On This Day in History, 1935, Thomas Wolfe published his second novel, “Of Time and the River.” His debut novel, “Look Homeward Angel,” had been published six years earlier. What traits do these two works have in common? Well, pardon me for saying it, but despite what some folks might say, neither one was very good. And I get to say that because… well, we’re family.
“WHAT’S THAT?” I hear you say. Yep, read on for the full story – you can get the History.com version here if you want – but believe me, the family stuff is much juicier.
First, there’s the family resemblance:
Wolfe was 6’5” and couldn’t sit comfortably at normal desks. He did most of his writing standing up, using the top of his refrigerator as a writing surface.
OK, I’m 6’4″. Check. My son is 6’7″. Double check. Next?
But wait! I hear you say. His name’s spelled different. What’s with the “e”?
Easy. Our common ancestors came from Germany. “Wolf” is the German spelling. The “e” makes the name look more “English.” It was added after Wolfe’s stone-cutter father (inspiration for the title of “Look Homeward Angel,” the “Angel” being one carved on a tombstone) changed it when he moved south to Asheville, NC. The idea was to make the name more highfalutin’. Thus the rough-hewn stone mason’s family would be more acceptable in polite society. Whether or not the ploy worked? Not sure.
OK, so where did Thomas Wolfe’s father live before North Carolina?
The Wolf family came to Pennsylvania from Germany in the early 1700’s. At that time, land west of the Susquehanna River where they settled was considered “Indian” country. So much so, that, when my Grandpa’s second cousin Edna Albert wrote a children’s book in 1930 called Little Pilgrim to Penn’s Woods (this was a German family’s immigrant tale based on stories she’d heard about growing up on the “frontier”) there were plenty of harrowing accounts of Redskins whooping it up outside the cabin door.
The house where I was born was one such cabin, originally built of logs in the 1860’s. The family farm where I grew up was founded on 160 acres in Latimore Township, PA. And that area is where, records show, Thomas Wolfe’s father lived – along with much of the rest of the extended clan – before he headed south: First to Baltimore, then to Asheville. That’s where his youngest son Thomas was born in 1900 – two years after the birth of my Grandpa Wolf, a farmer with no earthly use for an extra vowel on the end of his last name.
And we know all this HOW?
Glad you asked. Somebody did a genealogy search in the wake of Wolfe’s literary fame and traced our family’s roots all the way back to the Black Forest in the 1600’s. Lo and behold, there’s my grandfather Howard (b. 1898) and my father Harold (b. 1921) – both of them distant cousins several times removed from the great author himself. Turns out, I was born the same year (1958) that the stage adaptation of “Look Homeward Angel” won the Pulitzer Prize. Thomas Wolfe had been buried 20 years by then. He died of tuberculosis in 1938.
OK, so what’s the story with all the negative reviews then?
Have you ever actually tried to read any of this stuff? I mean, c’mon man! REALLY? Pulitzer or no Pulitzer… plowing through it is like trying to wade through a vast vat of cold molasses. It’s like pulling teeth – A WHOLE LOTTA TEETH – with a rusty old pair of pliers and no anesthetic. The literary consensus in a nutshell? Too wordy. Overwrought. Don’t believe me? Well, then believe his contemporaries Hemingway and Faulkner, both of them with axes to grind, but still…
Despite early admiration of Wolfe’s work, Faulkner later decided that Wolfe’s novels were “like an elephant trying to do the hoochie-coochie.” Hemingway’s verdict was that Wolfe was “the over-bloated Li’l Abner of literature.”
Comments about Wolfe are sprinkled throughout Hemingway’s letters and most of them are snide, snarky, and insulting. In a 1951 letter (to publisher Charles Scribner III): “Tom Wolfe was a one-book boy and a glandular giant with the brains and the guts of three mice.”
Or, as Malcolm Cowley of The New Republic said so pithily about “Of Time and the River”:
“It would be twice as good if half as long.”
OUCH!
Guess I better wrap this up then. Two out of three mice surveyed say they are growing restless… And the third? His poor little brain has fallen asleep. <No word on his guts.> Blood may run thicker than water, but – to quote perhaps Wolfe’s most famous line – “You can’t go home again.” I guess when it comes to literary pretensions I’ll stick with Papa Hemingway. No “e” needed at the end of the last name. At least not for THIS blue collar workingman’s offspring.
