!A, p. 160) In one sequence, Holfe even comas to pra1ae Hr. Jack at Honk 'e

expense. The very critioal review aoc1a1m1ng Esther '5 work, which Honk l had once parodied and mocked out of jea10usy and petty pride, Fred Jack 9.3. parodies out of an affeotion and belief so deeply felt that he can only express it ironically. \-lhere Monk is emotional1y charged and self-absorbed enough to resent Eather's talent, Frederick Jack ia unsel.fiahly delighted with it; it is outside of his own fram of refereno~ and he is unat1nting in his admiration. Mockingly, he addresses her in her bedroom before leaving for work as "Miss Esther Jack," as the newspaper had named her, gaily noting his own effacement from her friends' 'W'orld with the suggestion that a businessman could not possibly understand it. And yet he appreoiates her talent more than anyone else, even Honk, who has now oome to see her as competition. Jokingly he scolds himself: "He's nothing but a business manl He canlt appreciate herl--and a11 at once, to her amazement, she saw that hia eycs were ahot with tears, •• " (YCGHA, p. 18.3) Holfe ,.ras touohed by the old fashioned pride Mr. Jack took in his famUy and a11 tbat they did: And, strange1y, for one who 1ived among a11 the constant1y shifting visages of a feverish and unstab1e world, he had a1ways ha1d with tenacious devotion to one of the anoient traditions of his raoe-aa belier in the saored and invio1ate stab11ity of the fami1y. (!QQEA, p. 194) During the party, it beoomes evident that George Webber is observing carefu11y, and for the last tima, the OurioUB dispnrity between his own erratio and solitary Gentile nature, and the co11eotive1y cool, poised nature of the Jews. For the truly "lost" people at the party, though everyone 1a in a sense, are the Gentlles. There is a sharp diohotomy between the mien and behaviour of the Je,.,s and Genti1es present.

For one thing, there 1s a heavy emphasis placed on the ~~bane sophistication of the Jeys. Alma Jack, Estherls daughter, is "0001, 94. poised, loveIy," and Wolfe notes her "polished style, her e1egance";

(~, p. 235) l11se Lily Mandel1 ia poised to the point of other­ worldinees, whi1e her pursuer, Mr. Lawrence Hirach, is "sohoo1ed in power" and ultra-aophisticated. Roberta Hei1prinn, a working Jewess like Esther, "the governing brain of a celebrated art theatre," has na very handsome and striking appearance," and "the power of her wU1, and the superior quality of her metal were written plainly upon her." (YCGHA, p. 241) There is Sameul Fetzer, "an eminent theatre director whose lire since chi1dhood had been spent in the city, along Broadway and among the most highly polished groups of urban sooiety."

(lQQ!!A, p. 268) Mr. Jack himself is of oourse the very apogee of e1e­ gance and suavity. Fina11y there ie Jake lIJ)ramsolJ, who is "old, subt1e, eensual, weary ••• ["witiJ the face of a vulture. Curiously enough, it was also a etrangely attractive." It had in it "a kind of wise cyniciem, and a weary humour." (YCGHA, p. 236) All the Jews are suffused with the irony and wor1d-weariness of their ancient urban heritage. They oreate an ambivelent reaction

in the reader; they are not partioular1y attractive in their own 1igbt, but certainly tliey are far more appealing than the maladjusted lot of Gentilea nt the party. stephen Hook would be likeable, were he not

so painfully shy and neurotically conetrioted. Wolfe cal1s him a I1poor, tormented creature," who contamplates suioide because of a pimple on hie face. Margaret and John Ettinger are a ourious couple who go to al1 sooial avents with his mistress. They make a tawdry and repulsive

trio. ~ Carleton is, of course, a completely disintegrated creature of psychotic leanings, a pitifully sick contrast to Esther 'a glo\oling 95.

1 physical and psychical health. The perceptive stephen Hook, looking at Alrry, feels the horror of her splintered mind, and of his own, then compares their lives to the lives of the Jews in the room.

poer chUd J Poor ehild 1 So quiek and short and tem­ poral, both you and l, thought HoOk--the ehildren of a younger Idnd 1 WhUe these' He looked about him at the sensual volutes of strong nostrils curved with scornful mirth. These others of thia aneient ehomistry--unmothered, reborn, and venturesome, yet visely mindful of the flame--these others shall endure' Ah, Timol (EGHA, p. 254) Monk is ineluded amongst the alien Gentiles. Moeking both Lawrenoe Hirseh and himself, Honk watches him paoe the room vith seeming indifferenoe, noiselessly and patiently stalking the cat-like form of

Lily Mandell. Although Miss Mandell snubs him, he is unperturbed and infinitely pleasant, yet always pasaionately absorbed in the chase. Beneath his sophisticated exterior lurk the untamed instinots of fJVery man. But he is a Jew and he oan wait for Misa Mandellis favour. He is never swayed by the humiliating impulses of madness, "sach madness as the GentUe knew," and the scene is brilliantly outlined with the use of passages from "The Song of Songso" Wolfe loved this partioular aneient love eall, but in Lawrence Hirsch, its lyrieal intensity has only ironie application. He remained himself, the man of many interests, the maeter of imIœnse authorities. For he could wait. He did not take her aside and say: "Thou art fair, lIt:f love; behold, thou art fair, thou hast dovels eyes." Nor did he saya "Tell me, 0 thou whom rrry soul loveth, vmere thou feedest." He did not remark to her that she remained as beautiful as Tirzah, or eomely as Jerusalem, or terrible as an army with banners. He did not aak anyone to etay him with !lagons, or comfort him with apples, or confees that ho was sick of love. And as for saying to her: "Thy navol ia like a round goblet, whieh wantoth not liquor; thy belly ie like an heap of wheat set about with lUies," the idea hod nover occurred to him. (~, p. 271) 96.

The Jsws are set apart, by their uniform ability to keep their heads in the midst of internal chaos, and by their immense reserves of "dU and caution. They are not appalled by the exigencies of lire, as is demonstrated by their impaasive, but direct action during the fire.

And the y are together, oommunicative whero the Gentiles are note

Amw Carlaton is almost totally inartioulate. Her speech is constantly punctuated vith thrusts such as nI meanl" or "You knowL" when nobody really does. She has lost the secret of communication. And yet Jake Abramsom, d1scussing a trip abroad with Esther and Roberta Heilprinn, and mentioning the food on board ship, has only to say, nIt was fit for nothing but a bunch of goysl" (YCGHA, p. 238) and: This reference to unchosen tribes, with its evooation of humorous contempt, now 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, anoient, immensely knowing, and outside the world, regardant, tribal • • • It passed--the instant showing of their ancient signe The woman just smiled now, quietlya the y were citizens of the world again. (YCGHA, p. 238) Thus the idiom of the Jewe, depending on tho Gentiles at t1mes for effectiveness, drays them together, but further alienates George Webber from them. It is not l!!!! IIforgotten language Il ; this ls made abundantly clear to him.

