SOURCE: "From Death to Morning, The Hills Beyond, and the Short Novels," in Thomas Wolfe, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1984, pp. 95-133.

[In the following excerpt, Evans discusses and evaluates the writing of Wolfe's collections of short fiction From Death to Morning, The Hills Beyond, and The Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe.]

Although Wolfe published many short stories, he admitted that he did not know what magazines wanted and declared he would "like nothing better than to write something that was both very good and very popular: I should be enchanted if the editors of Cosmopolitan began to wave large fat checks under my nose, but I know of no ways of going about this deliberately and I am sure I'd fail miserably if I tried" (Letters, p. 325). Most often his short stories were segments of the larger manuscript he was always working on at the time, and he felt uncertain about excising a portion and shaping it as a short story. Once when he sent Elizabeth Nowell approximately seven typed pages out of a manuscript (a piece about two boys going to the circus) he wrote, "The thing ["Circus at Dawn"] needs an introduction which I will try to write today, but otherwise it is complete enough, although, again, I am afraid it is not what most people consider a story" (Letters, p. 402). ("Circus at Dawn" was published in Modern Monthly in 1935; it was also included in From Death to Morning). Wolfe generally left such decisions and selections up to Nowell.

All fourteen stones that From Death to Morning (1935) comprises appeared in magazines or academic journals between July 1932, when The Web of Earth was published, and October 1935, when "The Bums at Sunset" appeared. Seven of these stories were published by Scribner's Magazine, two by Modern Monthly, and one each by The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, and the Virginia Quarterly Review—a wide variety of publications. Letters in 1933 indicate that Wolfe was hard pressed for money; selling stories was therefore essential. He was down to $7, he said, when the sale of No Door to Scribner's Magazine brought him $200. Although he welcomed this sum, Wolfe wrote George Wallace (a former member of Professor Baker's 47 Workshop at Harvard) that he was considering taking his stories to another agent, one who had indicated he could get higher prices than Scribner's Magazine, Wolfe's most frequent publisher, offered. Obviously Wolfe would indeed welcome "large fat checks" from Cosmopolitan. These stories earned him funds first as single sales and then in the collected volume From Death to Morning. This volume appeared eight months after Of Time and the River was published, making 1935 an important year of publication for Wolfe.

Wolfe attributed the unenthusiastic reviews of From Death to Morning to the criticism that continued to be made about Of Time and the River, excessive length. The favorable reviews stressed the lyrical prose, humor, realism, and engaging characters. Nevertheless, this neglected volume generally has been underrated, with just a few stories receiving serious attention; indeed, Richard Kennedy thinks that From Death to Morning is a book that discourages a second reading. While critics wisely avoid extravagant claims for this collection, they need not shy away from confidently praising Wolfe's variety of narrative forms, his range of subject matter, the large number of effectively drawn characters, the careful attention to place, and the emotional power. Indeed, emotional power is the significant feature, one that Wolfe conveys best through a pervasive feeling of loneliness in characters and through some extraordinarily violent scenes.

Narrative forms include the episodic, epistolary, stream-of-consciousness, as well as slice-of-life, the form that describes "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" and "The Bums at Sunset." Each of these stories concerns a problem, for which no solution is reached. Like most of the stories in this collection, these two implicitly explore the theme of loneliness that is prevalent even in The Web of Earth, a piece of writing whose main character, Wolfe says, "is grander, richer and more tremendous" than Joyce's Molly Bloom at the end of Ulysses (Letters, p. 339). In both "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" and "The Bums at Sunset," the characters are flat, distinguished only by age and basic reactions. The bums are a chance collection of lonely men exiled for unknown reasons from families and productive work. Both stories center on the arrival of a stranger. In "The Bums at Sunset," the appearance of the young, uninitiated bum threatens those who know the ropes and are suspicious of his lack of experience. "What is dis anyway?" one of them sneers, "a noic'ry [nursery], or sump'n." In "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn," the big guy who presumes to learn all of Brooklyn by asking directions and studying his map baffles the narrator, who declares, "Dere's no guy livin' dat knows Brooklyn t'roo and t'roo." While the voice of the Brooklyn native narrates this story, an omniscient voice tells the story of "The Bums at Sunset," and his diction contrasts with the bums' ungrammatical speech and limited vocabulary in its use of figurative language; for example, the fading light of sunset looks, he says, "like a delicate and ancient bronze." And in picturing these nondescript men, the narrator emphasizes that their inescapable loneliness tells "a legend of pounding wheel and thrumming rod, of bloody brawl and brutal shambles, of the savage wilderness, the wild, cruel and lonely distances of America."

"Gulliver," a brief character study of an excessively tall man, relates the discomfort of someone who never fits into chairs, beds, or Pullman car berths—of a giant in a world of normal-sized people. Furthermore, the central character is subjected to the same insults wherever he goes: "Hey-y, Mis-teh! . . . Is it rainin' up deh?" His physical size dominates the story and causes the pain and incommunicable loneliness that mark his life. In "The Far and the Near," a very short piece originally entitled "The Cottage by the Tracks," Wolfe tells a sentimental story about a railroad engineer who finally discovers the reality of what he had thought to be an idyllic scene: a mother and a daughter who live in a country cottage near the tracks. For twenty years the engineer has waved to them as his train roared past, and now that he has retired, he comes to greet them in person. From the moment the older woman opens the door, he knows he should not have come. The idyllic scene he saw for years now fades before her suspicious attitude, her harsh voice, and her unsmiling face. The engineer is left disappointed and lonely, since the reality of the unfriendly cottage inhabitants precludes his hopes of friendship with them and indeed ruins his memory. If the engineer has any other life to go to, we are not told of it.

