Books: Last Words

THE HILLS BEYOND—Thomas Wolfe —Harper ($2.50).

When the late, sometimes great Thomas Wolfe died he left the manuscripts of The Web and the Rock (TIME, June 26, 1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (TIME, Sept. 23, 1940), and two huge packing cases which contained, along with “pots and pans, old shoes . . . discarded hats,” etc., about a million words. His friend and editor Edward C. Aswell, having put the two novels into shape, got busy with the contents of the packing cases. The Hills Beyond, announced as the last of Wolfe’s books, is the result. A scrupulous job of editing—”The object was to select the best, and that only”—it contains some of Wolfe’s best work, and one or two old shoes besides.

Not a novel, The Hills Beyond is mostly short flights of fiction. The opening piece on Grover Gant (who died early in Look Homeward, Angel) is a short, beautifully disciplined work, in a style of which Wolfe is popularly supposed to have been incapable. Chickamauga, which Wolfe slicked up unnaturally in the vain hope of selling it to the Satevepost, is a respectable experiment in the U.S. vernacular, as un-Wolfeishly plain as weathered bone. Also included: a steely-clean character sketch of a rich old New Yorker waking up; an almost religious essay on loneliness; a hard spanking of a literary critic who might be William Lyon Phelps or Henry Seidel Canby; a Swiftian attack on Irishmen; a few poignant pages on Cousin Arnold in which is resurrected the snorting ghost of that great comic character Bascom Hawke.

The title-piece consists of ten propitious chapters of the novel Wolfe was working on when he died. The Hills Beyond was to be the story of the ancestors of George Webber. In these chapters Wolfe laid out a brilliant panorama of 19th-Century Southern society, its law, war, murder and myth. Somewhere past midstream in his transition from wild lyric romanticism to humanism, this prose here lost in effusive splendor, but gained in wit, firmness and control.

In an afterword on Wolfe and his working methods, Editor Aswell mentions, among other unpublished manuscripts, the novel K 19, in which Wolfe tried to dispose of his obsession for trains and which, greatly reduced, became the tremendous first section of Of Time and the River. He adds a ghostlike fact: The number of the Pullman which took Wolfe’s family, on the same train with his dead body, back to Asheville, was K 19.