Volume 34, Number 14 · September 24, 1987
Big Bad Wolfe?
By Monroe K. Spears
The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe
edited by Francis E. Skipp, foreword by James Dickey
Scribner's, 621 pp., $24.95
Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe
by David Herbert Donald
Little, Brown, 579 pp., $24.95
No one is afraid of him now; but was Wolfe really big and bad? Of his bigness—in physical stature and appetites, in literary ambition and productivity—there can be no doubt. Nobody, least of all Wolfe himself, ever forgot it: Wolfe typically thought of himself as Gulliver, a giant surrounded by people who are not only little but petty, venomous, and contemptible (as in the short story 'Gulliver, the Story of a Tall Man,' and the foreword to Look Homeward, Angel, in which Wolfe asserts that 'all serious work in fiction is autobiographical…for instance, a more autobiographical work than Gulliver's Travels cannot easily be imagined'). If his gigantism is undeniable and unignorable, his badness is, inevitably, subject to debate: hardly his badness as a man, which, though softened by Donald's use of psychological terms like 'secondary narcissism,' is unmatched in its purity of self-absorption and ruthless egotism (one of the longest index entries under his name is 'infantilism'), but his badness as a writer. This debate arises from the fact that Wolfe was afflicted by a kind of literary bulimia, devouring life insatiably and expelling it in his writing, which he was unable to restrain or control.
Review, 4444 words
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