Winter/Spring 2015

 

A Sheep in Wolfe’s Clothing:
Thomas Wolfe and Edward Aswell at the Chelsea Hotel

If we overlook Mark Twain, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, then Thomas Wolfe was the greatest writer to live at the Chelsea. Wolfe, from Asheville, North Carolina, wrote the novels Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again. He was mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway and Fitzgerald and shared their editor, Scribners’ renowned Maxwell Perkins. In 1937, Chelsea resident Edgar Lee Masters, author of The Spoon River Anthology, introduced Wolfe to the hotel. Wolfe moved in, living and writing in Chelsea Room 831. British writer Florence Turner, who lived in Wolfe’s room in the 1970s, recounts that he enjoyed the Chelsea and planned to write his next book about the hotel, but the physical record of Wolfe’s stay there depends largely on souvenirs – a typewriter, a suit jacket, a pair of size-13 shoes and a few anecdotes.

         A well-known story has Wolfe, after an extensive writing binge, wandering out of the Chelsea into the streets at 3:00 a.m. during a violent thunderstorm.

         “I wrote ten thousand words today!” he shouted. “I wrote ten thousand words!” At over 30 pages, this is a good amount, whether or not the amount was good. Wolfe was known for his transcendent passages of lyrical prose, but also for being a disorganized writer whose editorial method was to amass words rather than cut them.

         Wolfe had an irascible personality. According to biographer David F. Donald, he once, during a drinking binge, became furious at one of the Chelsea’s phone operators for playfully calling him “Toots.” He reported the transgression to the hotel’s manager, who offered to fire the operator, whereupon Wolfe took the manager to task for mistreating his employees. Being at the receiving end of one of his diatribes – Wolfe was 6 foot 5 and weighed 250 pounds – could be daunting.

         Wolfe had just ended his working relationship with the renowned editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribners. Wolfe felt Perkins had over-edited his previous novel, Of Time and the River. He was also aware of rumors that Perkins had claimed that without his own keen eye, Wolfe’s work would have been unpublishable. So Wolfe moved to Harper and brothers and a new editor, Edward Aswell.

         Aswell was a country boy who had worked his way up from working class roots in Tennessee. His daughter, now a professor of literature, recalls his upbringing.

Mary Aswell Doll

His people were Scottish, very strict and very poor. My father did not have money to go to Harvard, so he earned it selling shoes in Chicago. He joked that the shoe business was a good one because with shoes, customers always had to buy two. But I do think he was ashamed of his background.

Aswell and Wolfe, both southerners, quickly became close friends. The parallels between the lives of these the two literary men were not lost on either.

Mary Aswell Doll

My father is from Nashville, Tennessee, and Wolfe was from Ashville, North Carolina. They were born within six days of each other. They both fled the South and went to Harvard. My mother felt that Wolfe was my father’s alter ego. She always said they were star-crossed, and this was true in my father’s eyes, as well. My father would refer to himself as a sheep in Wolfe’s clothing.

Despite their emotional connection, Wolfe’s talent for behaving badly soon became clear to Aswell. It culminated when Aswell invited the novelist to spend Christmas with his family in Chappaqua, New York.

Mary Aswell Doll

Wolfe came to our house for Christmas but arrived very late. My father went down to the train station to meet him. Train after train came and went, and finally my father went to meet the last train, the milk train. Wolfe was stumbling off it carrying a bear, a big toy bear for my brother. But the bear was scraggly and soaking wet – with bourbon.

My mother [the editor Mary Lou Aswell Doll] was not amused at this behavior. She had taken great trouble to decorate the house the way he had described it in one of his novels, how a real Kentucky home was decorated during Christmas. She had placed boughs of fresh evergreens all over the house. And the meal itself was going to be the way he remembered. She tried to follow the recipes in the same way he had written about the feasts in a real Kentucky home. So she was very put out by his bad behavior, arriving late like that and spoiling Christmas.

He never phoned or anything to say he was running late. The fact that he arrived at all, I suppose, is a miracle.

Shortly after, the novelist and his new editor arranged a meeting at the Chelsea, a routine visit in which Aswell would collect some of Wolfe’s manuscripts. In an article in Harper’s, Aswell details his expedition to Manhattan’s bohemian central:

         “I shall never forget my first visit to Tom at the Chelsea. He had a three-room suite which sounds more magnificent than it was, for the rooms were dark and dingy. But they had the advantage of ceilings high enough so that he ran no risk of bumping his head. The most impressive feature of the suite was the bathroom, which was quite large with a toilet set on a raised platform. Tom called it ‘the Throne Room.’ By the first week of February 1936, Wolfe had launched into his intensive work on his book. His cratefulls of mss. were all unpacked and scattered around his three big, high-ceilinged rooms at the old Chelsea.”

         Neither Aswell nor Wolfe could know that this brief meeting in Room 831 would instantly sink Aswell in to the biggest challenge of his career, an editing morass that would, even forty-three years later, ignite a literary scandal debated in The New York Review of Books. In the light of recent literary scandals involving plagiarism and misrepresented facts, this one features an interesting reversal.