In effeot then, the party serves the s~~e purpose for George as Ben's funer al had for Eugene. It drays together the forces that have been operative in his lire, and illuminates the aspects of those foroes that make it imperative for the youth to be on his way once more, an exile not of his own accord. In both cases, though, the consoioUB 97.

excuse for leaving is an intelleotual one. In ~,Homeward, Angel, Eugene had felt that he must go awy in order to develop himaelf artistically and intelleotually. New Monk claimB that he will

naver be a great aL°tist unless he leavea Estherls monied ro~-not beosuse she is wealthy and he is pOOl', since st heart Holfe ws no Marxist and admired what Mrs. Bernatein1a wealth had done for her--but becoause, as he olaimed, "now he knew that if he ws ever to suooeed

in writing the books he felt were in him, he must turn about and lift

his face up to some nobler height. ft (YCGHA, p. 320) But th~s 1a

false and hollml-soWlding. He had \-1l'itten 1d~ Homeward, Angel not only in the midst of her world, but vith her complete emotional support. No, the real reason ws the necessity of severing a bond that threatened to break his spirit, as his familyls had almost done. The mwthic voyage beckoned, and he ws once more to be slone with his destiny. And so he burned his bridges behind him--literally, in the apartment fire. America burned its bridges, too, in the great stook orash whioh followed the party, practioally on its heela. Nothing ws certain for Monk or for America any longer, except that somehew his cOWltry's long road back to home, and the "city of myself'" lay

ahaad in a ~ew America that he might calI his own •

.. "Therefore," he thought, "old master, wizard Faust, old father of the anoient and svarm-haunted mind of man, olà Garth, old German land vith a11 the measure of your truth, your glory, beauty, magic, and your ruinJ aDd dark Helen burning in our blood, great queen and mistress, soroeress--dark land, dark land, old anc1ent earth l love-farevellJ" (From l2!! ~ ,gg l!2!!!2 Again)

All the old \lorlds were dead. ~ ~ gg.!!E!!! Again, as the title suggests, ohronioles 'Holfels leave-takinga of all the places

and people he had tried to call "home." Bach, for aU it offered in the

short ~ be would raject rhough a psyahical and spiritual inability to identity fully with it, a ohronic failure to resolve the strange tension pulling him toward and away !rom anything or anybody that he

loved. In soma of the first chapters of the novel, Wolfe reoounts the dieconcerting awakening he had reoeivod on his return to

Asheville (tibya Hill in the book), after many years of absenoe, and

with a first novel to his credit. \olby a man and a writer vith the ineight of Thomas lIolfe abould have faUed to envisage the shook and humiliation his famUy and friands at home would surfer from the rave-

lat ions of ~ Homeward, Angel (~ !2 ~ Moimtains in the book) remains a mystery to most oritics. The change in their attitudo 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 vas treated with hostility and suspicion, certainly not as harsh as he made it Beem in the novel, but,

neVt3rtheless, coldly apparent. In the novel, George Uebber surfers a l 98 99. series of guilty nightmares, patterned af'ter those Wolfe describee in ~ st0l'1 ~ !~; these, in turn, eoho the guUt dreams of New York University days. As the only kind oi derence he knew, Wolfe pa10ted the tow in lurid and oarrupt terms, incarnate 10 the obscene degeneration of Judge Bland. Sign1ficantly, the only figure le1't unsoarred by Wolfe 1 s vengeful pen is Nebraska Crane. His IDdian Amerioan value of land for its own sake, and not for the sake of money, remaine intact" his motives unsullied. Sign1f'icantly, too, hC\lever, Nebraska Crane was wholly a creature of Wolfe's imagination.

In any event, the visit to Asheville oonvinoed Wolfe of the iutUity of trying to re-establ.ish a lite there. Manhattan ws all thnt remained for him now. But that "home" d1sintegrated, too, in the tumbling oollapse of the stoak market and the world of Aline

Bernstein. His only emotional buffer ws the promise oi iame and suooess vith the publioation of the novel 10 the iall oi 1929, shortl1 after the orasb. And the book ~ a great suooess, more than he had dared hope. For tbe firet t1me 10 his lite, he was inàeed a iamous man.

But iame, thnt "Fair Medusait of' ,.rolfe IS imagination, ws not ns he had fancied her. Innocently, be had featured himself the centre of all Americnls glad acc1aim and disinterested praise. Inatead, he found bimselt bes1eged by social climbers, lion bunters--every sort of opportunist. They brought him nothing but vnpid cocktail parties, meaningloss and short-lived affaira, and 18w suits, \-'olfe's pecu1:1ar È!ll!! noire in his lator yeBrs. He could no longer wark in penoe. He spent his tima in beating the lion hunters from his door, the 100.

critics 1 Vlords of damnation (or so it seemed to Wolfe, al though his press

was exceedingly good on the whole) from his ears, and the Vlorld from

his spirit.

It was to Brooklyn, then, that he \'lent for a new fom of exile,

"endless Brooklyn, a city 80 desolate as to be unbelievable."l Its very

desolation, though, attracted Wolfe at thie particular juncture in his

career. "To this place ffie cami! deliberately, driven by a resolution

to seek the most forlorn and isolated hiding spot that he could find."

(YCGRA, p. 401) In a sense, he \'las hiding from the world and its demands

in order to Vlork at his second novel; but Brooklyn Vias to be much more

than an escape. It Vias to be an affirmativo gesture on Wolfe's part

in his struggle to come to terms with America. As time went on, four ,. , years in all, the search Vias to take on an almost religious significance.

His very dwelling Vias monaetic 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 Vlould voluntarily elect to live in. It ie long and narrow, running parallel to the hall fram front to rear, and the only natural light that enters it comes through two emall windows rather high up in the wall, facing each other at the opposite ends and these are heavily guarded Vii th iron bars, placed there by the owner of the house to keep the South Brooklyn thugs from breoJd.ng in. (YCGRA, p. 400)

In this "dWlgeon, Il Wolfe slaved and pr~ed, alone, over his

personal, and jealous, hcathen deity-vœiting ond more writing. His only

contact with the outside world was Maxwell Per1d.na, \Vith whom he took

long walks almost every night in arder to discuos the progreso of his now

book. Every d~ he sweated, wrote, and observed the raw

l T.C. Pollock and Oscar Cargill, Thomas Wolfe & Waehineton Square (New York, 1954), p. 119. 101.

1 jungle in which he had made his home. out of this self-impose

oame emot10nal maturing am creative produotivity. out of:ft, too, came a new ability to see America in broader, more sooial, terma. It ws during this period that 1I1e impaot of the depression became a real

and loathsome exper1enoe to Wolfe. Aotually wtohing the buma of

Brooklyn digging in garbage palls for their dinner, cr sleeping in latrines so filthy that their stenoh turned awy even Wolfe (a man of

abnormally 1ndifferent sensibilities to the amenities of tme erosturG oOmforts), imposed a greater understanding of Amerioa's sorry plight

on his mind and heart. He began to see loneliness and suf'fering on

the faoes of people around him, not only on his OWD. He shared America 's torment and waxed iDdignant--not righteously, but objeotively,

-r. a nev sensation for him. Nov he abjured the amorphous emotional out- i pour.fngs of ear11er days; he sought the actuality of things as they were. He vanted to capture the "look and feel or an iron raU," or "the partioular shade of rusty green with whioh so many things are paintecl

in Amerioa." (YCGHA, p. 412) It was a proeess of disoovery in its most naked, l1teral, and primitive terme. He was just beginning really to see thousands of things for the first time, • • • He ws like a soientist in some new field of ehemistry who for the first _time realizes that he has stumbled upon a vast new world, am who will then pick out 1àentities, establish affiliations, • • • without yet being aware vhat the structure of the vhole is like, or what the firu:ü. end will be. (YCGHA, p.U2) He bagan to write, not of men, but of man. Where befora he had envisioned abstraot man only in terms of h1mself, he tried now to ooneeptualize him in the broadest philosophieal sense. And like the

great writer of Eeeles1astee, whoae wisdam he so emulated, he saw man 102.

as a cosmos of good and evil. "Ies, this is man, and it is impossible

ta say the worst of him; n (YCGHA, p. 433) but he found, tao, that it ws impossible ta express his grandeur, this nmoth of tim.e, n hurling

himself against the forces in lire that seek ta destroy him, body and

BOul. The fighting instinct in man, the wUl ta live in spite of

the horrors of existence, is his redeeming quality, and the key to his goodness. "Han loves l11'e, and loving 111'e, hates death, and

because of this he is greo.t, he is glorious, he is beautiful, and

his beauty is everlasting. n (YCGHA, p. 4%) Loneliness cames not only to poeta, but to Everyman, and every American in particulo.r. Where, then, lies !meriaals greatness over all other nations? Wolfe looked about him now to find her promise in the moet

obsoure reaohes of the land, in places he would not have dreamed of

some years earlier. He found it in na Negro'~oy, and, seeker, he is burning in the night.; (YCGHA, p. 507) he found it in nthat laan and tan-faced boy," who lived in nthe olay-baked piedmont of the South"; (XQS!!iA, p. 507) Or there again, in the East-Side Ghetto of Manhattan, two blocks away from the East River, • • • shut in his sweltering cell, ••• celled·there away 1Dto a little semblance of privacy and so11tud'e tram al1 the brallllng and. vooirerous l11'e and argument or his famUy and the seeth1ng hive around him,the Je", boy sits and pores upon his book • • • • And for ",bat? For what th1s agony of ooncentration? For what this hell of effort? • • • Beoause, brother, he ia burning in the night. He sees the class, the leoture room, the shining apparatus of gigantio laboratories, the open field of scholarship, and p\D.'e researah, certain knovledge, and the \olorld distinction of an Einstein name. (~, p. 508)

Commitment ta individuality and the right te exceJ.-lIthis, seeker, l is the promise of America.n (YCGHA, p.' 508). 103.

