Mother and Son

THOMAS WOLFE'S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER--Scribner ($3).

The father of the late novelist Thomas Clayton Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River) was a stonecutter of great rhetorical influence on his son. Echoes of his surging speech resound through Wolfe's novels. But the novelist's mother, a sinewy woman still living at the age of 83 in Asheville, N.C., was probably an even greater influence. She is a positive personality. "You told me," her son once wrote to Julia Elizabeth Wolfe, "that three great Americans had their birthday in February, and when I looked puzzled you said that you were the third." Readers may regret that Mrs. Wolfe's letters to her son are not included in this one-way correspondence, but they will appreciate her remarks as quoted by John Terry in his introduction.

Thomas Wolfe stood six feet, seven inches tall and was broad in proportion. As a child, says Mrs. Wolfe, Tom was breast-fed "until he was three and a half years old," slept with his mother "until he was a great big boy." Only when Tom got "what old-fashioned people called lice," did his mother consent to cut his "beautiful curls." She still clung to him, however, and kept him in short pants until two years before he went to the University of North Carolina.

A Mother Will Know. At 20, he caught a heavy cold, and when he took his handkerchief from his mouth after a coughing spell, he saw with horror "a tiny spot of blood on it." Life, that had hitherto been "desirable and glorious," was charged suddenly and forever with the terror of death. This terror spurred Wolfe's rebellion against those who urged him to look for security in life--"the crawling, abject, bird-in-a-hand theory." To his mother's plea that he settle down to teach in Asheville, he replied "I must make or ruin myself from this time on, by my own pattern." But for the time being he depended on his mother's money.

He went to the late Professor George Pierce Baker's drama course at Harvard. He told his mother: "By God I'll write a great play. ... All the critics in the world may say it's good but a man's own mother will know." His letters revealed his desperate unease, his steady struggle to convince his mother that her money was being well spent at Harvard, and to show Asheville that his way of life was a superior one. He would not come home and "stagnate," but if his "beautiful dreams" came true he "would return home like a hero." If he failed--"I think I would kill myself." When his mother did not seem to reassure him, he petulantly protested: "You don't want me at home, you said nothing about my returning. . . . You have about deserted me. . . . How in God's name can I believe you would forget me in a year's time?"

Leaving Harvard with his plays unplayed on Broadway, he bowed to the "inexorable circumstances" of poverty and took a teaching job at New York University.

A Bell Strikes 12. The divergence between his aims and his mother's was growing wider. In the boom years Mrs. Wolfe speculated in real estate. Tom wished her success, but warned her against losing "the capacity for enjoyment. . . ." In the strange mixture of bad, sincere, flamboyant prose that ran through all his writing, he spoke his unhappy mind: "The golden years of my life are slipping by on stealthy feet at nightfall; there is a footprint in the dark, a bell strikes 12, and the flying year has gone. . . . The great play is yet unwritten; the great novel beats with futile hands against the portals of my brain. Proud fool! . . . Shall my dust taste better than a peddler's when the worms are at me?"

Wolfe filled his letters with the artist's theme song -- the need of money, and the hatred of it. His only extravagance was satisfying his huge appetite, his "ravening gut." "I have a big body, and a devouring mind which will never let me rest. . . . And when that mind has worked a few hours on books, papers, creation-- it calls for a different sort of food-- meat, potatoes, pie."

Of the huge Rhinebeck estate where he spent an occasional weekend, he wrote: "If I had one tenth what those people have, I'd be a great man ten years quicker." He still felt anguish at being in his mother's debt; he hoped to repay her and assert his superiority by the little boy's revenge of becoming famous. "I shall be great --if I do not die too soon -- and you will be known as my mother." During a 1924 trip through Europe he pleaded: "Please, if you are able, stand by me a little longer."

Terrible Names, and All. A year later he was in England again, despondent at hearing from his mother "only once in two or three months." He sent her curt post cards ("Brighton, Eng. Dear Mama: --This is England's great shore resort for poor people. That explains my being here."). He worked on his novel, resolved to dedicate it to "the best and truest friend I have ever had -- the one person who has given love, comfort and understanding to my lonely and disordered life."*

In 1929 the psychological tide turned. For Mrs. Wolfe that year meant the decline of real-estate values; for her son, publication of Look Homeward, Angel. Wolfe's thinly disguised Asheville portraits set the whole town buzzing with curiosity and indignation. Mrs. Wolfe sat up reading the book until 3 a.m. "Sometimes I'd laugh," she said, "but again I'd cry. It was ridiculous in some ways, but I didn't look upon it as being anything serious." Her daughter Mabel thought otherwise. "I understand," she said, "that Tom has written up the family and the people and -- has given them terrible names, and all." "Why, that's all right," said ambitious Mrs. Wolfe, "even if he calls me old Caroline Peavine. I says, 'Why, if he makes a success of it,' why I says, 'I'll stand by. . . .' "

But it was Wolfe's turn to stand by. In a London paper he read of the failure of Asheville's Central Bank, wrote promptly to his mother that the family need not starve "as long as I have a penny." And, confidently: "If I am broke I can always get more." His letters, apart from indignation over Asheville's reaction to his novel, became more relaxed. His bitterness over his home town's commercialism turned to pity at its depression plight ("I hope a little wisdom has been left as a kind of dividend for all their grief").

Calamity At Home. Wolfe went home to Asheville at last, described his visit as a "calamity." He got no peace, was glad-handed and smothered, says Mrs. Wolfe, by the very people who had been most bitter over his first novel. "He didn't care to come back." But when mother and son met in New York, there was no lack of emotion. Over enormous steaks, they talked volubly, laughed till they cried, shared endless memories.

In the summer of 1938, 18 years after he had seen "the tiny spot of blood," Thomas Wolfe contracted pneumonia, died of a cerebral infection. In Asheville, says his mother: "I think they now see [Look Homeward, Angel] in its right light." She has also confided: "I believe I could have been a writer myself if I'd had a little more training."

* Scenic designer Aline Bernstein.

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