Thomas Wolfe Remembered

By Mark Canada

A collection of reminiscences captures the private life of a great American writer.
 
Thomas Wolfe’s life may seem to be an open book. A life that, after all, was the source for his best-known works, including the novels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, as well as his numerous short stories and dramas. Since his death in 1938, scholars and admirers of Wolfe have relied largely on these texts to understand the man himself.
 
Thomas Wolfe Remembered provides something new: a rich, multifaceted portrait painted by those who knew him (casually or intimately), loved him (or didn’t), and saw, heard, and experienced the literary (and literal) giant. This volume gathers in one place for the first time dozens of reminiscences by friends, family members, colleagues, and casual acquaintances, adding color and fine details to the self-portrait the author created in his novels.
 
Wolfe found plenty to challenge and frustrate him throughout his life, from his boyhood in Asheville, North Carolina, to his education at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University, through his time in New York and Europe, his travels through the American West, and his death in Baltimore. He experienced two distracted parents in a loveless marriage, the premature death of a beloved brother, a minor stutter, and the difficulties of controlling a mercurial temper. Yet Wolfe’s exuberance, perceptiveness, memory, and compulsion to record virtually all that he experienced made for an extravagance of material that sometimes angered the people whose lives he used as source material.
 
Editors Mark Canada and Nami Montgomery have collected dozens of remembrances, many unpublished or long forgotten, including pieces from Julia Wolfe, Margaret Roberts, Frederick Koch, Maxwell Perkins, Elizabeth Nowell, Edward Aswell, and Martha Dodd. Some are endearing, others are disturbing, and many are comical. All provide glimpses into the vibrant, haunted, boyish, paranoid, disheveled, courteous, captivating, infuriating, and altogether fascinating giant who was Thomas Wolfe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Sep 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9780817391935

Book preview

Wolfe.

1

Childhood (1900–1916)

Thomas Wolfe spent most of his youth in Asheville, a resort town in the mountains of North Carolina. At first, he lived with both of his parents, as well as six older siblings—Effie, Frank, Mabel, Ben, Grover, and Fred—in a house built and dominated by his larger-than-life father, William Oliver (W. O.) Wolfe, a lanky stonecutter and volcano of verse and vitriol. Later, after his mother, Julia, began running a boardinghouse not far from the homestead, young Tom moved in with her. The Old Kentucky Home, immortalized as Dixieland in Look Homeward, Angel, provided the artistically minded boy with a new kind of drama, not an endless run of King Lear with the dramatic W. O. in the lead role, but a revue featuring a variety of chippies, lungers, and other characters. Tom was the baby of the family, and his mother treated him as such, insisting that he wear his hair long, breastfeeding him until he was three-and-a-half years old, and sleeping with him in her bed until he was even older. She also brought him along on her trips to New Orleans, Daytona, Palm Beach, Hot Springs, Washington, DC, and St. Louis.

This variable, volatile childhood left its mark on Wolfe, who would spend much of the rest of his life wandering over America and Europe and clinging to various surrogate parents. The first was his beloved brother Ben, whom he depicted in Look Homeward, Angel as a kind of surly champion of young Tom’s interests. The next was a teacher at the North State Fitting School, a small, private institution that he began attending at age 12. Generally unimpressed with the headmaster, J. M. Roberts, Wolfe idolized the man’s wife, Margaret Roberts, who taught him literature. In Look Homeward, Angel, he would write that Margaret Leonard, a character clearly based on Roberts, first had touched his blinded eyes with light.¹

The reminiscences in this section capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary in the boy who would become one of the best-known writers of his generation. As Hal Fisher and Margaret Batterham Waters show, young Tom Wolfe loved baseball, played catch in the driveway of the Old Kentucky Home, debated the superior qualities of prominent pitchers, and celebrated the glories of his home state. This same boy, the reminiscences from his mother and Roberts indicate, read before he was two years old, quoted Shakespeare at age twelve, and wrote in a way that made him seem a boy apart.

1

Julia Wolfe

Julia Westall Wolfe (1860–1945) gave birth to Thomas Wolfe on October 3, 1900. He was the last of her eight children with William Oliver Wolfe (1851–1922). In 1906, she purchased a boardinghouse called the Old Kentucky Home in the family’s hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. She eventually purchased other properties in the Asheville area, becoming a successful investor in real estate. As she reveals in this reminiscence, Julia kept her youngest son very close. While the other children stayed at the family home a few blocks away, Thomas moved into the boardinghouse with his mother, eventually spending about a decade there before heading off to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill when he was 15.

