Thomas Wolfe Sucks

Thomas Wolfe's disgusting, purple prose somehow escapes infamy: perhaps due to the fact religious adherents of Thomas Wolfe are, by nature, idiots? Then, of course, we are a nation of idiots.

The bulk of his sweaty, weird oeuvre lent him status as America's answer to Europe, as the bearded naturalist held up against candy ass France with all that existentialist crap. In other words, Wolfe emerged as the laughing, in-your-face voice of youthful American narrative. But what a god awful voice, as is apparent from a reading the first page of that great classic, Look Homeward Angel. He hem.

Virginal sunlight crept into the street in young moteless shafts. At this moment Gant awoke. He lay quietly on his back for a moment in the pleasant yellow-shaded dusk of the sitting-room, listening to the rippling flutiness of the live piping birdy morning. He yawned cavernously and thrust his right hand scratching into the dense hair-thicket of his breast.

The first sentence bears mention for a variety of reasons, perhaps most of all because it is ungainly in a way that can only be described as magical. Virginal sunlight spreads its young, dustless shafts. A mote of course means a speck of something. But if a sunbeam isn't full of motes, then what is it? And what about these shafts? Through which apertures does this young light creep its way onto the street? You just can't imagine it happening! But that's really beside the point because what Wolfe is after is establishing primal essentialness: the feminine virginity of a world soon to be plundered by the essential, protestant modern, Gant.

Gant! Can you think of a better last-name-first-name for Wolfe's essential American? Is Gant Italian, or perhaps of Slavic ancestry? Uh, no! He's, like, Gant?! Like Grant, or Giant. Gant. A kind of obdurate pillar of a name suggesting a paragon of modern, racialist ideas and ideals, Gant lounges, nervously? Uh, hello?! Gant fidgets? Are you fucking kidding? He lays quietly, basking in his state of Zarathustrian being, of East Coast breeding, listening to the rippling flutiness of the live piping birdy morning. I admire a man who has the audacity to use the phrase rippling flutiness. But that's nothing, because here we have a phrase as nutso as any written by the hand of man.


Live piping birdy morning.


Oh yeah. Forget modernities injunction to be spare. No sir! Wolfe, a man of the essences, is taking a cue from Joyce, maximizing the potential and the philosophy behind free-wheeling Americanish! -- no dead cadences of British English here! No sir! All is fresh and young and American! Last names are now first names! Presto! A mouthful of sludge is pure poetry! And thus he grinds out as bizarre an accumulation of rhythmless syllables as has ever been seen: as if he's playing the game Mad Libs. Live piping birdy morning. Roll the syllables around in your mouth. Delicious! Wolfe you wordsmith!

He thrust his right hand scratching into the dense hair-thicket. When you have a dense hair-thicket on your chest, you'd better believe you thrust your hand into it. If you don't thrust, you wont get it in there! It's too disgustingly dense! You've got to scratch your way into it, thrusting from the top down like reaching into a bag of apples, or else from the bottom up like fixing a heating duct. But it's not just about body hair. In fact, throughout your daily routine, you do a lot of thrusting. You thrust your hand here and there. You can hardly do anything without some suggestive thrusting. After all, you are modernity's essential man. And what does the paragon of manhood need more than anything?

The fast cackle-cluck of sensual hens. Come and rob us. All through the night for you, master. Rich protesting yielding voices of Jewesses. Do it, don't it. Break an egg in them. Sleepless, straight, alert, the counterpane molded over his gaunt legs, he listened to the protesting invitations of the hens.

!

What a great paragraph, Wolfe! Aren't you the bawdy answer to censored continental literature. You just make it yourself, don't you? Fast cackle-cluck? Sensual hens? Oh, I get it, the hens are like women, like these fickle, sensual Jewesses hungry for Gant's essential, thickety seed all in the piping birdy morning. They want! They don't want! Sensual, fickle, chickens with their fast cackle cluck! But aren't hens in themselves sensual! With their feathers and their clucking and their picking at things? Isn't the word choice great? Don't hens just seem to revel in the world of the senses, what with their scratching and squawking? Don't they just seem like they want to be touched? Doesn't this writing gibe with you? Aren't you all like, "Oh Gant, you old rake, you old rooster! Go and rape (in sort of the less harmful, classical Zeus way) those Jewish hens and make up their minds for them! The feathers and the flapping will all seem so sensual!"

From the warm dust, shaking their fat feathered bodies, protesting but satisfied they staggered up. For me. The earth too and the vine. The moist new earth cleaving like cut pork from the plough.

LOL. Sorry. Laugh attack at cleaving like cut pork. Yes. And here come the hens staggering up out of the dust, protesting but satisfied: kind of like the rape scene in Straw Dogs. Push em down again Gant! Don't take no for an answer! This is all so erotic and sensual! The hens love it! But wait! More eating, meat metaphors to add to the deliciously sensual mix.

Or like water from a ship. The spongy sod spaded cleanly and rolled back like flesh. Or the earth loosened and hoed gently around the roots of the cherry trees. The earth receives my seed. For me the great lettuces. Spongy and full of sap now like a woman. The thick grapevine--in August the heavy clustered grapes--How there? Like milk from a breast. Or blood through a vein. Fattens and plumps them.

What's going on? Rolled back like flesh. What kind of flesh? Human flesh? What a gorgeously sensual image to go along with the gentle hoeing of the cherry trees and those dogged, conflicted hens! The pork cleaving, the flesh rolling back revealing the glistening, sensual musculature. Is this Gant, or is this Wolfe getting hungry...or homicidal? Oh! It's Wolfe merging with Gant because, you see, Wolfe is the essential American spilling the veritable seed of Gant upon the fertile soil of the American creative climate which, you can be sure, is spongy and full of sap like a hungry, fast cackle-clucking Jewess who in turn is like a great lettuce. Great in the huge sense and the great sense, because, after all, what's better than a huge head of lettuce?

But don't forget the grapes! Or, rather, the vine because, for Gant/Wolfe, it's not just wine, but it's the God of the Vine, the Religion of Dionysus, a bacchanalian commingling of bodily fluids, milk, semen, blood. Yes! Essential liquids are so erotic! Slavish Jewish chickens rising from the dust, protesting yet satisfied. Heads of lettuce full of sap! A veritable Reverend Dimmesdale fever dream! A glorious psychotic break resplendent with hairy chests so hairy you have to thrust and scratch your way into them! And weird last name first names. Gardeners skinning things, heads of lettuce spongy and full of sap like cackle-clucking chicken women. Oh Gant! Oh Wolfe! Do it! Don't it!

Crossing his suspender braces over his shoulders, he strode into the kitchen and had a brisk fire of oil and pine snapping in the range within three minutes. He was stimulated and alive in all the fresh wakefulness of the Spring morning!

At this point I imagine some impertinent coonskin capped harmonica playing hobo interrupting a hopelessly pompous European train of thought with a refreshing, communistic ballad about the healthful glories of chastity, or celibacy, or regularity, or masturbation, or something. Do you think Gant would have problems hanging with any of Jack London's characters? I think not! He can light a fire with the rest of them. He was stimulated and alive in all the fresh wakefulness of the Spring morning! That's an understatement. Bravo! Bravo! Worst page ever written not by James Fenimore Cooper.