Thomas Wolfe Remembered

by Mark Canada (Editor), Nami Montgomery (Editor)

Overview

A collection of reminiscences captures the private life of a great American writer.
 
Thomas Wolfe’s life may seem to be an open book. A life that, after all, was the source for his best-known works, including the novels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, as well as his numerous short stories and dramas. Since his death in 1938, scholars and admirers of Wolfe have relied largely on these texts to understand the man himself.
 
Thomas Wolfe Remembered provides something new: a rich, multifaceted portrait painted by those who knew him (casually or intimately), loved him (or didn’t), and saw, heard, and experienced the literary (and literal) giant. This volume gathers in one place for the first time dozens of reminiscences by friends, family members, colleagues, and casual acquaintances, adding color and fine details to the self-portrait the author created in his novels.
 
Wolfe found plenty to challenge and frustrate him throughout his life, from his boyhood in Asheville, North Carolina, to his education at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University, through his time in New York and Europe, his travels through the American West, and his death in Baltimore. He experienced two distracted parents in a loveless marriage, the premature death of a beloved brother, a minor stutter, and the difficulties of controlling a mercurial temper. Yet Wolfe’s exuberance, perceptiveness, memory, and compulsion to record virtually all that he experienced made for an extravagance of material that sometimes angered the people whose lives he used as source material.
 
Editors Mark Canada and Nami Montgomery have collected dozens of remembrances, many unpublished or long forgotten, including pieces from Julia Wolfe, Margaret Roberts, Frederick Koch, Maxwell Perkins, Elizabeth Nowell, Edward Aswell, and Martha Dodd. Some are endearing, others are disturbing, and many are comical. All provide glimpses into the vibrant, haunted, boyish, paranoid, disheveled, courteous, captivating, infuriating, and altogether fascinating giant who was Thomas Wolfe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817391935
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	09/11/2018
Series:	American Writers Remembered
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	328
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Mark Canada is a professor of English and the executive vice chancellor for Academic Affairs at Indiana University Kokomo. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of five books, including Introduction to Information Literacy for Students and Literature and Journalism in Antebellum America: Thoreau, Stowe, and Their Contemporaries Respond to the Rise of the Commercial Press. His work has appeared in American Literary Realism, Journalism History, and other venues.
 
Nami Montgomery is an ESL specialist in the Office of International Programs at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Julia Wolfe

Julia Westall Wolfe (1860–1945) gave birth to Thomas Wolfe on October 3, 1900. He was the last of her eight children with William Oliver Wolfe (1851–1922). In 1906, she purchased a boardinghouse called the Old Kentucky Home in the family's hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. She eventually purchased other properties in the Asheville area, becoming a successful investor in real estate. As she reveals in this reminiscence, Julia kept her youngest son very close. While the other children stayed at the family home a few blocks away, Thomas moved into the boardinghouse with his mother, eventually spending about a decade there before heading off to the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill when he was 15.

Julia Wolfe was the basis for the character of Eliza Gant in her son's first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, and his second novel, Of Time and the River. A remarkably durable woman with a keen eye for real estate, Eliza sometimes maddens her son Eugene and other children with her frugality and stubbornness, but she also evokes the narrator's pity, as she has endured the loss of three children and the verbal abuse and neglect of an unfaithful, alcoholic husband.

When Tom was a baby, he was a very beautiful baby, and had such bright eyes and a high forehead. He looked like he had more head than body — had such a fine head and face. He could talk when he was twelve months old and he being the baby I kept him a baby. I think he has written it up himself that he slept with me until he was a great big boy. He wasn't weaned until he was three and a half years old.

Whenever a prominent Doctor — he wasn't my doctor at the time, but he was Mr. Wolfe's after — he and another doctor were arguing about healthy children and babies. Dr. Glenn said to this other Doctor, says, "There's a child whose mother didn't wean him until he was three and a half years old." Said, "You know the old argument that children should be weaned before they're a year old?" Said, "It hurts the child and it hurts the mother." [quotation marks are sic] Now," he said, "There's an example of a fine looking child, healthy, and nothing wrong with the mother, either." Said, "What're you going to do about that?"

