2This essay focuses on how Wolfe’s relationship to time – “neophilia” and “neophobia” – influenced his position inside literary history. It situates him with regard to three time-related concepts of particular relevance to the Modernist period. The first is Renaissance. The French term, meaning rebirth, based on the Italian Rinascimento, was first used in the 19^th century to describe the return to and improvement upon ancient Greek and Roman knowledge in 14^th to 17^th century Europe. The novel in the Modernists’ productions was bound up with the dual moods of “neophilia” and “neophobia”: it was shaped by the Renaissance and by an increased attention to past forms which still informed culture as the Modernists developed upon them. Like them, Wolfe wrote the new with a consciousness of the past. The term renaissance is more widely used to indicate a new development, a revival, or an expansion, as is the case for the Modernist renaissances such as the Irish Literary Renaissance that marked the end of the 19^th century, whose leading figure was W. B. Yeats, or the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, of which Wolfe’s contemporary, Langston Hughes, was a representative. The term applies to the movements Wolfe was associated with, the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, mentioned above, and the American Renaissance, set earlier in time (c. 1830-1861) but given the name later, by scholar F. O. Matthiessen, in his 1941 book on Emerson and Whitman. Renaissance also suggests renewal through regeneration, the need for which inspired T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and was a constant concern of Wolfe’s in the face of a present which he viewed as degenerative. In this vein, one may speak of renaissance to indicate taking a new, improved direction in life, as do Wolfe’s characters, for example; or to speak of life after death.

3Renaissance is used for Wolfe’s posterity, yet the second concept, “bad Modernism,” developed by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, also enters into play. The versatile expression transcribes the original judgment of readers baffled by a work’s novelty and noncompliance with established proprieties and conventions; it applies to a work manifesting “bad behavior toward mainstream institutions or prevailing aesthetic standards,” that had “a refractory relation between itself and the dominant aesthetic values […], between itself and capitalism, between itself and mass culture, between itself and society in general” – a work whose avant-gardism in fact consecrates it as “new” and “Modernist” (Mao and Walkowitz 2006, 3). Or the term may be applied, on the contrary, to a Modernist work deemed not radical enough, and too rapidly integrated to the mainstream: Modernism can be perceived as “bad” due to its “alleged surrender of resistance and transgression” because of “sanctification and success” (Mao and Walkowitz 2006, 14). Again, it can be “bad” if the work is “deemed inferior or inadequate as Modernism” (Mao and Walkowitz 2006, 15). Thus, the expression “bad Modernism” registers fluctuations in taste and canon-making. It sheds further light on the tension between “neophobia” and “neophilia” in Modernism, and serves here to problematize Wolfe’s and his readers’ relation to the “new” as well as the elaboration of critical criteria, notably by the New Critics, whose standards Wolfe did not meet.

4The third concept is that of the instant as it occurs and passes – modo, the root of Modernism. As Vincent Sherry points out, the Latin modo tells the time of an action “occurring not simply “today” or even “now” but ‘just now’” (Sherry 2017, 2). Its fleetingness entails both “neophobia” and “neophilia”: “The impermanence that is scored into the root meaning of radical “Modernism” is a condition equally of threat and opportunity, where an improvisatory ‘modern’ is always allied with a sense of disintegration, so that the message of this mercurial instant includes also and inevitably a hermeneutic of decay” (Sherry 2017, 8). In his Conclusion to “The Renaissance” (1873), Walter Pater celebrated that time of modernity, encouraging his readers to enjoy the moments as they passed simply for those moments’ sake, arguing that art made this possible (Pater 1986, 220). As did Modernists William Faulkner with his frozen images, James Joyce with his epiphanies, or Virginia Woolf with her “moments of being,” Wolfe sought a focus on the modo that stayed decay. He pursued his desire for regeneration by depicting and sparking the vital effects of a fruitful instant.

5The first part of this essay, “Seeking renaissance into fullness,” considers Wolfe’s ambivalence about the new in light of the appeal of a restorative permanence, a facet of his craving for totality. The expansive Wolfe was, by temperament and in his writing, both an elegiacal “neophobe” and a “neophile” In his personal life he was attached to a happier past while captivated by aspects of the modern, and in his autobiographical fiction he tried to render all of life. Before Ezra Pound launched the phrase “make it new” in 1934 to encourage giving the past a new twist (a motivation retrospectively applied to all Modernists in the 1950s), he sought new effects and themes and experimented with the new styles and structures that many Modernists were using: he used the Modernist techniques of stream of consciousness, photographic/camera visions, style variations, genre pastiches, intertextual borrowing including songs, news items, and other extraneous material, episodic structure and open endings – while the “complete and whole articulation” of the life he wanted to recreate (Wolfe 1983b, 88) also relied on the past and other cultures’ traditions. He combined Joycean experimentation with Renaissance diction to revive the past, as when rendering the returning father’s thoughts in Look Homeward, Angel: “Breakfast. Fried brains and eggs with streaky rashers of limp bacon. Wake, wake, wake, you mountain grills! Sleeps she yet, wrapped dirtily in three old wrappers in stale, airless yellow-shaded cold” (Wolfe 1929, 73). Perhaps even more than other Modernists, he stressed the forces of decay and opposed them to an ideal timelessness, notably by using myth, that of the Golden Age in particular – but he recorded his hope for this life.

6The second part, “Bad Modernism,” deals with the perception of the “new tradition” that Wolfe tried to make for himself (Wolfe 1983b, 87). That Wolfe’s publishers saw and marketed the new and modern in his work points to the groundbreaking aspect of his Modernism; but he was seen as falling short of well-wrought Modernist art. Moreover, his success with the mainstream public as well as the hopeful credo on America he is known for today have lent his name what one may term “associations very close to the received order of things” (Sherry 2017, 17). However, delving into Mao and Walkowitz’s explanation of “bad Modernism,” with its contradictory suggestions of the authentically new, the traditional, and the inadequate, one realizes that what has been termed unsatisfactory may yet yield up new value, and this is the case with Wolfe’s work, of increasing interest in Modernist studies.

