An Irishwoman's Diary

You Can't Go Home Again, the title of a book, is far more widely known as one of those wry, quasi-philosophical phrases people use from time to time without giving much thought to their origins. Still, for some it remains most associated with the work of Thomas Wolfe, one of the most singular giants - in more ways than one - of US literature. And as his use of it referred to many things - not just returning home after years away, not just to the hopeless task of regaining lost innocence, but also to the aftermath of war as one who observed the beginning of the rot in 1930s Europe - perhaps Wolfe is the surest custodian of the phrase and its many nuances.

North Carolina

Born 100 years ago today in the Blue Ridge Mountain resort town of Asheville, North Carolina, Thomas Clayton Wolfe was the eighth and final baby of a cantankerous tombstone cutter from Pennsylvania and his third wife, Julia, a native of the mountains. William Oliver Wolfe would be immortalised by his son as W.O. Gant - Thomas Wolfe never did bother much with concealing his tracks. His terrifying father, his stoic, thrifty mother and his six surviving siblings all featured plain as life, as did the inhabitants of his outraged home town, in his first and most enduring novel, Look Homeward, Angel, which was published in October 1929, a few days before the Wall Street Crash.

It made him famous but also proved a burden. Wolfe, the clever Harvard graduate, remained the small-town boy who never quite grew up, despite standing 6 feet six inches tall.

An aura of romance lingers about his tormented life, helped by the fact that he died young. There are the stories of his wandering about the streets of Brooklyn at the end of mammoth writing sessions spent standing upright, using his refrigerator as a desk, muttering to himself. And of course, he was a Southerner, which in US terms means that rich, lush language akin to his native landscape was his birthright. He was a romantic and an obsessive, a loner whose relationships were disasters. His manuscripts were nightmarish, hand-scrawled and so lengthy that removal men were entrusted with collecting the crates of words and delivering them to the publisher's office.

Wolfe was ever on the run, as he writes in the opening of Look Homeward, Angel: "The first move I ever made after the cradle, was to crawl to the door, and every move I have ever made since has been an effort to escape. . ." Yet he did have a wider vision. For all its rhetoric, personal intensity and ongoing "search for a father", his work was largely concerned with a vast ambition - defining America. In his lifetime he paid the price for doing what nearly all writers do - drawing on his own experience. Look Homeward, Angel, with its passages of extraordinary beauty such as his brother Ben's death-scene, received fine reviews but was dismissed by others as autobiography.

Outside the trend

It was also seen as being outside the new trend of US fiction initated by the spare, tough prose of Hemingway. Wolfe's lyrical, romantic debut was markedly unlike A Farewell to Arms and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, both of which were also published in 1929. At a time when US writing was asserting a stylistic independence and a new literary realism, Wolfe was looking to his masters, Dickens and Tolstoy, and writing in the style of the 19th-century European novel.

While some critics, including the writer Sinclair Lewis, praised the novel, Wolfe's neighbours were impressed. One old lady who had known the author all his life wrote to him that, while never a supporter of lynch law, she would not intervene should a mob decide to drag his "big overgroan karkus across the public square". Home-town reaction was so hostile that Wolfe did not return for seven years.

On arriving in New York he certainly cultivated his position as the lonely Southerner in the bleak North. But he found a friend who not only gave him immense support, but disciplined his wild talent. That friend was Maxwell Perkins, the famous Scribners editor who discovered Scott FitzGerald, shaping both him and Hemingway. It was on reading A. Scott Berg's biography of Perkins, Editor of Genius, that I first encountered Thomas Wolfe the man. He seemed so crazy I had to read the fiction. Before I knew it I was writing my M.A. thesis on him.

Perkins, a father of five daughters, treated Wolfe like a son. He tightened a massive manuscript called "O Lost" into Look Homeward, Angel, and then spent two years editing Wolfe's next odyssey, Of Time and the River, published in 1935 at 1,035 pages.

Demented romance

Wolfe travelled through Germany and France, split from Perkins, sustained a demented romance with the theatre designer Aline Bernstein and continued writing, page after page, box after box of words. He signed with Harpers, a rival publisher, but Perkins, though hurt, remained sympathetic. Meanwhile, Wolfe's health collapsed as pneumonia seemed to have led to tuberculosis of the brain. Two operations revealed that he had multiple brain tumours. Perkins was present when Wolfe died in a Baltimore Hospital on September 15th, 1938, 18 days short of his 38th birthday. Perkins died less than nine years later. His last work had been writing the introduction to the Thomas Wolfe Collection for the Harvard Library.

As for Wolfe's writings, two further books, The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940) were shaped out of the mountain of manuscripts entrusted to the editor Edward Aswell. Wolfe often admitted, "I write too much." Luckily, a lot of it is wonderful.