The subjects of loneliness and death coalesce in the story of the dying man in "Dark in the Forest, Strange as Time." Because he is ill, the man must go away alone for the winter to warmer climate; his wife promises that she will join him in the spring. Other people board the train, many of them talking and laughing as they leave. The dying man's wife settles him in the compartment, turns, and quickly leaves to join her young, robust lover who waits on the platform. This desertion is repeated in a lesser way with the American youth assigned to this same compartment. His good health and youth contrast sharply with the dying man's condition. And when the youth leaves the compartment for the conviviality of the dining car, the older man dies. He never fulfills his modest desire of knowing well just "vun field, vun hill, vun riffer."

As it appears in From Death to Morning, No Door is only the first segment of a much longer work of the same title, a short novel Max Perkins considered bringing out in a limited edition. He did not do so, however. In the original version, this first segment is subtitled "October 1931." Structurally, the brief version in From Death to Morning fails to develop a unified plot. The story begins in the luxurious apartment of the host, a rich man who has taken the requisite trip to Europe, collected a suitably impressive collection of sculpture and rare books, and lives among furnishings that are of "quiet but distinguished taste." His young mistress is at his side when his guest (a writer) relates painful glimpses of Brooklyn's low life. The host appears to listen, but he responds incongruously—"grand," "marvelous," "swell"—even though the young man tells of men who live in alleyways, beat their wives, and consider murder and robbery honest toil. In some detail the guest relates an episode about the loud demands of a lonely prostitute for her $3 payment. Her client refuses to pay her until, as he puts it, she will "staht actin' like a lady." Oblivious to the irony, the host continues to murmur "grand," and he envies the young man the rich experience of living among such people.

In the final pages Wolfe abandons the host, his mistress, the tinkling cocktail glasses, and the penthouse balcony to recount the haunting story of a priest's death. One of Wolfe's finest vignettes, this episode stays in the narrator's mind "like the haunting refrain of some old song—as it was heard and lost in Brooklyn." At evening, a man and a woman appear in their respective apartment windows to talk, their voices issuing banalities such as "Wat's t' noos sinct I been gone?" Although Father Grogan has died while this speaker was away, the priest's death is little more than a piece of news to be reported by one nameless character to another. It is not a grief to be shared, as one can see by the response to the news: "Gee, dat's too bad . . . I musta been away. Oddehwise I woulda hoid." Although the narrator is fully aware of the tragic implications of the priest's death, he makes no overt judgments about the insensitive speakers. The scene ends with a simple line: "A window closed, and there was silence." The casual announcement of Father Grogan's death and the equally casual reaction lead the narrator to consider time, in whose relentless power fame is lost, names are forgotten, and energy is wasted. Indeed, Father Grogan and all mankind die in darkness; they are remembered only superficially, if at all.

Related as it is to loneliness and violence, the theme of human dejection is present throughout these stories. The host may be wealthy, but he is a man who has never really lived. Indeed, Wolfe says this man measures time not by actual deeds but "in dimensions of fathomless and immovable sensations." His young guest lives in a run-down section of Brooklyn, an environment in stark contrast to his host's penthouse. When the young man describes the abject conditions of his neighborhood, the host considers such tales colorful and alive, unlike his own rich but dead world. The diverse reactions of these two men cannot be reconciled. The unrelieved loneliness, the failure of communication, and the narrator's search for certitude and meaning are problems introduced but left unresolved. Solutions are hinted at through brief passages whose imagery expresses a momentary harmony—"all of the colors of the sun and harbor, flashing, blazing, shifting in swarming motes, in an iridescent web of light and color for an instant on the blazing side of a proud white ship." The color flashes and then is gone, however; what remains for the narrator is unspeakable loneliness.

Like "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" and "Dark in the Forest, Strange as Time," this short version of No Door is a poignant examination of people who do not know how to express their deepest feelings, of people who do not or cannot share the burden or happiness of another, of people who are overwhelmed by loneliness.

In June 1935, Modern Monthly published Wolfe's story "The Face of War." Much of the plot stems from the summer of 1918, when Wolfe worked in the Norfolk shipyards. Like Death the Proud Brother (the story that follows "The Face of War" in From Death to Morning) this story focuses on four separate episodes, uses shocking violence, and emphasizes loneliness. In the first episode, Wolfe objectively relates the senseless beating of a black construction worker at Langley Field by the slouchy, shambling figure of a Southern white man who is egged on by his worthless office clerk. Wolfe's imagery suggests the bestial nature of these characters. The white boss wields a club "in his meaty hand," and his abnormal voice is described "as high thick throat-scream of blood-lust and murder." His office clerk creeps about "with rat's teeth bared" and "the coward's lust to kill." The clerk keeps a safe distance from the black man and urges his boss "to shoot the bastard if he tries to hit you." After the beating, the black man staggers about with a broken nose, buckling knees, and a ripped skull. He had seen the enemy coming and had half crouched, "ape-like" with arms like "great paws." His "white eyeballs" were now fixed, and he was ready to leap or run. The victim never utters a word and finally is left unconscious before his enemies. The "paunchgut man" and his "white rat-face" clerk behind him beat the black man because the boss will be damned "if a Goddamn Nigger can talk back to a white man." This episode is particularly important since Wolfe does not include many black characters or often present racial issues and confrontations in his fiction. While he by no means attacks the subject with Faulkner's eye for its complexity, Wolfe was neither callous nor oblivious to the injustices that befell blacks.

