Is Genius Enough?

THOMAS WOLFE (196 pp.)—Herbert J. Muller—New Directions ($2).

It has now been nearly ten years since Thomas Wolfe died, and in that decade his reputation with the critics has steadily declined, while his popularity with the public has increased. His admirers see Wolfe as a rock-solid, almost primitive spokesman of the American people, whose novels are a grandiose articulation of their own vague, subterranean but insistent attitudes towards the puzzles of human life, and whose writing absorbed the textures, aromas, frustrations, daydreams and tragedies of America with an amplitude unequaled by any writer since Whitman.

Dissenters grant Wolfe a large talent, but claim that his technical deficiencies prevented him from fully realizing his potentialities. Such critics are appalled by what they consider Wolfe’s undisciplined and often pointless verbosity, his naive egotism and his outrageous lack of organized knowledge about the modern world. Bernard De Voto summed up this view in four words: “Genius is not enough.”

In his cautious and sympathetic study of Wolfe, Herbert Muller tries to strike a balance between the two extremes. Probably Muller’s temperate judgment is close to the truth, but readers who feel strongly about Wolfe are likely to become impatient with his fence straddling. Wolfe is the sort of author who inspires lyricism or invective, not judicious interpretation. Muller is therefore up against it, and knows it.

Ludicrous & Loving. Ready to grant most of the criticisms made of Wolfe, he admits that “no other important modern writer has appeared so often naive, extravagant, maudlin, ludicrous.” But the strength of Wolfe’s novels lies in their deep and loving evocation of significant segments of U.S. life; Thomas Wolfe’s “image is the great national myth, the American Dream.” No one else has so vividly rendered the inner tensions of ordinary, unintellectual small-town Americans—and done so in the traditional rolling phrases of the American declamatory style which Wolfe inherited from Whitman and Melville.

But the most daring and presumptuous thing about Wolf was his ambition to pour all of American experience through the filter of his own consciousness. All his novels are intensely autobiographical, self-centered as no other American writer has dared to be. And yet Wolfe claimed for them a universal relevance that no other American writer dared to claim.

Thunderbolt Language. His first novels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, were overwhelming performances: in the face of their mass and virtuosity, what was the use of rebelling against his frequent abuse of the language that he handled as if he were God hurling thunderbolts?

Then came Wolfe’s difficulties. As his thick flood of words rolled into his publishers’ offices, there to be diked and channeled, it became clear that Wolfe would never develop any controlling ideas that could give esthetic unity or moral significance to his work.

His most famous single sentence declared that “I believe we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found.” Wolfe did convincingly demonstrate in his novels what he meant by declaring Americans to be lost. Lusting to record his every private experience with thoroughness and passion, he did manage to portray individual loneliness in a mechanized society and the conflicts of a world torn, between accumulation of money and development of personality. But what did Wolfe mean by his affirmation that “we shall be found?” Wolfe was himself lost; he had only the foggiest notions about modern science and modern thought and throughout his life he indulged in cracker-barrel sneering at intellectuals. He was a confused boy with a great gift for language, whose significance as a writer was, as critic Alfred Kazin put it, “that he expanded his boyhood into a lifetime.”

When, in his later novels, he tried to achieve a more objective and disciplined mode of expression, his writing fell flat. Restraint was not for him. The attempt to cut away his faults inevitably meant a destruction of his virtues; both poured from the same volcanic source.