Legend of a Giant

THOMAS WOLFE (441 pp.)--Elizabeth Nowell--Doubleday ($5.95).

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.

--Joseph Conrad Thomas Wolfe was an undisciplined, ungovernable American Conrad whose sea was the land of his birth. His words, seeking "to find language again in its primitive sinews," rioted onto paper in millions, growing out of him, over him, and sometimes beyond him. In the West a few years before he died, he saw a sequoia for the first time. He stared upward for a moment in unbelieving silence, then ran to the big tree, his long arms stretched wide. It was a boyish gesture, but this man of 35 still believed that he might draw into his embrace the biggest thing that lived.

He strode along in his size 13 shoes, embarrassed by his 6-ft. 6-in., 240-lb. frame, carrying his eccentricities with him until fame had transformed them into legend. He seldom washed, changed his shirt or had a haircut; he could live for hours, even days, on cigarettes and coal black coffee, then eat twelve eggs, two quarts of milk and an entire loaf of bread in one breakfast. Wild-eyed and forever talking with all the intensity of his written prose, he sprayed everyone in range with reservoirs of spittle from the corners of his mouth. Some thought him ludicrous, but thousands worshiped the ground his feet never quite touched. Sooner or later he accused all his friends of tormenting him, but he needed them badly, and once, at a party in his new Manhattan apartment, he reached to the ceiling with a black crayon and wrote: "Merry Christmas to all my friends and love from Tom."

This first full-scale biography of Wolfe, by the late Elizabeth Nowell, his literary agent who four years ago edited an impressive collection of his letters, overflows with the portrait of an overflowing man.

Mother & Son. She writes economically about his early years in Asheville, N.C., where his mother kept a boarding house called the Old Kentucky Home, his father ran a marble yard, and each parent occupied a separate dwelling. Wolfe's seven brothers and sisters drifted aimlessly back and forth between the two, sleeping where they pleased; but the youngest child stayed with his mother. A little boy with long curls, Thomas Clayton Wolfe was not weaned until he was 3 1/2, and slept beside his mother until he was "a great big boy." All this is background for the two main relationships in the novelist's adult life: his six-year, mother-son love affair with a married woman nearly twice his age, and his eight-year, father-son working partnership with Editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribner.

Mrs. Aline Bernstein, who became Esther Jack in The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again, did have a husband, although the biography skips by him in one hurried sentence. Theodore Bernstein looked away while his wife entered wholeheartedly into a love affair with the 25-year-old Wolfe, set him up in a studio on Manhattan's Eighth Street, cooked gourmet meals for him while he wrote, helped add to the slim support he was getting from his mother and from his teaching job at New York University, and above all gave him the sort of encouragement he needed to produce Look Homeward, Angel. Wolfe was an oppressive lover. He was sickly jealous, perhaps fearful that he might be counter-cuckolded by Bernstein, and so boorish that he constantly called her "my Jew" and made such entries in his diary as "Met Jew at 11:00." When he eventually cut himself off from her because he thought that the affair was stifling his career, she wrote him letters signed in her own blood and even attempted suicide.

Father & Son. What Aline could not do for his career, Scribner's famed Maxwell Perkins did. The editor trotted to keep up with him on extravagant walks (the 6 1/2 miles completely around Manhattan's Central Park), sat evening after evening drinking with him at the Chatham Walk, where Wolfe could feel the rumble of his beloved trains from the New York Central tracks beneath Park Avenue, and above all shaped Wolfe's raw, spontaneous, poetic prose into Look Homeward, Angel. In time he became alarmed as Wolfe's great fungus of words threatened to expand beyond control. Once, Perkins asked him to write a brief description of the hero's reaction to his father's death, and Wolfe came back within hours with thousands of words on the life history of the doctor who attended the father's final illness. Eventually, with Wolfe cursing and threatening, Perkins decided to take the manuscript away from him (it was packed in crates). Otherwise, Of Time and the River might never have been published.

When Wolfe left Scribner in 1937, breaking with the man and the firm that had accompanied him to eminence, he said it was for ideological reasons: Perkins would not let him graft his passing romance with Marxism onto the surface of his novels. But Biographer Nowell insists on a different reason: Critic Bernard

De Voto had written that the novelist lacked the critical faculty essential to any complete artist, and was merely a collaborator with Perkins on the Scribner "assembly line." Wolfe cut himself free to prove that he could go it on his own. He died of brain tuberculosis four months after submitting a 1,200,000-word manuscript to his new editor at Harper's, who sliced it up to make The Web and the Rock, You Can't Go Home Again, and a book of short stories. In this last torrent of words, the influence of Maxwell Perkins seems badly wanting.

Authentic and painstaking, Elizabeth Nowell's biography has some deficiencies: she takes Wolfe and his self-appraisals at face value (a risky faith); she gives too much space to business detail of publishing; she is repetitive. But the biography is charged with unforgettable vignettes--Wolfe absorbing the black scowls of Adolf Hitler as he whoops hoarsely for Negro Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; complaining that "I can always find plenty of women to sleep with but the kind of woman that is really hard for me to find is a typist who can read my writing"; stuffing his ears with cotton for days after visiting the house of Beethoven and being reminded of the composer's deafness; walking up 49th Street under Writer Nancy Hale's window chanting "I wrote 10,000 words today"; and finally, lying dead in Maryland, survived by the ringing fact that nowhere in the region could a coffin be found that was big enough for Thomas Wolfe.

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