By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
ASHEVILLE, N.C. – No place whispers eternity quite like a graveyard.
I’m standing near the headstone of Thomas Wolfe, a now almost forgotten author who once was considered the great American
John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com
writer. When I was a college student, Wolfe’s books spoke to me in a way that no other writer’s did. Wolfe made me want to write.
His resting place here in this mountain resort town in western North Carolina where he grew up is a quiet place. His headstone looks over a range of peaks that appear as old as time, a reminder of things that endure. It’s peaceful.
Wolfe’s life was anything but that.
Born in 1900, the youngest child of an embattled stonecutter father with weaknesses for drink and wanton women and a parsimonious mother who ran a boarding house and whose spirituality veered between mountain mysticism and gothic spookiness, Wolfe’s early life was turbulent – a tale that involved his father often being sent away to dry out after brawls with his mother, who often shifted the young Wolfe from room to room (and even onto the porch) so that paying customers could have a bed.
A teacher, though, spotted a talent for writing in the young Wolfe – bless teachers – and encouraged him. Wolfe headed to the University of North Carolina when he was not quite 16, where he established himself as both the campus character and resident genius.
From there, he went to Harvard to study playwriting, unsuccessfully. Much younger than his classmates, who viewed him either as a Southern rube or a baby savant, Wolfe could lurch from insecurity to combativeness in the space of a breath.
By this time, he had grown to be 6’6’’ – another thing that added to his sense of being an outsider. He was so insecure about his appearance that he refused to let others walk up or down stairs behind him for fear that they would make fun.
He struggled to write plays into his middle 20s, at least two of which are fascinating to read but impossible to perform. (Plays with hundreds of characters and many elaborate set changes present logistical challenges for producers.)
Then he met an older married woman, a New York set designer named Aline Bernstein, who became his mistress. She encouraged Wolfe to write novels.
Theirs was a tempestuous romance. Wolfe had inherited his father’s taste for drink and prostitutes. Aline had her own highly developed sense of drama. Over the next few years, they loved, fought, broke up, got back together and finally split. Through it all, Wolfe wrote.
Eventually, his first novel – “Look Homeward, Angel†– found a publisher. When Wolfe showed up to sign the contract, he was recovering from injuries he’d received in a drunken brawl in Munich.
“Look Homeward, Angel,†with its marriage of pungent reality and poetic lyricism, established him as a literary sensation. He was not quite 29. Another big book, “Of Time and the River,†that was sometimes stunning and more often sloppy, followed six years later to initially ecstatic reviews. He was a literary lion and it was his moment to roar.
A couple of years after that, Wolfe’s appetites caught up with him. On a trip out west, he shared a bottle of whiskey with a hobo on a ferry in Puget Sound. Wolfe developed pneumonia, which opened a tubercular lesion on his lung that migrated to his brain. He died in a feverish coma in September 1938, just days before his 38th birthday.
Part of the generation of American writers – William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, etc. – we most revere, Wolfe once was considered the most promising of them.
But the things that endeared him to mid-20th-century writers such as Jack Kerouac and William Styron – his romanticism, his hunger for experience and, let’s face it, his lack of discipline – have cost him the readership his contemporaries still enjoy.
Wolfe shared with other Southern writers an obsession with time, a sense that the past not only was part of the present, but often threatened to overwhelm it. He lived and wrote with a sense that life was but a flicker and time an undying flame.
One of the most famous writers of his time, Thomas Wolfe now is one of the more obscure.
The tumult of his life and time now part of the enveloping past, he rests in a quiet spot, where his grave overlooks mountains that have endured millennia of trouble and tumult, seasons and strife, flickers and flame.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism, host of “No Limits†WFYI 90.1 Indianapolis and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.
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