The Colossus of Brooklyn

On Thomas Wolfe and Infinite Loneliness

Thomas Wolfe in Berlin, 1935, Photograph, Getty Images

1.

The retreat center was attached to a grand, turn-of-the-century hotel, straight out of The Shining, manned by a skeleton crew for the winter.

Wandering the grounds, I poked my head into the old lobby. Past the worn armchairs and covered grand piano, I found a musty little library with the door unlocked.

There is nothing quite like the almost holy feeling of presence in an informal, well-cared-for library.

When you enter, the books seem to whisper — Shhhhhh, hey, there's someone coming.

I tiptoed around, inspecting the familiar Northeastern canon — the Cheevers, Roths, Eugene O’Neills, and the Updike, so much Updike. One musty black spine called out to me from the shelves, its title eroded by time — a copy of the long-out-of-print Thomas Wolfe Reader.

That’s Thomas Wolfe, Southerner, born 1900, not Tom Wolfe, later-century dandy of The Hamptons.

Thomas Wolfe grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. As a precocious young playwright at UNC-Chapel Hill, he left the spiritually suffused but stultifying red clay of his native land to make his way in New York. By many accounts, he was an enfant terrible there, pissing people off mightily.

He published his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, at the tender age of 29 — a third-person autobiographical tragedy of his Appalachian family and childhood. His mother was good with Asheville real estate. His father was a fuck-up and died. It was lauded as the great American novel and he was the great American novelist.

It was also perceived as a total betrayal of the townspeople and family members that he depicted within it.

I read Look Homeward, Angel during my first summer in Brooklyn. I was living in a Bed-Stuy punk tenement, in a room with no doors that a couple passed through to go to their bedroom. I bought a used mattress off of Craigslist and one of those cheap little dual fans to put in the window — I would wake up in the peaceful Brooklyn pre-dawn to the sounds of birds and sirens, when the air blowing in from the dual fans was cool before turning to swampy heat, and read Wolfe’s story of boyhood, family, loss, totally hypnotized by its Biblical, repetitive language.

It was a book for the young, especially young Southern men, especially those who had ventured to the North, and I don't know if I could stomach it again today. My tastes have hardened. The memory of that reading experience is so crystalline and pure and perfect that I am afraid to do violence to my own first impressions.

Wolfe’s life’s work, which I would call something like ecclesiastical fiction, was controversial and beloved in its time but has now faded almost completely, not even revivable by a Jude Law biopic about his friendship with legendary editor Maxwell Perkins.

There are many reasons for this. He became a symbol of overwrought, purple prose, “young-man’s writing.”

Basically, it’s Truman Capote’s quip about Jack Kerouac: “that’s not writing, that’s typing”— which fits, because Kerouac was heavily inspired by old Thomas Wolfe’s ghost, his gothic, almost proto-rockabilly sensibility. The dark lineage there is Proust, Wolfe, Kerouac — the moon, the door, the railroad, autumn, so many streets and faces that will never come again…

Take his astonishing prose in Of Time and the River:

We are so lost, so naked and so lonely in America. Immense and cruel skies bend over us, and all of us are driven on for ever and we have no home…

For America has a thousand lights and weathers and we walk the streets, we walk the streets for ever, we walk the streets of life alone…

It is the place of autumnal moons hung low and orange at the frosty edges of the pines; it is the place of frost and silence, of the clean dry shocks and the opulence of enormous pumpkins that yellow on hard dotted earth; it is the place of the stir and feathery stumble of the hens upon their roost, the frosty, broken barking of the dogs, the great barn-shapes and solid shadows in the running sweep of the moon-whited countryside, the wailing whistle of the fast express. It is the place of flares and steamings on the tracks, and the swing and bob and tottering dance of lanterns in the yards; it is the place of dings and knellings and the sudden glare of mighty engines over sleeping faces in the night; it is the place of the terrific web and spread and smoldering, the distant glare of Philadelphia and the solid rumble of the sleepers; it is also the place where the Transcontinental Limited is stroking eighty miles an hour across the continent and the small dark towns whip by like bullets, and there is only the fanlike stroke of the secret, immense and lonely earth again.

I personally love it, it makes my heart ache. And I bet a lot of other Southerners — the kind of people easily moved to tears by dirt roads and their granddaddy’s truck — also love it.

