I was much taken with LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL when I read it as a young man, particularly the chapter on the death of Ben Gant. It was one of the most moving things I had read at the time and I never forgot it. With more years behind me than in front of me, I was curious to see what effect this novel would have on me on a rereading. I found this tome this time to be long, wordy, at times bombastic, with far too many "O Lost's." Mr. Wolfe never misses an opportunity to do long lists, often sounding like Walt Whitman on a bad day. And why on earth would he name Chapel Hill, North Carolina "Pulpit Hill" in the novel?
On the other hand, sometimes Wolfe writes pure poetry; and the novel pulses with life. He has captured a town (Asheville, North Carolina early in the 20th Century) with all its prejudices, idiosyncrasies but hopes as well and has created a family we will never forgot, the Gants. Anyone who knows anything about Thomas Wolfe understands that they are a thinly veiled version of his own family: the bigger-than-life patriarch of the family Gant who has bouts with the bottle; his wife Eliza, obsessed with making a dime at whatever cost; and their children-- Daisy, Helen, the sailor Luke, the twins Grover and Ben and Eugene, based on Wolfe, himself. These characters are as much of the literary history of the United States as Willie Loman, Rabbit Angstrom, the Compson family et al.
Yes, Wolfe's account of the death of Ben Gant at the age of 26 of double pneumonia will tear your heart out. After the Gant family members have spent excruciating days at his deathbed, Eugene has this beautiful words: "We can believe in the nothingness of life, we can believe in the nothingness of death and of life after death--but who can believe in the nothingness of Ben? Like Apollo, who did his penance to the high god in the sad house of King Admetus, he came, a god with broken feet, into the gray hovel of this world. And he lived here a stranger, trying to recapture the music of the lost world, trying to recall the great forgotten language, the lost faces, the stone, the leaf, the door."
LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL, for all its shortcomings, remains an American classic.