7The final part, “Modo and the potential for renaissance,” seeks to show how Wolfe’s desire for totality, stemming from “neophilia” and “neophobia,” surfaces and evolves in his approach to the instant. His high Modernist perception and treatment of moments of intensity and epiphanic glimpses, and, later, the “conversion” motifs of proletarian Modernism which stem from an instant’s clarity, render the fullness of experience, halt time, and are effective and revitalizing. They make bearable the Modernist tension caused by the instant segueing into an altered form and the conflict between the fleeting and the permanent through a communion that is sufficiently freed from time to redirect desire from the transcendent to the vital. Wolfe’s Modernism integrates the new in the form of the vital instant and sketches out a vita nova, liberating energies of rebirth so that one may question the received order of things.

Seeking renaissance into fullness

8Wolfe was ambiguous about the new. Here, stress is laid on how his ambivalence sparked a search for wholeness that can be linked to the various constituents of the concept of renaissance – writing with a consciousness of the past, expanding upon it, and hoping for regeneration. Personally, Wolfe tended to dwell on the past, with the melancholy of a man who had been spoilt as a young child but whose parents had soon separated, who had grown up in a town known for its tuberculosis sanatoriums, who had seen two of his brothers die, witnessed his father’s alcoholic excesses and, later, his drawn-out illness and death. His sensibility was much like that of Sherwood Anderson, who made loneliness and the inability to connect with others a major theme of his writing – Wolfe’s constant theme, stated in 1929, being “that men are strangers, that they are lonely and forsaken, that they are in exile on this earth, that they are born, live, and die alone” (Donald 1987, 219). His idealized childhood memories of a unified family translated into his autobiographical character Eugene Gant’s longing to return to prenatal fullness (Moisy 2006, 31-37). But he also embraced the present with gusto, was keenly alive to sensory impressions, talked animatedly for hours, ate and drank heartily. He sought out the new in literature, reading Joyce’s Ulysses when it was published, and he traveled to new lands whenever possible. His desire for totality pushed him towards excess – notably in his experimentation as a young playwright: he disregarded traditional form, composing plays that were unusually lengthy, punctuated with confusing directions, and called for too many characters and changes of scenery. Yet he found inspiration in the past of the country in the folk plays he wrote for Frederick Koch as an undergraduate at Chapel Hill, and later in Mannerhouse (begun at George Pierce Baker’s 47 Workshop at Harvard and published posthumously), in the past of his hometown and of his family in Look Homeward, Angel and The Hills Beyond, and in the past of New York and his lover’s family in The Good Child’s River (written in the 30s and published posthumously), which was trimmed into chapter 26 of The Web and the Rock. He also drew inspiration from the works of past writers. His father had recited Shakespearian monologues and poetry to him as a child, and he had studied classics at his preparatory school in Asheville. As a postgraduate student at Harvard, he studied under John Livingston Lowes and became acquainted with Coleridge’s notebooks. Seeing how Coleridge’s reading re-emerged in his poetry, he began to tear through books hoping that with “unconscious cerebration” what he read might enhance his writing (Wolfe 1970, xv). References to and quotes from other writers’ works abound in all his works, with or without quotation marks or italics to indicate their separate standing.

9Wolfe’s work is elegiac, for his Modernist sense of disintegration was strong, but he sought regeneration. He retold in graphic detail the illness and death of family members and the effects of World War I on American youth and life. By breaking up texts into multiple genres, as did other Modernists, he could reflect the fragmentation and the disorder of modern life. But his reliance on past cultures suggests, too, a more ancient and reassuring means of reaching a totality. As Victor Hugo says was his own case in his Preface to Cromwell, Wolfe must have admired Shakespeare for the freedom of his drama “in which the contradictions of human existence – good and evil, beauty and ugliness, tears and laughter – [were] resolved by the inclusion of both tragic and comic elements in a single play” (Barrère 2022, online). The impact of the Renaissance is patent in Wolfe’s work as he strove to reflect and contain the contradictions of human existence. T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” had stressed that the whole of past literature informs every new work, and that the new work in turn affects the entire order of past literary productions (Eliot 1997, 41). Wolfe, inserting echoes of Milton’s Paradise under torture of the dentist’s drill, for example, while showing his debt to Joyce, was, despite his deliberate irony, creating a new entity:

A tiny breeze blew back the thin curtains […].
“Do you feel that?” [the dentist] said tenderly.
“Wrogd gdo gurk!”
“Spit!” With thee conversing, I forget all time. (Wolfe 1929, 331)

10He uses language reminiscent of Shakespeare’s from the introduction of Look Homeward, Angel – “The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years” (Wolfe 1929, 3) – to the three pages on the worst and best of man in You Can’t Go Home Again – “This is man, who will steal his friend’s woman, feel the leg of his host’s wife below the table cloth, dump fortunes on his whores, bow down to worship before charlatans, and let his poets die” (Wolfe 1940, 434) – incorporating the fleeting and anecdotal into a greater totality.

