“Look Homeward Angel” is the most important novel ever written in North Carolina.
I have never read it in total ― fiction is a tough read for me. I have only heard about it in bits and pieces from family members.
As we were cleaning and rearranging our library den after dust had settled from a recent renovation, I picked up a green paperback copy of “Look Homeward Angel” by Thomas Wolfe.
“The” Thomas Wolfe of Asheville, North Carolina. Not the modern “Tom Wolfe,” author of “The Right Stuff” and “Bonfire of the Vanities.”
I tried to reshelve it a couple of times, but it kept coming back to my hands as if something or someone was telling me to “take up and read,” as Augustine did with Romans 13:13-14 before his conversion.
My sister read “Look Homeward Angel” annually. She kept telling me to read it since there were references to some of Dad’s extended family in Asheville, who were not very cleverly disguised in Wolfe’s autobiographical fiction.
“Uncle Walter,” whom I never met nor have I ever seen in any family album now 100 years old, was one of them.
Western North Carolinians such as Thomas Wolfe have always been great storytellers. Dad could turn a slight incident into a 30-minute story filled with laughter and delight when the spirit moved him.
On one occasion, he recounted how, during his sophomore year on the Lee Edwards (now Asheville) High School Maroons football team, he would get a phone call early on a Saturday morning after a Friday night game.
“Dan, this is Walter. Why didn’t you make that tackle on the third play of the second half on a sweep run?”
“Uncle Walter, are you calling from the county jail?”
“Sure am, Dan! I got my field binoculars and can see straight down the valley to the field where you played last night! Best seat in the house ― no one blocking my way!”
Walter had alternately made a fortune, lost a fortune and then made and lost it a couple more times during the boom-and-bust era of Asheville real estate in the 1920s. When the “big” Depression hit in 1930, he along with many others were ripe for becoming even more eccentric than before, which is why he sometimes found himself in jail for the weekend on the sixth floor of the otherwise beautiful art deco-style courthouse located at the highest point in downtown Asheville.
I finally found a way to search Wolfe’s books without reading them and came up with a “Tim Wagner,” who seemed to resemble Uncle Walter, just as my sister said. The telltale giveaway was the hearse he slept in during some of the hard times of the 1930s, which was both sad and humorous at the same time.
However, when I read Wolfe’s extensive, not-so-very nice description of “Tim Wagner,” I was somewhat horrified. “Perpetual sottishness” is not what anyone wants to read about a family member, no matter how distant. Augustine himself before he read Paul’s admonition in Romans to set aside all carousing, drunkenness and debauchery might have been a better model for Wolfe’s rendition of Mr. Wagner ― but not Uncle Walter.
It was obvious to me that other men way beyond Uncle Walter must have been in Wolfe’s mind as he recreated “Mr. Wagner.” For one thing, “Tim Wagner” had blown through and squandered not one but two huge family fortunes in a yearlong bacchanalian journey with friends across the country.
There were no massive Hill family fortunes to blow through ― none that we knew of anyway. Uncle Walter couldn’t have afforded to be Tim Wagner.
A friend told me he had been reading “Kid Carolina,” a biography of a scion of the R.J. Reynolds family, Dick Reynolds. Once he described the extravagant early life of Reynolds, which was splayed across North Carolina and national news headlines in the 1920s, it became evident Thomas Wolfe must have been thinking about him, much more so than Uncle Walter of the humble Hill family.
So Uncle Walter has been rehabilitated in family lore ― to some extent.
It stands to reason Wolfe’s second most famous book was titled “You Can’t Go Home Again.” He deliberately insulted over 200 Ashevillians in “Look Homeward Angel” even though he wrote a disclaimer in the preface claiming all characters were purely “fictional” in nature. Wolfe did not return to Asheville for a full eight years after “Look Homeward Angel” was published in 1929 ― 11 days before the October Crash.
People like my grandfather would have killed him with their bare hands for how he portrayed the good people of Asheville. No wonder Wolfe didn’t go home again.
If you want to read North Carolina’s greatest author to understand some of what makes North Carolinians tick, especially western mountain North Carolinians, pick up a copy of “Look Homeward Angel” and “You Can’t Go Home Again” and read along.
You might even recognize some of your extended family members in the gritty, real-life characters of Altamont (Asheville).