Violence also erupts in the second episode of "The Face of War" when three young, friendly, blue-eyed, slow-talking Southern men appear. Having finished their construction job for the day, they are stopped abruptly by a foul-mouthed armed guard who accuses them of mischief. He pulls his gun, snarls, and stares at them with "eyes a-glitter, narrow as a snake." The guard's senseless verbal attack bewilders them. His crude words contrast sharply with the calm passage that had earlier described the boys as they walked near the water's edge, talking of home, college, and plans for the weekend.

Throughout the story the August sun beats mercilessly, and in the third episode it shines on the raw pine brothel set up hastily in wartime. Recruited from northern and midwestern cities, the prostitutes are neither alluring nor beautiful, and their aggressive behavior covers any display of tenderness. The men are nameless except for one called Georgia. Dressed in khaki uniforms, they stand in line, impatiently calling to the occupants of the tiny cubicles to "come on out an' give some of duh rest of us a chanct, f' r Chris' sake!" The prostitutes are rapacious, weary-eyed, and hard-visaged. Their obscene language contrasts ironically with another side of them, which Wolfe describes as a "fearful, almost timid desire to find friendship, gentleness, and even love among the rabble-rout of lost and ruined men to whom they minister." Georgia recognizes a prostitute named Margaret as a girl from home. As if they had met under proper social circumstances, she says, "How are all the folks down home? . . . Tell'em that I sent my love." She prods the youth to promise that he will "ask for Margaret" next time, and then she is gone, "engulfed into the great vortex of the war." With this unseemly collection of men and women, Wolfe symbolizes the chaotic conditions of wartime, when virtue and life are easily destroyed.

The fourth episode concerns a paternalistic army lieutenant who curses at but also protects his black charges. The loading dock is suffocatingly hot as food and munitions of all sorts are put on the war-bound ship. Described by the lieutenant as "poor dumb suffering second cousins of an owl," the black troops are nearly left behind, since they have not been cleared of venereal disease. Because the lieutenant intervenes at the last minute, they are once again checked and this time declared clean by the ship's doctor and allowed to board. Clamoring their gratitude to the white man, they rush forward, bound for war and probable death.

"The Face of War" is filled with ironic juxtapositions. The tranquility of civilian life gives way to the harsh demands of wartime. Ships carry both food and weapons; the companionship of the troops contrasts with their eagerness to kill the enemy; and the raw, sensual, make-shift brothel is the opposite of the old life Margaret and Georgia knew back home in Hopewell. At the end of the story, the ship is loaded, shouting is replaced by silence, and the oppressive heat yields to "the breath of coolness." Death may await the ship's occupants, but for this night they remain in "the oncoming, undulant stride of all-enfolding and deep-breasted night."

One of the longest stories in From Death to Morning, Death the Proud Brother, tells of four deaths in New York City that the narrator witnesses. The first three are violent and occur in different locations at different times of the year. In a swift and horrifying accident, an Italian street vendor is killed by a truck on a spring day. For five pages, Wolfe presents details that characterize the nameless victim. His small pots and pans now are rubble, and his blood stains the sidewalk that a shop owner rushes out to clean. Business resumes and the street vendor drops from the memory of those who saw him daily. Related in six pages, the second death occurs in a new downtown building on an icy night in February when a drunken bum falls into a pile of iron beams and smashes his head. Wolfe then devotes twelve pages to the third death, that of a rivet catcher who misses the fiery steel tossed to his bucket and plunges to his death. The time is a May morning, ironically bright and sparkling. In contrast to the violence of these three is the fourth death, that of a nondescript man sitting on a subway bench; he collapses almost imperceptibly. Wolfe takes twenty-six pages to relate this final episode, which occurs at 1:00 A.M. in the Times Square station.

Each death involves the reactions of strangers. City people, the narrator thinks, accept death, "its violence, bloody mutilation, and horror calmly as one of the natural consequences of daily life." For example, a wealthy lady praises her chauffeur when he extricates her car quickly from the traffic snarl following the construction worker's death. To many onlookers, this dead man is a mere statistic: "Say—dat makes duh fourt' one on dat building—did yuh know dat?" Youthful onlookers are singularly unsympathetic, existing as testimony to "a new and desolate race of youth upon the earth that men had never known before—a race hard, fruitless, and unwholesome." They are simply curious and momentarily diverted; to them grief is "out of date and falsely sentimental." Older witnesses are equally insensitive and are interested only in repeating the news: "Sure! I seen it! I seen it! Dat's what I'm tellin' yuh!" Policemen, interns, and priests perform their respective functions because they must. In the end, the police tell the crowds, "Yuh gotta move. It's all oveh," more concerned with restoring the flow of traffic than with the fact of death. Such a sweeping judgment of city dwellers makes Wolfe's criticism somewhat stereotyped; nevertheless, although he was a city dweller all of his adult life, he did remain somewhat apart from the city and somewhat suspicious of its natives.

