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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
In his seminal work, 'Look Homeward, Angel,' Thomas Wolfe provides readers with a poignant and introspective exploration of human existence in the early 20th century American South. The novel is a rich tapestry of vivid scenes and detailed character portraits that capture the essence of small-town life and the complexities of family relationships. Wolfe's lyrical prose and stream-of-consciousness style make for a deeply immersive reading experience that delves into themes of longing, identity, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. This novel remains a classic in American literature for its profound insights into human nature and the eloquence with which it conveys the human experience. The novel is a must-read for anyone interested in Southern literature, coming-of-age stories, and the complexities of family dynamics. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL
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Table of Contents
Introduction
At its core, this book traces the struggle between the anchoring spell of home and the centrifugal pull of departure, as a young mind listens to the echo of family voices, feels the weight of time set like stone, and imagines an angel’s uplift toward distances beyond the town’s streets, storefronts, and hills, where promise glitters and loss shadows every possible path, so that yearning and belonging, desire and memory, intimacy and escape circle one another in widening arcs until the very idea of self must be forged from the tension between staying and going, remembering and remaking, loving and leaving.
Look Homeward, Angel is the first novel of Thomas Wolfe, published in 1929 by Charles Scribner’s Sons after intensive editing by Maxwell Perkins. Composed in the late 1920s, it reflects Wolfe’s ambition to transform lived experience into sweeping art. Emerging amid a vibrant American literary moment, the novel stood apart for its breadth and its rhapsodic style. Perkins, renowned for championing major writers of the era, helped shape Wolfe’s vast manuscript into the book readers encountered, a collaboration that has itself become part of American publishing lore. The result announced Wolfe as a major new voice and placed the novel immediately in national conversation.
The novel’s premise is straightforward and potent: a gifted, restless boy named Eugene Gant grows up in the fictional town of Altamont, North Carolina, a thinly veiled portrait of Asheville. Around him circle the forces that form and challenge him. His father, a stonecutter, works among marble and monuments, an angel figure presiding as emblem and mystery. His mother operates a boardinghouse, where the fluid traffic of guests brings the outer world to the family’s doorstep. From these rooms and streets, Eugene looks outward, absorbing the speech, customs, and energies of a region while testing the boundaries of his own identity.
Wolfe’s achievement lies not only in what happens but in how it feels on the page. The prose surges with sensory density, with lists, cadences, and sudden bursts of private revelation that place readers inside Eugene’s changing apprehensions. Scenes of family, town life, school, and labor accrue in sequences that privilege mood and perception over conventional plot mechanics. This amplitude is intentional: it creates a panoramic coming-of-age canvas that includes textures often missed by leaner narratives. If the book is grand in scope, it is just as precise in registering the minute shifts of desire, shame, pride, and wonder that shape a young consciousness.
Its classic status rests on this fusion of scale and intimacy, a wager that the specific life of one family and town can carry the weight of national experience. The novel insists that ordinary places hold mythic energies, that a boy’s awakening can mirror a country’s restless imagination. In doing so, it expanded the possibilities for autobiographical fiction in America, encouraging later writers to treat personal history as public art. Readers return to it for the audacity of its sentences and the tenderness of its gaze, finding in its exuberance a refreshing counterpoint to the cool restraint often associated with its contemporaries.
The book’s path to publication is also part of its legend. Wolfe delivered an enormous manuscript whose size and shapelessness challenged conventional boundaries. Maxwell Perkins guided the cutting and organizing of that manuscript into a coherent novel without extinguishing its vitality. When it appeared, the book drew immediate attention: praise for its language, reservations about its expansiveness, and intense regional interest because of its recognizable portraits. The local controversy only underscored what the book already proved—that Wolfe had written with such specificity and candor that his imagined town felt undeniably lived-in and alive.
Themes radiate from the domestic sphere into broader questions of fate and time. The family becomes both sanctuary and crucible, a place of nurturing affection and unsparing friction. Memory is everywhere, not as a museum of fixed images but as a field of energies that reorder themselves with each new self-understanding. The angel, standing at the threshold of commerce and commemoration, suggests both mortality and aspiration. Home steadies and confines; the road promises freedom and exacts loneliness. The novel’s subtitle points to inner life concealed beneath routine habit, a reminder that much of what makes us who we are remains submerged, potent, and searching.
As a bildungsroman, the story tracks education in multiple registers: classrooms that kindle or thwart, books that open vistas, work that disciplines, and encounters that humble and enlarge the spirit. The geography of the American South—its streets, trains, depots, and seasons—becomes a curriculum as formative as any lecture. Eugene’s hunger is intellectual, emotional, and physical, and the narrative faithfully renders the awkward grandeur of such hungers. The father’s stone yard ties the tangible world to memory; the mother’s boardinghouse brings contingency and change into the home. Together, they frame a youth learning to read his life’s signs.
Wolfe’s influence has been acknowledged by writers who discovered in his pages permission for amplitude and ardor. Jack Kerouac absorbed the lesson of a voice that could swing from the intimate to the ecstatic. Ray Bradbury drew on Wolfe’s ability to turn recollection into radiance. William Styron admired the novel’s boldness in transforming personal history into art of public consequence. Beyond individual debts, the book widened the horizon for American narrative, showing how the modern self—conflicted, expansive, uncontainable—could be rendered without sacrificing the magnetic pull of place and family.
Placed within American literary history, the novel stands as a bridge between regional portraiture and national epic. It is rooted in a specific locale, dialect, and set of customs, yet its energies belong to the larger American story of mobility, self-invention, and the uneasy romance with success. Neither strictly realist nor experimental, it draws from both traditions, marrying observation to rhapsody. What emerges is a text that helped keep open a space for large, impassioned novels about youth and belonging, even as fashions shifted toward compression, irony, or documentary minimalism.
Readers often note how the book teaches them how to read it. Its episodic architecture rewards patience; its long paragraphs invite immersion rather than hurried consumption. Characters arrive in vivid bursts, and the town reveals itself in patterns, revisitations, and intensities rather than neat plot points. This is not a defect but a design that mirrors memory’s workings. Approach it as one might a symphony, attentive to recurring motifs, crescendos, and quiet returns. In that spirit, the novel’s generosity becomes clear: it grants readers the time and breadth required to register a life in becoming.