Julia Wolfe was the basis for the character of Eliza Gant in her son’s first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, and his second novel, Of Time and the River. A remarkably durable woman with a keen eye for real estate, Eliza sometimes maddens her son Eugene and other children with her frugality and stubbornness, but she also evokes the narrator’s pity, as she has endured the loss of three children and the verbal abuse and neglect of an unfaithful, alcoholic husband.

Source: Julia Wolfe. Transcription of recorded interview by John Skally Terry. John Skally Terry Papers on Thomas Wolfe and Other Materials, 1917–1953, CW 1, Thomas Wolfe Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

When Tom was a baby, he was a very beautiful baby, and had such bright eyes and a high forehead. He looked like he had more head than body—had such a fine head and face. He could talk when he was twelve months old and he being the baby I kept him a baby. I think he has written it up himself that he slept with me until he was a great big boy. He wasn’t weaned until he was three and a half years old.

Whenever a prominent Doctor—he wasn’t my doctor at the time, but he was Mr. Wolfe’s after—he and another doctor were arguing about healthy children and babies. Dr. Glenn said to this other Doctor, says, There’s a child whose mother didn’t wean him until he was three and a half years old. Said, You know the old argument that children should be weaned before they’re a year old? Said, It hurts the child and it hurts the mother. [quotation marks are sic] Now, he said, There’s an example of a fine looking child, healthy, and nothing wrong with the mother, either. Said, What’re you going to do about that?"

I think we just weaned Tom off by the other children laughing at him and talking to him about being just a baby. He still nursed. But it was a habit with him, that was all: he didn’t really need it. Oh, when he was about a year old, he could toddle around, he’d come up and pull to me, and I think Mr. Wolfe told him at first, says, Ask her now, right nicely, Please Ma’m, says, maybe she’ll take you up and nurse you.

Well, he learned to say ‘please ma’m’. He thought that was the name of what he wanted—it was ‘please ma’m’. So every time, especially if I had company, he’d come and say, Please ma’m, [sic] please ma’m, And, oh, I’d say, you don’t want anything; you’ve had your dinner. You don’t want to nurse. And they said, Oh yes, you must take him up. Any child that can ask so nice that way must be taken up."

When Mr. Wolfe would, to tease me, have him ask me right out if there was company around, especially young men around, and they knew they’d have lots of fun over it and Tom would always carry out the directions, whatever he told him to ask for.

Mrs. Wolfe Talks About Tom’s Childhood

Tom liked to look at pictures, or pictures [sic] books of the other children which they had outgrown and for which they had no other use. But they were delighted to scatter the books around him when he was sitting in the baby carriage, or on a comfort [sic] on the floor with pillows around him. They would read the little stories printed under the pictures and before he was two years he could read anything they read to him. He would say, Read about that picture.

They were proud to see how much interest he showed, and too, they felt they were teachers. Often tried to imitate the way their teachers did at school.

Tom could talk when he was a year old and the whole family, since he was our baby, gave lots of attention to him. They all got tired of their old books and stories Tom wanted them to read, so any little new book of stories they found on a counter they would buy and bring home to him. Mr. Wolfe did the same. He took such a delight in getting new books for him and would talk—take him on his lap to read him the new story.

[. . . .]

Tom began to learn and understand things around him, could read the stories after Mr. Wolfe or the others had read a few times. He had a remarkable memory but had to learn words later on.

He at home, not like the other brothers and sisters who all grew up together and played together, had no one his own age to play with. There were two neighbor boys, one a year older and the other perhaps two that came in our alley and back yard. We had a fine playground with swing and playhouse where they went if it rained.

We bought Tom all kinds of toys. He had express wagons, fire engines, and ladders and many things that the neighbor boys did not have. And they and Tom had lots of fun and excitement climbing ladders and putting out imaginary fires.

Max Israel and Tom often played, when too cold to be out, in my sewing room. Tied chairs together and played street car. One day I stopped my sewing to listen to their plans.

