88
PARTISAN REVIEW
the significance of trivialities, a strange and frightening ego-centrism that
at times verges on the psychopathic.
You may say that we are fortunate in this barren year to have some–
thing like
Of Time and the River
to read if, with all its faults, it is yet
as good and as rich as
Look Homeward, Angel.
Perhaps. There is this
to consider:
Look Homeward, Angel
was a first novel; it central figure
was an adolescent. Because of the first fact we forgave its sprawling
shapelessness and because of the second we sympathized with its inchoate
day-dreaming and its absorption in its own flow of emotion and experience.
But
Of Time and the River
is a second novel; it appears five years after
the other; its central character is now a young man living, studying, and
working in Boston, New York, England, and France; and its
author
is
fove years older
(and God what years they have been). And so you cannot
help saying to yourself as you go through the 900 pages of this novel,
"So he has not changed? He has not grown older? He has no learned
yet how to control himself and his pen? He still takes himself so seri–
ously?" And when you have said these things, you have in effect said
that Thomas Wolfe by staying in the same place has gone backwards_.
Of Time and the River
is a "legend of man's hunger in his youth."
There cannot be the slightest doubt that it is largely autobiographical. Its
hero, Eugene Gant, is a North Carolinian, the son of an old stone-cutter,
who swept triumphantly through the state university and now, at twenty,
goes to Harvard to study dramaturgy. Two years of that, and he returns
to his home to watch his father die of cancer, to write, to drink wildly,
and to feel himself rot with inertia and disgust. He goes to New York
to teach in a college peopled chiefly with middle-class Jews, leaves that
to go to Oxford to write, then packs up for a long carousal in Paris,
followed by a season of aimless, painful wandering over the whole of
France, and finally comes back: to America.
That is the barest, least descriptive of outlines. It tells nothing of
the enormous diversity of scene and experience.
A
modest cottage in a
Southern town, a jail, a classroom, a shabby-genteel hotel, a magnificent
chateau on the Hudson, a room in the Village, a castle in France, a bar·
room, a cafe or. the boulevard, a railroad station, a whore-house, and
restaurants of a!l
k inds,
sizes, <.•1d qualities--these are the places through
which young Gam: r:!c.::; passwnately in his endless unrequited search for
peace and completion. Nor does it tell anything of the tragedies of friend–
ship and love, of the sorrow in the death of his brother that will never
leave him, of the horror and joy of his home, of the bawdy comedy that
lies in the vanities and pretentions of the strutting male.
What is the whip that brings blood to his eyes? He writes: "What
is it that we Americans are seeking always on this earth?" ''Where shall
I go now? What shall I do?"
"A
place of certitude and peace and wan–
dering no more." In a recent interview he said: "The general plan back
of these books is the story of a man's looking for his father. Everybody
in the world-not only men but women-is looking for a father. Looking
for some person of superior strength. Some person outside of themselves
to whom they can attach their belief."
Put those statements beside this: that in the same interview he "cried
out vehemently that he was 'born of working people.' " And also this:
