Intimations of Immortality

Thomas Wolfe! The Weather of his Youth, by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Louisiana State University Press, 183 pp. $3.50.

There is a widespread academic tendency to pass off Thomas Wolfe as an undisciplined child, as "wild little Tommy." When Wolfe is discussed, inevitably the conversation turns on the fact that he could manage to scrawl only three giant, illegible words on a page of manuscript, or to the fact that he sent off four orange-crates of novel to his publisher. In Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of his Youth, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., has attempted to approach the author and his works intelligently, and to treat them as something besides a gigantic, but insignificant, oddity.

Quality of His Memory

Rubin praises only one of Wolfe's four completed novels unequivocally, and that is Look Homeward, Angel. Autobiographical like all this completed novels, Look Homeward Angel treats the first twenty years of Wolfe's life. In his concluding paragraph, Rubin states that Look Homeward, Angel "is a novel, composed of memories stored up when the rememberer 'saw things whole', and saw them in depth . . . The first novel . . . was the unified and successive record of moments in which the author felt the sensation of stopping chronological time and transcend physical place . . ."

Of the subsequent three novels, Of Time and The River, The Web and The Rock, and You Can't Go Home Again, Rubin admits that they "are certainly not complete entities; the total impact is far from harmonious; and luminous passages are mixed in with opague and soggy passages." Wolfe himself at this period was "entirely dependent as a writer upon the quality of his memory, and the quality of the memories of manhood was infinitely poorer than those of childhood. There was far less perspective, and there was not the "space, color, and time" that the memories of his youth provided."

Wolfe believed that since physical change is measured in chronological time, then man's glimpses of the inalterable, unchanging and eternal are continually thwarted by his consciousness of these two elements. Rubin points out perceptively that Wolfe's attitude toward those rare and brief moments is closely related to Wordsworth's "intimations of immortality," and like Wordsworth, Wolfe found that as he grew older those moments came upon him less and less. Several times he closely echoes Wordsworth's "Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"

Home

All Wolfe's work is profoundly influenced by his youth in Asheville. Home represented the most important link to a childhood in which he had most often transcended the limitations of his being. In his concept of home, Wolfe's mother and father have a dominant role. His mother, despite her avarice, seemed to signify to Wolfe the durability and fertility of the earth itself, while his father--the W. O. Gant of Look Homeward, Angel, is the "Far Wanderer," the forever unsatisfied, Odysseus-like figure. Between these two forces, Wolfe saw himself poised, and his continual efforts to formularize these stresses into a concerted philosophy mark many of the conflicts which rage in his works.

There is, as Rubin says, some indication that Wolfe in the late thirties was no longer tortured by the questions he strove--sometimes magnificently, sometimes wildly--to answer in his first four novels. Rubin contends that in the ten chapters of the unfinished The Hills Beyond, Wolfe ascends from the turmoil of his mind, and approaches some kind of artistic objectivity toward his life and toward the forces that had shaped him. In this fragment, Wolfe no longer translates his experiences directly into prose, but has begun to sift and temper them through the medium of his nearly mature artistic creativity.

In writing Thomas Wolfe: The Weather of his Youth, Louis Rubin has made probably the most clear-headed statement of Wolfe's place in American fiction. With reserve and some brilliance, Rubin walks a steady line between the idolaters and the iconoclasts, and from his steady course, Thomas Wolfe's reputation will gain a great deal of stability.Wolfe in Berlin: "You Can't Go Home Again" From the Thomas Wolfe Collection of William B. Linsdom--Houghton Library