Wolfe The Greatest Works of Thomas Wolfe

Look Homeward, Angel, Of Time and the River & You Can't Go Home Again
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-80-268-9367-7
Verlag: e-artnow
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 2196 Seiten

'Look Homeward, Angel' is an American coming-of-age story. The novel is considered to be autobiographical and the character of Eugene Gant is generally believed to be a depiction of Thomas Wolfe himself. Set in the fictional town and state of Altamont, Catawba, it covers the span of time from Eugene's birth to the age of 19. 'Of Time and the River' is the continuation of the story of Eugene Gant, detailing his early and mid-twenties. During that time Eugene attends Harvard University, moves to New York City, teaches English at a university there, and travels overseas with his friend Francis Starwick. 'You Can't Go Home Again' - George Webber has written a successful novel about his family and hometown. When he returns to that town, he is shaken by the force of outrage and hatred that greets him. Family and lifelong friends feel naked and exposed by what they have seen in his books, and their fury drives him from his home. Outcast, George Webber begins a search for his own identity. It takes him to New York and a hectic social whirl; to Paris with an uninhibited group of expatriates; to Berlin, lying cold and sinister under Hitler's shadow.

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was an American novelist of the early twentieth century. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and the mores of that period, filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated, and hyper-analytical perspective.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wolfe, Thomas

