The Letters of Thomas Wolfe by Thomas Wolfe

First published: 1956

Critical Evaluation:

Sooner or later nearly every major world figure is destined to be represented by a volume of his collected letters, whether or not there is a reason for publishing them. In THE LETTERS OF THOMAS WOLFE there is enough fresh material to show Wolfe’s personality in some new lights if not in a different perspective, particularly in such matters as his early efforts as a playwright, complicated family relationships, his conduct under pressures of the literary life, friendships that usually ended badly or in uneasy reconciliations, restless wanderings that were journeys of both discovery and escape, and on several occasions the touch-and-go combination of attraction and wariness that marked his relations with women.

There were in effect two Thomas Wolfes. One was the Asheville stonecutter’s son who inherited his father’s giant frame, his tremendous appetites, his taste for invective and rhetoric, the awkward mountain boy who grew up in his mother’s boarding house, the Old Kentucky Home, among swarming, bickering brothers and sisters who had little time for the youngest of the brood. Because he was the youngest, he was often the outsider looking on in this household of divided loyalties and grudges—at his father and mother who were always in the middle of some bitter, unresolved conflict of wills, at the boarders who came and went season after season.

This was the Wolfe who developed a sharp eye for the eccentricities and contradictions of human nature and a keen ear for the idioms of American speech; the richly talented novelist who filled the death scene of old Gant with symbolic meaning and plumbed the disillusionment and disappointment the big city holds for the provincial mind; the remorseless realist who wrote with love and hate about his violent, ranting father, his scolding grasping mother, his frustrated sister Helen, his pathetic brother Ben; the regional chronicler of mountain life and legend in tales about Pentlands and Joyners in the hills of Old Catawba; the satirist who touched with comic exaggeration George Webber’s experience as a teacher among students with the souls of certified public accountants in “The School for Utility Cultures”; the moralist contemplating George’s discovery of the emptiness of fame. His gift for character was unsurpassed in his generation, and figures like old Gant and his wife Eliza are permanent properties of our imagination.

The other was the Wolfe who dramatized his every thought and action and made himself the hero of the books he wrote. Although he was to call himself Eugene Gant and George Webber, he was always the same autobiographical character who also grew up in his mother’s boarding house, knew the loneliness of the misunderstood child in a house full of older brothers and sisters, revolted against the narrowness and pettiness of their meager lives, found his escape in poetry and adolescent dreams of fame, went away to college, failed as a playwright, and then in his novels tried to capture the vastness and energy of the whole American continent in a net of rhetoric. He projected himself in the romantic image of the eternal “I” against an indifferent, materialistic world, and when his vision failed he tried to sustain himself with a torrential flow of words. This was the master of lush prose, a lover of swollen rhetoric pilfered from the classics he ransacked to feed his hunger for the living word. In loneliness and despair, in a hundred rented rooms in London, Paris, New York, and Berlin, he wrote ceaselessly in his ledgers about all that he had ever known of the land and its people.

In THE LETTERS OF THOMAS WOLFE, superbly edited by Elizabeth Nowell, these two figures meet and often merge. As a letter writer Wolfe exhibits the same intensity found in his fiction, the same straining and melodramatic, uncontrolled super-energized prose to be seen in LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL and OF TIME AND THE RIVER, and if there exists doubt that his novels are nearly pure autobiography, one need only look to this book to clear that doubt away. Wolfe says again and again that he does not want to edit his own work; he seems obsessed with the flat reporting truth of his life and insists that cutting and “polishing” would not could destroy his complete project. From many of the letters one learns at first-hand, as though peeking through a keyhole, of Wolfe’s dependence upon his various fiction editors. Had it not been for the forceful and wise editing efforts of Scribner’s editors John Hall Wheelock and, more importantly, Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe’s work might have remained in manuscript form, closed off forever from the world because of his insistence on describing every detail of his life, whether important, trivial or irrelevant, in the fullest possible manner. The charge critics made that Wolfe’s books were in reality the work of collaboration, that he was not capable of making them “work,” not capable of selecting and deciding and thus fashioning the run of life’s emotions and incidents into art (in a Saturday Review article, “Genius is Not Enough,” Bernard DeVoto charged that Wolfe lacked discipline and for this reason, DeVoto felt, he was incapable of writing anything well without the aid of Maxwell Perkins) is finally proved accurate through direct statements to that effect in various letters included in his correspondence.

In a letter to Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe explains that he should do his own editing but in trying to do so he may find that he has added instead of deleted words; therefore others must do the work of revision and selection. And when he has sent proof to John Wheelock, he states that a certain section Wheelock had advised shortening was not changed because Wolfe could not decide to cut and so Wheelock must decide instead. In still another letter to Wheelock, Wolfe says that the letters he has received from him show the work put into the book by Wheelock, and Wolfe thanks him for his labor. Such passages reveal the quantity of editorial “assistance” Wolfe’s work required.

