Books: Mother and Son

THOMAS WOLFE'S LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER—Scribner ($3).

The father of the late novelist Thomas Clayton Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River) was a stonecutter of great rhetorical influence on his son. Echoes of his surging speech resound through Wolfe's novels. But the novelist's mother, a sinewy woman still living at the age of 83 in Asheville, N.C., was probably an even greater influence. She is a positive personality. "You told me," her son once wrote to Julia Elizabeth Wolfe, "that three great Americans had their birthday in February, and when I looked puzzled you said that you were the third." Readers may regret that Mrs. Wolfe's letters to her son are not included in this one-way correspondence, but they will appreciate her remarks as quoted by John Terry in his introduction.

Thomas Wolfe stood six feet, seven inches tall and was broad in proportion. As a child, says Mrs. Wolfe, Tom was breast-fed "until he was three and a half years old," slept with his mother "until he was a great big boy." Only when Tom got "what old-fashioned people called lice," did his mother consent to cut his "beautiful curls." She still clung to him, however, and kept him in short pants until two years before he went to the University of North Carolina.

A Mother Will Know. At 20, he caught a heavy cold, and when he took his handkerchief from his mouth after a coughing spell, he saw with horror "a tiny spot of blood on it." Life, that had hitherto been "desirable and glorious," was charged suddenly and forever with the terror of death. This terror spurred Wolfe's rebellion against those who urged him to look for security in life—"the crawling, abject, bird-in-a-hand theory." To his mother's plea that he settle down to teach in Asheville, he replied "I must make or ruin myself from this time on, by my own pattern." But for the time being he depended on his mother's money.

He went to the late Professor George Pierce Baker's drama course at Harvard. He told his mother: "By God I'll write a great play. ... All the critics in the world may say it's good but a man's own mother will know." His letters revealed his desperate unease, his steady struggle to convince his mother that her money was being well spent at Harvard, and to show Asheville that his way of life was a superior one. He would not come home and "stagnate," but if his "beautiful dreams" came true he "would return home like a hero." If he failed—"I think I would kill myself." When his mother did not seem to reassure him, he petulantly protested: "You don't want me at home, you said nothing about my returning. . . . You have about deserted me. . . . How in God's name can I believe you would forget me in a year's time?"

Leaving Harvard with his plays unplayed on Broadway, he bowed to the "inexorable circumstances" of poverty and took a teaching job at New York University.