Today, the novel’s tensions—between place and possibility, heritage and reinvention—remain urgently familiar. In an era of rapid mobility and endless self-display, its meditation on the costs of leaving and the claims of belonging feels newly resonant. It speaks to families negotiating ambition and care, to communities balancing continuity and change, and to readers seeking meaning in the swirl of memory and desire. Its language still thrills; its candor still challenges. Above all, its vision of how a person finds, mourns, and refashions home keeps the book alive for each generation that discovers it.
Synopsis
Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (1929) is a semi-autobiographical novel tracing the early life of Eugene Gant in the fictional mountain town of Altamont, a rendering of Wolfe’s native Asheville, North Carolina. Cast as a coming-of-age narrative, it observes a boy’s growth into a young man against the bustle and confinements of a small Southern community in the early twentieth century. The story unfolds through richly textured scenes of family life, local commerce, and seasonal rhythms. At its center are questions of belonging and departure, as Eugene’s sharpened sensibility confronts the pull of home and the beckoning promise of a wider world.
Eugene’s family forms the crucible of his character. His father, a stonecutter whose shop displays a carved angel, is passionate, gifted, and volatile. His mother, practical and fiercely protective, channels her energies into acquiring property and running a boardinghouse called Dixieland. Their marriage is a stormy mix of love, resentment, and competing ambitions. Brothers and sisters crowd the home with distinct tempers and loyalties, providing both shelter and friction. The family’s ambitions, missteps, and survival instincts mirror the town’s own striving, giving Eugene an early education in desire, disappointment, endurance, and the strange intimacy of kinship.
Childhood in Altamont is rendered through close observation of streets, trains, shops, and mountain weather. Eugene experiences schoolrooms and playground codes, the allure of storefronts and parades, and the restlessness of a boy drawn to books and daydreams. The stone yard’s angel, poised and impassive, becomes a recurring emblem in his field of vision, joining his private world of symbols. From the cadence of town gossip to the scrape of chisel on stone, everything feeds his imagination. He senses both the warmth of familiarity and the limits of place, beginning to measure himself against the landscapes he knows by heart.
Domestic life intensifies Eugene’s contradictions. The household is loud with quarrels and reconciliations, marked by his father’s appetites and temper and his mother’s thrift and iron steadiness. Money troubles, property schemes, and the ceaseless labor of the boardinghouse keep the family in motion. Affections are real but complicated by pride and fear. Eugene watches, listens, and hoards impressions, testing his loyalties while cultivating an inward life. He is at once the child of this tumult and its critic, discovering how love can feel like refuge and constraint. In that friction, a writer’s eye forms, attentive to gesture, voice, and the weight of memory.
Adolescence widens Eugene’s horizon. Altamont’s trains bring travelers to Dixieland, filling its tables with stories of distant cities and uncertain fortunes. Friendships deepen and falter as he feels the first shock of attraction and the ache of idealized romance. A visitor from out of town crystallizes his longing, translating abstract dreams into an immediate hunger for connection. The affair, however tentative, teaches him about expectation and loss, setting passion against propriety and hope against self-knowledge. Through these encounters, Eugene begins to distinguish desire from destination, sensing that personal freedom will exact a cost he has not yet calculated.
Schooling provides Eugene a path forward. Teachers recognize his aptitude, and he discovers a vocation in language, finding excitement in literature, oratory, and the theatre. He leaves Altamont for a state university, where academic discipline and debate sharpen his intellect even as social hierarchies and institutional routines test his resolve. Campus newspapers, clubs, and classrooms bring mentors and rivals, expanding his sense of what a life of the mind might entail. With every book and conversation, he grows more aware of how provincial his upbringing has been, and how precious, cultivating a double vision he cannot easily reconcile.
The pull of home remains strong, and departures are followed by returns. Visits to Altamont reveal the town’s alterations as time works on businesses, neighborhoods, and faces. Family fortunes shift; illnesses and economic pressures leave their marks; small triumphs accumulate. Eugene sees his parents aging into habits they will not abandon and siblings adopting roles shaped by necessity as much as choice. The familiar rituals of meals, work, and argument resume, yet they feel newly charged, as if the same scenes were being replayed with altered stakes. The angel in the stone yard persists as a silent witness to these cycles.
As Eugene moves toward adulthood, conflicts sharpen between duty and self-assertion. Romantic entanglements at school and at home underscore his oscillation between idealism and disillusionment. Ambition drives him toward writing and the stage, while guilt and tenderness call him back to family obligations. He recognizes the power and peril of memory: devotion to the past can animate his art yet also immobilize his will. The town that once defined possibility now threatens to define its limits. Gathering these pressures, he confronts the prospect that escape and loyalty may be bound together rather than neatly opposed.
Look Homeward, Angel endures as a portrait of artistic formation and American restlessness. Without resolving every conflict it raises, the novel articulates a tension between the need to belong and the urge to depart, showing how identity is forged in the pressures of place, family, and time. Wolfe’s panoramic storytelling and sensuous detail turn a single life into a commentary on regional culture and national striving. The book’s broader message is that the past, with its anchors and burdens, is both the obstacle and the resource through which a self is made, and through which home becomes legible at last.
Historical Context
Look Homeward, Angel unfolds in the early decades of the twentieth century, in a small Southern mountain city modeled on Asheville, North Carolina, which Wolfe renames Altamont. The setting is shaped by Jim Crow segregation, Protestant churches, one‑party Democratic politics, booster-minded newspapers, and the growing reach of railroads and streetcars. Family businesses, boardinghouses, and craft shops anchor civic life, while public schools and a rising state university system signal new paths for ambitious youth. This social framework—provincial yet porous to national influences—provides the institutional backdrop for Wolfe’s coming‑of‑age narrative and its tensions between rootedness and aspiration, conformity and self-assertion.
