Thomas Wolfe. Of Time and the River. Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works. 1935. Pandora’s Box, 2018.

The biography of Eugene Gant, protagonist of Look Homeward, Angel, continues with Of Time and the River. Yes, the story rambles. Yes, by modern standards it has too much description. Still, the saying that Wolfe had plenty of bad sentences but no dull sentences holds true.

North Carolina native Gant becomes “a stranger among strange people,” and the people get progressively stranger, especially by his hometown standards.

First stop around 1920, a couple of years in Massachusetts in a master’s program at Harvard. On his way, he stops in Baltimore to visit his father, a long-term patient at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center where he is dying of prostate cancer. Wolfe’s description of older men with prostate problems (cancer or not) is spot on.

As in the first novel, there are over a hundred people described in some detail. One of the striking characters early in the book is a shrill, swarthy man who insists that things will just get better and better. We learned from World War I, he claims, and now the world is headed to Utopia.

But then we also hear from people who are “tired of Woodrow’s flowery speeches, an’ we’re tired of hearin’ about wars an’ ideals and democracy.” The return to normalcy, indeed.

Campus legend at Harvard tells us that when Thomas Wolfe was a student there, one night he started howling in front of its Widener Library. There were too many books there for anyone to read in a lifetime. Young Gant does not howl in this novel, but he is moved and pained because he realizes that it will be impossible to gain all the knowledge contained in those books.

A friend compares him to Faust—especially Marlow’s version. Faust makes his deal with the devil so that he can gain knowledge. At first he becomes famous for his medical savvy which saves many lives during the plague. It is only later in the tale that Faust reveals his wickedness.

Though Gant does not howl, he does prowl.

Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading in them like a madman. The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know—he greater the number of books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read seem to be.[See Ecclesiastes 12:12]

He simply wanted to know about everything on earth; he wanted to devour the earth, and it drove him mad when he saw he could not do this.

In some ways this is a sign of growing maturity. Gant is realizing that there are just so many people in the world that a single life becomes insignificant.

Gant is a poet-writer. His masters’ program teaches play writing. As a poet, Gant “at seventeen, as a sophomore, triumphantly denied God, but he was unable now to deny Robert Browning.” (“What’s a heaven for?”)

There are a number of chapters that could stand alone as stories. Indeed, at least one chapter on his uncle who moved to Boston many years before was published as a short story. His general chapter on what it was like to be a student at Harvard is still basically true. Let’s just say Wolfe would have used the term snark if it existed today in its present post-Carroll meaning.

He notes that at Harvard, one has to learn “to be beautiful, ‘distinguished,’ ‘smart,’ ‘chic,’ ‘forceful,’ and ‘sophisticated’—finally, how to have ‘a brilliant personality’ and ‘achieve success.'”

His professor drops names, e.g., “I have a letter from Gene O’Neill on this very point.” In the real world, O’Neill had taken the same master’s program about a decade before Wolfe.

The second half of chapter 36 about Miss Potter’s soiree, “that crowning horror of modern life, the art party…the meagre little spirits of no talent and great pretensions.” This describes in detail the same kind of party that J. Alfred Prufrock attends in his love song. One of the guests is a “Miss Shanksworth, the militant propagandist for free love, sterilization of the unfit, birth control by every one, especially the lower classes.” Margaret Sanger maybe?

A few chapters are devoted to Uncle Bascom Pentland, a brother of his mother, who settled in Boston after two decades as a theology student and preacher. He symbolizes the changes that the elites went through in the nineteenth century. He at one time was an Adventist, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, and then a Unitarian. Finally he even quit the Unitarian Church after he announced his agnosticism in a poem he read one Sunday. Now he does title searches for a real estate company.

Still, Uncle Bascom can quote the Bible, and we understand his sense of loss, not unlike that of Matthew Arnold. He cries out:

“‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end’—the mightiest line, my dear boy, the most magnificent poetry, that was ever written.” [cf. Revelation 1:8]

And he cries for pity:

“It brought back—memories…”

Not only does Gene Gant observe the Harvard and Bostonian way of doing things, but his uncle sets him up with a nice girl whose company he enjoys but to whom he is not that attracted. Gant also enjoys her mother’s cooking. Indeed, throughout the novel Gant describes in some detail the physicality of the food and the women he is attracted to. He is aged from twenty to twenty-five here, so there are many fantasies about women.