A critical objeotivity in hie observance of individuals

~ccompanied Wolfe's evolution into spiritual awarenese. Even the great and all-lmowing l.mxwell Perkins fell under hie careful scrutiny.

And Vlolfe concluded, after a long and unusuol intimaoy with h:lm, that

Perkine' vision vas lacking in hope. In Foxhall Edwrds, \-Tolfe explores Perkina' chsracter and personality. Through the Fox's reading of the news at breakfast, "lolfe hints at the limitations in Perkins \lhich helped to create the tension and eventual rupture in their relationehip. The news contains a story of an nunindentified man, ft C. Green, who has jumped from a hotel window to dash out bis brains on the sidewalk below. WhUe C. Green is representative to '''olfe of a lost America, driven to despair by the loneliness and lack ot parpose in his wretched and futile existence, the Fox sees him only as a city ciph., dr1ven beyond the limits of human help, and therefore a lost cause. Fox does not apprehend the kind of thinking thatstrives for a vorlà beyond deepair, beyond the limite of human action--the heroic vision--although Fox understande a great many other thinge in lire. "Fox hae no hope, reslly; he is beyond deepair.n (l"CGHA, p •.491) Fox's vay is to murmur Dpaeeionate regret,n but he will not mave to take aotion in ending America'e suffering. He acoepte her fate ae plighted, inevitable. Thie scopa of vision ie too narrow for George Webbar, ultimately, and a tension creepa into their relationship, although the actual proceee of eetrangement is not mentioned. The hardly disguised referencee to Wolte's Marxiet thinking are not the real issue, though. !gain, it wae s:lmply a differenee in temperament and Heltanschauu.ng thot \Tolle vas etriking out agoinst. He eould not tolerate a polemie in thought bet\reen himself and hie various mentors, einee it diarupted the process of identification so necessary to him. For this and other typioally vloUean reasons, a breaoh in the friendship wes inev1table. In 1934, UoJ.re oame out ot his Brooklyn exile. He lett its

solitary desolation as easily and completely as if he had been released trom a prison sentenoe or absolved from priestly vovs. His second book almost finished, he vent to Europe onoe again, this time with a

new perspective and sobriety. He spent bis time in England, obeerving the "real" people ot Londonz Daisy Purvis, vhom most critios oonaider too oozily and exaggeratedly Engliah to be real, and the "Little

People." England did not impress WoUe nov as a oulttu'al monolith, an abstraot and oharming ideal. Rather he was disgll8ted by the oruaty

mores ot a oountry, whose masses walked the streets wretched and

.... bungry, while its "betters" lived arr this suffering, obl1violl8 to the toundations of their comtort. So engraved on the minds ot all the

hopeless lower olass vere the iron sooial lave of the land, that none of them dared think things oould be, or should be, any different. Onoe George Webber reoognizes the aotuality ar the situation, he oannot see or love England as he had before. Tbe revelation oomas to bim of a sudden, and it is an "astounding disoovery."

It was lika a kind of terrible magic to realize suddenly that he bad been living in this English vorld and seeing only one part of it, thinking it wes the wbole. It ws not that the Little People were fev in number. Onoe he sav tbem, tbey seemed to be almost tbe whole population. They outnumbered the Big People ten to one. And after he SBlI them, he knew that England oould naver look the same to him aga in, and that nothing he might read or bear about the oountry therearter would malœ sense to him if it did not take the Little People into aocount. (YCGHA, p. 531) Idol and ideal, one after the other, was crumbling for "Tolte at tbis time. The last, the greatest disillusion, was yet to come, in 105.

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

England--and with Sinclair Lewis, .f1ationally reoreated as JJ.oyd McHarg.

Sinolair Lewis, who in 19:30 had seized the oocasion of his Pul1tzer

Prize acceptance speech to speak, not of himself, but of the ris1ng

young generation of novelist9i Wolfe among them, represented Fame

and Suocess in writing to Thomas Wolfe. What he did with it--and

did not do with it--was a stunning disappointment to the younger man.

Wolfe's br1l1iant, but devastating portrait of McHarg in 12!! Oan't gg

~ Again is a testimoDy to the shcck and bitterness Wolfe must bave

felt in their eventual meeting. Yet Lewis did a real service to

Wolfe--the same kind that Starwick, in all his neurotic faUure, hac1

done. Lewis demonstrated to Holfe in graphio terme what oould happen

~ ! to a writer who has lost the way, who never found h1mself amidst the accolàdes of the public. He served as a warning that Wolfe did not

ignore.

MoHarg had thought fe.ma would show him the way. He had used

a mere symhol of his own suocess as the prize itself, and in so doing

had dissipated his talent and moral purpose. He had stood before the

assembly of well-w1shers, aoknowledging their praise and gratitude--and

then it ws gone befora he had it firmly in his grasp.

Then, of· course, he toCk the inevitable next step. With a mind surchargea with fire, vith a heart th1rsting for some impossible fulfillment, he tock hie award, and copies of all the speeohes, programs, and tributes, sn11ed for Europe, and began to go from place to place, looking for something that he had no nama for, somathing that existed somewhere, perhaps--but where he did not knov. (YOGEA, p. 561)

George 's car ride vith McHarg through the demeJrliOd, stormy

T night in the wilds of Surrey is richly aymbolic. Far into the night .le 106. they ramble, surroundedby eery, chilling fog, lost and direotionless. MoHarg slips into a state of oomatose drunkenness, Wbile George is left alone to guide the terr1f'ied driver to some m;ysterious destination. When they finally do arrive at the home of MoHarg's friend, an English oountry house, haU' Mdden from the main rosd, George must take charge or his unoonsclous oompanion, see that he is put to bad, and assume al1 the duties of an agreeable guest, though his hosts are complete strangers to him. This he does with good oheer. He spenda a' ch.arm1Dg and intiJœte evening with the Rlckenbach Reades, but finds that by the next morning he has made some surprising dlsooveries. He knows by then the truth about MoHarg, if only intuitively: that the man is lost and desperate, his ultimate destination as lost and uriknowable as he is. For the Rasdes, MoHorgts hospitable and appealing friands, are as foggy in their vision and esoaplst in their predileotlons, as 18 their friend. They have chosen to live away from the life and oentre of England beoause they oannot faoe up to the truth at lirets heart. They live in a morlbund English world of neat cllohes and unchallenged, lordly serenity--a pseudo-calm, because they have oarefully banished all threats from the world outside. For Rlckeribaoh Reade, George began to see after a whlle, ws one of those men \mo are unequal to the oonditions of modern ;J.1fe, and who have acoordingly retreated from the tough realltles whioh they could not face. The pheno- men on was not a new one to George • • • • One found a surprising number of them in America • • •• (YCGHA, p. 605) Holte scoffed at ex-patriates now, who olained to have found a better world than home beyong their native shores, though he had sympathized with them in his youth. With a oonscienoe adjusted to 107.

maturity of personality and character, he ws able to see them and his younger self in the cold light of crltlcal objectivity. He reallzed that fllght tram ona's country, like fl1ght from self, is a sign of weakness, not courage. ttThey fled a vorld they vere not strong enough to meet." (YOGH4, p. 611) And so McHarg Is a painful, but valuable experlence for

George Yebber. Through the older man, he confronts and comes to grlps vith an old truth, tangibly expressed. "For something had begun which nov ws finished • • • • n (YCGHA, p. 618) Another "home n had come and gone. In the spring of 1935, Wolfe returned to Nev York and completed the giant manuscrlpt of his second novel. He had not ftfrozen up,n as Lewis had wrned he might, a cOmmOn occurrence after publlcation of one's first noveL But he vas exhausted., He dia not vant to vait for the revlews, and even the posaible glory. He had had

enough of lion hunters and opportunists, and lav-ouits; "suddenly,. he

thought of Germany • • • • n (~, p. 620)

Wolfe '6 long and pa1nf.ul involvcment with the German myatique

has been misunderstood by ma~ critics and readers or hie novale. Just as Wolfe 'a feelings for the Jews should never be crit10ized ln the 11ght of whether he vas or vaa not an anti-Sem1te, so his experiences in Germany ahould not be read as an indication that he ws or ws not

pro-Fasciat. In both cases, Holte' s senalb111 tiea functioned on a deeper, m;ythic level. To label Wolfe sUher soc101og1cally or

polltically Is to glve him lesa than his due, both as a wrlter and as

a man. 108.

