Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Oktoberfest, A ‘Paradise of Cram and Gorge’)

“Everyone was eating; everyone was drinking. A ravenous hunger—an insane hunger that knew no appeasement, that wished to glut itself on all the roasted ox flesh, all the sausages, all the salt fish in the world, seized me and held me in its teeth. In all the world there was nothing but Food—glorious Food. And beer—October beer. The world was one enormous Belly—there was no higher heaven than the paradise of Cram and Gorge. All of the agony of the mind was here forgotten. What did these people know about books? What did they know about pictures? What did they know about the million tumults of the soul, the conflict and the agony of the spirit, the hopes, fears, hatreds, failures, and ambitions, the whole fevered complex of modern life? These people lived for nothing but to eat and drink—and they were right.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1937), “Oktoberfest,” originally published in Scribner’s Magazine, June 1937, reprinted in The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, edited by Francis E. Skipp (1987)

The first Oktoberfest began in Munich, Germany, on this day in 1810. Since then, according to this brief history from Oktoberfest Tours, the celebration of this bacchanal has been moved to late September and ending in early October to allow for better weather conditions in the changeable local climate. Most similar observances of this festival around the world, including in the U.S., have followed suit.

But there are some American cities—including one I heard about this morning—that are still marking the occasion even as I write this. So, seizing on this slender occasion, I am writing this post.

The “parade of Cram and Gorge” that Thomas Wolfe described in the above passage occurred in 1928—one of a half-dozen visits he made to Germany from 1926 to 1936.  

His participation in that celebration might have been a little too vigorous, according to Ellen Apperson Brown’s April 2020 essay on Wolfe’s short story on the Website of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial: The aspiring novelist, after downing eight liters of beer, got into a drunken brawl that left him with “a concussion of the brain, 4 scalp wounds, and a broken nose,” along with trips to a police station and hospital, he confessed to his lover of the time, the American set designer Aline Bernstein.

At one point in the short story, Wolfe’s narrator, amid all the “powerful bodies” packed together in this hall, senses that “nothing on earth could resist them—that they must smash anything they came against”—a disturbing premonition of the violence that Germany would unleash under the Nazi regime in the 1930s. But, caught up in the tumult and friendship of those around him, he eventually relegates his unease to the back of his consciousness.

Wolfe would feel even more enthusiastic about the nation in 1935, when he was feted as a major literary figure—an unambiguous embrace of his work that he was not experiencing in the U.S. at the time.

But to his credit, as journalist Andrew Nagorski chronicled in Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, Wolfe came to see the error of his ways in the summer of 1936 during the Munich Olympics, when a German acquaintance laid out for him the mounting economic pressures and violence perpetrated on Jews by the Nazis.

Wolfe’s subsequent dramatic denunciation of the Nazis in the long “I Have a Thing to Tell You” chapter of his posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again led to his books being banned by the regime.

Most celebrations of Oktoberfest here in the U.S. will be closer to the feeling of “imminent and impending happiness” that Wolfe felt as he walked the streets back from this night. But here’s hoping that those who don’t know how to control their appetites will refrain from this festival of food and drink.

(The image accompanying this post, of Oktoberfest 2013 held in Munich, was taken Sept. 21, 2013, by Heribert Pohl.)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Loneliness)

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people -- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul…we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), “God’s Lonely Man,” originally printed in The American Mercury, October 1941, reprinted in The Hills Beyond (1941)

In high school I devoured the four massive novels of Thomas Wolfe (two published in his lifetime, two cobbled together from manuscripts and published posthumously), but was unaware of this piece until the other day.

I suspect that I’m not the only one who hadn’t noticed it: millions of people who’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver undoubtedly don’t know that it was screenwriter Paul Schrader’s tip of the cap to the Wolfe piece.

Most references to “God’s Lonely Man” that I’ve found on the Internet refer to it as an essay; others, as a short story. Virtually all these sources indicate that it was autobiographical. But with Wolfe, how much wasn’t?

In any case, it seems to have been inspired by his childhood and youth in a boardinghouse run by his mother in Asheville, N.C.—in real life, “Old Kentucky Home,” but renamed “Dixieland” in the coming-of-age novel that made his reputation (even as it made him persona non grata at home), Look Homeward, Angel.

