On the largely, ironically forgotten author
who deserves to be remembered and read.
Just after the feature article on Charlotte,
the magazine includes a briefer piece on various historic sites elsewhere in
North Carolina. A few of them are connected to Asheville, the Western North
Carolina, mountain city that has provided hotel stays and getaways for many
prominent Americans (including multiple presidents at George Vanderbilt’s enormous Biltmore House)
over the last century and more. Unmentioned among those references, however, is
the modernist American novelist who grew up in Asheville and whose mother made
her living in the city’s booming early 20th century real estate and
boarding businesses: Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe’s
absence from the article is unsurprising, as he has I would argue largely been
forgotten in the 65 years since his tragic early death;
but it’s also both ironic and unfortunate.
The irony of Wolfe’s elision, both from our
collective memories and from an article on North Carolina, is that he was, as
much as any American author, deeply concerned with the question of how and
whether an artist—or anyone—can both remain part of and escape from his home
and past. The original subtitle of his novel Look
Homeward, Angel (1929) was A
Story of the Buried Life, and the novel begins with a fragmented quote that
includes the lines “Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten
language” and “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.” Throughout,
Wolfe’s hugely autobiographical novel engages both backwards—into his own, his
family’s, his city’s, and the national pasts—and forwards, wondering whether
its protagonist can unearth those pasts, will become himself buried in the
process, should instead move on into a more separate future, and so on. Five
years later, Wolfe would explore those same themes again, from some of the same
yet also very distinct angles, in You
Can’t Go Home Again (1934). For this author to be absent from most of
our national narratives of modernist writers, American literature, or even his
home state is, again, powerfully ironic.
But it’s more than that: it’s a shame. Even
in his own lifetime, Wolfe
struggled with his editors over his sprawling and difficult style, and
found limited (or at least more limited than he otherwise might have) audiences
and successes as a result. Yet it seems to me that Wolfe’s style is as entirely
interconnected with his content and themes as were those of his fellow modernists
Hemingway and Faulkner; while it’s fair to say that Wolfe’s was not as
influential as either of theirs, I would also argue that the experience of
reading his can be just as rewarding and meaningful on its own terms. Moreover,
while some of Hemingway’s characters and stories feel more focused on European
experiences and some of Faulkner’s more specific to the South, Wolfe’s works
are, to my mind, profoundly representative of shared American (and perhaps
human) questions, both from that early twentieth century moment and from across
all our generations and communities. Time to put him back on the map, I’d say.
Next air-inspired post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Thoughts on Wolfe?
Other authors or artists we should better remember?
10/3 Memory Day nominees: A tie between Thomas Wolfe, whose flawed but powerful novels have a great deal to tell us about his own life, his home state, and turn of the 20th century America; and John Ross, whose lengthy and often tragic leadership of the Cherokee Nation reflects some of America’s darkest as well as its most inspiring histories and
moments.
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