Many critics claimed that Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) only knew how to write about himself. But, in his case, the autobiographical is so intense, so lyrical, so penetrating, that one must congratulate himself on looking at himself. With his torrential ability to narrate life, Wolfe achieved fictional monuments such as The Angel Watching Us (his 1929 debut), which one of his editors, Maxwell Perkins, considered another Moby Dick, and whose original version consisted of thousands of pages that were finally polished to give birth to this story about a southern family from the town of Altamont.
In recent years, we have also seen how his complete stories and various short novels were offered, plus the mammoth novels Del tiempo y del río (2013) and La red y la roca (2022), edited by Piel de Zapa. In the first, Eugene Gant personalizes “a legend about man’s anxiety in his youth”, as the subtitle says, and stages his initiation to the North: a train trip to Boston, parallel to the loss of his father, and his arrival at Harvard to attend a playwriting course. The second was published posthumously with a protagonist, George Webber, who left his family (the network) behind from another southern town to settle in New York (the rock), where he had a relationship with a married woman, and then went to Europe and, finally, returned to his country.
That was a colossal work, dedicated to understanding the interior of the human being and how his immediate environment affects him, in need of a sensitive reader in the face of the torrential verb of the author and his poetic tone. And it is that Wolfe, above all, was an artist of the word and of the narrative cadence, a tender and insatiable spirit, a romantic who died early from pneumonia who left a mountain of unfinished pages that his editor found a way to give to the world. In this way, he prepared the manuscript of the aforementioned The Net and the Rock (the title Wolfe wanted for the entire work) and then a kind of sequel, You Can’t Go Home.
As Gail Godwin notes in the introduction, Wolfe said that the novel he was working on was the story of how, “through his own folly, his mistakes, his stupidity, his selfishness, his aspirations, his hopes, his faith, and his confusion, George Webber learned the painful lesson that there is no going home.” And that’s so for two reasons: Wolfe’s hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, had been shocked to see itself portrayed in Wolfe’s prose, and on the other hand, the return to the place of childhood is always painful because of the changes that time produces in people and places.
Actually, that is Wolfe’s great literary theme: the impossibility, à la Heraclitus, of returning to the place of origin, as he recreated in his story “Return”, in which his hero leaves to be able to return, to experience the nostalgia of memory and of the train that takes him back home.
Webber confronts his former neighbors as well as the people who reproach him, from a distance, when he is installed in Manhattan, how he has poured streets and real people into literature and success, but also uncertainty, contemplate and stun him. For this reason, You Can’t Go Home also expresses the discomfort of having been sincere and the suffering of a writer who has apparently succeeded and at the same time seeks to find himself far from his homeland. In such a way that the novel is also a journey through London, Paris and, above all, the Berlin of the thirties, in times of crisis, real estate bubbles and rising Nazi anti-Semitism. All with this delicate protagonist who surrounds himself with an endless number of characters, affectionate or extravagant, with whom he shares long dialogues that will lead to a mixture of realism and sentimentality.
Thomas Wolfe You can’t go home Piel de Zapa Translation by Alberto Moyano Muñoz 668 pages 26 euros