Leseproben

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Table of Contents In the great processional of the years through which the history of the Gants was evolving, few years had borne a heavier weight of pain, terror, and wretchedness, and none was destined to bring with it more conclusive events than that year which marked the beginning of the twentieth century. For Gant and his wife, the year 1900, in which one day they found themselves, after growing to maturity in another century — a transition which must have given, wherever it has happened, a brief but poignant loneliness to thousands of imaginative people — had coincidences, too striking to be unnoticed, with other boundaries in their lives. In that year Gant passed his fiftieth birthday: he knew he was half as old as the century that had died, and that men do not often live as long as centuries. And in that year, too, Eliza, big with the last child she would ever have, went over the final hedge of terror and desperation and, in the opulent darkness of the summer night, as she lay flat in her bed with her hands upon her swollen belly, she began to design her life for the years when she would cease to be a mother. In the already opening gulf on whose separate shores their lives were founded, she was beginning to look, with the infinite composure, the tremendous patience which waits through half a lifetime for an event, not so much with certain foresight, as with a prophetic, brooding instinct. This quality, this almost Buddhistic complacency which, rooted in the fundamental structure of her life, she could neither suppress nor conceal, was the quality he could least understand, that infuriated him most. He was fifty: he had a tragic consciousness of time — he saw the passionate fulness of his life upon the wane, and he cast about him like a senseless and infuriate beast. She had perhaps a greater reason for quietude than he, for she had come on from the cruel openings of her life, through disease, physical weakness, poverty, the constant imminence of death and misery: she had lost her first child, and brought the others safely through each succeeding plague; and now, at forty-two, her last child stirring in her womb, she had a conviction, enforced by her Scotch superstition, and the blind vanity of her family, which saw extinction for others but not for itself, that she was being shaped to a purpose. As she lay in her bed, a great star burned across her vision in the western quarter of the sky; she fancied it was climbing heaven slowly. And although she could not have said toward what pinnacle her life was moving, she saw in the future freedom that she had never known, possession and power and wealth, the desire for which was mixed inextinguishably with the current of her blood. Thinking of this in the dark, she pursed her lips with thoughtful satisfaction, unhumorously seeing herself at work in the carnival, taking away quite easily from the hands of folly what it had never known how to keep. “I’ll get it!” she thought, “I’ll get it. Will has it! Jim has it. And I’m smarter than they are.” And with regret, tinctured with pain and bitterness, she thought of Gant: “Pshaw! If I hadn’t kept after him he wouldn’t have a stick to call his own today. What little we have got I’ve had to fight for; we wouldn’t have a roof over our heads; we’d spend the rest of our lives in a rented house”— which was to her the final ignominy of shiftless and improvident people. And she resumed: “The money he squanders every year in licker would buy a good lot: we could be well-to-do people now if we’d started at the very beginning. But he’s always hated the very idea of owning anything: couldn’t bear it, he told me once, since he lost his money in that trade in Sydney. If I’d been there, you can bet your bottom dollar there’d been no loss. Or, it’d be on the other side,” she added grimly. And lying there while the winds of early autumn swept down from the Southern hills, filling the black air with dropping leaves, and making, in intermittent rushes, a remote sad thunder in great trees, she thought of the stranger who had come to live in her, and of that other stranger, author of so much woe, who had lived with her for almost twenty years. And thinking of Gant, she felt again an inchoate aching wonder, recalling the savage strife between them, and the great submerged struggle beneath, founded upon the hatred and the love of property, in which she did not doubt of her victory, but which baffled her, foiled her. “I’ll vow!” she whispered. “I’ll vow! I never saw such a man!” Gant, faced with the loss of sensuous delight, knowing the time had come when all his Rabelaisian excess in eating, drinking, and loving must come under the halter, knew of no gain that could compensate him for the loss of libertinism; he felt, too, the sharp ache of regret, feeling that he had possessed powers, had wasted chances, such as his partnership with Will Pentland, that might have given him position and wealth. He knew that the century had gone in which the best part of his life had passed; he felt, more than ever, the strangeness and loneliness of our little adventure upon the earth: he thought of his childhood on the Dutch farm, the Baltimore days, the aimless drift down the continent, the appalling fixation of his whole life upon a series of accidents. The enormous tragedy of accident hung like a gray cloud over his life. He saw more clearly than ever that he was a stranger in a strange land among people who would always be alien to him. Strangest of all, he thought, was this union, by which he had begotten children, created a life dependent on him, with a woman so remote from all he understood. He did not know whether the year 1900 marked for him a beginning or an ending; but with the familiar weakness of the sensualist, he resolved to make it an ending, burning the spent fire in him down to a guttering flame. In the first half of the month of January, still penitently true to the New Year’s reformation, he begot a child: by Spring, when it was evident that Eliza was again pregnant, he had hurled himself into an orgy to which even a notable four months’ drunk in 1896 could offer no precedent. Day after day he became maniacally drunk, until he fixed himself in a state of constant insanity: in May she sent him off again to a sanitarium at Piedmont to take the “cure,” which consisted simply in feeding him plainly and cheaply, and keeping him away from alcohol for six weeks, a regime which contributed no more ravenously to his hunger than it did to his thirst. He returned, outwardly chastened, but inwardly a raging furnace, toward the end of June: the day before he came back, Eliza, obviously big with child, her white face compactly set, walked sturdily into each of the town’s fourteen saloons, calling up the proprietor or the bar-man behind his counter, and speaking clearly and loudly in the sodden company of bar clientry: “See here: I just came in to tell you that Mr. Gant is coming back tomorrow, and I want you all to know that if I hear of any of you selling him a drink, I’ll put you in the penitentiary.” The threat, they knew, was preposterous, but the white judicial face, the thoughtful pursing of the lips, and the right hand, which she held loosely clenched, like a man’s, with the forefinger extended, emphasizing her proclamation with a calm, but somehow powerful gesture, froze them with a terror no amount of fierce excoriation could have produced. They received her announcement in beery stupefaction, muttering at most a startled agreement as she walked out. “By God,” said a mountaineer, sending a brown inaccurate stream toward a cuspidor, “she’ll do it, too. That woman means business.” “Hell!” said Tim O’Donnel, thrusting his simian face comically above his counter, “I wouldn’t give W.O. a drink now if it was fifteen cents a quart and we was alone in a privy. Is she gone yet?” There was vast whisky laughter. “Who is she?” some one asked. “She’s Will Pentland’s sister.” “By God, she’ll do it then,” cried several; and the place trembled again with their laughter. Will Pentland was in Loughran’s when she entered. She did not greet him. When she had gone he turned to a man near him, prefacing his remark with a birdlike nod and wink: “Bet you can’t do that,” he said. Gant, when he returned, and was publicly refused at a bar, was wild with rage and humiliation. He got whisky very easily, of course, by sending a drayman from his steps, or some negro, in for it; but, in spite of the notoriety of his conduct, which had, he knew, become a classic myth for the children of the town, he shrank at each new advertisement of his behaviour; he became, year by year, more, rather than less, sensitive to it, and his shame, his quivering humiliation on mornings after, product of rasped pride and jangled nerves, was pitiable. He felt bitterly that Eliza had with deliberate malice publicly degraded him: he screamed denunciation and abuse at her on his return home. All through the summer Eliza walked with white boding placidity through horror — she had by now the hunger for it, waiting with terrible quiet the return of fear at night. Angered by her pregnancy, Gant went almost daily to Elizabeth’s house in Eagle Crescent, whence he was delivered nightly by a band of exhausted and terrified prostitutes into the care of his son Steve, his oldest child, by now pertly free with nearly all the women in the district, who fondled him with good-natured vulgarity, laughed heartily at his glib innuendoes, and suffered him, even, to slap them smartly on their rumps, making for him roughly...