At the outset, a few words ought to be said in defense of Maxwell Perkins. Those words are: He had to cut something.
Perkins, “Editor of Genius,” as A. Scott Berg calls him in the subtitle of his biography of the renowned editor of Scribners publishing house, edited Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. In Wolfe’s case, the legend long has been that Perkins was virtually a co-creator of the author’s first novel, “Look Homeward, Angel,” by cutting and rearranging a mammoth, shapeless manuscript into a publishable book.
Six years ago two scholars, Arlyn and Matthew J. Bruccoli, took issue with the legend and published the full text as Wolfe wrote it. They restored to their original places sections totaling about 66,000 words (22 percent of the manuscript).
The Bruccolis published it through the University of South Carolina Press as “O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life,” Wolfe’s original title. “Look Homeward, Angel” was a substitute agreed upon by both Perkins and Wolfe, who, in the early days, worked together amicably.
To my ear, at least, “Look Homeward, Angel,” a borrowing from Milton, is less pretentious than “O Lost,” a phrase that occurs throughout the novel. The subtitle is the same in both.
Some fine additions
At any rate, the Bruccolis called the result of their restoration effort “a greater work than ‘Look Homeward, Angel.”‘
Well, maybe. It is true that they restored some fine and funny sections, including parodies of boys’ fiction; a parody of T.S. Eliot; large chunks telling the university life of Eugene Gant, the protagonist; blistering commentary on organized religion; and several others. It is also true, as they said, that the effect of the cuts was to alter the scope and intention of the novel.
And maybe Scribner, which has just issued this new paperback edition of the standard work, knows better. Because the practical fact is that general readers – who make up 97 percent of the small remnant who still care about serious fiction – would hardly know the difference.
For nearly eight decades (the first publication was in 1929) we have been enjoying a magnificent novel, but one whose length is maddening and, to be honest, unnecessary. Perkins’ instincts were right: He knew he had to cut something. Perhaps he cut wrong – or perhaps he didn’t cut enough.
One big autobiography
“Look Homeward, Angel” is a fictionalization of Wolfe’s own life – with Eugene Gant in the starring role – from his birth in Asheville, N.C., in 1900 to the time he sets out for graduate school at Harvard 20 years later. In fact, Wolfe’s four novels constitute one gigantic autobiographical novel of well over one million words whose central character symbolizes the sensitive artist in a hostile world. The others are “Of Time and the River,” “The Web and the Rock,” and “You Can’t Go Home Again,” though in the last two the Eugene character becomes George Webber.
It is a magnificent novel of impressionistic realism, essentially plotless, with superb characterizations and lyrical prose. It employs a variety of styles – evocative description, symbolism, vigorous dialogue, parody, bawdy humor, fantasy – sometimes shifting so abruptly you may lose sight of what Wolfe is doing. Such virtuosity and knowledge from a writer in his mid-20s!
Dysfunctional family
Like Wolfe, Eugene is the misunderstood youngest child in a tumultuous family that shows little affection, headed by a wastrel, drunkard, stonecutter father and a tightfisted mother who runs a boarding house and whose only passion is acquiring property. He drinks to forget unfulfilled ambitions; her acquisitiveness is born of the South’s privation after the Civil War, a circumstance that the father, a native Northerner, never comprehends.
A studious, inquisitive boy, Eugene maneuvers the rocks and shoals of his family’s life. His deliverance is being allowed to attend a private school where his personality and talents can flower, and from which, at not quite 16, he goes off to the state university at Pulpit Hill.
A final irony
The great tragedy of the book is the death of Eugene’s older brother, Ben. Ben is the best of the lot, a young man of great humanity and great potential, both unrealized by the family; his death from pneumonia assisted by his parents’ neglect and the drudgery of his life. As a final irony, the family gives him the best funeral money can buy.
Just as directors’ cuts, generally longer than the theatrical release, do not necessarily become the definitive cuts of films, so “O Lost” does not show signs of becoming the definitive edition of Wolfe’s first novel. Anyway, it doesn’t matter: Under either title, and either length, it is one of the great American novels of the previous century.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
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Look Homeward, Angel
By Thomas Wolfe; introduction by Maxwell Perkins
Scribner, 544 pages, $17, paperback
