Reading Wolfe, Listening to Mozart
 | | Harry T. Cook |
We know for certain that Thomas Wolfe, one of the celebrated American novelists of the first half of the 20th century, was considered by his editors and not a few critics to be prolix in the extreme. Many of his readers, though, could not get enough of the detailed fullness of his descriptions of such a singular thing as a meal. I am one such reader.
By inference it is assumed that not a few late-18th century musicians and music critics were convinced that Wolfgang Mozart employed too many notes in his more than 600 compositions over 30 years. I have listened to Mozart's music for most of 65 years and sung in ensembles some of his choral works. I could not abide a deletion of so much as a sixteenth note.
Wolfe died at 38, Mozart at 35, and the question where both of them are concerned is how would their work have progressed if each had lived just another 10 years. What literary and musical wonders would we now have? Surely novels that topped out at 250,000 words each before Wolfe's editors balked as first they did in 1928.
Surely, too, ever more intricate compositions would have flowed from Mozart's quill pen as he replicated on paper what he was hearing already fully orchestrated in his head, no doubt with some busybody or another telling him that he could do with fewer notes.
I cannot tell you how many words I have written in my 76 years. With eight books to my credit -- or debit, depending on who's talking -- and years' worth of news stories, book reviews, editorials, op-ed columns, essays, exegeses, sermons, lecture notes and letters, I think I would not be far wrong in saying that some millions of words have been put down by the nib of my pen, have been pounded out on two different Smith-Corona manual typewriters and, in the last 35 years, on computer keyboards.
My professor in advanced composition once wrote across the top of a piece I had written this corrective: "Steady on there with the adjectives and adverbs." In a face-to-face moment after class, he told me that such parts of speech can be "the mashed potatoes of an already boring dinner." I protested, saying that a reader needed to be able to see what I had seen and hear what I had heard in order to comprehend what I was describing.
In a somewhat sympathetic and sidelong glance, he noticed a copy of Wolfe's "Of Time and the River" -- all 912 pages of it -- under my arm. "Very well," he said, "but it will not be necessary to blind or deafen readers."
Then came graduate school among scholars some of whose lectures were frequently long and complex. That played to what I thought was my long suit, so I let go at length in my papers and, in the end, to a veritable thesis that had as many footnotes as Mozart may have written sixteenth notes into a presto movement of a piano concerto.
At my oral examination, the effort elicited this from one professor as he thumbed through the sheaf of typewritten pages: "I wouldn't have thought that you would have written so many words to explain just one word in the whole Bible" -- pointing out that the then-new Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible had devoted only three columns to the term. It was the Hebrew word zakar generally rendered as "to remember." I had chosen an alternative translation: "to think about" and went on from there unsparing of manuscript paper and typewriter ribbon.
Given the professor's comment, I thought my dense paragraphs seeded with many a subordinate clause and penned-in Hebrew characters had doomed me. But it was the same professor who said rather offhandedly at the end of that grueling afternoon, speaking for the rest of the committee, "Oh, by the way, we gave you Distinction," meaning in effect that I had passed with honors, degree assured. He added: "You, sir, have become a budding scholar."
It is not known what Mozart did after his opera "Abduction From the Seraglio" was received with enormous enthusiasm, but from Wolfe's own words we know what he did when Charles Scribner's Sons accepted the manuscript of what turned out to be "Look Homeward, Angel":
"I left the publisher's office that day and entered into the great swarm of men and women who passed constantly along Fifth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street and presently I found myself at 110th Street, and from that day to this I have never known how I got there."/1
Something akin to that experience was my own 35 years later. I was so elated by the results of the examination that I walked around campus on my own private cloud, feet barely touching the sidewalk and mindlessly ending up many blocks from where I needed to be next. Never since that day has my self-confidence been at so intense a level.
There I was, just 25 -- a kid who had spent most of the first eight years of his education in a four-room school house in village with a population struggling to get to 100, who graduated high school in a class of 28 and from a small college with fewer than 1,300 students in all -- now spoken of as a scholar by a noted professor whom already I had idolized and who, naturally, had just become a god to me.
Soon enough, though, what Wolfe, upon Scribner's release of his first book, called "the fatal impingement of time" shocked me with the thought that this degree I had earned with Distinction on the oral examination could not be the end for me, that I would have to deserve it by going on and on to deeper research and ever more serious writing. Wolfe's own problem was the dreaded "next book" on which he ended up spending the ensuing five years and much of his psychic vitality.
Eerily, then, they came to me -- the last words of Wolfe's last novel: "Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken to me in the night, and told me that I shall die, I know not where. Saying: 'To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving ...'"/2
Only some time later did I learn that Mozart's last work was his Requiem and that he died with it left incomplete. I knew already that Wolfe's last two novels were edited and published posthumously -- each artist having run out of days well before he ran out of ideas. To me the recurring thought of Wolfe's "fatal impingement of time" makes In paradisum deducant te angeli seem like a threat rather than a promise of bliss. Not now!
I hasten to state that I do not for one minute delude myself into thinking that I could ever reach so much as the foothills of the mountain ranges from which Wolfe wrote and Mozart composed. Withal, I go on reading and re-reading the works of the former and listening again and again to the music of the latter ... that is until I feel the "fatal impingement of time" nagging at me. Then to the desk and the oxygen of words.
One of the Genesis writers depicted the gods "speaking" creation into being. St. John the Evangelist imagined that Jesus Christ was the "word" (λογος) that was before time. Unwillingly to quarrel with propositions I cannot with any coherence debate, I am content to treat the word with great respect inasmuch as what we say and what we hear, what we write and what we read are the fundamentals of human communication.
So very much writing is reiteration of the trivial committed in banal, clich�d and grammatically flawed prose. There can be, as well, allegations of too many words or too many notes. Yet no one who matters notices their number if each is deemed essential to the ideas being communicated. All of which is to say, writing cannot be a casual, offhand occupation -- not if the word is to become flesh.
1/ Wolfe, Thomas. "The Story of a Novel," The Portable Wolfe. New York, NY. The Viking Press, 1946. 567
2/ Wolfe, Thomas. You Can't Go Home Again. New York, NY. Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1941. 743
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