11But Wolfe was ambivalent about “the many-ness and the muchness of things” (Wolfe 1935a, 680). His search for a restorative wholeness is apparent in his use of lists, yet his success was questionable. The Modernists made lists and parataxis a feature of their style – striking examples are to be found in Joyce’s “Cyclops” chapter in Ulysses – a takeoff on Homer’s lists of Greek captains, armies, and equipment in the Iliad and on Virgil’s Roman adaptations in the Aeneid – or Fitzgerald’s lists of guests for Gatsby’s party in The Great Gatsby (1925) and shopping for Nicole in Tender is the Night (1934), or Gertrude Stein’s play “A List,” with its repetition and listing (Stein 1932). Wolfe’s catalogues and run-on lyrics bring to mind American Renaissance giant Whitman, and, like his, strive to convey the abundance of life, as in the two pages on scents and smells in Look Homeward, Angel:

He remembered yet the East India Tea House at the Fair, the sandalwood, the turbans, and the robes, the cool interior and the smell of India tea […]. Yes, and the exciting smell of chalk and varnished desks […]. Yes, and of the rank slow river, and of tomatoes rotten on the vine […], of cold starlight, and the brittle-bladed frozen grass…” (Wolfe 1929, 84-86)

12Like Whitman, Wolfe uses a “dithyrambic” lyrical style – “weary with harvest, potent with every fruit and ore, the immeasurable richness embrowned with autumn, rank, crude, unharnessed, careless of scars or beauty, everlasting and magnificent, a cry, a space, an ecstasy! – American earth in old October” (Wolfe 1935a, 331). Yet these lists or lyrics also enact the impossibility, for Whitman and Wolfe, of achieving the desired wholeness.

13Wolfe was ambivalent about his time. It comes out in his treatment of the South. Though the poetic sweep of the old Southern oratory style has a rehabilitative potential in his prose, recalling his Northern father’s bombast (“The grisly parade of the spectre years trooped through his brain” – Wolfe 1929, 6), he was critical of the Old South, mocking one Brahmins’ recollections of the Civil War in Look Homeward, Angel:

In his proud youth, in the only war that mattered, Colonel Pettigrew had marched at the head of his own cadets. There were 117, sir, all under nineteen. They stepped forward to a man … until not a single commissioned officer was left … 36 came back … since 1789 … it must go on! … 19, sir – all under one hundred and seventeen … must … go … on! (Wolfe 1929, 347-348 – all ellipses in the original text)

14And he portrayed the New South as grasping, with the portrayal of the mother, Eliza, who is not content with her Yankee husband’s stonecutting trade (“There was no money in death. People, she thought, died too slowly” – Wolfe 1929, 17), but is obsessed with making a profit from real estate (“The town seemed to be an enormous blueprint to her” – Wolfe 1929, 12). As Pierre Jamet has noted, Wolfe viewed progress in a Promethean fashion, expressing his “sheer admiration for man’s ability to build machines that will quench his thirst for adventure, or fulfil his hunger for movement across the earth and the universe,” such as trains and ships, and often wrote just as positively about big cities, amid whose movement and renewal his protagonists aspire to surpass themselves; yet his machines can be dehumanizing, his cities alienating and corrupt (Jamet 2021, 3-6). Not surprisingly, he dealt with the Modernist themes of alienation and fragmentation, the bankruptcy of social conventions and institutions, the interpersonal gulf between men and women, cultural decay, the dysfunctional family, illness, death, the war, and economic change (Ensign 2003, 7; Manche 2018); he dwelt on physical decay and the inadequacy of language, and his youths and artists are sorely misunderstood.

15Wolfe was ambivalent about time in general, and about the possibility of locating those chinks in time opening to potential regeneration. Martin Hägglund, in his study of chronophilia and chronophobia, evolves the concept of chronolibido, insisting that the poignancy of degenerative life is the key to art, but that “an investment in living on,” rather than a desire to transcend mortal life, guides the artist (Hägglund 2012, 14). Wolfe was invested in living. By presenting his ambiguous picture of the modern in his novels Wolfe wanted to render existence in all its fullness – “[I]t is life, life, life – the only thing that matters,” he wrote to his mother (Wolfe 1943, 49-50). But it appears he did share with the Southern Renaissance Fugitives and Agrarians a desire for permanent values. Pierre Jamet has Wolfe in mind when he says that all artists seek something that transcends the present: “The task of the artist consists in finding something at the heart of our fleeting world that is somehow permanent or that inscribes itself at least in a different temporality” (Jamet 2015, 237). In order to give the moment fullness, Wolfe based his autobiographical writing on a classical foundation. Joseph Millichap has shown how in his entire canon, he tried to convert his own life into an epic along the lines of Homer’s Odyssey. Southerners Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty and Ralph Ellison all wrote autobiographical epics influenced by the “cultural and literary legacies of the ancient Western world” (Millichap 2009, 7, xii). Yet most typical of Modernism was the adaptation of ancient myth in a modern context. Eliot explained that he had based The Waste Land, among many other borrowings, on a loose mythic structure inspired by James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Arthurian legend: the Fisher King has been wounded in the groin, the earth is going sterile and needs the grail to recover, but no-one on the war-torn earth seems equal to that task. Eliot coined the term “mythical method” in a 1923 essay in The Dial to describe Joyce’s achievement in Ulysses, in which Leopold Bloom’s day in Dublin is converted into a Homeric Odyssey. Eliot stated: “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. […] Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method” (Eliot 1975, 177). In a recent work, John Irwin argued that in Fitzgerald’s use of the “mythical method,” the resurfacing of the Pygmalion myth was a result of an inner compulsion. So was it with Wolfe, ever the nostalgic. Using the transcendence of myth and the lasting beauty of classical poetry, he sought to stabilize the shaky world in which he depicted his protagonists. Legend appeared better than a present that wrought destruction, permanence more desirable a point of reference than the ever-changing now, and allusion and myth could give his writing and his autobiographical protagonists an eternal dimension. He contrasted the “weary unbright cinder” of the earth today with a past Golden Age in Look Homeward, Angel (Wolfe 1929, 2), looked for a lost father in Of Time and the River, and denounced the “enemy” that has despoiled American hope in You Can’t Go Home Again. However, in this lost paradise, Golden Age myth, restoration into life was crucial, for the possibility of hope was in the balance – his autobiographical heroes are launched on what Northrop Frye termed a quest myth, to reestablish past harmony through art (see Moisy 2015).