Regardless of their backgrounds, witnesses to violent, bloody, fatal accidents press forward to stare; however, people confronted with the quiet death of the man in the subway stand back timidly. "Stunned, awed, bewildered, and frightened," they see that a man's death can come so quietly that it is difficult to perceive. In a way, this death is the most frightening because it reminds us that we face death alone. The youthful narrator, moved by these tragedies, quotes the line from a Thomas Nashe poem on the plague year, "Brightness falls from the air." Nevertheless, the narrator's own youth and vigor make him hopeful about the future: "I knew I should see light once more and know new coasts and come into strange harbors, and see again, as I had once, new lands and morning." Such bursts of lyricism are poignantly juxtaposed to the realistic details of death and dying.

Stylistically, much of Death the Proud Brother is starkly realistic. For instance, when the callous young couple pass the corpse of the bum, they look at him and remark that perhaps he might join their late night excursion: "Who else can we get?" they remark. Further, as the policemen remove the dead man from the subway station, they grumble when the lifeless arms tumble off the stretcher, and they finally secure them with the man's own necktie. Once they reach the street, a taxi driver "lifted his cap obsequiously to the dead man. Taxi, sir! Taxi!'" The policemen laugh and swear. Concrete details enhance the powerful realism in many parts of the story. For example, we are told that the Italian vendor's cart held such things as cheap candies, a greasy-looking orange-juice bottle, cheap knives, and a small oil stove. Although similes, metaphors, apostrophes, hyperbole, and catalogues are used effectively in this story, the image of the clicking turnstiles in the subway emitting their dull wooden notes perhaps makes the most profound impression. Through those turnstiles scurry passengers who rush to meet their schedules, and their routine leaves little time even to observe that a man has died. The dead man in the subway will probably go to a pauper's grave, mourned and remembered by none. All four of these victims led commonplace lives, but each is given "for an instant the immortal dignities of death, proud death, even when it rested on the poorest cipher in the street."

By far the most significant selection in From Death to Morning is the long story (or novella) The Web of Earth. This piece, a complicated monologue delivered by Eliza Gant to her son during a visit to his Brooklyn Heights apartment, consists of tales linked weblike by the filament of association. A word or a sound in the tale she is telling sends Eliza to another story, but no matter how far the new directions takes her, she retraces her steps, finishing each tale in turn. She begins with her earliest recollections at age two and continues with events from childhood, marriage, motherhood, and old age. Her memories are almost all sad and painful, but her spirit is resilient. The first tale is of men she saw returning from the Civil War shoeless, hungry, aged; their joy in reunion is undercut by their lament for the dead. Her other childhood memories are of vicious tricks played by brothers, sisters, and cousins on each other; she does not relate any pleasant childhood adventures.

Recollections of W. O.'s imprudent behavior color her memories about married life. Once when Eliza was pregnant and W. O. had begun a drinking spree, she walked into Ambrose Radiker's saloon and demanded that he sell W. O. no more liquor. It was a request Radiker would gladly have granted if he could, since W. O. often attacked the saloon's light-skinned black worker. W. O. would swear the man was Chinese, a race of which he had an unexplained terror. The latter fact moves Eliza's attention to W. O.'s comic, but appalling, display in a Chinese laundry, where, accompanied by Eliza, Ben, and Luke, he retrieves his shirts after much arguing and many threats. W. O. never does produce the much-called-for laundry ticket, to the frustration of the owner.

A lot of what Eliza tells concerns death: the Civil War victims; Bill Pentland, who announced the day and hour of his death, turned his head to the wall and fulfilled his prediction; W. O.'s first wife, Cynthia, who died of consumption; and the cold-blooded murders committed by Ed Mears and Lawrence Wayne. This latter episode includes details of the murderers' escape from prison, their separation and flight, and their later days out west. When Mears first escapes, he comes to the Gants' house, since he has no shoes and only W. O.'s will fit him. Throughout all these tales, Eliza's strength never wavers. She survives the births of children and drunken days of W. O.; she even lectures the murderer Ed Mears so effectively that he hands her his gun before he flees across the mountains.

The structure of the story defies analysis, so intricately are Eliza's tales interconnected. Rereading The Web of Earth impresses one with Wolfe's technical skill as well as with the stamina of the protagonist, an old woman who has survived much. The ending unifies the themes of suffering, endurance, and hope when after countless digressions, Eliza finally explains the mysterious words that opened the story: "Two . . . two . . . twenty . . . twenty." These words are a sign of the birth of the twins, Grover and Ben, twenty days after the evening Ed Mears came to beg shoes "at twenty minutes to ten o'clock on the seventeenth of October." (Yet both Grover and Ben, of course, died young.)

Eliza conveys present time by commenting on the sound of the ships in the Brooklyn harbor, and her son must keep pointing out to her the direction of those ships. This setting is new to her, and she has difficulty in getting her bearings. However, she is, in a sense, a compendium of human experience, and she admonishes her son, "My dear child, eat good food and watch and guard your health: it worries me to think of you alone with strangers." She herself has endured a life filled with sadness, loss, and disappointment. Yet when her contemporary, Miller Wright, weighed down with the burdens of the Depression, asks her, "Eliza, what are you going to do?" she says, "Do! . . . I'm going to pitch right in and work till I'm eighty and then . . . I'm goin' to cut loose and just raise hell!" Although her optimism is unfailing, the story is filled with tales and recollections that tell of death, despair, and loneliness.