I think we just weaned Tom off by the other children laughing at him and talking to him about being just a baby. He still nursed. But it was a habit with him, that was all: he didn't really need it. Oh, when he was about a year old, he could toddle around, he'd come up and pull to me, and I think Mr. Wolfe told him at first, says, "Ask her now, right nicely, Please Ma'm," says, "maybe she'll take you up and nurse you."

Well, he learned to say 'please ma'm'. He thought that was the name of what he wanted — it was 'please ma'm'. So every time, especially if I had company, he'd come and say, "Please ma'm," [sic] please ma'm," And, oh, I'd say, you don't want anything; you've had your dinner. You don't want to nurse. And they said, "Oh yes, you must take him up. Any child that can ask so nice that way must be taken up."

When Mr. Wolfe would, to tease me, have him ask me right out if there was company around, especially young men around, and they knew they'd have lots of fun over it and Tom would always carry out the directions, whatever he told him to ask for.

Mrs. Wolfe Talks About Tom's Childhood

Tom liked to look at pictures, or pictures [sic] books of the other children which they had outgrown and for which they had no other use. But they were delighted to scatter the books around him when he was sitting in the baby carriage, or on a comfort [sic] on the floor with pillows around him. They would read the little stories printed under the pictures and before he was two years he could read anything they read to him. He would say, "Read about that picture."

They were proud to see how much interest he showed, and too, they felt they were teachers. Often tried to imitate the way their teachers did at school.

Tom could talk when he was a year old and the whole family, since he was our baby, gave lots of attention to him. They all got tired of their old books and stories Tom wanted them to read, so any little new book of stories they found on a counter they would buy and bring home to him. Mr. Wolfe did the same. He took such a delight in getting new books for him and would talk — take him on his lap to read him the new story.

[....]

Tom began to learn and understand things around him, could read the stories after Mr. Wolfe or the others had read a few times. He had a remarkable memory but had to learn words later on.

He at home, not like the other brothers and sisters who all grew up together and played together, had no one his own age to play with. There were two neighbor boys, one a year older and the other perhaps two that came in our alley and back yard. We had a fine playground with swing and playhouse where they went if it rained.

We bought Tom all kinds of toys. He had express wagons, fire engines, and ladders and many things that the neighbor boys did not have. And they and Tom had lots of fun and excitement climbing ladders and putting out imaginary fires.

Max Israel and Tom often played, when too cold to be out, in my sewing room. Tied chairs together and played street car. One day I stopped my sewing to listen to their plans.

Max first said: "Tom, I think I'll be a street car conductor when I get to be a man." Then all of a sudden he said, "No, guess I'll be a plumber like my papa."

Tom spoke at once. "I'd rather be a United States General than a plumber."

It occurred to me then that there was a difference in rank and Tom had the idea. Tom got the idea of U.S. general — he had heard his father often talk of the great generals of the Civil War: Lee, Jackson, and Stewart. Mr. Wolfe had great admiration for these Southern leaders. All this took place before we went to St. Louis in the summer of 1904.

Tom's other playmate, a neighbor's boy, was Charles Perkinson, who was perhaps two years older. Tom was four years old — oh yes, one month old when Grover died, and old enough to know and remember, but not old enough to know or remember much about it. That was my second great sorrow.

CHAPTER 2

Hal Fisher

Hal Fisher had a brief acquaintance with Wolfe while the two were boys. Fisher's family had met Wolfe and his mother in Jacksonville, Florida, and later visited the Wolfes at their boardinghouse. Fisher recounted this acquaintance in a letter to Mabel Wolfe Wheaton some twenty years after Wolfe's death.

[....]