1 Wolfe' s "prejudioes" formed the basis of his earliest feelings for Germanyj he had always thought of tbat oountry aa his paternal

home, his o\m oultural inheritanoe, and in more exalted terme, the

"other bal!' of my heart 's home." ACCOl'ding to his belief in the

mystio intuition of' the rao:Lal past, his oonviction that "people kne",

more than they knew," Ger.many vas indeeà the fountairihead of his obaraoter. It ws the "light" bal!' ot his heritage, the masouline principle standing in opposition to the darkly femin'ne enigma or the South and his mother 's people.

In more philosophioal terms, Wol!'e's swift and fervent

intoxication with Germany may be explained as an inner response to a

kindrod Weltanschauung, a shared af'finity with the Germans for what

Bella Kussy calls the "Vitalist PhiloBophy," in her penetrating ( article on that subject.2 She defines this philosophy as a beliet

in lif'e as the all-pervasivo toroe in man and his supreme value.

Morality is a thing apart trom it; only a powertul expression ot the lite toroe, whether expressed in pol1tios or literature, is its

signature.

Real lite, as the vitalists have it, is an intensive, and

aven paintul experience. Most mortals merely exist under the ordinary

lnv of' nature, the "struggle for oxistenoe," but the vitalists rise

above this minimal plane of baing ta grapple with the "will ta power."

In people of extraOl'dinary power and energy, the natural and even

emlted teœanoy i8 for the lite foroe ta overfiow into dangeroUB,

2sella Kussy, "The Vitalist Trond and Thoms \ololfe," The \lorld E! l Thomas ~, ed. C.H. Holman (New York, 1961), pp.10l-l:rr. 109.

[ unrestrained dynamism, ungu1iled by ethioal or humane impulse. Wolfe 's instinots, one feels, olosely fit this desoription, espeo1ally aB he

reveals them in his fiotional oreations. When he wants to demonstrate

an individual's foroe of personality, he does so in exaggerated

physioal and emotional terms, suggesting that people like these are too full. of lUe ·s. anergies to exist wxler normal oonditions. Gant is

lilœ thota a man so paoked vith energy, vital ity, and turbulent emotion

that he oan only express himself in booming rhetorical outbursts, ar .. in great leaping fires, or in mountainous piles of food loaded upon the family table. The fires and the heaped-up foodstuffs seem a

very extension of the man. The reader 's impression that Gant is larger than lire is what Wolfe wanted to achieve.

.' Esther Jackls energy is described to create the sama erfect • Her body is almost palpably alive on the pages, "glowing" vith an inner fire that threatens to burst the confines of its too small

vessel. She speaks in foroeful, spasmodio bursts of enthua1asm, as though everything she thinks and feels ie too much to express, too

overwhelming to reoreate in mere speeoh. Constantly dle pounds her fist

into her ohest, orying that she has knovledge unutterable "in here."

And 1-lolfe himaelf, in his various guises, is vitalism embodied. Always

he is nfnriouan , dominated and buf'feted by his 0'WD emotions, as though

the m;rtl11o ViDds of Aeolus are housed in his body, straining to be set !ree, and oontained only by the fiercest of disoiplines. Aocording to the vitalist philosophy, the earth itaelf sbares

the 5ame impulses thot drive men, except tbat "the earth alons endures, and it endures forever." Nevertheless, it is a reoeptacle of the fury 110.

in men'a lives, passing on to the next generation the Bto~ energy of the one gone. Those who stem trom a long, fairly pure raoial stook,

are more fortunate than others vith no raal 'inheritanoe, l1ke Amerioans,

wha are forever a nomad raoe, forever wandering up and down the1r great, unlmown oontinent. The Germans derived a mystioal kind of strength, Wolfe felt, trom the oenturies of Germanio blood in their veins, both as individuals and !m l!!!!!!!.2J this is what makes them so terr1fyingl.y vital. This, too, is the source ot the exceptional Jew1sh vitality, vhioh so fasoinated Wolfe, a oontrast to the "juioelessrt qualities he asoribes to the Gentiles. The aotual experienoe of pure sensation, no matter vhether it is eostaoy or agony, beoomes all-important in Wolfe's vork. Human values are easily muddled and obsoured by the overvhelming sign1tioanae 1'­ i ot surging internal power. Moxœnts ot supreme sensation assume an exaggerated meaning; they tend to vindioate the ind1vidual's meaDnsss

ar oruelty in petty daily affairs. In Wolfe, physioal, tangible

expe~ienee oan beoorne obsessive at t1mes. George Webber's ·squeal,ft the outward and voeal expression of his inner dynamism, is a valuable, almost a saored thing to h1m; Esther, a sympathizer in Monk's value schema, ean easily eommiserate vith him vhen he loses it. This parti- oular sequence may seem faroioal am meaningless to an "ordinary"

person, but to a vitaliat, it is a sombre ocoasion, not'1r) be taken lightl.y.

The "wU! for power" 1nevitably results in confusion and disaster. It needs weaker individuals tor exoroise, soon extending to a "viah to overthrow"; essentially, it is a slck, death-oriented instinct.

It seeka the death of lesser belngs, ultimately seeking lts own as the lU. ( supreme sensation. In Wolfe, there are figurative ndeathsn of those

wom he oonsidered weak, and offensive because of their weakness.

Timo and again, he would take vengeance on those whom he oalled the

pseudo-peoples artists, critios, lavyers, dentists--or the manswarm.

In Germany, the ultimate expression of vitalism ws tobe somewhat

more literal-and thorough. ~ere the raal woakness lies is obvious. But "'olfe took some time in disoovering this; the Germans did not find out until it was too late.

The religion of ~Jle lire foroe, evooatively outlined in NietzaChefs famous dootrine of the superman, ie at the heart or the German mystique,. Small wonder that their groat heroes are men wo destroy themselves through a too faithful devotion to its prinoiplea, .-. such as Faust, who wes will1ng to acoept death and eternal damD3tion i . , for twenty-four years of omnisoienoe. But all the great heroes are

in soma wise akin to Faust; Wolfe admitted a ourious affinity far his dilemma, which he had always inoorporated in his work. There is, as Wolfe was to discover, soma of this kind of sioknoss, for he

oame to admit it ~ a siokness, in all men, only more oonoen"t,rated

in the Teutonio spirit. And \-1olfe, partly German himself, was more susoeptible than most people to the blandishments of the Faustian oreed. Heroism or genius was inoonoeivable to him without the over- tones of self-destruotion. He oould not enviBion a rational hero; this was one reason why he oould not maintain Perkins as a hero in his mind. Perkina refused to cross the lino from sanity to suicidal despair. T 112.

'f Intellectualism in general is in1m1col to the life force, l 1 and Wolfe was always anti-intellectual in some degree. Intelligence

plots a reasonable course at its best, and vitalism is not reasonable.

limotional response alone encourages development of the vitalistic impulse.