While the pieces in From Death to Morning vary sharply in quality and while many are more accurately described as sketches than short stories, Wolfe emerges in this work as "a serious experimenter in fiction" (Holman, Loneliness, p. 14). The Hills Beyond (1941), the last book from Wolfe's posthumous papers edited and published by Edward Aswell, falls into three parts. First there are ten pieces ranging from two of Wolfe's best short stories ("The Lost Boy" and "Chickamauga") to short sketches such as "No Cure for It," which may have been written, Aswell contends, as early as 1929. The second part, entitled The Hills Beyond, is a ten-chapter fragment of a novel set in Old Catawba (North Carolina). Although Wolfe goes back as far as September 1593 to relate the setting of the state of Old Catawba (a story similar to that of the Lost Colony in North Carolina), the fragment centers on the patriarch William "Bear" Joyner and his numerous offspring from two marriages. The final portion of the volume is a forty-page note that Edward Aswell wrote about his role as Wolfe's editor. Here Aswell comments on Wolfe's working habits during the last year of his life as well as on various pieces included in the volume. Unfortunately, except for the two excellent stories mentioned above, there is little in The Hills Beyond that enhances Wolfe's reputation. However, some critics have seen significance in Wolfe's returning to the North Carolina mountains for his setting and subject matter and others have praised his detached third-person narration in the novel fragment.

"The Lost Boy," by far the best piece in the volume, uses the Gant family again and focuses upon Grover's childhood in Part I, particularly his initiation experience in the Crockers' candy store. Paid in postage stamps for work he has done at Reed's drugstore, Grover, age eleven, cannot resist the smells of the candy and breaks his own resolve to stay away from the stingy Crockers. He goes into the store for 15 cents' worth of chocolate fudge. His stamps had been accepted as payment before, but now Crocker will not refund three one-cent stamps that represent an overpayment. The boy asks for their return, but he has an inherent respect for his elders. These old people who run the candy store are neither plump nor cheerful as such owners might be expected to be. Their hands are like bird talons; furthermore, they accuse Grover of misdealings and threaten to call the police about the postage stamps. Grover's embarrassment sends him to his father, who storms from his shop across the street into the Crockers' store. W. O. throws down the needed pennies, retrieves the boy's stamps, and delivers an invective against the Crockers worthy of the Old Testament prophets: "God has cursed you. He has made you lame and childless as you are—and lame and childless, miserable as you are, you will go to your grave and be forgotten!"

Through the images that begin the story, "light came and went and came again," Wolfe suggests the realization that Grover has come to. Adults, he had thought, are to be respected and depended upon. The Crockers, however, accuse him falsely and humiliate him. Although W. O. rescues him, afterwards he says only "Be a good boy" to a child who has never been anything but good. Grover struggles to regain his sense of reality and looks carefully at his physical surroundings: things are just as they have always been—the square, the fountain, the horse at the water trough, his father's shop. Irrevocable change, however, has come to Grover himself:

But something had gone out of the day, and something had come in again. Out of the vision of those quiet eyes some brightness had gone, and into their vision had come some deeper color. He could not say, he did not know through what transforming shadows life had passed within that quarter hour. He only knew that something had been lost—something forever gained.

What Grover has lost is a great part of his childhood innocence; what he has gained is the inevitable experience of the world.

The remaining three parts of this story take place years after Grover's death at age twelve, as the mother, sister, and brother remember Grover and in so doing reveal much about themselves. Part II is Eliza's monologue as she talks to Eugene, telling him again about the trip to St. Louis long ago. In particular, she relates details about the Fair in St. Louis and remarks on Grover's maturity and manliness. She coyly recounts how she fooled the reporter from New Jersey who came to interview her about her famous son, Eugene the novelist. Eliza hinted to the reporter that Grover, not Eugene, was her brightest son. Her bragging memories mingle and reveal much of her past. At the end of this section, Wolfe returns to the pervasive idea of time and loss as Eliza says, "It was so long ago, but when I think of it, it all comes back, as if it happened yesterday. Now all of you have either died or grown up and gone away, and nothing is the same as it was then."

Part III, "The Sister," is Helen's monologue. Like the Ancient Mariner, Eugene's older sister is compelled to tell her story, and she tells Eugene about the time in St. Louis that led to Grover's illness and death. Now in middle age, Helen realizes that her ambitions are unfulfilled—she will never be a famous singer in an opera house. Since Eugene has been to college and reads books, he should have answers to her questions. What happens, she wants to know, to all of our expectations and dreams? Wolfe uses a photograph of the Gant family when they were young and full of plans to symbolize the dreams of youth. Helen ponders the photograph; turning to Eugene, she asks, "Does it happen to us all, to everyone? . . . Grover and Ben, Steve, Daisy, Luke and me—all standing there before the house on Woodson Street in Altamont—there we are, and you see the way we were—and now it all gets lost. What is it, anyway, that people lose?"

Part IV, "The Brother," shows Eugene's attempt to answer Helen's questions. As a grown man, Eugene goes to St. Louis. Working from fragments of childhood memories, he finds the house where the Gants lived during the summer of 1904, the summer of the World's Fair, the summer that Grover died. Inside the house, Eugene peers into a mirror at the bottom of the stairs and momentarily enters the past. He hears Grover's voice, but the recapturing of this childhood experience lasts only for an instant. The "lost boy" of the title is not just Grover, who was lost through death at an early age. It is also Eugene, who learns that one cannot recapture the past save for a fleeting moment. Helen must face the fact that the dreams of childhood often are unrealized; Eugene learns that none of the past can be recaptured, and Helen will learn this too. From all four points of view in this story, Wolfe explores the idea of time and loss and most effectively shows the regret adults have for the past and many of its associations.

