The protagonist in The Web and the Rock, George Weber, writes a novel deemed unpublishable due to its extreme length—lazy editors send him insulting rejection letters without bothering to read the manuscript, alcoholic writers give it backhanded praise after admitting to having only read “a page or two, a line here and there” (even Weber’s lover, who believes him a genius, counsels him to cut a few hundred pages). The critical establishment is portrayed as populated by unsuccessful authors who bitterly attack the great writers of the day and explain their own failures by saying that literature isn’t possible in an age (how little has changed!) when “the real poetry is written by advertising men.” These rejections drive Weber into bitterness and paranoia, and ultimately he rejects his lover.Wolfe himself was a man at war with the attitudes of the critics, with time itself, with his own body, and most of all with the publishing world’s idea of the appropriate length for a novel. His first, “Look Homeward Angel” had faced less the editor’s red pen than the paper shredder, losing countless pages he thought necessary to the story. Outraged, he left his publishing house and sought a contract that allowed no editor to tamper with his works. Wolfe handed off five thousand pages to his new editor, Edward Aswell. This was not a completed manuscript but parts of a large, almost hubristically ambitious project called “Of Time and the River” the basic architecture of which Wolfe hoped to familiarize Aswell with. Unfortunately Wolfe died shortly thereafter, leaving his publisher with a “mess.” Conspiring with Wolfe’s literary executor, Aswell used a loophole in the contract to chop the huge manuscript into three separate books. The story of George Weber was told in “The Web and the Rock” and “You Can’t Go Home Again” with some of the hundreds of pages about Weber’s lineage forming “The Hills Beyond,” published last of the three. But Aswell did not merely make a trilogy of the work—as John Halberstadt writes, “Aswell would take a few pages from a chapter or variant version of a chapter, a few pages from a second, write a line himself, then mix in third and even fourth sources until he had the hybrid he desired.” He also merged characters into composites. This is comparable to the relatively recent editing of Ralph Ellison’s massive incomplete manuscript into a book called “Juneteenth” for posthumous publication, except that in that book’s case the editors were upfront about their process, while Aswell wrote a disingenuous essay claiming that his task had been mainly to polish a nearly complete work. It is almost certain that in both cases the intrusive editing brought the works to a larger readership than they would have found in their behemoth states.But knowing all this, how does a critic approach “The Web and the Rock”? This, after all, was nothing like Ezra Pound blowing “The Wasteland” to bits and resembling it with TS Eliot’s consent, but nor was it like a ghostwriter inflating a scribble in the notebook of Robert Ludlum or VC Andrews into a complete novel. A literature professor who had been teaching the book for years vowed to stop doing so after dis- covering that it brought up issues of authorial intention more likely to spark smiles on the faces of his more post-modern oriented colleagues. Wolfe criticism was upended by the revelation and as Halberstadt writes, “We may need to study Aswell's biography for clues to Wolfe's psyche.”The real question then is: did Aswell do a good job in assembling these novels? Richard S. Kennedy believes so, writing, “Wolfe's manuscript was unpublishable in the state he left it, but it contained magnificent material and an over-all design that was generally clear. Aswell fulfilled Wolfe's intentions, as well as he could discern them, and two generations of readers have been grateful.”As a reader who knew nothing about the book’s editing until I’d read half of its 700 pages, I didn’t notice any odd transitions or shifts in tone. Of course after learning the book’s history I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened in-between each scene. While Wolfe can be fairly windy and overly focused on transcendence (this was a man who would hold his breath on the subway in an effort to “break through” into something or other) many of his extended pieces are magnificent, from the evocation of a lynching early in the novel to the scene where a multiple murderer kneels by a river rather than run from the mob chasing him. The book’s first half follows George Weber’s boyhood in the south while the back half treats his adult life in New York City and follows him to Germany. Weber’s love affair with a married woman (Edith) dominates this second half, and the conversations between the lovers, especially as Weber descends into suspicion and begins acting erratically, have remarkable power.That this material would have likely remained unpublished or put out a state that only scholars would have bothered attempting to navigate had Aswell not intervened argues for the editorial position he took—coherence over completeness.http://mullatari.parastrophy.com/arch...
