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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Thomas Wolfe's "Of Time and the River" explores the intricate tapestry of human experience, blending lyrical prose with profound philosophical inquiries. This semi-autobiographical novel serves as a sequel to his earlier work, "Look Homeward, Angel," and captures a young man's journey through the tumultuous waters of life, love, and self-discovery. Wolfe's rich, evocative style employs stream-of-consciousness techniques, allowing readers to traverse the fluid boundaries of memory and time, while grappling with the unreliability of both. The narrative, steeped in the cultural milieu of early 20th-century America, reflects timeless themes of longing and existential questing, posing an intimate exploration of the American spirit. Wolfe, born in 1900 in Asheville, North Carolina, was deeply influenced by his Southern upbringing and the complexities of familial relationships. His early life and experiences in academia, particularly at Harvard, fostered a keen sense of literary ambition. Wolfe's encounters with diverse cultures during his travels to Europe further enriched his narrative style, imbuing his work with a striking sense of place and introspection. This background undoubtedly shaped the thematic richness and emotional depth seen in "Of Time and the River." Readers are encouraged to delve into this masterpiece, as it not only chronicles the protagonist's struggles but also offers a reflection on the universal human condition. Wolfe's artistic exploration of time, memory, and identity resonates profoundly, rendering this novel a seminal piece that is both thought-provoking and deeply affecting, inviting readers to ponder their own rivers of time. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Of Time and the River
Table of Contents
Introduction
A young man hurtles along the river of time, driven by hunger to name his life before the current sweeps him onward. Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River centers on this urgent momentum, capturing the restless passage from youth toward an uncertain adulthood. The novel follows a single consciousness as it stretches to absorb the world, seeking forms, voices, and places that might explain what a life is for. Wolfe’s narrative energy evokes both the exhilaration and the ache of becoming. From its first pages, the book announces an epic reach: a desire to gather a nation’s sounds, the persistence of memory, and the solitude of ambition.
Its status as a classic arises from the daring scale of its vision and the music of its prose. In the landscape of American literature, Wolfe insisted that a novel could be capacious enough to hold cities, seasons, family legacies, and the tidal pull of longing. Readers and critics have returned to this book for its resonance with the American experience of movement and reinvention. The work’s lyric intensity, its candid interiority, and its frank engagement with time have made it a touchstone. It stands alongside key modern works that redefined what a narrative could do with memory, place, and the shaping force of desire.
Written in the early 1930s and published in 1935, Of Time and the River continues the story of Eugene Gant, the protagonist introduced in Wolfe’s earlier novel. Wolfe, an American writer from North Carolina, sets Eugene’s quest against a broad American and transatlantic canvas. The book traces his departure from his Southern home toward larger worlds of study, travel, and artistic aspiration. Without disclosing later developments, it suffices to say that the novel’s arc concerns discovery rather than destination. Wolfe’s purpose was to dramatize the ordeal and exultation of growth, the friction between memory and ambition, and the ceaseless pressure of time upon the self.
Wolfe sought nothing less than to render the texture of life in full, with sentences that surge and coil like the river of the title. His method combines autobiographical immediacy with a modernist sensitivity to consciousness and rhythm. The result is an immersive, rhapsodic narrative that watches a mind meet the world. The book’s expansiveness is not ornamental; it is the form taken by hunger, the stylistic counterpart to a young man’s desire to know. In this way, Wolfe’s art marries subject and structure, allowing the reader to experience turbulence, clarity, and sudden stillness as elements of a single current.
The novel also bears the imprint of rigorous editorial collaboration during its shaping. Wolfe worked intensively in the period leading to publication to refine an enormous manuscript into a coherent whole. The discipline of that process helped concentrate the book’s power without erasing its amplitude. This history matters because it speaks to a defining tension in the novel: abundance tempered by form, exuberance guided toward articulation. It is a work both prodigious and composed, carrying the feeling of overflow within a deliberate design. Readers sense in its pages an ambition tested and steered, and the final text shows the strength born of that trial.
Composed amid the upheavals of the interwar years and the Great Depression, the book listens closely to the sounds of its era. Trains, streets, classrooms, boardinghouses, and ship decks create a chorus of modern life that frames Eugene’s search. Wolfe’s America is restless and kinetic, its cities rising with opportunity and echoing with loss. Europe, glimpsed in episodes of travel, provides a counterpoint of history and scale. These contexts heighten the protagonist’s struggle to name himself in a world both vast and intimate. The novel’s historical setting thus deepens its drama, embedding a private journey within a larger record of change.
Identity, home, and departure form a triad that organizes the narrative’s emotional logic. The pull of origins remains strong, yet the need to leave is irresistible, turning exile into a condition of growth. Wolfe captures the way people carry the landscapes and voices of childhood even as they replace them with new maps and languages. The family’s presence persists as memory, discipline, and love, but the protagonist seeks a vocabulary that is genuinely his own. The novel honors both demands: fidelity to the past and the courage to risk it. This doubleness gives the book its abiding tension and pathos.
Time in this novel is lived as recurrence and rush, not merely a sequence of dates. The river motif clarifies this: water holds the past in its flow even as it moves forward. Wolfe’s narrative returns to images and feelings to show how experience gathers its meanings over time. Moments echo and transform, turning youth into a complicated inheritance. The book is, in this sense, a meditation on memory’s power to form identity and to mislead it. By staging the conflict between memory and motion, Wolfe articulates the human struggle to keep faith with what was while moving toward what might be.
Movement animates the novel’s pages: trains cut through night, streets stream toward horizons, and classrooms open onto imagined worlds. Wolfe invokes the American appetite for distance as both promise and test. The physical journey frames an interior one, where the scale of cities enlarges the mind’s possibilities and its confusions. Landscapes are more than setting; they are instruments, tuning the protagonist to new registers of perception. Through this orchestration of place, the book composes an atlas of becoming. It records how geography and mobility shape ambition, and how finding a voice often requires crossing literal and figurative borders.
Of Time and the River influenced later writers drawn to expansive, autobiographical forms and rhythmic prose. Its willingness to embrace excess, candor, and musicality opened a path for novelists who sought to make private experience feel national in scope. The book’s blend of confession and panorama can be felt in mid-century American narratives that prize immediacy and sweep. Authors who celebrated momentum, spiritual hunger, and the vernacular energies of the United States found encouragement in Wolfe’s audacity. As a result, the novel stands not only as an achievement in itself but as a catalyst for bolder, more capacious storytelling.