When I visited Asheville some years ago, I made it a point to stop at Old Kentucky Home, which over the years became The Thomas Wolfe Memorial. I was fascinated by the stories told about his upbringing. 

With the boy Thomas often required to give up his bedroom at night to accommodate transient visitors of all kinds, I could easily understand the restlessness and alienation—in short, the loneliness—that he wrote about in the above passage.

With all that I learned about the novelist while there, I was deeply saddened to read that, due to Hurricane Helene, this historic site will be closed “indefinitely.”

The Facebook page for the site read: “Due to the intense winds brought on by Hurricane Helene, one of the property’s maple trees has fallen against the historic house. Damage to the structure appears relatively minimal, and our priority in the coming days, as we can safely do so, is to secure the site by having the tree removed and the house thoroughly inspected."

In 1998, due to a still-unsolved act of arson, the house sustained a loss of 20% of the original structure and 15% of its artifact collection. It took nearly six years before it reopened to the public. 

One hopes that the wait won’t be as long this time for admirers of the intensely lyrical novelist that William Faulkner believed possessed ambitions so enormous that he sought to “put all the experience of the human heart on the head of a pin.”

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Paris at Year’s End, Nearly A Century Ago)

“The whole earth seemed to come to life at once. Now that [Francis] Starwick was here, this unfamiliar world, in whose alien life he had struggled like a drowning swimmer, became in a moment wonderful and good. The feeling of numb, nameless terror, rootless desolation, the intolerable sick anguish of homelessness, insecurity, and homesickness, against which he had fought since coming to Paris, and which he had been ashamed and afraid to admit, was now instantly banished. Even the strange dark faces of the French as they streamed past no longer seemed strange, but friendly and familiar, and the moist and languorous air, the soft thick grayness of the skies which had seemed to press down on his naked sides, to permeate his houseless soul like a palpable and viscous substance of numb terror and despair, were now impregnated with all the vital energies of living, with the intoxication of an unspeakable, nameless, infinitely strange and various joy. As they walked across the vast court of the Louvre towards the great arched gateway and all the brilliant traffic of the streets, the enormous dynamic murmur of the mysterious city came to him and stirred his entrails with the sensual premonitions of unknown, glamorous and seductive pleasure. Even the little taxis, boring past with wasp-like speed across the great space of the Louvre and through the sounding arches, now contributed to this sense of excitement, luxury and joy. The shrill and irritating horns sounded constantly through the humid air, and filled his heart with thoughts of New Year: already the whole city seemed astir, alive now with the great carnival of New Year's Eve.”— American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth (1935)

This description of Paris at New Year’s Eve reflected Wolfe’s own time in the city in December 1924.

Quote of the Day (Adam Nicolson, on the Importance of Place)

“Places give access to minds.” — English author Adam Nicolson, How to Be: Life Lessons From the Early Greeks (2023)

What Nicolson had in mind when he wrote this were natural landscapes. But countries, cities, towns—even homes—can play just as important a role in exciting the imagination.

I can think of few better examples than "Old Kentucky Home," a boardinghouse in Asheville, NC, that was the boyhood home of novelist Thomas Wolfe—now preserved as the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site.

In his classic 1929 coming-of-age novel Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe transformed this environment into "Dixieland," a place so chaotic that he slept in a different bed each night because of his mother’s need to accommodate the stream of visitors who, she believed, represented the only means she had of keeping the family from poverty.

As I explained in a May 2012 post, Wolfe recalled to his favorite teacher that he had been “a vagabond since I was seven—with two roofs [his stonecutter father, vehemently opposing wife Julia’s purchase of the property, refused to leave their former house in town] and no home. I moved inward on that house of death and tumult from room to room, as the boarders came with their dollar a day, and their constant rocking on the porch.”

As a youngster, Wolfe dreamed of a life beyond this environment and the hills of western North Carolina. Little could he have imagined that he had already received a lifetime’s worth of material, in the form of his own large and larger-than-life family and the boarders whose stories he couldn’t help overhearing at night—and remembering years later.

