When Angels Looked Homeward
by MacDonald King Aston
10 February 2010
About 81 years ago, Herbert Hoover sat in the White House. The Wall Street crash in late October brought about a host of suicidal bankers whose jumps from Wall Street windows became so common that hotel clerks began asking guests if they wanted a room for sleeping or jumping. Fifty percent of America’s children suffered from a lack of food, shelter, and medical care. Times were tough. Almost beyond words.
From the heart of the “Hoover Stew” came Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Clayton Wolfe’s first novel, published on 18 October 1929, just days before “Black Tuesday.” Though no one knew it at the time, with Look Homeward, Angel, the South took ascendency for all time in American literature (whatever “American” literature might be). William Faulkner of Mississippi, born on 25 September 1897, had just published The Sound and the Fury in the same month. Flannery O’Connor had just been born a few years earlier in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. A myriad of Southern authors would cement the above mentioned ascendency, including Caroline Gordon, Tennessee Williams, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston, James Dickey, William Price Fox, Davis Grubb, Walker Percy, and Harper Lee, among others.
Almost from the gate, Look Homeward, Angel became a GAN (“Great American Novel”). The prose leapt and bounded from short declarative sentences to poetic utterances:
...a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
When I was a boy and first came upon Wolfe’s writings, I thought these words enchanting. I still do. But now I know why. More than mere literary brilliance, more than artistic pathos, Wolfe’s words flowed, as would Flannery O’Connor’s, from a numinous and sacred place, from what Rudolph Otto would call “Das Heilige,” or The Holy. The Holy is external, to some extent, to the self, and a mysterium tremendum et fascinans (terrifying but fascinating mystery). The concept of The Holy is found, in some form or another, in all Southern writing of the type represented by Wolfe. In Flannery O’Connor, for example, Das Heilige is the Misfit, the brooding evil effective at what it knows best, evil, yet in the end a nothing there.
In writing descended from New England, The Holy is remarkably absent. In its place are rules, regulations, warnings, advice, lessons, and the whole baggage of Puritanism and the Yankee. Thus Hawthorne, Whittier, Melville, Emerson, and the whole lot of the dark-garbed propagandists of guilt. From New England there came a world of “transcendence,” and of transcendent ideals. Of the holy work of God’s hands, His creation, we find little beyond the proscription of the Salem witches and the barren writings of Cotton Mather.
In Southern writing, however, God’s creation is both imminent and immanent. “Fool,” said Ben, “what do you want to find?” And Wolfe could answer with certainty: “Myself, and an end to hunger, and the happy land. For I believe in harbors at the end.”
Throughout the depiction of God’s creation is an honesty, even if it be a disturbing honesty. A family argument:
Their faces were sad. There was great age in them. They felt suddenly the distance they had come and the amount they had lived. They had a moment of cohesion, a moment of tragic affection and union, which drew them together like small jets of flame aginst all the senseless nihilism of life.
Wolfe was a master of vocabulary. It showed in Look Homeward, Angel, with sentences such as: “Fluescent with smooth ripe curves, the drawling virgins of the South filled summer porches.” Fluescent? (The act or state of becoming fluent or smooth.) Try searching that on the Internet. Even James Joyce used the word but once in Ulysses.
Thomas Wolfe’s prose bothers modern readers. For one, there is no plot, at least no movie-like plot. No Act 1, Act II, Act III. For Wolfe, life itself was the subject, and life needed no plot. Another bother to The Modern is the tidal splash of words, the highly descriptive, yet poetic wave of words, a wave that threatens to drown the unwary. As the Thomas Wolfe Web Site phrased it: "His words are torrential explosions of adjectives and adverbs, but through the magic of his words, he breathed life into his vision of the world around him."
Yet those words come together in an almost impossible way to transform the ordinary into The Holy. A famous example is the death scene of Wolfe’s character, Ben, his brother in real life. Ben’s death scene is one of the most powerful pieces of writing in all the world.
Filled with a terrible vision of all life in the one moment, he seemed to rise forward bodilessly from his pillows without support—a flame, a light, a glory—joined at length in death to the dark spirit who had brooded upon each footstep of his lonely adventure on earth; and, casting the fierce sword of his glance with utter and final comprehension upon the room haunted with its gray pageantry of cheap loves and dull consciences and on all those uncertain mummers of waste and confusion fadng now from the bright window of his eyes, he passed instantly, scornful and unafraid, as he had lived, into the shades of death.
Look Homeward, Angel has never gone out of print since the day it was published in 1929. It stands as a monument to genius, as a testament to The Holy, and as what it really is: art at its highest.
Links: The Thomas Wolfe Memorial, The Thomas Wolfe Web Site, "Thomas Wolfe" (Wikipedia).
Email MacDonald King Aston |