I don’t imagine Wolfe-ian prose today would ever survive the first year of an MFA program. Too flowy, too grand, too descriptive, most of all, not spare and tight enough.

I opened The Thomas Wolfe Reader and flipped to a late B-side essay I had never seen before, titled “God’s Lonely Man.”

It started: “My life, more than that of anyone I know, has been spent in solitude and wandering. Why this is true, or how it happened, I cannot say.”

The essay continues in this vein: being lonely is terrible because it robs you of your self-confidence, fills you with self-doubt and inferiority and horror, and heightens your sensitivities and literally makes you ill — but, to accomplish anything, it has to be done alone and most of our lives are spent alone with ourselves.

The truth is, he writes, “I have found the constant everlasting weather of man’s life to be, not love, but loneliness…”

Love is the rare precious flower that gives life, but love is also the flower of death that drives us to madness, pain and darkness, and I have known that too.

Wolfe was a mercurial, impassioned graphomaniac, who wrote best while hunkered down on long, solitary Atlantic ocean crossings. He was a big, tall man driven by passions and hungers. According to one biography, he wrote best after masturbating without reaching climax. He wrote standing up, using the top of a refrigerator as a desk — at the end of his marathon twelve-hour edging sessions, he would sing, “I wrote 10,000 words today, I wrote 10,000 words today!” to whomever would listen, most likely to his editor Maxwell Perkins, whom he regarded until the end of his life as his only friend.

He was also a peripatetic city wanderer. I see him now, a big disheveled sweaty man, lost in himself, shambling at night from Downtown Brooklyn to Brownsville, like the Colossus in that Goya painting.

2.

I remember a woman I had disappointed writing me a goodbye-fuck-you e-mail, saying that I was “lonelier than Cain,” among many other mean things. I had started something I couldn’t finish and had insulted her pride. People can say very mean things to you when they’re mad or hurt. You shouldn’t take it too much to heart, but I always take it too much to heart.

I read what she wrote with growing anxiety, horror and alarm, then immediately reached for the nearest bottle and cigarette to dull the pain.

When cruel people say shit to you, the fear is always that they’re right, that they “know you better than you know yourself.” The black pit opens and you go down it — it says you don’t know yourself.

In reality, they're usually projecting all sorts of bullshit onto you because whatever they think should happen has been dashed or disappointed. What they’re really doing is saying, “I curse you and damn you because you made me feel not worthy and because you don't want to be with me.”

I wondered if she was right, if I was lonelier than Cain. Then I looked at it seriously and had to admit that I had not lived that lonely a life really, I have always had friends and family and generally people who care about me around. Any loneliness I have experienced has been mostly self-imposed, running away from people to try to be more myself and hear myself more than their voices.

When I was a little kid, I loved hiding deep inside the big azalea bushes in our yard. I loved listening to people call out for me, looking for me, and not answering — and not wanting to come out, to keep hiding. Being “alone” feels like that — alone but knowing there are always people there. Like Thoreau and his mom’s house nearby.

I hear these days that the melodramatic shut-in Zoomers are depressed, that they’re lonely and scared and want to kill themselves. God bless them, the world of other people is a minefield.

I wonder if they are actually genuinely isolated, with no one to talk to, or just shying away from life. Is it the world's problem that they decided to lock themselves in their room and see no one and talk to no one on the phone? It's a personal problem. It's that their life has been consumed by fear. Yeah, there are horrible things right outside the door to get enmeshed in, but if you live a perfect little life from fear you never experience anything but video games and online “friends.”

I understand, there are a lot of bullshit self-help aphorisms about loneliness that get repeated over and over again. They boil down to:

—Put yourself out there, do new things, be open to people and new experiences.

—You need to love yourself to love someone else.

—Get used to enjoying your own company.

—Etc. etc.

I think these are…kind of true, but mostly helpful to normalize loneliness to the lonely people.

The problem with loneliness is you sit around all day feeling lonely and complaining to yourself and hating everything and then you go out and join a group of people and yeah, occasionally it is very good and you feel seen and loved and you no longer feel lonely, but sometimes being among a group of people or with a certain friend or in a social web just increases and worsens the feeling of loneliness.

And then let's not even speak of romantic love, of marriage, of partnership.

Good Lord.

On the one hand, people immersed in relationships or marriage are of course less physically isolated. But if they’re lonely in each others’ company, it can be a nightmare.

