The Last Look Around

A WESTERN JOURNAL (72 pp.)--Thomas Wolfe--University of Pittsburgh ($3).

Thomas Wolfe was only 37 when he died, but there had been nothing small-scale or quiet about the life he left behind. His 6 ft. 5 1/2, 240 Ib. frame required massive feedings and guzzlings, and his stormy, undisciplined manuscripts were big enough to fill a crate. A natural wanderer, he was always on the prowl, and the area that fascinated him most was his own U.S.A.

In the spring of 1938, just after he had delivered 1,200,000 words of manuscript* to his publisher, Wolfe headed for the Pacific Northwest, the only part of the U.S. he had never seen. In Portland, Ore., he met a newspaperman who was about to start on a high-speed tour of the Western national parks. The American Automobile Association was paying expenses and providing a white-painted Ford for the junket. When Wolfe was invited to go along, he jumped at the chance.

Scenic Spree. A Western Journal is the diary Wolfe kept on the hectic two-week trip through eleven parks in eight states (distance covered: 4,632 miles). Judged as literature, these hurried jottings are unimportant except to Wolfe students and cultists. But like his novels and stories, they reflect Wolfe's insatiable appetite for evidence of his country's natural variety and grandeur. He was, as a close friend remarked, "a man who could get drunk on scenery," and the Journal shows him on one of his happiest sprees.

Some of his entries are almost hiccuping with raw poetry. In Bryce Canyon he saw: "A million wind-blown pinnacles of salmon pink and fiery white all fused together like stick candy--all suggestive of a child's fantasy of heaven . . ." In Salt Lake City he let loose a hot blast at Mormonism: "The harsh ugly temple, the temple sacrosanct, by us unvisited, unvisitable, so ugly, grim, grotesque, and blah . . . Enough, enough, of all this folly, this cruelty and this superstition--into the white car now and out of town." But what the Mormons had done with the countryside sent him into an ecstatic chant: "And then below the most lovely and enchanted valley of them all--the great valley around Logan . . . the very core and fruit of Canaan--a vast sweet plain of unimaginable riches--loaded with fruit, lusty with cherry orchards, green with its thick and lush fertility and dotted everywhere with the beauty of incredible tree? .. ."

"Take It Easy!" Huge and untidy in a rumpled brown suit, Wolfe reminded his companions of a "big, awkward bear." When the beer and liquor flowed, he was anything but bearish, but as the white Ford bounced down steep canyon roads he kept bawling to the driver, "Take it easy!" Crossing Montana towards the end of the trip he saw "suddenly--the tops of the great train lined with clusters of hoboes--a hundred of them--some sprawled out, sitting, others erect, some stretched out on their backs lazily inviting the luminous American weather . . . and the 'bos roll past across America silently regarding us--the pity, terror, strangeness, and magnificence of it all."

From the notes in the Journal, Wolfe hoped that he might "succeed in recording a whole hemisphere of life and of America . . . My ringers are itching to write again." That itch was never worked off. Four days after the trip was over, Tom Wolfe had pneumonia. Ten weeks later he was dead of a brain infection.

* The posthumous novels The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again, and a collection of short stories, The Hills Beyond.

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