# 2026-07-15 - Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
I checked this book out from the local library. Most of the books on
my old high school reading list have been excellent and even mind
expanding. This book strikes me as more literary: a book for English
students to have homework about.
I read a review that described Look Homeward, Angel as symphonic,
with repeated variations of motifs woven throughout the story. This
book is not like a slice of life: it's like drinking from the fire
hose. It is long winded.
This book is also described as autobiographical. The author grew up
in North Carolina during the segregation, which is where this book
begins. I like author's attention to detail and realism.
By far my favorite part of this book is the literary references from
the author's childhood habits as a bookworm. Reading this is like
scanning through a shelf in a used book store for other interesting
books to read; the more obscure, rare, and forgotten, the better.
He mentioned Ridpath's History of the World and Stoddard's Lectures,
both of which are in my serial reading list [1]. I am also
interested in reading The Cloister and the Hearth [3].
I get the impression that the author, who was born with a brilliant
mind into a large, abusive, and alcoholic family, had a lot of
"steam" to vent. It is no wonder that the editor had to cut out
2/3rds of the original manuscript.
Well into his early teens he slept in the same bed with his mother,
because she didn't want to sleep alone. He had long hair because she
wouldn't let him cut it. She liked the look of his curls and didn't
want him to grow up. He was raised by his older brother and sister
Ben and Helen as much as by his parents Gant & Eliza. I think he
would have been a ripe candidate for Gestalt Therapy or IFS [2].
What follows are quotes from the book that i found interesting.
* * *
They were a life unto themselves--how lonely they were they did not
know, but they were known to every one and friended by almost no one.
Their status was singular--if they could have been distinguished by
caste, they probably would have been called middle class, but the
Duncans, the Tarkintons, all their neighbors, and all their
acquaintances throughout the town, never drew in to them, never came
into the strange rich color of their lives, because they had twisted
the design of all orderly life, because there was in them a mad,
original, disturbing quality which they did not suspect. And
companionship with the elect--those like the Hilliards--was equally
impossible, even if they had the gift or the desire for it. But they
hadn't.
Gant was a great man, and not a singular one, because singularity
does not hold life in unyielding devotion to it.
* * *
Something taut snapped in her; she remembered his furtive backward
glance, and she wept. And she did not weep for herself, but for him:
the hour after his birth she had looked in his dark eyes and had seen
something that would brood there eternally, she knew, unfathomable
wells of remote and intangible loneliness: she knew that in her dark
and sorrowful womb a stranger had come to life, fed by the lost
communications of eternity, his own ghost, haunted of his own house,
lonely to himself and to the world. O lost.
* * *
The books he delighted in the most were three huge calf-skin volumes
called /Ridpath's History of the World/.
* * *
The gates of his life were closing him in from their knowledge, a
vast aerial world of fantasy was erecting its fuming and
insubstantial fabric. He steeped his soul in streaming imagery,
rifling the book-shelves for pictures and finding there such
treasures as /With Stanley in Africa/, rich in the mystery of the
jungle, alive with combat, black battle, the hurled spear, vast
snake-rooted forests, thatched villages, gold and ivory; or
Stoddard's /Lectures/, on whose slick heavy pages were stamped the
most-visited scenes of Europe and Asia; a Book of Wonder, with
enchanting drawings of all the marvels of the age--Santos Dumont in
his balloon, liquid air poured from a kettle, all the navies of earth
lifted two feet from the water by an ounce of radium (Sir William
Crookes), the building of the Eiffel Tower, the Flatiron Building,
the stick-steered automobile, the submarine. After the earthquake in
San Francisco there was a book describing it, its cheap green cover
lurid with crumbling towers, shaken spires, topping many-storied
houses plunging into the splitting flame-jawed earth. And there was
another called /Palaces of Sin/, or /The Devil in Society/,
purporting to be the work of a pious millionaire, who had drained his
vast fortune in exposing the painted sores that blemish the
spotless-seeming hide of great position, and there were enticing
pictures showing the author walking in a silk hat down a street full
of magnificent palaces of sin.
Out of this strange jumbled gallery of pictures the pieced-out world
was expanding under the brooding power of his imagination: the lost
dark angels of the Doré "Milton" swooped into cavernous Hell beyond
this upper earth of soaring or toppling spires, machine wonder, maced
and mailed romance.
* * *
[Regarding Helen, the adult older sister of Eugene:]
She took insatiable delight in him, stuffing him with sour and
sugared relishes, tumbling him, in a random moment of her restless
activity, upon Gant's lounge, and pinioning him while she slapped his
squirming face sharply with her big hand.
Sometimes, frantic with some swift tangle of her nerves, she would
attack him viciously, hating him for his dark brooding face, his full
scalloped underlip, his deep absorption in a dream. Like Luke, and
like Gant, she sought in the world ceaseless entertainment for her
restless biting vitality: it infuriated her to see other people seek
absorption within themselves--she hated him at times when, her own
wires strumming, she saw his dark face brooding over a book or on
some vision. She would tear the book from his hands, slap him, and
stab him with her cruel savage tongue. She would pout out her lip,
goggle her face about stupidly on a drooping neck, assume an
expression of dopey idiocy, and pour out on him the horrible torrent
of her venom.
"You little freak--wandering around with your queer dopey face.
You're a regular little Pentland--you funny little freak, you.
Everybody's laughing at you. Don't you know that? Don't you? We're
going to dress you up as a girl, and let you go around like that.
