United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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Thomas Wolfe ... A Sonnet Sequence By HAROLD KARR INTRODUCTORY NOTE r j HOMAS WOLFE’S novels are greeted by appreciative and discriminating readers everywhere as the most moving and overwhelming documents of the modern mind. “Look Homeward, Angel,” his first and possibly greatest statement, sets the mood of the theme to follow with a brief introductory monograph. It begins with “. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. . . .” This symbolism, which vibrates subtly, yet strongly and ceaselessly be¬ neath the voluptuous reality of the story and gave a terrible intensity to its meaning, is maintained to the end of the book. More than that; it is maintained throughout his writings even to the end of the last novel published before his untimely death, “The Web and the Rock.” No other novelist has that same sense of the crisis of life today, or feels with equal sensibility and immediacy the problem of reality and metaphysics with which the modern soul must cope for the sake of its integrity. “A stone, a leaf, an unfound door . . .” of the philosopher’s stone to solve the great WHY of eternity—why this earth? why are we here? why this hunger? this sensitivity to pain? to what end? of the leaf that trembles with winded life and dies earthward posing the unsolved riddle of the spark of existence—what is the secret of the leaf that it grows? how? from where? whence? of the quicknesses that rupture the dust to dust duration of organic life? of the duration of the soul’s life? of the unfound door and the lost lane-end into heaven for which we hunger and wander aimlessly seeking ... of the transcendentals of happiness and reality and truth which we find not, but know by implications and intimations and because they must be. ' - Wolfe’s novels should be experienced and integrated slowly and repeatedly before they can be fully comprehended. They are laden with manificent gustos and sensuous acceptances of life which do not degenerate to ttie fljkfortunate pornographies of the majority of modern novelists who attempt realism to the full. They are enraptured with prose-poetries of style, sometimes with the momentous elevation and simplicity of the book of Job ' , sometimes with the fluid verbosity of Henry James at his very best, but usually with the powerful dynamics of the blinding speed and overwhelming pressure of the dynamo of life that Stephen Spender found in his white-heat moments. They are enobled by the terrible sincerity of the soul as it struggles and gropes through the ever¬ lasting complexities of living toward the mysteries of the stone, the leaf, and the unfound door. 1900-1938 Time will list Thomas Wolfe among the truly great. He wrote of his search. But he wrote of our search too. 21

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T. S. Eliot violates the temperament of our age by violating the contemporary distrust of ultimates phrased as anything but questionings. He has cried out for standards and criteria in an age that rejects the possibility of standards, and much of the abuse and resentment that has gathered about him can be traced to this. He is, as artist and as a man, acutely aware of the desolation of the human spirit without faith and sanctions, and in his analysis of the modern mentality and soul’s rest, and in his own intellectual activity he has accepted the warning of Waldo Frank: “In times of basic cultural transition the criticism that does not start out from metaphysics and a true under¬ standing of religious experience is idle, irrele¬ vant, and anti-social.” The last charge that could possibly be made against Eliot is a want of seriousness or a failure to understand men’s predicament. Whether or not one subscribes to his conclusions one cannot deny the honesty of his search and the depth of his concern. He is convinced of man’s need for sanctions and for himself he has found them in a return to tradition and the authority of tradition. It is an antiquarian short-cut to faith. Eliot has con¬ vinced himself that one must bow to the ex¬ perience of the past and learn to accept what the past can teach us. It is this characteristic that has led certain exasperated contemporaries to exclaim that “T. S. Eliot was born middle aged and has not been growing any younger.” Eliot would (and has) turned the argument in another way, and has written that the darkest ignorance of the modern man is his pride and attempted self-sufficiency—in a sense his demo¬ cratic faith—and has said “the greatest, the most difficult of the Christian virtues (is) the virtue of humility.” It is this kind of thinking that has led Eliot to the point where he has announced that he is “a classicist in literature, a Catholic in religion, and a cavalier in poli¬ tics.” Those who admired him as an analyst of post-war frustration and damn him as a re¬ actionary, and those who praise him since his entry into the aristocratic fold are equally guilty of doing him an injustice. The present position of Mr. Eliot is inherent in the search he set himself and the premises on which he based that search. As early as 1921 he wrote in connection with the English metaphyicals (of whom he is a direct descendent): “That firm grasp of human experience is their distinguish¬ ing mark as a group. This wisdom, cynical perhaps but untired, leads toward and is only completed by the religious comprehension.” It is unfair to assume that Mr. Eliot made a sud¬ den breach of faith with truth in his entry into the high Anglican church. It is unfair to sug¬ gest that he rests easily in the faith he has ac¬ cepted there. One cannot but realize that a profound and moving honesty and a tense search for faith motivate Eliot. Frost is apparently capable of resting in a humanism that is without a comprehensive metaphysic. But T. S. Eliot cannot be so easily satisfied and the boundaries of his search for sanctions have been immeasurably broader than those of Frost. One has been content with an emotional conviction. The other has sought a coherence between what he feels and what he believes. His very nature is intensely analytic and intellectual and he demands a con¬ sistency between thought and emotion. No one who has not travelled the hard road he has set for himself can lightly condemn him as a traitor to a cause of undisciplined emotional¬ ism, without revealing his own limitations. For Eliot has accepted the “iron fact that art issued from religion and is forever allied thereto and must in sober truth become more and more religious as religion itself loses its hold upon the minds of men.” Whether or not one in¬ cludes in this, allegiance to the Catholic church may be a matter of dispute, but I do not think it can honestly be argued that Eliot has “escaped” into the church easily and happily. The meaning of his poems and the phil¬ osophy of composition behind them is briefly this. Civilization and meaning are disintegrated and despair and disillusion stalk the waste land. By a “learned and calculated chaos” in method Eliot sought to parallel and describe the chaos and futility of contemporary existence where man in frustration and loneliness cannot feel or think. His verse is extremely intellectual and analytic. He is typically modern in the manner in which he has turned his sensitive¬ ness to account in an intellectual process. His technique is subtle and brilliant though for the most part I have failed to cope with him be¬ cause of an incapacity to deal with his highly literary associations as he searches for a blend¬ ing of the individual talent with the stream of (Continued on page 34)

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SONNET SEQUENCE: I Consider livings and the way they fled, O masterpiece of God, to ’hind or ’fore: When will your tears return the tears of yore, Or veil today the tears that lie ahead? . . . Have you not faltered from the drowsy dead? . . . Or burst your breast to find the unfound door, The door, the stone, the leaf that lurks no more? . . . Sunken and lost in Time’s deep river-bed. . . . Where flames the fire that webs the universe? O lost one from the distant flood of time. . . . Was Blake a breast . . . was Blake a sense of rhyme . . . Was Christ or Pan the meaning of the verse? . . . Seek further; seek the thorn, the threshold crossed . . . O brother lone and grieved, O brother lost. . . . II Out of this dream, O lost impatient one, Out of this web of life, the sunken well, The stranger Time, the faintly tolling bell Ever begun and ever past and done . . . I rescue thee ... to run where once has run Thyself ... a child . . . what are the flowers that fell? . . . What are those long far years? . . . Ah who can tell Or bring again lost things? lost stars? lost sun? . . . What of the child that cried? his crib and toys? What of this stranger child? . . . O taken; slain . . . By whom? by what? . . . O nevermore again Those years, those loves, those vagrant vanished joys . . . O lone grieved angel lost . . .the turning lane Is lost . . . and ah, the songbird dead in brain . . . 22