Asheville’s economy at the turn of the century combined mountain trade with tourism and health-seeking visitors, enabled by the railroad’s arrival in the late nineteenth century. The city gained a reputation as the “Land of the Sky,” attracting seasonal migrants and patients for tuberculosis sanatoria. Boardinghouses proliferated to serve this traffic, creating opportunities for women entrepreneurs and reshaping neighborhoods. Stonecutting and the funerary monument trade also flourished, supplied by marble and granite carried on new transport lines. Wolfe’s novel mirrors this local economy through its attention to guesthouses, shopkeeping, and funerary art, using those enterprises to dramatize the precariousness and pride of small-business life.
The Progressive Era left a strong imprint on North Carolina’s towns. Municipal leaders pursued paved streets, expanded water and sewer systems, electric lighting, and public health campaigns against typhoid and tuberculosis. The “Good Roads” movement, active in the 1910s and culminating in major state highway funding in the early 1920s, signaled a broader drive to connect rural areas with markets and schools. Wolfe’s Altamont reflects the optimism of civic improvement—cleaner streets, better schools, and public pride—while also exposing underlying anxieties: indebtedness, inequality, and the limits of reform when family economies are fragile and social hierarchies remain entrenched.
The legal and social order of Jim Crow defined public life. In North Carolina, a white-supremacy campaign at the turn of the century culminated in the 1900 constitutional amendment disenfranchising many Black voters through literacy tests and poll taxes. Segregation governed schools, transport, and public space, and racial violence remained a threat in the wider region. In tourist towns, Black residents were often concentrated in service, domestic, and laboring roles. While Wolfe’s narrative centers on white characters, the novel’s background is that of a segregated city, where racial boundaries—largely invisible to the white protagonists—structure encounters, labor, and civic silence.
Protestant churches—Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian—dominated religious life in the upland South, with revivals, itinerant preachers, and Sunday schools shaping moral discourse. The early twentieth century saw tensions between evangelical certainties and emerging modernist approaches to scripture and science, a conflict that would crest publicly in trials and controversies by the 1920s. Wolfe’s pages draw on the rhetoric, music, and theater of revivals, showing how sermon cadences and collective fervor mold youth, while also hinting at skepticism fed by education, urban experience, and the felt dissonance between religious absolutes and the untidiness of desire, grief, and ambition.
Public education expanded rapidly in North Carolina in the 1910s, when new funding, longer terms, and the “high school movement” brought more adolescents into classrooms. Libraries and debating societies multiplied, and the state university at Chapel Hill grew in enrollment and cultural ambition. By 1918, the Carolina Playmakers fostered a native drama tradition, emblematic of the South’s intellectual ferment. Wolfe’s protagonist channels this energy: the schoolroom and campus become gateways to a larger world of books, journalism, theater, and argument. The novel captures both the liberating thrust of education and the social penalties for exceeding the expectations of one’s town.
Women’s roles in the South were constrained by custom, yet the period also saw the growth of women’s clubs, teachers’ networks, and small enterprises run from home. Boardinghouses, in particular, gave married and widowed women routes to property ownership and income. North Carolina, like other states, had reformed married women’s property laws in the nineteenth century, making such ventures more feasible. The suffrage movement culminated in the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, which superseded the state legislature’s refusal to ratify at the time. Wolfe’s portrait of an enterprising mother reflects these openings, and the domestic sphere’s transformation into a calculating, risky business arena.
Technological change altered daily life. Electric streetcars, telephones, and better lighting tightened the weave of city neighborhoods and widened social horizons. The Model T, mass-produced after 1908, made automobiles increasingly visible even in mountain towns; improved roads in the 1910s–1920s amplified regional mobility. Mail-order catalogs and national magazines brought fashions and consumer desires to doorsteps once distant from big-city markets. Wolfe’s narrative registers these shifts in pace and possibility—the shock of travel, the spell of printed words, the lure of city lights—set against the endurance of older rhythms in churchgoing, seasonal work, and face-to-face bargaining.
Migration patterns remade the South. Rural families moved into towns seeking wages and schooling; seasonal visitors from the North flowed into resort areas like Asheville; and, beginning around 1915, the Great Migration drew many Black Southerners toward northern industry. The mountain city thus felt both centripetal and centrifugal forces, gathering strangers while propelling its youth outward to college or northern careers. Wolfe’s coming‑of‑age arc turns this churn into a psychological fact: home is intimate yet provisional. Train depots, hotel lobbies, and campuses become thresholds where identities are tested, while departures carry both promise and an ache for what is left behind.
North Carolina’s industrial landscape was dominated by textiles, tobacco, and furniture. Mill villages spread across the Piedmont, and debates over child labor intensified. The federal Keating–Owen Act of 1916 tried to curb child labor in interstate commerce, only to be struck down by the Supreme Court in 1918; reformers persisted until national standards arrived decades later. Although Asheville was less industrial than mill towns to the east, class divisions between artisans, shopkeepers, professionals, and laborers marked everyday life. Wolfe’s attention to the dignity of craft—especially stonecutting—and to precarious shop finances reflects a society balancing pride in work with exposure to market shocks.
World War I transformed public culture, even in mountain cities far from the front. The United States entered the war in 1917; North Carolina hosted training camps, and local newspapers carried casualty lists and liberty loan drives. The 1918 influenza pandemic brought closures, quarantines, and sudden losses across the state. Wolfe’s novel, while centered on one youth’s passage, absorbs this atmosphere of mobilization and mortality: parades, rumors, and grief leach into the fabric of town life. The sense that time accelerates—and that youth is fragile against impersonal forces—connects wartime anxiety to the book’s larger meditation on impermanence.
Temperance activism was powerful in North Carolina. After decades of local-option campaigns, the state adopted prohibition in 1908, more than a decade before national prohibition began in 1920. Enforcement proved uneven, and bootlegging persisted, especially in rural areas. Public rhetoric framed alcohol as both a moral failing and a social scourge linked to poverty and family instability. Wolfe’s depiction of drinking—its conviviality, its compulsions, and its consequences—unfolds within this climate: official disapproval, clandestine availability, and a culture that both condemns and tolerates excess. The result is a portrait of addiction and reform broader than individual vice.