16Though Elizabeth Outka opines that in the final section of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe creates a “Modernist moment” in which images replicate like a virus and cities are like bones, translating Eugene’s grief and confusion (Outka 2020, 86-87), John Idol sees in the title, borrowed from “Lycidas” (Milton 1988, 60, l.162) as well as in the ending, a belief in a restoration to come (Idol 2003, 199). Both interpretations of the finale, as a sign of grief and a sign of affirmation, are valid, as the final lines, in which Eugene “turns his eyes upon the distant soaring range” (Wolfe 1929, 626), allow hope for the protagonist in his future life despite his sorrow. Later, in his novella “The Web of Earth,” published in Scribner’s Magazine, July 1932, the mother, Eliza, whose speech is reproduced, becomes an elemental figure who holds out hope for the living in the Depression, nourishing and generous where the first Eliza was miserly:

I’ve got a secret that I’m going to tell you. I’ve still got a little patch of land out in the country that no one knows about and if the worst comes to the worst,” I said, “I won’t starve. I’ll go out there and grow my food and I’ll have plenty. And if you go broke you can come on out,” I said. (Wolfe 1935b, 302-303)

17One will recall that in ancient myth, after Pandora unwittingly released plagues on mankind, hope was left in the world. Wolfe, keenly aware of the forces of dissolution at work at the heart of time, nevertheless saw Eliot as a no-hope Waste-Lander who wrote about brokenness and loss; Wolfe, on the other hand, sought the possibility of regeneration in the degenerative present.

“Bad Modernism”

18This section deals with Wolfe’s triple relation to “bad Modernism” as the phenomenon described by Mao and Walkowitz: when the public’s “neophobia” in art becomes “neophilia,” the art that was once radical becomes passé; it may be judged faulty on new terms (see Mao and Walkowitz 2006, 13-14). The process can be traced in Wolfe’s virtuously “bad” willingness to innovate and shock, in the rapid popular acceptance of his work, making it seem to pass from defiantly “bad” art to conventionally “good” productions, and in the numerous criticisms that he lacked competence as an artist, which are slowly being revised.

19Wolfe was twenty-eight and had failed as a playwright when he submitted the manuscript of his first novel, O Lost, to publishers. Although the work’s voice and range included the past, it was novel. In his autobiographically inspired story of several generations of a small-town American family, he had a “bad” Modernist disregard for Victorian proprieties and style: O Lost dealt with alcoholism, prostitution, decay, illness, and death. It both reflected and overcame the fragmentation of the age in a prose that was interspersed with poetic passages (“O inevitable, beautiful, and unswerving Chance! … Through you, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through you, the hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas” – Wolfe 2000, 219), imbedded lyrics (“…there are blue eyes that shine / Just because they meet mine.…” – ibid., 215), collage (“SPEND YOUR SUMMERS AT / DIXIELAND / In Beautiful Altamont, / America’s Switzerland. / Rates Reasonable – Both Transient and Tourist. / Apply Julia E. Gant, Prop.” – ibid., 174), or caught frozen images (“A flashlight: Hugh Barton and his bride limply astare – frightened; Gant, Ben, and Fred; Eugene, sheepishly agrin; […] the pert flower girls; Pearl Hine’s happy laughter” – ibid., 417). His prose translated the stream of consciousness (“The bread that I fetch will be eaten by strangers. I carry coal and split up wood for fires to warm them. Smoke. Fuimus fumus. All of our life goes up in smoke” – ibid, 317), included anamnesis (“all the minutes of lost time collected” – ibid., 656) and even some magical realism, as the stone angels and lambs in W.O. Gant’s shop come alive (ibid., 653-54). It had an organic plot and an episodic structure, and Wolfe, obsessed with the “Modernist metanarrative” of rendering life in full (Meindl 2007, 84) had written 1,110 double-spaced pages; to most publishing firms the manuscript seemed frighteningly long, formless, and unpublishable. Yet editor Maxwell Perkins, who had discovered and edited F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, saw a way of further rejuvenating the staid image of Scribner’s and was willing to put in the work to help Wolfe cut O Lost and turn it into the marketable Look Homeward, Angel.

20Before publishing the novel, Scribner’s Magazine published Wolfe’s “An Angel on the Porch” in their August 1929 issue. It was a short story excerpted from Look Homeward, Angel, in which a harlot has died of an abortion. As Carol Ingalls Johnston notes, that issue of Scribner’s Magazine featured the fourth installment of A Farewell to Arms.

The first installment of the Hemingway story in the May issue had resulted in the banning of the June issue in Boston and in a boost in sales in other cities. Wolfe’s story was placed between beginning and conclusion of Hemingway’s episode, at a point in the issue in which readers were sure to pass as they read what may have been the coarsest installment yet. Perkins’s implicit critical commentary on Wolfe was: Here was another maverick writer […] ready to storm the bastion of middle-class morality, […] ready and willing to offend the defender of the outmoded Genteel tradition. (Johnston 1996, 37)

21A Boston ban on Look Homeward, Angel would have heralded an exciting, unconventional, modern writer, one who flew in the face of the system, but like the Hemingway ban, it would have fed into the capitalist plan. Wolfe wrote to a former Harvard classmate: “[T]his is between us – if it does get banned, I hope it makes a loud noise – for God’s sake try to get some publicity out of it for me” (quoted in Johnston 1996, 37). The book was not banned, though its ‘bad Modernist’ depiction of swearing and sex drives, illnesses, and dysfunctional relationships prompted Edwin Fairley of the Unitarian Christian Register to assert “[The editors] should have burned it” (Fairley 1996, 46). Gerald Gould of The Observer claimed to be stymied by the difficulty of the work: “I cannot form the remotest conception of what ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ is about, though I have been humbly gnawing at it for weeks” (quoted in Donald 1987, 243).

