Initial contact with the immensity of the novels of Thomas Wolfe sometimes so overwhelms the reader that he has difficulty from that moment on thinking of Wolfe as the author of anything other than his four major works. Yet to reduce the contribution of Wolfe to these major novels is to disregard some of his best and most disciplined work such as The Web of Earth and No Door. No Door, especially, is a case in point, for critics have almost entirely ignored it. In her biography of Wolfe, Elizabeth Nowell mentions it in passing, and that primarily in relation to the $125,000 libel suit which it triggered. Chronologically, it was one of the short pieces which grew out of the writing of Of Time and the River in 1933; a two-installment portion of it was published in Scribner 's that year. But for the most part it went unnoticed until it was resurrected by C. Hugh Holman in 1961 and printed for the first time as it was originally written.¹ By then all Wolfe readers had certainly encountered No Door, but they had come across it fragmented and scattered in so many places and rewritten in so many forms for specific occasions that the thematic integrity and artistic discipline of the original piece were entirely lost.² This is indeed unfortunate, and most unfair to Wolfe, for No Door is perhaps his most effectively controlled presentation of the dominant theme of loneliness and aloneness which stands central to his life and work.

No Door is structurally divided into four sections, each one headed by a month and a year as title. Section I, "October: 1931," was published independently under the title No Door as the first item in From Death to Morning.³ Appearing separately, it does exhibit a certain integrity in that it establishes social separation and personal alienation. The protagonist, a young writer who remains nameless throughout the composition but who is obviously the Wolfe-Gant amalgam of Of Time and the River, begins by observing, "It is wonderful with what warm enthusiasm well-kept people who have never been alone in all their life can congratulate you on the joys of solitude." This observation is made specific in an extended illustrative narrative. The young writer has been invited to dine with one of his admirers, "a most aesthetic-looking millionaire." In a pent-house apartment surrounded by luxuries which bespeak "a quiet but distinguished taste," the writer feels suddenly far removed from the desolation and poverty, the hunger and loneliness of his Brooklyn apartment. He takes on the role of an outsider who for a moment indulges in the type of life for which he yearns, and for that moment it seems to him that the great vision of the city which for years has burned in his heart is about to come true, that "some glorious happiness of fortune, fame, and triumph" will be his at any minute. Yet in the same moment he knows this cannot be.

The social disparity between the writer's painful existence and the "most aesthetic-looking millionaire's" manner of living is starkly underscored when conversation reveals that the wealthy, middle-aged admirer envies the freedom, the youth, the insularity of the writer and at the same time fails to fully appreciate the position of wealth and power which attracts the young man. And just as no door opens to admit the writer to the glorious life of his dream, so abysmal lack of perception and understanding prevents the wealthy host from seeing the anguish and pain which is the lot of the writer, the "loneliness, black, bitter, aching loneliness" for which there are no words. The writer tries to communicate his knowledge to his host but concludes, ". . . when you try to tell the man about it you cannot, for what is there to say?" The magnetic attraction which solitude holds for man, the painful experience of what Wolfe elsewhere calls "the habit of loneliness," the reality of social separation fuse to form a poignant moment of awareness.

Paradoxically, while "October: 1931" thus has an inherent integrity of its own, its function as Section I of No Door is expository in nature: it introduces character, establishes conflict, and provides an avenue to the development of theme. In this expository capacity it was conceived. Chronologically it is the last of the four sections, and as such it establishes the frame for the series of three backflashes which make up the remainder of the short novel. The protagonist, inspired by the pent-house experience and his need "to break out of the prison of his own loneliness," searches back through his life for crucial moments of estrangement and recalls his search for doors opening out from himself. In doing so, he encounters a three-pronged dilemma which holds him, which indeed holds all men, in thrall; and while a resolution is suggested in the final section of the novel, the moment is still too early in the life of this young man to permit him to accept what he has just begun to understand.

