“I know I write too much of everything. The thing I am going to learn some day is that you might write one of the best things you ever put on paper, but it doesn’t necessarily belong in the book at hand. I am going to learn, though. I’ll work hard and I know I can do it.”—Thomas Wolfe quoted in “Brevity to be Goal of Thomas Wolfe,” The New York Times, July 5, 1935, in Thomas Wolfe Interviewed, 1929-1938, edited by Aldo P. Magi and Richard Walser (1985)
Thomas Wolfe, boisterous, needy man-child, overflowing with creative fecundity, had little time left to master the kind of Jamesian control over his material of which he was speaking here. Another 3½ years and he’d be dead, leaving behind another three books to be hewn from the mass he left behind for his second, final editor, Edward C. Aswell.
Truth be told, the kind of self-consciousness he was promising as he stepped off the boat from a trip to Europe wasn’t always everything it was cracked up to be. All that endless mulling and shaping of materials could leave aridity to one’s work—something that Marion (Clover) Adams, clever, suicidal wife of historian Henry Adams, noted when she observed, about the work of her husband’s friend, Henry James: “He’s chewed much more than he’s bitten off.”
That kind of self-control also implied the ability to sit still—and it was growing ever more obvious that the gargantuan, experience-hungry Wolfe didn’t possess this gene, either. Nevertheless, on the day before the above quote appeared in The New York Times, questions about his self-discipline were becoming increasingly constant, and eventually they would drive a wedge between himself and the man who met him on the dock that Fourth of July when he came back from a triumphant trip abroad, his first editor, mentor and friend, Maxwell Perkins.
Wolfe had become a kind of surrogate son for Perkins, father of five daughters, as the Scribners editor shaped the manuscripts of the hulking Southerner’s first two sprawling novels, Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, into print. The novelist had frankly acknowledged his debt in a nonfiction account of his writing process, The Story of a Novel, as well as three months ago in his dedication of the just-published Of Time and the River. (See my prior post on Wolfe, Fitzgerald and Hemingway—the trio that Fitzgerald called Max’s “sons”—and their competition for his attention and approval.)
But now the whispers were growing louder about how much Wolfe was a creature of his editor. Before long, critic Bernard De Voto would bring these concerns to a fever pitch—and damage Wolfe’s reputation so much that it never fully recovered—in “Genius Is Not Enough.”
The German intelligentsia hadn’t minded Wolfe’s headlong romantic spirit. This, after all, was the country that had practically invented Romanticism, and the writers Wolfe met there embraced him eagerly. He exulted to Perkins about having awoken one morning, Byron-like, to find himself “famous in Berlin.”
Guided through Berlin by the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, Wolfe’s sojourn was a triumph. Biographer Andrew Turnbull wrote a glittering description of this American giant in a nation otherwise increasingly fearful about exercising its own creative energies:
“The might and music of his personality exalted everyone he met; striding the streets with head aloft and his body full of lumbering rhythm, he personified the freedom and promise of America. For the first time since Hitler’s rise to power the Romanische Café, a former gathering place of artists and intellectuals, showed signs of life.”
Try as you might, you can’t really understate Wolfe’s puppy-like yearning for adulation or naivete. At the same time, we need to give him some credit—no matter how much he hated to notice faults in a country that paid no attention to his biggest creative limitation, he had, by the end of his sojourn in Germany, begun to be alarmed by that nation’s anti-Semitism, which was so virulent that it exceeded his own. It all manifested itself, insidiously, in "the solid, liquid smack of booted feet, and young brown faces shaded under steel goose-stepping beneath the green arcades of the Kurfurstendamm, the army lorries rolling past, each crowded with regimented rows of young, formal, helmeted, armfolded, ramrodded bodies.”
Wolfe, let it be said, did not become blind to a country that had lionized him, as Charles Lindbergh was about to do with Hitler’s Germany, or willfully uncurious about why intellectuals he had befriended were suddenly disappearing, as Paul Robeson would react when faced with the toll of Stalin’s purges. Two years later, his short story “I Have a Thing to Tell You” would make unmistakably clear his break from the country he loved more than any other next to his own.
