Thomas Wolfe Fatigue

My rule for including a book on my “Books Read” list for any given year is that I have to read the whole thing. If it’s on my list, I read it from beginning to end. That doesn’t mean I read every book I pick up from beginning to end, but it does mean I try not to waste much time on books that aren’t worth reading in their entirety.

Earning that listing right (my own rule) might seem like enough reason for me to plow ahead with Of Time and the River, though at page 511 of the 912-page book I was beginning to long for the end. But I like to have at least one additional reason, because otherwise I begin to have doubts, coming because I remember a why-we-are-in-Vietnam argument that went, “We have to stay and keep fighting because it’s already cost us so much.” My Thomas Wolfe reading correlative might be, “I’ve spent so much time on the book that I have to [double my investment to] reach the end.” Not a great comparison, since it’s only time, not lives, at stake, and only my own time, and the end of the book is in sight, whereas, for year after year, no one could not say that about the war. But I do think I need more reason to keep reading a book than having already read a lot of it.

So what’s my supplementary reason for battling on through Thomas Wolfe fatigue? Maybe I should first say something about what’s brought on the fatigue, and I’ll introduce it with a question: How does Thomas Wolfe portray character?

The main character in Of Time and the River, Eugene Gant (from Look Homeward, Angel), is so intensely autobiographical it’s embarrassing. Wolfe spares us none of young Gant’s overwrought emotions, and we are privy not only to every sensation but also to every judgment that Gant makes about other characters, almost as if in reading the book we have the experience of inhabiting his mind and body. Other characters are portrayed very differently, which makes sense, since the story is told from Gene’s point of view, albeit in the third person. Of course Wolfe/Gant, with access to Eugene’s insides, could only know other characters from the outside – from their appearances, speech, and behavior. I get that.

But the extreme lack of sympathy shown for other characters, especially those with different ethnic backgrounds – is it only the characters, or is it also the author’s, or was it the way the author felt when younger but got over as he matured? Negroes (frequently referred to with the more vulgar N-term) and Jews, Greeks to a lesser extent, are “oily” and “primitive,” with features of face and hair and body exaggerated and dwelt on at great length. Women, of any age, are generally either seductive or repulsive – sometimes, paradoxically, both! Is it only Gant, or was it Wolfe, too, who looked on other human beings not only as separate from himself but almost as members of another species? All others in this book, it seems, are Others, examined and described with the glittering, objective, curious but at the same time repelled eye of a boy collecting insects and pinning them, still wriggling, to his collecting board. This would be off--putting at any time, but at the end of an election cycle marked by statements of prejudice, hatred, and fear, it's downright sickening.

Sickening. Tiresome. Sad. Maddening. You just want to slap the egocentric, self-dramatizing young genius (already a legend in his own mind) upside the head and remind him that he, too, is a human being, seen from the outside by other people! How about putting that gigantic imagination to work to try to understand other people’s situations? That’s what I mean by Thomas Wolfe fatigue.

So you’re probably wondering, why go on at all? What on earth can justify my spending more time in Wolfe’s world?

“I love the language,” a friend of mine frequently says of a book she’s just read. And while there’s plenty of Wolfe’s language I don’t love, there are other passages, long and lyrical, which absolutely soar. Overwritten, maybe, from the postmodern point of view (certainly often emotionally overwrought), but when he leaves characters behind and pens hymns to land and trees, to rivers, to cities and towns, to trains and night, to time – all manner of general experiential topics having nothing to do with individuals or plot – then I want nothing more than for a friend to interrupt my reading just long enough for me to say, “Wait! Listen to this!” And then I’d begin to read aloud.

The river is a tide of moving waters: by night it floods the pockets of the earth. By night it drinks strange time, dark time. By night the river drinks proud potent tides of strange dark time. By night the river drains the tides, proud potent tides of time’s dark waters that, with champ and lift of teeth, with lapse and reluctation of their breath, fill with a kissing glut the pockets of the earth. Sired by the horses of the sea, maned with the dark, they come. 

 They come! Ships call! The hooves of night, the horses of the sea, come on below their manes of darkness. And forever the river runs. Deep as the tides of time and memory, deep as the tides of sleep, the river runs.

In these passages, repetition of words and phrases, so very annoying (and at times disgusting) when a character is described over and over with the same objectifying words and phrase -- these descriptive passages not involving other human beings are poetry, song. Wolfe can go on for pages like this, and when he does I feel the wind in my hair as the horses of the sea carry me across the water, and I ride through the night in the train, peering through the window at passing scenes. Oh, then Thomas Wolfe is glorious!

So there you have it. In the early pages of the book, I was thinking of recommending the novel to others in our Ulysses Reading Circle. I have abandoned that thought. I will, however, finish my own reading Of Time and the River, and I believe it will have been time well spent.