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Selfishness and Greed)

“I think we know the forms and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope. I think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed. I think the enemy is blind, but has the brutal power of his blind grab. I do not think the enemy was born yesterday, or … or that we began without the enemy, and that our vision faltered, that we lost the way, and suddenly were in his camp. I think the enemy is old as Time, and evil as Hell, and that he has been here with us from the beginning. I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land. I think he took our people and enslaved them, that he polluted the fountains of our life, took unto himself the rarest treasures of our own possession, took our bread and left us with a crust, and, not content, for the nature of the enemy is insatiate—tried finally to take from us the crust.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Americans’ ‘Almost Quenchless Hope,’ Even Amid the Great Depression)

“It is also true—and this is a curious paradox about America—that these same men who stand upon the corner and wait around on Sunday afternoons for nothing are filled at the same time with an almost quenchless hope, an almost boundless optimism, an almost indestructible belief that something is bound to turn up, something is sure to happen. This is a peculiar quality of the American soul, and it contributes largely to the strange enigma of our life, which is so incredibly mixed of harshness and of tenderness, of innocence and of crime, of loneliness and of good fellowship, of desolation and of exultant hope, of terror and of courage, of nameless fear and of soaring conviction, of brutal, empty, naked, bleak, corrosive ugliness, and of beauty so lovely and so overwhelming that the tongue is stopped by it, and the language for it has not yet been uttered.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on ‘The Ruined People That We Like’)

“[W]ith ruined people it is either love or hate: there is no middle way. The ruined people that we like are those who desperately have died, and lost their lives because they loved life dearly, and had that grandeur that makes such people spend prodigally the thing they love the best, and risk and lose their lives because it is so precious to them, and die at length because the seeds of life are in them. It is only the people that love life who die in this way— and these are the ruined people that we like.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth (1935)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on the ‘Hunger That So Haunts and Hurts Americans’)

“All that we know is that having everything we yet hold nothing, that feeling the wild song of this great earth upwelling in us we have no words to give it utterance. All that we know is that here the passionate enigma of our lives is so bitterly expressed, the furious hunger that so haunts and hurts Americans so desperately felt--that being rich, we all are yet so poor, that having an incalculable wealth we have no way of spending it, that feeling an illimitable power we yet have found no way of using it.

“Therefore we hurtle onward in the dark across Virginia, we hurtle onward in the darkness down a million roads, we hurtle onward driven by our hunger down the blind and brutal tunnel of ten thousand furious and kaleidoscopic days, the victims of the cruel impulse of a million chance and fleeting moments, without a wall at which to thrust the shoulder of our strength, a roof to hide us in our nakedness, a place to build in, or a door.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), Of Time and The River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth (1935)

This Day in Theater History (George Pierce Baker, Teacher of US Drama Giants, Dies)

Jan. 6, 1935— George Pierce Baker, an academic who influenced more than a generation of notable American playwrights—including Nobel, Pulitzer and Oscar winners—through innovative theater courses at Harvard and Yale, died in New York City at age 66.

I alluded briefly to Baker in a prior post on the unsuccessful playwriting experiences of student Thomas Wolfe, who caricatured him as “Professor Hatcher” in his 1935 novel Of Time and the River. But I have felt that the professor deserved a more extensive treatment that did justice to his career—and made his name known to people who had no idea he existed.

Before Baker arrived, the U.S. theater scene, influenced by Henrik Ibsen, was moving away from melodrama, spectacle and farce and more toward realism, but there were no significant counterparts to Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Synge, and other European giants of the stage. Starting in 1905, however, with the introduction of his famous Workshop 47 course, the likes of Eugene O’Neill, Philip Barry, Sidney Howard, S.N. Behrman and Edward Sheldon began to write in a strongly personal mode while learning the rudiments of practical dramatic construction in his class.

In an introduction to a collection of the plays of Barry, States of Grace, New Yorker critic Brendan Gill noted that students in Workshop 47 “met in cramped quarters in Lower Massachusetts Hall and acted out plays on a makeshift stage in the little Agassiz Theatre at Radcliffe.” The quarters were unprepossessing, but this also meant that the stakes were low.

The advantage that meant to his students was summed up by one, drama critic John Mason Brown, nearly 30 years later: “As a rule, the good plays that Baker's more famous pupils wrote were written long after they had ceased to work with him. They were helped in writing these good plays because of the patience he showed in dealing with the bad ones they had written for him.”

The photo accompanying this post gives a pretty good impression of Baker in class: peering gravely at students from behind his pince-nez. That look, initially, could appear cold. But students soon found what they needed here: a forum where, free to experiment, they could make mistakes and learn, and, throughout the process, encouragement to continue.