The novelist might have been talking about artistic self-control when he vowed “I am going to learn” when he stepped off the boat, but he did, in fact, learn something along the way before he died: not to allow ego or ideology to cloud his vision of the world before his eyes.
Thomas Wolfe, boisterous, needy man-child, overflowing with creative fecundity, had little time left to master the kind of Jamesian control over his material of which he was speaking here. Another 3½ years and he’d be dead, leaving behind another three books to be hewn from the mass he left behind for his second, final editor, Edward C. Aswell.
Truth be told, the kind of self-consciousness he was promising as he stepped off the boat from a trip to Europe wasn’t always everything it was cracked up to be. All that endless mulling and shaping of materials could leave aridity to one’s work—something that Marion (Clover) Adams, clever, suicidal wife of historian Henry Adams, noted when she observed, about the work of her husband’s friend, Henry James: “He’s chewed much more than he’s bitten off.”
That kind of self-control also implied the ability to sit still—and it was growing ever more obvious that the gargantuan, experience-hungry Wolfe didn’t possess this gene, either. Nevertheless, on the day before the above quote appeared in The New York Times, questions about his self-discipline were becoming increasingly constant, and eventually they would drive a wedge between himself and the man who met him on the dock that Fourth of July when he came back from a triumphant trip abroad, his first editor, mentor and friend, Maxwell Perkins.
Wolfe had become a kind of surrogate son for Perkins, father of five daughters, as the Scribners editor shaped the manuscripts of the hulking Southerner’s first two sprawling novels, Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, into print. The novelist had frankly acknowledged his debt in a nonfiction account of his writing process, The Story of a Novel, as well as three months ago in his dedication of the just-published Of Time and the River. (See my prior post on Wolfe, Fitzgerald and Hemingway—the trio that Fitzgerald called Max’s “sons”—and their competition for his attention and approval.)
But now the whispers were growing louder about how much Wolfe was a creature of his editor. Before long, critic Bernard De Voto would bring these concerns to a fever pitch—and damage Wolfe’s reputation so much that it never fully recovered—in “Genius Is Not Enough.”
The German intelligentsia hadn’t minded Wolfe’s headlong romantic spirit. This, after all, was the country that had practically invented Romanticism, and the writers Wolfe met there embraced him eagerly. He exulted to Perkins about having awoken one morning, Byron-like, to find himself “famous in Berlin.”
Guided through Berlin by the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, Wolfe’s sojourn was a triumph. Biographer Andrew Turnbull wrote a glittering description of this American giant in a nation otherwise increasingly fearful about exercising its own creative energies:
“The might and music of his personality exalted everyone he met; striding the streets with head aloft and his body full of lumbering rhythm, he personified the freedom and promise of America. For the first time since Hitler’s rise to power the Romanische Café, a former gathering place of artists and intellectuals, showed signs of life.”
Try as you might, you can’t really understate Wolfe’s puppy-like yearning for adulation or naivete. At the same time, we need to give him some credit—no matter how much he hated to notice faults in a country that paid no attention to his biggest creative limitation, he had, by the end of his sojourn in Germany, begun to be alarmed by that nation’s anti-Semitism, which was so virulent that it exceeded his own. It all manifested itself, insidiously, in "the solid, liquid smack of booted feet, and young brown faces shaded under steel goose-stepping beneath the green arcades of the Kurfurstendamm, the army lorries rolling past, each crowded with regimented rows of young, formal, helmeted, armfolded, ramrodded bodies.”
Wolfe, let it be said, did not become blind to a country that had lionized him, as Charles Lindbergh was about to do with Hitler’s Germany, or willfully uncurious about why intellectuals he had befriended were suddenly disappearing, as Paul Robeson would react when faced with the toll of Stalin’s purges. Two years later, his short story “I Have a Thing to Tell You” would make unmistakably clear his break from the country he loved more than any other next to his own.
The novelist might have been talking about artistic self-control when he vowed “I am going to learn” when he stepped off the boat, but he did, in fact, learn something along the way before he died: not to allow ego or ideology to cloud his vision of the world before his eyes.
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