In 1933, Thomas Wolfe received a letter from Donald Chacey, a naval aviator and a fan of Wolfe’s work. Chacey praised Wolfe’s first novel, Look Homeward, Angel; Alfred Dashiell, one of Wolfe’s editors at Scribner, passed along the note with the intention of providing encouragement to the author, who was questioning his ability to produce a second novel. Though Wolfe did not finish his second book by the following autumn, as he promises here, Of Time and the River was completed within a few years.
February 27, 1933
Dear Mr. Chacey:
I do not suppose I answer one letter in a dozen, and I have always felt very bad about this because procrastination and good intentions I have not followed out are the reasons I do not answer them, but I am going to answer yours even if all I can do is to bang out a short note by way of thanks.
Your letter made me feel good because if my book was as you say, meat and drink to you and you read it seven times and further are not a literary fellow, and do not know anything more about me than what you found out in the book, or whether I got any success or reputation for it—then your kind of letter is also meat and drink to me, and would make anybody proud whoever wrote a book. Your letter also touched me up a bit and got me a little hot under the collar when you asked me if I was ever going to do it again, or if the old well had gone dry.
I will tell you the plain truth to start with which is—I will be damned if I know myself. The well certainly has not gone dry, in fact, I seem to have tapped a whole subterranean river and the water is spouting up in columns and geysers more than it ever did. But whether it will be that life-giving beverage which you liked so much in the first book I do not know, but I hope and believe it will be and my publisher also thinks so. At any rate, it will be out next autumn if I can hold on long enough to finish it, and I hope when it comes out people like yourself who thought well of the first one will also like this one.
I realize that a flying officer writing such a letter as you did from his ship at sea does not do so because he belongs to one of the ten thousand literary gangs who live the cute, quaint, gossiping life of the literary gangster but for some better and more substantial reason, and that is the reason I am writing you this letter. You may wonder why anything in your letter should touch me up at all or get me a little hot under the collar, but let me put it to you this way. If at one time in your life you had gone up about 30,000 feet—that is a good height isn’t it?—and your colleagues congratulated you and pounded you on the back when you came down, but at the same time asked you whether you would be able to get up to that height again, you might get a little hot too. But, at the same time you might grind your teeth together and say: “I won’t eh, well by God we’ll see about that. I will show these birds, and just for that I am going to hit 35,000 feet next time.”
Well Chacey, that is the way it is with a writer, except that with a writer much more I guess than with a flying man, he goes through periods of doubt, despair and confusion when he does not think he is worth a damn and never will be any good again, and this is particularly true of a young fellow who is just starting out and who has not tested his strength and resources far enough to understand fully what he can do or what his limits are. Also, 10,000 well-meaning people praise him, write him letters, call him on the telephone, etc., tell him what was wrong with his first book and what was right with it, and how to do it better the next time. Finally, after lashing and batting around like a mad man, tortured by all kinds of self-doubt and loss of confidence he may have sense enough to get away from all these clever minds and forget their good advice and lose himself somewhere out in the wilds of Brooklyn and work like hell twelve or fourteen hours a day doing his job as best he can in his way, which may not be a good way, but is the only way he knows and that is what I am doing now.
The book will be out next autumn, It will not be and never would have been called K 19, which was only the name of a section in it which an ambitious publicity man at Scribners picked up and sent out to the press. The whole final and complete book, which I hope to live long enough to write will be called October Fair, but this present volume which we are trying to keep to 800 or 1000 pages long will be called, according to my present intention, Time And The River….
This is all that I can write you, and I have written you at such length because I suppose it is for the respect and belief of such persons as yourself who have no literary ax to grind and no literary style to follow that a fellow like myself is writing. Also, I would like to say this. A flying man who hits 30,000 feet on one flight can probably hit 35,000 feet on his next big effort if he sets his mind and heart on it, but it does not always go so evenly as this with a writer. I hope and believe that I am going to hit that 35 the next time, but if I do not I hope I hit 25, and still believe there is a chance left for me to break the record some day. I have myself done considerable flying in my time and spent a good part of my life up in the air, but not in the way you have, although the way you do it is the way I have always wanted to do it.
Any way, as one flying man to another, I am writing you this letter and thank you for your own, and think that it did me good.
I send you my best wishes for success in everything you do.
From The Letters of Thomas Wolfe. Edited by Elizabeth Nowell. New York: Scribner, 1956. pp. 363-364.
FURTHER READING
Dashiell’s letter to Wolfe in which he enclosed Chacey’s comments can be found in the letter collection To Loot My Life Clean.
Elizabeth Nowell, the compiler of Wolfe’s letters, and their author-editor relationship.