....among the dozens of other novelists Ross
Lockridge was reading in the early 1940s, Wolfe
and Joyce were the two with whom he
was locking horns. The likes of Hemingway, Saroyan, and Mann
he simply admired. Joyce was by far the greater writer, he thought,
but Joyce and Wolfe had equal and opposite defects.
Wolfe's were egoism and formlessness.
This "strange, pathological subjectivism and egotism"
is "not to be objected to in itself, but for what it does
to the author's artistry and his feeling for existence."
Incapable of love and obsessed "with himself and the charmed
circle of his experience and acquaintanceship," Wolfe is
unable to write convincingly of love relationships or even to
create character. His characters "are all drawn in fits
and starts of rhetoric and contradiction." "It is the
moral world that does not really exist for T.W."
Evidence of this is his almost complete lack of humor, which
Wolfe imagines he has in great supply. His constructions do not
go beyond the randomness of mere autobiographical reminiscence.
The "dreary richness of the style" and its lack of
diversity show an artistry swallowed up in egoism.
So if he's no good on character
or plot, why was my father in '42 and '43 reading all those Wolfe
novels? The southern writer expressed one thing very well that
resonated deeply with his own sensibility--a tragic sense of
time.
But even this was limited: it
is "not so much a sense of time in all its mysteriousness,
future, present, and eternity--but rather time that is gone--the
ghost residence of the dead events." By means of this single
intuition, Wolfe creates "the anchorless soul, wandering,
grieved and adrift . . . He returns with real poetic feeling
and passion and metaphysical intuition to this theme again and
again," and it compensates for the "terrible crippled
artistry."
When in The Web and the Rock
Wolfe describes George Webber's childhood home on Locust Street,
which seemed "fixed for him into the substance of immemorial
antiquity," Lockridge thinks of his own Creighton Avenue
in Fort Wayne and makes the marginal shorthand note, "Strange
how Wolfe anticipates me in many things."
My father did not know, when he
encased You Can't Go Home Again in disparaging marginalia,
that Wolfe's embittered novel would in some measure prove prophetic
for him, not just retrospective for Wolfe. Reading his copy,
I find the dramatic irony painful.
If Wolfe had too little form and
artistry, Joyce had too much. His defects are outlined in two
fragments where my father is most intense in grappling with a
predecessor, and most willfully clearing ground for his own novel.
The first, written in September, 1942, is entitled "From
the Point of View of the Aspiring Writer--The Virtues and the
Faults of Ulysses." He thought better and struck
"The Virtues and."
"One does not get creation
in its highest forms in Joyce. It is a case of the mind analytical,
the mind catalogical, the mind enumerative, the mind curiously
weaving and unweaving of word webbing. But forms and wholes are
not created. Characters are broken down and presented in bits
and fragments and buttends, and tips rather than as a series
of impressions or in the shining wholes of action, motion, accomplishment."
He has given us a work of "exhaustiveness" and "patience,"
but at a great sacrifice.
With the mind analytical in control,
Joyce fails in communication. "The emotions are there, but
not for the reader, who is too busy deciphering." The "objective
details of Stephen's thought or Bloom's" do not result in
a "forceful and pathetic equivalent" in the mind of
the reader, who lacks the "subtle interconnections"
that lend them significance for the characters. Expression is
"both expanded and contracted" in Joyce, who "teaches
freedom in the inner transformations of the word, but in the
larger applications of language . . . it seems to me that he
fails." Instead, we get life "staled with wordpiss."
For all his Shakespearean comprehensiveness, he doesn't communicate
"a sense of humanity." "It is good that Joyce
did the job so completely. It need not to be done over. But what
a goldmine for afterfollowers."
I recall the fatigue of some painter
friends after they had braved the Picasso and the Matisse exhibitions
that spread through the entire Museum of Modern Art in New York.
What was there left to paint? My father was contending in his
own way with the achievement of Joyce.
The other commentary on Joyce
followed his systematic reading of Finnegans Wake in the
spring of 1943 as he was getting into gear to revise American
Lives. It's his single most revealing critical pronouncement,
written like the earlier one for himself alone and first uncovered
by my brother Ross. In part he elaborates his mixed review of
Ulysses: critics "get a vicarious pleasure of creativity
by repeating in reverse the intellectual processes by which Joyce
created Ulysses. Of course, this is a cul-de-sac in itself.
The intellect alone never created a great work of art, and without
the obvious humanity and emotional and religious renunciations
of Ulysses, it would not be great. As it is, it has a
maimed and terrible greatness about it."
Joyce remains "a slave to
his mentors, Vico, Aristotle, Aquinas. Having rejected the Jesuitical
discipline, he really remains a slave to it." The book is
too damned "literary." And in Finnegans Wake
Joyce is too much like Jesus in assuming his disciples and publicity
staff will mop up after his "enormous intellectual arrogance."
Still, my father would not have either of these novels different.
