Tales From the MoJo Road –
By Glynn Wilson –
COULTERVILLE, Calif. – This just goes to show you that, in these crazy, mixed up times, even a bad movie can inform and entertain.
These days at night, like everybody else, I scroll through the mostly bad movies and shows on streaming services trying to find something worth watching. It’s like an online version of browsing through the selections in a video rental store (I guess they are all out of business now, another business that bit the dust due to the internet).
On Amazon Prime Video, full of bad old movies and shows but a few good ones, I happened on one called “Genius,” a biographical drama film directed by Michael Grandage and written by John Logan released in 2016, based on the 1978 National Book Award-winner Max Perkins: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg.
It begins in New York City in 1929, when Wolfe’s first novel Look Homeward, Angel was published, but is filmed entirely in the UK. It stars Colin Firth as the legendary book editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. He is known for “discovering” great authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Jude Law plays the writer Thomas Wolfe from North Carolina.
Nicole Kidman plays Wolfe’s older love interest and wife Aline Bernstein. There are brief appearances by Dominic West as Ernest Hemingway, Guy Pearce as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Laura Linney as Louise Perkins, the editor’s wife.
The film lost money at the box office and was poorly rated by the critics, as you can see on Wikipedia.
But it still drew my interest, mainly due to nostalgia for the Golden Age of American and Southern writing and literature.
Back during the Covid pandemic, when I went to hide out in rural North Carolina for awhile, I was considering trying to start some kind of artist and writers retreat, along with an organic garden commune. It’s still an idea that could work, somewhere. I later tried in Maryland, but could not find enough financial support. I’m considering trying it now in California, although everyone seems too distracted by Trump and A.I. to pay attention to something real.
But when I was searching for inspiration and looked into famous writers from North Carolina, Thomas Wolfe obviously came up at the top of the list from that state.
I didn’t know much about him.
Born on October 3, 1900, he was an American novelist and short story writer, known largely for his first novel, and for the short fiction that appeared during the last years of his life. He died on September 15, 1938 at the age of 37 of tuberculosis after visiting national parks in the American west.
After Wolfe’s death, The New York Times wrote:
“His was one of the most confident young voices in contemporary American literature, a vibrant, full-toned voice which it is hard to believe could be so suddenly stilled. The stamp of genius was upon him, though it was an undisciplined and unpredictable genius … There was within him an unspent energy, an untiring force, an unappeasable hunger for life and for expression which might have carried him to the heights and might equally have torn him down.”
He was considered one of the pioneers of autobiographical fiction, and along with William Faulkner, he is considered one of the most important authors of the Southern Renaissance within the American literary canon. He has been dubbed “North Carolina’s most famous writer.”
Wolfe wrote four long novels as well as many short stories, dramatic works, and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on the American culture and mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe’s sensitive and uncomfortable perspective.
After Wolfe’s death, Faulkner said that he might have been the greatest talent of their shared generation, and that he had aimed higher than any other writer. Faulkner’s endorsement failed to win over mid- to late-20th century critics and Wolfe’s place in the literary canon remained in question. However, 21st century academics have largely rejected this negative assessment, and a more positive and balanced assessment has emerged, combining renewed interest in his works, particularly his short fiction, with greater appreciation of his experimentation with literary forms. This has secured Wolfe a place in the literary canon, a body of works that are widely regarded as essential reading within a culture, often serving as a benchmark for measuring literary quality.
Wolfe had great influence on Jack Kerouac, and his influence extended to other postwar authors such as Ray Bradbury and Philip Roth.
One of the coolest things about the internet, or at least the way The New York Times has embraced it, is this. While I was watching the movie scenes when Wolfe was in Paris waiting on the reviews to come out on his second novel, Of Time and the River, I was able to look up the review in the New York Times digital edition archives, which go all the way back to the 1850s, even though Adolph Ochs didn’t purchase it and turn it around until 1896.
If you pay for the Times, you can see it here too.
MR. WOLFE’S PILGRIM PROGRESSES; “Of Time and the River” Carries On “Look Homeward, Angel”
By Peter Monro Jack
March 10, 1935OF TIME AND THE RIVER. A Legend of Man’s Hunger in His Youth.
By Thomas Wolfe. 912 pp. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. $3.THE superabundance that Thomas Wolfe shares with the great writers, who have rarely practised a niggardly economy—the surplusage, in Pater’s disparaging phrase is in the very nature of this richest of young American writers. Where other men write a sentence he writes a paragraph; where they write books he writes libraries. There must be all of 400,000 words in this second novel of his, and it covers no more than five years of the stream of time down which Mr. Wolfe is careering: the years of Harvard, New York University, Oxford, and Paris, the years from 1920 to 1925.
This is not to be dismissed as a writing-mania. It is an essential belief in the richness and variety of living, to which only a “huge chronicle of the billion forms, the million names (of) the huge, single, and incomparable substance of America” can do justice.
For this ambitious program Mr. Wolfe has been born lucky. A backward glance at “Look Homeward, Angel” reminds us at once that the driving power lay in the astonishing Gants and Pentlands of North Carolina from whom Eugene sprang. In them was a living force that exhausted the extremes of comedy and tragedy. The emotional richness of their life, solidly and stubbornly maintained; their gross and mountainous sensuality, their ever-rising fury, the oaths and the violence, the terror and the sudden pity: above all, the unappeasable hunger for sensation—all this is an overflowing spring of life, as ungovernable as it is enriching.
Mr. Wolfe’s characteristic material is continuous and dynamic where so much in contemporary fiction is static; it expands where so much else contracts into a poverty of spirit. The Gants and the Pentlands of North Carolina who descend on Boston and New York and London and Paris in the person of Eugene are in the great tradition that life is most fully lived when it is most fully alive.
