SOURCE: "Thomas Wolfe's Success as Short Novelist: Structure and Theme in A Portrait of Bascom Hawke," in The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Fall, 1980, pp. 32-41.

[In the following essay, Domnarski describes A Portrait of Bascom Hawke as a "tightly structured work" and investigates its themes of the cycles of life, youth, age, and time.]

Maxwell Perkins said that Thomas Wolfe was a born writer if there ever was one.¹ Few critics have disagreed with that assessment of Wolfe's natural talent. Even Bernard DeVoto, who turned his heavy artillery on Wolfe in 1936, conceded that Wolfe had genius. But genius was not enough for DeVoto.² Others have felt the same way, thus making the vital issue in Wolfe's critical reputation not whether he had talent, but what he did with it.

The most frequent charges levelled against Wolfe have stressed his prolixity, structural formlessness, and excessive interest in autobiography.³ These weaknesses can be seen in each of Wolfe's long novels. In contrast, however, they are not present in his short novels, which have received little attention despite their excellence.⁴ In many ways these short novels present the best of Wolfe. Here he is under control, with the defined length of the short novel form imposing necessary restrictions on him.

An examination of structure and theme in A Portrait of Bascom Hawke, which Wolfe completed in 1932, illustrates his achievement as a short novelist. The novel is a brilliant portrait of the eccentric Bascom Hawke, who is modelled after Wolfe's uncle Henry Westall, but it is also a book about the narrator, David Hawke, who is Wolfe himself. The contrast between the elderly, despairing uncle and his young, hopeful nephew stands at the heart of the novel, with the ideas of life and death and growth and decay dominating. Wolfe summarized his hopes for Bascom Hawke in a note to Perkins. He wrote, "I've simply tried to give you a man—as for plot, there's not any, but there's this idea which I believe is pretty plain—I've always wanted to say something about old men and young men, and that's what I've tried to do here. I hope the man seems real and living to you and that it has the unity of this feeling I spoke about."⁵

Wolfe overstates Bascom Hawke's lack of plot. Scenes from Bascom's past, as well as what might pass as part of a day in his life, make up most of the novel. The only present tense narrative action centers on a conversation between Bascom and his nephew David late in the book. Wolfe's novel is not rooted in the present. Rather, the present is used as a complementary means of illuminating the past—both Bascom's past and the inexorable force of time—and the future. The concept of eternal time holds the novel and its two major characters together. This continuum helps Wolfe achieve "the unity of this feeling" that he mentions to Perkins.

The plot of Bascom Hawke might be spare, but the novel is tightly structured. It opens with Bascom emerging from a Boston subway exit on his way to work as a real estate conveyancer. At this point we are part of the crowd reacting to the cadaverous, grimacing man as others on the street would. We cannot fail to notice this elderly man, whose "grimaces were made by squinting his small sharp eyes together, widening his mouth in a ghastly travesty of a grin, and convolving his chin and cheek in a rapid series of pursed lips and horrible squints as he swiftly pressed his rubbery underlip against a few enormous horse teeth that decorated his upper jaw."⁶ More important, we see Bascom as he verbally assaults motorists who have nearly run him over because he has ignored the rules of safe pedestrian traffic. Bascom baits these unsuspecting motorists into arguments to show, in his distinctively imperious manner, his knowledge and their ignorance of automobile law.

Wolfe seems to pause following this opening scene. A clear transition sentence announces the physical description of Bascom that will follow. The description begins with his tall, tough, and angular body and proceeds to his worn and ill-fitting clothes that make him appear more like a beggar than the prosperous businessman he is. This discrepancy leads into an account of Bascom's history. All that our narrator tells us not only helps shade in Bascom's portrait, but also heightens the tension between youth and age and furthers our understanding of Bascom's bitter despair at the novel's conclusion. In a passage that takes on increased importance as we move through the novel, our narrator tells us that "Bascom's youth, following the war between the States, had been scared by a bitter poverty: at once enriched and warped by a life that clung to the earth with a root-like tenacity, that was manual, painful, spare and stricken, and rebuilt itself—fiercely, cruelly, and richly—from the earth" (13).

Poverty constricted Bascom's physical world and turned him to literature, where he found the joys of life otherwise denied him. He read voraciously and ended up at Harvard. There he lived monkishly and established a brilliant record as an undergraduate and graduate theology student. We read that "at thirty [Bascom] was a lean fanatic, a true Yankee madman, high-boned, with gray thirsty eyes and a thick flaring sheaf of oaken hair—six feet three inches of gangling and ludicrous height, gesticulating madly and obliviously before a grinning world. But he had a grand lean head: he looked somewhat like the great Ralph Waldo Emerson—with the brakes off (14).