The first horn of the dilemma is a purely mechanical one. It is also a general one in that it pervades all sections of No Door and all of Wolfe's creative work. Simply put, it is concerned with the limitation of language and the inability of man to put into words the total truth of which he is most urgently aware. Repeatedly the narrator bemoans the fact that what he has to say, what he so desperately feels he must say if he is to have life, if he is to be released from his aloneness, is just one word away. But he cannot find that word. It is the "no door" that stands between him and the fulfillment of his creative genius. So he fails always to define the exact relationship or degree of estrangement which exists between him and others and falteringly focuses on the moment of confrontation as "one of those simple and profound experiences of life which people seem always to have known when it happens to them, but for which there is no language" (p. 197). Speaking of English faces and aspects of English life which remind him of home, again he falters:

It was a life that seemed so near to me that I could lay my hand on it and make it mine at any moment. I seemed to have returned to a room I had always known, and to have paused for a moment without any doubt or perturbation of the soul outside the door.

But I never found the door, or turned the knob, or stepped into the room. When I got there 1 couldn't find it. It was as near as my hand if I could only touch it, only as high as my heart and yet I could not reach it, only a hand's breadth off if I would span it, a word away if I would speak it. (p. 190)

The failure was an agonizing one for a sensitive writer who felt he had to more than touch, who had to grasp, to devour, if he was to be.

The failure of direct expression, however, does not constitute an unsurmountable barrier to communication. One can still express himself through illustration and suggestion.

This accounts in part for the multitudinous vignettes and catalogues which fill the pages of the Wolfe novels. It also explains in part his heavy reliance on symbol. Repeatedly he tries by a desperate rather than a calculated combination of details and concretions to elevate the reader into an awareness of what he is trying to say. And when he is successful, a transcendent light breaks forth between the lines, and an epiphany burns to life.⁴ But the single word, the door to precise and consummate expression, remains unfound. In that sense, the language barrier, the first of the barriers, remains unbreached. It becomes "no door."

The second horn of the dilemma, the specific theme of Section II, "October: 1923," is the protagonist's futile resistance to the passage of time and to the changes which that passage brings with it. This barrier of no return establishes temporal alienation and, in a real sense, is the sharpest of the three horns in that it evokes, bound up as it is with personal grief, the most intense and passionate outpouring in the novel. The inability to communicate which is so apparent in the pent-house episode turns the writer back into himself, and he retreats in memory to what was perhaps the most crucial moment in his life: October, 1923, the October in which he returned home for the first time after the death of his father. In image, rhythm, and depth of emotion, this second section of No Door is undoubtedly one of the most highly lyrical stream-of-consciousness passages Wolfe produced. It was incorporated with only minor changes in Of Time and the River as the transition between Books II and III. Thus it stands introductory to the search-for-a-father motif which gives continuity to the well-known Telemachus section of that novel.

"October: 1923" actually begins with a return to the writer's fifteenth year and a selective four-page summary of the years of "solitude and wandering" which intervened between then and October, 1923. This autobiographical survey fixes the foundation for one vividly remembered night in the life of the young man when sense of loss and recognition of inevitable change strip him of even minimal security, fill him with grief-laden helplessness and fear, and goad him into flight. A concrete narrative frame is constructed. The protagonist has returned home in October. Lying alone in a bed in his mother's house, immediately beneath the room where his brother had died in another October, he listens to the storm wind sweeping the night, he feels the "moving darkness" pressing upon him, he hears the distant howling of the dogs and the silence of early frost. This narrative situation anchors the half-conscious nighttime reverie; and fictive fact, memory, and subconscious symbolic interpretation of fact and memory are intricately interwoven to produce two and three levels of meaning at the same time. So the howl of the dogs and the silent frost mingled with memories of similar experiences in other Octobers become reminders of the inevitability and presence of death; and the mysterious but ceaseless movement of the wind and darkness strikes pain to the young man's heart as they remind him that his father is dead, that time sweeps relentlessly and endlessly forward, and there can be no return.

Desperately he tries to cling to what was, to deny what is. October, he reflects, is the month of return; so surely his father will return now and things will be as they were. October, he remembers, is the month of harvest and abundance. But then he recalls the consuming flames of autumn, and they strike a thorn of memory into his heart. The frost, the voices of dogs, the ceaseless wind, the pressing dark, the fire, and later the trains that roar like wind in the trees, the flooded river which sweeps like a wind to the sea, and an imagined death knell which may sound in the night—all combine to lead him to the plaintive question he has asked before: What is there to say? He will call again for the return of his father; but the voices of passing time and death will drown out his words, and he will turn in flight. The door he sought which would reverse time and permit him to sustain life as he had known it remains unfound. His insularity in terms of time past is established, so he can only turn toward morning.

