Thomas Wolfe. You Can’t Go Home Again. Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works. 1940. Pandora’s Box, 2018.

I think the enemy comes to us with the face of innocence to us:
“I am your friend.” (47635)

You Can’t Go Home Again is the last of the four novels completed by Thomas Wolfe. This was published posthumously. I recall in college that most discussions about his work seemed to reach a consensus that this was his best piece. I would agree.

It is typical Wolfe, largely autobiographical with descriptions that come alive. Another writer once said that the Wolfe wrote many bad sentences but he didn’t write any dull sentences. However, in many ways this novel does not focus on the biography, but on the culture. It has a lot of observations about America and the world that still resonate today.

As Of Time and the River was a sequel to Look Homeward, Angel, so You Can’t Go Home Again is a sequel to The Web and the Rock. We continue the life (adventures?) of George Webber. While much of the story is set in Manhattan (the Rock), Webber leaves the Rock for his hometown of Libya Hill and then for England and Germany. We note some significant changes.

At the beginning, Webber is still involved with Mrs. Esther Jack, but he is beginning to think of breaking up with her. He still admires her and respects her greatly, but there is a sense that he does not fit in with her world. He devotes several chapters to a big party Mrs. Jack and her husband have at their New York City apartment. All kinds of people attend.

This brings in the fun of reading Wolfe. Wolfe carefully observes hundreds of people in his stories. As he sets the stage and we meet the different guests, we get introduced to all kinds of people from the elevator operators in the building and their girlfriends to the wire puppeteer who provides the entertainment at the Jacks’ party. As was true with The Web and the Rock, a few of the incidents that relate to the party were published as short stories that I had previously read. That again tells us something of the nature of the novel. While there is a thread and continuity, individual characterizations and episodes stand by themselves.

Without giving too much away, the Jacks’ party is interrupted by a fire alarm. There is a fire in one of the other apartments in the building, so everyone has to evacuate. In typical Wolfe fashion, then, we meet not just the partiers, but the other inhabitants of the apartment building, some of its neighbors, and the firemen and policemen who are called in. Whatever else once can say, Wolfe loves people.

The fire becomes a symbol. The party happens very shortly before the 1929 Stock Market crash which changes everything. There is a party—namely, the Roaring Twenties—but the fire that burns it down is inevitable. It is after the party that Webber breaks off his relationship with Mrs. Jack. As is often the case with the intimate relations in his novels, we are not privy to any conversation concerning this. The reader simply knows the relationship has ended.

That is not the only relationship that ends in this novel. Webber has recently published a second novel that has had some commercial success like his first. Still, he decides that it is time to change publishers for the third novel he is working on. He devotes more than one chapter to describe in detail his admiration for the editor at the first publishing house, Foxhall Edwards. Foxhall Edwards is clearly based on Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe’s editor at Scribner’s. The edition we have been using of Wolfe’s works tells us that his first two novels, the Eugene Gant stories, were done by Scribner’s but then he changed to Harper for his last two, the George Webber stories.

The changes continue. Webber gets word that the aunt who raised him after he was orphaned has died. He does go back home. As would be typical in the early 1930s, he takes a train from New York to Libya Hill. Even the train ride is something special.

Again, typical of Wolfe, about a hundred different passengers and commuters passing through the railroad station are described in great detail. No, Webber does not know any of these people personally, but they fascinate him and he wonders about their lives. Ditto for a number of the people he observes on the train.

In some ways the train ride is like the prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Passengers on the train include a number of prominent people from Libya Hill such as its mayor, some businessmen, and one person who acts as a kind of a Pythian or Teiresian oracle. He is the one who tells Webber that he can’t go home again.

There is some truth to that. Part of it is that some people are mad at him for putting them as caricatures in his books. His best friend, though, realizes that the people in the book are different. Webber’s work is fiction. Since he has come to bury his aunt who raised him, he does not have the family connection any more. Perhaps if he had stayed in Libya Hill, he might have married his friend’s sister, a nice girl that likes him. But he has changed, too, with his experiences in New York and overseas.

One message, though, that comes through is that the country is changing. The mayor and businessmen of Libya Hill are still bullish on the city: They have big plans for investment and development. The Depression comes to Old Catawba as well. They have their problems, and city is not what it once was and not what the boosters envisioned that it will become.