Max first said: Tom, I think I’ll be a street car conductor when I get to be a man. Then all of a sudden he said, No, guess I’ll be a plumber like my papa.

Tom spoke at once. I’d rather be a United States General than a plumber.

It occurred to me then that there was a difference in rank and Tom had the idea. Tom got the idea of U.S. general—he had heard his father often talk of the great generals of the Civil War: Lee, Jackson, and Stewart. Mr. Wolfe had great admiration for these Southern leaders. All this took place before we went to St. Louis in the summer of 1904.

Tom’s other playmate, a neighbor’s boy, was Charles Perkinson, who was perhaps two years older. Tom was four years old—oh yes, one month old when Grover died,¹ and old enough to know and remember, but not old enough to know or remember much about it. That was my second great sorrow.

2

Hal Fisher

Hal Fisher had a brief acquaintance with Wolfe while the two were boys. Fisher’s family had met Wolfe and his mother in Jacksonville, Florida, and later visited the Wolfes at their boardinghouse. Fisher recounted this acquaintance in a letter to Mabel Wolfe Wheaton some twenty years after Wolfe’s death.

Source: Hal Fisher to Mabel Wolfe Wheaton. Letter, September 16, 1958. William B. Wisdom Collection of Thomas Wolfe, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[. . . .]

My acquaintance with Tom Wolfe extended only over a few weeks in May and June, 1914, but the impression Tom made on me then was so deep and enduring that it didn’t surprise me, a number of years after his death, when I encountered the article in Life,¹ and learned that he had become a great man. I then exclaimed to my family, Why Thomas Wolfe the author was Tom Wolfe, my boyhood friend!

I first met Tom and your mother early in 1914—January, I believe. They had come down to Jacksonville, where they stopped at the Lenox Hotel, in which my parents and I then lived. That hotel still stands. It is in Newnam [sic] Street, at the southwest corner of Adams, and now rejoices in the name of The Berwood. [. . . .]

As the result of the visit of Tom and your mother to the Lenox, we stopped at 48 Spruce Street when we went to Asheville after school closed in the Spring of 1914. As nearly as I can remember, school was dismissed in Jacksonville on May 22, and my mother and I left for Asheville that evening; my father meeting us there Saturday.

My romantic craving for mountains having been very little satisfied up to that point, I was anxious to go exploring. Tom took me up Sunset Mountain on Sunday, May 24. I remember that I came near diving to my everlasting when unable to make a turn while running down a path. I saved myself with a baseball slide. We closed the afternoon by inspecting Grove Park Inn, which struck me as an architectural marvel. It still does.

In the ensuing weeks, Tom and I frequently played catch in the driveway at the south side of 48 Spruce. We took turns acting as catcher, and the catcher was also the umpire. The latter fact occasioned many disputes over the fairness of decisions. I admit there [sic] were sometimes questionable; particularly when I was the arbiter.

At various times, after vigorous exercise, we would spend an hour or so delving through baseball guides on the front steps. Tom held with the American League; I with the National. Tom was convinced Walter Johnson was the greatest pitcher of all time, while I firmly believed that this distinction belonged to Christy Mathewson.² Tom introduced on his side the earned run averages, which were printed that year for the first time and which demonstrated that Johnson had allowed a lower number of earned runs per nine inning game than Mathewson.

Hal Tom would say, Don’t you concede that the American League is a harder hitting organization than the National? If so, can’t you see that Johnson is the better pitcher?

I must admit that logic was on his side.

The foregoing details appear trifling, it is true. On the other hand, I believe every recollection anyone has of the great is worth setting down. Each item serves to provide a more complete picture for posterity.

Another controversy concerned the merits of a couple of Southern Association pitchers, Prough of Birmingham and Coveleskie of Chattanooga. Prough was at the top in Games Won and Lost column for the 1913 season. I, a native of Birmingham, was determined that Prough must have been the best in the Southern Association that year. On the other hand, Coveleskie was very close to Prough in winning percentage, and had, I believe, pitched a greater number of games, so Tom favored Coveleskie. I must say that time showed Tom to be correct, because I never heard of Prough again whereas Coveleskie went from Chattanooga to Detroit, and was a prominent pitcher for years. I saw him (Harry) several times myself and also watched his brother Stanley, who was younger and a still better pitcher.³ The earned run averages played no part here, because they were confined to the minor