[In honor of the
upcoming birthday of an old friend, on which more this weekend, a series on histories
and stories from the Tarheel State! Add your Carolinian responses and stories
in comments, y’all!]
On the largely, ironically forgotten author
who deserves to be remembered and read.
A few years back, I wrote a
series on AmericanStudies connections found in a US Airways Magazine. Just after a feature on Charlottes, the
magazine included 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 Carolina
story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Carolinian histories or stories you’d share?
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