Stirred by thil' tacitlY. ld.ndred feeling in the German atmosphere, Wolfe

was ripe to foll passionately in love wi th Thea Voelcker, Else von Kohler

in !.9.!:! Can't .Q2 ~ AgBin, "a perfect type of the Norse Valqrie"-

a perfect opposite to Esther Jack. For Wolfe, Thea \VaS everything

German in i ts most primordial implications. Their relationship vIas

violently physical, bordering on the uncivilized. Th'eir happiest hours

were spent awo:y from the city, high up in primitive mountain country.

Even in appearance, blond, tan, and unmistakably Nordic, Thea \'las a

total departure from Aline Bernstein and the other womon who had meaniD8

in Wolfe's life. For Thea was representative of a reality that evoked

a long-suppressed aspect of Vlolfe's character, an aspoct Mrs. Bernstein

had recognized and fought bitterly against. This was the "poison" in

George Webber's mind that Esther Jack feared and lamented. It was

indeed a poison, but its initial effects were exalting: "The girl became

for George the ultimate reality underlying everything he thought and felt and

was during that glorioUB and intox1cating period of hia life." l~, p. 625)

Germany, then, lavr ready-made for a spontaneous identification

on Wolfe's part with ito people and cultw'e. On his first trip thore,

he was sm1tten with evcrything good and glorioUB that he saw. The

Germans could do no \'Il'ong. On one occasion, he wrote to Maxwell Perkins,

"1 want to tell you thut l do not see ho\'l ~one • • • could possibly 113. fail to love the oountry ••• u and he ca11ed the Germans themselves

"one of the moet ohlld-like, kindly and susceptible people in the 3 vorld." Absurd an observation as this seems in retrospeot, it is aleo true. No other paradox oould acoount for the unpreoedented amorality that seized suoh a great part of this nation in ~ars to oome. The

Germans would have to be "ohild-l1ke" and eagerly obedient; or alee they woUld have to be a nation of sadists. As Ben Heoht once wrote, the Germans make wonderf\Ù soldiers-and wonderf\Ù walters. Their submisslve delight ln taking any kinà of orders and fulfilling them metlo\Ùously is now legion. And yet this very pragmatism of theirs has earmd them a false reputation for unimaginativeness and coldness of temperament. Nothing oould be farther from the truth, as Wolfe ws to disoover, firet to hie joy, and then ohagrin. The Frenoh, for a11 their bruited Dromantioism," Wolfe fowXi to be shrewd, self-defenaive, and ohillingly meroenary. The Germans, on the other hand, are the most romantio people in the world, and their literature and music oonfirma this. Withal, it 1s a bhild-l1ke romaDtioism, that delights in gloo~ fairy tales wlth mysterious enohanted forests. And that ie Wolfe, too, lost ohild that he was. Their curioualy mixed temperament or sensuality, melanoholy, and fundamantal prudishnesB 10 very oloBe to

Wolfe 's own. In Germany, he found appetitès to mat oh his.

Wolfe identified with BOmB real-lire German heroes, Beethoven and Goethe in particular. He visitea Goethe's old home, oarefully enshrined by the Germans, inspeoting his belonginga with reverence am

:3 T. Wolfe, Lettera, p. 460. 114.

fascination; but he folt a speoial kinship with Beethoven. He likened

Beethoven 'a deafness to his awn doteot, his unusual height. He even

apent a woek with his eara stuffed with cotton in order to understand

the feeling ai' deafness. In faot, WoUe believeà tbat greatness

WBS inèvitably acoampanied by soma physical detor.mity, a beliet far

removed trom the Amerioan dream of youth and beauty as the proper

aocoutrements of aucoeas. When Wolfe was an undergraduate at Chapel

Hill, he, too, had tancied himself becoming a model of physioal

perfection to complement hia genius. But then, deeply affeoted by

Benla death, and roused to the knowledge that he vould always be

"abnormal, n he oame to see the mtter of health and beauty in a new

lighta

Thus, through the death ot hi)! brother, and the s~~kness that was rooted in his own fleshLthe Pentland ntetter!(, Eugene came to know a deeper and darker viadam than he had ever known befere. He began to see that what vaa subtle and beaut1ful in human life vas touched with a divine pearl.. siokness. Health vas to be found in the steady etare of the cata and dogs, or in the smooth vaoant ohops ai' the peasant. But he looked on the faoes of the lords ot the earth--and he sav them wasted and devoured by the beautitul diseaae ot thought and pBasiJon. (,YIA, pp. 622-62)

Deafnese and respiratory ail.menta were WoUe IS "tavourite" ailments.

Aline Bernstein and Maxwell perkina both autfered from slightly

defeotive hearing, and Wolfe used to like the "listening" look in

Mrs. Bernateinls face when ehe talked to people. Beethoven he admired,

far by hie very deafnees "thie man was a worla complete unto himselt.n4

other people ill his lire had lung dieeasea. His father le first wife

had died of oonsumption, and W.0. '~olte feared he would succumb to l it, too, although he ultimately died of oancer. Julia Wolte, though, 4 Nowell, ~. ~., p. 120. 115.

seems to have instiUed a fear of lung diseases in Uolfe, though the topic may have arisen naturally from the fact that Asheville was

a popular resort for ailing consumptives and thare were many of them in the boarding house. Mrs. Robert was a conswnptive; har wasted body had always seemed to Wolfe to add to her spiritual and ethereal look. Mrs. Barnstein's father died of soma lung diseasee

But it was Ben, whose early, tragic death ~rOm pulmcnary pneumonia,

who convinced Wolfe of the greatness that accompan1es dise~Be and

physical fragility. IronicaUy, Wolfe himaelf died of tuberculosis of the brain, which had begun in his lungs. Several t1mes, his friands have recorded, ha complaincd of soma myaterious lung weaknass,

but if he had actual medical causa to worry befere his fatal illnesB, no one ever knew it. One telling example of Wolfe's fascination with r the subject, though, is his moving portrait of the hero in nDark in the Forest, strange as T1me,n a short story including most of Wolfe's favourite themes. The hero, a German Jow dying of tuberculosis, seems to be a composite or Joe Linder and Gant, and parhaps Wolfe himaalf. The pie ce is lyrically written, the man's W8sted, dying visage evocatively and sensitively described. In any event, Wolfe seems to hava found in the German herces men after his ovn heart. And in the German oountryside, he found what he felt must be nthe happy landn of his youthful imagination. It was

aU so different from the landscape or America, yet it WRS strangely familiar to him from the beginning. As he sat by train windows, ruehing through t1melesa, elfin forests and eoaring, ghoetly mountaina, he aeemed to recognize and underatand the enchanged myetery brooding over 116.

1 this Germanie eartha And what are we? We are the naked men, the lost Amaricans. Immense and lonely skies bend over us, ten thousand men are marchiDg in our blood. Whero does it come from-the sense of strangeness, instant reoognition, the dream-haunted, almost captured, memory1 Where does 1t come from, the constant hunger and the rending lust, and the music, dark and solemn, eJ.rish, magic, sounding through the wood? How 1s 1t tbat th1s boy, who is Amarican, has known this strange land trom the firet moment that he saw 1t? 5

There were two trips to Germany and two kinds of exper1enoe. The first was recorded in almost wholly sensual terms. Wolfe had come to Germany and round it a delight, fUled with beauty and var1ety enough to seduce the most jaded appetite. There, he did not feel 11ke some monstros1ty of nature as he had in France and in America. The Germans were big people, as he recalled them, and they enjoyed his

b1gness. In faot, his first recollections were that they dwarfed hm, an unlikely poss1bility. "He felt a little as Gull1ver must have felt among the Brobd1ngnagians." (mm, 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 ficanoe. He felt he could never get enough to eat, although "The quantity of meat they consume is enormoua • • • the air 1s filled vith

the death-squeals of butohered svine."6 B1110tted st Friiulein Bahr IS Eens10n in Munioh, George Webber is always ravenous. He envisages the entire bosrding house as hunger-dominated people, who spend their whole day waiting for the next meal, yet walking away from eaoh meal unsatisfied. This seme insatiate hunger fo11ows him everywhere, no matter how much he

5 '1'. Wolfe, "Dark in the Forest, strange as Time, n From Death till .' Morn1!lg:(New York, 1935), p. 106. --- 6 Latter to Aline Bernstein, Latters, ~. ~., p. 141. 117.

eats. And it is, he intuits eorreetly, as mueh a hunger of the spirit

ae of the belly.

