The Wolfe at My Door

I did read Look Homeward, Angel, in a Southern Literature class in college (at Barnard, about as far from the South, geographically and spiritually, as one get). I mocked it the whole time, and it's a long book. A friend who took the class with me and I would, for years afterward, sarcastically intone: A stone! A leaf! A door! for no particular reason.

The whole Southern Lit class was a mistake. The professor annoyed me. I had never been to the South and had a typical Yankee arrogance about it as backward, rascist, pathetic. The only writers we read in that class that I liked were Erskine Cadwell and Flannery O'Conner; the rest of them seemed impossible to get, like I was reading them in a bad translation from the old Icelandic. I developed a particularly strong dislike of Faulkner that has persisted to this day.

In North Carolina, Wolfe is almost as holy as Dean Smith. I picked up Look Homeward, Angel one day from my neighbor's bookshelf when I had gone to their house to take care of the cats. Unfortunately I found it, although more moving, to be every bit as ponderous as I remembered it, and soon put it down again.

When I arrived in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, I discovered that Wolfe, when he came to New York in search of literary fame, lived in this neighborhood, within blocks of me. I picture him roaming the same old streets of 19th-century townhouses, and wonder if he liked them as much as I do. Decades apart, we share the bond of being transplanted Tar Heels set down in stony, leafy Brooklyn, and I feel an odd affection for him. My link to North Carolina, a place where I was very happy. But to me, no longer home.