To read this book is to encounter sentences that pulse with sensation and an outlook that refuses smallness. The narrative’s breadth demands patience, but it rewards attention with moments of startling clarity and tenderness. Wolfe brings readers close to the textures of youth: the exhilaration of first arrivals, the solitude of ambition, the bewilderment of change. He also honors the work of craft, showing how form can contain feeling without diminishing it. The experience is immersive rather than discrete, a long inhalation rather than a series of fragments. It offers a way of seeing that feels at once intimate and immense.
Of Time and the River endures because it articulates a perennial struggle: how to make a life within the relentless motion of time. Its themes—identity, memory, ambition, home, and the transforming force of travel—remain urgent to contemporary readers. The novel’s language invites us to dwell within experience, while its structure reminds us that movement itself is a kind of knowledge. For anyone who has felt the ache to go farther and the tug to turn back, this book provides company and challenge. It stands as a testament to the audacity of youth and the ongoing task of becoming.
Synopsis
Of Time and the River follows Eugene Gant, a young Southerner driven by an immense hunger for experience, as he leaves his mountain hometown to pursue education and art in the North. The novel opens in movement, with farewells, trains, and the sensation of crossing boundaries of place and self. Family ties, memories of streets and seasons, and the ache of departure frame his resolve to find a larger life. This continuation of his story traces the first steps of independence, setting the central course: the collision between the pull of home and the lure of vast cities, and the relentless passage of time. Throughout, the narrative binds personal longing to landscapes and crowds.
Eugene arrives in Boston and Cambridge to study, encountering the academic world with heightened expectations and uncertainty. He works through long reading days, seminar rooms, and library nights, absorbing voices that promise access to culture and mastery. At Harvard, he confronts his limits as well as new capacities, meeting mentors and classmates shaped by different regions and ambitions. The intellectual promise of the North contrasts with remembered hills and streets from home. Early chapters mark this new life in careful sequences of rooms and streets, framing his desire to become a writer and dramatist while he learns the disciplines and detours that education demands.
Amid classes and lectures, Eugene navigates the practical demands of survival in boardinghouses, cafeterias, and cheap rooms, observing the anonymous rhythms of urban life. He begins to test his talent against the city’s appetite, writing at night and worrying over money, loneliness, and purpose. Letters and news from home echo through these months, sharpening both nostalgia and resolve. The seasons turn in the North with stark clarity, and the distance from his origins deepens his perception of time. The narrative carefully records work, wandering, and the slow gathering of material, positioning his inner restlessness as the engine driving him toward larger stages.
Periodic visits back to the South reveal the changing shape of his family and town. Familiar faces, childhood places, and the business energies of his enterprising mother contrast with his new perspective. He feels both the comfort of recognition and the estrangement that comes from growth. These returns clarify the book’s central tension: belonging is powerful but cannot contain his expanding aims. The home scenes provide a counterweight to northern experience, reminding Eugene of debts, affections, and the memory-laden streets that formed him. They also underscore his awareness that the world is wider than any one place, urging him to continue outward.
After his studies, Eugene moves to New York, where the scale of the city matches his ambitions. The narrative enters crowded avenues, elevated trains, and midnight workrooms, charting his push to write for the stage and find a voice that fits the metropolis. He meets fellow strivers and skeptics, discovering how opportunity and indifference mingle in the theatrical world. The city’s energy becomes both inspiration and trial. Days dissolve into drafting, errands, and encounters that enlarge his sense of America’s many lives. New York crystallizes the idea that art must wrestle with the vastness of modern experience while remaining anchored in a singular, authentic vision.
In this period, Eugene forms a consequential bond with an older, sophisticated woman who supports his artistic ambitions while challenging his independence. Their relationship brings access to cultural circles, travel, and material stability, but it also introduces conflicts of loyalty, timing, and need. The novel treats this connection as a pivotal education in affection, power, and artistic purpose. Through shared rooms, rehearsals, and arguments, he learns how devotion can sustain and complicate creation. This relationship shapes his sense of responsibility to his work and to others, adding emotional depth to his pursuit of a vocation that must eventually stand on its own.
Eugene crosses the Atlantic, and Europe opens to him in ports, rapid rail journeys, and long walks through cities layered with history. Cathedrals, museums, cafés, and crowded streets immerse him in the weight of time and the continuities of art. The Old World’s grandeur contrasts with the newness and speed of America, sharpening his awareness of his origins. He absorbs voices and scenes without settling, writing and observing as he moves through England and the Continent. The voyage and its aftermath deepen his sense of distance and destiny, providing experience that he will later shape, while preserving the uncertainty that marks a life still in transit.
As seasons and miles accumulate, Eugene recognizes the need to transform raw experience into sustained work. The narrative narrows to the discipline required to turn observation into art, even as daily pressures persist. He returns to New York with a broadened outlook, balancing ties to home, commitments in the city, and the challenge of making a coherent whole from scattered lives and places. Professional possibilities begin to flicker at the edges, and meetings hint at future recognition. Yet the emphasis remains on the process: rooms, drafts, revisions, and the hard clarity that comes with choosing a path forward without abandoning the sources that nourished him.
The novel closes this phase of Eugene’s journey by uniting its central elements: the pull of home, the vastness of America, the instructive gravity of Europe, and the unyielding movement of time. Without finality or dramatic revelation, it affirms youth’s hunger as a force that drives learning and loss alike. The river of experience carries him onward, and the book preserves his passage as a record of becoming rather than completion. Its message centers on growth through motion, the shaping of identity from distance and return, and the necessity of turning life into art, setting the stage for the next steps in his story.
Historical Context
Thomas Wolfe sets Of Time and the River in the United States and Europe during the early to mid 1920s, a period marked by rapid urban growth, postwar upheaval, and transatlantic mobility. The narrative follows Eugene Gant from the upland South of North Carolina to Cambridge, Massachusetts, into New York City’s intense commercial and theatrical worlds, and onward to England, France, and Germany. This geography reflects the era’s expanding rail networks, bustling steamship routes, and crowded metropolitan life. The time frame sits between the armistice of 1918 and the end of the decade’s boom, embedding the story in a society transformed by war, migration, and technological change.