         Aswell inherited the same problems with Wolfe that Maxwell Perkins had shouldered. According to Yale literary scholar John Halberstadt, a party in the later scandal, Wolfe had, on that day at the Chelsea, bulldozed Aswell with a literary landfill, “a collection of materials Perkins had cut from earlier novels, previously published sketches, or even short novels, chapters in variant versions, fragments,” as well as some new writing. The mass of it totaled around five thousand pages, or 1,250,000 words.

         Aswell christened the manuscript “a mess,” and not just the writing.

Mary Aswell Doll

There were banana peels and a broken broomstick stuck in between the sheets of paper. Literally.

The pages included drafts of what would become Wolfe’s final three novels: The Web and the Rock, You Can’t Go Home Again, and The Hills Beyond. But the work was such an unchecked gush of prose, so incomplete, fragmentary and uneven in quality that it presented Aswell with a severe editing conundrum.

         Then, to make matters worse, Wolfe went and died. After handing over the manuscripts, he left New York on a lecture tour out west, and contracted the miliary tuberculosis that killed him quickly.

         Wolfe’s death lifted Aswell’s problems out of literature and into the law. He had a legal contract to publish a celebrated author’s final three works but couldn’t possibly publish them in their condition. According to Halberstadt, the contract also barred Aswell from making any changes to the work that Wolfe hadn’t agreed to in writing. Aswell pored over the contract, looking for loopholes. He discovered a glaring one stipulating that the final manuscript could not exceed 750,000 words. This was promising news – it left Aswell with half a million words to play with.

         And play he did, with expert precision, cutting pages here, adding pages from other manuscripts there, cherry-picking far flung passages and placing them side-by-side, and finally adding some of his own writing as mortar between the bricks. It was an editing tour-de-force.

         It also launched a scandal.

Mary Aswell Doll

He did a really handsome, really brilliant job, which was nevertheless scrutinized by subsequent critics.

One of the critics was Halberstadt, then a Ph.D. candidate at Yale, who saw in Aswell’s work not a masterpiece of editing, but a literary crime. By comparing manuscripts, Halberstadt exposed in detail the liberties Aswell took in creating both The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again. Some literary scholars agreed that Aswell’s heavy intervention called the novels’ legitimacy into question. The scholar R.W.B. Lewis wrote, “in years past, I have often taught The Web and the Rock . . . After reading Halberstadt, I would not dream of doing so again.”

         Scholarly camps for and against Aswell began to form.

         Temple University’s Richard S. Kennedy, already familiar with some of Aswell’s creative editing, defended the job, calling it a valid move by an editor in a legal and literary bind.

         Halberstadt dug in his heels. He brought his Ph.D. dissertation, with its charges of fraudulent editing, to the Thomas Wolfe estate at Harvard’s Houghten Library. The estate’s executor, Paul Gitlin, agreed to allow Halberstadt to do research at Houghten as long as he promised never to publish his dissertation or any part of it. This was an odd demand in the world of research. Just as oddly, Halberstadt agreed.

         But then he changed his mind. The Yale Review published his article about Aswell’s edit job. For this, the Houghten Library banished Halberstadt for a year. In response, Halberstadt fired off a letter to The New York Review of Books, concluding, “Wolfe, I believe, would have approved my writing this letter.”

         Four months later, Kennedy wrote a reply in The New York Review entitled “Crying Wolfe.” Kennedy maintained that “Aswell’s editorial practice of interweaving various portions of the material was similar to Wolfe’s own procedure and to some extent dictated by the material itself.” Halberstadt’s accusations, he concluded, were absurd. The controversy, dubbed Wolfegate, continues to this day.

         Unlike many contemporary literary scandals, Aswell’s editing amounted to a kind of reverse plagiarism. Aswell, inspired by a mix of brute necessity and a felt sense of spiritual kinship with Thomas Wolfe, did not represent Wolfe’s work as his own – he represented his own work as Wolfe’s.

Mary Aswell Doll

That’s why he called himself a sheep in Wolfe’s clothing. He knew what he was doing.

Halberstadt may have been right about one thing: if Wolfe had not died soon after handing over the manuscript to Aswell at the Chelsea, Wolfe may have objected to Aswell’s edits, just as he had objected to the edits by Maxwell Perkins. This brings up a thorny question about aesthetics, authorship, and intellectual property. What if the work of both editors did actually improve Wolfe’s work? Both editors saw that his manuscripts needed serious surgery. And once the three novels were published, critics recognized them, especially You Can’t Go Home Again, as works of genius.

         Practically all literary works are, to one degree or another, collaborations. Authors collaborating with editors, writing teachers suggesting edits to their students’ work both amount to a kind of collaboration. So do writers’ suggestions to fellow writers, either privately or in workshops. Precisely where does an author’s work end and a collaborator’s begin? The author’s name appears on the book’s cover, whereas the editor’s, teacher’s, or fellow writer’s might get a nod on the acknowledgements page. If Edward Aswell hadn’t hauled stacks of papers loaded with banana peels and broomsticks down the Chelsea’s creaking elevator, we would be left with only manuscripts instead of masterpieces, piles instead of pearls.

         It’s impossible to say how many great works of art lie dormant in chests, closets, and desk drawers. The Chelsea might be a good place to search. But without the work – and the luck – of artists recognizing their kinship with other artists, our cultural life would be a little bit poorer.