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
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Look_Homeward_Angel
title: Look Homeward Angel