October 19, 1918—In the upstairs bedroom off the sleeping porch of the family homestead/boardinghouse, as parents and siblings watched in stunned anguish, a sardonic 25-year-old, Benjamin Harrison Wolfe, died in Asheville, N.C., from a severe case of pneumonia—a death scene memorably recounted by Thomas Wolfe, his adoring younger brother, in the latter’s first and most famous novel, Look Homeward, Angel.
By the end of October 1918, approximately 200,000 people had died of Spanish flu. The influenza pandemic that swept through Europe and America that year and the next killed more people than the Great War itself, with estimates of loss of life at somewhere between 20 and 40 million.
Two of those deaths would affect a pair of young American writers for the rest of their lives. One was William Maxwell, the novelist-short story writer who made an equally profound impact on American literature as the longtime fiction editor of The New Yorker. His mother’s death in December 1918 plays a role in three of his novels.
The centennial of Maxwell’s birth occurred this past summer. I was fortunate enough to meet this very fine writer before he died, and I intend to write about him at greater length in a not-so-distant future post. But for now, I’d like to discuss Thomas and Benjamin Wolfe.
Like most readers, I discovered Thomas Wolfe in adolescence, the time of life when one becomes as drunk on words as on alcohol, when life quivers constantly on the edge between boundless promise and utter heartbreak. It’s not only the best time to experience Wolfe but, I would argue, perhaps the only time to understand his bildungsroman, or “coming-of-age” novel.
Within a year, I had devoured the four sprawling roman a clefs that constitute most of the bulk of the North Carolina writer’s legacy: Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River; The Web and the Rock; and You Can’t Go Home Again.
Literary reputations can fluctuate as wildly as some nation’s currencies. Some writers manage to be revived after a period of malign neglect toward the end of their lives, only to achieve a posthumous immortality, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, and, perhaps, Dawn Powell. Other writers have seen their stock in reputation plummet because of revelations about their character and attitudes, such as Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin.
Wolfe represents an especially problematic case. From his six-foot-seven-inch frame to the manuscripts he brought editors Maxwell Perkins and Edward Aswell, everything about him was huge. I think modern readers—especially those of the 21st century, brought up on MTV and video games—have an especially tough time with his books.
Add to that the grievous blow dealt Wolfe in his own lifetime by Bernard De Voto’s critique, “Genius Is Not Enough.” After that, the academy and creative writing schools increasingly fell under the sway of what I’ll call the Flaubert-James method of self-conscious literary craftsmanship—the notion that it’s better to have a novel that’s laboriously, painstakingly crafted like a perfectly shaped egg than that it grab and depict large chunks of life.
Some practitioners of the latter school are not to be sneered at—especially the writer who inspired the title of this blog. (Incidentally, Fitzgerald was jealous of the attention given the younger novelist by the editor they shared, Maxwell Perkins.) But so much of the style of fiction writers today make more of a fetish out of what is left out or buried in a work—its “subtext”—than they are by what’s put in.
William Faulkner, a fellow Southerner who received the literary accolades that eluded Wolfe, would, I suspect, have rebelled at this worldview. He wrote that the North Carolinian was his generation’s greatest novelist. It was undoubtedly an assessment based on the ambition Wolfe shared with Wolfe—to get everything down on paper.
The death of Ben Gant, occurring toward the end of Look Homeward, Angel, is probably the scene best recalled in the book. Ben was the brother that stayed with Thomas and his mother when the Wolfe parents, W.O. and Julia, decided to live in different houses. His brother’s death hit Thomas hard. “I think the Asheville I knew died for me when Ben died,” he wrote his sister Mabel.
Three deaths of fellow students occurred during my high school years, with one particularly shattering one that in my sophomore year. The experience of death at such a young age is especially hard to process, and perhaps that had something to do with the visceral reaction that I and so many other readers had to the death of Ben Gant.
But much of the power of this passage derives not just from Wolfe’s extraordinary rhetorical quality, but from the enormous love for his brother that Wolfe communicated. Consider especially this haunting prose-poem of a passage, when the dying Ben briefly rallies:
“But suddenly, marvelously, as if his resurrection and rebirth had come upon him, Ben drew upon the air in a long and powerful respiration; his gray eyes opened. Filled with a terrible vision of life in the one moment, he seemed to rise bodilessly from his pillows without support—a flame, a light, a glory—joined at length in death to the dark spirit who had brooded upon each step of his lonely adventure on earth; and, casting the fierce sword of his glance with utter and final comprehension upon the room haunted with its gray pageantry of cheap loves and dull consciences and on all those uncertain murmurs of waste and confusion fading now from the bright window of his eyes, he passed instantly, scornful and unafraid, as he had lived, into the shades of death.”
