SELF-ABSORPTION

Eugene Gant, Thomas Wolfe's narrator in Look Homeward, Angel enters the theatre of human events in 1900, a new start at the foot of a page of dead heroes. The first noun in the novel is destiny. Five hundred lusty, overripe pages of family life with Eugene at the centre, ensue. 

We would give willingly some more extended account of the world his life touched during the first few years, showing, in all its perspectives and implications, the meaning of life as seen from the floor, or from the crib, but these impressions are suppressed when they might be told, not through any fault of intelligence, but through lack of muscular control, the powers of articulation, and because of the recurring waves of loneliness, weariness, depression, aberration, and utter blankness which war against the order in a man's mind until he is three or four years old. p. 33

Thomas Wolfe, Eugene, wrote himself large. In the womb he was already a man. For the next thirty-eight years he wrestles with it. He protests. He observes. He describes.

The strangeness, the remote quality of this face was enhanced by its brooding fabulous concentration, by its passionate dark intensity, across which every splinter of thought or sensation flashed like a streak of light across a pool. The mouth was full, sensual, extraordinarily mobile, the lower lip deeply scooped and pouting. His rapt dreaming intensity set the face usually in an expression of almost sullen contemplation; p. 177

You could edit these five hundred pages down to five and there your Eugene Gant would be, stripped to yet unknown essentials.

He knew hunger. He knew thirst. A great flame rose in him. He cooled his hot face in the night by bubbling water jets. Alone, he wept sometimes with pain and ecstasy. At home the frightened silence of his childhood was now touched with savage restraint. He was wired like a racehorse. A white atom of inchoate fury would burst in him like a rocket, and for a moment he would be cursing mad. p. 267

You could turn Thomas Wolfe into Raymond Carver, Raymond Carver into Thomas Wolfe.

Walled up in the great city of his visions, his tongue has learned to sneer, but the harsh rasp of the world had worn no grooving in the secret life. .... He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged to the Mythmakers. For him, the sun was a lordly lamp to light him on his grand adventuring. He believed in brave heroic lives. p. 319

 By page 482 Eugene Gant is nineteen. The Angel is in the rearview mirror. 

But what, said Eugene very slowly into the darkness, if I'm not a Genius? He did not ask himself the question often. He was alone: he spoke aloud, but in a low voice, in order to feel the unreality of his blasphemy. It was a moonless night, full of stars. There was no thunder and no lightning. p. 482

Oh but there was.

 

ACTS OF THE BODY

In the nineteen seventies a number of long novels written about twenty years before were reissued, including the works of Patrick White in Australia, John Cowper Powys in Wales, and Thomas Wolfe in America, all of them works that slowly emerge from what feels like the long, nearly cosmic or mythic breath of a place. None of them, since then, has shown through in my walks along the bookshelves as a potential reread, until this long indoor period with very little coming into my reading life through the post or any other way, which led to my going back to Patrick White. As with other rereading lately, unleavened by work outdoors, I am easily irritated, less by the telling than by the reader I was in the nineteen seventies, and possibly the writer I was then, too. Though an ancient doggedness prevails and, after The Aunt's Story I read The Tree of Man, grateful for anything that goes on this long, with a slow sense of ageing and inevitability, great evidence of people's bodies, as if to set them forever as thin, yellowing, travelling, possibly mad aunt, or thickening, solidifying worthy farmer of few words, and his worthy wife, doubtful children, their places in what had been a wilderness and gradually became a town, with post office and motor cars. 

What then was wrong? There was nothing, of course, that you could explain by methods of logic; only a leaf falling at dusk will disturb the reason without reason. Stan Parker went about the place on which he had led his life, by which he was consumed really. This is my life, he would have said if he had expressed himself other than by acts of the body.

The other day D said she didn't like novels because she didn't like feeling the presence of the author. She thought it always sounded pompous. It wasn't the moment for discussion but I would like to some time. Is it pompous to create characters who cannot express themselves, for whom the sudden discovery of a dragonfly on a mulberry leaf has to stand in place of all that they might say, if they could, about their lives together? The Tree of Man is nearly five hundred pages long. And most of the characters decide, where possible, to say nothing.