Thomas Wolfe’s first novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929; the title comes from Milton’s Lycidas) cast a critical eye on the small town of his birth, and was greeted with outrage by his townsfolk. There was more than one threat to lynch his ‘big overgroan karkus’ if he ever returned. When he did finally pluck up the courage to visit (eight years later) he was mercifully unharmed, but realized that his connection to his birthplace had been severed forever.At a dinner with a friend, the Communist activist Ella Winter, he told her of the experience, and she commented, ‘But don’t you know you can’t go home again?’ Wolfe asked her: ‘Can I have that? I mean for a title...I’m writing a piece...and I’d like to call it that. It says exactly what I mean.’ And indeed it did: the ‘piece’, You Can't Go Home Again, published after his death, was a record of what happens when one writes a novel excoriating the town of one’s birth, i.e that one receives death threats and poison pen letters and is mortally afraid to go back home. As the book itself puts it, 'You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, [...] back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.’ Rather neat, in a sense. Wolfe's first book had, by its very existence, created the conditions necessary for his final one to be written.
Consulted:
Donald, David Herbert: Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (2002)
cool.
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