Up to a point, Of Time and the River may be considered as of a piece with Look Homeward, Angel—another huge length sliced off the story that Wolfe apparently will go on writing forever… I should pause to remark that he is indeed taking an unconscionably long time in growing up. Of Time and the River still reads like a first novel. Although published six years after Look Homeward, Angel, it is full of the same extravagances and is not a more finished technical performance; Wolfe appears to have learned little or nothing about his craft. Offhand, in fact, Look Homeward, Angel comes off better in a comparison. It remains the most unified of his novels, lyrically and dramatically, because it naturally falls into a simple pattern. It covers a natural stage in a man's life; it tells with whole-hearted intensity the story of growing pains, which to the youth are very complicated but to the grown man an old story. By contrast, Of Time and the River is an arbitrary slice of a man's life, with practically no plot unity, no climax, no dramatic beginning, middle and end. It has more breadth and variety because Eugene Gant has got out into the great world; it also seems more formless and muddled because he is lost there, at the end appearing to be just about where he was at the beginning.

Perhaps the best index to the range and the limits of Wolfe's capacities at this stage is the creation of Francis Starwick, the esthete who is Eugene's best friend at Harvard and who turns out to be a homosexual. On the whole, it is an impressive creation. It is the more notable because, though drawn from life, this is a kind of life utterly foreign to the world of Look Homeward, Angel and to Wolfe's natural bent. But it was too foreign for him wholly to command. He never convinces us that Starwick was quite so rare and brilliant a spirit as he declares—"one of the most extraordinary figures of his generation." His admiration of Starwick seems rather provincial; the uncouth country boy is envious of the polished gentleman-artist. The country boy is also exasperated by him, however, and becomes tiresome in his mimicry of Starwick's precious accents: "The thing is so utterly French … really quite astonishing… terribly amusing… perfectly grand." In his impassioned moments, on the other hand, Starwick is apt to talk like Wolfe: "My God! to come into this world scarce half made up, to have the spirit of the artist and to lack his hide, to feel the intolerable and unspeakable beauty, mystery, loveliness, and terror of this immortal land—this great America—and a skin too sensitive, a hide too delicate and rare … to declare its cruelty, its horror, falseness, hunger, the warped and twisted soul of its frustration." Here Wolfe romanticizes the pathetic story of Starwick's inadequate talent, as if it were the tragic ruin of genius, because he identifies himself with Starwick and conceives the frustration of the artist as the most terrible of life's cruelties. The basic uncertainly of his conception is most apparent in the closing scenes, where Starwick emerges as "his friend, his brother—and his mortal enemy." Wolfe is characteristically attempting to create a symbolic, mythical figure, and by his characteristic method of incongruity; but the only apparent basis for the mortal enmity is that Starwick got the girl for whom Eugene had a fancy. In the scene of their final parting—goodbye, my one true friend, and goodbye, my mortal enemy, and "Oh, to feel so, suffer so, and live so!"—the myth collapses into banality.

Hence when Wolfe died, three years after the appearance of Of Time and the River, with his subsequent work not yet published, the more critical obituaries generally expressed the attitude that still persists. It was agreed that he had splendid talent, energy, ambition; but he had no art, no perspective, no humor, no philosophy, no social consciousness—in effect, no mind. He was compared to an automobile "with unlimited horsepower, a tiny steering wheel, and no brakes." Others dated the automobile. "Wolfe belonged to the high-pitched, unreal 1920's …" wrote Louis Kronenberger. "When he died, young as he was, he had lived too long. For the soberer life that came after the 20's, when the accent fell not on the individual but on society, was something Wolfe could not understand." Kronenberger added that he "never acquired, of course, any values—either intellectual or moral—that were worth consideration." John Peale Bishop, on the other hand, placed Wolfe in the disenchanted 'thirties. Appreciating his values as a mythmaker, Bishop linked him with Hart Crane, as the two most conspicuous failures in recent American literature. Both Crane and Wolfe sought their subject in the greatness of America, but both found that the America they longed to celebrate did not exist. "Both were led at last, on proud romantic feet, to Brooklyn. And what they found there they abhorred." The depression in particular killed Wolfe's faith, Bishop thought. Hence Wolfe could find no meaning, no structure, for Of Time and the River.