A raging hunger and a quenoh1ess thirst was gnawing at him, and no matter what he ate or drank he eo\Üd not get enough. It oannot be told about, it esn never be deseribed, it eannot be oalled a name. It ws appalling, it vas revolting, it wes loathsome and disgustiDg, It was a hunger that was no hunger, it weS a thirst that vas no th1rst, it wae a hunger and a thirst that grew trom ever1th1ng they fed upon. It eonsumed him even as he tried ta feed it and oOlXluer it. It was like aome enormous oonsumption of the soul and body f

were violently expressed in his physical appetites vas only natural in a oountry where sensation is so tangible an articulation of innèr

dynamism, and whieh enoouraged the seme response in one k1ndred in

~. spirit. Something in \tfolfe leaped to embraoe aIl at onoe the whole German ethoe and malte it his; his instinots told him it belonged to him. But as ever, something drew him baok at the same tlme as he

reaohed out. What rep\Üaed him ws a dawning peroeption of German barbarism, gl1mpsed through the mountains of food, the great draf'ts of foaming dark beer, and aIl the faory enohantment.

Thoae who oondemn Wolfe for his eeaming insensibilit~· to the politicsl maehinery of thie pre-war period in Germany oannot have

read Wolfe's novels with attention or eympathy. Wolfe waa not a politieal oreature, it is true. For most of hie lire, he eoareely

rend a newspaper, and then usually for the baeeball ~reB. Indeed,

MruGlell Perkins' reservations about Holte 's enthusiastieally burgeoning politioal intereats in his later years appearing in his work ware 118.

well-f'ounded. Pure politica \las out of' "Tolfe IS realm. His genius vas suited to personality exploration, insights 1n:to the heart of' man, and not the civUized manifestations of' it. But what 'tololf'e ,9!g Bee demonstrated hie "almost terrifying olairvoyanoen7 into the motivating behaviour ot the Gernans. What began as pure, unqualified belief' in their "child-like" response to lite quiokly ohanged to diemay at the implioations it harboured. Beneath the fey exterior, he unoovered a frlghteningly amoral puissanoe trom VhlCh only brutality and barbario

force oould issue. Thie he saw olearly even trom the Germans 1 obseseion

wi th food. In the peginn1ng, he ewayed between his fundmœntal love for the people and the uncomfortable knowledge ot wbat they oould become. This ie the 1'8al Germany f.ihe Oktoberfeeg--lt is imprassive and powerful, and yet, atter a tima, l dis11lœ it. Nsverthe­ leee, l think thie oountry interests me more than any in Europe-can you explain thie enigma? Here ie this brutal, r beer-owUling people, and l doubt it there is ae much that ie sp1ritually grand in any other people in Europe as in thie one. Later in the same letter, Wolfe \lent ont

you OOllS to the heart of' Germany ••• to its raal heart. It is one enormous belly. They eat and drink themselves into a etate ot bestial stupefaotion • • • • You teel tbat vithin these ciroles is somehow the magic, the essence of' the race •••• 8 References to these àisturbing implications are everywhere

soattered throughout this section or ~ ~ !a2 ~~. Wolfe himself', falling under the hypnotio sway or the Oktoberf'estls primitivism, became àrunk trom the unusually powerful beer, and got involveà in a violent fight through no fault of his ovn, during vhioh he almost killeà a man, himself' ending up in a Munich bospital vith a concussion and a broken nose.

7Franz Schoenberner in!!!.2 Enigma !a! Thomas Wolfe, p. 296. 8 Letter to Aline Bernstein, Lattera, ~. ~., p. 141. 119.

T • He oould sea very olearly now the malevolent energies that lay submerged in this culture, and more significantly, in his own deepest self. He

would be scarrad for lire from thie enoounter \lith the German "magio, Il literally and symbolically. But aven befere the Oktoberfest, Wolfe had begun to reoognize in himself the ugly beetiality of the savage that had oome to the surface in thiB "familiar" country. Disgusted by his insatiate appet1te, George Webber ws starting to bata himself for this unoontrollable swin1shness. He loathed the hunger that oonsumed him. He hated the food of whioh he ate beoause he oould not eat aIl that he wanted or it. He hated the family of the earth to whioh he himself belonged beoause he himself belonged to it, beoause its blood ws in him, his in 1t, beoausa twin demons of his soul d1v1ded him in unending warfare. He hatad the faoo of the great swine, the oreased neok of the unsated beast, beoause he felt himself the hunger of the beaat's nover--ending lust, and oould find no end of it. There were in him two powers discrete, two foroes of the soul and of inher1tanoe, and now they waged oontention daily in his life upon a batt1ef1eld where there oould nevèr be a viotor, • • • • He understood it aIl so weIl, beoause he had himself created it • • • • He hated it so muoh beoause he had auch deep and everlasting love for it. He fled from it and knew he could never escape. (TH&TR, p. 661) The "two foroes" are Germany and Amerioae But the love-hato syndrome i6 a famUiar part of Wolfe. He loves the Jevs and he batoa them. He bates the city and he loves it. He hates his motber and he loves

his father-thore is no cure for it. As vith aIl the other objeo1:.s in his life upon which he fastened the burden of his love-bate, there

ws to be a orisis demanding a commitment of some kind from him. In aIl the other instanoes, he bad fled the tension--nût without some matur1ty gained--but into new exiles nevertheless. Germany was to pose the biggest, and the most unsettling oriais of aIl. This was not a person or a thing or place he had now to oontend with. It was his very life-blood, his speoial heritage, his father's promise. At the end of 120.

the firat trip, Wolfe resolved the problem in a typically escapist way. He left Germany after he got wall, but only to return to America and a

grudging reoonolliation vith 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 1936, his circumatances ware radically altered, as were Germany's. He knev before sailing exaotly vhat the situation vas there: the speotaoular rise of the Nationalist

Sooialist party vith its "oomic-opera" leader, the stD~ troopers, the "vork camps," the literary censorship. He knev it, Just aa the vhole vorlà knev it, and he did not vant to believe it--as.the whole vorld dia not vant to believe it. In bis case, though, there vere speoial .... ; reasons for his turning a deaf ear, aven if for a very short time, to the approaohing Armageddon. For one thing, Wolfe could never really appreciate a situation

unless he had experienced it at first band. "1 could never learn any­ thing except the bard way. l must experienoe it myself before l knew."9 But there uere blandisbments set in his vay that vould be difficult for anyone to resist. "FoUe had never realized just how sensationsl a euccess he had become in Germany. His 122! Homeward, Angel 'Was acclaimed by the German press vith unqualif1ed praise as a great novel; he himself vas bailed

BS a virtual hero in the country. Fame and glory came to him there juot uhen he had reacheà a peak of iITitation and exhaustion in America. He had come to Germany, because, as he said, "I am tired of r 9Quoted in Nowall, ,2E. ill., p. 325. 121.

l myself ••• of being with myself, l am surfeited.nlO He had not even ... waited for the reviews of bis second book before seiling to Europe, sinee he did not want a repeat performance of the angUish he had gone thl'ough vith the first. Even though the book ws a great sueeess in

America, critioally and popularly, he knew nothing of this, for he had refused to have revievs and press olippings sent to him. And nov he stepped suddenly into a golden spotlight of fame and admiration, the kind he had dreamed of, but never realized, in Amerioa. nI had gone baek for rest, for oblivion to that land • • • l have loved best • • • 11 and no man ever had a happier or more fortuitous return.n His youthful fantasy had mat'erialized; and nov he "felt, like Tamerlane, that it ws passing great to be a king, and l'ide in triumph through

Persepolis--and be a famous man. n12

No note of adverse oriticism marrèd the glamour of his acoeptanoe there. Not only were the Germans exuberant over the quality of his 'Work, for Wolfe 1 s partiaîlar style translates beautifully into

German, but, unlilœ the Americans, they were delighted vith its enor- mous bulk. And yet there vas more , ta their enthusiasm than mare appre- eiation. Thomas Wolfe vas one of the few people in Germany, in the

summer of 1936, who had some literary stature. Martha Dodd, daughter of the then Amerioan Ambassador in Berlin, and herself a journalist of note, wrote a bock about her familyls experiences in pre-var

Germany, Through Embassy ~ (1939). In it, abe explains that for several years previous to Wolfels visit, there had been a steady drain lOIbid.,- p. 268. llIbid~- , p. 269. 12Ibid • , p. 2!70. 122.

