From the Blue Ridge to the Rocky Mountains: Thomas Wolfe and the American West

Edited text of an address (via Skype) to the Thomas Wolfe Society, Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting, 24 May 2013, Abraham Lincoln Auditorium, Idaho State Capitol, Boise. Thomas Wolfe was passionate about many things. He loved to describe the sound of trains in the night and the thrill of journeys to far places. He loved to celebrate the lure of great cities and the lordly power of rivers. He delighted in catalogues of food, giant feasts, and the faces of thousands of nameless people. More than any other American novelist, he attempted to gather up in one epic catalogue the whole of life, the sum of experiences he had had and the experiences he imagined. Wolfe exhibited in all work a particularly intense and complex interest in mountains. He was passionate about big things, colossal things, and mountains were among the biggest things he had encountered, along with oceans and great rivers and giant teeming cities. I share at least three things with Thomas Wolfe: an October 3rd birthday, the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, and a love of words and storytelling. When I was almost fifteen I discovered Look Homeward, Angel in the bookmobile that came to Green River Baptist Church every first Monday afternoon of the month. Like most fifteen-year-olds, I was intoxicated by the bravura language, the Byronic sadness of Eugene Gant. I felt I was Eugene Gant and family was my family. I learned chunks of the novel by heart and wept when I read the section on the death of Ben. It was Look Homeward, Angel that gave me the idea that I too might write something big and intense. But where Eugene Gant dreamed of escaping Altamont (Asheville) to the great cities of the East and Europe, I dreamed of escaping from the small farm to Asheville, the shining city on a hill. Wolfe was, after all, a city boy, and there is something sinister in portrayals of the mountains around Asheville and the mountain people in the coves and hollows. They were mountains and kin, yet he feels a deep alienation from them, especially in earlier writing. They belong to the world he was trying to escape. Near the beginning of Look Homeward, Angel he describes Oliver Gant's first sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains: Dusk came. The huge bulk of the hills was foggily emergent. Small smoky lights went up in the hillside shacks. The train crawled dizzily across high trestles spanning ghostly hawsers of water. Far up, far down, plumed with wisps of smoke, toy cabins stuck to bank and gulch and hillside. The train toiled sinuously up among gouged red cuts with slow labor. As darkness came, Oliver descended at the little town of Old Stockade where the rails ended. The last great wall of the hills lay stark above him. As he left the dreary little station and stared into the greasy lamplight of a country store, Oliver felt that he was crawling, like a great beast, into the circle of those enormous hills to die. (7) In Wolfe's descriptions of the Blue Ridge Mountains there is almost always a sense of hauntedness, of lostness. More often than not tone is elegiac. When Oliver visits fiancee's family, the Pentlands, he feels he's entered an alien world. Greeley, the youngest, is eleven, degenerate, weak, scrofulous, but his white moist hands could draw from a violin music that had in it something unearthly and untaught (15). The whole scene with the Pentlands suggests an alien, isolated people: And as they sat there in the hot little room with its warm odor of mellowing apples, the vast winds howled down from the hills, there was a roaring in the pines, remote and demented, the bare boughs clashed. And as they peeled, or pared, or whittled, their talk slid from its rude jocularity to death and burial: they drawled monotonously, with evil hunger, their gossip of destiny, and of men but newly lain in the earth. And as their talk wore on, and Gant heard the spectre moan of the wind, he was entombed in loss and darkness, and soul plunged downward in the pit of night, for he saw that he must die a stranger--that all, all but these triumphant Pentlands, who banqueted on death--must die. …