Literary Types - Look Homeward, Angel

This one is for you literary types -

The title of this collection is a tiny wink and nod to Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward, Angel. A nod because of the obvious title reference. A wink because, though he wrote of the angst of the young man outgrowing his small mountain town, he also could not help writing of home:

“But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.”

His writing oozes his longing for the familiar, beautiful things that are constant, unmoveable - a connection to the earth and to something greater than the earth.

“Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.

The voice of forest water in the night, a woman's laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children's voices in bright air--these things will never change.

The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry--these things will always be the same.

All things belonging to the earth will never change--the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth--all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth--these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.”
-Thomas Wolfe
You Can’t Go Home Again

The saying, “You can’t go home again” comes directly from the title of his later novel by that name, and in a sense it is true. We go forward. Life changes. People and places will not be exactly the same if you visit them after 20 years abroad. But there is a desire, a hope in each of us for a place of anchor and this seeps through in his works. I don’t know if he ever found it.

Look Homeward, Angel is a haunting, tragic, moving, sometimes oppressive, but often beautiful hunk of a novel - 500 pages after 60,000 words were cut by his editor. It is a thinly -very thinly- disguised autobiography. It is set in my home state, North Carolina, which inspires many of my paintings. Thomas Wolfe’s (and, so, his literary alter-ego, Eugene Gant’s) childhood life was eccentric, difficult, lacking security and warmth. His father was an unstable man, an alcoholic who flew off on terrifying rampages from time to time, and his mother was an odd woman, wealthy in real estate, yet a penny-pinching miser. His monumental intellect quickly outgrew his town, his family, and then his university and he left each in his quest to find belonging. The protagonist is not a hero, and the book is not redemptive or even uplifting. It is a coming-of-age story, but also a looking-for-a-place story. How important it is to find a place where you can love and serve and be at peace in the world. I hope you have found such a place.

Your friend,
-Karen