Books: Legend of a Giant

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THOMAS WOLFE (441 pp.)—Elizabeth Nowell—Doubleday ($5.95).

Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.

—Joseph Conrad Thomas Wolfe was an undisciplined, ungovernable American Conrad whose sea was the land of his birth. His words, seeking "to find language again in its primitive sinews," rioted onto paper in millions, growing out of him, over him, and sometimes beyond him. In the West a few years before he died, he saw a sequoia for the first time. He stared upward for a moment in unbelieving silence, then ran to the big tree, his long arms stretched wide. It was a boyish gesture, but this man of 35 still believed that he might draw into his embrace the biggest thing that lived.

He strode along in his size 13 shoes, embarrassed by his 6-ft. 6-in., 240-lb. frame, carrying his eccentricities with him until fame had transformed them into legend. He seldom washed, changed his shirt or had a haircut; he could live for hours, even days, on cigarettes and coal black coffee, then eat twelve eggs, two quarts of milk and an entire loaf of bread in one breakfast. Wild-eyed and forever talking with all the intensity of his written prose, he sprayed everyone in range with reservoirs of spittle from the corners of his mouth. Some thought him ludicrous, but thousands worshiped the ground his feet never quite touched. Sooner or later he accused all his friends of tormenting him, but he needed them badly, and once, at a party in his new Manhattan apartment, he reached to the ceiling with a black crayon and wrote: "Merry Christmas to all my friends and love from Tom."

This first full-scale biography of Wolfe, by the late Elizabeth Nowell, his literary agent who four years ago edited an impressive collection of his letters, overflows with the portrait of an overflowing man.

Mother & Son. She writes economically about his early years in Asheville, N.C., where his mother kept a boarding house called the Old Kentucky Home, his father ran a marble yard, and each parent occupied a separate dwelling. Wolfe's seven brothers and sisters drifted aimlessly back and forth between the two, sleeping where they pleased; but the youngest child stayed with his mother. A little boy with long curls, Thomas Clayton Wolfe was not weaned until he was 3½, and slept beside his mother until he was "a great big boy." All this is background for the two main relationships in the novelist's adult life: his six-year, mother-son love affair with a married woman nearly twice his age, and his eight-year, father-son working partnership with Editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribner.