Making It New: 1900–1945 463devote himself to his writing, since it was an immediate success. A vast, sprawling
book, like all Wolfe’s major novels, it follows the contours of the author’s early life
closely. Eugene Gant grows up in a household torn between restlessness and
rootedness. His father has a love of rhetoric, craft, and a demonic passion for
adventure; his mother is wedded to her ancestry, place, making money and finding
security; and they quarrel constantly. Eugene reads voraciously, attends school,
then state college where, while he continues to feel “different” and lonely, he is
beginning to fulfill his desire for “getting away,” getting on and finding a place in the
world. The pilgrimage Eugene is embarked on, in search of “the lost lane-end into
heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door,” is continued in Of Time and the River,
which covers his experiences at Harvard and abroad and his teaching in New York
City. Together, the two narratives move outward in a series of concentric circles –
from provincial hometown to state college to cosmopolitan centers and the wide
world beyond – just as Wolfe’s own life did. And, as they do, they chart that urge
toward movement, that restless desire to break away that, like Le Sueur, Wolfe saw
as the source of American culture. What Wolfe adds to this, however, like, say, Cather,
is a backward glance, a centripetal impulse that is a matter of emotion rather than
action. Neither Gant nor America can properly escape, Wolfe suggests, since they are
“acted upon by all the accumulated impact” of their ancestral experience. They can
no more deny this than Gant can rid himself of a mysterious “tetter of itch” that
appears on the nape of his neck one day – a blemish his creator identifies as the
outward and visible “sign of kinship” with his ancestors in the mountains. For Gant,
as for Wolfe, as for America, the past is a part of their blood. They cannot go home
again, to the old, lost times, but they can never entirely leave them either.
You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) is, in fact, the title of a novel by Wolfe that was
published posthumously. It is the sequel to The Web and the Rock (1939), which also
appeared after Wolfe died suddenly at the age of 38. In these two books, which were
edited from material that Wolfe left behind at his death, the hero is called George
Webber. He is, however, indistinguishable in character from Eugene Gant, and he
continues Wolfe’s project of turning his life into a national epic and himself into a
representative man. The title of the first novel symbolizes the problem of its
protagonist and recalls the dualism of all Wolfe’s writing. George Webber is caught
between the web of environment, experience, ancestry, and the rock, the original
strength, adventure, and beauty of the vision of his father. He concludes that “you
can’t go home again” but, even as he departs from his hometown, he suffers the same
conflict as his fictive predecessor, Eugene Gant: a “tension of the nerves” so painful
as to make him” grit ... the teeth and harden ... the jaws.” George continues his
pilgrimage in the second novel as he discovers, among other things, the unpleasant
changes that progress and property have brought to his own hometown and the
horrors attendant on the rise of fascism in Germany. And, like Wolfe again, he is torn
between a sense of loss and hope. He recognizes that a corrupt society destroys
the individual, but he still believes that “the true fulfillment of our spirit, of our
people, of our mighty and immortal land is yet to come.” So Wolfe remained true,
throughout his life, to that nostalgic utopianism so characteristic of AmericanGGray_c04.indd 463ray_c 04 .indd 463 8 8/1/2011 7:54:01 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 01 AM