A spirit of civic boosterism quickened Asheville’s early twentieth-century boom. Real estate subdivisions expanded, newspapers celebrated the climate, and landmark hotels—most notably the Grove Park Inn (opened 1913)—advertised luxury in the mountains. The promise of perpetual growth drew investors and fueled speculative habits later exposed in the 1920s. While Wolfe’s narrative is set largely before that decade’s peak, it captures booster language and the distortions it can introduce into family finances and personal hopes. The town’s self-mythologizing contrasts with the rougher truths of illness, debt, and failure, inviting readers to question the glossy brochures of place and identity.
The novel arrived in 1929, amid American modernism’s experiments with memory, time, and voice. Editors like Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner’s Sons supported ambitious, stylistically daring books, and readers were primed by contemporaries exploring interior life and regional experience. Wolfe’s capacious, autobiographical form draws on the bildungsroman tradition while absorbing modernist techniques of lyrical amplification and associative narrative. Its frankness about family conflict, sex, and death was both timely and contentious. Published on the eve of the Great Depression, the book’s long look back at the Progressive Era reads like a summing-up before a national order collapsed.
In the interwar years, the South underwent a literary reappraisal often called the Southern Renaissance, when writers confronted the region’s history, modernity, and social contradictions. Though not aligned with any single group, Wolfe’s work belongs to this larger reckoning alongside peers who probed memory, community, and change. Intellectual debates over regional identity, agriculture and industry, and the costs of modernization framed reception of Southern books in northern markets. Wolfe’s depictions of small-town pieties and yearnings entered that arena, challenging stereotypes of the “isolated” mountain South by showing a town enmeshed in national circuits of money, media, and mobility.
Biographical context deepens the novel’s social texture. Thomas Wolfe was born in Asheville in 1900 to a stonecutter father and a mother who, in 1906, purchased and operated a boardinghouse—experiences that map closely to the book’s economic and emotional terrain. He attended the University of North Carolina in the late 1910s and later studied writing at Harvard, eventually teaching in New York in the 1920s. These trajectories—rooted in a Southern town, extended through public higher education, and culminating in literary ambition—mirror broader patterns of upward mobility available to a small cohort of early twentieth-century Southerners.
Urban infrastructure and media ecosystems shaped the consciousness the novel records. Local dailies amplified booster visions while reporting epidemics, lynchings elsewhere in the South, and national political contests, binding town readers to a wider world. Electric trolleys, telephone exchanges, and improved water systems remade routines; department stores and druggist lunch counters standardized consumption and sociability. These changes are not merely backdrop in Wolfe’s book; they make possible the very rhythms of wandering, watching, and reading that define the protagonist’s apprenticeship to the modern. The new city is a schoolroom, its storefronts and depots a text to be read and contested in memory thereafter.—ignore punctuation is fine? I'll ensure there's no stray punctuation errors. Wait the last char is
Author Biography
Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) was an American novelist whose sweeping, autobiographically inflected prose made him a defining voice of the interwar era. He wrote with rhapsodic intensity and panoramic ambition, seeking to capture the energies and dislocations of American life. Though aligned with the modern moment, his sensibility remained romantic, lyrical, and fervently personal. Over a brief but incandescent career he published two vast novels and a collection of stories, then left a mountain of manuscripts that editors shaped into major posthumous books. His title You Can’t Go Home Again entered the cultural lexicon, and his reputation rests on extraordinary ambition married to musical, incantatory prose.
Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Wolfe came of age amid the transformations of the New South. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he wrote, acted, and studied theater in the late 1910s. In the early 1920s he pursued playwriting at Harvard University with George Pierce Baker’s influential 47 Workshop, absorbing habits of drafting, critique, and revision that later informed his fiction. His reading mixed American romanticism and Walt Whitman’s breadth with biblical cadences and elements of European modernism. Out of these influences he forged a voice that combined orchestral rhythms with a reporter’s specificity and an orator’s surge.
After Harvard, Wolfe first pursued drama but found limited success on the stage. He relocated to New York City, supported himself by teaching English at New York University in the mid‑1920s, and began channeling his material into prose. An enormous manuscript took shape—part memoir, part myth of American becoming. At Charles Scribner’s Sons he found a crucial advocate in editor Maxwell Perkins, whose patient cutting and structural guidance helped turn the unwieldy pages into publishable form. Wolfe worked obsessively, revising in long nightly sessions, and poured scenes from boardinghouses, classrooms, and streets into his growing book.
Look Homeward, Angel appeared in 1929 to strong notices for its energy and candor. Reviewers praised the exuberant language and the coming‑of‑age arc, while some objected to its frank portrayals of small‑town life, a controversy that underscored Wolfe’s unflinching realism. The novel announced a voice determined to render consciousness in cascading sentences and sprawling catalogues, binding the personal to the national. Success allowed Wolfe to spend time abroad and to imagine an even larger sequel that would carry his protagonist into wider American and European settings. The first book established his central preoccupations: memory, ambition, the ache of departure, and the fugitive idea of home.
Of Time and the River (1935) extended his project, tracing artistic apprenticeship and restlessness across cities, railways, and seaports. Its publication confirmed Wolfe as a major figure, though critics split over its prodigality and structural looseness. The same year, From Death to Morning gathered his short fiction, showing his gift in a compressed form. In The Story of a Novel (1936), a reflective essay, he explained his methods and acknowledged the decisive role of editing in shaping his vast drafts. Fame brought lectures and wider readership, yet also fresh tensions between sheer amplitude and disciplined form—an aesthetic struggle that remained central to his work.
In the late 1930s Wolfe changed publishers, moving from Scribner’s to Harper & Brothers, seeking new editorial direction for manuscripts that had grown to a monumental scale. He continued to produce thousands of pages, much of it interlinked, as he reimagined earlier material and pursued new characters and settings. After his death, editor Edward Aswell organized and prepared these papers for publication, resulting in The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940), followed by The Hills Beyond (1941). These volumes revealed a writer reaching toward broader social canvases while deepening the themes of memory, aspiration, loss, and return.
