Live it all, tell it all

William Faulkner had Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) as the most promising writer of his time, and we will never know how far he would have gone due to his early death, before his 38th birthday. Well, here is Thomas Wolfe. Not very well known in Spain, where El Ángel que mira nos (Valdemar) was translated long ago and the one considered for his most ambitious work, Del tiempo y el río (Montesinos and, later, Piel de Zapa), Wolfe was absolutely admired by most of the great American storytellers, from Faulkner himself to Philip Roth, through Scott Fitzgerald or Jack Kerouac. He was a torrential, incontinent, wild writer, of what his literature suffers, reason why his most finished and round work perhaps are these Talesthat now publishes Foam Pages and that are added to those that Peripheral had already published in separate volumes ( The Lost Child, A Door I Never Found, Speculation, Sister Death, and Old Rivers ). In the movie The Book Publisher his relationship with his publisher (that is, the man who read his texts on behalf of the publisher) Maxwell Perkins, who was also one of other greats, is fairly well reproduced; a relationship that was rather a struggle to tame Wolfe's wild writing, as Perkins was concerned with shaping texts that Wolfe was unable to contain and control.

Wolfe wrote wildly. He was a man of irrepressible vitality, his desire for totality was to tell everything, read everything, live everything, but his logically autobiographical writing is in an expansive way, that is to say: he does not intend to speak first of all about himself and his personal experience, but of the world through which he walks, loves, laughs, sings, lives ... The protagonist of his texts is not he, but the world in which he lives as he sees it, and this precision seems fundamental to me to value his work beyond the autobiographical genre, today as rampant as it is fashionable.

His style is of a descriptive quality as has rarely been found in contemporary literature.

The explosion of life that his books contain does not stop remembering another vitalist: Walt Whitman. The song to development, to progress (so typical of the time), to the city, to the country, to pain and love, to hope and misfortune has in Wolfe both of elegy and drama because his lucidity, accompanied by the Compassion (and I mention compassion as a positive and vigorous value) and enthusiasm for life and for the America that was being made, undoubtedly comes from the Whitman song. But although the novel often leads him to overflow, the tales, of a smaller size, give the measure of his genius, who was also his worst enemy. Hence the extraordinary importance of this volume.

Wolfe's writing, of an intensity and descriptive quality as has rarely been found in contemporary literature, is, as a result of the character of its author, cumulative, that is, it uses the accumulation of adjectives in its eagerness to surround the name and extract its essence; and even at the risk of being repetitive, it reaches a potential for expressive beauty out of the ordinary. Several of his stories are, rather than stories, reflections on reality, always without losing their style, while those that are structurally and formally more consistent with the more traditional construction are admirably resolved, both the shorter ones (see, for example , 'Boom Town' or 'Four Lost Men') as in the longer ones ('The Lost Boy', a wonderful text on the death of Wolfe's little brother, a masterpiece of the use of point of view).

There are stories that are pure reflective speculation (this is the case of the splendid 'There is no door'); others are customary (the wonderful 'The Sun and the Rain', a display of observation of the way of being of some people), or 'The train and the city', with echoes of the way of doing of O. Henry. Sometimes he writes as a recitation of a prayer, others in an enthusiastic tone, others with compassion, others with pure emotion, others with an air of sermon, others in an elegiac way, but the constant is always the understanding of the human heart, so that even in the More somber and painful texts there is always a background of celebration of life and sadness of a door that never found. Let's not forget that Wolfe died at 38 years old. And, of course, this writing is a constant breeding ground for literary images loaded with impressive beauty.

It may seem that Wolfe needed a Maxwell Perkins at his side; that's true, but only to protect it from excess. In fact, the structure of many of these stories perfectly complies with Henry James' mandate that intrigue must emanate from characters and situations and not the other way around (which is the characteristic of books that “are read in one fell swoop ", So typical of best sellers ). Even when it takes time to get into the subject because he likes to prepare what is coming, we read avidly because what interests us is not only what he is about to tell, but how he tells it, in such a comprehensive and integrating way that surpasses the anecdote to fill it with people, reality and sensations that create a continuous expectation, to the point that it often seems that he goes into a garden, as they say, from which he always leaves to return, enriched, to the heart of the story. What is not recommended is reading the book all the time, which can be exhausting, but getting used to living happily with it.

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Author: Thomas Wolfe.

Translator: Amelia Pérez de Villar.

Editorial: Foam Pages, 2020.

Format: hardcover (952 pages, 39 euros).

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