Then let’s speak of them —the few, the proud, the brave, who actually live this life in this world very, very alone. They’re not full of shit. They mean it.

When Thomas Wolfe writes — “I have lived about as solitary a life as a modern man can have. I mean by this that the number of hours, days, months, and years that I have spent alone has been immense and extraordinary. I propose, therefore, to describe the experience of human loneliness exactly as I have known it.” — I believe him. By his insane literary output before his death from tuberculosis at 37, you know, I actually believe him.

3.

I have often found myself standing beside a piece of sterile, corporate modern art dedicated to Wolfe in the Raleigh-Durham airport baggage claim. It’s a dead-looking aluminum tree with a little bird and below it is engraved his mantra-like phrase, “a stone, a leaf, an unfound door” that lost place of youth and innocence that he spent his short life seeking after. As a piece of art, and as an homage to Wolfe, it’s a farce. It seems to mock him.

Whenever I look at it I see the ruddy, slightly-bloated faces of the Southern developers and the transplant developers and the boosters who, like vampires, have been lingering around Asheville and Raleigh and Durham for a century, with their promises of “progress” and “growth.”

Wolfe’s family were deeply tied into Asheville’s 1920s real estate boom before the Great Crash put it into hibernation — all the New Yorkers and the stars went to Asheville then, for healing, for that cool, cool water and good green mountain air. Asheville, Land of the Pines, home of Roaring Mountain Streams! As an old country LP I listened to on repeat when I lived in Asheville put it: Asheville, you’re a Southern lady…and you’re the girl of my dreams.

Today, Wolfe is known but barely read in North Carolina let alone in New York, his home in exile, though his wonderful descriptions of those two places formed the two poles of his inner landscape.

The South does not take kindly to individuals who abandon it for the North and then write about it from a place of exile. The most heralded Southern writers have always stayed put, the most beloved ones never leaving their sleepy little Fried Green Tomatoes hamlets. I mean, look at Robert Morgan. From Hendersonville to Cornell…no respect in the South.

Wolfe’s defensive introduction note at the front of Look Homeward, Angel, makes obvious how much the controversy around his debut autofiction novel hurt him:

“...this book was written in innocence and nakedness of spirit, and that the writer’s main concern was to give fullness, life, and intensity to the actions and people in the book he was creating. Now that it is to be published, he would insist that this book is a fiction, and that he meditated no man’s portrait here.”

He continues:

“But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives — all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel. This is not the whole method but the writer believes it illustrates the whole method in a book that is written from a middle distance and is without rancour or bitter intention.”

The mothball-smelling gatekeepers of Southern literature at that time — Robert Penn Warren, Allan Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, who gathered under the banner “The Southern Agrarians” — attacked young Wolfe, his style, and questioned if he was a “real” Southerner and if what he was writing was real Southern writing.

His follow-up book — probably better known than his debut — was You Can’t Go Home Again. In it, he dialed back the flights of fancy and endless pages of rhapsodic description, and tried to write straight. (In my opinion, the tightening up and editing out of the breathless prose made this book worse than the first book.) It was another early kind of autofiction, a proto-Knausgaardian book about a young novelist who has written the great American novel about his hometown, returning back to find himself kind of celebrated and deeply unwelcome.

Wolfe wrote the sweeping, Proustian saga of his life and the South from the distance of exile — this singular effort was later chopped up into several unsatisfying individual books that were essentially The One Big Book, that had it appeared under one cover would have been titled O Lost! — Wolfe’s original title for Look Homeward, Angel.

After You Can't Go Home Again, he spent the rest of his days as a restless peripatetic, lost on the face of the earth, before dying at 37.

His real lasting legacy is that the generation of writers that followed after him reacted to him and the blown-out style, and in doing so, built the kind of spare American modernist style that has reigned ever since, straight on into the program era.

Only in death could Wolfe return back home—no wife, no kids, buried at the top of Riverside Cemetery with his parents and siblings, overlooking the little mountain town that shaped him. As always happens, the town that disowned him celebrates his name and now operates a little museum in his honor. Jesus was right. You can’t be a prophet in your hometown.

Aaron Lake Smith is a writer currently living in Stockholm. He's written for Harper's, Commonweal, and American Affairs. You can also read him on Substack at

Empty Railroad Gulch

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