"Return" an essay by Thomas Wolfe

The cover of "Return," by Thomas Wolfe. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

The 1929 publication of Thomas Wolfe’s first novel Look Homeward, Angel shocked the citizens of his hometown, Asheville, North Carolina. Wolfe didn’t reveal anything that terrible about Asheville, named Altamont in the novel, but apparently his portraits of the townspeople were readily identifiable to anyone who lived in the city.  

Wolfe stayed away from Asheville until 1937. It wasn’t too difficult for Wolfe—he was a wanderer, eager to see as much of the world as possible, to drink down the sweet pap and juices of life from all the corners of the earth. Wolfe spent much of the intervening years writing his second novel, which continued the story of Eugene Gant, the main character in Look Homeward, Angel. When Of Time and the River was published in 1935, it became a best-seller, silencing the critics who had tabbed Wolfe as just a one book author.  

Upon Wolfe’s return to Asheville in the spring of 1937, he was greeted as a local celebrity, and the hard feelings of the residents of Asheville had mellowed. Wolfe wrote a short essay for the Asheville Citizen-Times about his time in Asheville. Titled “Return,” it was published in the newspaper on May 16, 1937. “Return” is now available to purchase as a pamphlet at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial in Asheville.  

In “Return” Wolfe makes clear his dissatisfaction with those who merely saw his novels as being strictly autobiographical. Wolfe has the townspeople critique his version of events, and they chide him for getting details wrong in the telling of stories. He has one of his friends say to him, “Why, hell, I only said she wasn’t forty-four, the way HE said, but forty-eight, and that instead of two gold teeth the way HE had it, she had three. And two of them were on the side, with a great big bright one in the middle—not one above and one below, the way HE told about it. And it wasn’t popcorn that I bought her, but a bag of peanuts. I just wanted him to get it straight, that’s all.”  

While Wolfe’s friend is annoyed that Wolfe didn’t “get things straight,” Wolfe knows that writers of fiction are not merely transcribers of reality. In his book The Story of a Novel, Wolfe wrote: “It is literally impossible for a man who has the stuff of creation in him to make a literal transcription of his own experience. Everything in a work of art is changed and transfigured by the personality of the artist.” (p.20) Wolfe knew that the process of selection, of choosing what to write about, what to include and what to exclude, inevitably changes and transforms reality into fiction.  

Philip Roth was another writer who often struggled with critics assuming that everything he wrote was autobiographical. Roth’s fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman says in The Anatomy Lesson, “That writing is an act of the imagination seems to perplex and infuriate everyone.” I suspect that Thomas Wolfe would agree with Zuckerman’s statement. It certainly infuriates Wolfe’s friend in “Return” that Wolfe has not stated the facts, but Wolfe has instead bent those facts for his own purpose.  

“Return” is a beautiful little essay, and it shows Wolfe’s affection for his hometown. One of my favorite passages is this one: “And all of it is as it has always been: again, again, I turn, and find again the things that I have always known: the cool sweet magic of starred mountain night, the huge attentiveness of dark, the slope, the street, the trees, the living silence of the houses waiting, and the fact that April has come back again.”