22Other critics stressed the resurgence of the past in the work rather than its radical modernity. It recalled the best of the Renaissance: Wolfe’s comic exaggeration and vitality were compared to Rabelais, and another early review stated that Look Homeward, Angel had “the buoyant health of the roaring Elizabethan tales of Nashe and Greene” (Johnston 1966, 44). Connections were also made to the writers of the American Renaissance – the energy of Wolfe’s notably recalling Whitman’s. Linking Look Homeward, Angel with these works established that Wolfe was working from a place in tradition, as any true artist must, according to T.S. Eliot, in order to provide a new contribution to the entirety of letters.

23This new contribution became more apparent as Look Homeward, Angel, as a roman à clé that was critical of the old ways of the South, fulfilled its ‘bad Modernist’ credentials by creating a scandal in many parts of the region. Some foresaw that the novel might engender a literary rebirth. One week before the English publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Richard Aldington wrote a review comparing Wolfe to Joyce, and, favorably, to Faulkner, whose Soldier’s Pay was also being published in England, seeing both works as harbingers of a Southern renaissance: “I do not know if this authorizes us to applaud a re-birth of energy and genius in the South after the disaster of the War of Secession and brutalizing of the Reconstruction period. I should like to think so” (Aldington 2001, 142). With its blend of old and new and its aspiration to fullness, Wolfe’s opus was a “living creation” such as Sinclair Lewis had called for in his 1930 Nobel acceptance speech, speaking a few words in praise of Wolfe’s “Gargantuan” work for its “great gusto of life” (Lewis 1930, online). The public responded to the breath of new life in his productions: aspiring poet Kimball Flaccus wrote Wolfe that Look Homeward, Angel had opened his eyes “to all the joy, the sadness, the tenderness, the tragic terror of life” (Donald 1987, 222).

24Wolfe’s first novel, and later works with Scribner’s and Harper’s, or his short stories in such publications as Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, Vogue, or The Saturday Evening Post, written in as ‘bad’ a Modernist style as he could get away with, boosted the sales of those publishing houses and journals, and reflected well on the mainstream publishers. Yet these associations curbed Wolfe’s work. As Holliday points out, small presses left Pound and Joyce time to do their work and let Henry Miller write sexually explicit books. Wolfe, who wrote mostly about his own experiences, had little time to think them over and learn from them due to pressure from the publishers. Scribner’s, concerned with making a profit, besides revising his work and softening the author’s language, hurried Wolfe and simplified his complex schemes (Holliday 2001, 26-29). At Scribner’s, political inuendo was excised from his writings, though he published more radical texts in The New Masses and The Nation. Many of his projected books were not written, and instead of the form he was best at, novellas, he was encouraged to produce long novels, or short stories, cut for publication with the aid of his agent, Elizabeth Nowell. Perkins insisted that Wolfe give up his ambitious plans for The October Fair, the second novel he had been working on for four years, and concentrate on a sequel to Look Homeward, Angel, of which he supervised the rewriting, and that was finally entitled Of Time and the River. In The Story of a Novel (1936), which Wolfe published afterwards, he recounted how Perkins had stood by him through his disorganized drafting bouts and had told him when his book was finished – causing critic Bernard DeVoto to jeer about “the assembly-line at Scribner’s” in his article “Genius is not enough” (1936) and precipitating Wolfe’s break from Scribner’s (DeVoto 1962, 89). According to Holliday, his move to Harper & Brothers in December 1937 “did little to improve Wolfe’s cause as a serious literary artist” in view of the publishing house’s “conservative reputation and its penchant for producing cheap trade editions” (Holliday 2001, 30).

25After Of Time and the River, Wolfe resolved to exercise more independence, no matter how bad it might prove for Scribner’s affairs (Donald 1987, 382, 397). When he left Scribner’s for Harper’s, his new contract had a clause stipulating that the publisher could make “no changes, additions, or alterations in the title or text” without the written consent of the author (Donald 1987, 466). However, Wolfe died leaving his incomplete manuscripts in disorder, so that his posthumous books had to be rewritten and reshaped. Editor Edward Aswell based the progress of the last books on Wolfe’s experiences and The Web and the Rock was not the more “objective” book Wolfe had claimed it would be in the “Author’s Note” that prefaced the work; the youth’s vision was subjective and oscillated between extremes as in his previous novels; and the more mature writer in You Can’t Go Home Again was shown floundering in a torrent of words, like Eugene in Of Time and the River, as he tore down the “devoto-bloato” critics and writers of the day (Wolfe 1940, 486) and tried to find “The way! The way! […] I’m looking for a way […]. Something – a story – composed of all the knowledge I have, of all the living I’ve seen […] – something distilled out of my experience and transmitted into a form of universal application” (Wolfe 1940, 386-387).

