America had come to the end of something, and to the beginning of something else. They did not know that you can’t go home again. “I’ve seen the damnedest things here … it’s a great enormous blot and three million people live here!”Įigeman noted, though, that despite Wolfe’s moments of distaste, Brooklyn was also the site of some of his greatest writing, prose that often features “elegiac suites that turn on a dime and punch you in the face.” It was thrilling and daunting to think of him, perched up a few flights of stairs, writing these lines (which Susan Bruce read on Monday) about the night he met Bernstein while on a transatlantic voyage:īut they were wrong. Similarly, Wolfe was alternatively exultant and disparaging of his adopted borough: “God, I hate Brooklyn,” he once told a New York newspaperman. As an adult, he lived in physical and psychic exile from Asheville, North Carolina, where he grew up, and his writing is both obsessed with the particularities of that past and an aggressive act of rejection. Wolfe, that incandescent exploding star of early-twentieth-century fiction, had a deeply felt ambivalence to the idea of home. “We’ll wait if you have to get your coat and leave.” We remained. This is a different Tom Wolfe, he told the audience, in case we had expected talk of white suits and Kool-Aid. After a bit of biography, he paused to make a clarification. Eigeman then took over as emcee, leading a discursive retelling of Wolfe’s life.
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