On the other hand, will I re-read it someday or pick up another novel by Thomas Wolfe? Not likely. By the time I get to the last page of this one, I will have been well immunized. 

Newspapers, Novels, and Radio

Long view out to Manitou Islands

View across orchards and hills

What looks like a low-lying cloud in the photo above was heavy mist over north Lake Leelanau this morning, but the view of any field depends on where you’re standing. Baseball and politics. Past and present. And so I say that good fiction is not an escape from real life but allows us a different perspective on our reality.

Back in the last decades of the last century, David and I, younger then, were late night people. Now I get up early most mornings, sometimes actually waking as early as 2 or 3 a.m. and going to another room to read until I can fall asleep again until 6 or 7 a.m., a more decent hour to begin a new day. (So I still see 2 a.m. as often as I did long ago, but from the other end, as it were.) Two a.m. used to be the hour the bars closed, time to look for an all-night diner; now the same hour is morning but too early to make coffee.

Red twig dogwood, close up

My middle-of-the-night reading has its corollary in David’s dark-of-the-night radio hours. Sometimes by dawn he has listened to the same news cycle half a dozen times over and is ready to turn to another channel; his alternate listening then is a station where two men and one woman each morning find endless sources of hilarity in the happenings of the last 24 hours. Sometimes I try to imagine how that trio would have responded to the announcement of America’s entry into World War II or news of the assassinations of the 1960s. My imagination fails me. But that’s neither here nor there.

Beautiful fall ash leaves -- ash, traditional wood for baseball bats

Back to last night. As usual, I was ready for bed earlier than David and took my book with me – and yes, dozed off over it, with Sarah pressed up against my feet, keeping them warm. When David was ready to join us, I woke up, and he put in a DVD of “The Man From Snowy River,” telling me, “I got this for you because it has horses in it,” but he was also keeping track, for both of us, of Game 7 of the World Series on the radio, and from time to time he would pause the movie and turn up the radio so I could share in the baseball action.

I’ll be honest: I was fading in and out of consciousness a lot of the time. I’d drift off and then open my eyes to watch beautiful horses thundering across the screen, drift again and wake to hear the current score and share the nail-biting suspense as another player came up to bat. “An epic battle,” said Ben Zobrist. It certainly was. Despite the fact that I slept through a lot of it, I was excited by every moment I heard – and thrilled by Chicago’s win!

Lake Leelanau Narrows, Thursday morning

This morning when David came out for his first cup of coffee, he gave me the latest radio report of the joy in Wrigleyville and I told him of the coincidence of my having reached the final game of the Series this morning in Wolfe’s famous novel. “Those Cubbies!” we said to each other happily, we who seldom pay attention to sports. Here is the literary coincidence I experienced:

They look at him with laughing and exuberant faces, unwounded by his scorn. They look at him with a kind of secret and unspoken tenderness which the strange and bitter savor of his life awakes in people always. They look at him with faith, with pride, with the joy of confidence and affection which his presence stirs in every one. And as if he were the very author of their fondest hopes, as if he were the fiat, not the helpless agent, of the thing they long to see accomplished, they yell to him in their unreasoning exuberance: “All right, Ben! Give us a hit now! A single’s all we need, boy! Bring him in!” Or others, crying with the same exuberance of faith: “Strike him out, Ben! Make him fan!” 

 But now the crowd, sensing the electric thrill and menace of a decisive conflict, has grown still, is waiting with caught breath and pounding hearts, their eyes fixed eagerly on Ben.... 

 The batter stands swinging his bat and grimly waiting at the plate, tense, the catcher, crouched, the umpire, bent, hands clasped behind his back, and peering forward. All of them are set now in the cold blue of that slanting shadow, except the pitcher who stands out there all alone, calm, desperate, and forsaken in his isolation....

Reading Of Time and the River for the first time, there’s no way I could have known ahead of time that this morning I would reach the pages where Thomas Wolfe describes the last game of a long-ago World Series! The scene is set about a hundred years ago, and protagonist Gene’s older brother, Ben (shortly afterward to die in the early 20^th-century pneumonia epidemic) has a very visible role to play in their town’s national baseball experience. As we learned 150 pages earlier, it is Ben who announces the faraway game to fans in their little Southern hometown. Gene’s entry into the smoking car of the train in that earlier section of the book provoked memories among the older men there.

“Oh, I remember that boy now,” the swarthy pompous-looking man suddenly broke in with a flash of recollective inspiration—“Wasn’t Ben the boy who used to stand in the windows of The Courier offices when the World Series was being played, and post the score up on the scoreboard as they phoned it in to him?” 

 “Yes,” wheezed Mr. Flood [the publisher of The Courier], nodding heavily, “You got him now, all right. That was Ben.”