Later in the story Gant seems to use one scene to justify his own irreligion and attraction to prostitutes. He witnesses and describes in some detail two prostitutes who successfully tempt a couple of Catholic priests.

There is also a recurring theme that America is so “immense” that Americans “are driven on forever and have no home.”

“What’s wrong with people?…Why do we never get to know one another?…Why is it that we get born and live and die in this world without finding out what any one else is like?…[ellipses in original]

To Gant, his travels are like those of the Argonauts. Chapter 14, his meditation on Washington D.C. and America is another great stand-alone chapter. So is one describing a baseball game with Christy Mathewson pitching.

After getting his master’s degree, Gant gets a job teaching freshman writing at New York University. Some things never change: he has to deal with students’ questions about relevancy, “Why do we have to do this?” Chapter 66 is a great one to read for anyone who teaches a writing class, especially freshman composition.

NYU is largely Jewish then, and at first, Gant brings some of his Southern prejudices and fears about Jews with him. However, he becomes friends with the student who had intimidated him the most, and learns to respect their culture and the many trials his family and other Jews have had to overcome.

While in New York, he connects with a buddy from Harvard who comes from a very wealthy family that has an estate on the Hudson River north of the city. A few chapters describe his time there. We might be reminded at little of The Great Gatsby, but not Gatsby himself, rather perhaps the Buchanans or Jordan Baker. In other words, people to the manor born. In some ways the name-dropping here is humorous. We really do understand that when they say “It’s too bad about Franklin,” they are speaking of their neighbor Franklin Roosevelt who has come down with polio.

Throughout the book there are meditations on literature. Gant goes first to England, partly to join friends at Oxford, but also to perhaps understand better some of its great literature. He says:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. To me, he is not one of the great English poets. He is The Poet…he is there by Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser.

His meditations on literature include many of the popular writers of his day such as Joyce (whom he says is the best), Sherwood Anderson, Belloc, and a variety of others. And like many of the American writers of that time, he has to spend time in France.

The last thirty or forty percent of the novel is set in France. He leaves Oxford with the sense that none of the Americans there will ever fit in. He is attracted to France because he believes that France likes writers, that even mediocre writers get good reputations in France.

While he does some writing while there, he spends most of his time in France with three friends from Boston and New York, Starwick, his girlfriend Elinor, and her friend Ann. They travel from place to place, eating and drinking. Eugene often seeks out prostitutes. Elinor has left her husband to travel with the younger Starwick. Ann is tagging along, as is Eugene. Most evenings they go out drinking and spend the next morning asleep or hung over.

They stay in Paris for a long while seeing the sights. Eugene seems to have a love-hate attitude about the art he sees at the Louvre. They then travel south to numerous other cities including Lyons, Marseilles, Dijon, and Nice. While distinctive, Of Time and the River does have echoes of some of the other “Lost Generation” novels telling of epicurean wanderings around postwar Europe searching for something, e.g., The Sun Also Rises or Tender is the Night.

Jack Kerouac called Wolfe, “the best writer, except for me, of course.” Reading Wolfe’s intense, rambling account of Eugene Gant’s adventures in search of love and fame in France are similar to On the Road. Of Time and the River must have inspired Kerouac.

One thing to note for the reader: In On the Road Sal and Moriarty travel through Southern California and Mexico. It helps the reader to know a little Spanish for those scenes. Similarly, it helps the reader to know a little French for the chapters on Eugene’s French argosy. (He compares himself and his companions to the Argonauts.)

There really is a lot of humor in this book. Eugene or Wolfe sees and describes many people, and people are funny. Like a lot of Hemingway’s work, there is an appeal to the adolescent in all of us.

There is one glaring and ironic inconsistency in the overall effect of the story. Like Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River describes at least a hundred people—their physical features, maybe their background, their speech, their behavior. Eugene notes random people on the street or sitting near him in a restaurant or outside a train window. Yet, when our “Faust,” Eugene, meets his “Helen,” the book is remarkably vague. All we get is that he has fallen in love, whatever that means. We do not know what she looks like, what she says, what she does.

It is like Frank Zappa’s parody of pop love songs:

Wowie zowie, baby, you can’t be beat
Wowie zowie, baby, you’re so neat

or maybe “Wild Thing”:

Wild thing, you make my heart sing,
You make everything groovy

or maybe even (gasp!) the Archies!

A critic might be disappointed at fuzziness, but as a reader, one just has to laugh one last time. As Eugene tags along with Starwick, so we tag along with Eugene, taking our time and, yes, following the course of many rivers.