Bitter Mystery

THE WEB AND THE ROCK -- Thomas Wolfe--Harper ($3).

The passions and furies of the late Thomas Wolfe made him seem like some frenzied Wagnerian hero condemned to live in a nursery. In his autobiographical Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, he recorded only the emotions of his childhood and adolescence, the first intellectual awakenings of his young manhood. What passions, readers asked themselves, what intensities of brooding, pain and rhetoric would Thomas Wolfe show himself evincing in his first serious love affair? The possibilities were slightly awesome to contemplate.

The Web and the Rock--first half of his posthumous 1,000,000-word novel -- is an answer.

"Heart's centre" of the story is petite, passionate Mrs. Esther Jack, a stage designer with a grown daughter and a nebulous husband somewhere in the Park Avenue background. Hero is not Eugene Gant but a presumably new character named George ("Monk") Webber. Unlike Eugene, he is of medium height, pug-nosed, simian-shaped. His antecedents are carefully different from Gant's. But no disguise will hide a Thomas Wolfe hero.

Pacing up & down in Mrs. Jack's "workshop" in Greenwich Village, Monk sings, makes strange gurglings, stares out of the window, suddenly emits an ecstatic "goatlike cry of joy." Whereupon they join in wild cavorting, break off to eat the lunch which she comes each day to prepare. At times Monk speaks as follows: "Can I devour you? Can I feed my life on yours, get all your life and richness into me, walk about with you inside me, breathe you into my lungs like harvest, absorb you, eat you, melt you, have you in my brain, my heart, my pulse, my blood forever . . ." and so on until the smell of burning food calls a halt.

When the romance begins to wane, when Monk begins brooding over love's "bitter mystery," then not even the most extravagant prophet could anticipate the window-rattling violence and savagery of these lovers' quarrels, the crazed sadism of Monk's accusations, or the deadly criticism that Mrs. Jack shoots back. Because she always comes back for more, however, because they make up from time to time and declare "Was there ever love like ours?" it is a long time before the final parting. Near the end Monk makes his bitterest accusation: "I've lost my squeal" --meaning his "wild goat-cry of pain and joy and ecstasy."

In a preface, Thomas Wolfe declared this "the most objective novel that I have written," expressed hope that "the protagonist will illustrate in his own experience every one of us. . . ." Exhausted readers, dazed and deafened from their long buffeting, may seek in vain for Wolfe's "objectivity," for an identity in

Monk's demented passions with their own. But in The Web and the Rock they will be reminded again that, in the death of Thomas Wolfe, U. S. literature has lost its most violent personality.

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