Wolfe died in 1938, at thirty‑seven, in Baltimore, from complications of tuberculous meningitis, leaving behind unfinished drafts and an outsized reputation. His early death fed a legend of prodigy cut short, but his achievement rests less on romance than on pages that seek to contain multitudes. Later authors of expansive, autobiographical fiction have cited him as an influence, and his sentences—rhythmic, incantatory, intimate—still challenge and inspire. The sheer scale of his ambition, his evocation of American longing, and the cultural resonance of a title that became an idiom have kept his work in print and his place secure in American literary history.
LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL
To the Reader
This is a first book, and in it the author has written of experience which is now far and lost, but which was once part of the fabric of his life. If any reader, therefore, should say that the book is “autobiographical” the writer has no answer for him: it seems to him that all serious work in fiction is autobiographical — that, for instance, a more autobiographical work than “Gulliver’s Travels” cannot easily be imagined.
This note, however, is addressed principally to those persons whom the writer may have known in the period covered by these pages. To these persons, he would say what he believes they understand already: that this book was written in innocence and nakedness of spirit, and that the writer’s main concern was to give fulness, life, and intensity to the actions and people in the book he was creating. Now that it is to be published, he would insist that this book is a fiction, and that he meditated no man’s portrait here.
But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives — all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel. This is not the whole method but the writer believes it illustrates the whole method in a book that is written from a middle distance and is without rancour or bitter intention.
Part One
... a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
1
A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.
Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.
The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cut-purse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time[1q].
This is a moment:
An Englishman named Gilbert Gaunt, which he later changed to Gant (a concession probably to Yankee phonetics), having come to Baltimore from Bristol in 1837 on a sailing vessel, soon let the profits of a public house which he had purchased roll down his improvident gullet. He wandered westward into Pennsylvania, eking out a dangerous living by matching fighting cocks against the champions of country barnyards, and often escaping after a night spent in a village jail, with his champion dead on the field of battle, without the clink of a coin in his pocket, and sometimes with the print of a farmer’s big knuckles on his reckless face. But he always escaped, and coming at length among the Dutch at harvest time he was so touched by the plenty of their land that he cast out his anchors there. Within a year he married a rugged young widow with a tidy farm who like all the other Dutch had been charmed by his air of travel, and his grandiose speech, particularly when he did Hamlet in the manner of the great Edmund Kean[1]. Every one said he should have been an actor.
The Englishman begot children — a daughter and four sons — lived easily and carelessly, and bore patiently the weight of his wife’s harsh but honest tongue. The years passed, his bright somewhat staring eyes grew dull and bagged, the tall Englishman walked with a gouty shuffle: one morning when she came to nag him out of sleep she found him dead of an apoplexy. He left five children, a mortgage and — in his strange dark eyes which now stared bright and open — something that had not died: a passionate and obscure hunger for voyages.
So, with this legacy, we leave this Englishman and are concerned hereafter with the heir to whom he bequeathed it, his second son, a boy named Oliver. How this boy stood by the roadside near his mother’s farm, and saw the dusty Rebels march past on their way to Gettysburg[2], how his cold eyes darkened when he heard the great name of Virginia, and how the year the war had ended, when he was still fifteen, he had walked along a street in Baltimore, and seen within a little shop smooth granite slabs of death, carved lambs and cherubim, and an angel poised upon cold phthisic feet, with a smile of soft stone idiocy — this is a longer tale. But I know that his cold and shallow eyes had darkened with the obscure and passionate hunger that had lived in a dead man’s eyes, and that had led from Fenchurch Street past Philadelphia. As the boy looked at the big angel with the carved stipe of lilystalk, a cold and nameless excitement possessed him. The long fingers of his big hands closed. He felt that he wanted, more than anything in the world, to carve delicately with a chisel. He wanted to wreak something dark and unspeakable in him into cold stone. He wanted to carve an angel’s head.
Oliver entered the shop and asked a big bearded man with a wooden mallet for a job. He became the stone cutter’s apprentice. He worked in that dusty yard five years. He became a stone cutter. When his apprenticeship was over he had become a man.
He never found it. He never learned to carve an angel’s head. The dove, the lamb, the smooth joined marble hands of death, and letters fair and fine — but not the angel. And of all the years of waste and loss — the riotous years in Baltimore, of work and savage drunkenness, and the theatre of Booth and Salvini, which had a disastrous effect upon the stone cutter, who memorized each accent of the noble rant, and strode muttering through the streets, with rapid gestures of the enormous talking hands — these are blind steps and gropings of our exile, the painting of our hunger as, remembering speechlessly, we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, a door. Where? When?
He never found it, and he reeled down across the continent into the Reconstruction South — a strange wild form of six feet four with cold uneasy eyes, a great blade of nose, and a rolling tide of rhetoric, a preposterous and comic invective, as formalized as classical epithet, which he used seriously, but with a faint uneasy grin around the corners of his thin wailing mouth.
He set up business in Sydney, the little capital city of one of the middle Southern states, lived soberly and industriously under the attentive eye of a folk still raw with defeat and hostility, and finally, his good name founded and admission won, he married a gaunt tubercular spinstress, ten years his elder, but with a nest egg and an unshakable will to matrimony. Within eighteen months he was a howling maniac again, his little business went smash while his foot stayed on the polished rail, and Cynthia, his wife — whose life, the natives said, he had not helped to prolong — died suddenly one night after a hemorrhage.
So, all was gone again — Cynthia, the shop, the hard-bought praise of soberness, the angel’s head — he walked through the streets at dark, yelling his pentameter curse at Rebel ways, and all their indolence; but sick with fear and loss and penitence, he wilted under the town’s reproving stare, becoming convinced, as the flesh wasted on his own gaunt frame, that Cynthia’s scourge was doing vengeance now on him.
He was only past thirty, but he looked much older. His face was yellow and sunken; the waxen blade of his nose looked like a beak. He had long brown mustaches that hung straight down mournfully.