Such verdicts were understandable enough at the time. Although they should have been more generally revised after the appearance of You Can't Go Home Again, I cite them here chiefly to emphasize the real limits of Wolfe's achievement up to this point. His central meaning was not clear; his critics were confused about his purposes and his values because he was himself confused. Yet Of Time and the River does give signs that he was really developing, coming out of confusion. The signs may escape notice because they involve the realization of a few elementary truths that will be no revelation to the reader. They may be apparent chiefly in rereading, in the light of Wolfe's final accomplishment. I may be overemphasizing them here simply because it is the critic's business to make out unity and continuity, to get things into shape. Nevertheless this is the critic's business; and Wolfe does not have to be pounded into shape. He was in fact acquiring both moral and intellectual values, entering on the "soberer life that came after the 20's."

The most obvious sign of this growth is an increasing strain of self-criticism. Although Wolfe is still far from mastering his follies, as man and as artist, at least he now recognizes them. In Look Homeward, Angel he is pleased by his romantic image, proud of such discoveries as his dislike for "whatever fits too snugly in a measure"; he is pleased to be Dr. Faustus, at whatever cost of mad hunger, fury and despair, because this is the divine madness of the Artist; and while he admits his human failings, the grievous fault is always in the world around him. Although his romanticism is not shallow—he notes that his quality as a romantic was not "to escape out of life, but into it"—his realism is also youthful. He wants Life, which is a glowing abstraction, necessarily different from all the life he knows; he wants the world, even though the world is his natural enemy. In Of Time and the River, however, he becomes aware that his mad hunger may be literally mad, and its futility no sign of divinity. At moments "the hopeless and unprofitable struggle of the Faustian life" become "horribly evident." It is unprofitable, as Starwick points out to Eugene, because it is unnecessary as well as hopeless:

Do you think that you will really gain in wisdom if you read a million books? Do you think you will find out more about life if you know a million people rather than yourself? Do you think you will get more pleasure from a thousand women than from two or three—see more if you go to a hundred countries instead of six?

Eugene does think so, or for the most part continues to act as if he does; but at least Wolfe no longer does. If he may still rant about the futility of ranting, and his passion may grow madder because he is horrified by the thought that it is mad, he is getting more distance between Eugene and himself, viewing his story with more detachment. Furthermore, his maturer attitudes are coloring the substance and quality of his narrative, not merely punctuating it with reflective passages. An incidental example is the appearance of a quieter, cooler satire, approaching subtlety, as in the skilful portrait of Professor Hatcher. ("He was one of those rare people who really 'chuckle,' and although there was no doubting the spontaneity and naturalness of his chuckle, it is also probably true that Professor Hatcher somewhat fancied himself as a chuckler.") Similarly there appears a quieter kind of drama, as in Eugene's experience with the Coulson household in England: the crisp, competent, self-assured Coulsons who are lost in fog, failure and ruin, always friendly but unapproachable behind "the armor of their hard bright eyes"; while their boarders, who have also lost something precious and irrecoverable, nightly improvise negro jazz, fighting their emptiness with a "deliberate, formidable, and mad intensity of a calculated gaiety, a terrifying mimicry of mirth," as the storm-wind howls through the dark trees around them. In this episode Wolfe handles his typical incongruities with something like the melancholy, ironic detachment of Joseph Conrad; and his tone differs from Conrad's less in its higher pitch than in its more apparent tenderness.