Forward again to the pages I reached this morning, we have a flashback to the final game of that World Series, with Ben, still alive, death still in his future, standing in the window of the newspaper office, phone to his ear, facing the local crowd out on the sidewalk.

The young man on the floor thrusts another placard into his hand. Ben takes it quickly, swiftly takes out a placard from the complicated frame of wires and rows and columns in the window (for it is before the day of the electric scoreboard, and this clumsy and complicated system whereby every strike, ball, substitution, or base hit—every possible movement and event that can occur on the field—must be indicated in this way by placards printed with the exact information, is the only one they know) and thrusts a new placard on the line in place of the one that he has just removed. A cheer, sharp, lusty, and immediate, goes up from the crowd.

Last night we could hear the cheers from the stands in Cleveland on our bedside radio, and friends who reported this morning being in a Chicago bar last night said the mood there was ecstatic. No doubt!

“A little good news,” I said to David, the two of us beaming at each other.

“We needed it,” he agrees.

What we call popples are called aspen out West

Following the end of the final game in the book, the crowd quickly disperses.

And instantly, there in the city’s heart, in the great stadium, and all across America, in ten thousand streets, ten thousand little towns, the crowd is breaking, flowing, lost forever! That single, silent, most intolerable loveliness is gone forever. With all its tragic, proud and waiting unity, it belongs now to the huge, the done, the indestructible fabric of the past, has moved at last out of that inscrutable maw of chance we call the future into the strange finality of dark time.

And almost instantly the dispersed crowd loses its short-lived unity.

To pace again the barren avenues of night, to pass before the bulbous light of lifeless streets with half-averted faces, to pass the thousand doors, to feel again the ancient hopelessness of hope, the knowledge of despair, the faith of desolation.

But Thomas Wolfe was only 31 years old when he began writing the novel and only 38 years old when he died. It is far easier for younger people to despair because they have not lived through earlier crises. Is it true our country has “never been more divided” than it is today? How about during the Civil War? How about during the 1960s? This morning, all over Leelanau County, people are smiling over and taking joy from the Cubs’ victory. So while I am reveling in Wolfe’s prose, in his wide ecstatic national vision, I’m not going to let go so quickly and easily of last night’s happy victory.

Cherry orchards are as beautiful in fall color as in springtime blossom

We needed happy news! We needed a reason to cheer! Oh, those Cubbies! Surely even Cleveland can’t help loving them?

Dark clouds sometimes make bursts of sunshine look brighter

Contested Autumn

It was at just that season of the year when two events which are dear to the speculations of the American had absorbed the public interest. These events were baseball and politics, and at that moment both were thrillingly imminent. The annual baseball contests for “the championship of the world” were to begin within another day or two, and the national campaign for the election of the American president, which would be held in another month, was moving to its furious apogee of speeches, accusations, dire predictions, and impassioned promises. Both events gave the average American a thrill of pleasurable anticipation: his approach to both was essentially the same. It was the desire of a man to see a good show, to “take sides” vigorously in an exciting contest—to be amused, involved as an interested spectator is involved, but not to be too deeply troubled or concerned by the result. -      Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River

Thomas Wolfe has a lot to say in this book, edited down by Maxwell Perkins to a readable 899 pages, but by the end of Part I he has said not a word of Halloween, a holiday of fun undoubtedly restricted to children in the years immediately following World War I (the time period of the novel quoted above). Passages on train travel, however, are thrilling, especially to one who can remember, if only just barely, riding in a Pullman sleeper car as a young child. Happy memories and comfort books -- that's where my fevered mind has sought relief. I'm reading Time and the River for the first time and don't expect it to be bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy, but the poetry of the language and the author's Proustian willingness to stay with a scene are certainly voluptuous reading pleasures.

Politics and baseball? Well, the World Series has certainly been exciting without being, for me, in any way unnerving, but I cannot say the same of Halloween or the presidential election. Amused by this campaign season? Not too deeply troubled or concerned? I can’t say that. Can you? Now Halloween, at least, is past. For me, that's minor one down, one much greater trial to go....

But rather than close on a deep-sounding note of anxiety, I want to leave you today with Thomas Wolfe’s words of appreciation for his editor, surely one of the most effusively grateful dedications in all of American literature:

To

MAXWELL EVARTS PERKINS

A great editor and a brave and honest man, who stuck to the writer of this book through times of bitter hopelessness and doubt and would not let him give in to his own despair, a work to be known as "Of Time and the River" is dedicated with the hope that all of it may be in some way worthy of the loyal devotion and the patient care which a dauntless and unshaken friend has given to each part of it, and without which none of it could have been written.

Wow! That's what I call gratitude!

And now, come on, Cubbies!!!

Continued entwining of World Series and Thomas Wolfe here.