Thomas Wolfe. The Web and the Rock. Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works. 1940. Pandora’s Box, 2018.

Thomas Wolfe’s novels are all autobiographical. The Web and the Rock, his third novel, introduces us to a new character; however, George “Monk” Webber could be a stand-in for Eugene Gant from the first two novels. He comes from a city in the mountains of North Carolina (“Old Catawba” he calls it) near the Biltmore Estate. In this novel, though, he calls Asheville Libya Hill instead of Altamont.

Monk Webber’s background differs slightly from Eugene Gant’s. He is orphaned and raised by relatives with connections to the countryside. Yes, Webber’s father came from Pennsylvania Dutch country like Gant’s, but this pays more homage to Wolfe’s mother’s rural relatives. Instead of going to the state college like Gant, Webber goes to a small Baptist college in South Carolina.

The first part of The Web and the Rock provides the web. Like Look Homeward Angel, it is a collection of memories and sketches of what the people and places were like growing up in the mountains of Old Catawba. Like Gant’s, there are detailed descriptions of George’s relatives, neighbors, and townspeople. All of these people and locations and events provide the network, the web, to his background or foundation.

George begins to get led astray in college. He may or may not have had experiences with prostitutes, but he starts attending an Episcopal church rather than a Baptist church of the school’s affiliation. We skip a few years until George, like Gene, arrives in New York City. He hints about having spent some time in Boston, but there are no Prufrock-like soirees until he gets to the Big Apple.

If his upbringing and later travels are the web, George tells us that Manhattan is the rock. In a previous review I marveled that Wolfe was so meticulously detailed about even random people Eugene Gant saw on a street once but was so vague about the true love he meets or discovers. Not here. Much of this tale is about the tempestuous and intense relationship between Webber and Mrs. Esther Jack.

Like other writers who cut their teeth in the 1920s, we see little remorse for an extramarital affair in here. In fact, Webber frequently complains that Esther has been unfaithful to him in spite of her being married. We meet her about a third of the way through the book, but it is more than halfway before we find out that she is still married. The Web and the Rock is the closest thing to a love paean on Wolfe’s part to his longtime paramour and supporter, Aline Bernstein, who was a stage designer and wife a Jewish businessman.

If even half of the relationship described in The Web and the Rock is based on what really happened, Wolfe owed a lot to “Mrs. Jack.” She was connected. At one point George Webber freaks out, as we might say today, because he has not heard back from a publisher that has had his typescript for five weeks.

Five weeks! As I write this, a publisher has had a typescript of mine for over three years! I once had an article rejected by a magazine after they had had it for four years. The business has surely changed in a century!

As always, Wolfe probably overwrites, but he writes so passionately. We see a lot about the upper class Jewish culture of the turn of the last century in New York. We get a sense of the theater in the 1920s. There is a lot of humor as Mrs. Jack and Webber go back and forth with Jew-Gentile stereotypes. Back then, Christian meant “Gentile” to most Western Jews. As has been said, there is never a dull sentence. Wolfe is simply interested in everything and everyone.

Some of the chapters could be separate stories on their own. At least one was. I started reading the chapter titled “The Child by Tiger,” I knew the story. I do not think I had read the short story by the same name, but I had heard it, probably on The Moth Radio Hour or one of those other literary radio shows. Wolfe was a middle class white from the segregated South. Yes, he sometimes uses language of the time period that would be considered offensive today, but he had great sympathy for the blacks of his hometown and was appalled by the injustice of the Jim Crow system. We find such appalling incidents in his “web.”

Wolfe also had his own take on the Lost Generation. He says that that is what they call us, but what it really means is not so much misplaced, but never found. Still, there is a lot of searching.

Whether it is the horrors of a lynching or the spontaneous camaraderie of the Munich Oktoberfest, The Web and the Rock brings us there. The reader can decide whether George Webber, a.k.a. Gene Gant, a.k.a. Thomas Wolfe, lived a life well-lived, but regardless of that, The Web—the taspestry of life—and the Rock—a “singing” Mannahatta—have an intensity that this prose Whitman weaves, and maybe unravels, for us.

N.B. Because parts are set in the American South of a hundred years ago, some characters in this novel use language that would be considered racist today, though it is clear the author himself does not share that sentiment.