His tremendous bouts of drinking had wrecked his health. He was thin as a rail and had a cough. He thought of Cynthia now, in the lonely and hostile town, and he became afraid. He thought he had tuberculosis and that he was going to die.
So, alone and lost again, having found neither order nor establishment in the world, and with the earth cut away from his feet, Oliver resumed his aimless drift along the continent. He turned westward toward the great fortress of the hills, knowing that behind them his evil fame would not be known, and hoping that he might find in them isolation, a new life, and recovered health.
The eyes of the gaunt spectre darkened again, as they had in his youth.
All day, under a wet gray sky of October, Oliver rode westward across the mighty state. As he stared mournfully out the window at the great raw land so sparsely tilled by the futile and occasional little farms, which seemed to have made only little grubbing patches in the wilderness, his heart went cold and leaden in him. He thought of the great barns of Pennsylvania, the ripe bending of golden grain, the plenty, the order, the clean thrift of the people. And he thought of how he had set out to get order and position for himself, and of the rioting confusion of his life, the blot and blur of years, and the red waste of his youth.
By God! he thought. I’m getting old! Why here?
The grisly parade of the spectre years trooped through his brain. Suddenly, he saw that his life had been channelled by a series of accidents: a mad Rebel singing of Armageddon, the sound of a bugle on the road, the mule-hoofs of the army, the silly white face of an angel in a dusty shop, a slut’s pert wiggle of her hams as she passed by. He had reeled out of warmth and plenty into this barren land: as he stared out the window and saw the fallow unworked earth, the great raw lift of the Piedmont, the muddy red clay roads, and the slattern people gaping at the stations — a lean farmer gangling above his reins, a dawdling negro, a gap-toothed yokel, a hard sallow woman with a grimy baby — the strangeness of destiny stabbed him with fear. How came he here from the clean Dutch thrift of his youth into this vast lost earth of rickets?
The train rattled on over the reeking earth. Rain fell steadily. A brakeman came draftily into the dirty plush coach and emptied a scuttle of coal into the big stove at the end. High empty laughter shook a group of yokels sprawled on two turned seats. The bell tolled mournfully above the clacking wheels. There was a droning interminable wait at a junction-town near the foot-hills. Then the train moved on again across the vast rolling earth.
Dusk came. The huge bulk of the hills was foggily emergent. Small smoky lights went up in the hillside shacks. The train crawled dizzily across high trestles spanning ghostly hawsers of water. Far up, far down, plumed with wisps of smoke, toy cabins stuck to bank and gulch and hillside. The train toiled sinuously up among gouged red cuts with slow labor. As darkness came, Oliver descended at the little town of Old Stockade where the rails ended. The last great wall of the hills lay stark above him. As he left the dreary little station and stared into the greasy lamplight of a country store, Oliver felt that he was crawling, like a great beast, into the circle of those enormous hills to die.
The next morning he resumed his journey by coach. His destination was the little town of Altamont, twenty-four miles away beyond the rim of the great outer wall of the hills. As the horses strained slowly up the mountain road Oliver’s spirit lifted a little. It was a gray-golden day in late October, bright and windy. There was a sharp bite and sparkle in the mountain air: the range soared above him, close, immense, clean, and barren. The trees rose gaunt and stark: they were almost leafless. The sky was full of windy white rags of cloud; a thick blade of mist washed slowly around the rampart of a mountain.
Below him a mountain stream foamed down its rocky bed, and he could see little dots of men laying the track that would coil across the hill toward Altamont. Then the sweating team lipped the gulch of the mountain, and, among soaring and lordly ranges that melted away in purple mist, they began the slow descent toward the high plateau on which the town of Altamont was built.
In the haunting eternity of these mountains, rimmed in their enormous cup, he found sprawled out on its hundred hills and hollows a town of four thousand people.
There were new lands. His heart lifted.
This town of Altamont had been settled soon after the Revolutionary War. It had been a convenient stopping-off place for cattledrovers and farmers in their swing eastward from Tennessee into South Carolina. And, for several decades before the Civil War, it had enjoyed the summer patronage of fashionable people from Charleston and the plantations of the hot South. When Oliver first came to it it had begun to get some reputation not only as a summer resort, but as a sanitarium for tuberculars. Several rich men from the North had established hunting lodges in the hills, and one of them had bought huge areas of mountain land and, with an army of imported architects, carpenters and masons, was planning the greatest country estate in America — something in limestone, with pitched slate roofs, and one hundred and eighty-three rooms. It was modelled on the chateau at Blois. There was also a vast new hotel, a sumptuous wooden barn, rambling comfortably upon the summit of a commanding hill.
But most of the population was still native, recruited from the hill and country people in the surrounding districts. They were Scotch–Irish mountaineers, rugged, provincial, intelligent, and industrious.
Oliver had about twelve hundred dollars saved from the wreckage of Cynthia’s estate. During the winter he rented a little shack at one edge of the town’s public square, acquired a small stock of marbles, and set up business. But he had little to do at first save to think of the prospect of his death. During the bitter and lonely winter, while he thought he was dying, the gaunt scarecrow Yankee that flapped muttering through the streets became an object of familiar gossip to the townspeople. All the people at his boarding-house knew that at night he walked his room with great caged strides, and that a long low moan that seemed wrung from his bowels quivered incessantly on his thin lips. But he spoke to no one about it.
And then the marvellous hill Spring came, green-golden, with brief spurting winds, the magic and fragrance of the blossoms, warm gusts of balsam. The great wound in Oliver began to heal. His voice was heard in the land once more, there were purple flashes of the old rhetoric, the ghost of the old eagerness.
One day in April, as with fresh awakened senses, he stood before his shop, watching the flurry of life in the square, Oliver heard behind him the voice of a man who was passing. And that voice, flat, drawling, complacent, touched with sudden light a picture that had lain dead in him for twenty years.
“Hit’s a comin’! Accordin’ to my figgers hit’s due June 11, 1886.”
Oliver turned and saw retreating the burly persuasive figure of the prophet he had last seen vanishing down the dusty road that led to Gettysburg and Armageddon.
“Who is that?” he asked a man.
