Time Marches On

Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe’s second novel, and I came into the world within months of one another 75 years ago. But infants know nothing of stories and it would be years before I began to gulp down Wolfe’s fiction and couple my destiny, in imagination, with that of his gangling hero, Eugene Gant. I followed Gant to Pulpit Hill (as Wolfe calls Chapel Hill) and became his remote successor as editor of the student paper and European wanderer. For aspiring literary adolescents, Wolfe was a dangerous intoxicant, as I recalled some years ago in an anniversary piece on Look Homeward, Angel, the first of his Gant novels:

[I was] mesmerized by the Joycean and Homeric mannerisms of his ripe rhetoric. I shall not forget—it was one of those traumatic events that loom large at 17—the astonished indignation with which a college English instructor scored the Wolfean apostrophe to the Mojave Desert which I handed in as a freshman theme: Embarrassing! Really! No, no! D-plus. It was a chastening experience.

I hadn’t, until recently, reread Of Time and the River since my youthful binges and rather shied away for fear of finding the book cloying. It cannot be boyish prejudice at this late date to say that I found it an indisputably great novel—and, notwithstanding its episodic structure, one of the greatest in our language. Of course, some critics never learn that writers needn’t jump through the hoops they devise. Tolstoy, one of Wolfe’s models and heroes, refused to call the sprawling War and Peace a novel since it did not conform to conventional fictional patterns.

The Magazine

Time Marches On

The golden age of Thomas Wolfe and the Gant clan.

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