Place defines experience in the novel: Cambridge’s academic precincts, New York’s streets and theaters, ship cabins and foreign stations, and the remembered hills of the southern Appalachians. The American city in the 1920 census tipped to a majority urban population, and Wolfe anchors Eugene in that shift, tracing the lure and peril of northern metropolises. Abroad, Paris and Berlin symbolize a continent reconstructing itself, with currencies, borders, and routines unsettled after 1918. Wolfe’s settings mirror a generation navigating new institutions and distances, moving by train from Asheville to Boston, by subway through Manhattan, and by ocean liner to Europe’s volatile capitals.
The defining historical matrix for the book is the decade after World War I, 1918 to 1929, when the United States demobilized roughly 4 million soldiers, weathered a sharp 1920–1921 recession, and then surged into the decade’s consumer boom. Industrial production initially contracted, wholesale prices fell by more than a third, and unemployment rose above 10 percent in 1921 before recovery set in. By mid decade, electrification, mass production, and advertising reshaped daily life; urban populations swelled past 54 million by 1930, and automobile registrations climbed toward 23 million. New York crystallized these forces: subways multiplied, skyscrapers rose, and Broadway’s lights drew money and ambition. The period’s prosperity masked anxieties bred by Prohibition’s hypocrisies, nativism, and labor conflict. College enrollments expanded rapidly, and professional schools tied culture more closely to institutions and markets. Transatlantic movement intensified as the strong dollar and low ocean fares enabled American students, artists, and teachers to travel widely. For Wolfe’s protagonist, this is the river of time itself: the arc from provincial town to world city, from classrooms to commercial stages, from crowded steerage stairs to European boulevards. His fits of elation and estrangement imitate the age’s oscillation between abundance and unease, placing his personal growth within the concrete rhythms of postwar trains, offices, and streets.
The influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1920 killed an estimated 675,000 people in the United States and tens of millions worldwide, closing schools, theaters, and churches and driving mask ordinances from San Francisco to New York. Life expectancy in the United States fell more than ten years in 1918. The pandemic’s proximity to the armistice compounded mourning and sharpened a sense of precarious existence among young adults. Wolfe’s book does not anatomize the disease, but its mood of loss, sudden departure, and the press of the living city evokes a generation emerging from grief into restlessness, seeking motion, company, and meaning in trains, crowds, and nocturnal streets.
Prohibition began nationwide on 17 January 1920 after ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and passage of the Volstead Act. It forbade the manufacture, sale, and transport of intoxicating liquors until repeal by the Twenty-First Amendment on 5 December 1933. Enforcement fueled organized crime and corruption; New York alone was estimated to host tens of thousands of speakeasies by the mid 1920s. Raids, bootlegging, and back-room politics became part of urban routine. Wolfe channels this environment in New York scenes of after-hours sociability and moral ambiguity, presenting the city’s night world as a crucible where social boundaries blur and the era’s public pretense collides with private appetite.
The First Red Scare peaked from 1919 to 1920 amid strikes and fears of Bolshevism. The Boston Police Strike erupted in September 1919; the nationwide Steel Strike began the same month. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer authorized raids in November 1919 and January 1920, leading to thousands of arrests and deportations, including the December 1919 sailing of 249 alleged radicals aboard the Buford to Soviet Russia. Academic centers and cities buzzed with debate over civil liberties. Wolfes Harvard years place Eugene in proximity to Boston’s labor and police disputes and to the climate of suspicion, informing portraits of tense lecture halls, guarded conversations, and ideological friction in the streets.
U.S. immigration policy shifted sharply through the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924. The 1921 law capped arrivals from each nation at 3 percent of its 1910 resident population; the 1924 law reduced the quota to 2 percent of the 1890 base and effectively excluded most immigrants from Asia, while establishing the Border Patrol. Ellis Island processed dwindling numbers as quotas tightened and inspections intensified. In New York’s neighborhoods, older communities received fewer new arrivals, and nativist rhetoric grew. Wolfe’s New York chapters track the cosmopolitan sidewalks born of earlier waves while registering the era’s narrowing gates and the anxieties of belonging within a guarded nation.
The Sacco and Vanzetti case gripped Massachusetts and the world. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists, were arrested in May 1920 for a payroll robbery and double murder in South Braintree. After trials and appeals marked by controversy over evidence and prejudice, they were executed on 23 August 1927. Protests erupted from Boston to Paris, and the case became a symbol of nativist justice and political fear. Wolfe situates Eugene within the Boston area’s intellectual and civic ferment, and the atmosphere of argument, pamphlets, and crowd assemblies that the case generated resonates in the novel’s depictions of overheard polemics, street-corner debates, and the moral noise of the decade.
Women’s suffrage was secured with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, expanding the electorate and supporting rapid shifts in public roles. By the late 1920s, women comprised roughly 24 percent of the workforce, and female college enrollments climbed, with coeducational institutions opening professions and advanced study. Civic and social reforms diversified, from birth control advocacy to professional associations. In the novel’s world, classrooms and editorial rooms include articulate women navigating new freedoms and constraints. Wolfe’s portrayal of independent women in New York and the academy, alongside the often fraught relations between male ambition and female agency, reflects a society adjusting to enfranchisement and expanding public lives.
The Great Migration moved more than a million African Americans from the South to northern and midwestern cities between 1916 and 1930, swelling New York’s Black population from about 91,000 in 1910 to over 328,000 by 1930. The period also saw racial violence, including the Red Summer of 1919 in Chicago and Washington, and the Tulsa massacre of 1921, which destroyed Greenwood’s business district and killed an estimated 100 to 300 people. New York’s Harlem and other neighborhoods became centers of social and civic life. Although Wolfe does not center these communities, his urban panoramas acknowledge segregated geographies and the uneasy coexistence of aspiration, prejudice, and crowd life.
The Ku Klux Klan’s revival after 1915 expanded rapidly, with membership estimated between 4 and 5 million by 1925. The Klan exerted political influence across the South and Midwest, staged a 40,000-person march in Washington, D.C., in August 1925, and targeted Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and African Americans. In North Carolina and neighboring states, Klan parades and local officeholding reinforced Jim Crow hierarchies. Wolfe’s depiction of the provincial South and Eugene’s hunger to leave it are framed by this atmosphere of coercive conformity. The character’s ambivalence toward home ground captures a region where public rituals enforced exclusion and private yearnings pushed outward toward broader horizons.
