Book Review: The Four Lost Men: The Previously Unpublished Long Version, by Thomas Wolfe, Edited by Arlyn and Matthew J. Bruccoli (2008)

James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, and Rutherford B. Hayes.

Thomas Wolfe’s 1934 short story “The Four Lost Men” is a meditation on storytelling, the American past, and four obscure U.S. presidents. Earlier this year, I read the version of “The Four Lost Men” that appears in the 1987 book The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe. I just finished reading an expanded version of the short story in the book The Four Lost Men: The Previously Unpublished Long Version, published in 2008, and edited by Arlyn and Matthew J. Bruccoli.  

The long version of “The Four Lost Men” is considerably longer than the version of the story that appears in The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, as it’s expanded from 7,000 words to 21,000 words. The long version adds a lot of material, but is it actually better than the short version? I like the focus that the shorter version has, and I think the longer version ventures into some detours that don’t necessarily add much to the main story.  

The story begins with the narrator’s father spinning a tale on the porch of the family’s boardinghouse in 1917. Wolfe’s fiction often had a strong autobiographical flavor, and his mother ran a boardinghouse, which is now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site in Asheville, North Carolina.  

The narrator’s father proclaims that he is a proud Republican, which makes him something of an oddity in the then “Solid South,” where nearly every politician was a Democrat. This was in large part due to the Civil War, and the South’s animosity towards the Republican party, which persisted until the 1960’s when the South flipped from Democratic to Republican, due to civil rights.  

The narrator’s father then recounts all of the presidents he has seen come and go, including “Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes.” Wolfe writes: “Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and Hayes—time of my father’s time, earth of his earth, blood of his blood, life of his life—living, real, and actual people in all the passion, power, and feeling of my father’s youth. And for me, the lost Americans: their gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam together in the sea-depths of a past intangible, immeasurable, and unknowable as the buried city of Persepolis. 

And they were lost.” (p.38-9) 

Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison are not exactly household names, and even a dedicated student of American history would have trouble telling you much about these men.  

It’s no wonder these presidents seemed lost to Wolfe. Only Benjamin Harrison was still alive when Wolfe was born in 1900, and Harrison died the next year. To Wolfe, they were long gone, ancient. No one was penning odes to Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and Hayes. They were not inspiring sonnets, odes, poems, lyric dramas, great novels, or popular songs. Jazz Age underclassmen wearing racoon coats were not serenading sweethearts on their ukuleles with tunes about the Civil War heroism of these four forgotten men.  

The core of the story is the flights of fancy that the narrator’s mind goes on as he is pondering the lives of these four presidents. He imagines what their Civil War service was like—all four men became generals during the war.  

Wolfe writes: “Had Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and Hayes been young? Or had they been born with flowing whiskers, sideburns, and wing-collars, speaking gravely from the cradle of their mother’s arms the noble vacant sonorities of far-seeing statesmanship?” (p.42) I love those sentences, it’s impossible for me to think of men from that era as having ever been young. But of course, they must have been.   

Wolfe originally wrote of the four presidents frequenting brothels, but when his editor Maxwell Perkins objected, Wolfe cut the references for the original publication of the story in Scribner’s magazine. In the version of the story included in The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, the reference was put back in: “Did they not, as we, when young, prowl softly up and down past brothels in the dark hours of the night, seeing the gas lamps flare and flutter on the corner, falling with livid light upon the corners of old cobbled streets of brownstone houses?” (p.113) 

Curiously, the reference is changed in The Four Lost Men: The Previously Unpublished Long Version, as it reads “prowl softly up and down the doorless avenues of night.” (p.42) I’m not quite sure why the Bruccolis made this change to the text. Wolfe did take the word “brothel” out, but it seems clear that he had originally intended to use the word brothel and then changed it at Perkins’ request. I prefer the Complete Short Stories version, as it paints a more interesting portrait of the presidents as brothel visitors. And it seems in keeping with Wolfe’s idea of making these remote historical figures into real, flesh and blood humans.  

The flights of fancy that Wolfe embarks upon in the story are fantastic. He has the four presidents proclaiming the virtues of American women from the different regions of the country, like a Greek chorus. “’And there are women in the North,’ cried Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and Hayes, ‘who wait for us with Viking eyes, the deep breast and the great limbs of the Amazons. There are powerful and lovely women in the North,’ they said, ‘whose eyes are blue and depthless as a mountain lake.’” (p.47)  

“The Four Lost Men” was cut by quite a bit when it appeared in Wolfe’s 1935 collection of short stories, From Death to Morning, and this version, also included in the book, is inferior to the original magazine version, and the long version.  

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an admirer of “The Four Lost Men.” Fitzgerald wrote to a friend, asking “did you notice that in the second issue of Scribner’s that really great story by Tom Wolfe,” which was “The Four Lost Men.” (Correspondence of FSF, p.323) 

Fitzgerald also expressed his enthusiasm for “The Four Lost Men” in a letter to Maxwell Perkins, written after Wolfe’s death. Fitzgerald wrote: “I like ‘Only the Dead’ {Only the Dead Know Brooklyn, another Wolfe short story} and ‘Arthur, Garfield, etc.’ {The Four Lost Men} right up with the tops.” (Letters of FSF, p.316) Obviously, the story made an impression on Fitzgerald. 

I don’t envy the task that the Bruccolis faced in putting together the long version of “The Four Lost Men.” Basically, they found all kinds of additional material in Wolfe’s archives that seemed to belong to the story “The Four Lost Men” and so they included it. But because Wolfe’s authorial intent is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain, it’s very hard to say, “This is how Thomas Wolfe wanted this story.” But for fans of Wolfe’s powerful writing, The Four Lost Men: The Previously Unpublished Long Version highlights one of his great short stories.