{"id":197395,"date":"2021-10-18T12:00:26","date_gmt":"2021-10-18T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=197395"},"modified":"2021-10-12T09:41:27","modified_gmt":"2021-10-12T08:41:27","slug":"thomas-wolfe-on-ambition-gratitude-and-the-true-measure-of-success-in-letters-to-his-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/10\/thomas-wolfe-on-ambition-gratitude-and-the-true-measure-of-success-in-letters-to-his-mother\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Wolfe on Ambition, Gratitude, and the True Measure of Success, in Letters to His Mother"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt is not all bad, but it is not all good, it is not all ugly, but it is not all beautiful, it is life, life, life \u2014 the only thing that matters.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cDoes what goes on inside show on the outside?\u201d<\/em> Van Gogh wrote to his brother in contemplating how ambition is transmuted into art<\/a>, adding wistfully: \u201cSomeone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney and then go on their way. So now what are we to do, keep this fire alive inside, have salt in ourselves, wait patiently\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Most artists are driven by this fuming disconnect between their interior fire and its exterior smoke, but few have confronted it with more blazing a refusal to be patient than the great novelist and dramatist Thomas Wolfe<\/strong> (October 3, 1900\u2013September 15, 1938), who channeled his fiery ambition with extraordinary eloquence and intensity in the correspondence collected in the out-of-print gem Thomas Wolfe\u2019s Letters to His Mother<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the closest thing we have to a record of the creative credo animating one of the twentieth century\u2019s greatest writers.<\/p>\n

\"thomaswolfe1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Wolfe was very much a craftsman of his own destiny \u2014 his father was a gravestone carver, his mother operated a boarding house, and he was the youngest of their eight children. He entered college when he was only fifteen and was admitted into Harvard\u2019s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at nineteen. In a letter from mid-May of 1921, as he was completing his first semester of graduate studies at Harvard, twenty-year-old Wolfe writes to his mother:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve put a heavy burden on myself; the burden of vindicating your generosity. If I fail you need never expect me home. You\u2019ll never hear from me again. If I succeed, and it is on that I love to think, I will be able to return and afford you, I hope, a certain measure of satisfaction and pride. Meanwhile, whatever taunts may be thrown at me, if any, of selfishness, pride, conceit, snobbishness, or what not, strike against as tough a hide as a sensitive fellow can call to his defense.<\/p>\n

I tell you, if success depends on desperate determination I will not fail. I think if the realization ever came to me that I was doomed to eternal failure, that \u201cmy bright sun\u201d would always be just out of reach \u2014 I think I would kill myself\u2026 Of one thing I earnestly entreat you never to doubt: That is the sense of gratitude and loyalty I feel to you and Papa\u2026 When I retire at night, when I wake in the morning I am conscious of the weight of my gratitude; it is the spur that drives me on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Thomas<\/a>
Thomas Wolfe and his mother, Julia, sitting on the porch of his childhood home in Asheville, North Carolina.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Shortly after Wolfe received his master\u2019s degree from Harvard the following year, his father died \u2014 an event that devastated him and deeply imprinted his identity as a writer. To pull himself from under the weight of grief, he reached for the heights of creative self-actualization with ever-greater ambition and determination. In a letter from March of 1923, he writes to his mother:<\/p>\n

I feel the sap rising in me, I cannot with all humility, help but feel that the thing is bound to come, and come with a rush when it does.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two months lather, Wolfe\u2019s ambition erupts:<\/p>\n

I know this now: I am inevitable. I sincerely believe the only thing that can stop me now is insanity, disease, or death. The plays I am going to write may not be suited to the tender bellies of old maids, sweet young girls, or Baptist Ministers but they will be true and honest and courageous, and the rest doesn\u2019t matter. If my play goes on I want you to be prepared for execrations upon my head. I have stepped on toes right and left\u2026 I am not interested in writing what our pot-bellied members of the Rotary and Kiwanis call a \u201cgood show\u201d \u2014 I want to know life and understand it and interpret it without fear or favor. This, I feel is a man\u2019s work and worthy of a man\u2019s dignity. For life is not made up of sugary, sticky, sickening Edgar A. Guest sentimentality, it is not made up of dishonest optimism, God is not<\/em> always in his Heaven, all is not<\/em> always right with the world. It is not all bad, but it is not all good, it is not all ugly, but it is not all beautiful, it is life, life, life \u2014 the only thing that matters. It is savage, cruel, kind, noble, passionate, selfish, generous, stupid, ugly, beautiful, painful, joyous \u2014 it is all these, and more, and it\u2019s all these I want to know and, by God, I shall, though they crucify me for it. I will go to the ends of the earth to find it, to understand it \u2026 and I will put it on paper, and make it true and beautiful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But Wolfe, a staunch idealist who despised how commercialism hijacks beauty from truth, adds a piercing caveat:<\/p>\n

When I speak of beauty I do not mean a movie close-up where Susie and Johnnie meet at the end and clinch and all the gum-chewing ladies go home thinking husband is not so good a lover as Valentino. That\u2019s cheap and vulgar. I mean everything which is lovely, and noble, and true. It does not have to be sweet, it may be bitter, it does not have to be joyous, it may be sad.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

I know there is nothing so commonplace, so dull, that it is not touched with nobility and dignity. And I intend to wreak out my soul on paper and express it all. That is what my life means to me: I am at the mercy of this thing and I will do it or die.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a sentiment strikingly similar to young Sylvia Plath\u2019s exaltation at the raw material of writing<\/a>, Wolfe adds:<\/p>\n

This is why I think I\u2019m going to be an artist. The things that really mattered sunk in and left their mark. Sometimes only a word \u2014 sometimes a peculiar smile \u2014 sometimes death \u2014 sometimes the smell of dandelions in Spring \u2014 once Love. Most people have little more mind than brutes: they live from day to day. I will go everywhere and see everything. I will meet all the people I can. I will think all the thoughts, feel all the emotion I am able, and I will write, write, write.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In another letter to his mother from July of the following year, Wolfe revisits the sense of gratitude driving his art:<\/p>\n

Life teaches us. Nothing endures. Nothing lasts except beauty \u2014 and I shall create that\u2026 I shall never forget, or be lacking in gratitude for what you have done for me \u2014 but I shall repay that some day. I shall be great \u2014 if I do not die too soon \u2014 and you will be known as my mother. I say that seriously \u2014 I believe it. There is no one like me, and I shall conquer. Fools will call this conceit, but let them say what they will \u2014 they are fools.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A little more than a year later, Wolfe began writing what would become Look Homeward, Angel<\/em><\/a> \u2014 his autobiographical debut novel, the 1929 publication of which catapulted him into literary celebrity. He wasn\u2019t yet thirty. Nine years later, complications from pneumonia took his life two weeks before his thirty-eight birthday. The day after his funeral, The New York Times<\/em> wrote:<\/p>\n

There was within him an unspent energy, an untiring force, an unappeasable hunger for life and for expression which might have carried him to the heights and might equally have torn him down.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thomas Wolfe\u2019s Letters to His Mother<\/em><\/strong><\/a> is an electrifying read in its entirety, brimming with precisely this \u201cunappeasable hunger for life and for expression\u201d that Wolfe channeled into his work and his ideas on art, literature, and life. Complement this particular portion with Georgia O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s magnificent letter to Sherwood Anderson on what success really means<\/a> and David Foster Wallace on the double-edged sword of ambition<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired UK and<\/em> The Atlantic, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>. Email: brainpicker@brainpickings.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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