"It simply is now, immutably like all other existential
facts."
So why was he reading Joyce? Well,
beneath the obscurities of that Irish philologist's novels are
some simple yet powerful myths. He's learned from Joyce "the
secret to the greatest writing. It is to pervade all scenes and
characters with mythos--with a sense of the symbolical character
of human life, with the feeling of reiterated and perpetual mystery
that informs all acts of human life.... The thing to do is to
discover the mythical character inherent in any given age or
nation or people, for myth is domesticated in each country. So
far, I think, America has not evolved very clearly her own mythos."
Then he gets more personal. How
uncover the mythic character of his own experience that he will
write of in his own fiction? He thinks himself essentially religious,
more so than Joyce, "a vague, undefined religion, I fear,
based on a sort of blind optimism, the inheritance of my blood
and my surroundings, but nevertheless loving and so adoring the
miracle of humanity and of being." His God, though, is not
the transcendent God of the Old Testament but the divine potential
in each human being. His novel-in-progress--a tragedy which has
at its core a ritual slaying of the father--implies a repudiation
of Old Testament values.
But he already looks beyond this
novel to the next one, where he plans to exploit through indirection
the mythic values of the New Testament. These values he thinks
are immanent, human-centered, and "self-realizing."
Myths are more than "primitive fragments" left over
from earlier cultures. The "source of myths" is always
with us, we create them anew in "the still continuous world
of the human emotion with its ancient fixations."
Creative genius is simply the
ability to bring to the surface and express the mythic structures
that lurk in all human beings. The New Testament expresses one
set of mythic values that are partly transcultural and are felt
in moments of intense psychic awareness.
How recover and create anew for
fiction those values in the ordinariness of his own midwestern
life?
His answer startled me. It would
be a novel based on his mother's response to the death of her
son Bruce.
Just as one sees in Mary mother
of Jesus and her circle "the terrible anguish of the women
and the refusal to acknowledge the death," so he sees in
his mother, Elsie, the "resurrection symbolized in [her]
intense faith and conviction." It is a conviction that fastens
to the mythic divinity she sees in her own dead father, who isn't
really dead for her and whose perpetuity extends to her drowned
son.
Beginning with this framing circumstance
in his own life, he plans to explore in a new fiction the mythic
character of American society, its wars, industry ("The
Wayne Knitting Mills"), art, motion pictures, its insights
and illusions. The novel-in-progress uses mythic parallels such
as the Garden of Eden rather bluntly--the "symbolism here
less disguised than it will be in the later book, involving Ft.
Wayne and the drowning of my brother Bruce."
So Bruce was lurking enormously
in his consciousness all along. I hadn't expected to find so
direct a confirmation of what I had been wishfully projecting
onto my father. Like me, he was five years old at the time of
a catastrophic death in the family and, like me, he had tucked
it away, in a child's hiding place of memory, only to have its
significance grow. Now he conceived an entire book on this early
death, an American New Testament, beyond the Old Testament as
pirations of the work-in-progress. He would see in his mother's
anguish and refusal to acknowledge the death of her son not pathology,
as Freud would say, but creative mourning. Its roots were deep
in American culture, which had, he felt, domesticated the Christian
myth on many levels.
An artist of prophetic memory,
my father hoped to redeem that early death through literary apotheosis
and, like his mother, not let that boy die. In bearing witness
to the fragility yet tenacity of dear human life, the drowned
brother Bruce would be cast as a sacrificial figure, reviving
in his homey way the myth of Jesus.
What about the novel at hand?
Wolfe and Joyce reinforced my father's passionate evocation of
the past and his mythic rendering of everyday life. But their
faults, as he read them, were also evident in his own novel,
American Lives. Instead of a single unified work, it seemed
to him more like a "series of novels" in its two thousand
pages. Had he solved the Wolfean problem of form, or was this
not a heap of words without radiant focus or center, an inert
"glacial mass"? And was there not a pretentious Joycean
complexity about it that would make it fail to communicate? And
there were other problems.
Set mostly in the 1890s but extending
well back into the nineteenth century and as far forward as summer,
1941, the novel was plotted around a series of days, apparently
July first through fourth, 1891. The principal character was
based on his uncle Ernest Vivian Shockley, as he had planned
while he was sick back in '35 and '36. But there were several
other characters--his mother, Elsie; his grandmother Emma Shockley;
his grandfather John Wesley Shockley; and purely fictitious characters
like the Reverend Hezekiah Grubb, a murderous pharisee, and Mrs.
Desmore Brown, a hot-to-trot widow. Each of these characters
assumed, by turns, the novel's center of consciousness--each
had dreams and interior monologues, each was involved in a string
of episodes.
--Facsimiles of Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s Notes
on Joyce--Sept. 1942 & also Spring 1943, pages 1
& 2; 3 & 4; 5
& 6.
--Text (& facsimile) of Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s Notes
on Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel.
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