On the seventh day of August 1861, I was nineteen years of age. If I live to the seventh day of August this year, I’ll be ninety-five years old. And the way I feel this morning I intend to live. Now I guess you’ll have to admit that that’s goin’ a good ways back.
This is the introduction to one of Wolfe’s most famous and highly respected short stories. His desire was to contribute to the wealth of Civil War literature by southern writers by adding to the canon a simple story deliver in “the language of the common soldier.” The narrator is based on Wolfe’s own uncle whom he interviewed in 1937 when the former soldier was a mere five years short of hitting the century mark. The uncle didn’t make it, and in fact died later that same year. The story was originally published in 1938.
“M-m-m-man at Harvard . . . fourteen languages . . . Put gorilla in cage with man . . . all over! . . . done for! . . . half a minute!” He snapped his fingers…Gorilla make mince meat of him . . . Homer . . . Dante . . . Milton . . . Newton . . . Laws of Gravity. . . . Muh-muh-muh-muh—Mind of man! . . . Yet when dead—nothing! . . . No good! . . . Seven ten-penny nails worth more!”
Thomas Wolfe is usually included among that list of writers that critics and readers have lumped into the flexible category know as “Southern gothic.” If that be so, let it at be asserted that Wolfe’s sense of the gothic is one of the least grotesque to found among those authors. That being said, the title character of “Arnold Pentland” which is sometimes found under that alternate title listed above is perhaps the single most grotesque character in the entire canon. He is thirty-six, obese, congenitally filthy, pathologically weird and speaks in a guttural stammer through a mouth that always seems to be either on the verge of laughing maniacally or shouting hysterically. It is a short tale about a sad, strange, fat little lovesick man.
Some day someone will write a book about a man who was too tall—who lived forever in a dimension that he did not fit, and for whom the proportions of everything…were too small. …showed the tall and lonely man the barren unity of life, and that finally, curiously, in a poignant and inexplicable fashion, gave him faith in man, a belief in man’s fundamental goodness, kindliness, and humanity, as nothing else on earth could do.
These are the opening and closing lines of the story. Wolfe begins by suggesting that someday a story will be written and proceeds to write a story about a tall man. What happens in between is perhaps not quite the tale that Wolfe suggested and is likely to surprise readers who have been seduced into expecting to read the story Wolfe has laid out. What they get instead is a particularly autobiographic story about a writer know for being an especially autobiographical writer.
“Brother! Brother! . . . What did you come home for? . . . You know now that you can’t go home again!”
Perhaps no other author is as associated with one single phrase as Thomas Wolfe is with “you can’t go home again.” It is more than just the title of his 1940 novel; it is the overarching theme of his autobiographical fiction. It is an admonition to stand up to and not give in to nostalgia; just enjoy the memories of what was and don’t try to recapture. This story is divided into two parts. The first is strangely unreal, with Wolfe’s alter ego writer Eugene Gant fighting off ghosts in his mind. Part two is achingly realistic as Gant returns home for the first time in seven years. He neglected to heed the advice of his dead brother Ben which comes to him as a disembodied voice calling out as part one ends.
