A Motorcar Runs Through It: Imagining the Unwritten Western Book

Address to the Thomas Wolfe Society, Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting, 25 May 2013, Boise, Idaho. In the last session this morning, David Radavich said, "Ultimately, Thomas Wolfe did not find the home that he was seeking. He remained restless ... [and] his true home was in writing." I too would like to talk this evening about the relationship between home and community on the one hand and restless motion on the other. I am interested in Wolfe's thoughts about homes and communities in A Western Journal, and in the way--had he lived--westerners themselves might have continued to influence him as he worked on the next big book. We began this conference with an imaginary dialogue between Vardis Fisher and Thomas Wolfe, and I'm going to end the formal program tonight with more of the what-if game. You all are better equipped than I to speculate about what Wolfe might have written if he had lived beyond 1938; I'd like to focus narrowly on how westerners' experiences of home, community, and motion might have found their way into Wolfe's sympathetic consciousness and affected his ideas of home. What if he remained restless, as David Radavich said, and discovered an idea of home compatible with motion? In my reading of A Western Journal, Wolfe may have been moving toward such a reconciliation of opposites. From research on Wolfe's northwest literary friends and the western news of 1938, I'm going to speculate that Wolfe was in the process of learning from his western surroundings that vital and necessary communities--homes, even--could be the creative work of people in motion. Did Wolfe die before he could articulate in fiction an insight that homes could be the creative and vital work of people in motion? To answer this, I'll begin with a reading of homes and other gathering places in the Western Journal, then share some brief stories about western homes and western mobility from Wolfe's northwest friends and from regional newspapers published along the route of the national parks tour, any of which might have influenced Wolfe. Finally, I'd like to read to you from a western writer who came to the national scene shortly after Wolfe passed away, and who may have achieved an insight about homes that Wolfe himself was moving toward when he died. I agree with Shawn Holliday, who wrote in 1997 of A Western Journal, that "Wolfe was interested in how Americans made their home on the land" (36). But in the Western Journal, homes--or dwellings that humans create and inhabit--are rarely attractive. Gerry Max read some of these passages yesterday, but let me remind you of a few. Listen especially for the word blistered, a word that appears both in letters and in the Western Journal in association with houses and homes. Speeding through the Mojave Desert of southeastern California, Wolfe sees "very occasionally a tiny blistered little house" (14). (1) In the small Mormon towns of Utah, he admires green farms and "pleasantness" of "Canaan," but the "little houses of frame" are "for the most part mean and plain and stunted looking" (28). So irrigation alone is not enough to make western homes livable. In southeast Idaho, ascending to Wyoming, Wolfe admires lush farmland, but in the midst of "vernal greenness, lushness, freshness" comes again "The little blistered house / The farm buildings curiously forgotten in the vast curious landscape / The towns--blistered--little blistered houses" (47). About three weeks earlier, from Boise, Wolfe had described the southern Idaho landscape as an "abomination of desolation," with its "little pitiful blistered towns huddled down in the most abject loneliness underneath the huge light and scale and weather" ("To Elizabeth" 768). With the exception of Logan, Utah, when houses appear in the Western Journal, they appear utterly unlivable to Wolfe's eastern eye. But life abounds in the Western Journal in places where tourists and employees of the tourist industry form transient, ad hoc communities. …