Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works. 1929. Pandora’s Box, 2018.

I had never read Look Homeward, Angel though I could quote a little from it. Somewhere I came across the following—which gives a sense of the style and scope of the novel.

O sea! (he thought) I am the hill-born, the prison-pent, the ghost, the stranger, and I walk here by your side. O sea, I am lonely like you, I am strange and far like you, I am sorrowful like you; my brain, my heart, my life, like yours, have touched strange shores…And you will bring me to the happy land, you will wash me to glory in bright ships.

Florid or beautiful?

Somehow I missed reading Thomas Wolfe even though I was an English major at Harvard. Fifty years before I was there, Wolfe had attended a master’s program in play writing there, the same program Eugene O’Neill had attended a few years earlier.

We heard stories about Wolfe even fifty years later. Perhaps they came from his stories, perhaps they came from campus oral tradition. I think if I had read Look Homeward, Angel when I was in college, I would have probably responded differently than I do now, but I am not sure how.

Look Homeward, Angel is an American Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Now, I had read that novel in high school and found it very moving. The story inspired this reader to the art of writing and telling stories. Yes, I said to myself, I want to write poetry, too.

I reread Portrait of the Artist about ten years ago. It was not the same book. I did not recall any of the business with the prostitute or the pages of discussion of Catholic doctrine. Probably when I read it, there were reasons I overlooked those things. One, I was pretty naive about things, and probably I was clueless about the stuff with the prostitute. (Hey, I thought The Scarlet Letter was a setup, and Dimmesdale really did not have an affair with Hester!) And I was a Protestant confirmad, so all that stuff about confession and church doctrine just meant that Stephen Dedalus belonged to the wrong church anyhow.

Look Homeward, Angel is similar. It is a coming of age story—very impressionistic, almost stream of consciousness. Our protagonist is Eugene Gant, and the story is terribly autobiographical. With some slight details altered or exaggerated, it is Wolfe’s story from before he was born to when he graduated from college.

Readers will either love or hate his style of writing. It is sweeping, turgid, intense. The intensity never stops regardless of who or what is happening or what he is describing. And there is lots of description. Nearly two hundred people are at least briefly described. Except for the main players, they are mostly caricatures, like the minor characters in a film. No movie did it better than Casablanca’s cast of customers and refugees at Rick’s Café Américain. The same thing happens in Look Homeward, Angel but on a larger scale.

There is so much to this story, it is hard to sum it all up. Even though it is mostly set in the small city of Asheville, North Carolina—Altamont in the novel—it touches on so many observations about life. Every person is unique. Family relationships are important.

Like many other novels set in rural America or in the South, the family characteristics rule. Is Eugene more like the Gant side of his family or like the Pentlands, his mother’s clan? The youngest of eight, all his older siblings have already been categorized. Who is he? Which crazy uncle does he take after?

Even though the story is narrated in the third person, we know virtually everything that Eugene is thinking. And when he cannot think, he still emotes. His father is an alcoholic. His mother becomes a businesswoman. Her main business, though, is maintaining a boarding house called Dixieland. Eugene learns much about humanity just by observing and interacting with the various boarders.

Eugene is smart. Some readers who read a lot could probably identify with him. He sees school examinations as exciting challenges to be overcome. We learn about the books he reads. When he is about thirteen, “Eugene thought The Cloister and the Hearth the best story he had ever read.” I read it about the same age and loved it, too.

One older brother joins the Navy during World War I, another brother is turned down for medical reasons. That rejection foreshadows the climax of the story. The war ends just a couple of months before Eugene would be old enough to join. Still, he spends a desperate summer in the Norfolk-Newport News area working in shipyards.

We see him grow from a toddler to a schoolboy, to a high schooler, and to a collegian. In some ways he does not fit in. He is very tall for his age and, like anyone with a distinctive physical characteristic, he gets tired of people pointing this out.