27Thomas Underwood deems that the Agrarians’ rejection of Wolfe enabled them to perfect the theory of their new form of criticism, which had evolved from the studies of I.A. Richards and the criticism of T.S. Eliot (Underwood 1989, 45; Menand 2021, 457-461). Allen Tate, who had introduced the Fugitives to the poetry of T.S. Eliot, told his students, after Of Time and the River, that Wolfe “not only did harm to the art of the novel, but moral damage to his readers” (Underwood 1989, 35). Underwood lists Agrarians Tate, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren’s grievances against Wolfe as his failure to abandon autobiography, his attempts to convert his own stream of consciousness into fiction for a national audience, and his failure to structure his novels in any traditional manner. When they became influential New Critics and contributed to institutionalizing literary theory, they insisted upon form, analyzing texts through close readings that ignored the author’s intentions, the work’s historical and cultural background, or the reader’s emotions. It must be noted that contrary to Wolfe, writers such as Faulkner or Joyce, and Eliot, on whose tenets the New Critics based theirs, were the subjects of much work by these scholars. Cleanth Brooks, in particular, “helped move Faulkner criticism in new directions, repackaging him as a Modernist writer whose works were ahistorical, apolitical, and dominated by structure” (McMichael 2008, 48); he was even laudatory about Hemingway in The Hidden God (Brooks 1963), and enthusiastically commented on Joyce, whom Ransom declared to be “on the side of the angels” in 1939 (quoted in Segall 1993, 115); Tate, Warren, and R. P. Blackmur, whose critical perspective was influenced by the work of the New Critics, also published on Joyce (Segall 1993, 125). New Criticism has contributed to those writers’ recognition by the establishment, inclusion in university syllabi, or earning Nobel prizes – it turned these defiantly ‘bad’ Modernists into inexhaustibly ‘good’ ones; but they tore down Wolfe, insisting that his work was faulty, “bad Modernism,” condemning him for the lack of an aesthetic system (Litz et al. 2000, 10-13; Underwood 1989, 37-38, 45) without which his novels could not be “‘real’ literature” (Litz et al. 2000, 214).

28Robert Taylor Ensign believes that Wolfe’s “language and affirmative visions were incongruent with the prevailing trends in literature and criticism” (Ensign 2003, 8). Regarding language, there was simply too much of it. Wolfe could write in his dithyrambs or in Southern oratorical style and say, “as for plot, there’s not any” – as he did about his novella “A Portrait of Bascom Hawke,” a study in youth and old age, which became a section of Time and the River. As for affirmative visions, the previous section has shown that although he longed for past felicity and in his Modernist experimentation gave graphic depictions of illness, decay and death, he believed in hope and the vital. In “A Portrait of Bascom Hawke,” the protagonist embodies youth and life, and the narrator’s series of rhetorical questions counters “the influence of T.S. Eliot and other nay-sayers on literature” (Donald 1987, 262-263) in a poetic denial:

The dry bones, the bitter dust? The living wilderness, the silent waste? The barren land?
Have no lips trembled in the wilderness? No eyes sought seaward from the rock’s sharp edge for men returning home? […] All, then, all? Birth and the twenty thousand days of snarl and jangle – and no love, no love? Was no love crying in the wilderness?
It was not true. The lovers lay below the lilac bush; the laurel leaves were trembling in the wood. (Wolfe 1961, 70)

29Wolfe’s involvement with mainstream editors, the pains he took to dissociate himself from any movement in writing, his ridiculing of the intelligentsia and notably of the Agrarians in his posthumous novels, as well as the hopeful views for the future of the nation which concluded the last novel (“Credo” – Wolfe 1940, 741), made him popular with the public at large. But the factors that once appealed to the laymen contributed to isolating him on the ahistorical, formalist American literary scene that the New Criticism shaped.

30At Wolfe’s death in September 1938, while his Joycean tendencies were grudgingly admitted, he was already pegged as a man of the past. The New Republic called him “a Whitman turned inwards through reading James Joyce” and praised his talent for “comic or tragic distortion that [went] back to Dickens” (Mitchell 2001, 283). John Peale Bishop wrote, the winter after Wolfe died, “The only contemporary literary influence on Wolfe which was at all strong is that of Joyce” (Bishop 2001, 289), ignoring the Anderson connection and his response to T.S. Eliot, for instance. Nine years after he died, David McDowell summed up his standing thus: “It is a commonplace that Thomas Wolfe was completely out of the stream of literary fashion of his time” (McDowell 1948, 536). And after Donald had published his biography of Wolfe as a Modernist, Harold Bloom introduced his “Modern Critical Views” on Wolfe by calling him a human and aesthetic disaster, opposing him to former Agrarian Robert Penn Warren – “our leading poet, with a Sublime voice wholly his own” (Bloom 1987, 7, 5).

Modo and the potential for renaissance

32Despite Eliot’s criticism of “our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else” (Eliot 1997, 40), this section identifies one difficulty in Wolfe’s work that makes his voice “wholly his own” (Bloom 1987, 5), for all his borrowing. He centers on the moment and opens onto the new, compensating for that preoccupation with death and decay which made the permanent values that the past offered seem so appealing.

33The moment in modernity is complex. Vincent Sherry cites Reverend Inge’s 1937 interpretation of the word “Modernism” as having the fleeting instant at its root:

Modo, as the Oxford English Dictionary informs him, means something narrower than an adjectival understanding of “recent” or “current”; it finds its meaning as a temporal adverb, telling the time of an action occurring not simply “today” or even “now” but “just now” […] a special present, a brink of time, a precipitous instant, all in all, a crisis time. These several associations move to the acutest register in the twentieth century through the addition of the suffix “ism,” which adds a self-conscious awareness to this special experience of the “modern” moment, turning the uncertainty of instantaneous time into not just a feeling but an idea, maybe even a faith or belief in this condition of constantly disruptive change […].
No, it is not about the mannerisms, odd or otherwise, that are attached to “Modernism” as its characterizing styles, which, in any case, are much too various to conform to any one version. No, it is about time: it is about this new experience of vertiginous instants in which “Modernism” is most self-consciously involved. (Sherry 2017, 3)

34Only particular instants, according to Marcel Proust, make time’s otherwise unobservable passing perceptible: novelists have to “turn the hands of the clock at dizzying speed” to procure a consciousness of change. He used juxtaposition and involuntary memories to achieve this (Hägglund 2012, 45-46), while William Faulkner favored frozen images to heighten a consciousness of the stream of life continuing on its course around them (Meindl 2007, 78).