"Chickamauga" is the first-person narrative of a Civil War veteran who will be 95 on his next birthday. Although the digressions are not as numerous as Eliza's in The Web of Earth, several features in these two works are similar. Like Eliza, the old veteran has a remarkable memory. He recalls that, seventy-five years before, on August 7, 1861, "at seven-thirty in the morning . . . I started out from home and walked the whole way to Clingman." There he joined the Twenty-ninth Regiment and headed for battle. Wolfe effectively uses the Civil War as subject matter and renders experience other than his own. The narrator and his friend, Jim Weaver, march off to war; Jim resents every day that keeps him away from home and his love, Martha Patton. Now the old man, Jim's friend so many years ago, describes a day of battle: "The bloodiest fightin' that was ever knowed, until that cedar thicket was soaked red with blood, and than was hardly a place left in thar where a sparrer could have perched." The narrator describes in homely terms the difficulty of taking Missionary Ridge: it was "like tryin' to swim the Mississippi upstream on a boneyard mule." When Jim Weaver dies in battle, the narrator retrieves from Jim's pockets his watch, his pocket knife, and Martha Patton's letters. Like the sister in "The Lost Boy," the narrator is bewildered at this turn of events: "Hit's funny how hit all turns out—how none of hit is like what we expect." His friend is dead; it is the narrator who lives, goes home, and marries Martha Patton.

In comparison to "The Lost Boy" and "Chickamauga," the remaining stories and sketches in The Hills Beyond are slight indeed. "No Cure for It" is a brief sketch about the growing pains of a gangly boy. Here Wolfe revives names from Look Homeward, Angel—Eliza, Gant, Dr. McGuire—and the material in this sketch is similar in tone to that first novel. "Gentlemen of the Press," a short piece that was probably written in 1930, uses the devices of a play script to designate speakers, time, and setting. The cub reporter, Red, spins an outlandish tale about Abraham Lincoln being a descendant of Napoleon, and the older men listen with amused tolerance. Red's earnestness is a part of his youth. His ridiculous tale, however, is juxtaposed with reports coming in over the wire services telling of new French casualties in World War I.

"A Kinsman of His Blood" is similar to the Bascom Pentland material in Of Time and the River. In this story, Wolfe changes Pentland's name to an earlier version—Bascom Hawke—and tells about one of Bascom's children, who changes his identity and loses touch with reality, talking of nonexistent love affairs. "The Return of the Prodigal" is in two parts: "The Thing Imagined," which is an imagined account by Eugene Gant of his coming home, and "The Real Thing," which is a realistic account of Eugene's return to Altamont. In the second part, Wolfe uses many details of his 1937 trip to Asheville, including a street shooting he witnessed in nearby Burnsville, North Carolina, while he was en route.

The brief sketch "On Leprechauns" belongs to the George Webber material, and "Portrait of a Literary Critic" is Wolfe's satirical picture of the inept type of critic that he loathed. "The Lion at Morning," which belongs to the pre-Depression sections of You Can't Go Home Again, portrays James Wyman, Sr., a wealthy banker who begins his day amid routine luxury and unexpected scandal. "God's Lonely Man" is Wolfe's personal anatomy of loneliness. As well suggests that his version went through several drafts and at one point had the title "On Loneliness at Twenty-three."

Besides these stories and sketches, this collection contains the first six chapters of a novel that was to be called by the title Aswell used for the posthumous collection of fragments The Hills Beyond. These chapters tell the stories of George Webber's maternal ancestors, the Joyners, whose history begins with William "Bear" Joyner. Wolfe traces the founding of the state, Old Catawba, and particularly satirizes the desire among some of these residents to trace their ancestry:

In the South, particularly, this preoccupation seems to absorb most of the spare energies of the female population for it is an axiom of Southern life that a woman without "family" is nothing. A woman may be poor; she may be abysmally ignorant (and usually is); she may have read nothing, seen nothing, gone nowhere; she may be lazy, nasty, vain, arrogant, venomous, and dishonest; her standards of morality, government, justice may not differ one whit from that of the lynching mob: but if she can assert, loudly and without challenge, that her "family" is older (and therefore better) than other families, then her position in the community is unquestioned, she is the delicate flower of "Southern culture," she must not be "talked back to"—she is, in short, "a lady."

Wolfe's satire includes The Society of the Sons and Daughters of the Aborigines, who would grasp dueling pistols if anyone hinted at a drop of black blood in their ancestry. Just as fervently, however, they claim kin with Indians, "their dusky ancestors of some two and a half centuries before."

William "Bear" Joyner is Wolfe's legendary character, a descendant of Mike Fink, Davy Crockett, and Paul Bunyan, and the Yankee peddler. Extraordinary in every way, Bear founded a large clan. His first wife, Martha Creasman, died in childbirth, and the fates of their surviving children (Zacharias, Hattie, Robert, Theodore, and Rufe) are the primary subject matter of the fragment. Even though Bear's second wife bore him "fourteen or sixteen children . . . there were so many of them, and their destinies were so diverse, that even their number has been disrupted," it is the first set of children who are considered in the narrative. A lawyer like his brother Robert, the colorful Zacharias becomes governor of Old Catawba and later a United States senator. In whatever office he holds, he is generally effective. He exposes social climbers by telling their true history: many have descended from escaped convicts and are themselves people "raised on hawg and hominy." Wolfe perhaps reflects his own distrust of lawyers when he describes them here as "that articulate tribe which was to breed and multiply with such astonishing proliferation during the next century." The assumption that lawyers will enter politics is borne out in Zacharias; however, his brother Robert has no desire to "get into politics." Robert is content to remain a lawyer; his refusing the gains that politics can bring leads people to say that "he was a fine man, of course, but a little queer."

