You can't go home again
By Susan Swan

From Thomas Wolfe's old suite at the Chelsea Hotel, author Susan Swan
considers the potent and difficult legacies of the writer and her own father

from National Post
Saturday, June 18, 2005

I rented Thomas Wolfe's old suite at the Chelsea Hotel in New York this spring to touch base with an early mentor. Born in 1900 in Asheville, N.C., Wolfe lived in the Chelsea before his death at 38 from tuberculosis. He was one of the great mid- 20th-century American writers whose books inspired me to become a writer.

I used to thrill over Wolfe's words: "I believe we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found ... I think the true discovery of America is before us."

Contemporary novelists rarely sound that hopeful. The Holocaust and Sept. 11 hadn't happened. Wolfe could write passionately about the world around him as if he were a prophet, confident he was speaking for everyone when he spoke for America. It's Thomas Wolfe, not Tom, I point out to young friends who haven't read his magnificent and uneven novels, which closely follow his own life.

Wolfe was only a year older than my father. Like my father, he was too young to enlist in the First World War. And like my father, Wolfe was a giant, at 6-foot-8. After Wolfe's death, the staff at the Chelsea found a pair of his size-13 shoes in the hotel basement. A member of the Thomas Wolfe Society quickly came and took them away. Wolfe's writing still tends to invite such touching acts of homage.

It's because of my father that I can imagine Wolfe pacing up and down in these rooms writing late into the day before an evening of heavy drinking.

If he stood in the small alcove that houses the kitchen, you would have seen light winking up and down the edges of his large frame. Big men fill doorways, and their bulk creates interesting lighting effects. They also share a burden that shorter people don't understand. They are seen as targets by other men who want to test their masculinity against their size. Women want to shelter under their large frames and be protected.

My father, a gentle, compassionate person, handled these projections by patting women reassuringly and by joking with the men. Wolfe didn't have the same ease. In Look Homeward, Angel, his great novel about his childhood and early youth, Wolfe recreated his family on the page, explaining why he had to leave them. In You Can't Go Home Again, he described literary fame coming to
a young writer like himself in New York. His protagonist, as Wolfe did, falls in love with an older woman, a theatre designer, and then leaves her because he believes she will ruin his art.

One biographer claimed Wolfe imagined he had to sabotage the relationships with the people he loved to protect himself. And so he ended up here alone at the Chelsea. He died in Baltimore, but it was here that he lived his last days, driving himself relentlessly, writing, always writing, and excluding anyone who threatened him with intimacy.

Like Wolfe, my country doctor father threw himself into his work absolutely. He spent little time with his children. Fathers of that generation tended to be like that. My father said he was doing it for us; Wolfe said he was doing it for his art. But were they really?

My father loved my mother deeply, but he was married to his work, my mother's friends said. "He may be your husband but he belongs to us," one of his patients told my mother. My mother responded by telling us that doctors shouldn't have wives. Yet my father left a potent legacy. His community in
our small Ontario town adored him, and he rewarded them with selfless care-taking, even keeping German textbooks by his bed so he could speak to patients who were new immigrants.

And of course Wolfe left his novels, magnificent portraits of another age in
America. When I became a writer and then had a child, my mother didn't know how I would combine writing with a family, but I was determined to try. My daughter is grown up now and a strong, successful young woman in her own right. Still, looking back, there were days when I chafed under the single-minded example of men like my father and Thomas Wolfe.

They were great role models when it came to dedicating themselves to their work, but they didn't show me how to integrate a career with intimate relationships. In the end, the fanaticism of that older generation of fathers
makes me sad.

Neither Wolfe nor my father when I was a child was good at intimacy, although both men may have sensed they were cheating themselves. Toward the end of his life, my father spent more time with my mother and became skeptical about the way he had worked. Wolfe died too young to reach that stage of self-doubt. How do you excel at your work and be good to those you love? What would either of them say about it now, I wonder?

It's getting late. In a mirror, I can see the tiny yellow and green lights of New York oscillating like dwarf fires on a remote planet. The suite with its faded baronial splendor must look a lot as it did when Wolfe lived here. I wish Wolfe could answer me, I think, as I light candles on the mantel with its hand-carved neo-classical woodwork.

You can't go home again, he famously wrote, because both you and home have changed. He made a profound point, but thinking about Father's Day (by the hearth that once warmed one of America's greatest writers), I wish you could.

Susan Swan's new novel, What Casanova Told Me, is published this month in Vintage paperback in Canada and in hardcover in the U.S. by Bloomsbury. She is a humanities professor at York University.