You haven't got a drop of Gant blood in you--papa's practically said
as much--you're Greeley all over again; you're queer. Pentland
queerness sticking out all over you."
Sometimes her sweltering and inchoate fury was so great that she
threw him on the floor and stamped on him.
He did not mind the physical assault so much as his did the poisonous
hatred of her tongue, insanely clever in fashioning the most wounding
barbs. He went frantic with horror, jerked unexpectedly from Elfland
into Hell, he bellowed madly, saw his bountiful angel change in a
moment to a snake-haired fury, lost all his sublime faith in love and
goodness. He rushed at the wall like an insane little goat, battered
his head screaming again and again, wished desperately that his
constricted and overloaded heart would burst, that something in him
would break, that somehow, bloodily, he might escape the stifling
prisonhouse of his life.
This satisfied her desire; it was what deeply she had wanted--she had
found purging release in her savage attack upon him, and now she
could drain herself cleanly in a wild smother of affection. She
would seize him, struggling and screaming, in her long arms, plaster
kisses all over his red mad face, soothing him with hearty flattery
addressed in the third person.
"Why, he didn't think I meant it, did he? Didn't he know I was only
joking? Why, he's as strong as a little bull, isn't he? He's a
regular little giant, that's what he is. Why, he's perfectly wild,
isn't he? His eyes popping out of his head. I thought he was going
to knock a hole in the wall.--Yes, ma'am. Why, law me, yes child.
It's /good/ soup. [An inside joke between the two of them.],"
resorting to her broad mimicry in order to make him laugh. And he
would laugh against his will between his sobs, in a greater torture
because of this agony of affection and reconciliation than because of
the abuse.
Presently, when he had grown quiet, she would send him off to the
store for pickles, cakes, cold bottled drinks; he would depart with
red eyes, his cheeks furrowed dirtily by his tears, wondering
desperately as he went down the street why the thing had happened,
and drawing his foot sharply off the ground and craning his neck
convulsively as shame burnt in him.
* * *
And he saw the town of Augusta first not in the drab hues of reality,
but as one who bursts a window into the faery pageant of the world,
as one who has lived in prison, and finds life and the earth in rosy
dawn, as one who has lived in all the fabulous imagery of books and
finds in a journey only an extension and verification of it--so did
he see Augusta, with the fresh, washed eyes of a child, with glory,
with enchantment.
* * *
"Well, tell me boy," she [Margaret Leonard] said, "what have you been
reading?"
Craftily he picked his way across the waste land of printery, naming
as his favorites those books which he felt would win her approval.
As he had read everything, good and bad, that the town library
contained, he was able to make an impressive showing. Sometimes she
stopped him to question about a book--he rebuilt the story richly
with a blazing tenacity of detail that satisfied her wholly. She was
excited and eager--she saw at once how abundantly she could feed his
ravenous hunger for knowledge, experience, wisdom. And he knew
suddenly the joy of obedience: the wild ignorant groping, the blind
hunt, the desperate baffled desire was now to be ruddered, guided,
controlled. The way through the passage to India, that he had never
been able to find, would now be charted for him. Before he went away
she had given him a fat volume of nine hundred pages, shot through
with spirited engravings of love and battle, of the period he loved
best.
He was drowned deep at midnight in the destiny of the man who killed
the bear, the burner of windmills, and scourge of banditry, in all
the life of road and tavern in the Middle Ages, in valiant and
beautiful Gerard, the seed of genius, the father of Erasmus. Eugene
thought /The Cloister and the Hearth/ [3] the best story he had ever
read.
* * *
He [Luke] waited on tables, he solicited for college boarding-houses,
he was the agent for a tailor who made Kippy Kampus Klothes.
[
Interesting, in The Plastic Age i read about Kollege Kut Klothes [4].
I wonder whether these businesses were associated with the KKK.
]
* * *
To, to Ben dead was given more care, more time, more money than had
ever been given to Ben living. His burial was a final gesture of
irony and futility: an effort to compensate carrion death for the
unpaid wage of life--love and mercy. He had a grand funeral.
* * *
... and the faces of most of the young college men and women were
stamped in a mould of enamelled vacancy, and became unclean to him.
The national demand for white shiny plumbing, toothpaste, tiled
lunchrooms, hair-cuts, manicured dentistry, horn spectacles, baths,
and the insane fear of disease that sent the voters whispering to the
druggist after their brutal fumbling lecheries--all of this seemed
nasty. Their outer cleanliness became the token of an inner
corruption: it was something that glittered and was dry, foul, and
rotten at the core. He felt that, no matter what leper's taint he
might carry upon his flesh, there was in him a health that was
greater than they could ever know--something fierce and cruelly
wounded, but alive, that did not shrink away from the terrible sunken
river of life; something desperate and merciless that looked steadily
on the hidden and unspeakable poisons that unify the tragic family of
this earth.
author: Wolfe, Thomas, 1900-1938
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Look_Homeward_Angel
(HTM) source: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300721.txt
tags: biography,ebook,fiction,reading list
title: Look Homeward Angel
# Footnotes
(TXT) [1] Ridpath's History of the World and Stoddard's Lectures (CSV)
(TXT) [2] IFS (Internal Family Systems) (wikipedia)
(HTM) [3] The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade (gutenberg)
(DIR) [4] The Plastic Age by Percy Marks (KKK reference)
# Tags
(DIR) biography
(DIR) ebook
(DIR) fiction
(DIR) reading list