In the suddenly remembered dream of "new lands, morning, and a shining city" which thus ends Section II, the quest for yet another door, self-discovery through identification with others, is begun. Flight from that October night in his mother's house leads the protagonist back to England and his work. But Section III, "October: 1926," presents another problem: the young writer finds himself alone, and there is no door to lead him from this aloneness. "October: 1926," the longest section in No Door, is a mixture of cases which are constant reminders of man's alienated state mixed with frequent observations relative to the inadequacy of language and the missing word which stands between experience and communication. Portions of it are included in Of Time and the River, and a major part of it was published in Scribner's under the title "The House of the Far and Lost."⁵

Flight does not afford escape. Removal to far places does not alter the constancy of truth. Instead it intensifies the young writer's awareness that he is alone; and more and more he begins to discover that what is true of him is true also of others. He looks into the faces on the street and in the shops. Repeatedly he seems to be on the verge of recognition, on the very brink of identification. But always the moment is lost even before it is found. The Coulsons, in whose house he has a room, have been cruelly separated from the society which has been their heritage, and one instinctively knows that the separation was not of their choosing. The cruelty of the severance is intimated by the disturbing and undefinable reaction to the Coulson name and address, the suddenly alerted awareness and frozen response, the secretive and sinister laughter behind closed doors. The fact that the reason for the social banishment is never disclosed only serves to intensify the reality and unreasonableness of man's alienated state. Furthermore, the individual members of the family are separated from each other. The house in which the young writer lives with them consists of walls and closed doors. An impenetrable secret fills the air that moves through the house. A brooding sorrow lurks behind the masked faces of the Coulson family. For them all doors are closed, and there is no escape. The Coulson sorrow is the sorrow of man.

Three mechanics who also room in the Coulson house provide a second example. One is fortyish and maimed; the other two are youthful and seemingly strong. Like the Coulsons they are ruined people. They "had lost their lives because they loved the earth too well, and somehow had been slain by their hunger" (p. 199). All three exhibit a perverse desire to forget their lostness and the meaninglessness of their lives. They give themselves to frenzied movement across the earth in pursuit of pleasure and to an unrealistically staged devotion to jazz. They are moved by "the madness of desperation, the deliberate intent of men to cover up or seek oblivion at any cost of effort from some hideous emptiness of the soul" (p. 200). Their roots have been severed. Dialogue with them cannot be established, even by others who are alone. The door between them and life is closed. So, in Section III, no door opens from the aloneness of the young writer. He too is lost, irretrievably separated from others, slain by his hunger.

The final section of No Door is the only one set in April, and significantly so. April is the month of beginnings, but not without the bitter awareness that what is born must die. "Late April: 1928" constitutes a return to New York, the setting of the first section, in a mechanical way thus unifying the short novel. In this concluding section, the protagonist seems to face up to the dilemma of man's existence, and the narrative moves toward resolutions as he comes to recognize that the door for which he has been seeking does not exist and that man's only solution to the dilemma must be acceptance.

Such acceptance is demonstrated by the truck drivers observed at the beginning of Sction IV. The vantage point from which the protagonist looks out on New York is an apartment window facing a dingy storage warehouse. The world he sees is masculine and physical. The men who work on the docks and drive the trucks are men of blood and muscle, men of oath and gesture, tough men with seamed faces, men born into and accepting the reality of the iron and asphalt city. These men are without memory. They are without dream. They live in the present, unaware of the past and unmolested by the future. They accept their aloneness, for while they work furiously, they also work unamiably. They give themselves to the "narrow frontier of their duty"; they cut their lives "sparsely into its furious and special groove." They have no hesitation, confess neither ignorance nor error, and know no doubt. They accept themselves without question, and they are not agonized by what they are not. So they stand in sharp juxtaposition to the protagonist who is haunted by the passage of time and searches for a door into understanding. His life, "by a cruel comparison with the lives of these men who had learned to use their strength and talents perfectly in a life demanding manual skill, and the mastery of sensuous materials, seemed blind, faltering, baffled, still lost in clouds of chaos and confusion" (p. 222).