My acquaintance with Tom Wolfe extended only over a few weeks in May and June, 1914, but the impression Tom made on me then was so deep and enduring that it didn't surprise me, a number of years after his death, when I encountered the article in "Life," and learned that he had become a great man. I then exclaimed to my family, "Why Thomas Wolfe the author was Tom Wolfe, my boyhood friend!"

I first met Tom and your mother early in 1914 — January, I believe. They had come down to Jacksonville, where they stopped at the Lenox Hotel, in which my parents and I then lived. That hotel still stands. It is in Newnam [sic] Street, at the southwest corner of Adams, and now rejoices in the name of "The Berwood." [....]

As the result of the visit of Tom and your mother to the Lenox, we stopped at 48 Spruce Street when we went to Asheville after school closed in the Spring of 1914. As nearly as I can remember, school was dismissed in Jacksonville on May 22, and my mother and I left for Asheville that evening; my father meeting us there Saturday.

My romantic craving for mountains having been very little satisfied up to that point, I was anxious to go exploring. Tom took me up Sunset Mountain on Sunday, May 24. I remember that I came near diving to my everlasting when unable to make a turn while running down a path. I saved myself with a baseball slide. We closed the afternoon by inspecting Grove Park Inn, which struck me as an architectural marvel. It still does.

In the ensuing weeks, Tom and I frequently played catch in the driveway at the south side of 48 Spruce. We took turns acting as catcher, and the catcher was also the umpire. The latter fact occasioned many disputes over the fairness of decisions. I admit there [sic] were sometimes questionable; particularly when I was the arbiter.

At various times, after vigorous exercise, we would spend an hour or so delving through baseball guides on the front steps. Tom held with the American League; I with the National. Tom was convinced Walter Johnson was the greatest pitcher of all time, while I firmly believed that this distinction belonged to Christy Mathewson. Tom introduced on his side the earned run averages, which were printed that year for the first time and which demonstrated that Johnson had allowed a lower number of earned runs per nine inning game than Mathewson.

"Hal" Tom would say, "Don't you concede that the American League is a harder hitting organization than the National? If so, can't you see that Johnson is the better pitcher?"

I must admit that logic was on his side.

The foregoing details appear trifling, it is true. On the other hand, I believe every recollection anyone has of the great is worth setting down. Each item serves to provide a more complete picture for posterity.

Another controversy concerned the merits of a couple of Southern Association pitchers, Prough of Birmingham and Coveleskie of Chattanooga. Prough was at the top in Games Won and Lost column for the 1913 season. I, a native of Birmingham, was determined that Prough must have been the best in the Southern Association that year. On the other hand, Coveleskie was very close to Prough in winning percentage, and had, I believe, pitched a greater number of games, so Tom favored Coveleskie. I must say that time showed Tom to be correct, because I never heard of Prough again whereas Coveleskie went from Chattanooga to Detroit, and was a prominent pitcher for years. I saw him (Harry) several times myself and also watched his brother Stanley, who was younger and a still better pitcher. The earned run averages played no part here, because they were confined to the minor leagues.

After we had practically exhausted the Spalding Official Baseball Guide and the Spalding Official Baseball Record, which were the two I had brought to Asheville with me, I acquired a copy of the Reach Official Baseball Guide. As we examined that, we found that the classifications of each minor baseball league were shown, which was not the case in the Spalding books. To our surprise, we discovered that the Pacific Coast League was Class AA (the highest minor league class at that time). Like most other good Eastern boys of the day, we could perceive nothing but a murky haze west of the Mississippi. I remember that Tom said:

"Gee! I bet they play some good ball out there!"

CHAPTER 3

Margaret Batterham Waters

Margaret Batterham Waters (1897–1995) grew up in Asheville and attended the Orange Street School with Wolfe. Her father owned a business near the shop of Wolfe's father. When Batterham was in her late teens, she was the Asheville society correspondent for the Charlotte Observer newspaper. In 1918, she graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, then a women's college. This reminiscence is an excerpt from her book Those Upland Meadows (1994). At the time this appeared in the Thomas Wolfe Review, Those Upland Meadows had not yet been published.