Like Emerson, Bascom first entered and then left the ministry. For twenty years he moved from town to town and from church to church hoping to find spiritual satisfaction. But it never came. After much soul-searching, and after investigating the Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Unitarian churches, all with the hope of finding one that quelled his growing religious skepticism, Bascom turned his back on God and became an agnostic. Freed in a way, Bascom next sought to make as much money as possible as a real estate conveyancer in Boston, perhaps to avenge his youthful poverty. But he had lost more than just his faith during those twenty years. Beginning with his marriage to Louise, Bascom had also gained and lost a family. He and Louise are still together when we meet them in the novel, but Bascom sees his marriage as dead and his wife lost to him as a result of her insanity. His children, in a different way, are also lost because once they came of age they fled from home and never returned.

Having brought us up to date, Wolfe then continues the novel with scenes from a typical day at the office for Bascom. The description is again organized and meticulous. We are shown the outside and inside of the office building before meeting Bascom's office-mates. Their characters reflect the dullness of the office. There is the banal Miss Brill, the meager-looking Samuel Friedman, and the self-satisfied Stanley Ward. They do not understand Bascom and therefore make fun of his eccentricities. John T. Brill, the loud and dominating figure in the office, on the other hand, understands and respects Bascom, so much so that he brags of Bascom's intellect to visitors as though Bascom were his son. Bascom and Brill come from different backgrounds and have different sensibilities, yet there is much common ground between them; nephew David writes:

Brill was a lewd and innocent man. Like my uncle, by comparison with these other people, he seemed to belong to some earlier, richer, and grander period of the earth, and perhaps this was why there was more actual kinship between them than between any of the other members of the office. These other people . . . belonged to the myriads of the earth, to the numberless swarms that with ceaseless pullulation fill the streets of life with their gray immemorable tides. But Brill and my uncle Bascom were men in a thousand, a million: if one had seen them in a crowd he would have looked after them, if one had talked with them, he could never have forgotten them. (30-31)

One reason we cannot forget Brill's conversation is that it is earthy and vulgar. We sense that Brill naturally incorporates obscenities into his language, but we also sense that he uses as many vulgarities as possible when Bascom is around. This is consistent with Brill's character and his relationship with Bascom, for Brill takes great delight in jokingly trying to offend him. The lengthy section discussing their relationship details many examples of Brill teasing Bascom. He teases Bascom, for instance, about his eccentric aversion to eating in restaurants. Bascom tries to explain that he finds the preparation of restaurant food unhealthy and that he will eat only raw health foods, but we know, as does Brill, that Bascom is simply reluctant to spend money. The same can be said about Bascom and overcoats. He claims that he never wears them because they carry cold-inducing germs; the truth is that Bascom is too cheap to part with the money needed for a warm overcoat.

But even though Bascom cringes at Brill's coarse language, and even though he finds himself the butt of many jokes, he admires and respects Brill. Brill is a man of character—of forceful and aggressive character. Brill lusts after life, and this is reflected in his language, his "invective" as Bascom terms it. In different ways, Bascom and Brill are remarkable men in that they understand life's possibilities and have been willing, in their different ways, to go after what they want. Bascom might bristle at his coarse language, but he also wishes that he had the peculiar kind of strength to use it. Brill's scathing invective thus links the section about the two men with the following section, a digression that focuses on an extramarital affair Bascom was once tempted to have while he vacationed in Florida.

The woman, a plump, sensuous widow, appears an odd match for Bascom. She is so dull-witted, for example, that she misunderstands his long and very obvious poem about his agnosticism. Ordinarily, Bascom would be offended by such stupidity in anyone. The widow may be stupid, but she is shrewd. She recognizes that he is the man she wants and she knows how to get him: by appealing to his vanity and by appearing willing to listen to his harangues. Bascom, who feels underloved and underappreciated by his wife, falls prey to the widow. Their relationship builds and moves to a climax when the widow offers herself sexually to Bascom, who has ambivalent feelings about the offer. On the one hand, he wants to fill the void created by his marriage to Louise. At the same time he cannot break free from social and marital conventions, nor can he overcome his repressed religious beliefs defining the appropriate expressions of love and sex. He wants to defy convention in the way that Brill defies convention when he unleashes his invective, but he does not have the necessary kind of daring. He feels frustrated by his inadequacy. Hence, Bascom declines the widow's offer and the romance ends.