1 of German oulture through auppression, by the Nazis, or anything oi'i'en- sive or oontravers1Bl; Most of the eminent writers had eithar left Germany in exile, or had gone into foroed retirement, ",hile all their pUblications "'ere banned. People acoepted the situation. Even the Dodds, proteoted from many of the Nazi striotures through diplomatio immunity, ",ere forced to invite to their sooial gatherings only those people approved by the authorities, at the risk of danger to their friends. Miss Dodd relates that their parties, once the soul of cultivated ",it and gaiety, ",ere now drab, meaningless affaira, attended by an ever-d1minishing number or talented or interesting indiviàuals. Into the dying cultural atmosphere of Nazi Germany BVept

, Thomas Wolfe like a breath of clean, fresh air. Once more the people 1 gathered in Berlin's outdoor cntes, so long deserted, to hear Wolte

hold forth in his mangled, but cnthusiastic German, on everything and

anything that occurred to him. A Titan of energy and vitality, loIolfe reminded the Germans ot their glorious p8st, "when gr.eat writers ware 13 great man." And the Germano felt as muoh a kinehip with him as he vith theml "there actually seemed to be Bomething Germanie about him 14 whioh they all oould 0 laim." Adulation tollowed him everywhere in Berlin; his hotel roam was deluged with tlawers and love notes from adoring women. Overpowered

by the unexpeoted windfall oi' attention, "'olte enjoyed it to the full

131.fartha Dodd, !!,lrough Dnbassy ~ (New York, 1939), p. 91. 14Ibid., p. 90. , 1 12.3. for some weeks. It was, alter aIl, "the triumphant and glorious vinai- 1 15 cation or all that l thought ~ !ife could be •• , or art achieve." Not that his German friends did not reveal in private what thay vere afraid to mention in public. Again Wolfe knev, bul; he avoided the inavitable awakening. Frightened by what he heard, he refused to take a tour of a German work camp, lmowing that once he !!! Naziism at work, aU the good things wOlÙd end for hm. Then, wen the initial tbrill of joy and gratir:l.oation wore off, he sa", without prcdding what he had so long evaded--nnd then he saw more than anyone else. Illuminated by Wolfe's awesome powers of perception, a sickening picture or the old German barbarism swam into focus fram the murky depths halo", its surface brilliance. It was a picture or the Dark Ages come again • • • • and l recognized at last, in all its trightflÙ aspects, the spiritual disa~ü& whioh was poisoning unto death a noble and a mighty people. 161' Unlike so many German apologists who sought to lay the blame for Naziism on historical accident, or eoonomic duress, or Hitler's freakish, unabetted ~ise to power, Wolfe dia not hesitate, though he loved this country as though it vere his ovn, to indict the entire nation and race for oruelty and unspeakable inhumanity. George bagan to realize now the tragedy that lay behind such things. There vas nothing political in any of it. The roots of it were muoh more sin1ater and deep and evil than politics or even racial prejudice could ever be. For the f:1rst time in his lire he had coma upon something full of horror that he had never known before--something that made all the swift violence and passion of !marica, the gangster compacte, the sudden killings, thé harshness and corruption that infested portions of American business and public lire, seem innocent besiae it. lfuat George began to see ws a picture of a great

15Quoted in Nowell, .2E. ill., p. 270. 16Ibid., p. 333. r people who had been psychically wounded and were.now desperately ill wi th some dread malady of the soule Bere was an entira nation, he n~ realized, that WBS infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear. It W8S a kind of oreeping paralysis which tvisted and blightad all human relations.' The pressures of a oonstant and infamous compulsion had silenoed this whole people into a sweltering and malignant seoreay untll they had become spiritually septic vith the distillations of their own self-poisons, for which now'there was no medioine or release. (YOGUA, pp. 630-631) These are harsh words, and once published, irrevooable. Wolfe knev that, and he knev, too, that they would obviate any further contaot

vi th the German people under this government, not even through his novels, whioh he realized 'Would be banned immediately, as they vere upon pUblication as a magazine article or "I Have a Thing to Tell You" when Wolfe returned to New York. Never before in his lire had commitment

to some kind of affirmative action been so necessary, and never before

had the stakes been so high. ~ll former leave-takings of al1 the old -homes" had come about through aooumulated pressure from within, fomenting an emotional rebell10n and a grudging break. New evidenoe of the neaessity for an abrupt dec1sion 18y al1 around him at a time when "Tolfe bimBelf was still very muoh involved with Germany, and when, so far as he knew, no better home lay ahead. Thus his deoision to leave Germany,

and to publiah the truth of what he had seen there, called for mat ur ity and oourage on his part. Those who have read "I Have a Thing to Tell

You, n later incorporated in!QB. ~ .ru! l!2!!!2 Again, will testUy that Wolfe rose magn1fioently to the oocasion. As though to oonfirm Uolfe in the wisdon of his deoision, 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 thnt he ws abandonning, in an inoident BO swift and quiet, 125. only Wolfe and a few others realized it vas happening. One of the people in Wolfe IS train com~tment, heading for France, was a little German Jew, although his travelling oompanions vere unavaro of him as anything but a small German bus~noGs man on a selling trip to Paris. When he asked Wolfe to hold some extra money for him until they had croeeed the border, Wolfe assumed he ws merely trying to smuggle a few extra Marksabave 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 schedule, Wolfe began to suspect something ws wong. In a moment, he had vitnessed German offioials oarrying the little Jew oft the train, queetioning him beeide the rails. It ws quiokly apparent that the

Jew had no chance; the offioials had him.

They had him, all right. The officers eurroUDded him ~ • • • And the men in uniform said nothing. They had no need to speak. They had him. They just stood and vatohod him, oaoh vith a faint suggestion of that intolerable slov smil. up or. bis face. (YOGHA, p. 699)

Wolfe 1 s paintul decision to leave Germany ws not, thon, to be a matter of oonsoience alone. The incident, so ironioal and coinoi- dental that it seemed to have been etaged for Wolfe's benefit, laft a permanent emotional SCaI' on the writer as wall. As the train finally pulled awy, they paeeed the little Jew and his aaptors on the platform. As the car in vhich he had been riding elid by, he litted his pa ety face and terror-strioken eyes, and for a moment his lips were stil1ed of their anxious pleading. He looked once, direotly and eteadfaetly at his former companione, and they at him. And in that gaze there wse all the unmeasured weight of man' s mortal anguish. George and the others felt eomehow naked and ashamed, and somehow guilty. They all felt that they vere saying farevell, not to a man, but to huma nity; not to some pathetio stranger, some chance acquaintanoe of the voyage, but to mankind; not to some name1ess oiJ?her out of lite, but to the fading image of a brother's faoe. (,YOGHA., p. 699) 126.