35Wolfe experimented with different ways to make what Hägglund describes as the pathos of the perception of time’s passing come alive in “brinks of time,” “vertiginous instants” and “crisis times” (Sherry 2017, 3), but he affirmed energy and life after transience. His focus on charged and epiphanic instants lead to a poetic replenishment, and, in certain works, leads to a renaissance of sorts.

36A critical moment evidencing time’s work of decay in Look Homeward, Angel is balanced by a restorative heightened instant. Shortly after depicting an old Latin teacher “in a fit of coughing strangulation […] [tearing] up from his convulsed organs a rotting mass” (Wolfe 1929, 335), Wolfe catches the poetic vision of dancing soda jerkers in the local drugstore: “The jerkers moved in ragtime tempo, juggling the drinks, tossing scooped globes of ice-cream into the air and catching them in glasses, beating swift rhythms with a spoon” (ibid., 344). Again, in the short story “In the Park” (1935), in which he attempted to merge meaning and sounds, inserting onomatopoeias to render the “chittering bicker and fast-fluttering skirrs of sound” of the birds in the trees (Wolfe 1987, 258; see Donald 1987, 259), Wolfe ended on a vital dawn chorus in poignant contrast with the narrator’s recollection of the moments preceding her father’s death. Such heightened instants procure an aesthetic and emotional satisfaction that assuages temporal concerns.

37The epiphanic moment also carries one beyond the temporal. Robert Langbaum sees in Wordsworthian “spots of time” the origins of the Modernist focus on the transcendent moment. Like Joycean epiphanies or Woolfean “moments of being,” they induce a stasis in the narrative, a poetic breath which is created through the reader and transcends time (Langbaum 1983, 337). In Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Stephen sees a girl gazing out to sea and he, she and time are instantaneously transformed: “A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!” (Joyce 1936, 196). The instant Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway is kissed by Sally Seton lingers powerfully, transforming reality:

And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it – a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling! (Woolf 1993, 38)

38Like his contemporaries, Wolfe emphasizes the “just now,” and the fleeting instant unites the writer, protagonist and reader in a communion charged with life. In Look Homeward, Angel, the first child’s death leads Gant to an epiphany phrased in diction that is not his oral style but suggests transcendent comprehension. Such poetry gives readers a pleasure that compensates for desolation at man’s lot:

“If I had known. If I had known,” said Eliza. And then: “I’m sorry.”
But he knew that […] she was sorry for all who had lived, were living, or would live, fanning with their prayers the useless altar flames, suppliant with their hopes to an unwitting spirit, casting the tiny rockets of their belief against remote eternity, and hoping for grace, guidance, and delivery upon the spinning and forgotten cinder of this earth. O lost. (Wolfe 1929, 59-60)

39In Of Time and the River, a penitent Eugene goes to his mother’s room at night to explain why he has behaved irresponsibly; he has an impulse to make her understand “the things he had always wished to say, but never said.” He is checked when he sees her false teeth in a glass on the cupboard. In that glimpse of teeth separated from the mouth, which evoke “the intolerable memories of the vanished and the irrevocable years,” the mother and son’s apartness is confirmed. As in “A Portrait of Bascom Hawke,” age is contrasted with youth’s vitality, and Eugene is struck by “the strange and bitter miracle of life” (Wolfe 1935a, 403), suggesting the potency of the life force although life and death are inextricably linked.

40Wolfe’s epiphanies have caused his work to be termed ‘bad,’ or faulty, but their raison d’être is a concern for the restoration of vital forces – a renaissance. Morris Beja has argued that Wolfe could not control “his passion for epiphany,” that there are too many to be artistically significant (Beja 1987, 29, 45), much like John Peale Bishop who complained that “[Wolfe] can so try to impress us with the immensity of the moment that it will take on some sort of transcendental meaning. But what that meaning is, escapes him, as it does us” (Bishop 2001, 288). The abundance of the moments that Wolfe privileges attests to a tension which John McGowan has identified in his essay on “Modernist Epiphany and the Soulful Self.” By showing the pure difference of each moment in isolation, Wolfe seems to manifest Pater’s suspicion “that selfhood itself is a trap,” imagining “a self that is entirely new in each instant,” while building an identity and a soul in his art (McGowan 1990, 418-419). Walter Pater, in his Conclusion to “The Renaissance,” suggested that fleeting impressions, or “experience itself” could ensure a restorative energy, “ecstasy,” without “the fruit of experience”:

Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, – for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. (Pater 1986, 218)

41In Wolfe, the tension Gowan speaks of endowed disparate moments with both a “restorative energy” and the potential to change his protagonist or readers. The vital instant dispels routine, the impact of each situation may be felt fully, and nascent capacities may be realized. Focusing on the moment, Wolfe describes and in turn causes what Vladimir Jankélévich calls “vertical” experiences, in which the senses are so sharpened that the world is seen with new eyes, consciousness of time and constraints vanish, unlike in everyday, “horizontal” experience. Jankélévitch considers what is perceived in the vertical instant as a vision of God – horizontal life is scattered, but the vertical instant shows things as they are, revealing the unity and effectivity of life (De Montmollin 2000, 354, 363, 115).

He could not answer. For as she spoke he knew that [...] she’d never understand –
- Never understand tomorrow –
- That a tide was running in the hearts of men –
- And he must go. (Wolfe 1940, 320, 322)

43Webber lets impressions “soak in, just soak in” until he sees that he has to help “cure” America (ibid., 728-730).

44As for the effect of Wolfe’s texts on the public, Carol Ingalls Johnston believes Look Homeward, Angel, for one, “empower[s]” readers, changing lives, altering perceptions of reality, encouraging them to achieve goals that they believed were beyond them” (Wolfe 1929, 62). Pat Conroy recalled, “I never went back to the boy I was before Look Homeward, Angel occupied my sixteen-year-old heart. […] [T]he voice of Eugene Gant sounded the anthems of liberation” (Conroy 1999b, 8-9).

