Look Homeward, Angel

This sublime monument is known around here as "Wolfe's angel". This is the angel that inspired Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, and the short story Angel on the Porch. It can be found at the Oakdale Cemetary in Henderson County, which is about seven miles from my house.



















Thomas Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1900. He died in 1938 from tuberculosis. If you haven't had the opportunity to read Wolfe, you'll find it easy to locate a copy of Look Homeward, Angel - it hasn't been out of print since its publication in 1929.

Literary critic William Michaelian writes that "a reading of Look Homeward, Angel reveals a man already ancient in life’s wisdom. Angel is an autobiographical novel. In it Wolfe spared no one, especially his family, and least of all himself. His was a great mind imprisoned in a great, gangling body, both of which in youth seemed always to be in the way. As the main character, Eugene Gant, he was often the brunt of laughter. From the beginning, Eugene lived a raging internal life. He wanted to know and see everything, and to be recognized as the loftiest, gentlest, and most powerful of heroes. He read constantly, forgot to eat, prowled about, and kept irregular hours. He tried hard, meanwhile, to fit in..."
Michaelian also comments that Look Homeward, Angel "is free-ranging, poetic, and full of the hungry, raw energy that springs from knowing there remains much yet to explore. It is constrained by nothing; Wolfe’s language is full, ripe, uninhibited. Moreover, his work is a refreshing and well-deserved slap in the face of much of today’s writing, which is often so weary, crippled, careful, tedious, humorless, and politically correct that it is unbearable to read".

The Thomas Wolfe Memorial is on Market Street in Asheville, and is the old boarding house that his mother Julia once ran. Click on the Memorial link to see a picture, and the hours of operation.

From Look Homeward, Angel
by Thomas Wolfe

. . . The only sound in the room now was the low rattling mutter of Ben’s breath. He no longer gasped; he no longer gave signs of consciousness or struggle. His eyes were almost closed; their gray flicker was dulled, coated with the sheen of insensibility and death. He lay quietly upon his back, very straight, without sign of pain, and with a curious upturned thrust of his sharp thin face. His mouth was firmly shut. Already, save for the feeble matter of his breath, he seemed to be dead — he seemed detached, no part of the ugly mechanism of that sound which came to remind them of the terrible chemistry of flesh, to mock at illusion, at all belief in the strange passage and continuance of life.

He was dead, save for the slow running down of the worn-out machine, save for that dreadful mutter within him of which he was no part. He was dead.

But in their enormous silence wonder grew. They remembered the strange flitting loneliness of his life, they thought of a thousand forgotten acts and moments — and always there was something that now seemed unearthly and strange: he walked through their lives like a shadow — they looked now upon his gray deserted shell with a thrill of awful recognition, as one who remembers a forgotten and enchanted word, or as men who look upon a corpse and see for the first time a departed god. . . .