The most elaborate satire in the fragment concerns the brother Theodore. Unable to pass the bar, Theodore marries a "Drumgoole of the Virginia Drumgooles," produces several children, and operates a "military school," the Joyner Heights Military Academy. Zacharias calls Joyner Heights "Hogwart Heights" and derides his brother's every endeavor, especially the pretentious military training provided at the school when the Civil War is imminent. Zack declares that "they had a devil of a time getting those twenty-seven pimply boys straightened up as straight as they could get—which is to say, about as straight as a row of crooked radishes." But when the war comes, those same pimply boys march off and many die. Theodore becomes more foolish after the war. Although he has no legitimate military claim, he is now Colonel Joyner and bears himself, the narrator says, as if "a whole regiment of plumed knights [were] in his own person."

The final four chapters of the fragment center on Robert Joyner, who lost a leg in the Civil War—a fact, that his son Edward learns from a history book. Reading an account of the Battle of Spottsylvania, Edward comes upon the name Joyner in a passage that ends, "among others, I saw Joyner among his gallant mountaineers firing and loading until he was himself shot down and borne away by his own men, his right leg so shattered by a minie ball that amputation was imperative." Bewildered, the boy takes the book to his mother and asks, "What the book says—is that father?" Her answer comes quickly: "Your father is so proud, and in some ways a child himself. He wouldn't tell you. He could not bear to have his son think that his father was a cripple." Now a judge, Robert Joyner is impatient with the old veterans who hang around the courthouse hoping for sympathy. Robert befriends John Webber, a stranger to Libya Hill who arrives with the construction crew of the hotel. Webber's reputation as a fine workman earns him respect, and Wolfe seems to pair him with Robert Joyner, implying that these two men share many of the same good qualities.

The fragment ends with Edward Joyner, now fifty, recalling the day years ago when he discovered that his father had been a Civil War hero. That discovery in turn explains his father's impatience long ago with the hangers on from the war who haunted the courthouse for undeserved sympathy. With Edward's recollection, Wolfe abandons the objective narration that characterizes the fragment and concludes with a meditation on time that is, like so many of Wolfe's lyric passages, quite effective: "And time still passing . . . time passing like river flowing . . . knowing that this earth, this time, this life, are stranger than a dream."

The material in The Hills Beyond deserves attention primarily because it shows the variety of writing styles Wolfe tried. But the six chapters of the title fragment are not promising, and certainly the fragment provides no evidence, as some have claimed, that Wolfe's writing had taken a turn away from the autobiographical style of the earlier work. Much material here derives from the folklore tradition and also from Wolfe's own early work. Furthermore, although satire is prevalent throughout the fragment and in some of the stories, it lacks the power to chastise and reform. Except for making "The Lost Boy" and "Chickamauga" more readily available in this volume, Edward Aswell did little to advance Wolfe's reputation by publishing The Hills Beyond, a book that contains much mediocre writing.

In 1961, Scribner's published The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe, a volume edited by C. Hugh Holman, whose introduction and headnotes, along with Wolfe's texts, constitute an indispensable part of the Wolfe canon. Wolfe had difficulty determining what a short story should be, and he agonized over the proper form of a novel. Only a handful of his short stories are first rate, and among his novels only Look Homeward, Angel achieves satisfactory form. However, he wrote some of his most successful work in the intermediate-length form of the novella (roughly 20,000 to 30,000 words). In addition to the five short novels in this edition, Holman mentions three others. "The Train and the City," a 12,000-word story, appeared in Scribner's Magazine in May 1934. The longer and more successful work Death the Proud Brother appeared in the June 1934 issue of the same publication. Boom Town, which was published in the May 1934 issue of the American Mercury, satirizes the real estate craze that swept Asheville before the Depression. Like the previous two works, Boom Town was drawn from the large manuscript Wolfe was writing; furthermore, this long story was the first of Wolfe's work that Elizabeth Nowell placed after she became his agent. The five short novels that Holman edited represent Wolfe's best work except for Look Homeward, Angel (see additional discussions of these short novels earlier in this chapter). Each had been published in magazines in the 1930s, and except for The Web of Earth all were then placed in various sections of Wolfe's last three novels. At the time, these magazine publications provided a much-needed source of income for Wolfe; indeed, one of the short novels, A Portrait of Bascom Hawke, tied for the Scribner's Magazine short-novel contest. Wolfe split the $5,000 prize with John Herrmann. Based on Wolfe's uncle Henry Westall, Bascom Hawke is Wolfe's most eccentric character. After A Portrait of Bascom Hawke appeared in Scribner's Magazine, the material it contains was widely dispersed into various sections of Of Time and the River. Although the appearance of Bascom in the novel is most interesting, the full short novel presents him, his family, and his co-workers more colorfully and appealingly. The unity gained in the short novel form was almost totally lost when the work was broken apart.