My father, Harry Batterham, who had his real estate office on Pack Square near the Wolfe monument works, would often stop in to talk to W. O. Wolfe, who bragged about his youngest son, Tommy, a bright little shaver born the same year as my younger sister, Edith. Tommy and I both attended Orange Street Primary Public School. When he later went to Roberts's private school, he would sometimes join us in our play in the field opposite our home. He particularly enjoyed sailing our kites on windy March days.

Mrs. Wolfe was a member of a well-regarded regional family, the Westalls. Her husband was likable without financial ambition. The necessity of having to support her children by running a rooming-boarding house made her understandably penny-pinching. She drove sharp bargains with the country people selling produce from door to door, and she questioned the accuracy of the gas and electric companies' meter readings upon receiving their monthly bills. My father was drawn willy-nilly into a disagreement with her over the employment of one of his repairmen.

Tommy was constantly subjected to snubs from his prominent kin. Today it is difficult to realize the importance of people to people in that period of our childhood in the small mountain town. In our casual friendship with the Wolfes, we could not understand that their father, unlike our own, was not a revered dominant personality. My older sisters were in high school with Mabel Wolfe. Fred Wolfe, my brother's friend, took us for rides about town in his Model T Ford. This was a treat to us who were accustomed to our slower paced horse and carriage.

On one of our teenage group camping trips up Craggy Mountain, Tommy was included. He, Hiden Ramsey and I climbed to Craggy Pinnacle together looking down on the valley of Asheville lying in a bluish haze. At the University of Virginia, Hiden majored in political science and was then studying the newly proposed tri-commission form of city government.

"You want to bring it to our town?" Tommy asked.

"Yes."

Tommy shoved back his hat from his wide forehead. "Reform us all, eh?"

"What are you going to do for our town?" Hiden countered.

Tommy swept his arm restlessly across the wide view before us and shrugged. "Our town, our state, and what a state!" He extolled our heritage: North Carolina had everything, the highest peak east of the Rockies, agriculture on the Piedmont, a granary of seafood, Cape Hatteras's lighthouse the tallest in the land, and, with the Gulf Stream swinging close inshore, under its ameliorating tropical climate, oranges could grow in those Outer Bank villages.

Crossing the Square one morning in 1914, I met Tommy beside the fountain's circular pool. He smiled, lifted his hat and held it in his hand. He was growing tall and the quirk of humor about his eyes and lips was more mature. This was the first time I'd seen him since our Craggy trip.

"You're going to Greensboro Normal?" he asked.

I nodded. "You'll be going away some day yourself."

His family were planning to send him to the University of North Carolina, and Tommy replied slowly: "Yes, that day will come." He glanced about the Square, the civic core of our upbringing, both distaste and nostalgia in his manner.

CHAPTER 4

Margaret Roberts

Margaret Roberts (1876–1947) taught literature to Wolfe between 1912 and 1916 at Asheville's North State Fitting School, a private school run by her husband, John Munsey Roberts. A native of Ohio, she attended Valparaiso University in Indiana and Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

Wolfe idolized his teacher. Later, while he was a student at UNC and Harvard, he remained in touch with her, writing her letters and postcards and visiting her when he was home from school. For Look Homeward, Angel, he created the character Mrs. Margaret Leonard, based on Roberts; his description of Mrs. Leonard included this passage: "enduring, a victorious reality amid his shadow-haunted heart, she remained, who first had touched his blinded eyes with light, who nested his hooded houseless soul." Wolfe was less kind to the character based on her husband, characterizing him as something of a faker and a fool. As she notes in another reminiscence (in Part 4 of this volume), the book left her feeling "hurt and helpless."

Since Tom Wolfe's death in 1938 my mind has shot back and forth, shuttle-like, back to the time when first I heard of him; to when I first saw him; to the years when he was our pupil; to the college student who became our friend; and then to the Thomas Wolfe whom the public knew.