Baker’s perception could, in fact, be quite acute. In Barry’s case, he urged the young man to “amuse in such a way that one is thinking about the play afterwards—not exactly in amusement, but thoughtfully and pleasantly.” This, in fact, became the template of the creator of such sparkling but rueful comedies as The Philadelphia Story, The Animal Kingdom and Holiday.

A graduate of Harvard himself, Baker began at his alma mater as a professor of rhetoric. Especially in the first years of Workshop 47 (named for its place in the school’s catalog), many in the university’s administration undoubtedly wish he had stuck with rhetoric, for they remained suspicious of the utility of his playwriting class.

In 1925, after a generation of wearily enduring this placement at Harvard’s periphery--and unable to persuade it to offer a degree (not just a class) in playwriting--Baker took up Yale’s offer to become first chair of its Department of Drama in the School of Fine Arts. There he remained until 1933, when illness forced him to cease teaching.

Howard, who had his first Broadway success a half dozen years after taking Workshop 47—and who would go on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning play They Knew What They Wanted as well as the screenplay for Gone With The Wind—paid tribute to Baker by observing that “he taught his students truths more valid than technique. He taught them that plays are important and hard to write; that few subjects are worthy of dramatization; that characters must be imagined beneath their words; that art is an obligation, not a Sunday suit."

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, to His Favorite Teacher)

“I was without a home—a vagabond since I was seven—with two roofs and no home. I moved inward on that house of death and tumult from room to room, as the boarders came with their dollar a day, and their constant rocking on the porch. My overloaded heart was bursting with its packed weight of loneliness and terror; I was strangling, without speech, without articulation, in my own secretions—groping like a blind sea-thing with no eyes and a thousand feelers toward light, toward life, toward beauty and order, out of that hell of chaos, greed, and cheap ugliness—and then I found you, when else I should have died, you mother of my spirit who fed me with light. Do you think I have forgotten? Do you think I ever will?” —Thomas Wolfe, letter of May 30, 1927, to his former teacher, Margaret Roberts, in The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, edited by Elizabeth Nowell (1956)

In this season of graduations and moving on from one grade to another, most of us, if we have amounted to anything in life, can remember a teacher who glimpsed possibilities that we never knew we had. Sometimes we tell them what they mean to us; more often, they die or move on to who knows where before we can express what a difference they made in our lives.

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was one who got the chance to thank his teacher, and as seen above, he did not squander the opportunity. He was a gangling boy of 11 when the Asheville, N.C. schoolteacher Margaret Roberts picked his paper out of 60 in a writing contest and told her husband, “This boy, Tom Wolfe, is a genius! And I want him for our school next year.” For the next four years, at Orange Street School, where her husband John was principal, Margaret fired Wolfe’s imagination. The boy needed that stimulation because his home environment, a boardinghouse called Old Kentucky Home, was so chaotic that Wolfe slept in a different bed each night because of his mother’s need to accommodate visitors.

Wolfe being Wolfe, he had to turn Ms. Roberts into a character, in the novel that made his reputation and made him persona non grata in Asheville for awhile, Look Homeward, Angel. His depiction of her husband as someone who didn’t measure up to his wife’s sensitive spirit hurt her and led to a seven-year break in her friendship with her best student. But they reconciled again before his untimely death.

None of us can summon all the words and thoughts Wolfe showered on "the mother of my spirit." But a thank-you to those holding among the most thankless jobs in the country--the ones who motivated and inspired us when we needed it most--wouldn't hurt.

(The image accompanying this post was taken of Wolfe in 1937 by photographer Carl Van Vechten, and is now part of the Van Vechten Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.)

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Spring in the City)

“Spring came that year like magic and like music and like song. One day its breath was in the air, a haunting premonition of its spirit filled the hearts of men with its transforming loveliness, wreaking its sudden and incredible sorcery upon gray streets, gray pavements, and on gray faceless tides of manswarm ciphers. It came like music faint and far, it came with triumph and a sound of singing in the air, with lutings of sweet bird-cries at the break of day and the high swift passing of a wing, and one day it was there upon the city streets with its strange sudden cry of green, its sharp knife of wordless joy and pain.”—Thomas Wolfe, “The Train and the City,” in The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, edited by Francis E. Skipp (1987)

I took the image accompanying this post this past Friday at Madison Square Park, in New York City.