Look homeward : a life of Thomas Wolfe by Donald David Herbert 1920-2009

Author:Donald, David Herbert, 1920-2009
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Wolfe, Thomas, 1900-1938, Novelists, American
Publisher: New York : Fawcett Columbine
Published: 1988-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Once at 3 a.m., he was found stretched out on the floor and drunk in the men's room at the Plaza Hotel. The attendant, who did not want to call the police, begged him to leave, but he cried and said he would not go until Mrs. Bernstein came to get him. So early in the morning Aline — who had not talked to Wolfe for two years — was routed out of bed in the nearby Gotham Hotel. She found Wolfe babbling incoherently but, with the help of the attendant, she managed to fold him into a taxi and sent him back to Brooklyn.

After exhaustion or alcohol finally drove Wolfe to bed in the early morning hours, he slept badly, tormented by anxiety dreams. In one recurrent dream he was back at New York University, "rushing through those swarming corridors, hurrying frantically from one classroom to another, trying desperately to find the classes I had . . . forgotten." Then, in the department of EngHsh, he came upon a "mounting pile of unmarked student themes — those accursed themes that grew in number week by week — that piled up in mountainous and hopeless accumulations."

Some of his nightmares were sexual. He woke in anguish from a dream in which he was dying, "mad, barren, sterile, drugged by a whore and castrated by her masters, forced to swallow my own genitals." Or he dreamed that he "lay quilted in abominable filth and nastiness with women who had loved him as a child . . . ; he held clasped in his arms, pressed to his lips . . . women . . . whose bodies were ugly, sallow, withered or wasted by an old disease."

Tormented and exhausted, Wolfe could not keep his pledge to Perkins to stay at his desk until his book was finished, and from time to time he felt compelled to get away, if only for a day or two. In March he met Julia in Washington to see the inaugural parade of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Occasionally he visited his brother Fred, who was now trying to sell farm machinery in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and they drove out to York Springs to see relatives of their father and to admire the bountiful fields and the great stone barns that W. O. Wolfe had so often talked about.

Even when Wolfe stayed in New York he tried now and then to break away from his work, but many of his associates found him hard to put up with these days, especially when he was drinking. Often he "snarled at the whole world" and vented his "horrible, ugly and furious temper" both on very old friends, like Henry Carlton, with whom he quarreled bitterly and without apparent

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.