In the Footsteps of Wolfe

With this personal reminiscence in prospect I’ve been looking at a photograph of Thomas Wolfe as an undergraduate at Chapel Hill. Could this confident young man with pipe be the original of Eugene Gant? Creators often differ from the autobiographical characters they create. But this certainly isn’t the suffering ’Gene Gant of Look Homeward, Angel.

Merle Leavitt Riggs, a New England-born schoolmarm, had migrated from New Hampshire to the Woman’s College of UNC, as it then was, and thither to our town. She taught me French and math and cultivated “intellectual curiosity.” I needed it. I was an under-read high-school sophomore, who spent most of my spare time drawing and painting and stuffing my mind with baseball lore. I aspired in that time of limitless ambition to be a great left-handed pitcher. Merle saved me from my adolescent self. She had a flair for the dramatic and one day intoned—I mean the word precisely—the first rhythmic lines of one of Wolfe’s short stories. That was the appetizer. Later she drew Look Homeward, Angel from the library shelves and told me that I must read it if I wanted to be a writer. I already had inky fingers from a summer job on the local semi-weekly. I did read it—and as I wrote on the seventieth anniversary of its publication, the effect was instantaneous.

There is [as Scott Fitzgerald intimated] a glut of caviar in LHA. . . . Wolfe could elevate mundane life to a mythic level; and my, how he could draw character . . . Who forgets the Gants? I could not, though at 15 or so I found them hard to believe in—the penny-pinching Eliza, with her real-estate schemes; the rip-snorting stonemason father . . . with his roaring drunks and his self-pitying Lear-like bombast. Wolfe’s Altamont (Asheville) reminds you of a Breughel landscape in which gaping yokels, revolving between mischief and indolence, sense death and decay hovering over their rural festivities. . . . The Gants are arty, querulous, turbulent dreamers, always on the brink of tragedy and madness, living narrow lives of almost unearthly intensity.

I can’t recall exactly what memories of Look Homeward, Angel I brought to Chapel Hill—only that I tended to view the campus landscape as Pulpit Hill. His description is unforgettable: “It seemed to Eugene like a provincial outpost of great Rome: the wilderness crept up to it like a beast.” I knew that Wolfe had changed my life. And for that distant freshman, Wolfe the writer and Gant the creature were thoroughly fused.

But, from that perspective, Thomas Wolfe had left big footsteps—not least as editor of the Tar Heel, the student paper. And my essay about freshman camp was rewarded with my first appearance in that paper: I had arrived. I took the English placement exam and was told that I could skip composition, English i and ii. I elected, however, to take English ii—a stroke of blind luck, for my teacher was a graduate instructor and Burke scholar, Jack Weston. I have long ago lost touch with him—he received his doctorate and I my ba in English at the same 1956 commencement—but I needed his supervision, for I was “flown” with Wolfe’s prose, as Milton’s devils are “flown with insolence and wine.” Mesmerized, that is, by Wolfe’s powers of narrative and characterization, and by the ripe mannerisms of his rhetoric. Without dampening my exuberance, for he could see that I was serious about writing, Weston cured me of the illusion that I was an embryonic Wolfe. The curative process reached a crisis when he assigned an apostrophe. The exercise was routine but unfamiliar, as were the conventional forms. As I recalled years later, “I shall not forget the astonished indignation with which [Weston] scored my apostrophe to the Mojave Desert . . . Embarrassing! Really! No! D-plus. It was a chastening experience. But such was the spell that Thomas Wolfe cast.”

Why the Mojave Desert, of all things? It happened that I had crossed it one early morning en route to...