Like all four of the huge, generally formless and quite outstanding books Thomas Wolfe completed before his early death, 'The Web and the Rock' is really an autobiography thinly disguised as a rhapsodic coming-of-age novel.Like his author, George 'Monk' Webber' is from North Carolina, is an ambitious, overly sensitive young man who dreams of finding fame as a writer, and goes to New York where he becomes a teacher and has an affair with an older, married, wealthy woman who supports him. That's just about it as far as a plot goes. the rest is all memory, mythologizing, navel-gazing and the big notions, the big emotions, the whole spectrum between 'wordless joy' and 'unutterable sorrow', as well as every other type of joy and sorrow.On memory, Wolfe writes:'From his childhood he could remember all that people said or did, but as he tried to set it down his memory opened up enormous vistas and associations, going from depth to limitless depth, until the simplest incident conjured up a buried continent of experience.'He wasn't exaggerating.I could have picked more than a hundred examples of his gift for creating myths out of the everyday - the people, the places, the seasons and the times of the day - but I like this one, of a childhood friend Nebraska Crane and his father, who: 'seemed to have come straight from the heart of immutable and unperturbed nature. Warmth thy had, staunch friendliness, and the capacity for savage passion, ruthless murder. But they had no more terror than a mountain.' If you have not yet any Wolfe and were thinking of giving him a go, I think this description the author gives of Crime and Punishment is instructive because he could just as easily be describing his own work.: 'instead of following the conventional line of structure and story, plot, and pattern, seemed to boil outward from secret, unfathomable and subterranean source'. In Wolfe, America already had its own Beat Poet a full generation before Kerouac et al ever picked up a pen and went out on the road.
What do You think about The Web And The Rock (1999)?
More than once, while reading this book, I have risen from my chair and crossed the room to a friend, acquaintance or family member. Needing to show someone a passage just read. The thought of the words trapped dark between the pages, unread, unseen -- cause me to take a quick breath, as i prepare to reveal to them a most glorious paragraph -- then a slow exhale, as I realize my impending oft repeated folly. Not ready -- not nearly ready are they to hear. So I return to my seat, and read more. My jaw drops time and time again, as my eyes step down the lines on the page, through his carefully chosen words -- a ladder providing access to a deep part of my heart -- even the arrangement of syllables and cadence are planned it seems, as he describes things I had considered indescribable.
—G. E.
What I learned from this book was patience. It took me over a month to finish this book, and I was ready to pitch it a quarter of the way into it. Thomas Wolfe may be an elegant writing, however his descriptive flowery phases run on and on. This book is not for those who wish to speed read or just enjoy fast pace novels. This book is to be consumed, to be taken fully for his development of each sentence as it leads to similar thoughts though more deeply elaborated as many similitudes strung together in order to embellish the narrative and strengthen the underlying theme of that particular moment. As for the subject matter... a young southern boy, adopted by his kinfolk and reared in the strict evangelistic culture but who sees the world so exciting and alive. After college he moves to NY city, enjoying all it can offer and begins his journey as a writer. Some believe it is a autobiographical of Thomas Wolfe and how he might have seen life in his early twenties. It ends abruptly in his 26th year while he is abroad, leaving a hole in a portion of his life that still awaits in NY. And what is his self discovery? That is the reason to read the book or maybe not.
—Bill Currie
My second time through this one, and I think I liked it better the first time. It ran long in a lot of parts, and, as the introduction points out, Wolfe’s affinity as an author does not run to telling a story. Nothing much happens in this book: George Webber grows up in a southern town, goes to NY, and there falls in love with an older woman. That’s about all of the plot. But, the thing about Wolfe is his turn of phrase, and his insight into life. One review I read said that you could pick up a Wolfe book, open it to any page, read a few paragraphs, and then put the book away again. He writes very upliftingly, very beautifully, but that style of writing begins to bug when there isn’t much story to speak of and when the book goes on for hundreds of pages. But, he’s still a favorite of mine, even if this book is not on the top of my list.
—Matt Gough