This relative sobriety is most notable in Wolfe's treatment of his family, especially his father and mother. They have not changed, but they appear more admirable and more pitiable in Of Time and the River than in Look Homeward, Angel; Wolfe is no longer taking out on them his own bitterness. In the death of Gant—another of his unforgettable scenes—he does complete justice to their humanity. There is horror enough, or possibly even too much: the old stone-cutter, long a spectre except for his grotesquely powerful hands, suffers from enough cancer to kill a battalion of ordinary men. There is also a quality of tenderness and pity that has been rare in Wolfe. In the last conversation between Gant and Eliza he makes amends, yet without sacrificing truthfulness:

"Eliza,"—he said—and at the sound of that unaccustomed word, a name he had spoken only twice in forty years—her white face and her worn brown eyes turned toward him with the quick and startled look of an animal—"Eliza," he said quietly, "you have had a hard life with me, a hard time. I want to tell you that I'm sorry."

And before she could move from her white stillness of shocked surprise, he lifted his great right hand and put it gently down across her own. And for a moment she sat there bolt upright, shaken, frozen, with a look of terror in her eyes, her heart drained of blood, a pale smile trembling uncertainly and foolishly on her lips. Then she tried to withdraw her hand with a clumsy movement, she began to stammer with an air of ludicrous embarrassment, she bridled, saying—"Aw-w, now, Mr. Gant. Well, now, I reckon,"—and suddenly these few simple words of regret and affection did what all the violence, abuse, drunkenness and injury of forty years had failed to do. She wrenched her hand free like a wounded creature, her face was suddenly contorted by that grotesque and pitiable grimace of sorrow that women have had in moments of grief since the beginning of time, and digging her fist into her closed eye quickly with the pathetic gesture of a child, she lowered her head and wept bitterly:

"It was a hard time, Mr. Gant," she whispered, "a hard time, sure enough.…"

But presently she is ashamed of her tears, and adds hastily, "Not that I'm blamin' you, Mr. Gant … I reckon we were both at fault … there was always something strange-like about you that I didn't understand." Then, drying her eyes, she returns to her dauntless self, sublime and ridiculous in her optimism: "Well, now, Mr. Gant, that's all over." Now he must set his mind on getting well. She winks at him briskly. Half our ills are imagination, she adds sententiously. But if he'll just make up his mind to it, he'll get well. They both have years before them, perhaps the best years of their life; they can now profit by their mistakes. "That's just exactly what we'll do!" A few minutes later blood is pouring out of his mouth and nostrils; and Mr. Gant is dead.

The matrix of all these developments in Of Time and the River is Wolfe's growing realization of the deep bonds that united him with his fellowmen. With nature the childgiant from the mountains had been one, but in society he had been one apart; he was "called" but had no clearly recognized or generally respected calling; and he had prized his loneliness as a token that his spirit, like Shelley's, was "tameless and swift and proud." But now Wolfe is less proud. After a drunken escapade that lands him in jail, Eugene comes out feeling more than remorse. He is conscious "of a more earthly, common, and familiar union with the lives of other men than he had ever known." Wolfe tells us that Shelley is no longer his favorite poet: the sense of "proud and lonely inviolability" that he had treasured in Shelley has lost its magic.

This consciousness of community is again an elementary discovery, and in part a matter of mood. It has not yet got into Wolfe's habitual feeling—for a long time he had been at home with his feeling of homelessness. Yet his new consciousness was clear and deep enough to be of decisive importance in the myth that he was living as well as writing. It gave him a self-knowledge that his intense self-consciousness had denied him; for only through identification with others can one really know one's self, only through a full recognition of the typical and communal can one fully realize his individuality. Wolfe's romantic individualism had stamped him as a familiar type and impeded the growth of a real individuality, much as the popular worship of personality hinders people from becoming real persons. By the same token, Wolfe now came closer to the sources of myth; for at its broadest and deepest the typical is the mythical. And the realization of the living truth in such truisms is not, perhaps, so elementary a discovery after all. As Thomas Mann has said, the mythical represents an early, primitive stage in the life of humanity, but a late and mature one in the life of the individual.…