45When reading Wolfe, one perceives each moment’s effective power to break with past constraints and bring new developments to fruition. Wolfe would no doubt have approved of Aswell’s placing at the conclusion of You Can’t Go Home Again the following passage justifying George Webber’s severance (as a man who believes in renewing one’s efforts for the common good from moment to moment) from his fatalistic editor Foxhall Edwards (who thinks things must continue as they have always done):

You and the preacher may be right for all eternity, but we Men-Alive, dear Fox, are right for Now. And it is for Now, and for us the living, that we must speak, and speak the truth, as much of it as we can see and know. With the courage of the truth within us, we shall meet the enemy as they come to us, and they shall be ours. And if, once having conquered them, new enemies approach, we shall meet them from that point, from there proceed. In the affirmation of that fact, the continuance of that unceasing war, is man’s religion and his living faith. (Wolfe 1940, 738)

46Wolfe imagines a renaissance that is a vita nova. His famous invocation to the spirit, “Ghost, come back again” (Wolfe 1929, 2) is not only for lost loved ones but for the vision and strength that the vital instant, the breath of life can bring, enabling one to meet challenges and see beyond convention with new ideas, fresh resources, and a feeling that one’s decisions are just.

47Wolfe’s affirmative vision need not be considered so discordant with Modernism as critics such as Ensign assert. Edwin Berry Burgum sees him as a “belated successor to Whitman rather than an American version of Proust’s or Joyce’s despair” as he showed “confidence in the principle of kinship as the fundamental and persistent directive of American life” (Burgum 1962, 118-119); his writing does strive for unity despite division, and his insistence on the privileged moment, in his poetic epiphanies or in his political pronouncements stressing brotherhood, does create renewal through communion. But it is facile to distinguish him from other Modernists where Modernism is understood as representing atomized experience. For the Modernists attempted to make up for the alienation of modern life, unifying creations with epiphany or myth, or, in the case of D.H. Lawrence, by insisting on the fusion between man and woman, awakening in the reader, as did Wolfe, inklings of a richer reality. In this respect, Wolfe’s position in Modernism is a particularly dynamic one. To a very large extent, he succeeded in what he described as the artist’s goal, “to fix eternally in the patterns of an indestructible form a single moment of life’s beauty, passion, and unutterable eloquence, that passes, flames, and goes” (Wolfe 1935a, 551). Though he represented atomized experience in fragmented texts in which he deplored the individual’s isolation from his fellow man, he harnessed the power of the vital moment to his writing to regenerate his characters, enable a restorative fusion with his readers, and create new possibilities for just action, so that his ambivalence about the new might find a resolution in the potential it creates for renaissance.

Conclusion

48Wolfe’s texts produce dynamic changes, as he leavened experiences of degeneration and decay by attention to the modo, or “just now.” He offers a vita nova in which life can still be lived more poetically and humanly, as both “Man-Creating” and “Man-Alive” (Wolfe 1940, 353-354), as it is constantly renewed and replenished by what is perceived in timeless vertical instants.

49If we take renaissance to mean new forms of art and life, Wolfe innovated in his work throughout his career, though he did not see the publication of his less autobiographical American scenes like “K 19” (c.1932), “The Hound of Darkness” (c. 1935), The Hills Beyond, or the travelogue A Western Journal (1938). Holliday may be right as concerns the United States, at least, when he says, “Besides John Keats, no other writer’s short career influenced as many as Thomas Wolfe” (Holliday 2001, 127). He undoubtedly impacted many more than have testified to admiring his prose, who echo his poetic style and use his favorite techniques or delve into the same themes that he explored – see J.D. Salinger’s misunderstood adolescents, Kurt Vonnegut’s presentation of the limits of language, Thomas Pynchon’s open endings or Rick Moody’s portrayals of physical decay, for instance. Traces of his vertical instants which initiate spiritual regeneration are to be found in the works of writers who have stated their desire to emulate Wolfe: in Jack Kerouac’s Beat seizing of the moment, in Harriet Arnow’s lyrical social prose that zeroes in on privileged instants and vivid daydreams, or in George Saunders’ satirical flights, to name a few. Abroad, too, he has been seen as a living, connective force – Gilles Deleuze saw him as typifying not so much Modernism as Anglo-American literature in this respect: “Thomas Hardy, Melville, Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe, Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Miller, Kerouac. In them everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside” (Deleuze and Parnet 2007, 36).

50Despite such an artistic legacy, in recent years Wolfe has been read in smaller increments, as many modern readers prefer his short stories or online excerpts to his long novels. Yet even a paragraph found on the web may regenerate one’s apprehension of reality, and instill a consciousness of the beauty and fleetingness of life, and of the need to live it fully. In the 1999 introduction to Of Time and the River, one of the writers he had inspired called Wolfe “a dues-paying member of the kiss-my-ass school of American writing” (Conroy 1999a, 16). Wolfe, who would have laughed at being reduced to a figure of any movement or -ism whatsoever, testifies to the range and ambivalence of Modernism. His “bad” productions may be unequal, partly due to editorial intervention, but they are as varied in style and theme as they are rich, spanning several epochs as regards literary inspiration. He was both a “neophile” and a “neophobe,” but he empowers readers and writers because he found a way of writing what can be seen as a romance of the present against decay and oblivion, courting the vital and opportune moment. His texts are living things that do not die, to cite Jean Onimus’s definition of poetic works: in them one will always discover the new (Onimus 2017, 137). His vertical instants stimulate new visions, new decisions, and debouch into what Onimus described as the more intense, open and complete life that overrides systems (Onimus 2017, 166, 198). Wolfe deserves to be more widely known and read, for the modo effects he creates can lift us out of time and carry over into our future.