Letters from Leviathan

THE LETTERS OF THOMAS WOLFE (797 pp.)--Edited by Elizabeth Nowell--Scribner ($10).

The novels of Thomas Wolfe often seem written at the top of his voice, shouted in the mingled accents of Coleridge, Melville, Tolstoy, Joyce and Walt Whitman, accompanied by the basso profundo of Ecclesiastes. But Wolfe was more than an echo chamber. Though writing in the manner of many men, what he had to say was pre-eminently his own, and he came excitingly close to creating the long-anticipated Great American Novel.

Wolfe speaks for and to the young, particularly to young men who know instinctively that "it is good to eat, to drink, to sleep, to fish, to swim, to run, to travel to strange cities, to ride on land, sea and in the air upon great machines, to love a woman, to try to make a beautiful thing." He speaks against the naysayers who consider such occupations futile, and orders them to "go bury themselves in the earth and get eaten by worms to see if that is less futile." Tom Wolfe swings a bludgeon against lawyers, pedants, critics, Communists, boosters, money-changers, sophisticates of all sorts, artistic women and snobbish men. He showers indiscriminate love on all of the world's loveless.

But, especially, he hungers for his native land, so much so that he can devote pages to assuaging "the whole intolerable memory of exile and nostalgia" by a recitation of American names: the States, the Indian tribes, the railways, the rivers and mountains and towns.

Everything that Wolfe thought or felt or feared or hoped for had instantly to be put on paper. And such was his certainty of genius and conviction that everything he wrote would be pored over for years to come, that he scarcely ever dashed off a hasty or unconsidered line. Even letters that were never intended to be sent were rewritten, annotated, polished. This bulky volume of his Letters is the record of a man's life, from the childish scrawl of an eight-year-old ("It has been raining here for two or three days") to the moving, final word of a dying man of 37 who has a "hunch" that the end is near.

"The Cold Grey Dawn." Wolfe lived his few years as fully as a man can. A physical giant, he was always conscious of being "six-foot-six in a world of five-foot-eight." He loved to drink, to argue the strange vexed state of man "until the cold grey dawn and the last milk wagon have gone by," to prowl the nighttime streets alone, reveling in his aloneness. He quarreled with everyone, then endlessly apologized, and no friendship was safe from his eternal analysis. Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe's editor at Scribner's, once pleaded long before their final break: "If you have to leave, go ahead and leave, but for Heaven's sake, don't talk about it any more!"

His relations with women were even more chaotic. All the great loves of his life were women much older than himself.

The most enduring was the late Aline Bernstein, a theatrical designer with a son Wolfe's age, who became Esther Jack in The Web and the Rock. The present volume contains none of Wolfe's personal letters to her, since Aline Bernstein had intended to edit them herself. But there are enough letters to other women to indicate the line of Wolfe's attachments: first, his passionate onslaught; then his impatience on achieving (or failing to achieve) success; finally, his fairly brutal and exhaustively documented disillusion. Like many young men, Wolfe talked longingly of marriage until it seemed possible--then he was off and away like a roweled stallion.

Wolfe knew his literary defects as well as any of his critics. Of his prolixity, he confessed that if he were reporting a crime, "the murderer would be in Canada before I had finished describing where the body was found." But he also knew that tidiness and brevity -- for him -- could mean disaster. To Perkins he wrote: "Restrain my adjectives, by all means, discipline my adverbs, moderate the technical extravagances of my incondite exuberance, but don't derail the train, don't take the Pacific Limited and switch it down the siding towards Hogwart Junction."

He sounded his defiance most sharply in answering F. Scott Fitzgerald's advice to write more like Gustave (Madame Bovary) Flaubert, who "has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe ... will come along and say presently." Snarled Wolfe: "Just remember that although Madame Bovary in your opinion may be a great book, Tristam Shandy is indubitably a great book because it boils and pours ... A great writer is not only a leaver-outer but also a putter-inner, and Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dostoievsky were great putter-inners and will be remembered for what they put in ... as long as Monsieur Flaubert will be remembered for what he left out."

"Your Guts Will Ache." Despite his habitual wordiness, Wolfe could catch the feel of a place in a single line. To Elizabeth Nowell, his literary agent and the editor of this volume, he described the Midwest as "fat as a hog and so fertile you felt that if you stuck a fork in the earth the juice would spurt." Brooklyn was a "vast sprawl upon the face of the earth, which no man alive or dead has yet seen in its foul, dismal entirety."

When Wolfe was at home, he thirsted for the far cities of the world; when abroad, he longed for home. From London in November he wrote: "If you have sat in the parlor reeking with its gravedamp chill, if then you go out into the steaming air into a street of villas, catch your bus and ride home through vast areas of drab brick, lightened by an occasional pub in which you see a few sodden wretches mournfully ruminant over a glass of bitter beer--if you have gone through this, then, my boy . . . your guts will ache with passion for the Happy Land, the glorious country with the bright Sunday evening wink of the Chop Suey signs, the roar of the elevated, the sounds of the radio . . . and the peaceful noise of millions of Jews in the Bronx slowly turning the 237 pages of the New York Sunday Times"

The letters are packed with humor, both conscious and unconscious. For a girl from New Orleans, Wolfe wrote a delightfully bawdy poem called A.D.-2024, and, flying up the Rhone Valley, he looked down from a height of 3,000 ft. and saw "a little moving dot in one of the fields shoveling manure: it looked so much like a critic that I have not wanted to finish my letter since." High comedy results from Wolfe's continual difficulties with he friends and relatives who considered hat he had behaved abominably in puting them in his books. After the publication of Look Homeward, Angel almost the entire population of Asheville, N.C. was eager to lynch the author. Wolfe and devoted Editor Perkins laboriously explained to one and all the writer's need to draw lis fictional people from experience. But when Perkins read the manuscript of No More Rivers, he too was outraged to find himself and his Scribner associates pilloried in Wolfe's savage prose. And Wolfe's own turn had come when Aline Bernstein, in Three Bine Suits, gave her version of their love affair. Sounding exactly like one of his own victims, Tom wrote her a note complaining that the book would "get pawed over and whispered about by wretched, verminous little people who want to poke around, pick out identities and gloat over . . . scandalous morsels."

"The Shortest Distance." Wolfe's preoccupations in the letters are often dated --the stock-market crash, Naziism--and sometimes remarkably contemporary. He anticipated, for instance, the notion of the "other-directed" man--but with more affection for America than is usually shown by sociologists. In 1937 Wolfe argued that the standardization of U.S. life resulted from the fact that every American in a fundamental sense is a surveyor: "America has really never yet, in any profound and essential way, been explored--it has rather been surveyed. The first problem of the people who settled in this immense and spatial continent was not to explore it but to 'lay it out'--to find the shortest distance between two points, to get the best and easiest grade across the continental divide . . . We have hunted always for the short cut, the practicable way . . . Well this is surveyordom--it is not exploring."

Wolfe was a loving explorer of America ; the short cut was never his way. The Letters cannot--and should not--be read at a sitting. Like a dish of Thomas Wolfe's own beloved Carolina pecans, they should be dipped into, not gulped. Much of a man's life is here and far more of his internal agonies, aspirations, despairs and creative frenzies than are ordinarily found in the correspondence of a great writer. But, best of all, it is impossible to read the Letters without wanting to go hungrily back to the novels that--for all their dithyrambs, apostrophes, narcissism and logorrhea--go deeply into the mighty American spirit.

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