The symbolic signposts, somewhat pretentiously used to orient the book, are from such sources of potency, from Homer, Euripides, Marlowe: Telemachus and Jason, Orestes, Faustus. It is not surprising that Mr. Wolfe should write so much; it is surprising that a portion of his illimitable material should find itself within the manageable covers of a book.
Where the life of North Carolina is dominant the novel is at its best. There is nothing comparable to the figure of Eliza throwing out her hand in a loose and powerful gesture, “her powerful, hopeful, brooding, octopal and web-like character, with all its meditative procrastination, never coming to a decisive point, but weaving, reweaving, pursing her lips, meditating constantly and with a kind of hope, even though in her deepest heart she really had no serious belief that he (Eugene) could succeed in doing the thing he wanted to do.”
Or to Helen with her undercurrent of lewd passion, or Luke with his excited babble of pure good-heartedness, or old Mr. Gant wetting his thumb preparatory to an ecstasy of oratory. A new one turns up in Boston while Eugene is at Harvard, the tremendous crazy figure of Uncle Bascom (a Pentland), whom one will never forget ushering his visitor to the door “howling farewells into the terrible desolation of those savage skies,” while his little old wife snuffles and cackles and whoops into her pots and pans in the kitchen.
Beside these figures, which we may haphazardly describe as Dickensian extravagance done over with the realism of Joyce, the newcomers are thin and shadowy. Harvard is treated with a contemptuous brevity, or, when characters are singled out, like Professor Hatcher of the play-writing class, and Starwick his assistant, and Miss Potter, the Cambridge hostess, they are written up in a brutal caricature. The “pavement lives” of New York seem to him horribly undeveloped: “these raucous voices, the pitiable sterility of these feeble jests, that meager and constricted speech consisting almost wholly of a few harsh cries and raucous imprecations that recurred intolerably, incredibly through all the repercussions of an idiot monotony—all of the rootless, fearful, and horrible desolation of these young pavement lives. . . .”
His Jewish students at Washington Square college are dismissed with a merciless scorn; and yet, in an attempt to be fair, Eugene follows one of them, Abe Jones, into his home life but little enough comes of this. It should be remarked, either as a necessary difficulty of the plan of the book (which is to run into six novels) or as a fault in the rewriting, that there are many loose ends: characters appear and disappear with alarming suddenness, characterization and speech seem sometimes to be moments of sheer virtuosity, not part of a fictional scheme; and too often one feels the weakness of all autobiographical fiction—that something is put in because “it happened so.”
The rich and powerful sense of life inherited from the Gants and Pentlands is thus a burden as well as a blessing to Eugene. He looks for its counterpart and can match it nowhere in his travels. As he wanders further away from it, to England and France, the book loses some of its zest in action and character, while it grows in the poignancy of its longing for a lost integrity.
Eugene’s character has ugly moments, displayed in the murderous fury toward Starwick because he turns out to be abnormal, and in the horrible dinner with Ann where he excites himself sexually by heaping dirty names on a Boston spinster. Indeed, much of the French material, though no doubt a necessary part of the plan, is aimless, and so a little wearying.
But by himself again, in the train journey to Orleans (Wolfe has a genius for trains: there is not a dull train journey in the book), with the fantastic countess in the Orleans hotel, and at Tours, the book mounts to its old height. It is coming nearer to terms with itself. Eugene is learning not to be disappointed with people for not being what he is. He no longer expects places and people automatically to educate him and help him find himself. The supercilious or brutal treatment of Harvard, Oxford and his friends in Paris will probably not occur again, not because he has changed his belief in himself but because he has deepened it; he expects less from outside and is not upset when he gets nothing.
He returns to Ben’s wisdom in the remarkable last chapter of “Look Homeward, Angel”: “Where, Ben? Where is the world?” “Nowhere,” Ben said. “You are your world,” It is the journey back to self and back to America. The consciousness of America is a deep undercurrent in the book. Wolfe broods over it constantly: surely in no other country could a young man wake every morning so … (Continued on Page 14)
(Continued from Page 1 of the Book Review section)
… astonished at belonging to his nation. Yet this is necessary to his soaring spirit, to attach himself to the whole meaning of America, to be its living counterpart. It will be seen that this book is only one movement in an enormous machine for recapturing Wolfe’s past and his present idealism. It has infinite possibilities for moving backward or forward. It has a continuing pattern of time that never comes to an end, and so it has that sense of being constantly living, constantly working itself out in the present tense. This sense of immediacy is on every page. Mr. Wolfe’s sensuous perceptions are, as he describes Helen’s, “literal, physical, chemical, astoundingly acute.” He thinks with his blood and feels with his head.
The reality of what he sees possesses him in every part of his body and there is no peace until every part of it, every least and peculiar aspect, is caught up in a welter of evocative words. No American novelist is so vigilant in the perception of character or so urgent in its expression. Nor is any one, except perhaps Dreiser, so unafraid of the immensity of life. This tremendous capacity for living and writing lifts “Of Time and the River” into the class of great books. It is a triumphant demonstration that Thomas Wolfe has the stamina to produce a magnificent epic of American life.
Wolfe’s works should be in the public domain now, although it does not appear anyone has gotten around to publishing them yet as free text or audio books. (A project for Yosemite Radio?)
Those days are long gone. There are no more literary giants like Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Wolfe. What will we do without them? Watch bad films on streaming services and short videos from A.I. bots?
Nope. Like Mark Twain wrote of the 20th century, I feel like a stranger in the 21st. This can’t go on much longer.
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