0'0 ;:y l The voyage had oome full oirole. As the train pioked up speed, and 100 Germany was left bebind, there vas only the mamory of the Jew's

terror-strioken look--and the ooins he had given Wolf'e, greasy in his pooket !rom the little man's sweat. Here was his deBd nbrother,. hare vas Edward Miohalove, and Starwiok, and all the lost, desperate people in his lire. And yet he himaelf' vas freep He ws "out" or thàt land of nameless evU, whioh had been "ao much more to him tban land, so

muoh more than plaoe. It had been a geography of heart's desiro; • • • • Il (YCGBA, p. 703) 1114 ...... \0 This was the lest farewll, and the last beginning. From

Ashaville's town square, he had oome a long vay, and ir he had not yet fully fathomed "the oitY of myself," he had made heroic stridea toward that ultimate goal. The years of doubt, fury, and brooding had borne 1 " fruit for Wolfe. From almost absolute egoiam, he had oomo to a deep sympathy for the -vide world of a11 humanity." Through despair he

had found hope: hope for Amerioa, whioh WBS nlost," but whioh he believed would be found; hope for himself', for whom the process of healthy grovth had never rea11y stopped; and hope far the world, "--Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward whioh the oonsoienoe of the world is tending--a wind is rising, and the rivers flow." (YCGH4, p. 743) Thomas Wolfe wss on his way home. COOOWSION

A colleague and friend of Thomas \-folfe in his teaching

years at New York University wrote that, had \-lolfe lived, he never

would have enjoyed the maturity he predioted for himBelf; that, in fact,

"emotional maturity would have been the death of him. n

l thought he \lould have gone insane. l thought that beoause to the day of his death, so far as l know, he had not been able to understand and disoipline the tyrannie al emotions in him that made him a wnderer among men. 1

Like Lord Byron, "lolfe may have fallen uneonseiously under the swy of the myth that he had himself developed in his art. But others who knew Wolfe write that he ws just coming into a heritage

of peace, so long promised and so urgently sought, wen death ov'eroame

him two weeks before his thirty-eighth birthday. The question is moot.

In any avent, those \mo allege that Wolfe 's eapacity for

spiritual growth and Wlderstanding ws negligible have failed to

appreoiate Wolfe's ehroniele in all its rich and profound wisdam.

These are critics like Harold RibalO1rl, who oarpe ovor the question of

whether Holte was anti-Semitic, failing to go below the most super- fieial level or the novels in support of his olaims. In his indictment, he is prey to the subjeetivity and defensiveness that Wolfe eould

inspire in many people. Ribalow elaims that Wolfe 's eharlletera eœe

a11 "maladjustedll or "queer," but he does not point out that \-1011'e's

Gentile eharacters are also "maladjusted" and "queer." Indeed, "Iolfe Is Jewish figures are the sllnest, most down-to-earth and generously endowed

!vardis Fisher, nHy Experiences with Thomas Holfe," Thomlls "folfe ~ Washington Sguare, op. cit., p. 133.

127 128. of aIl Wolfe1s creations. Specious half-truths like Ribalowls mar many of the critiques on ~lolfe. ParoclU.al in thought and vision, these writera are like tiny parasites who attaoh themaelves to a giant host, unaware of the mass of weight that 100InS ab ove them, so intent are they on their immediate sphere of interest. Seen in perspeotive, Wolfe oan nevel' be adjudged a static writer or thinker. The learning process never stopped for a moment in his lire; the world was his claaaroom. To understand Wolfe 1a to affirm him; it ia to hope that his death ws 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 calI home, an end to exile, has come to passa RTo lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the lire you have, for greater lire; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth--n BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Thomas Wolfel

.L2Qls Homeward, Angel, Scribner 's. New York. 1952.

Of ~ !!!!! .:!ill2 River. Scribner IS. New York. 1935. i.!.Q!!! Death 12 Morning. Scribner 's. New York. 1935.

The Story 2!. ! Novel. Scribner IS. New York. 1936.

!h2 ~ ~ :!ill.2~. Harper and Bros. New York. 1939.

X2Y Canlt Q2 ~ Again. Harper and Bros. New York. 1940. Latters !2l!!ê. Mother. ad. John S. Terry, Scribner's. New York. 1943.

Ih2 Letters ~ Thomas Wolfe. ed. Elizabeth Nowell, New York. 1956.

Ih2 Short Novels ~ Thomas Holfe. ed. C.H. Holman, Scribnerls. Nev York. 1961.

!h§ Hille Beyond. Harper and Rew. New York. 1964.

~ Correspondence .2!: Thomas Holfe and Homer Andrew~. ed. Osoar Cargill and Thomas Clark Pollock. New York University Press. 1954. 1

Selected Seoondary Sourcesl

Anderson, Sherwood. Letters E~ Sherwood Anderson. ad. H.M. Jones. Little, Brown & Co. Boston. 1953.

Bernstein, Aline. Three ~~. Equinox Cooperative Press. New York. 1933.

____ • ~ Journey Q2!œ. Alfred A. Knopf. New York. 19.38.

AB Actor 's Daughter. Alfred A. Knopf. New York. 1941-

Blachford, Janet. Studies.!!! ~ Novel!:! .2f Thomas ~. McGi11 University Thesis. 1963.

Brown, E.K. "Thomas Wolfe: Rea1ist and Symbo1ist, Il University 2!. Toronto QUDrterly, X (1940-41), 153-166.

Cowley, Halcolm, ed. After ~ Genteel 'l'radition. Southern Illinois University Press. 1964.

Dodd, Martha. Through Embassy lli!!. Harcourt, Brsce & Co. New York. 1939.

129 130.

Fied1er, Les1ie. "The .1ew as 14ythio Amerioan," Ramparts (Fall, 1963), ,39-51.

Frohook, W.H. stra9firs ~ .IlË:!! Ground. Southern Methodist Univ. Press. Dallas. 19 1.

Geismar, Maxwell. Writers.!!l Criais. Houghton Mifflin. Boston. 1942. ____ • Amerioan Modernsl !!:.2! Rebellion to Conformitx. W.H. Allen. London. 1958.

Gelfant, Blanohe Houaman. ~ Amerioan City~. . University of Oklahoma Press. 1954.

Gold, Hiohael. ~ Without Money. Horaoe Liveright. New York. 1930.

Goldhurst, William. l. Soott Fitzgerald ~ !!!!! Contemporaries. \~orld Publishing Co. Cleveland and New York. 1963.

Holman, C. Hugh. The World of Thomas Wolfe, ed. Martin Steinmann, Jr. SoribnerïS: New York. 1964. Johnson, Edgar, ed. "Thomas Wolfe and the Amerioan Dream,n ! Treasury ~ Satire. Simon and Sehuster, Ine. New York. 1945. pp. 741-754.

Johnson, Elme).' D. ~ ~ .!!È Thomas Wolfe: ! Bibliography ~! Charaeter r ~ .2! His Works. The Seareorow Press, Inc. New York. 1959. Johnson, Pamela H. Thomas Wolle: ! Critical Study. Wm. Heinemann Ltd. London. 1947.

Kennedy, Richard S. The Window of Memory. University of Carolina Press. Cha pel Hill:-ï962. --

Malin, Irving. ~!!!È Amerieans. Southern Illinois University Press. 1965.

Hersand, Joseph. Traditions in Amerioan Literature. Hodern Chapbooks. New York. 1939.

Muller, Herbert J. Thomas ~. New Direct ion Books. Norfolk. 1947.

Norwood, Hayden. The 14!lrble l.mn IS vlire. Seribner IS. New York. 1947.

N01.lell, Elizaboth. Thomas Holle: ! Biography. Doubledlly and Co. New York. 1960.

Pollock, Thomas Clark and Oscar Cargill. ThoIr.as ~ At vlashington Sguare. New York University Press. 1954.

Ribalow, Harold U. "Of Jews and Thomas vlolfe," Chicago Je\rish Formn (vlinter, 1954), 89-99. - (. 131.

Rosenberg, Edgar. ~ Shyloek to Svengali. Stanford University Press. ' 1960. Rosenberg, stuart E. America .!!! Different: The Searoh !!2! Jewish Identity. Thomas Nelson & Sons. New York. 1964.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. Thomas Wolfel ~ Weather .2! lI!!! Youth. Louisiane. State University Press. 1955.

Samuel, Maurice. ~ Gentiles. Haro ourt , Braee & Co. New York. 1924. Spitz, Leon. flloTas Wolfe an Anti-Semite?" AIœriean Hebrew. CLVIII (1948), 5.

\-lalser Richard, ad. I!!! Enigma of Thomas Holfe. Harvard University Press. 1953. ____ • Thomas Wolfe: Ir!; Introduction!!!2 Interpretation. Barnes and Nobles. New York. 1961. Hatk1l'18, Floyd C. Thcmas Wolfe ts Characters. University of Oklahoma Press. 1957.

'to1heaton, Mabel 'torolfe. Thomas Wolfe alld His Family. Doubleday & Co. New York. 1961.

.1.

1