"Oktoberfest," a short story by Thomas Wolfe (1937)

Germany held a special place in Thomas Wolfe’s heart. His first visit in the fall of 1928 was the inspiration behind the short story “Oktoberfest,” published in 1937. Wolfe’s later visits to Germany in 1935 and 1936, after Hitler and the Nazis had taken power, transformed his view of the country, and when he left in 1936, he knew he would never return to Germany. Wolfe chronicled his disillusionment with Germany under fascism in the powerful short novel “I Have a Thing to Tell You,” and the excellent short story “The Dark Messiah.”  

“Oktoberfest” is a portrait of the Germany that Wolfe fell in love with. The story was later incorporated into Wolfe’s posthumous novel The Web and the Rock. It’s not a typical short story with rising action, dramatic tension, and a climax. Rather, “Oktoberfest” is a sketch of a time and place. The story becomes a vehicle for Wolfe’s powerful talent for observation and description. Wolfe is especially good as describing food and drink: “an enormous hunger woke in me, a hunger for flesh such as I had never known: I wanted not only to see the Roasted Ox, I wanted to devour great pieces of it.” (The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, p.310)  

Wolfe and his German friend Heinrich make friends with the locals as they sit in the beer tent, drinking and eating. “We went our way, and they went theirs...The fumes of the heady and powerful beer, and more than that the fumes of fellowship and affection, of friendship and of human warmth, had mounted to our brains and hearts. We knew it was a rare and precious thing, a moment’s spell of wonder and of joy, that it must end, and we were loath to see it go.” (p.315) 

Heinrich says to Wolfe, “A poet, ja. These people did not know you, and they said you were a poet. And you are.”  

This sets up the final paragraph of the story, which is one of my favorite pieces of Wolfe’s writing. 

“And in the moonlight, his lonely scarred and pitted face was transfigured by a look of happiness. And we walked the streets, we walked the streets. We felt the sense of something priceless and unutterable, a world invisible that we must see, a world intangible that we must touch, a world of warmth, of joy, of imminent and impending happiness, of impossible delight, that was almost ours. And we walked the streets, we walked the streets. The moon blazed blank and cold out of the whited brilliance of the sky. And the streets were silent. All the doors were closed. And from the distance came the last and muted murmurs of the fair. And we went home.” (p.315) 

It’s such a beautiful paragraph, capturing the fleeting joy of a memorable evening. Wolfe was such a great writer of joy—his exuberant prose nearly leaps off the page. And there’s such lovely poetry in his repeating the line, “And we walked the streets, we walked the streets.”  

Over just eight pages, “Oktoberfest” gives the reader a sense of why Thomas Wolfe was such a talented writer.  

Thomas Wolfe at 125

Thomas Wolfe, 1900-1938

Thomas Wolfe was born on October 3, 1900, 125 years ago. I’ve been reading The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, along with an expanded version of one of his short stories, The Four Lost Men: The Previously Unpublished Long Version, so he’s been on my mind a lot. 

The best of Wolfe’s work has a kind of breathless exuberance. The words and sentences flow and tumble and cascade around each other, creating a reading experience that I find very moving. Probably the closest literary comparison I could make to Thomas Wolfe would, ironically enough, be Tom Wolfe—the champion of New Journalism and author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Both Wolfes sought to explore America and capture its rhythms, its textures, in a way no one had before. Both writers needed a lot of space to express themselves, and they produced works that were long, but also commercially successful.  

Thomas Wolfe’s writing contains such wonderful passages. Here’s just one paragraph, from his short story “No Door.” 

“October had come again, and that year it was sharp and soon: frost was early, burning the thick green on the mountain sides to the massed brilliant hues of blazing colors, painting the air with sharpness, sorrow, and delight. Sometimes, and often, there was warmth by day, and ancient drowsy light, a golden warmth and pollinated haze in afternoon, but over all the earth there was the premonitory breath of frost, an exultancy for all men who were returning and for all those who were gone and would not come again.” (The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, p.79)  

That’s such a fantastic paragraph. I’d love to be able to write a paragraph that good. Beautiful, haunting, melancholic, evocative, and masterful.  

Thomas Wolfe died of tuberculosis on September 15, 1938, at the age of 37, less than three weeks before his 38th birthday. This was a huge loss for American literature. Wolfe had only published two novels during his lifetime: Look Homeward, Angel, and Of Time and the River. Two more posthumous novels were carved out of the mountains of manuscript he left behind: The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again. I can’t help but wonder what Wolfe’s writing would have been like had he lived longer. Where would he have gone? It’s one of the great what ifs of American literature.  