The man looked and grinned.
“That’s Bacchus Pentland,” he said. “He’s quite a character. There are a lot of his folks around here.”
Oliver wet his great thumb briefly. Then, with a grin, he said:
“Has Armageddon come yet?”
“He’s expecting it any day now,” said the man.
Then Oliver met Eliza. He lay one afternoon in Spring upon the smooth leather sofa of his little office, listening to the bright piping noises in the Square. A restoring peace brooded over his great extended body. He thought of the loamy black earth with its sudden young light of flowers, of the beaded chill of beer, and of the plumtree’s dropping blossoms. Then he heard the brisk heel-taps of a woman coming down among the marbles, and he got hastily to his feet. He was drawing on his well brushed coat of heavy black just as she entered.
“I tell you what,” said Eliza, pursing her lips in reproachful banter, “I wish I was a man and had nothing to do but lie around all day on a good easy sofa.”
“Good afternoon, madam,” said Oliver with a flourishing bow. “Yes,” he said, as a faint sly grin bent the corners of his thin mouth, “I reckon you’ve caught me taking my constitutional. As a matter of fact I very rarely lie down in the daytime, but I’ve been in bad health for the last year now, and I’m not able to do the work I used to.”
He was silent a moment; his face drooped in an expression of hangdog dejection. “Ah, Lord! I don’t know what’s to become of me!”
“Pshaw!” said Eliza briskly and contemptuously. “There’s nothing wrong with you in my opinion. You’re a big strapping fellow, in the prime of life. Half of it’s only imagination. Most of the time we think we’re sick it’s all in the mind. I remember three years ago I was teaching school in Hominy Township when I was taken down with pneumonia. Nobody ever expected to see me come out of it alive but I got through it somehow; I well remember one day I was sitting down — as the fellow says, I reckon I was convalescin’; the reason I remember is Old Doctor Fletcher had just been and when he went out I saw him shake his head at my cousin Sally. ‘Why Eliza, what on earth,’ she said, just as soon as he had gone, ‘he tells me you’re spitting up blood every time you cough; you’ve got consumption as sure as you live.’ ‘Pshaw,’ I said. I remember I laughed just as big as you please, determined to make a big joke of it all; I just thought to myself, I’m not going to give into it, I’ll fool them all yet; ‘I don’t believe a word of it’ (I said),” she nodded her head smartly at him, and pursed her lips, “‘and besides, Sally’ (I said) ‘we’ve all got to go some time, and there’s no use worrying about what’s going to happen. It may come tomorrow, or it may come later, but it’s bound to come to all in the end’.”
“Ah Lord!” said Oliver, shaking his head sadly. “You bit the nail on the head that time. A truer word was never spoken.”
Merciful God! he thought, with an anguished inner grin. How long is this to keep up? But she’s a pippin as sure as you’re born. He looked appreciatively at her trim erect figure, noting her milky white skin, her black-brown eyes, with their quaint child’s stare, and her jet black hair drawn back tightly from her high white forehead. She had a curious trick of pursing her lips reflectively before she spoke; she liked to take her time, and came to the point after interminable divagations down all the lane-ends of memory and overtone, feasting upon the golden pageant of all she had ever said, done, felt, thought, seen, or replied, with egocentric delight. Then, while he looked, she ceased speaking abruptly, put her neat gloved hand to her chin, and stared off with a thoughtful pursed mouth.
“Well,” she said after a moment, “if you’re getting your health back and spend a good part of your time lying around you ought to have something to occupy your mind.” She opened a leather portmanteau she was carrying and produced a visiting card and two fat volumes. “My name,” she said portentously, with slow emphasis, “is Eliza Pentland, and I represent the Larkin Publishing Company.”
She spoke the words proudly, with dignified gusto. Merciful God! A book agent! thought Gant.
“We are offering,” said Eliza, opening a huge yellow book with a fancy design of spears and flags and laurel wreaths, “a book of poems called Gems of Verse for Hearth and Fireside as well as Larkin’s Domestic Doctor and Book of Household Remedies, giving directions for the cure and prevention of over five hundred diseases.”
“Well,” said Gant, with a faint grin, wetting his big thumb briefly, “I ought to find one that I’ve got out of that.”
“Why, yes,” said Eliza, nodding smartly, “as the fellow says, you can read poetry for the good of your soul and Larkin for the good of your body.”
“I like poetry,” said Gant, thumbing over the pages, and pausing with interest at the section marked Songs of the Spur and Sabre. “In my boyhood I could recite it by the hour.”
He bought the books. Eliza packed her samples, and stood up looking sharply and curiously about the dusty little shop.
“Doing any business?” she said.
“Very little,” said Oliver sadly. “Hardly enough to keep body and soul together. I’m a stranger in a strange land.”
“Pshaw!” said Eliza cheerfully. “You ought to get out and meet more people. You need something to take your mind off yourself. If I were you, I’d pitch right in and take an interest in the town’s progress. We’ve got everything here it takes to make a big town — scenery, climate, and natural resources, and we all ought to work together. If I had a few thousand dollars I know what I’d do,”— she winked smartly at him, and began to speak with a curiously masculine gesture of the hand — forefinger extended, fist loosely clenched. “Do you see this corner here — the one you’re on? It’ll double in value in the next few years. Now, here!” she gestured before her with the loose masculine gesture. “They’re going to run a street through there some day as sure as you live. And when they do —” she pursed her lips reflectively, “that property is going to be worth money.”
She continued to talk about property with a strange meditative hunger. The town seemed to be an enormous blueprint to her: her head was stuffed uncannily with figures and estimates — who owned a lot, who sold it, the sale-price, the real value, the future value, first and second mortgages, and so on. When she had finished, Oliver said with the emphasis of strong aversion, thinking of Sydney:
“I hope I never own another piece of property as long as I live — save a house to live in. It is nothing but a curse and a care, and the tax-collector gets it all in the end.”
Eliza looked at him with a startled expression, as if he had uttered a damnable heresy.
“Why, say! That’s no way to talk!” she said. “You want to lay something by for a rainy day, don’t you?”
