Thomas Wolfe Remembered ed. by Mark Canada and Nami Montgomery (review)

The Great American Read, an eight-part documentary sponsored recently by PBS, partly involved selecting by national survey America's one hundred most loved books. Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel (1929) did not make that elite list. Many would contend that Wolfe's most famous novel should have. Born in Asheville, North Carolina, as the twentieth century opened, Wolfe grew up in a sprawling boarding house in a large family. He drew from his background to write Look Homeward Angel. Possessed of an incredible memory, Wolfe portrayed a Shakespeare-quoting and heavily imbibing father; the boy's superstitious, penurious, but indomitable mother; a raft of brothers and sisters; boarders; and the welter of Asheville. He employed his recreating (and not uncritical) eye and a slightly-veiled autographical voice again in Of Time and the River (1935) and posthumously in The Web and the Rock (1939), and You Can't Go Home Again. (1940). In addition to these books, several novellas and a number of short stories constitute the literary legacy of Thomas Wolfe.

If his production was remarkable in a short life (Wolfe died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-eight), so was the man. The indelible impressions the 6'8" giant left on acquaintances constitute Thomas Wolfe Remembered. Mark Canada and Nami Montgomery have excavated accounts from teaching colleagues, friends, a wide variety of those who had some association with him, even Wolfe's typists. Some recount his Asheville beginnings, others knew Wolfe as a student at the University of North Carolina, but most describe "Tom" during his adult life. The picture that emerges is of a man compulsively driven to create. One contributor considered his friend, "tortured by the demon of the writer in him" (88), and another allowed that "the only important thing in the universe to him was his work…" (127). Caring little for material possessions, Wolfe lived in various New York City and Brooklyn garrets, all spartan, unkempt, and littered with the telltale trappings of the author: coffee cups, cigarette butts, and books. "Wolfe's daily life was governed almost wholly by this need to write," observed his literary agent (135). As someone who never mastered the typewriter and who was described as "completely un-mechanical" (135), he composed in torrents with pencil, in a hand that sorely challenged interpreters. And yes, as famously rumored, the towering figure occasionally wrote on refrigerator tops. Maxwell Perkins tempered a writing profligacy and forced cuts on the agonizing author. "I began then to realize that nothing Wolfe wrote was ever lost," the Charles Scribner's Sons editor rationalized, "that omissions in one book were restored in a later one" (99).

Maybe the greatest contribution of Canada and Montgomery is to further advance the essential humanity of Thomas Wolfe. He lived alone, never married, but was hardly the cloistered introvert. Wolfe craved companionship, talked at length, and immensely enjoyed food (exquisitely described in his prose), alcohol, and the company of women. The North Carolinian was drawn to and repelled by the South, and like other themes in his unsparing prose, did not flinch at addressing the falseness he perceived. Wolfe began writing what became Look Homeward Angel in London, spent months at a time in Europe, but it was America—its sounds, smells, sights, and above all the country's people—that he labored to capture.

The reader anticipating deep analysis of underlying themes in Wolfe's work will be disappointed. Omission of any such literary criticism is understandable and commendable, for that is not the editors' intent. Their purpose involves providing an appreciation for the brilliantly gifted but troubled man behind the masterful fiction. Wolfe's personal eccentricities, his qualities and flaws, and above all his amazing vitality, emerge in this fine collective mosaic. One summarizing the version of Thomas Wolfe she knew recalled on learning of his untimely death, "I felt as if someone told me that...