New York City’s physical and commercial growth accelerated through the 1920s. Grand Central Terminal (1913) funneled regional flows; subway lines multiplied under the IRT and BMT; the Theater District around Times Square consolidated as a national marketplace for entertainment. By the late 1920s, illuminated signage and ever taller office buildings remade Midtown’s skyline, while radio broadcasting, inaugurated famously by KDKA in 1920, knitted the country into a shared soundscape. Publishing houses clustered near Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue. Wolfe’s New York chapters, steeped in editorial offices and stage doors, capture a metropolis where culture is a business, movement is constant, and anonymity and opportunity rise in tandem.
The expansion and professionalization of higher education shaped cultural production. Harvard’s English 47 Workshop, led by George Pierce Baker since 1912, trained playwrights through laboratory methods, and in 1925 Baker departed to found the Yale School of Drama, aligning theater with university resources and prestige. Graduate enrollments at elite institutions grew as credentialing intensified. Wolfe studied with Baker in the early 1920s and earned a Harvard master’s degree in 1922, then moved into New York’s theatrical world. The novel’s investment in classrooms, mentors, and institutional corridors traces the new channels through which ambition flowed, and the costs of binding art and identity to gatekept, northern academies.
Transatlantic travel connected American cities to Europe’s unsettled capitals. Weimar Germany suffered hyperinflation peaking in 1923, as prices spiraled until stabilization with the Rentenmark and the Dawes Plan of 1924; Berlin’s nightlife and cabarets became shorthand for modern urban energies and risks. Paris drew students and professionals with a strong dollar and cheap lodgings, making Montparnasse cafes hubs of American social life. Major liners like Mauretania and Leviathan carried thousands across the Atlantic. Wolfe threads Eugene through these ports and boulevards, registering the exhilaration of distance and the shock of encountering foreign ruins and recoveries, and calibrating his American identity against European currencies, manners, and streets.
The Wall Street Crash of October 1929, marked by Black Thursday on the 24th and Black Tuesday on the 29th, shattered equity values; by 1933 U.S. unemployment neared 25 percent, and thousands of banks failed. Breadlines, mortgage foreclosures, and deflation followed. While Of Time and the River largely unfolds before the crash, it was published in 1935 under the shadow of the Great Depression. The book’s retrospective undertone, its scrutiny of 1920s hustle and illusion, and its attention to crowded offices and strained livelihoods reflect a consciousness formed in the downturn, reading the prior decade’s energy as both vital and dangerously overleveraged.
By tracing a southern provincial’s ascent into the northern metropolis and across the Atlantic, the book critiques the social order that celebrates mobility while deepening class stratification. It exposes the commercial theater’s dependence on patronage and gatekeeping, the hypocrisy of Prohibition’s public virtue and private indulgence, and the narrowing of national belonging through immigration restrictions and patriotic surveillance. The city’s splendor sits beside exploitative workplaces and precarious boardinghouses. Wolfe’s crowded streets dramatize the anonymity imposed by scale and market logic, and his academic corridors reveal how merit is mediated by networks, pedigree, and region in a nation ostensibly committed to equal opportunity.
The novel also judges the South’s racial and religious orthodoxy and the North’s nativist and corporate pieties as two faces of coercion. It shows how Jim Crow habits, the Klan’s social policing, and fears of modern science deform communities, while northern institutions transmute prejudice into quotas, security screens, and editorial prejudice. In the aftermath of war and pandemic, Wolfe’s narrative voices grief at lives truncated and rage at lives narrowed. The river of time he names is social as well as personal, and its current reveals the period’s injustices: the unsteady rights of women, the segregation of Black citizens, and the reduction of human longings to marketable ambition.
Author Biography
Thomas Wolfe was a major American novelist of the early twentieth century, renowned for the amplitude of his autobiographical fiction and the lyric intensity of his prose. Emerging from the Southern Appalachian region, he sought to encompass the vastness of American life—its restlessness, memory, and longing—within sprawling narratives. His best-known works include Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935), with The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) appearing posthumously. Wolfe’s early death curtailed a prodigious talent, yet his ambition to write the “total” American book has remained central to assessments of his achievement and influence.
Wolfe’s formal education helped shape his literary aspirations. He studied at the University of North Carolina, where he wrote and staged early dramatic pieces, and then at Harvard University, working in George Pierce Baker’s celebrated 47 Workshop, which trained prominent playwrights. The discipline of theatrical craft—scene construction, monologue, and the orchestration of voices—left an imprint on his later fiction. He read widely in American and European literature and absorbed romantic and modern currents alike, with a particular affinity for expansive, oratorical diction. This formation, grounded in academic training and literary voracity, furnished the technical and rhetorical resources that would distinguish his mature novels.
After graduate study, Wolfe moved to New York and taught at New York University while pursuing a career in drama. When theatrical prospects faltered, he turned decisively to fiction. A crucial professional relationship with editor Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner’s Sons enabled Wolfe to wrestle his enormous manuscripts into publishable form. Look Homeward, Angel appeared in 1929, a boldly autobiographical first novel that traced a young writer’s emergence from a Southern town to a larger world. It earned strong reviews for its passionate style and panoramic detail, while also causing controversy among those who recognized real-life models. The book established Wolfe as a significant new American voice.
In the early 1930s Wolfe traveled in Europe and broadened the geographic and emotional range of his work. Of Time and the River (1935) extended his autobiographical project, chronicling artistic apprenticeship and the centrifugal pull of modern life. The same period saw the publication of From Death to Morning (1935), a collection of stories that displayed his gifts in shorter forms. Critics praised his power, music, and sense of scale, even as some faulted his expansiveness and structural looseness. Wolfe, for his part, embraced the challenge of writing at an epic register, aiming to fold the rhythms of cities, landscapes, and memory into a single capacious vision.
Mid-decade, Wolfe reflected on his methods in The Story of a Novel (1936), outlining the labor and editorial collaboration behind his books. He publicly condemned persecution and censorship in Nazi Germany in the essay I Have a Thing to Tell You, signaling a broadening social conscience. Seeking greater autonomy over his manuscripts, he left Scribner’s for Harper & Brothers in 1937. There he continued to draft vast sequences that reimagined earlier material while pressing forward thematically. After his death, editor Edward Aswell shaped these drafts into The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), with The Hills Beyond (1941) offering additional stories and fragments.
