I know I’m not the first person to have a problem with Thomas Wolfe. I’m stuck on the racist treatment of Blacks and Jews by the protagonist, Eugene, and his friends during their childhood.
Even though it had been years since I read Look Homeward, Angel, I included Wolfe, as well as Proust and Kerouac, as influences on the semi-autobiographical aspect of my novel Tamper. I recently decided to read Angel again, and I can’t get past that ugliness.
Sure, many people have explained that “those were different times,” or that Wolfe is not condoning the racist actions, but simply “telling it like it was.” Some even see it as a soul-baring confession. The thing is, even keeping all these explanations in mind, I find it very difficult to identify or sympathize with the perpetrator of these gross injustices.
I thought I would find more about this on the internet, but apparently, all the in-depth essays on the subject are restricted to journals that I can’t access unless I finally make good my threat to go back to college.
Over at Amazon.com, book reviewer Mark Valentine says, “I doubt if Wolfe will be read by a wide audience in this day because his race references can easily be construed as racism. Push past that, though, and read it for its heart, not the age in which it was written.”
According to The Washington Post, civil rights crusader/punk rocker Henry Rollins thinks highly of Wolfe, which means Rollins either shares Mark Valentine’s view, or, like me, hasn’t read Angel lately and has forgotten all the bad parts.
Here’s something interesting: The YMI Cultural Center in North Carolina, reporting on the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Reopening in 2004, allows that “Wolfe’s depictions of African-American individuals are sadly stereotypical. Wolfe’s closest contact with African-Americans came in brief snatches while on his paper route. This short, impersonal contact helps explain the shallowness of Wolfe’s understanding of African-Americans. In conjunction with the reopening of the Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse, Wolfe’s childhood home, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial and the YMI Cultural Center are presenting (Wolfe’s play) Welcome to Our City… While we will stick closely to Wolfe’s original text, the African-American characters will be portrayed with more depth than Wolfe originally gave them.” And that comes from an organization that presumably likes Thomas Wolfe.
Most exciting to me, so far, is that I found a book I want to read, and that’s always a good thing. The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Facism, 1930-1950, by Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. The thesis of this book, according to reviewer Ted Atkinson on H-Net, is that “European fascism indelibly shaped how southern writers understood southern society and culture and, as a consequence, exerted a profound influence on their writing–sometimes directly, but more often than not as a haunting force.”
Quite a dilemma. Any comments?
Al Letson