Eventually one man stands out from all the others. Day after day he can be seen, always seated at a desk and always doing nothing, his face fixed with an "abstracted stare" as he looks out on the fury and desperation of life which surrounds him. In that face the young writer sees "a timeless image of fixity and judgment," and the indolent man becomes to him "the impartial, immutable censor of all the blind confusion and oblivion of a thousand city days, and of the tortured madness and unrest" of his own life. Goaded by the secrecy of the judgment and by his agonizing sense of inadequacy, he throws himself into the demented streets of night until day comes "incredibly like birth, like hope, like joy again." One could add, like April, because it is in this April that understanding begins to dawn and that the novel moves toward resolution as the protagonist comes to the very brink of discovery.

The face in the warehouse window serves as a catalyst which precipitates a vision of an unknown man sitting in the window of an old house at the end of the day. Looking out quietly, his calm and sorrowful face reflects "the immutable exile of an imprisoned spirit." His voice is soundless; but it carries the knowledge of a million tongues, for it is no less than the voice of all men and all experience. In toneless syllables it assures the young man that the madness, the hunger, the fury of youth will pass away; that the despair that comes with the cognizance that the earth is too large for one life will pass away; but that some things will never change. Above all, the voice suggests, man comes eventually to accept his limitations. He comes finally to recognize that he cannot master all knowledge, that "we know what we know, we have what we have, we are what we are." Transmuted to a fixed position in time, leaning on the sill of the window of evening, man comes to know that most things are vanity, most things are ephemeral as far as the individual is concerned; but the perennial desperation of young men en masse as they become conscious of their insignificance in the universe will not change, the miracle of life will not change, the blade and leaf will endure while the proud edifices created by men crumble. The bitterness of life will always endure, and all that belongs to the earth, "all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth" will always be the same. For "only the earth endures, but it endures forever" (pp. 229-231).

The vision is not new to the world, but it is new to each youth as he comes to the discovery of himself. Man is imprisoned by the very nature of his existence, and there is no door to lead him out of the prison of himself. He is destined to live alone, and he destined to die alone. The world he seeks to devour is too large for him to contain. He must come to know what he is, to recognize and to accept his limitations, and with the preacher to cast all idle dreams and pretense aside. He must understand that the miracle of life is eternal, and he must come to believe that it will prevail. "Child, child," counsels the tongueless image, "Have patience and belief. . . ." In this new understanding lies April, cruel April in that the knowledge is not without its portion of bitterness. It marks the beginning of life and hope which will be driven to their roots by the frost of October, but which will be sustained by the earth like a pulse, like a cry, "like a flower, forever bursting from the earth, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April." The climactic vision in No Door parallels that of Ben's ghost at the end of Look Homeward, Angel, and the message is essentially the same. One must come to know himself in his time, and he must come to believe that the spirit of man is deathless. Only thus will he find meaning in his existence.

The fact that understanding goes before acceptance is clearly reflected in the reverse structure of No Door. Understanding comes in "Late April: 1928"; but in "October: 1931," the section with which the novel begins, the writer protagonist still dreams of and hungers for an existence other than his own. He has not yet come to accept the essential and enduring truth of his insularity. He still yearns for a life other than the one he knows. It is this instinctive and stubborn and frustrating search for meaning beyond the limitations of self, this obsessive unwillingness to accept life and live it, the inability to bridge the precipitous gorge between understanding and acceptance that sustain the search motif in the novel; and it is the protagonist's failure to find fulfillment in resigning himself to the only life he has, thus escaping aloneness by identifying his state with the mortal state of all men, that gives meaning to No Door.

Notes

¹The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe, ed. C. Hugh Holman (New York, 1961), pp. 155-231. Citations in my text are to this volume.

² For a brief record of the publication history of "No Door," see The Short Novels, pp. 157-158.

³ New York, 1935.

⁴ See Maurice Natanson, "The Privileged Moment: A Study in the Rhetoric of Thomas Wolfe," QJS, XLIII (1957), 143-150.

⁵Scribner's Magazine, XCVI (August, 1934), 71-81.