Look Homeward, Angel remains a very personal legend of a very young man who is literally lost and seeking an actual home. Already Wolfe begins to say that he can't go home again, but by home he means simply Asheville. Even in these terms, to be sure, the legend has universal significance: countless young men have felt lost, homeless, hungry for life, love and fame—and have believed themselves unique. Nevertheless Wolfe was still thinking primarily in personal terms, as the old mythmakers did not. He also differed from them in that where they perceived chiefly likenesses or identities, he perceived incongruities and profound oppositions as well. So must we all today; only in these complex terms can the myth still be valid. In his egocentricity, however, Wolfe magnified the oppositions, or even created them. And it is these that begin to dissolve in Of Time and the River. Although Wolfe is still confined to his own experience, incapable of a detached, objective view of the world around him, he now recognizes that his experience is not singular and that he has much in common with the world. Although he is prone to create other men in his own lonely image, he recognizes their community in loneliness, and despite loneliness. In general, his personal legend becomes increasingly typical and symbolical. Specifically, it becomes an American legend.

Thus his highly individualized, even eccentric characters are now presented as characteristic American products or types. His father's life is an American tragedy: the life of "the lost American who has been brought forth naked under immense and lonely skies, to 'shift for himself,' to grope his way blindly through the confusion and brutal chaos of a life as naked and unsure as he, to wander blindly down across the continent, to hunt forever for a goal, a wall, a dwelling place of warmth and certitude, a light, a door." In particular, old Gant is a symbol of the old pioneer America which has been increasingly corrupted by commercialism: thus as a young man he had carved a marble angel, in his dream of becoming a sculptor, and as an old man he sold it to ornament the grave of a whore. American, too, is the "dissonance and frenzied unrest" of Eugene's brother Luke, hurling himself along lonely roads at night, "going furiously from nowhere into nowhere, rushing ahead with starlight shining on his knit brows and his drawn face, with nothing but the lonely, mournful, and desolate red-clay earth about him, the immense, the merciless emptiness and calm of the imperturbable skies above him." Even the rare, the precious Francis Starwick turns out to be the son of a Mid-Western small-town school superintendent; and his story is at bottom the pittifully common one of a precious devotion to "culture" because of the "rawness" and "crudeness" of American life. So a host of unrelated characters, who had entered Wolfe's novel chiefly because they had entered his life, are now related to a common theme—the magnificent promise and the appalling blight of American life.

Similarly a host of sensuous images of the physical background become related to a more philosophical image. Initially, they owed much more to memory than to reflection; they constituted a panorama of America rather than a vision; and the meaning of the spectacle changed with Eugene's mood. Often Wolfe's image of America is an enchanted one of an immense, exultant, fabulous country "where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time." As often it is a disenchanted view of an immense desolation, ugliness, cruelty, savagery; the miracles do not happen. But now he is more earnestly seeking a central meaning, and more clearly perceiving that he must find it in precisely these violent contradictions. Eugene makes the "desperate and soul-sickening discovery" that he must find goodness, truth and beauty, not in radiant, magical images, but in "the mean hearts of common men," in "all the blind and brutal complications" of the destiny of America. There, in ways still darklier and stranger than he had thought, lay his heart's desire: "buried there in the grimy and illimitable jungles of its savage cities—a-prowl and raging in the desert and half-mad with hunger in the barren land, befouled and smutted with the rust and grime of its vast works and factories, warped and scarred and twisted, stunned, bewildered by the huge multitude of all its errors and blind gropings, yet still fierce with life, still savage with its hunger, still broken, slain and devoured by its terrific earth, its savage wilderness—and still, somehow, God knows how, the thing of which he was a part, that beat in every atom of his blood and brain and life, and was indestructible and everlasting, and that was America!"