Ben, his brother noted, was “one of those fine people who want the best and highest out of life, and who get nothing—who die unknown and unsuccessful.” Ben might have died unsuccessful, but through the love and lyrical powers of his brother Thomas, he did not die unknown. Ninety years after Ben’s death, many readers of Look Homeward, Angel would insist that they know him very well—about as well as their own siblings, even.
By the end of October 1918, approximately 200,000 people had died of Spanish flu. The influenza pandemic that swept through Europe and America that year and the next killed more people than the Great War itself, with estimates of loss of life at somewhere between 20 and 40 million.
Two of those deaths would affect a pair of young American writers for the rest of their lives. One was William Maxwell, the novelist-short story writer who made an equally profound impact on American literature as the longtime fiction editor of The New Yorker. His mother’s death in December 1918 plays a role in three of his novels.
The centennial of Maxwell’s birth occurred this past summer. I was fortunate enough to meet this very fine writer before he died, and I intend to write about him at greater length in a not-so-distant future post. But for now, I’d like to discuss Thomas and Benjamin Wolfe.
Like most readers, I discovered Thomas Wolfe in adolescence, the time of life when one becomes as drunk on words as on alcohol, when life quivers constantly on the edge between boundless promise and utter heartbreak. It’s not only the best time to experience Wolfe but, I would argue, perhaps the only time to understand his bildungsroman, or “coming-of-age” novel.
Within a year, I had devoured the four sprawling roman a clefs that constitute most of the bulk of the North Carolina writer’s legacy: Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River; The Web and the Rock; and You Can’t Go Home Again.
Literary reputations can fluctuate as wildly as some nation’s currencies. Some writers manage to be revived after a period of malign neglect toward the end of their lives, only to achieve a posthumous immortality, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, and, perhaps, Dawn Powell. Other writers have seen their stock in reputation plummet because of revelations about their character and attitudes, such as Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin.
Wolfe represents an especially problematic case. From his six-foot-seven-inch frame to the manuscripts he brought editors Maxwell Perkins and Edward Aswell, everything about him was huge. I think modern readers—especially those of the 21st century, brought up on MTV and video games—have an especially tough time with his books.
Add to that the grievous blow dealt Wolfe in his own lifetime by Bernard De Voto’s critique, “Genius Is Not Enough.” After that, the academy and creative writing schools increasingly fell under the sway of what I’ll call the Flaubert-James method of self-conscious literary craftsmanship—the notion that it’s better to have a novel that’s laboriously, painstakingly crafted like a perfectly shaped egg than that it grab and depict large chunks of life.
Some practitioners of the latter school are not to be sneered at—especially the writer who inspired the title of this blog. (Incidentally, Fitzgerald was jealous of the attention given the younger novelist by the editor they shared, Maxwell Perkins.) But so much of the style of fiction writers today make more of a fetish out of what is left out or buried in a work—its “subtext”—than they are by what’s put in.
William Faulkner, a fellow Southerner who received the literary accolades that eluded Wolfe, would, I suspect, have rebelled at this worldview. He wrote that the North Carolinian was his generation’s greatest novelist. It was undoubtedly an assessment based on the ambition Wolfe shared with Wolfe—to get everything down on paper.
The death of Ben Gant, occurring toward the end of Look Homeward, Angel, is probably the scene best recalled in the book. Ben was the brother that stayed with Thomas and his mother when the Wolfe parents, W.O. and Julia, decided to live in different houses. His brother’s death hit Thomas hard. “I think the Asheville I knew died for me when Ben died,” he wrote his sister Mabel.
Three deaths of fellow students occurred during my high school years, with one particularly shattering one that in my sophomore year. The experience of death at such a young age is especially hard to process, and perhaps that had something to do with the visceral reaction that I and so many other readers had to the death of Ben Gant.
But much of the power of this passage derives not just from Wolfe’s extraordinary rhetorical quality, but from the enormous love for his brother that Wolfe communicated. Consider especially this haunting prose-poem of a passage, when the dying Ben briefly rallies:
“But suddenly, marvelously, as if his resurrection and rebirth had come upon him, Ben drew upon the air in a long and powerful respiration; his gray eyes opened. Filled with a terrible vision of life in the one moment, he seemed to rise bodilessly from his pillows without support—a flame, a light, a glory—joined at length in death to the dark spirit who had brooded upon each step of his lonely adventure on earth; and, casting the fierce sword of his glance with utter and final comprehension upon the room haunted with its gray pageantry of cheap loves and dull consciences and on all those uncertain murmurs of waste and confusion fading now from the bright window of his eyes, he passed instantly, scornful and unafraid, as he had lived, into the shades of death.”
Ben, his brother noted, was “one of those fine people who want the best and highest out of life, and who get nothing—who die unknown and unsuccessful.” Ben might have died unsuccessful, but through the love and lyrical powers of his brother Thomas, he did not die unknown. Ninety years after Ben’s death, many readers of Look Homeward, Angel would insist that they know him very well—about as well as their own siblings, even.
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