In Thomas Wolfe's story "The Lost Boy" three related themes are eventually absorbed into what became perhaps the major theme of Wolfe's writing and of his life. The first of these is the theme of change, of the loss of illusions through change, and it is so closely related to the second, the loss of innocence through experience, that the two can only be examined together. The third is the theme of loneliness, and it is with the implications of this theme that I wish ultimately to deal.

One is aware of time, of change, from the first paragraphs of the story when the boy Grover is conscious of the light that "came and went and came again" in the square of Altamont, of the strokes of the town clock booming across the town, of the streetcars on their quarter-hourly schedule. Yet to Grover this is a sort of change without significance, and he is unaware of any more significant kind of change, for he is not yet "the lost boy": "It seemed to him that the Square, itself the accidental masonry of many years, the chance agglomeration of time and of disrupted strivings, was the center of the universe. It was for him, in his soul's picture, the earth's pivot, the granite core of changelessness, the eternal place where all things came and passed, and yet abode forever and would never change."

In the central episode of part one of "The Lost Boy," Grover goes into the candy store of the Crockers to buy candy with stamps given him for running errands. He buys fifteen-cents' worth of candy, but accidentally pays with eighteen-cents' worth of stamps. Crocker refuses to return the three cents in stamps. He and his wife imply that Grover stole the stamps, and put Grover out of the shop. Now "something had gone out of day. He felt the overwhelming, soul-sickening guilt that all the children, all the good men of the earth, have felt since Time began. And even anger had died down, had been drowned out, in this swelling tide of guilt, and This is the Square'—thought Grover as before—'This is Now. There is my father's shop. And all of it is as it has always been—save I."' Through time and experience Grover has changed. He is now the lost boy. He has learned something about separateness, about isolation, about inhumanity; and perhaps Grover's feeling of guilt is a symptom of this failure in fellowship.

The lost boy moves across the square to his father's stonecutter's shop; it may be significant that he passes the "angel with strong marble hands of love." Grover intends to maintain deliberately a sort of separation from his father, for he fears that his father will hear of the Crockers' accusation. Then suddenly he finds himself blurting, "Papa, I never stole the stamps." Gant's nearly immediate action is to take Grover to Crocker's shop and to demand repayment. Then Grover is alone again in the square: "And light came and went and came again—but now not quite the same as it had done before. The boy saw the pattern of familiar shapes and knew that they were just the same as they had always been. But something had gone out of 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." Grover has lost something of innocence; he has gained in experience and knowledge.

If this first episode of the story says something tentatively about time and change, it says something more about isolation, about loneliness. In the autobiographical essay "God's Lonely Man," which appeared with "The Lost Boy" in the volume The Hills Beyond (1941) but which was begun perhaps seven years previously, Wolfe said:

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people—not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul, as evidenced by the innumerable strident words of abuse, hatred, contempt, mistrust, and scorn that forever grate upon our ears as the manswarm passes us in the streets—we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.

Grover, the "dark-eyed and grave," the "too quiet and too listening" boy, is like Wolfe himself in that "there are times when anything, everything, all or nothing, the most trivial incidents, the most casual words" can strip him of defenses, can plunge him into despair, can take from him hope and joy and truth. They can show him his separateness and yet send him searchingly to his father, who also has lonely eyes and who is immediately responsive to his son, but whose indignation surely has an element of failure in it as he lashes at Crocker: "You never knew the feelings of a father, or understood the feelings of a child; and that is why you acted as you did. But a judgment is upon you. God has cursed you. He has afflicted 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!" There is a loneliness too in the light that came and went, in the strokes of the town clock, even in the "His Master's Voice" dog, in the music-store window, listening to the silent horn, listening for the unspeaking voice.

In parts two and three of "The Lost Boy," the mother, Eliza Gant, and the sister remember Grover, but they reveal also their nostalgia regarding time and change and disillusionment. The tone for these sections is partially set by the poetic refrain playing variations on the final line of part one: "Just then a buggy curved out through the Square, and fastened to the rear end was a poster, and it said 'St. Louis' and 'Excursion' and 'The Fair.'"

Years after the family went to the St. Louis Fair, the Exposition of 1904, the mother remembers "all of you the way you looked that morning, when we went down down through Indiana, going to the Fair." Her children have all grown up and gone away, and she says she is proud of them all, but she adores in memory grave and earnest, curious and intelligent Grover. He is for her, paradoxically, the symbol of all that has changed, of all who have either died or gone away, and yet of the changeless, because he is fixed forever in memory as he was "that morning when we went down through Indiana, by the river, to the Fair." The mother has known change and loss, and even in the words of her refrain there is a loneliness.

In part three Wolfe emphasizes the sister's disillusionment and her bewilderment in the face of time and change. She too remembers Grover and the summer of the Fair, the summer when Grover died of typhoid; she remembers also her lost ambitions—to be a famous pianist, to be an opera star:

All my hopes and dreams and big ambitions have come to nothing, and it's all so long ago, as if it happened in another world. . . . Sometimes I lie awake at night and think of all the people who have come and gone, and how everything is different from the way we thought that it would be. Then I go out on the street next day and see the faces of the people that I pass. . . . Don't you see something funny in people's eyes, as if all of them were puzzled about something? As if they were wondering what had happened to them since they were kids? Wondering what it is that they have lost?