Part of his coming of age concerns sexual curiosity and exploration. His family is just nominally religious, so he does not have the crisis that Stephen Dedalus does in Portrait of the Artist, but Eugene still feels physically unclean somehow when he steps over accepted bounds in his relationships with the opposite sex.

She did not know that every boy, caged in from confession by his fear, is to himself a monster.

One could make a fascinating study on the way the different family members handle Mr. Gant’s drunkenness. Today we would call some of them enablers, but what are we supposed to do? Our father loves us—at least some of the time. How can we ignore him, even if we try? He is, after all, a husband and father.

In spite of the somewhat narrow setting, the story has scope. Mr. Gant starts out in Pennsylvania and has been married twice before marrying Eugene’s mother. He had no children in either of the first two marriages, but he treats late wife number one as a kind of saint that no one can measure up to.

While some of the characters in town were alive during the Civil War and still talk about it, Eugene does not buy the tales of the Lost Cause. He is rather sarcastic about that.

No, sir, and by heaven, so long as one true Southern heart is left alive to remember Appomattox, Reconstruction, and the Black parliaments, we will defend with our dearest blood our menaced, but sacred, traditions.

More than anything else, though, Eugene is searching for the meaning of life. His brother Ben cries out, “Where do we come from? Where do we go to? What the hell is it all about?”

In some ways, Ben becomes the focus of the tale. Part of coming of age may be learning about relationships, but also part of it is coming to terms with death. Although Wolfe’s father actually was a tombstone carver and his mother did run a boarding house, these things become symbols in the story.

Mr. Gant’s occupation is a kind of memento mori. He frequently reminds his family, especially when on a bender, that he supports them financially. This reminds us that he makes a living as people die.

The boarding house with its variety of people passing through reminds us that we all are just here on earth for a short while. It becomes like Ecclesiastes, “all is vanity,” or Hebrews, “we are pilgrims and sojourners.” We are all just strangers passing through.

He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.

That last sentence is an allusion to Shakespeare. There are hundreds of allusions in this story. They add a richness and depth to the story telling and to the emotional and intellectual content. That repetitive pentameter “Never” is from King Lear’s dying speech. In it Lear expresses the ultimate vanity and purposelessness of life. It is beyond tragic because nothing matters. The context in Look Homeward, Angel suggests something similar.

And that is just one allusion. I suspect one could write a thesis paper just on the allusions to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom Wolfe calls “the chief prince of moon and magic.” Anyone who loves Coleridge cannot be all bad. Shakespeare, Keats, Milton, the Greeks, they all get their due.

This is one rich book.

Wolfe, or Eugene Gant, at the end of the novel is still trying to answer the question. He would like to believe but cannot. Things seem too random, too disconnected. Still Look Homeward, Angel has probably the most detailed death scene in literature. It may not be as moving as, say, King Lear’s or Othello’s or any number of death scenes written by Dickens, but none is more detailed. (Eugene himself is moved by the death of “Alcestis—noblest and loveliest of all the myths of Love and Death.”) We get nearly every minute of brother Ben’s last day.

Even more than the family conflict and the way everyone seems to engage in some kind of self-deception as the brother dies, what stays with the reader is Eugene’s observation on his brother’s passing:

We can believe in the nothingness of life, we can believe in the nothingness of death and of life after death—but who can believe in the nothingness of Ben?

Wolfe is getting at something here. We are not nothing. His beloved, if flawed, brother was not nothing. Personality matters. What does this mean? Is there something after all?

All Wolfe or Eugene can say is “We shall never come back again. But over us all, over us all, over us all is—something.” As Ecclesiastes 3:11 asserts and so many things in life demonstrate, God “has put eternity into man’s heart.”

Look Homeward, Angel is not florid. Like humanity itself, it may be flawed, but it is beautiful.

N.B. While the novel is not pornographic at all, some people may be put off by the sexual experiences in the story. Because it is set in the American South of a hundred years ago, some characters use language that would be considered racist today, though it is clear the author himself does not share that sentiment.