Wolfe’s fiction is marked by rhapsodic catalogues, incantatory rhythms, and a sweeping, often Whitmanesque embrace of the American panorama. Recurring themes include the hunger for home and belonging, the passage of time, the formation of artistic identity, and the ceaseless motion of modern society. His collaborative editorial process—especially with Perkins—became famous as an example of how prodigious raw material can be shaped without extinguishing its energy. While contemporaries sometimes contrasted Wolfe’s amplitude with the economy favored by other modernists, many recognized the singularity of his talent. His work continues to attract readers for its emotional intensity, sensory richness, and visionary ambition.
Wolfe died in the late 1930s, not yet forty, after a sudden and severe illness, leaving behind an extensive body of drafts and notebooks. Posthumous editions brought his later vision to readers, where they were received as both a culmination and a continuation of his lifelong attempt to render the American experience whole. His legacy rests on the audacity of that imaginative undertaking and on the lyrical force of his prose. Wolfe remains a touchstone for writers exploring autobiographical material at panoramic scale, and his novels are still studied for their scope, sound, and evocation of time, place, and memory.
To
MAXWELL EVARTS PERKINS
A GREAT EDITOR AND A BRAVE AND HONEST MAN, WHO STUCK TO THE WRITER OF THIS BOOK THROUGH TIMES OF BITTER HOPELESSNESS AND DOUBT AND WOULD NOT LET HIM GIVE IN TO HIS OWN DESPAIR, A WORK TO BE KNOWN AS “OF TIME AND THE RIVER” IS DEDICATED WITH THE HOPE THAT ALL OF IT MAY BE IN SOME WAY WORTHY OF THE LOYAL DEVOTION AND THE PATIENT CARE WHICH A DAUNTLESS AND UNSHAKEN FRIEND HAS GIVEN TO EACH PART OF IT, AND WITHOUT WHICH NONE OF IT COULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN
“Crito, my dear friend Crito, that, believe me, that is what I seem to hear, as the Corybants hear flutes in the air, and the sound of those words rings and echoes in my ears and I can listen to nothing else.”
“Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn, Im dunkeln Laub die Gold–Orangen glühn, Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht, Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht, Kennst du es wohl? Dahin! Dahin Möcht’ ich mit dir, O mein Geliebter, ziehn!
Kennst du das Haus, auf Säulen ruht sein Dach, Es glänzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach, Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an: Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan? Kennst du es wohl? Dahin! Dahin Möcht’ ich mit dir, O mein Beschützer, ziehn!
Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg? Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen Weg, In Höhlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brut, Es stürzt der Fels und über ihn die Flut: Kennst du ihn wohl? Dahin! Dahin Geht unser Weg; O Vater, lass uns ziehn!”
Of Time and the River
Book i Orestes: Flight Before Fury
... of wandering for ever and the earth again ... of seed-time, bloom, and the mellow-dropping harvest. And of the big flowers, the rich flowers, the strange unknown flowers.
Where shall the weary rest? When shall the lonely of heart come home? What doors are open for the wanderer? And which of us shall find his father, know his face, and in what place, and in what time, and in what land? Where? Where the weary of heart can abide for ever, where the weary of wandering can find peace, where the tumult, the fever, and the fret shall be for ever stilled.
Who owns the earth? Did we want the earth that we should wander on it? Did we need the earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever needs the earth shall have the earth: he shall be still upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room for ever.
Did he feel the need of a thousand tongues that he sought thus through the moil and horror of a thousand furious streets? He shall need a tongue no longer, he shall need no tongue for silence and the earth: he shall speak no word through the rooted lips, the snake’s cold eye will peer for him through sockets of the brain, there will be no cry out of the heart where wells the vine.
The tarantula is crawling through the rotted oak, the adder lisps against the breast, cups fall: but the earth will endure for ever. The flower of love is living in the wilderness, and the elm-root threads the bones of buried lovers.
The dead tongue withers and the dead heart rots, blind mouths crawl tunnels through the buried flesh, but the earth will endure for ever; hair grows like April on the buried breast and from the sockets of the brain the death flowers grow and will not perish.
O flower of love whose strong lips drink us downward into death, in all things far and fleeting, enchantress of our twenty thousand days, the brain will madden and the heart be twisted, broken by her kiss, but glory, glory, glory, she remains: Immortal love, alone and aching in the wilderness, we cried to you: You were not absent from our loneliness.
i
About fifteen years ago, at the end of the second decade of this century, four people were standing together on the platform of the railway station of a town in the hills of western Catawba[1]. This little station, really just a suburban adjunct of the larger town which, behind the concealing barrier of a rising ground, swept away a mile or two to the west and north, had become in recent years the popular point of arrival and departure for travellers to and from the cities of the east, and now, in fact, accommodated a much larger traffic than did the central station of the town, which was situated two miles westward around the powerful bend of the rails. For this reason a considerable number of people were now assembled here, and from their words and gestures, a quietly suppressed excitement that somehow seemed to infuse the drowsy mid-October afternoon[2] with an electric vitality, it was possible to feel the thrill and menace of the coming train.
An observer would have felt in the complexion of this gathering a somewhat mixed quality — a quality that was at once strange and familiar, alien and native, cosmopolitan and provincial. It was not the single native quality of the usual crowd that one saw on the station platforms of the typical Catawba town as the trains passed through. This crowd was more mixed and varied, and it had a strong colouring of worldly smartness, the element of fashionable sophistication that one sometimes finds in a place where a native and alien population have come together. And such an inference was here warranted: the town of Altamont a mile or so away was a well-known resort and the mixed gathering on the station platform was fairly representative of its population. But all of these people, both strange and native, had been drawn here by a common experience, an event which has always been of first interest in the lives of all Americans. This event is the coming of the train[3].
It would have been evident to an observer that of the four people who were standing together at one end of the platform three — the two women and the boy — were connected by the relationship of blood. A stranger would have known instantly that the boy and the young woman were brother and sister and that the woman was their mother. The relationship was somehow one of tone, texture, time, and energy, and of the grain and temper of the spirit. The mother was a woman of small but strong and solid figure. Although she was near her sixtieth year, her hair was jet-black and her face, full of energy and power, was almost as smooth and unlined as the face of a girl. Her hair was brushed back from a forehead which was high, white, full, and naked-looking, and which, together with the expression of her eyes, which were brown, and rather worn and weak, but constantly thoughtful, constantly reflective, gave her face the expression of straight grave innocence that children have, and also of strong native intelligence and integrity. Her skin was milk-white, soft of texture, completely colourless save for the nose, which was red, broad and fleshy at the base, and curiously masculine.