This whole development, finally, gives Of Time and the River a kind of form, which helps to explain the cumulative power of the novel that many readers feel even while they feel troubled by the absence of conventional plot or dramatic unity. As Joseph Warren Beach remarks, it is a musical form, comparable to a tone poem of Richard Strauss or a Wagnerian opera—or in the novel to Gide's The Counterfeiters. The central theme is the idea of a pilgrimage; the leitmotifs are the recurrent images of loneliness and hunger, the quest of a father, of a gate or door, of a tongue or word by which to articulate and "possess" all life; and the basic incongruities may serve as counterpoint. In terms of episode, the related themes are the pilgrimages of the Southerner to the North, of the country boy to the big city, of the American to Europe—all projected against the background of time and the river, the pilgrimage of man's life on the timeless earth. Such elements of form are clearer when Of Time and the River is viewed in relation to Wolfe's whole "book," and in any view are blurred by considerable extraneous material. Unlike Gide, Wolfe did not consciously plan his novel so. Yet his central theme, at least, is clear and explicit; and as the passionate pilgrim becomes more conscious of its implications, the related themes emerge more clearly from the sprawl and dissonance of his experience.

The least significant of these themes is Wolfe's flight from the "lost and lonely South." He was indeed a self-conscious rebel, who wrote bitterly of the sterile romanticism of the South with its "swarming superstition," its "cheap mythology," its "hostile and murderous intrenchment against all new life." He accordingly angered many Southerners; one critic suggested that perhaps he "should be obliged, in the vast area of his sympathies, to make room for the people who bred him." In fact, however, Wolfe never lost his sympathy for these people. He always wrote with deep feeling of "Old Catawba," and its obscure but magnificent history "full of heroism, endurance, and the immortal silence of the earth"; in his last work he was writing this history. His very pride in it intensified his scorn of the legends of an "aristocratic culture," especially in South Carolina. At any rate, he had not been deeply affected by the romantic mythology of the South, and quickly outgrew his boyish attachment to it. For him the road to the "proud fierce North," the land of his father, was doubtless the road to freedom and life; his flight was a sign of the realistic quality of his own romanticism. Yet the North was not itself the land of freedom; he was no less critical of it, and lost and lonely in it. And though his criticism sometimes betrays the proud Southerner, who is sometimes embarrassed by a feeling of apostasy, this was a more or less incidental complication of his thought and feeling. The chief point is that no merely regional tradition could satisfy his hunger or provide an image large enough for his belief and his power.

Hence the most significant experience that the North afforded Wolfe was the experience of cosmopolitan New York, the melting pot of rural as well as foreign-born America, and the symbol of the multitudinous life he had a passion to absorb. This stage of his pilgrimage reveals his exceptional ability to recapture the marvelous and the mythical in the commonplace. Because the coming of a country boy to the big city is so old a tale, we are apt to forget what a thrilling, magical and meaningful adventure it is; and no other writer has rendered its quality so fully and so glowingly as has Wolfe. But this experience is also fundamental to his whole legend. Inevitably he was disillusioned by New York, unable to digest its multitudes, and his revulsion inspired his blackest, bitterest pages. Necessarily he had to outgrow or transcend this disillusionment if his myth was to accommodate the terms of modern experience. For it New York is not the whole of America, it is the symbol of modern industrial America at its best and its worst. It is the quintessential manifestation of the exuberant energy and the might of a polyglot land; of the fabulous power of "natural knowledge" expressed in the soar of skyscrapers, the sweep of bridges, the blaze of swarming streets; of the grandeur and the glory realized in concrete, steel and glass. It is also the quintessence of the grime and filth, the dreary waste, the raucous vulgarity, the blatant materialism, the brutal violence of industrial America. So must it be accepted, as magnificent monument and as foul blot. So Wolfe did in time accept it. "And that was America!" was the conclusion of his "desperate and soul-sickening discovery." If the discovery seems needlessly desperate, at least he earned his exclamation point.

The turning point in his experience, however, was the pilgrimage to Europe. In Europe he saw a way of life magical in its grace, its form, its assurance; here were people who had found a way, a door; here were actual pleasure and joy, immediately realized and shared, instead of the lonely joys of expectancy and promise that he knew in America. Yet it was an alien life, he could not enter this door or share this joy; he remained a lonely American who could thrill only to the splendid promise. As he wandered, his memories and his desires were extraordinarily intensified by his aching homelessness. And so he discovered America, he tells us, by leaving it. His years abroad made him realize his profound need of it.