When I first heard of him, Thomas Wolfe was eleven years old and in the sixth grade of the Orange Street School in Asheville, when my husband became its principal. Tom soon attracted his attention because, when there were special programs, Tom was always the most important participant. His teacher commented on this. This preeminence, however, was not confined to the classroom. If some athletic event was under discussion, Tom was an enthusiastic assistant planner. Whatever challenged his interest challenged his activity in promoting that interest. Because of these things, my husband soon marked him as a notable pupil. But it was an untidy, one-page story that placed him, in our minds, as a boy apart.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Thomas Wolfe Remembered"
by .
Copyright © 2018 University of Alabama Press.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents List of Illustrations Chronology Introduction PART 1. CHILDHOOD (1900–1916) 1. Julia Wolfe 2. Hal Fisher 3. Margaret Batterham Waters 4. Margaret Roberts PART 2. COLLEGE YEARS (1916–1922) 5. Albert Coates 6. J. Y. Jordan Jr. 7. Paul Green 8. Frederick Koch 9. Margaret Roberts 10. Mary Terry 11. W. Clement Eaton 12. Marjorie Fairbanks 13. Philip Barber PART 3. APPRENTICESHIP (1922–1929) 14. L. Ruth Middlebrook 15. Vardis Fisher 16. Henry Volkening 17. Maxwell Perkins 18. James Mandel 19. Theodore G. Ehrsam 20. Louise Jackson Wright 21. Dix Sarsfield PART 4. PROFESSIONAL WRITING CAREER (1929–1938) 22. Maxwell Perkins 23. Elizabeth Nowell 24. Margaret Roberts 25. Mabel Wolfe Wheaton 26. John Hall Wheelock 27. Kyle Crichton (Robert Forsythe) 28. Robert Raynolds 29. Alladine Bell 30. Joyce Maupin 31. Gladys Hall Coates 32. Clayton Hoagland 33. Kathleen Hoagland 34. Desmond Powell 35. Dorothy Heiderstadt 36. Martha Dodd 37. Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt 38. William H. Fitzpatrick 39. William B. Wisdom 40. George Stoney 41. Edward Aswell 42. George McCoy 43. Max Whitson 44. Charles G. Tennent 45. Ray Conway 46. Edward M. Miller List of Reminiscences Additional Reminiscences Notes Works Cited Index

Editorial Reviews

"[The Editors] purpose involves providing an appreciation for the brilliantly gifted but troubled man behind the masterful fiction. Wolfe's personal eccentricities, his qualities and flaws, and above all his amazing vitality, emerge in this fine collective mosaic:
—The Alabama Review

"Similar in approach to William Faulkner of Oxford, ed. by James Webb and A. Wigfall Green (1965), and Andre Dubus: Tributes, ed. by Donald Anderson (2001), the present volume captures the memories of people who knew Wolfe (1900-38), including family members, friends, and editors. Although most of the reminiscences included have already appeared in print, many come from specialized journals that may not be easily available. A number of unpublished narratives come from major Wolfe collections at the libraries of Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Organized chronologically, the book includes 46 anecdotes and narratives, a chronology, a dozen illustrations, two lists of remembrances, and notes. Among the contributors are Wolfe's mother (Julia Wolfe), editors Maxwell Perkins and Edward Aswell, Wolfe collector William Wisdom, Wolfe's teacher Margaret Roberts, his agent and biographer Elizabeth Nowell, and dramatist Paul Green. Part of the series "American Writers Remembered," edited by Jackson Bryer, this volume has an appeal that goes beyond Wolfe specialists to serious readers. These memories about one of the most significant writers of the 20th century cover a range of experiences, including a dinner with writers at Antoine's Restaurant in New Orleans." Recommended.
—CHOICE

"Thomas Wolfe Remembered is lively and informative, providing many insights for understanding Wolfe’s rich and complex art and life. It’s a very welcome and important addition to Wolfe scholarship and will no doubt greatly appeal to both Wolfe scholars and general readers.”  
—Robert Brinkmeyer, author of The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950 and Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West

From the Publisher