[The World, Saturday, October 26, 1929]

The First Reader
Ah, Life! Life!

Among the first novels that give me an impression of strength and promise is "Look Homeward, Angel," by Thomas Wolfe, an instructor in New York University. It is a big, fat novel in the Thackeray manner about a common-place American family in a drab American town. There is rich emotion in it, there is understanding sympathy in it, and there is in it the presence of an author who is aware of himself and his theme, who is more than a recorder.

Many new novels reject everything that this author includes. The young men and women who are making a record of life as it is, whether of actions or mental attitudes (Gertrude Diamant, Jean Riordan, Josephine Herbst, for example), are not interested in taking the roofs off houses and looking in, or in taxing the tons off skulls and watching the convolutions of the brain. They report, for the most part, objectively; they eliminate non-essentials; they take for granted that ages of novel-writing have put the reader in the possession of aspects, points of view, attitudes that we take for granted. Not so Thomas Wolfe.

When I opened "Look Homeward, Angel," and read the author's apology for using real people out of the old home town-transmuted, of course, for his novel-I knew that he would have his say. He used a whole page to announce what most authors put into a sentence: "Many of these characters are reminders of actual people, but although all are reminiscent, none is an actual portrait." Even that has been simplified by many authors to a line that protects them from libel suits: "The characters in this book are entirely imaginary."
But Mr. Wolfe is determined to do a full portrait. He has behind him, as internal evidence shows, the range of English literature. He knows Thackeray's manner (in his worst writing) of jumping into the text. He knows George Meredith's musings over destiny, fate, love, ah me! ah me! He is able to sprinkle phrases out of English authors into his pages without quotation marks, without reference to footnotes, and thereby paying his reader the compliment of intelligence. He observes behavior, but to him behavior is not enough.
So "Look Homeward, Angel" becomes a rather formidable book, loaded down with details about the family of the Gants-about Gant, the father, who made tombstones in the provincial town of Altamont; and Eliza, the mother, who, after a protracted period of childbearing, opens a boarding house; and Eugene, the son. All egotists in their own way, all going forward to what? "Look Homeward, Angel" is a negation of any plan in life. This family sprawls, uses up its best talents without discretion, finds its vitality spent in frustrated efforts, gets nowhere. On the wife's side were the Pentlands-"that strange, rich clan, with its fantastic mixture of success and impracticality, its hard moneyed sense, its visionary fanaticism." To this end the elder Gant, who had drowned in liquor his protest at the imprisonment of the spirit, did not belong. His son Eugene felt its irony and futility in greater measure, as neither of his two adolescent ambitions-to be loved and to be famous-proved the origin of lasting happiness.

All those varied forces that make for the success and the failure of American life are here brought to bear on the fortunes of a single family, and on one man, Eugene, the lad whose romantic appraisal of life was gradually worn down by defeat. We follow him in his Odyssey, half of the mind, half of the body, and watch him beating on the great door that imprisons life. What message has life to give him? The best of his discovery comes with the words of his dead brother, who appears to him to say that there is no happy land, no end to hunger. "You are your world," says Ben. The only lesson Eliza gains from life comes also at the end when she parts with Eugene: "We must try to love one another." In his Meredithian prose Wolfe continues: "The terrible and beautiful sentence, the last, the final wisdom that the earth can give, is remembered at the end, is spoken too late, weakly. It stands there, awful and untraduced [sic], above the dusty racket of our lives. No forgetting, no forgiving, no denying, no explaining, no hating. O mortal and perishing love, born with this flesh and dying with this brain, your memory will haunt the earth forever."

Moralizing such as this has been absent from novels these thirty years. In the days of James Lane Allen it became a bit cloying. To-day it is something of a surprise. Mr. Wolfe's commendable strength makes criticism seem captious. He has glaring defects, chief of which seems to be a lack of clearness at the beginning. He treats Oliver Gant so sympathetically that we have difficulty believing his excesses when they occur. But apparently his aim is to portray life without directing the feelings of the reader against any one character. Toward the whole he has the forgiveness that comes with understanding. His second novel will tell us whether he has staying power as a novelist, whether he will be more than a one-book man.