The Web and the Rock
The Web and the Rock is an American bildungsroman novel by Thomas Wolfe, published posthumously in the 1939. Like its sequel, You Can't Go Home Again (and also The Hills Beyond) it was extracted by Edward Aswell from a larger manuscript after Wolfe's death.
 | |
| Author | Thomas Wolfe |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Wolfe himself |
| Genre | bildungsroman |
| Set in | North Carolina, New York City, Europe |
| Publisher | Harper & Sons |
Publication date | 1939 |
| Pages | 695 |
| OCLC | 588795334 |
| Followed by | You Can't Go Home Again |
| Text | The Web and the Rock at Internet Archive |
Description
The novel's protagonist is George "Monk" Webber, a novelist from North Carolina who is clearly based on Wolfe himself and is reminiscent of Eugene Gant, the protagonist of Wolfe's earlier novels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, also based by Wolfe on himself.
Wolfe believed that the book represented an artistic evolution for him, which is why he changed the name of the protagonist from Eugene Gant to George Webber, who was also more mature and aware than Gant. The book, which like all of Wolfe's major works mirrors Wolfe's own life experience, takes Webber from a Southern small-town boyhood to college (with its escape from the "web" of family ties), to New York City where he seeks the meaning of life and attempts to establish himself as a novelist, engages in a stormy affair with the sophisticated married woman Esther Jack (based on Wolfe's real-life affair with Aline Bernstein), goes to Europe, is disillusioned by Hitler's rise to power, and dreams of returning to his home town, but realizes that he can't recapture the past: the book's ending words are the title of his next novel – "you can't go home again."[1][2][3]
My sister and I were brave and beautiful as children. We were so strong, so faithful, and so full of love. The vexed weave and fabric of our childhood was so rich, but full of pain and joy, and most uncertain. There were my father and my mother, and our lovely Bella. They were so lost and beautiful that it almost seems now we had been the parents of our parents, the mothers of the children that begot us. We were both so young, so clear, so unperplexed, so richly gifted. The gift of structure and of beauty was alive in us, and everything we made was good. The earth was ours because we loved the earth. We had the touch and gift of nature in us. We saw the life that all things have in them – the life that slowly beats its pulse out of the thickness of an old brick wall, the life that hangs wearily in the set of an old warped door, the life that lives in chairs and tables, and in old knives with worn silver handles, the life of all things that a man has used and dwelt in – a coat, a shoe, the set of your battered hat, my dear one. ... But – you can't go home again.
— Thomas Wolfe, The Web and the Rock[3]
Creation
In May 1938, Wolfe gave his manuscript to his new editor, Edward Aswell. According to John Halberstadt, "It was not a finished product in any sense. It was a collection of materials [that Wolfe's previous editor, Maxwell] Perkins had cut from earlier novels, previously published sketches or even short novels, chapters in variant versions, fragments, new writing — only the 'enormous skeleton' of a novel... perhaps one and a quarter million words, some five thousand pages, over two hundred chapters." Wolfe then left New York City and died later that year.[4]
Thus, The Web and the Rock was very heavily edited by Aswell. According to Halberstadt, Wolfe's later books (including The Web and the Rock) were "not really written by Wolfe in the usual sense but were predominantly the work of... Aswell." Aswell removed the entire first section (covering Webber's ancestors) and later published this as a separate work, The Hills Beyond. Aswell then crafted a new opening, cut fifty chapters, and recast other chapters by combining sections of various chapters and writing connective material himself.[4] Unused parts of the manuscript would later be published as You Can't Go Home Again.
Wolfe's biographer David Herbert Donald complained that Aswell's work was butchery and went well beyond the proper remit of an editor: "From standardizing the names and the tenses of Wolfe's manuscript, Aswell moved on to modifying the rhythm of his prose, to altering his characterizations, and to cutting and shaping his chapters. Greatly exceeding the professional responsibility of an editor, Aswell took impermissible liberties with Wolfe's manuscript, and his interference seriously eroded the integrity of Wolfe's text. Far from deserving commendation, Aswell's editorial interference was, both from the standpoint of literature and of ethics, unacceptable"[5]
Harold Bloom, however, praised Aswell's work: "Wolfe's Byronic blank verse (very blank) masking as prose, left pretty much unaltered by Maxwell Perkins, is less tiresomely obtrusive after being worked over by Aswell."[5]
Leo Gurko, in his book Thomas Wolfe: Beyond the Romantic Ego, wrote of the book "Read, as it should be, as an intensely articulated mural, first of the provincial and then, climatically, of the urban landscape, it not only does not suffer by comparison with its famous predecessor, but is not to be compared [with anything else]".[6] Kirkus Reviews described The Web and the Rock as a further example of Wolfe's "utter inability to select and discard, his obsession with himself and his actions and motives and emotional turmoils" coupled with his "queer streak of genius", resulting in a "turgid outpouring of his own emotional life, put into fictional form" which demonstrates "the same weaknesses, even more sharply emphasized, and the same sense of power that made his earlier work memorable".[2]
References
- "The Web and the Rock". Goodreads. Retrieved November 12, 2018.
- "The Web and the Rock". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved November 12, 2018.
- Wolfe, Thomas (1939). The Web and The Rock. New York and London: Harper & Brothers. ISBN 978-0807123898. Retrieved November 12, 2018.
- John Halberstadt (March 19, 1981). "Who Wrote Thomas Wolfe's Last Novels?". New York Review of Books. Retrieved November 12, 2018.
- Harold Bloom (February 8, 1987). "Passionate Beholder of American in Trouble". New York Times. Retrieved November 12, 2018.
- Gurko, Leo (1975). Thomas Wolfe: Beyond the Romantic Ego. Crowell. ISBN 978-0690007510. Retrieved November 12, 2018.