Revisions of Thomas Wolfe's "The Lost Boy" - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1998 by James D. Boyer

Since [Thomas] Wolfe's success in achieving the larger unity for which he strove in the last three long novels is considerably less than total, the materials which he had organized into short novels have an integrity and a consummate craftsmanship which they seem to lack in the long books.... In the short novel form Wolfe was a master of his craft.

-- C. Hugh Holman, The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe

It is the care that went into the planes and surfaces of Wolfe's work--the tactile areas--that makes it an inhabitable literary world, just as it was the continuous rehearsal of his experience in his own mind--and the slow discovery of the underlying substratum of meaning--that made it, finally, a durable world.

-- Maxwell Geismar, The Portable Thomas Wolfe

James Clark's recent edition of "The Lost Boy," differing in significant ways from earlier published versions of that story, has renewed critical interest in what many feel is Wolfe's finest, most complex and carefully crafted piece of short fiction. I want in this essay to trace that careful crafting of the story as we find it in the typescripts preserved in the William Wisdom Collection of the Houghton Library and to discuss the significance of the story's theme as it relates to a major portion of Wolfe's late work--that is, "The Lost Boy" as a gateway into You Can't Go Home Again. Such an examination helps to define the dramatic redirection of Wolfe's late writing--that work written or reworked in 1936-1937 and later incorporated into the posthumous novels. Through the typescripts of this story we can trace the complex process of composition through which Wolfe himself came to understand what he wanted to say with the material--the "slow discovery," as Geismar calls it, of "the underlying substratum of meaning." No other Wolfe story illustrates so well both his experimentation with narrative technique and his sustained effort at revision and restructuring to get the final effect of a story just right.

From the beginning of Wolfe's fiction writing in the late 1920s, his work gives evidence of the ferment of American fiction during those years and of his drawing on the experiments of other writers. Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River both show Wolfe's considerable debt to James Joyce in his experiments with stream of consciousness and with juxtaposing myth and plot. Wolfe learned from Sherwood Anderson to anchor episodes with imagery and to center them on aspects other than plot; Joseph Bentz in a recent essay discusses similarities in the way the two writers structured stories around what he calls "climactic lyrical insights" (151). Most important of all for "The Lost Boy," Wolfe had as a model Faulkner's use of the shifting narrator to tell a story--both As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury had been published before Wolfe began work on this four-part story with its three first-person narrators and four perspectives.

Wolfe himself had already tried, in his stories from 1932-1935, a variety of experiments--the joining of discrete episodes related only by setting and theme in "Death, the Proud Brother" and "The Face of the War," the use of choric voices in "The Four Lost Men," the use of visions in "Bascom Hawke," the use of allegory in "Fame and the Poet," the use of various first-person voices, from the wonderful rambling voice of Eliza Gant in "The Web of Earth," (a voice that he returns to in a more restrained form in the second part of "The Lost Boy") to the voice of the Brooklyn tough guy in the often-anthologized "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn." He was, when we look back at particulars, a surprisingly experimental writer. Only in "The Lost Boy," however, does he experiment with the shifting narrative voice, which gives this particular story its distinctive depth and force.

It is difficult to say exactly when Wolfe began the writing of this story, which was first published in Redbook in 1937. It has generally been assumed that the story was written in 1936 and that the inspiration for the story had grown out of his trip to St. Louis in 1935, when he revisited the home where the Wolfe family had lived during the 1904 World's Fair. But Wolfe had, of course, already included a brief account of Grover's death at the Fair in the Autobiographical Outline (1920s) and a brief fictional account in Look Homeward, Angel (1929), long before he mentioned in his notebooks this story on the subject in the fall of 1935 (Notebooks 779). It is likely that the first three parts of the four-part story were drafted earlier than 1935-specially Part 2, with an Eliza who sounds very much like the narrator of "The Web of Earth," written in 1932, and Part 3, narrated by the sister, a caricatured Helen similar to the character of Luke in "Boomtown," published in 1934. Both of these sections may have been written initially for a 1930-1932 manuscript called "Antaeus," wherein Wolfe went back to the family characters developed in Look Homeward, Angel and gave an extended account of some conversations among the family, or more specifically among Eugene, Luke, Helen and Eliza (Wisdom Collection, bMS Am 1883 [409]). It is clear that Wolfe and his magazine agent, Elizabeth Nowell, came back to the material in 1936 and produced the story published in Redbook Magazine in 1937.(1)