“I’m having my rainy day now,” he said gloomily. “All the property I need is eight feet of earth to be buried in.”
Then, talking more cheerfully, he walked with her to the door of the shop, and watched her as she marched primly away across the square, holding her skirts at the curbs with ladylike nicety. Then he turned back among his marbles again with a stirring in him of a joy he thought he had lost forever.
The Pentland family, of which Eliza was a member, was one of the strangest tribes that ever came out of the hills. It had no clear title to the name of Pentland: a Scotch–Englishman of that name, who was a mining engineer, the grandfather of the present head of the family, had come into the hills after the Revolution, looking for copper, and lived there for several years, begetting several children by one of the pioneer women. When he disappeared the woman took for herself and her children the name of Pentland.
The present chieftain of the tribe was Eliza’s father, the brother of the prophet Bacchus, Major Thomas Pentland. Another brother had been killed during the Seven Days[3]. Major Pentland’s military title was honestly if inconspicuously earned. While Bacchus, who never rose above the rank of Corporal, was blistering his hard hands at Shiloh, the Major, as commander of two companies of Home Volunteers, was guarding the stronghold of the native hills. This stronghold was never threatened until the closing days of the war, when the Volunteers, ambuscaded behind convenient trees and rocks, fired three volleys into a detachment of Sherman’s stragglers, and quietly dispersed to the defense of their attendant wives and children.
The Pentland family was as old as any in the community, but it had always been poor, and had made few pretenses to gentility. By marriage, and by intermarriage among its own kinsmen, it could boast of some connection with the great, of some insanity, and a modicum of idiocy. But because of its obvious superiority, in intelligence and fibre, to most of the mountain people it held a position of solid respect among them.
The Pentlands bore a strong clan-marking. Like most rich personalities in strange families their powerful group-stamp became more impressive because of their differences. They had broad powerful noses, with fleshy deeply scalloped wings, sensual mouths, extraordinarily mixed of delicacy and coarseness, which in the process of thinking they convolved with astonishing flexibility, broad intelligent foreheads, and deep flat cheeks, a trifle hollowed. The men were generally ruddy of face, and their typical stature was meaty, strong, and of middling height, although it varied into gangling cadaverousness.
Major Thomas Pentland was the father of a numerous family of which Eliza was the only surviving girl. A younger sister had died a few years before of a disease which the family identified sorrowfully as “poor Jane’s scrofula.” There were six boys: Henry, the oldest, was now thirty, Will was twenty-six, Jim was twenty-two, and Thaddeus, Elmer and Greeley were, in the order named, eighteen, fifteen, and eleven. Eliza was twenty-four.
The four oldest children, Henry, Will, Eliza, and Jim, had passed their childhood in the years following the war. The poverty and privation of these years had been so terrible that none of them ever spoke of it now, but the bitter steel had sheared into their hearts, leaving scars that would not heal.
The effect of these years upon the oldest children was to develop in them an insane niggardliness, an insatiate love of property, and a desire to escape from the Major’s household as quickly as possible.
“Father,” Eliza had said with ladylike dignity, as she led Oliver for the first time into the sitting-room of the cottage, “I want you to meet Mr. Gant.”
Major Pentland rose slowly from his rocker by the fire, folded a large knife, and put the apple he had been peeling on the mantel. Bacchus looked up benevolently from a whittled stick, and Will, glancing up from his stubby nails which he was paring as usual, greeted the visitor with a birdlike nod and wink. The men amused themselves constantly with pocket knives.
Major Pentland advanced slowly toward Gant. He was a stocky fleshy man in the middle fifties, with a ruddy face, a patriarchal beard, and the thick complacent features of his tribe.
“It’s W. O. Gant, isn’t it?” he asked in a drawling unctuous voice.
“Yes,” said Oliver, “that’s right.”
“From what Eliza’s been telling me about you,” said the Major, giving the signal to his audience, “I was going to say it ought to be L. E. Gant.”
The room sounded with the fat pleased laughter of the Pentlands.
“Whew!” cried Eliza, putting her hand to the wing of her broad nose. “I’ll vow, father! You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Gant grinned with a thin false painting of mirth.
The miserable old scoundrel, he thought. He’s had that one bottled up for a week.
“You’ve met Will before,” said Eliza.
“Both before and aft,” said Will with a smart wink.
When their laughter had died down, Eliza said: “And this — as the fellow says — is Uncle Bacchus.”
“Yes, sir,” said Bacchus beaming, “as large as life an’ twice as sassy.”
“They call him Back-us everywhere else,” said Will, including them all in a brisk wink, “but here in the family we call him Behind-us.”
“I suppose,” said Major Pentland deliberately, “that you’ve served on a great many juries?”
“No,” said Oliver, determined to endure the worst now with a frozen grin. “Why?”
“Because,” said the Major looking around again, “I thought you were a fellow who’d done a lot of COURTIN’.”
Then, amid their laughter, the door opened, and several of the others came in-Eliza’s mother, a plain worn Scotchwoman, and Jim, a ruddy porcine young fellow, his father’s beardless twin, and Thaddeus, mild, ruddy, brown of hair and eye, bovine, and finally Greeley, the youngest, a boy with lapping idiot grins, full of strange squealing noises at which they laughed. He was eleven, degenerate, weak, scrofulous, but his white moist hands could draw from a violin music that had in it something unearthly and untaught.
And as they sat there in the hot little room with its warm odor of mellowing apples, the vast winds howled down from the hills, there was a roaring in the pines, remote and demented, the bare boughs clashed. And as they peeled, or pared, or whittled, their talk slid from its rude jocularity to death and burial: they drawled monotonously, with evil hunger, their gossip of destiny, and of men but newly lain in the earth. And as their talk wore on, and Gant heard the spectre moan of the wind, he was entombed in loss and darkness, and his soul plunged downward in the pit of night, for he saw that he must die a stranger — that all, all but these triumphant Pentlands, who banqueted on death — must die.
And like a man who is perishing in the polar night, he thought of the rich meadows of his youth: the corn, the plum tree, and ripe grain. Why here? O lost!