On a personal level, I keep thinking about the fact that Wolfe died so young. If I had died at the same age as Wolfe, three weeks before turning 38, I would have died in March of 2019. So many things have happened in my life since March of 2019. I’ve written 300 blog posts since March of 2019. I’ve presented at two International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conferences since 2019. I’ve spoken in Asheville at the Thomas Wolfe House. I’ve presented at the Thomas Wolfe Society Conference in Chicago. Not to mention the fact that my two children have been growing up during the six and a half years since March of 2019. It just really hits me how young Thomas Wolfe was when he died, and how much more of life he sadly missed out on.  

Go pick up one of Thomas Wolfe’s books. Lose yourself in it, immerse yourself in the feeling, the rhythms, the textures of his words, and you’ll see why he still speaks to readers today, so many years later.  

Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing, Edited by Larry W. Phillips (1985)

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips, is a slim volume of 96 pages that collects Fitzgerald’s advice and thoughts on the craft that he practiced. Originally published in 1985, it was recently reprinted in November 2024. It was a book that had escaped my attention until I saw it in a bookstore this spring. I was quite surprised that there was a compilation of Fitzgerald’s writing that I was unaware of.  

The later volume F. Scott Fitzgerald on Authorship, from 1996, covers similar ground as F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing, as you might expect from the titles. While FSF on Authorship is a more scholarly tome, including the full text of Fitzgerald’s various articles and essays on writing, FSF on Writing features brief excerpts from Fitzgerald’s writing and is meant for a more general audience. FSF on Authorship is also twice as long as FSF on Writing. Phillips selected some relevant quotes from Fitzgerald’s novels about writing. One of my favorites is from his novel The Beautiful and Damned: “Dick doesn’t necessarily see more than anyone else. He merely can put down a larger proportion of what he sees.” (p.9) This seems to me an apt quotation that applied to Fitzgerald himself as well.  

There are many fantastic quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing. One of my favorites is this one: “It is my old contention that tiredness, boredom, exhaustion, etc., must not be conveyed by the symbols which they show in life, in fact, can’t be so conveyed in literature because boredom is essentially boring and tiredness is essentially tiring.” (p.37)   

Fitzgerald’s admiration for the Polish/British novelist Joseph Conrad comes through strongly in this volume. Fitzgerald wrote: “I’d rather have written Conrad’s Nostromo than any other novel.” (p.41) I suspect that Conrad’s novels Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim strongly influenced Fitzgerald as he wrote The Great Gatsby, particularly in his decision to make Nick Carraway a partially involved narrator, after the fashion of Conrad’s narrator Marlow.  

A quote that I found fascinating comes from a letter that Fitzgerald wrote to Andrew Turnbull in 1933. Turnbull, a future biographer of Fitzgerald, was 12 years old in 1933, and Fitzgerald was renting a house on the Turnbull family property. Fitzgerald wrote: “Nobody naturally likes a mind quicker than their own and more capable of getting its operation into words. It is practically something to conceal. The history of men’s minds has been the concealing of them, until men cry out for intelligence, and the thing has to be brought into use...most of the great things you learn in life are in periods of enforced silence.” (p.82-3)  

I find that a fascinating idea, that men conceal their intelligence until it has to be used. Fitzgerald was fond of showing off his intelligence at a young age, and he understood how that intelligence isolated him. This fits perfectly with one of my favorite quotes about Fitzgerald’s personality. One of his colleagues from the army said of Fitzgerald, “He was eager to be liked by his companions and almost vain in seeking praise. At the same time he was unwilling to conform to the various patterns of dullness and majority opinion which would insure popularity.” (The Far Side of Paradise, by Arthur Mizener, p.23) This captures Fitzgerald so well—he wanted to be liked, but he was far too intelligent to be a conformist. At some point during his life, Fitzgerald understood it was better to draw less attention to his intelligence.  

There are so many terrific nuggets in F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing. Some of my favorites are: “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” (p.3) “Genius is the ability to put into effect what is in your mind. There’s no other definition of it.” (p.13) “You don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you’ve got something to say.” (p.52) F. Scott Fitzgerald was certainly a writer who had something important to say.