A stranger seeing her for the first time would have known somehow that the woman was a member of a numerous family, and that her face had the tribal look. He would somehow have felt certain that the woman had brothers and that if he could see them, they would look like her. Yet, this masculine quality was not a quality of sex, for the woman, save for the broad manlike nose, was as thoroughly female as a woman could be. It was rather a quality of tribe and character — a tribe and character that was decisively masculine.
The final impression of the woman might have been this:— that her life was somehow above and beyond a moral judgment, that no matter what the course or chronicle of her life may have been, no matter what crimes of error, avarice, ignorance, or thoughtlessness might be charged to her, no matter what suffering or evil consequences may have resulted to other people through any act of hers, her life was somehow beyond these accidents of time, training, and occasion, and the woman was as guiltless as a child, a river, an avalanche, or any force of nature whatsoever.
The younger of the two women was about thirty years old. She was a big woman, nearly six feet tall, large, and loose of bone and limb, almost gaunt. Both women were evidently creatures of tremendous energy, but where the mother suggested a constant, calm, and almost tireless force, the daughter was plainly one of those big, impulsive creatures of the earth who possess a terrific but undisciplined vitality, which they are ready to expend with a whole-souled and almost frenzied prodigality on any person, enterprise, or object which appeals to their grand affections.
This difference between the two women was also reflected in their faces. The face of the mother, for all its amazing flexibility, the startled animal-like intentness with which her glance darted from one object to another, and the mobility of her powerful and delicate mouth, which she pursed and convolved with astonishing flexibility in such a way as to show the constant reflective effort of her mind, was nevertheless the face of a woman whose spirit had an almost elemental quality of patience, fortitude and calm.
The face of the younger woman was large, high-boned, and generous and already marked by the frenzy and unrest of her own life. At moments it bore legibly and terribly the tortured stain of hysteria, of nerves stretched to the breaking point, of the furious impatience, unrest and dissonance of her own tormented spirit, and of impending exhaustion and collapse for her overwrought vitality. Yet, in an instant, this gaunt, strained, tortured, and almost hysterical face could be transformed by an expression of serenity, wisdom and repose that would work unbelievably a miracle of calm and radiant beauty on the nervous, gaunt, and tortured features.
Now, each in her own way, the two women were surveying the other people on the platform and the new arrivals with a ravenous and absorptive interest, bestowing on each a wealth of information, comment, and speculation which suggested an encyclopædic knowledge of the history of every one in the community.
“— Why, yes, child,” the mother was saying impatiently, as she turned her quick glance from a group of people who at the moment were the subject of discussion —“that’s what I’m telling you! — Don’t I know? ... Didn’t I grow up with all those people? ... Wasn’t Emma Smathers[4] one of my girlhood friends? ... That boy’s not this woman’s child at all. He’s Emma Smathers’ child by that first marriage.”
“Well, that’s news to me,” the younger woman answered. “That’s certainly news to me. I never knew Steve Randolph had been married more than once. I’d always thought that all that bunch were Mrs. Randolph’s children.”
“Why, of course not!” the mother cried impatiently. “She never had any of them except Lucille. All the rest of them were Emma’s children. Steve Randolph was a man of forty-five when he married her. He’d been a widower for years — poor Emma died in childbirth when Bernice was born — nobody ever thought he’d marry again and nobody ever expected this woman to have any children of her own, for she was almost as old as he was — why, yes! — hadn’t she been married before, a widow, you know, when she met him, came here after her first husband’s death from some place way out West — oh, Wyoming, or Nevada or Idaho, one of those States, you know — and had never had chick nor child, as the saying goes — till she married Steve. And that woman was every day of forty-four years old when Lucille was born.”
“Uh-huh! ... Ah-hah! the younger woman muttered absently, in a tone of rapt and fascinated interest, as she looked distantly at the people in the other group, and reflectively stroked her large chin with a big, bony hand. “So Lucille, then, is really John’s half-sister?”
“Why, of course!” the mother cried. “I thought every one knew that. Lucille’s the only one that this woman can lay claim to. The rest of them were Emma’s.”
“— Well, that’s certainly news to me,” the younger woman said slowly as before. “It’s the first I ever heard of it. ... And you say she was forty-four when Lucille was born?”
“Now, she was all of THAT,” the mother said. “I know. And she may have been even older.”
“Well,” the younger woman said, and now she turned to her silent husband, Barton, with a hoarse snigger, “it just goes to show that while there’s life there’s hope, doesn’t it? So cheer up, honey,” she said to him, “we may have a chance yet.” But despite her air of rough banter her clear eyes for a moment had a look of deep pain and sadness in them.
“Chance!” the mother cried strongly, with a little scornful pucker of the lips —“why, of course there is! If I was your age again I’d have a dozen — and never think a thing of it.” For a moment she was silent, pursing her reflective lips. Suddenly a faint sly smile began to flicker at the edges of her lips, and turning to the boy, she addressed him with an air of sly and bantering mystery:
“Now, boy,” she said —“there’s lots of things that you don’t know ... you always thought you were the last — the youngest — didn’t you?”
“Well, wasn’t I?” he said.
“H’m!” she said with a little scornful smile and an air of great mystery —“There’s lots that I could tell you —”
“Oh, my God!” he groaned, turning towards his sister with an imploring face. “More mysteries! ... The next thing I’ll find that there were five sets of triplets after I was born — Well, come on, Mama,” he cried impatiently. “Don’t hint around all day about it. ... What’s the secret now — how many were there?”
“H’m!” she said with a little bantering, scornful, and significant smile.
“O Lord!” he groaned again —“Did she ever tell you what it was?” Again he turned imploringly to his sister.
She snickered hoarsely, a strange high-husky and derisive falsetto laugh, at the same time prodding him stiffly in the ribs with her big fingers:
“Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi,” she laughed. “More spooky business, hey? You don’t know the half of it. She’ll be telling you next you were only the fourteenth.”
