Burning, Burning, Burning

YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN -- Thomas Wolfe-- Harper ($3).

"Something has spoken to me in the night . . ." wrote Thomas Clayton Wolfe on the last page of his last novel -- You Can't Go Home Again -- "something has spoken in the night, and told me that I shall die, I know not where." Wolfe died in Baltimore in 1938. He was 37. He had published two long novels, Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935). Then as if in premonition of his death, Wolfe began to write so furiously that he became the first U. S. writer to leave two complete posthumous novels in the hands of his publisher. They were two of the longest one-volume novels (some 700 pages apiece) ever written --twin parts of a total autobiographical recall. First part was The Web and the Rock (1939). Second part was You Can't Go Home Again, published this week.

Both novels are about George Webber, a bulky, simian creature with knee-length dangling arms and a Webster-length vocabulary. In The Web and the Rock, George left his home town, Libya Hill, Old Catawba (North Carolina), to become a famous writer in Manhattan. Much of The Web and the Rock was taken up with the fits & starts and impassioned prose of a love affair between would-be Writer George and wealthy, married, Jewish Scene Designer Esther Jack. When love threatened to supersede writing, George fled to Europe. You Can't Go Home Again resumes this unsatisfactory affair after George's return. But the novel is only incidentally about George and Esther. It is about: 1) the publication of George's first novel, Home to Our Mountains; 2) George's filial literary relationship with his editor, Foxhall Edwards (in real life Scribner's book-wise Maxwell Perkins); 3) the scandal which George's novel caused in Libya Hill and the anguish this caused George; 4) the real-estate boom and moral deterioration of Libya Hill, and the town's collapse along with the rest of the U. S. in the 1929 crash; 5) George's four years of soul searching in sordid, proletarian South Brooklyn; 6) George's life in England while writing another book; 7) George's two-day adventures with Novelist Lloyd McHarg (in real life Sinclair Lewis, who plugged Thomas Wolfe in his Nobel Prize address); 8) George's return to Germany and dissatisfaction with the Nazis, although George was one of Nazi Germany's favorite U. S. authors (as was Thomas Wolfe); 9) George's return to the U. S. and break with Foxhall Edwards (as Wolfe broke with Perkins) because Editor Edwards insisted on believing that men are and always will be what they always have been. George believed that within limits there was hope for them.

Admirers of Thomas Wolfe (their number is legion and their literary tempers are short) may hail You Can't Go Home Again as the culminating Wolfe masterpiece. To others it may seem like rereading The Web and the Rock. There is the same mass and specific gravity of wordage. There is the same tidal flux and reflux of language. There is Wolfe's constant continental sense of the U. S., which sometimes turns into a Whitmanic bill of particulars. There are the same major characters, all from life, and the same unreality surrounding them. There are the same successes with minor characters, the same fine ear for idiom. There is the same power to create fantastic episodes, like Piggy Logan's inane marionette show, or the pathetic account of the little Jewish lawyer who attempts to flee the Third Reich and gets caught. There is Wolfe's vast, ever-welling pity for all lowly, downcast little people who mainly populate the earth, his deep, constantly iterated, constantly irritated concern for his integrity as man and artist. Above all, there is Thomas Wolfe's cosmic sense of Thomas Wolfe, motelike but meaningful against immensity.

For Wolfe is the only real character in his posthumous novels. The others are props and foils, caught up and jolted into a semblance of animation by the Wolfian earthquake. Thomas Wolfe spent his short life trying to experience everything in the world with all five senses at once, and to communicate the experience in a series of verbal landslides. Sometimes they piled up in masses of magnificent rhetoric: "And we? Made of our father's earth, blood of his blood, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh--born like our father here to live and strive, here to win through or be defeated--here, like all the other men who went before us, not too nice or dainty for the uses of this earth--here to live, to suffer and to die--O brothers, like our fathers in their time, we are burning, burning, burning in the night." But Thomas Wolfe might have lived longer to write greater things, if someone had explained to him one simple word: Relax!

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