BOOKS: Unpredictable Imagination

The death last week of Thomas Clayton Wolfe shocked critics with the realization that, of all American novelists of his generation, he was the one from whom most had been expected. He had almost finished his third novel when he contracted pneumonia in Seattle two months ago and was apparently recovering when an infection spread to his kidneys and heart. Rushed to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore, he was operated on twice during the week, died of an acute cerebral infection, at 38.

The puzzle of Thomas Wolfe’s fiction was its combination of wild romanticism and drab, literal reporting, a lyric intensity that often gave way to hollow word-mongering, a torrential eloquence which was often spent on wooden characters, commonplace situations. Critics agreed that Thomas Wolfe was a genius, that he was inspired, uninhibited, undisciplined and unpredictable, that he had not fulfilled his potentialities. He had shown his ability to take the ordinary, humdrum, back yard happenings of everyday existence — the squabbles in a small-town boardinghouse, the race of a train across the New Jersey flats, the thoughts of a newsboy carrying the morning papers over his route — and, by the freshness and immediacy of his prose, transform them into experiences gilded with enchantment.

Despite Wolfe’s fecund imagination, his range was limited : He had only one story to tell and he wrote brilliantly of only one setting — his home town, Asheville, N. C. — and of only one family — his own. The central character of his novels, Eugene Gant, was Wolfe himself. But though his story was literally true to Wolfe’s life, Eugene always seemed unreal, his creative torments unconvincing; a product of Whitman or Melville rather than of Asheville.

The living parts of Wolfe’s novels are their pictures of the Gant family. Old Gant, bursting into the house with his arms filled with food, ranting and raving and getting drunk; Eliza with her endless monologues, her shrewdness, her hardness, her gasping, awkward embarrassment at Gant’s rare displays of tenderness. Unlike any other characters in American fiction, these people and their neighbors seemed to be commonplace, recognizable, small-town figures who have suddenly grown more than life size, with such titanic appetites and emotions that their simplest domestic squabbles were like the struggles of giants. And Asheville, although Wolfe never lost sight of its everyday life, was a fitting stage for their struggles: It was half lazy southern town, half pushing resort, but sometimes—as when Eugene saw it early in the morning on his paper route —it was mysteriously transformed and silent, and a vision of what life there might be collided violently with a knowledge of what it was.

To Harpers, his new publishers, Thomas Wolfe had turned over a million words of a new novel, and a book called Western Journey, describing a 10,000-mile automobile trip across country. For his literary executor he picked Maxwell Perkins of Scribners, who published his first books. The plainest fact about Wolfe’s development was that he was turning away from the theme of the artist’s conflict which had preoccupied him in his earlier books; he had, as he had said, realized that “one can’t go home again, and that the home of every man is in the future, to shape and use it as he may.” Because he was searching for inspiration in new fields and seemed to have freed himself of the source of the greatest weakness of his work, critics had hoped, in the words of Harry Hansen, that Thomas Wolfe might be the one writer who could succeed in combining “the poetry and realism of American life.”