The Haunting of Thomas Wolfe

Abstract

FEATURED AUTHOR THE HAUNTING OF THOMAS WOLFE Mary Aswell Doll "O lost and by the wind grieved, ghost, come backagain!" That famous refrain is one most readers ofThomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel know by heart. It is a puzzling line, really: What is a "wind grieved ghost?" Without pressing poetry too strongly for its literal meaning, the refrain is a romantic cry from the heart about loss. But since it is addressed to the ghost, the refrain refers to the dead ones whose hold is ever present, as in Wolfe's comment, "I am worrying for the dead this Christmas," or as in his poetic lines, "You who were made for music, will hear music no more: in your dark house the winds are silent. Ghost, ghost, come back." During my growing-up years, some say that my father was a wind grieved ghost. My father, the second editor of Thomas Wolfe, saw the big man as his most promising writer at Harper & Brothers in the late 1930s, even though the two knew each other for only six and a halfmonths. When Tom tragically died, a piece of my father's soul died too. The general impression my father as editor gave was of a cold man, an authoritarian and a stickler for details. My experience of him was different. The younger of his two children, and a girlchild at that, I was the pot ofgold at the end ofthe rainbow, he told me. My mother has recounted the odd coincidences that conjoined Thomas Wolfe with Edward Aswell. Their birthdates were almost alike: Ed Aswell born October 9, 1900, Thomas Wolfe born October 3, 1900. Ed Aswell born in Nashville, Tom Wolfe in Asheville. Tom Wolfe fled the South, Ed Aswell fled the South. Both attended Harvard University. Something about the South makes blood brothers of exiles. For my father, I think the South meant semi-poverty and complacency and conformity. As we can determine from reading his novels, the same was true for Tom (I call him Tom, although I never knew him). In some way my father felt he was Tom's other half, providing the balance ofrestraint to Tom's gargantuan ofexcess. 36 That, in any case, was my mother's conviction. In a letter she wrote to Wolfe's second biographer, Andrew Turnbull, she said my father was obsessed by Wolfe. "He wasn't the same man after Tom's death," she wrote. "I think he believed, poor man, that the posthumous novels were actually a product of the Great Collaboration, a monument ofTom plus Edward Aswell, his alter ego." The bond was partly the South, the place that cursed them both and claimed them both. I have thought of the bond between Wolfe and Aswell as "mythic," in the manner ofGilgamesh grieving for the death ofhis soul mate, Enkidu, from the Sumerian legend. My father described his bond with Wolfe more simply and much more wittily as "a sheep in wolf's clothing." I was born after Thomas Wolfe died. The stories of the visit of Wolfe to the Aswell home have been recounted many times, possibly because that was the only visit Wolfe made to my father's house and so much was made of that. The stories are of my mother creating a Christmas dinner for the honored guest, carefully matching Tom's descriptions in LookHomeward, Angeloffeasts at holiday times; stories about Tom bringing my brother a large teddy bear, a gift he carried on the milk train hours after he was supposed to arrive in Chappaqua for the 1937 Christmas celebration—a careless delay my punctilious mother found unconscionable. I was not born yet. But I do remember playing with that bear, moving its arms around and delighting in the straw noises the arms made. After my parents' divorce in 1946, I grew up in my father's house with a man who seemed burdened and saddened, even while his career was moving forward. But did I really remember that, or did my mother's interpretation ofthe "poor man" color my memory? In two years, as I am writing this piece, my father will have been dead fifty years. Tom will...