Wolfe's Racism Revisited: A Response to Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr

Following the recent trend of reading southern writers within a global context, Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr., in The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950 (2009), offers a valuable examination of the ways that major writers from this period vigorously engaged in the worldwide debate about the evolution of government and social structure. Inspired by Lillian Smith's view that the South was haunted by three ghosts of racism and segregation--the black woman as sexual object and as surrogate mother, as well as the ostracized child of mixed-race parentage--Brinkmeyer identifies a haunting the southern psyche: the specter of European Fascism arising within America (3). In chapter 5, devoted to Thomas Wolfe, he explores the connections between this fourth ghost and Wolfe's nativist racism (153). Contrary to what he sees as the common tendency to view white southern writers of the 1930s and '40s as xenophobically turning inward and away from the debate about the threat of totalitarianism to Western democracy, Brinkmeyer argues that they actually turned fearfully outward, haunted by the ghostly presence of Fascist Italy and Nazi (2). Brinkmeyer traces the numerous forms that fear of Fascism was to take--beginning with the Nashville Agrarians' fear of modernity as a manifestation of Fascism and their allegiance to southern regionalism as the last bulwark against the erosion of democracy. Afterward, he examines the Agrarians' antithesis in W. J. Cash, who viewed the South's resistance to modernity as the death of civilization and its traditions (87) and perceived the ideological similarities between white southerners and their contemporaries in Nazi Germany--notably authoritarianism, fear of difference, and willingness to punish dissent with barbaric violence. Brinkmeyer also offers compelling readings of William Alexander Percy, Thomas Wolfe, Lillian Smith, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and Lillian Hellman. All these writers, with the exception of Faulkner and McCullers, Brinkmeyer notes, visited Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy during the 1930s and returned transformed, their fiction and drama turning decidedly darker and more focused on authoritarian politics and control (23). In his chapter on Thomas Wolfe, entitled Can't Go to Germany, (for which he was awarded the 2009 Zelda and Paul Gitlin Literary Prize by the Thomas Wolfe Society), Brink meyer recounts the story of Wolfe's travel to Germany in 1936, following earlier visits in 1926, 1927, 1928, 1930, and 1935. During this last visit Wolfe witnessed a country and a people he had loved now transformed by the pervasive despair that came from living under an oppressive totalitarian regime, even though the processes of oppression hidden from the visiting American--at least until he left the country. In Have a Thing to Tell You,' originally published serially in three issues of the New Republic (March 1937) and later--in a much longer version--included as the climactic dramatic episode of the posthumous You Can't Go Home Again (1940), (1) Wolfe irrevocably broke ties with his spiritual homeland and sacrificed his huge sales there in order to tell the truth about Nazi Germany and its rising tide of Fascist oppression. Have a Thing to Tell You' concludes with the horrific detention of a Jew trying to flee the country. The man attempts to take across the border by rail a portion of his life's savings, ten marks of which he has entrusted to George Webber, just as his real-life counterpart had entrusted the same sum to Wolfe upon his 1936 departure from Germany. (2) The Jew is taken from the train by Nazi police, leaving Webber with the ten marks in his pocket and a feeling he shares with his fellow travelers that they were saying farewell, not to a man, but to humanity (You Can't 699). Like other critics, Brinkmeyer reads publication of 'I Have a Thing to Tell You' as evidence of Wolfe's growing social consciousness during the 1930s, representing a break with his earlier Romantic fixation on the isolated ego. …