The longest of the five novellas, The Web of Earth, appeared in Scribner's Magazine in July 1932. When he included this Joycean interior monologue in the collection From Death to Morning, Wolfe changed the protagonist's name from Delia Hawke to Eliza Gant and made a few minor additions. Thus, unlike the other titles in the Holman edition of the short novels, The Web of Earth has always been readily available in its original form.

Until the Holman edition appeared, however, No Door had never been published in its original four parts, which total some 31,000 words. Since this version was much too long for a single issue, Scribner's Magazine published it as two long stories, the first entitled No Door, and the second "The House of the Far and Lost." Later the first episode of the original version was used as a short story in From Death to Morning and "The House of the Far and Lost" was used virtually unchanged in Of Time and the River. The remainder of the total 31,000-word version was worked into five sections of Of Time and the River and one section of You Can't Go Home Again. Without question the discussion of the Coulsons, an English family, is the most interesting part of No Door. Wolfe presents the alcoholic husband, the wife who gazes out upon the foggy cold weather and declares that in her heart Italy is home, and the daughter, Edith, who in young womanhood resigns herself to a bleak family existence. When Eugene urges Edith to come away with him to America, he declares to her, "Failure and defeat won't last forever." To these words Edith responds, "Sometimes they do." Some secret in the past surrounds this family, but Eugene never learns what it is. Furthermore, he never comes to know his fellow boarders, the three men who squeeze into their small car each day, speed to their factory work, and spend every evening performing American jazz. These men seem compelled to play, yet they do not seem to enjoy the music. The leader, Captain Nicholl, has a mutilated arm; his disfigurement suggests the spiritual wound in the Coulson family. They may be a family that lives beneath a common roof, but each lives a separate life.

The last two short novels in the Holman edition are convincing evidence of Wolfe's growing social awareness and of his ability to write direct, simple, and objective prose. I Have a Thing to Tell You was Wolfe's awakening to the perils of Nazi Germany. He portrays Berlin no longer as a city of enchantment and friends but instead as a "world hived of four million lives, of hope and fear and hatred, anguish and despair, of love, of cruelty and devotion." Wolfe insisted that this work was not intended as propaganda, and to prevent such accusations he refused to allow a Yiddish translation.

As many critics have pointed out, Wolfe was fortunate that his first publisher had a monthly publication; indeed, Scribner's Magazine brought out much of Wolfe's work. His stories and short novels that appeared in this magazine gave Wolfe needed income and kept his name before the reading public, thus enhancing his critical reputation. It was fitting that the May 1939 issue of Scribner's Magazine published one of the last pieces Wolfe wrote, The Party at Jack's, some nine months after Wolfe's death. The editor commented on Wolfe's career and included in the issue's preliminary pages a letter from Max Perkins, who had written, "The credit for Thomas Wolfe belongs to Scribner's if to anyone." Heeding Perkins's suggestion, the editor also included a photograph of the recently completed oil portrait of Wolfe painted by Perkins's son-in-law, Douglas Gorsline.

The Party at Jack's was the last piece of Wolfe's unpublished work that Scribner's Magazine brought out; in the same issue, however, "An Angel on the Porch" was reprinted with this editorial note:

Thomas Wolfe's "An Angel on the Porch" was published in the August 1929 issue of Scribner's Magazine with these words . . . "The first work of a new writer about whom much will be heard this fall." That was almost exactly nine years before Wolfe's death. We are republishing "An Angel on the Porch" in this issue as an appropriate companion for The Party at Jack's. The first and we are sorry to say, the last Thomas Wolfe to appear in Scribner's Magazine.

Like I Have a Thing to Tell You, this final short novel is a statement of strong social concern written in taut, objective prose. The reader who assumes that Wolfe's writing was always lengthy, discursive, and laden with rhetorical devices probably would not guess these last two short novels to be his work. Wolfe spent much of the summer of 1937 finishing The Party at Jack's; much of this work was done while he stayed in a cabin near his Asheville home for several weeks. Holman considers it one of Wolfe's "most impressive accomplishments" (Short Novels, p. xvi).

As previously discussed, the social satire in The Party at Jack's focuses on the absurd performance of Piggy Logan and his circus as well as on the wealthy residents of a luxury Park Avenue apartment building. This short novel also includes Wolfe's invective against pompous literary critics, particularly in the character Seamus Malone. In addition, the action places George Webber in the home of his mistress, Esther Jack. Here he watches her fulfill the roles required of her without ever entirely ignoring him. For George, she is the ideal woman, as appealing in middle age as she is in the portrait painted of her when she was twenty-five. The portrait hangs in Jack's apartment and during the party several guests comment that both portrait and subject have lasting beauty and grace. Of this George Webber is certain.

Thomas Wolfe did not live to have a second act as a writer; critics continue to speculate whether or not his stylistic excesses might have been curtailed had he continued to write throughout a long life. Although the published corpus is fairly substantial, it is by no means of uniform worth. Wolfe's reputation in the 1980s suffers because his major works are severely flawed. He suffers too because many people, discouraged by the length and the obvious indulgences in style, do not read him, except perhaps for Look Homeward, Angel. The charges of egotism, of autobiographical dependence, of rhetorical excess, and of lack of narrative control are made again and again. And although Wolfe's accomplishments are considerable if one evaluates all of his work, most careful readers nevertheless judge him to be a failed artist.