It is clear from You Can’t Go Home Again that the author loves America. In his description of the livelihoods and people, he becomes Whitmanesque. America is great. America is good. There may be a depression, but there is potential.

But there is also warning. Do not rely just on material wealth. Not only does that not ultimately satisfy, but seeking wealth above other things is dangerous. What happens if you lose it? What does that make you? A vivid and disturbing chapter is devoted to a scene on a New York sidewalk where a young businessman has just committed suicide by jumping out of a window of the adjacent hotel. We realize that the man may have been only thinking of himself, but his suicide affects many he never knew: the policeman who responds to the call, the vendor whose stall he lands in front of, the various pedestrians on the street who see him fall, and the person he barely misses as he lands on the sidewalk. Of course, Wolfe wonders about his family, friends, and business associates as well.

Even before the crash Webber is wondering what is really worth it. Speaking of the business and artistic elite who associate with the Jack family, “At these repeated signs of decadence in a society which had once been the object of his envy and his highest ambition, Webber’s face had taken on a look of scorn.” (40610)

He notes that one of the Jacks’ wealthy businessman friends supports socialist and communist causes. This is in the 1920s. The radicalism of the American elite has been going on for a hundred years.

The sources of Mr. Hirsch’s wealth and power, whatever they might be, were quite accidental and beside the point. His position as a liberal, “a friend of Russia,” a leader in advanced social opinion, a searching critic indeed, of the very capitalist class to which he belonged, was so well known as to place him in the very brain and forehead of enlightened thought. (40629)

Mr. Hirsch’s letters to the editor and support of Sacco and Vanzetti were considered fashionable. Substitute Silicon Valley, “friend of China,” and Antifa or Black Lives Matter, and things have not changed that much. Such attitudes are more entrenched among our elites today because they have been going on for a century.

He sees the irony of the morally loose elite themselves “exploiting” the people they claim to care about.

The whole tissue of these princely lives, he felt, these lesbic and pederastic loves, these adulterous intrigues, sustained in mid-air now, floating on the face of night like a starred veil, had none the less been spun from man’s common dust of sweated clay, unwound out of the entrails of man’s agony. (40458)

That is even more relevant today.

Webber understood that he could become part of the elite by writing what they wanted to hear. This is the crux of his choices in You Can’t Go Home Again. In breaking up with Mrs. Jack, he is seeking an identity beyond the elite of the liberal system.

Could he as a novelist, as an artist, belong to this high world of privilege without taking upon himself the stultifying burden of that privilege? Could be write truthfully of life as he saw it, could he say the things he must, and at the same time belong to the world of which he would have to write? Were the two things possible? Was not this world of fashion and of privilege the deadliest enemy of art and truth? (40462)

As if to illustrate the consequences of such thinking, Webber, after returning from Old Catawba, goes somewhere else that may seem like home to him—Germany. In The Web and the Rock, he spends almost a year there, and likes it. He likes the people. He had a lot of fun at Oktoberfest. He speaks the language.

It is now 1934, however. Things have changed. The elitists and the socialists have taken over. Remember, Nazi stands for National Socialism. He could not go back there and have the same kind of life. Oh, he tries. He finds a young widow as a mistress and manages well on his royalties. For obvious reasons, it becomes too oppressive. The train trip he takes when he leaves the country is harrowing, not so much for him as an American citizen returning home, but for some of the other passengers, especially the Jews.

There is even more; for example, he spends some time in England as well and connects with an older, famous American writer, Lloyd McHarg. According to some sources, McHarg is based on Sinclair Lewis. This would have been shortly after he won the Nobel Prize—”the greatest ovation one could win.” While grateful for the kudos McHarg gave his first novel, Webber seems disappointed at his bitter outlook in spite of his great success.

He also connects with a friend from his hometown who becomes a Major League baseball player. This becomes a very realistic look into the life of a professional athlete as he plays for eight years before his injuries catch up to him. Can he go home again? This is Frank O’Rourke baseball realism.

(Baseball’s a dull game, really; that’s the reason it is so good. We do not love the game so much as we love the sprawl and drowse and shirt-sleeved apathy of it.) (43720)

Still, Wolfe hears America singing. He notes the decadence of the elites, the oppression in Central and Eastern Europe, but he sees that America can overcome these things.

I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. (47619)

Is that still true in 2021?

N.B. Parenthetical references are to Kindle locations, not page numbers.