This discovery no doubt owed something to the jealous pride of the provincial, and a resentment of the European condescension toward America. But Wolfe was also a sensitive, penetrating observer. While fully appreciating both the superficial charms and the deep satisfactions of the ancient culture of Europe, he saw clearly the vanities, the ancient fears and hatreds, the corruption and decay beneath the charming surface. He thereby got a perspective on the notorious limitations of America. If Americans were provincial and cocky, the British were no less insular and complacent; if they were materialistic, they had no more reverence for the dollar than French peasants and merchants had for the sou; if they were standardized, the very superiority of Europe was supposed to lie in its settled manners or standardized way of life. Although Wolfe did not formulate the generalization, in effect he began to realize that every society must have the defects of its virtues, its over-emphases and under-emphases. The glory of Europe lies in its traditional way of life; but tradition preserves a great deal of junk as well as precious achievement, and a reverence for it can also be a symptom of stagnation. The limitations of America lie in its raw, reckless youth; but youth is also the source of its energy, vitality, humor, faith and hope.

Hence Wolfe was able to end Of Time and the River on a triumphant note that does not sound forced or shrill. The wanderer returns from Europe, more enthralled by the homecoming than was Ulysses. Wolfe describes the voyage to America as "the supreme ecstasy of the modern world." "There is no other experience that is remotely comparable to it, in its sense of joy, its exultancy, its drunken and magnificent hope which, against reason and knowledge, soars into a heaven of fabulous conviction, which believes in the miracle and sees it invariably achieved." Here Wolfe is mythicizing, in the heroic manner; and good Americans may be embarrassed. Yet if this grandiloquence is "against reason and knowledge," Wolfe by now does have the reason and knowledge. His view of America is far more realistic, complex and ironic than was, say, Homer's view of Greece. He has not come by his enthrallment easily or cheaply; and once we have modestly admitted that a trip to America is not the supreme ecstasy, we may be grateful for the ecstasy that he has legitimately recaptured. His primary gift as a mythmaker, once more, was this quick feeling for the wonderful strangeness of the familiar, the enchantments of routine modern experience.

Meanwhile Wolfe's growing awareness of the meaning of his legend has not yet brought the peace, strength and wisdom he is seeking. His image of America is very large, and none too clear or steady; his supreme ecstasy at the end of Of Time and the River is not a supreme certainty. Moreover, Wolfe's emotion will swell to fit this mighty subject, and swell the more because his America too is created in his own image. In his exultant moods he must now celebrate not only his own youthful hopes but the power and promise of a youthful nation; in his dark, bitter moods he must now agonize over not only his personal frustrations but the loneliness and waste of American life. He still has too few general ideas, and too little interest in such ideas. He has the more need of them because he still has a great deal of unemployed emotion.

Yet the important thing is that Wolfe is finding a meaning for his book. It will become more explicit, it will broaden and deepen; but the design is already apparent. Granted that all Wolfe's discoveries are rather elementary, as well as rather belated, the really effective ideas in human history—the great ideas by which men and nations live—are usually platitudes. His discoveries are at least an adequate groundwork for his myth—myths do not require novel or highly original themes. And so with a still more elementary and more fundamental discovery that is stressed in the closing pages of Of Time and the River. In the little towns of France an ancient faith, latent in Wolfe's blood, was quietly but powerfully awakened. His senses, his heart, his mind were filled with rich, drowsy sensations of the unutterable familiarity of this strange world. Life in these towns, he was pleased to rediscover, was the same as life in the little towns of America, and everywhere on earth. "And after all the dark and alien world of night, of Paris, and another continent… this re-discovery of the buried life, the fundamental structure of the great family of earth to which all men belong, filled him with a quiet certitude and joy."