With the conclusion of the aborted romance, the focus of the novel shifts to David, whom we hardly know, even though fifty pages of this short novel have passed. David is ostensibly detailing a conversation he had with Bascom, but their conversation fades into the background as David tells us about himself and his life in Boston. We soon realize that David's life has certain parallels to Bascom's. Both came to Harvard from North Carolina, and both possessed a nearly insatiable appetite for books and life. The following quotations reveal much about David. In addition, the quotations illustrate the sense of vitality that Wolfe infused into Bascom Hawke. In the first quotation, David demonstrates his love for life and learning when he discusses his burning ambition to know everything, an ambition Bascom had fifty years earlier. David says:

My hunger and thirst had been immense: I was caught up for the first time in the midst of the Faustian web—there was no food that could feed me, no drink that could quench my thirst—like an insatiate and maddened animal I roamed the streets, trying to draw up mercy from the cobblestones, solace and wisdom from a million sights and faces, or prowled through the endless shelves of high-piled books tortured by everything I could not see and could not know, and growing blind, weary, and desperate from what I read and saw. I wanted to know all, have all, be all—to be one and many, to have the whole riddle of this vast and swarming earth as legible, as tangible in my hand as a coin of minted gold (50).

The second quotation reflects David's sensitivity to life, to the earth, and to the products of the earth. He says:

The air will have in it the wonderful odors of the market . . . the delicate and subtle air of spring touches all these odors with a new and delicate vitality; it draws the tar out of the pavements also, and it draws slowly, subtly, from ancient warehouses, the compacted perfumes of eighty years: the sweet thin piney scents of packing boxes, the glutinous composts of half a century, that have thickly stained old warehouse plankings, the smells of twine, tar, turpentine and hemp, and of thick molasses, ginseng, pungent vines and roots and old piled sacking; the clean ground strength of fresh coffee, brown, sultry, pungent, and exultantly fresh and clean; the smell of oats, baled hay and bran, of crated eggs and cheese and butter; and particularly the smell of meat, of frozen beeves, of slick porks and veals, of brains and livers and kidneys, of haunch, paunch, and jowl; of meat that is raw and of meat that is cooked . . . (53).

This section outlining David's exuberant view of life sets the stage for the climactic concluding section. David is in Bascom's office to visit; but what transpires is not really a conversation between the two, as Bascom does almost all the talking. Through his monologue, as well as through the further glimpses into Bascom's past that David gives us, we begin to understand the idea about young men and old men that Wolfe told Perkins he had.

Bascom's denegration of women occupies much of his harangue. The reason for this denegration stems from his unhappy marriage to Louise. Bascom had wanted to possess her totally when they married, and when he realized after they were wed that he could not do so because Louise's beauty invariably brought complimentary looks from other men, a kind of madness overcame him. He raged with a black jealousy and felt that marriage and love had betrayed him. Because his life was self-centered and self-contained, Bascom could not cope with the idea that he shared his wife, even if sharing amounted only to having other men look at her. Unable to cope, and determined to maintain his fierce individuality and integrity, Bascom did what only he could: he forgot about Louise and treated her with indifference.

The results of this indifference were profound. The gap between Bascom and Louise widened to an unbreachable abyss. Because she could not understand the cause of Bascom's indifference, Louise slowly but inexorably lost her mind. Their children were also affected by his behavior. Bascom also treated them with indifference because he saw them as his wife's children, not his own. Moreover, he imposed his miserly ways on his children and denied them many of the pleasures he too had been denied as a child. As soon as they could, the children escaped from home, bearing bitter grudges that remained with them.

Bascom, then, sees his life as a series of frustrations and betrayals. His life at thirty, which had so much promise because he had been able to overcome the handicaps of youthful poverty with intelligence and perseverance, was attacked by the betrayals of his wife, his children, and his faith. These betrayals relate directly to the theme of the earth that Wolfe develops in Bascom Hawke. Wolfe describes Brill as a product of the earth, for example, because he possesses a challenging spirit and a lust for life. Similarly, Wolfe describes Bascom as a product of the earth because his tenacious desire to survive and prosper helped him escape from his bleak childhood. But at the same time, the theme of the earth also carries implications of organic unity, the sense that the individual is integrally bound with society, which represents the fruits of the earth. It is not surprising, therefore, that when Wolfe wants to show David as a product of the earth, he uses the above quotations that focus on David's relationship with the earth and its bounty. The sense of organic unity also extends to the concept of family, both in the particular terms of spouse and children and in the broader concept of the family of man. Believing he has been betrayed by a wife who is not really a wife to him, and by children who despise him, Bascom experiences frustration and bitter loneliness, a loneliness that is compounded by his loss of religious faith. Bascom communicates this genuine despair to David, who in turn tells us that by understanding Bascom we can understand the history of man's loneliness, his dignity, his grandeur, and his despair (39).

