The Web and the Rock by Thomas Wolfe

First published: 1939

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Impressionistic realism

Time of plot: 1900-1928

Locale: North Carolina, New York, and Europe

Principal characters

• George Webber, a young writer
• Esther Jack, his beloved

The Story:

George Webber’s childhood is one of bleakness and misery. He is a charity ward who lives with his aunt and uncle. George’s father deserted him and his mother and went off to live with another woman. After the death of George’s mother, her Joyner relatives take George into their home, where the boy is never allowed to forget that he has Webber blood mixed in with his Joyner blood. Strangely, all of his good and beautiful dreams are dreams of his father, and often he hotly and passionately defends his father to the Joyners. His love for his father makes his childhood a divided one. George hates the people his aunt and uncle call good, and those they call bad, he loves. A lonely child, George keeps his thoughts and dreams to himself rather than expose them to the ridicule of the Joyners, but the picture of that happy, joyful world of his father, and others like him, stays with him during those bleak years of his childhood.

When George is sixteen years of age, his father dies, leaving the boy a small inheritance. With that money, George leaves the little southern town of Libya Hill and goes to college. There he finds knowledge, freedom, and life. Like many other young men, George wastes some of that freedom in sprees of riotous and loose living, but he also reads everything he can get his hands on, and he is deeply impressed with the power of great writers. George is beginning to feel the need to put some of his thoughts and memories down on paper. He wants to write of the two sides of the world—the bright, happy world of the people who have everything and the horrible, dreary world of the derelicts and the poor. His college years end, and George fulfills the dream of every country boy in the nation; he goes to the city, to the beautiful, wonderful “rock,” as he calls New York.

The city is as great and as marvelous as George knew it would be. He shares an apartment with four other young men; it is a dingy, cheap place, but it is their own apartment, where they can do as they please. George, however, finds the city to be a lonely place in spite of its millions of people and its bright lights. There is no one to whom he is responsible or to whom he belongs. He thinks he will burst with what he knows about people and about life, and, because there is no one he can talk to about those things, he tries to write them down. He begins his first novel.

The next year is the loneliest one George ever knew. He drives himself mercilessly. He is wretched, for the words torturing his mind will not go on the paper as he wants. At the end of a year, he takes the last of his inheritance and goes to Europe. He hopes to find there the peace of mind he needs to finish his book. The cities of Europe do not hold his salvation. He is still lonely and bitter, because he cannot find the answer to the riddle of life. He goes back to New York, and the city is no longer an unfriendly enemy, for George finds Esther.

They meet on the ship bound for New York. Esther is Mrs. Esther Jack, a well-known and successful stage-set designer. She is fifteen or twenty years older than George, but she is also younger in many ways, for Esther loves people and believes in them. Where George is silent and distrustful, Esther is open and trusting. George sometimes feels that theirs is the greatest love of all times, at once brutal and tender, passionate and friendly, so deep that it cannot last. For the next three years, however, he is the king of the world. To Esther, George tells all of his dreams, all of his memories, and all of his formerly wordless thoughts about life and people.

At first, George fails to realize that Esther means more to him than just a lover. Gradually, he comes to know that through her he is becoming a new person, a man who loves everyone. For the first time in his life, George belongs to someone. Since he is no longer lonely, the torture and the torment leave him. At last, his book begins to take shape, to become a reality. George is happy.

Slowly, however, the magic of his affair with Esther begins to disappear. He still loves her more than he believes possible and knows that he will always love her, but they begin to quarrel, to have horrible, name-calling scenes that leave them both exhausted and empty, even the quarrels that end with passionate lovemaking. At first, George does not know the reason for those scenes, although he always knows that it is he who starts them. Slowly, he begins to realize that he quarrels with Esther because she possesses him so completely; he gave her his pride, his individuality, his dreams, and his manhood. Unknowingly, Esther is also a factor in his disillusionment, for through her he meets the great people of the world—the artists, the writers, the actors—and he finds those people disgusting and cheap. They destroy his childhood illusions of fame and greatness, and he hates them for it.

When George’s novel is finished, Esther sends the manuscript to several publishers she knows. After months pass without his hearing that it is accepted, George turns on Esther in one final burst of savage abuse and tells her to leave him and to never return. Then he goes to Europe again.

Although he goes to Europe to forget Esther, he does nothing without thinking of her and longing for her. Esther writes to him regularly, and he paces the floor if the expected letter does not arrive; but he is still determined to be himself, and, to accomplish his purpose, he must not see Esther again.

One night in a German beer hall, George gets into a drunken brawl and is badly beaten. While he is in the hospital, a feeling of peace comes over him for the first time in ten years. He looks into a mirror and sees his body as a thing apart from the rest of him. He knows that his body was true to him, that it took the abuse he heaped upon it for almost thirty years. Often he was almost mad, and he drove that body beyond endurance in his insane quest—for what, he does not know. Now he is ready to go home again. If his first novel is not published, he will write another. He still has much to say. The next time he will put it down correctly, and then he will be at peace with himself. At last, George is beginning to find himself.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Thomas Wolfe. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. A collection of eight essays by seven writers, including a general overview of Wolfe’s fiction, an examination of his treatment of the South, and “The Web and the Rock” by Leo Gurko.

Ensign, Robert Taylor. Lean Down Your Ear upon the Earth, and Listen: Thomas Wolfe’s Greener Modernism. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. An ecocritical interpretation of Wolfe’s work, examining his depiction of the natural world and his characters’ connection with it. The references to The Web and the Rock are listed in the index.

Evans, Elizabeth. Thomas Wolfe. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. An excellent introduction to The Web and the Rock. Analytically summarizes its episodes and discusses Wolfe’s narrative devices.

Holliday, Shawn. Thomas Wolfe and the Politics of Modernism. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. A reevaluation of Wolfe, describing how the experimental nature of his fiction and other aspects of his work and life define him as a modernist writer.

Idol, John Lane, Jr. A Thomas Wolfe Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Explains how Wolfe’s editor became virtually his coauthor. Identifies as major themes an artist’s problems in a hostile environment; loneliness; and personal, social, and religious conflicts. Presents a book-by-book plot summary, an explication of symbols, and analyses of characters, all of whom are identified in a glossary.

Johnston, Carol Ingalls. Of Time and the Artist: Thomas Wolfe, His Novels, and the Critics. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1996. Examines the bitter relationship between Wolfe and the literary critics, and how he responded to their critiques in his fiction and letters. The section on The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again provides information about the initial American and German reviews and later reviews from the 1940’s until after the 1960’s.

Kennedy, Richard S. The Window of Memory: The Literary Career of Thomas Wolfe. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962. Definitively combines biographical data and critical perceptions to fit The Web and the Rock into the evolution of Wolfe’s career.

Ryssel, Fritz Heinrich. Thomas Wolfe. Translated by Helen Sebba. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1972. Shows how Wolfe confronted and partially solved technical and thematic problems resulting from his turning to less autobiographical writing in The Web and the Rock.