Lit

By Stefan Kanfer

"O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again." Lines like that were once the cynosure of adolescents and the despair of writers like Ernest Hemingway, who called their creator, Thomas Wolfe, a "glandular giant with the brains and the guts of three mice . . . the over-bloated Li'l Abner of literature."

In the '30s, few agreed with that verdict. Wolfe was a best-selling author celebrated for his gargantuan appetites, his 600-page novels with their catalogs of sensual impressions, and his operatic love affair with Stage Designer Aline Bernstein, whom he alternately praised as someone who afforded him the "happiest hours I have ever known" and a "titillative New York Jew." His autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel was a sensation, and the title of his third book, You Can't Go Home Again, became a rallying cry. William Faulkner later appraised him as one of the most important contemporary American writers. But even in his lifetime, Wolfe was cruelly parodied, and after his death from tuberculosis in 1938 at the age of 38, he fell into disfavor, a symbol of self-indulgence and creative excess.

David Herbert Donald, a Harvard historian, attempts to revise that judgment by presenting an oversize, extravagantly gifted North Carolinian who tried bold Joycean experiments in stream of consciousness and attempted to rescue American writing from the expatriate Lost Generation in Europe. According to legend, Wolfe was saved from drowning in his own verbiage by Editor Maxwell Perkins, mentor of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. According to the biographer, Perkins and his colleagues distorted Wolfe's intentions and eviscerated his posthumous works beyond recognition.

Donald employs new biographical sources, and he makes a persuasive case for Wolfe's idiom and energies. But he also acknowledges that his subject "wrote more bad prose than any other major writer I can think of." The only disputable word is major. The quotes from the novels -- not to say the novels themselves -- suggest the literary equivalent of a dinosaur: vast in structure, unoccupied by thought and, after all the ponderous effort, wholly extinct.