DeVoto’s attack stunned Wolfe for a time, but as one sees from his letters, he soon took “corrective measures.” Where some writers might have attempted to solve the problem through self-investigation in an effort to become more critically aware of their own work, Wolfe stubbornly rejected the charge and set to work to prove them wrong. To accomplish this end, he broke off with Scribner’s and Perkins (over two hundred pages are devoted to this ordeal) and took up with Harper and Brothers publishers, proving his unwillingness to investigate his weaknesses. In an early letter to his creative writing professor, George Pierce Baker, of the Harvard 47 Writers’ Workshop, Wolfe wrote that he did not have the virtue of taking criticism in his stride. He felt that to be a great artist one does not need to be able to learn from criticism and that criticism is not a necessary part of a great writer.

To Wolfe, writing was more than a profession; it was a vital way of life, the only means he had for justifying himself before the world. Actually, he had only one story to tell—his own—and that he tried to give universal meaning in his use of the symbolic pilgrimages his heroes make: the Southerner to the North, the country boy to the world city, the American to Europe. Many of these letters help to show the deeply personal meaning of his search. Eventually his vision expanded to take in all America, and in his books he attempted to express the vastness and energy of the American land within the experience of one man. Bitterly as he resented the charge, Wolfe was never far from literal autobiography in anything he wrote, but for most readers the line dividing fact from creation has never been very clear in his work. For this reason a book like the LETTERS was needed to detach the actual man from his fictional backgrounds and the tags of legend which clustered about him as his fame grew.

It occurs to the reader of LETTERS at this point that had Thomas Wolfe lived past the age of thirty-seven, and thus been allowed time to mature as a writer and to become something of a self-critic, the world might have found itself with yet another gifted and prolific reporter who would feel a responsibility for shaping his very accurate and sometimes profound vision of life, its circumstances, and the American land.

But Wolfe’s letters are valuable in still another way which is perhaps more positive. Wolfe announced to Wheelock that he liked to write, rather than speak, the things that moved him deeply. Written, he could say them more clearly and keep them better. Here, it seems, is a key to why Wolfe wrote at all. It seems that (and this includes his stories and novels) he wrote to “keep them,” that is to say, he treasured his life, emotions, sense perceptions to such a degree that he felt forced to record them forever on paper and thus make them forever available. It is well known that he preserved every page he wrote and stored them in packing boxes which he kept with him at all times, usually in his apartment living room. And many of the letters included in Miss Nowell’s edition were unfinished and unmailed. He seemed to have to say “it,” but then, operating under the same motivating force which caused him to write the letter in the first place, he found himself incapable of letting go of what he had said. It is not uncommon for painters to part reluctantly with their canvases; it is understandable, since there can be only one painting. But a writer can have copies made. Certainly publication ought to satisfy his need to “keep them.” But, as some children will keep (if you let them) and cherish everything they find, Wolfe kept everything he could that came from his mind. This was not a strange or unnatural obsession, merely an immature “adjustment.” Miss Nowell in THE LETTERS OF THOMAS WOLFE, performed an editorial feat rivaling Perkins’, these letters having been gathered from a myriad of sources, placed in chronological order, and, though the very important letters to his mother are not included (they have been published separately), nor were those addressed to his love of many years, Aline Bernstein (she had intended to bring out a volume and would not release them to Nowell), the collection provides a rather complete picture of a man ho had not yet matured as an artist, a man plagued by a paranoiac fear of criticism, a man who nearly to the time of his death wrote consistently to a grade school teacher, Margaret Roberts, whom he felt was responsible for the launching of his writing career:

The chief impression left by Wolfe’s letters, in fact, is one of waste and unfulfillment—waste of energy because of the hundreds of false starts he made in his fiction, waste of talent because he projected himself prodigally in his novels yet fulfilled himself in none, waste of thought and feeling because of the intensity with which he approached even the commonplace aspects of living. These qualities make THE LETTERS OF THOMAS WOLFE an important literary and personal document. If the collection does not illuminate a literary generation, it at least reveals a man.

But perhaps the real contribution this book makes is that once and for all it settles the question of whether Wolfe did his own writing or whether one must consider him a particular kind of collaborator. But whatever the debt, and all evidence points to the fact that it was considerable, we are left with great moments in rich books, and it should make little difference to us how the books came about. The world is better for them, and perhaps better even for the controversy which has for so long surrounded them.

Bibliography

Bassett, John Earl. Thomas Wolfe: An Annotated Critical Bibliography. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1996.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Thomas Wolfe. New York: Chelsea House, 2000.

Donald, David Herbert. Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe. 1987. Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Evans, Elizabeth. Thomas Wolfe. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984.

Field, Leslie A., ed. Thomas Wolfe: Three Decades of Criticism. New York: New York University Press, 1968.

Idol, John Lane. Literary Masters: Thomas Wolfe. Detroit: Gale, 2001.

Kennedy, Richard S. The Window of Memory. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962.

McElderry, Bruce R. Thomas Wolfe. New York: Twayne, 1964.

Phillipson, John S., ed. Critical Essays on Thomas Wolfe. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr., ed. Thomas Wolfe: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973.