More specifically, the sound of a cathedral bell, as Wolfe sat in a cobbled square in the ancient city of Dijon, served him much like the famous madeleine that inspired Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. With the sound of the old bell, "everything around him burst into instant life," a life he had always known. His school bell, the distant chimes on a street at night, the lonely sounds of old Catawba—a host of long-forgotten things swarmed back, incredibly alive and near. Then, after a moment of brooding silence, began the sound of men going home for lunch; and Wolfe was closer to the lost America of his childhood than he would ever be when in America:

They came with solid, lonely, liquid shuffle of their decent leather, going home, the merchants, workers, and good citizens of that old town of Dijon. They streamed across the cobbles of that little square; they passed, and vanished, and were gone forever—leaving silence, the brooding hush and apathy of noon, a suddenly living and intolerable memory, instant and familiar as all this life around him, of a life that he had lost, and that could never die.

It was the life of twenty years ago in the quiet, leafy streets and little towns of lost America—of an America that had been lost beneath the savage roar of its machinery, the brutal stupefaction of its days, the huge disease of its furious, ever-quickening and incurable unrest.… And now, all that lost magic had come to life again here in the little whitened square, here in this old French town, and he was closer to his childhood and his father's life of power and magnificence than he could ever be again in savage new America; and as the knowledge of these strange, these lost yet familiar things returned to him, his heart was filled with all the mystery of time, dark time, the mystery of strange million-visaged time that haunts us with the briefness of our days.

This experience obviously helped Wolfe to amplify the meaning of his legend, by linking the pilgrimage of a lost American with the universal destiny of lonely man. So he had felt at the death of old Gant, that his father was unlike any other man who had ever lived, and that every man who ever lived was like his father. Less obviously, however, this experience also threatened to cut short his pilgrimage or narrow its meaning. Like Proust, Wolfe was seeking to recapture his whole past experience, through his sensory impressions; but like Proust he sometimes sought the remembrance of things past as a refuge, an escape from adult frustrations. He hankered to go home again, to this lost America, the world of his childhood; his quest of a father sometimes looks more like the quest of a mother, a yearning for the womb—we may recall that he was not weaned until he was three and a half years old. Yet Wolfe did not go home again, finally. He returned instead to the actual America. Literally and figuratively, he returned to his senses: the exceptionally alert, acute senses that were the springs of his art. And the abiding value of his experience in the ancient towns of France, even if he did not clearly realize it, was that it deepened and clarified this source of his strength.

Unlike Proust, Wolfe did not attempt a minute analysis of all his sensory impressions, or an elaborate rationalization of his whole method; he did not erect his intuitive practice into a Bergsonian philosophy of intuitionism. The most difficult problem that he wrestled with, he explains in The Story of a Novel was the problem of time; but his concept of time was a very simple one, not mystical or metaphysical. He wanted to give at once the sense of the actual present in its continuous flow, the sense of past time as living in the present and at every moment conditioning the lives of his characters, and the sense of time immutable—the timeless time of earth and sea against which would be projected the transience of man's life. He wanted, in other words, to render permanence and change as they are felt in immediate experience, in which both are very real; whereas Proust, like the mystics, aspired to the realm of pure Time, the realm of Essence or Being, where change is mere appearance. And the sensory image, fully apprehended, was the key to Wolfe's time problem, the means of rendering at once the transient and the timeless. It is the carrier of the essential meanings of art, the key to its magical union of the material and the ideal, the passing and the surpassing; for the universal and the eternal are realized only in the particular, and our loftiest, rarest, most "spiritual" ideas are stirred by sensory images, brought home by them, and embodied in them. Through the senses, so commonly despised by philosophers, by theologians, by scientists and even by poets in their Platonic moods, one is led to an intense realization of natural continuities, the rhythms of the universe, the vast enveloping whole; and so one may apprehend the "deeper reality" or "higher reality" that all aspire to.

In short, Wolfe was now realizing more than the face value of his extraordinarily keen senses and retentive memory, which make possible the uncommon perceptions, the deep associations and the complex syntheses that are one way of defining genius.