Uncertainty and Bravado: New Revelations about Thomas Wolfe

FEATURED AUTHOR UNCERTAINTY AND BRAVADO: NEW REVELATIONS ABOUT THOMAS WOLFE Shawn Holliday Ted Mitchell, ed. Windows of the Heart: The Correspondence of Thomas Wolfe and Margaret Roberts. Columbia: Unversity of South Carolina Press, 2007. 201 pages. Hardback. $34.95 Joanne Marshall Mauldin. Thomas Wolfe: When Do the Atrocities Begin? Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007. 361 pages. Hardback. $38.00 This spring, two books were published that bookend Thomas Wolfe's literary career. One documents the relationship between the author and his earliest mentor from the time he was a teenager to the successful publication of Look Homeward, Angel in 1929; the other depicts the last seventeen months of his life before his sudden death in 1938. Although much ofthe material included has been covered in previously-published books, both provide new details that illuminate our understanding ofThomas Wolfe, his relationship to Asheville and his philosophy ofart. Ted Mitchell's Windows ofthe Heart: The Correspondence ofThomas Wolfe andMargaret Roberts collects over seventy letters and postcards exchanged between Wolfe and the woman he called "the mother ofmy spirit" (121), his teacher at the North State Fitting School who was the first to recognize his genius. Since most of the letters were composed while Wolfe was in college or immediately after, when he was a failed playwright living in New York, they provide special insight into Wolfe's developing thoughts on writing. Much oftheir correspondence deals with literary concerns: Wolfe's preference for Percy Shelley over Wycherley and Congreve for the poet's "broadcast view ofthings" (18), hisdefenseofJ. M. Barriessentimentalitybecause "theacademic, critical point of view shrinks nervously away from the sympathetic" (26), and his hatred for the Babbittry of Asheville's citizens, who promote 67 "[g]reed, greed, greed—deliberate, crafty, motivated—masking under the guise ofcivic associations and municipal betterment" (28). Because these quotations come from letters written in the early 1920s, they show how romanticism, lyricism, sentimentality, and satire became such a pervasive part ofhis work. They were elements ofliterature he deemed important while a student at the University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard University. More importantly, however, Windows of the Heart offers the most complete account ofthe split that occurred between Wolfe and Roberts upon the publication ofLookHomeward, Angel, a complicated event that disrupted their correspondence for over six years. Although the most important letter in their epistolary relationship has been lost—perhaps destroyed by Wolfe upon reading Roberts' accusation that "you have crucified your family and devastated mine" (120)—it remains clear that Roberts never got over Wolfe's treatment of her husband as the mean-spirited schoolmaster John Dorsey Leonard in LookHomeward, Angel. Her letters to Wolfe from 1936-1938 exhibit a coldness and hesitancy that the earlier ones do not. Besides being hurt, perhaps Roberts felt that the successful author had out-grown her since he had achieved literary fame without her continued encouragement. In his final letters, Wolfe rattles on about his developing social conscience with her adding little comment in response. Another important element of Windows of the Heart is Ted Mitchell's meticulous editing. Not only does he provide a biographical account of Margaret Roberts' life in his introduction, but he also includes many unpublished photographs of the Roberts family from private collections. His lack of emendations and textual intrusions also allow readers to experience the letters as they were originally written. Surely, Mitchell's thorough footnotes benefited from the Sunday afternoons he spent talking with Roberts' daughter, Margaret Rose Roberts, before her passing. Her insights into the Wolfe/Roberts relationship, the intricacies of which no one else could know, help clear up ambiguities in many places. Also impeccablyresearchedisJoanneMarshallMauldin'sbiography When Do theAtrocities Begin? which covers the last year and a half of Thomas Wolfe's life, from May 3, 1937, his first trip home to Asheville since the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, to September 15 , 68 1938, the date ofhis death in Johns Hopkins Hospital from tubercular meningitis. Throughout, Mauldin relies on a plethora of sources, both public and private, to give readers the fullest account ofWolfe's last months ever published. In the process, she corrects mistakes perpetuated by the author's previous biographers. While readers with only...