“H’m!” the older woman said, with a little scornful smile of her pursed lips. “Now I could tell him more than that! The fourteenth! Pshaw!” she said contemptuously —“I could tell him —”
“O God!” he groaned miserably. “I knew it! ... I don’t want to hear it.”
“K, k, k, k, k,” the younger woman snickered derisively, prodding him in the ribs again.
“No, sir,” the older woman went on strongly —“and that’s not all either! — Now, boy, I want to tell you something that you didn’t know,” and as she spoke she turned the strange and worn stare of her serious brown eyes on him, and levelled a half-clasped hand, fingers pointing, a gesture loose, casual, and instinctive and powerful as a man’s. —“There’s a lot I could tell you that you never heard. Long years after you were born, child — why, at the time I took you children to the Saint Louis Fair[5] —” here her face grew stern and sad, she pursed her lips strongly and shook her head with a short convulsive movement —“oh, when I think of it — to think what I went through — oh, awful, awful, you know,” she whispered ominously.
“Now, Mama, for God’s sake, I don’t want to hear it!” he fairly shouted, beside himself with exasperation and foreboding. “God-damn it, can we have no peace — even when I go away!” he cried bitterly, and illogically. “Always these damned gloomy hints and revelations — this Pentland spooky stuff,” he yelled —“this damned I-could-if-I-wanted-to-tell-you air of mystery, horror, and damnation!” he shouted incoherently. “Who cares? What does it matter?” he cried, adding desperately, “I don’t want to hear about it — No one cares.”
“Why, child, now, I was only saying —” she began hastily and diplomatically.
“All right, all right, all right,” he muttered. “I don’t care —”
“But, as I say, now,” she resumed.
“I don’t care!” he shouted. “Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace,” he muttered in a crazy tone as he turned to his sister. “A moment’s peace for all of us before we die. A moment of peace, peace, peace.”
“Why, boy, I’ll vow,” the mother said in a vexed tone, fixing her reproving glance on him, “what on earth’s come over you? You act like a regular crazy man. I’ll vow you do.”
“A moment’s peace!” he muttered again, thrusting one hand wildly through his hair. “I beg and beseech you for a moment’s peace before we perish![1q]”
“K, k, k, k, k,” the younger woman snickered derisively, as she poked him stiffly in the ribs —“There’s no peace for the weary. It’s like that river that goes on for ever,” she said with a faint loose curving of lewd humour around the edges of her generous big mouth —“Now you see, don’t you?” she said, looking at him with this lewd and challenging look. “You see what it’s like now, don’t you? ... YOU’RE the lucky one! YOU got away! You’re smart enough to go way off somewhere to college — to Boston — Harvard[6] — anywhere — but YOU’RE away from it. You get it for a short time when you come home. How do you think I stand it?” she said challengingly. “I have to hear it ALL the time. ... Oh, ALL the time, and ALL the time, and ALL the time!” she said with a kind of weary desperation. “If they’d only leave me ALONE for five minutes some time I think I’d be able to pull myself together, but it’s this way ALL the time and ALL the time and ALL the time. You see, don’t you?”
But now, having finished, in a tone of hoarse and panting exasperation, her frenzied protest, she relapsed immediately into a state of marked, weary, and dejected resignation.
“Well, I know, I know,” she said in a weary and indifferent voice. “ ... Forget about it ... Talking does no good ... Just try to make the best of it the little time you’re here. ... I used to think something could be done about it ... but I know different now,” she muttered, although she would have been unable to explain the logical meaning of these incoherent and disjointed phrases.
“Hah? ... What say?” the mother now cried sharply, darting her glances from one to another with the quick, startled, curiously puzzled intentness of an animal or a bird. “What say?” she cried sharply again, as no one answered. “I thought —”
But fortunately, at this moment, this strange and disturbing flash in which had been revealed the blind and tangled purposes, the powerful and obscure impulses, the tormented nerves, the whole tragic perplexity of soul which was of the very fabric of their lives, was interrupted by a commotion in one of the groups upon the platform, and by a great guffaw of laughter which instantly roused these three people from this painful and perplexing scene, and directed their startled attention to the place from which the laughter came.
And now again they heard the great guffaw — a solid “Haw! Haw! Haw!” which was full of such an infectious exuberance of animal good-nature that other people on the platform began to smile instinctively, and to look affectionately towards the owner of the laugh.
Already, at the sound of the laugh, the young woman had forgotten the weary and dejected resignation of the moment before, and with an absent and yet eager look of curiosity in her eyes, she was staring towards the group from which the laugh had come, and herself now laughing absently, she was stroking her big chin in a gesture of meditative curiosity, saying:
“Hah! Hah! Hah! ... That’s George Pentland. ... You can tell him anywhere by his laugh.”
“Why, yes,” the mother was saying briskly, with satisfaction. “That’s George all right. I’d know him in the dark the minute that I heard that laugh. — And say, what about it? He’s always had it — why, ever since he was a kid-boy — and was going around with Steve. ... Oh, he’d come right out with it anywhere, you know, in Sunday school, church, or while the preacher was sayin’ prayers before collection — that big, loud laugh, you know, that you could hear, from here to yonder, as the sayin’ goes. ... Now I don’t know where it comes from — none of the others ever had it in our family; now we all liked to laugh well enough, but I never heard no such laugh as that from any of ’em-there’s one thing sure, Will Pentland never laughed like that in his life — Oh, Pett, you know! Pett!”— a scornful and somewhat malicious look appeared on the woman’s face as she referred to her brother’s wife in that whining and affected tone with which women imitate the speech of other women whom they do not like —“Pett got so mad at him one time when he laughed right out in church that she was goin’ to take the child right home an’ whip him. — Told me, says to me, you know —‘Oh, I could wring his neck! He’ll disgrace us all,’ she says, ‘unless I cure him of it,’ says, ‘He burst right out in that great roar of his while Doctor Baines was sayin’ his prayers this morning until you couldn’t hear a word the preacher said.’ Said, ‘I was so mortified to think he could do a thing like that that I’d a-beat the blood right out of him if I’d had my buggy whip,’ says, ‘I don’t know where it comes from’— oh, sneerin’-like, you know,” the woman said, imitating the other woman’s voice with a sneering and viperous dislike —”‘I don’t know where it comes from unless it’s some of that common Pentland blood comin’ out in him’—‘Now you listen to me,’ I says; oh, I looked her in the eye, you know”— here the woman looked at her daughter with the straight steady stare of her worn brown eyes, illustrating her speech with the loose and powerful gesture of the half-clasped finger-pointing hand —”‘you listen to me. I don’t know where that child gets his laugh,’ I says, ‘but you can bet your bottom dollar that he never got it from his father — or any other Pentland that I ever heard of — for none of them ever laughed that way — Will, or Jim, or Sam, or George, or Ed, or Father, or even Uncle Bacchus,’ I said —‘no, nor old Bill Pentland either, who was that child’s great-grandfather — for I’ve seen an’ heard ’em all,’ I says. ‘And as for this common Pentland blood you speak of, Pett’— oh, I guess I talked to her pretty straight, you know,” she said with a little bitter smile, and the short, powerful, and convulsive tremor of her strong pursed lips — “‘as for that common Pentland blood you speak of, Pett,’ I says, ‘I never heard of that either — for we stood high in the community,’ I says, ‘and we all felt that Will was lowerin’ himself when he married a Creasman!’”
