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• Title: Wolfe's "Drug Store": Theme and Variation in the Hound of Darkness (Thomas Wolfe) (Critical Essay)
• Author : Thomas Wolfe Review
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 193 KB

Description

Thomas Wolfe believed that Americans were a nighttime people, and he filled his first novel with nighthawks: the Altamont of Look Homeward, Angel gains depth and life as Ben Gant and his cronies from the paper leave their night shifts and meet up with doctors, undertakers and socialites at the all-night Uneeda Lunch while others sleep. "The Face of Night," later named "Death the Proud Brother," consists of passages on nighttime occurrences and was originally planned for, but not included in, Of Time and the River. A manuscript version of "The Bums at Sunset" ends on an apostrophe to night that, although excised from the version in From Death to Morning, is retained in The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe (277-78). (1) In the short novel "Death the Proud Brother," (2) the narrator grows up among "that strange and lonely company of men who prowl the night" (15) and comes to find "the immortal beauty of America.... at the heart of night, of dark, proud, secret night ..." (16). In 1935, after seeing the American West on his trip to Boulder, Colorado, Wolfe asked Maxwell Perkins to announce a forthcoming book on America at night. Inspired by the methods of film structure, in which images can be shortened, altered, and assembled at will, Wolfe imagined panoramic shots of the American land, zooms, a montage of scenes with characters from all parts of the country. He meant to arrange the pieces as "a great tone-symphony of night," not focalized by "a definite personality," thus "blast[ing] forever the charge of 'autobiography'" that had been dogging him ("To Maxwell" 179-80; emphasis in orig.). Wolfe's projected "book of the night" was, however, never published as he had intended. Rather, he allotted some parts to the Webber and Joyner cycle that he turned to instead, and others went into "A Prologue to America," published in Vogue in February 1938. Combining not so much "skits" as distinct voices running into and echoing one another, the Vogue piece exemplifies what Wolfe meant by a symphonic style. "A Prologue to America" also serves as precursor to The Hound of Darkness, a collection of sixteen dramatic pieces edited by John L. Idol Jr. and published by the Thomas Wolfe Society in 1986. As Idol points out in his foreword, the sketches Wolfe had been collecting in a ledger combine to form a tone-symphony of sorts (xviii). Keeping to the symphonic conceit, I believe that one of the pieces that make up The Hound of Darkness, "The Drug Store" (81-88), sounds a basic Wolfean theme, one that swells in his characters' hearts at night and is recognizable elsewhere in brilliant variations. Although it is not the first sketch in the collection, "The Drug Store" carries a basic message and reminds us of a well-known lament. It is set in a South Carolina town at the end of a hot day, a location that affords an opportunity to echo what Wolfe has elsewhere had to say about the South. I will suggest that it is no coincidence that Wolfe chose this setting to strike the first notes of the theme of The Hound of Darkness: nighttime's special status in the passage of time.

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