Bascom has lost and suffered much. Though some strength remains (his scolding of Boston motorists shows this), he is only a shell of the man he once was. David understands the life Bascom has lived and wants to graft Bascom's experiences onto his own to enrich the life he is to continue living. Sitting with Bascom in his office, David says:

And now, as I looked at the old man, I had a sense of union with the past. It seemed if he would only speak, the living past, the voices of lost men, the pain, the pride, the madness and despair, the million scenes of the buried life—all that an old man ever knew—would be revealed to me, would be delivered to me like a priceless treasure, as an inheritance which old men owed to young, and which should be the end and effort of all living. My savage hunger was a kind of memory: I thought if he could speak it would be fed (67).

But Bascom does not tell David what he wants to hear. Bascom only says, "It was so long ago . . . so long ago. I have lived so long. I have seen so much. I could tell you so many things" (67).

As the novel draws to its conclusion, David imagines a scene in which a group of old men and women are sitting at a dinner table. Like Bascom, they have suffered and lived on. David discovers in his vision, as he did with Bascom, that these people cannot speak of their pasts. He learns that the past cannot be transmitted. It must be lived again.

The enduring human condition is Bascom Hawke's major theme. Bascom and David epitomize the continual cycle of hope, frustration, and despair, which is followed by renewed hope for the future. Wolfe's short novel is really about the birth and death of dreams. But the acknowledgement we see in old Bascom that dreams die does not stamp Bascom Hawke with pessimism. Rather, the novel affirms life. The affirmation of life at the novel's conclusion is to seek, to live. David says this with great beauty and force after he realizes that he cannot rekindle the flame of life in Bascom. He says:

Then I got up and left him and went out into the streets where the singing and lyrical air, the man-swarm passing in its million-footed weft, the glorious women and the girls compacted into a single music of belly and breasts and thighs, the sea, the proud, potent, and clamorous city, all of the voices of time fused to a unity that was like a song, a token and a cry. Victoriously, I trod the neck of doubt as if it were a serpent: I was joined to the earth, a part of it, and I possessed it; I would be wasted and consumed, filled and renewed eternally; I would be emptied without weariness, replenished forever with strong joy. I had a tongue for agony, a food for hunger, a door for exile and a surfeit for insatiate desire: exultant certainty welled up in me, I thought I could possess it all, and I cried: 'Yes! It will be mine!' (71)

The juxtaposition between David and Bascom highlights what might be called the human cycle, which reflects nature's cycle of birth, growth, decay, and rebirth. Not surprisingly, the earth and what it represents play vital roles in Bascom Hawke. Wolfe structures his novel around the development of this theme. He begins with Bascom's youth and then amplifies this idea of the earth with comparisons and contrasts with John T. Brill, another product of the earth. David, the new Bascom, is next identified with the earth, thus providing the final contrast between youth and age. David's triumph stems from his willingness to risk life's disappointments, the disappointments of lost love and frustrated emotions that weaned the once hearty Bascom.

Wolfe knew what he was doing when he wrote Bascom Hawke. He carefully draws us into Bascom's world and then proceeds to make Bascom and his plight come alive for us in the subsequent sections. Every section has a purpose, and every character has a function. Bascom Hawke contains the great language, the great themes, and the great characterizations that Wolfe erratically achieved in novels such as Look Homeward Angel and Of Time and the River. Significantly, Bascom Hawke is a tightly structured work—something his long novels are not—that contains all of these elements. It is a novel that should be read and remembered.

Notes

¹ Maxwell Perkins, Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell Perkins (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1950), p. 68.

² See Bernard DeVoto, "Genius Is Not Enough," Saturday Review XIII (April 25, 1936), pp. 3-4, 14-15.

³ See Robert Penn Warren, "A Note on the Hamlet of Thomas Wolfe," reprinted in Selected Essays of Robert Penn Warren (New York: Random House, 1958), p. 183.

⁴ Professor Hugh Holman was the first to point to Wolfe's talent as a short novelist. In his introduction to The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961), Holman writes, "In the short novel form Wolfe was a master of his craft . . . these successful products of his efforts should not be forgotten."

⁵ Quoted in Holman's introduction to The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe, p. xx.

⁶ Thomas Wolfe, A Portrait of Bascom Hawke, collected in The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe, pp. 4-5. All future references are in the text and are to this edition.