“Oh, you didn’t say that, Mama, surely not,” the young woman said with a hoarse, protesting, and yet abstracted laugh, continuing to survey the people on the platform with a bemused and meditative curiosity, and stroking her big chin thoughtfully as she looked at them, pausing from time to time to grin in a comical and rather formal manner, bow graciously and murmur:
“How-do-you-do? ah-hah! How-do-you-do, Mrs. Willis?”
“Haw! Haw! Haw!” Again the great laugh of empty animal good nature burst out across the station platform, and this time George Pentland turned from the group of which he was a member and looked vacantly around him, his teeth bared with savage joy, as, with two brown fingers of his strong left hand, he dug vigorously into the muscular surface of his hard thigh. It was an animal reflex, instinctive and unconscious, habitual to him in moments of strong mirth.
He was a powerful and handsome young man in his early thirties, with coal-black hair, a strong thick neck, powerful shoulders, and the bull vitality of the athlete. He had a red, sensual, curiously animal and passionate face, and when he laughed his great guffaw, his red lips were bared over two rows of teeth that were white and regular and solid as ivory.
— But now, the paroxysm of that savage and mindless laughter having left him, George Pentland had suddenly espied the mother and her children, waved to them in genial greeting, and excusing himself from his companions — a group of young men and women who wore the sporting look and costume of “the country club crowd”— he was walking towards his kinsmen at an indolent swinging stride, pausing to acknowledge heartily the greetings of people on every side, with whom he was obviously a great favourite.
As he approached, he bared his strong white teeth again in greeting, and in a drawling, rich-fibred voice, which had unmistakably the Pentland quality of sensual fullness, humour, and assurance, and a subtle but gloating note of pleased self-satisfaction, he said:
“Hello, Aunt Eliza, how are you? Hello, Helen — how are you, Hugh?” he said in his high, somewhat accusing, but very strong and masculine voice, putting his big hand in an easy affectionate way on Barton’s arm. “Where the hell you been keepin’ yourself, anyway?” he said accusingly. “Why don’t some of you folks come over to see us sometime? Elk was askin’ about you all the other day — wanted to know why Helen didn’t come round more often.”
“Well, George, I tell you how it is,” the young woman said with an air of great sincerity and earnestness. “Hugh and I have intended to come over a hundred times, but life has been just one damned thing after another all summer long. If I could only have a moment’s peace — if I could only get away by myself for a moment — if THEY would only leave me ALONE for an hour at a time, I think I could get myself together again — do you know what I mean, George?” she said hoarsely and eagerly, trying to enlist him in her sympathetic confidence —“If they’d only do something for THEMSELVES once in a while — but they ALL come to me when anything goes wrong — they never let me have a moment’s peace — until at times I think I’m going crazy — I get QUEER— funny, you know,” she said vaguely and incoherently. “I don’t know whether something happened Tuesday or last week or if I just imagined it.” And for a moment her big gaunt face had the dull strained look of hysteria.
“The strain on her has been very great this summer,” said Barton in a deep and grave tone. “It’s — it’s,” he paused carefully, deeply, searching for a word, and looked down as he flicked an ash from his long cigar, “it’s — been too much for her. Everything’s on her shoulders,” he concluded in his deep grave voice.
“My God, George, what is it?” she said quietly and simply, in the tone of one begging for enlightenment. “Is it going to be this way all our lives? Is there never going to be any peace or happiness for us? Does it always have to be this way? Now I want to ask you — is there nothing in the world but trouble?”
“Trouble!” he said derisively. “Why, I’ve had more trouble than any one of you ever heard of. ... I’ve had enough to kill a dozen people ... but when I saw it wasn’t goin’ to kill me, I quit worryin’. ... So you do the same thing,” he advised heartily. “Hell, don’t WORRY, Helen! ... It never got you anywhere. ... You’ll be all right,” he said. “You got nothin’ to worry over. You don’t know what trouble is.”
“Oh, I’d be all right, George — I think I could stand anything — all the rest of it — if it wasn’t for Papa. ... I’m almost crazy from worrying about him this summer. There were three times there when I knew he was gone. ... And I honestly believe I pulled him back each time by main strength and determination — do you know what I mean?” she said hoarsely and eagerly —“I was just determined not to let him go. If his heart had stopped beating I believe I could have done something to make it start again — I’d have stood over him and blown my breath into him — got my blood into him — shook him,” she said with a powerful, nervous movement of her big hands — “anything just to keep him alive.”
“She’s — she’s — saved his life — time after time,” said Barton slowly, flicking his cigar ash carefully away, and looking down deeply, searching for a word.
“He’d — he’d — have been a dead man long ago — if it hadn’t been for her.”
“Yeah — I know she has,” George Pentland drawled agreeably. “I know you’ve sure stuck by Uncle Will — I guess he knows it, too.”
“It’s not that I mind it, George — you know what I mean?” she said eagerly. “Good heavens! I believe I could give away a dozen lives if I thought it was going to save his life! ... But it’s the STRAIN of it. ... Month after month ... year after year ... lying awake at night wondering if he’s all right over there in that back room in Mama’s house — wondering if he’s keeping warm in that old cold house —”
“Why, no, child,” the older woman said hastily. “I kept a good fire burnin’ in that room all last winter — that was the warmest room in the whole place — there wasn’t a warmer —”
But immediately she was engulfed, swept aside, obliterated in the flood-tide of the other’s speech.
