Thomas Wolfe & October

Yesterday I missed a golden opportunity. I was thinking about October, and that thinking eventually led, after I'd already done my post for the day, to Thomas Wolfe, who wrote beautifully about the month. And it just so happened that yesterday, 3 October, was Wolfe's 106th birthday, even though he lived for only 38 years or so. I didn't make the connection of what an appropriate 3 October posting some of Wolfe's October writing might have made.

Wolfe was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1900. Having grown up in the same area, I feel a connection with this writer of Look Homeward, Angel (1929), and because his writing is often about the area where we both grew up, I'm particularly attracted to it.

Wolfe was a novelist, but his style, the flow of his words and images, was that of a poet. To demonstrate this, John S. Barnes created a book he called A Stone, a Leaf, a Door: Poems by Thomas Wolfe, and published it with Wolfe's publisher Charles Scribner's Sons in 1945, six years after Wolfe's death. Barnes took several passages from Wolfe's writing and broke up the prose into lines of verse. Here are some selected passages from a piece Barnes titled "October":

October had come again,
And that year it was sharp and soon:
Frost was early,
Burning the thick green on the mountain sides
To massed brilliant hues of blazing colors,
Painting the air with sharpness,
Sorrow and delight—
And with October.

Sometimes and often,
There was warmth by day,
An ancient drowsy light,
A golden warmth and pollenated haze in afternoon,
But over all the earth
There was the premonitory breath of frost,
An exultancy for all the men
Who were returning,
A haunting sorrow
For the buried men,
And for all those who were gone
And would not come again. . . .

October is the richest of the seasons:
The fields are cut,
The granaries are full,
The bins are loaded to the brim with fatness,
And from the cider-press the rich brown oozings
Of the York Imperials run.

The bee bores to the belly of the yellowed grape,
The fly gets old and fat and blue,
He buzzes loud, crawls slow,
Creeps heavily to death
On sill and ceiling,
The sun goes down in blood and pollen
Across the bronzed and mown fields
Of old October.

The corn is shocked:
It sticks out in yellow rows
Upon dried ears,
Fit now for great red barns in Pennsylvania,
And the big stained teeth of crunching horses.
The indolent hooves kick swiftly at the boards,
The barn is sweet with hay and leather,
Wood and apples—
This, and the clean dry crunching of the teeth
Are all:
The sweat, the labor, and the plow
Are over.
The late pears mellow on a sunny shelf;
Smoked hams hang to the warped barn rafters;
The pantry shelves are loaded
With 300 jars of fruit. . . .

Trains cross the continent
In a swirl of dust and thunder,
The leaves fly down the tracks behind them:
The great trains cleave through gulch and gulley,
They rumble with spoked thunder on the bridges
Over the powerful brown wash of mighty rivers,
They toil through hills,
They skirt the rough brown stubble of shorn fields,
They whip past empty stations in the little towns
And their great stride
Pounds its even pulse across America. . . .

Come to us, Father, in the watches of the night,
Come to us as you always came,
Bringing us
The invincible sustenance of your strength,
The limitless treasure of your bounty,
The tremendous structure of your life
That will shape all lost and broken things on earth
Again into a golden patter of exultancy and joy.

Come to us, Father,
While the winds howl in the darkness,
For October has come again
Bringing with it huge prophecies of death and life
And the great cargo of the men who will return.
For we are ruined, lost, and broken
If you do not come,
And our lives, like rotten chips,
Are whirled about us
Onward in darkness
To the sea.

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