Home-Grown Giant

THOMAS WOLFE by Andrew Turnbull. 374 pages. Scribner. $7.95.

No one who ever met Thomas Wolfe was likely to forget the force of his personality. A hearty clasp of his huge paw could mean considerable pain to the hand he had shaken. And no reader of his novels, whatever the reservations about their real worth, could easily forget their impact. That is part of the trouble that confronts Biographer Andrew Turnbull. In his conversations, which were really monologues, and in his novels, notably Look Homeward, Angel and The Web and the Rock, Wolfe spilled it all. His autobiographical heat and drive, the boiling response of his senses, are the substance of his books; and he, no matter what the protagonist's name, is always the hero.

Turnbull tries hard. Many people remember Wolfe (he died in 1938), and Turnbull has talked with scores of them. As a biographer (Scott Fitzgerald) who seems to be making a specialty of writing about Scribner's authors in books for Scribner, he has had access to all the "sources." His biography is just, but pedestrian; it only slightly enlarges on what other biographers, Wolfe's own letters, and his not yet forgotten presence make clear enough.

The Quota. Wolfe was a myth-sized American natural (6 ft. 6 in. and 240 Ibs.), born in the mountains of North Carolina. His eating, his boozing, his lovemaking, his flashes of temper and his formidable output of words, spoken or written, were indulgences on a massive scale. His self-pity and his ruthless use of others, both in fiction and in reality (his own family, mistresses, editors), made it plain to friends and perceptive readers that Tom Wolfe asked more of life than he had the talent to pay for. So harshly did he caricature his native Asheville that the title of his last novel might have been a warning from its inhabitants: You Can't Go Home Again.

Still, in every caricature, there was always some saddening or joyous truth, just as in Wolfe himself; when he could shake whatever demon was riding him, there was a quota of humor, fundamental decency and kindness. Moreover, he packed a mighty literary ambition. He made it plain that he was out to lasso and pin down the Great American Novel. He wanted to force the whole torrent of the U.S. experience between covers, from mean Brooklyn alleys to the lush farms of the heartland, from city slickers to wary countrymen--and for good measure he meant to throw in mountains, rivers and railroads.

Set Pieces. In this attempt Wolfe never got beyond his barbaric yawp of an overture. He left only four novels, two of them posthumous, all of them painfully hacked out of his vast scrawlings by his editors. Since he had no ideas, he dealt with none. Politics interested him not at all, and economics could be summed up by comparing cash in hand with what he owed his landlord. He was an undisciplined poet of feelings, of emotions, usually his own and always tortured. Wolfe did leave memorable set pieces (in Look Homeward, Angel the death of his brother, the portrait of his stonecutter father) that have convinced two generations of his powers as a writer.

This is a biography of vast and irritating gaps. The '20s and '30s, their colors, temper and ideas, are hardly recognizable. Only in a footnote does Turnbull, who sticks to the surface energies of his man, try to get at the worth of the books. His guess: Wolfe's "premature death surely deprived us of some magnificent bursts." Yet he adds that Wolfe's unfinished work would have been only echoes of the bursts that had sounded before. In no important or even fumbling way does Turnbull get within a bullwhip lash of whatever it was that drove Tom Wolfe. But admirers of Look Homeward, Angel, his best novel, can sense it for themselves. It is still read today (55,000 copies sold in 1967), and sophisticated youngsters probably absorb it as the word-drunk, mountain-boy folk myth that it must have been for Wolfe himself.

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