She feels the separateness and yet the likeness of people, who all lose something, who all reach points other than those of their dreams. And again there is a loss of innocence, a nostalgia regarding time and change, and a loneliness comprehending them both.

The fourth and final section of the story describes the brother Eugene's return to St. Louis, many years later, in search of the magic of the past and particularly in search of the "lost boy." Here change through time and loss of innocence are strongly dramatized. Eugene finds the house of that summer of the Fair very much the same, but the feeling is different and he himself is different, and different too is the magic street, the King's Highway, which "had not been a street in those days but a kind of road that wound from magic out of some dim and haunted land, and that along the way . . . got mixed in with Tom the Piper's son, with hot cross buns, with all the light that came and went, and with coming down through Indiana in the morning, and the smell of engine smoke, the Union Station, and most of all with voices lost and far and long ago that said 'King's Highway."' In the change in the King's Highway, which is now just a street, in the absence of Grover, in the absence of the child he himself used to be, in the fact that "as a child he had sat there feeling things were Somewhere—and now he knew," Eugene is aware of time and change and the effect of experience.

And above all there is the mood of loneliness, of remembered loneliness and present loneliness. He remembers how, as a boy, he felt "a kind of absence in the afternoon" after the streetcar had passed, "a sense of absence and vague sadness" in the afternoons when he sat alone in the house, on the hall steps, and listened to the silence; he remembers how he waited in loneliness for the return of Grover and the family from the Fair. But his present loneliness is more inclusive and more sophisticated. He knows the summer desolation of the great American cities; he knows the desolation, the separateness

that one feels at the end of a hot day in a great city in America—when one's home is far away, across the continent, and he thinks of all that distance, all that heat, and feels, 'Oh God! but it's a big country!" And he feels nothing but absence, absence, and the desolation of America, the loneliness and sadness of the high, hot skies, and evening coming on across the Middle West, across the sweltering and heat-sunken land, across all the lonely little towns, the farms, the fields.

He feels that he should not have come and must not come again, that lost magic is forever lost, that his brother was "life's stranger, and life's exile, lost like all of us, a cipher in blind mazes." And he himself seems "drowned in desolation and in no belief."

If the prevailing mood of "The Lost Boy" is loneliness, then the story should be examined in the light of "God's Lonely Man," Wolfe's tragic and definitive statement on his own loneliness. First, we should be aware that he sees loneliness as "the central and inevitable fact of human existence" and that he knows that it is sometimes evidenced in such ways as the mistrust and meanness of Crocker and the shrill words of scorn of Gant. He knows that men are both cursed and blessed by separateness, for he has learned that upon the doubt and despair of loneliness may be built the triumph and joy of creativity.

In "God's Lonely Man" Wolfe has much to say about the Old Testament as the chronicle of loneliness and the New Testament as an answer to loneliness through love, but although he says that "the way and meaning of Christ's life is a far, far better way and meaning than my own," he repudiates it as his own way: "For I have found the constant everlasting weather of man's life to be, not love, but loneliness. Love itself is not the weather of our lives. It is the rare, the precious flower. Sometimes it is the flower that gives us life. . . . But sometimes love is the flower that brings us death." In "The Lost Boy" love is present—the love of Eugene, particularly, for life; the love of all the family for Grover, although this feeling sometimes appears to be better described as pride than love. But love is not presented as a solution and is not pervasive. It must not be emphasized as a theme in the story nor inferred as a solution to the loneliness, the separateness. No solution is given.

In "The Lost Boy" Eugene seems "drowned in desolation and in no belief," and in "God's Lonely Man" Wolfe, himself a lonely man, "is united to no image save that which he creates himself, . . . is bolstered by no other knowledge save that which he can gather for himself with the vision of his own eyes and brain. He is sustained and cheered and aided by no party, he is given comfort by no creed, he has no faith in him except his own." It is in this sense that "God's Lonely Man" is a tragic statement, for although such independence may be heroic and Promethean, such denial of dependence implies a tragedy of misunderstanding. And even when Wolfe asserts that "suddenly, one day, for no apparent reason, his faith and his belief in life will come back to [the lonely man] in a tidal flood," we wish that it would come back for an apparent reason, that it might be the result of the re-ascendancy of reason and judgment, or of the healthful wedding of judgment and feeling.

Yet his faith in life does come back, and he is compelled to speak whatever truth he knows, in his renewed confidence; and among the truths which Wolfe speaks, out of his loneliness, is that "the lonely man, who is also the tragic man, is invariably the man who loves life dearly—which is to say, the joyful man." Like Eugene in "The Lost Boy," he knows loneliness, death, time, change: "Out of this pain of loss, this bitter ecstasy of brief having, this fatal glory of the single moment, the tragic writer will therefore make a song for joy. . . . And his song is full of grief, because he knows that joy is fleeting, gone the instant that we have it, and that is why it is so precious, gaining its full glory from the very things that limit and destroy it." These lines from "God's Lonely Man" may be taken as a description of "The Lost Boy," for surely this story describes the pain of loss, the bitter ecstasy of brief having, and it is a song for joy at the same time that it is a cry of grief.

Wolfe's treatment of the theme of loneliness is detailed and thoughtful. And since this theme appears to be highly characteristic of modern American literature and thought, Wolfe's statement is meaningful for us all.