When I was a young reader, in
high school and college, Thomas Wolfe was my favorite author. I found Look
Homeward, Angel an exciting and mysterious book, especially the penultimate
chapter where Eugene Gant talks with his dead brother Ben. I was entranced by the Wolfe legend, of the
young writer from North Carolina, brimming with words and a compulsion to tell
his story, who is discovered by a New York editor and whose first book becomes
a best seller and an American classic. I
read everything by Wolfe, and everything I could find about him. I’m an older
reader now, perhaps we should say, an old reader. I don’t read Wolfe now and find him difficult
to stomach when I try. But as a writer
who was once important to me, he holds a special place in my memory.
I found the film Genius (dir. Michael Grandage, 2016),
about the relationship of Thomas Wolfe and his editor Maxwell Perkins, jarring
and inauthentic. The image of Wolfe it
presents—of a boorish, overbearing, narcissistic, hayseed young writer so
fixated on publishing his work that he tramples on everyone around him—seemed
to me entirely wrong. Not that the basic
outlines are wrong. They’re just not right. What we have in Jude Law’s portrayal of Wolfe
is a caricature, a parody, including the fake Southern accent. Law is actually good in the role. He even manages to resemble Wolfe in a
certain way (though Wolfe was actually a foot or so taller). It’s the role itself that is flawed. The film buys into the mythology of Wolfe,
writing on the top of his refrigerator, drinking wildly, unable to curb and to
bring into coherent form the outpouring of words he produces. The film almost portrays Wolfe as a
psychological case study—a writer who can produce torrents of words without
being able to control them.
The film to me seems unaware of
what it means to be a writer, of how a writer works, of the editing process
itself. It romanticizes, simplifies,
obfuscates. And it seems uncertain what to make of the figure of Wolfe—was he a
great writer helped by Perkins to bring his work to print, or was he a writer
who needed an editor like Perkins to order and unify his inchoate (a word I
associate with Wolfe) outpourings?
Colin Firth makes Maxwell
Perkins out to be an automaton. He never
quite divests himself of his British accent.
He makes Perkins a kind of cipher—attractive in ways, indifferent in
others.
I didn’t care for this
hyperbolic film. But maybe I‘ll try to
read Look Homeward, Angel again.
