Travel Writing Selections from Thomas Wolfe

“During that first period of all that I can now say is that the writing wrote itself . . . . I wrote about October, or great trains that thundered through the night, of ships and stations in the morning; of men in the harbors and traffic of the ships . . . .” (The Story of a Novel, 37-38)

“Because I was penniless and took one ship instead of another, I met the great and beautiful friend who has stood by me through all the torture, struggle, and madness of my nature for over three years, and who has been here to share my happiness these past ten days.” (letter to Mrs. Roberts, Sat. Jan. 12, 1929—Letters of TW, Elizabeth Nowell, p. 165)

“I wish I could tell you how magnificent a great ship at sea is, or of the glory and beauty of the sea and the sky, which are always different. We are nearing the coast of England, the days are much longer, and we have begun to pass tramps and steamers outward bound for America. All day the gulls have been sweeping over the water. I look forward with the greatest excitement to seeing land to-morrow; it has never failed to touch me very deeply. . . . I can’t write a good letter on a ship—the movement, the tremble of the engines, and the creaking of the wood destroy concentration. I’ll write later from Paris. Goodbye for the present.” (on board S.S. Volendam, Sat. May 17, 1930, letter to Maxwell Perkins—Letters of TW, Elizabeth Nowell, p. 228-9)

“The sounds that come up/from the harbor of Manhattan at night—/that magnificent and thrilling music/of escape, mystery, and joy,/with the mighty orchestration of the transatlantics,/the hoarse little tugs, the ferryboats and lighters,/those sounds that well up/from the gulf and dark immensity of night/and that pierce the entrails of the listener.” (A Stone, A Leaf, A Door, 70)

“Always the rivers run,/and always there will be great ships upon the tide,/always great horns are baying at the harbor’s mouth,/and in the night a thousand men have died,/while the river, always the river,/the dark eternal river, full of strange secret time,/washing the city’s stains away,/thickened and darkened by its dumpings,/is flowing by us,/by us, to the sea.” (A Stone, A Leaf, A Door, 71)

“They come! Ships call!/The hooves of night, the horses of the sea,/come on below their manes of darkness./And forever the river runs./Deep as the tides of time and memory,/deep as the tides of sleep,/the river runs.”   (A Stone, A Leaf, A Door, 59)

“We feel the sorrow and the hush/of evening in the city,/the voices, quiet, casual, lonely,/of the people,/far cries and broken sounds,/and smell the sea, the harbor,/and the huge, slow breathing of deserted docks,/and know that there are ships there!/And beauty swells/like a wild song in our heart,/beauty bursting like a great grape in our throat,/beauty aching, rending, wordless, and unutterable,/beauty in us, all around us,/never to be captured--/and we know that we are dying/as the river flows!” (A Stone, A Leaf, A Door, 34)

“ ‘Long, long into the night I lay awake,/thinking how I should tell my story.’ /(One!)/ Now in the dark I hear the boats/there in the river./(Two!)/Now I can hear the great horns/blowing in the river./Time! Where are you now,/and in what place, and at what time?/ Oh now I hear the whistles on the river!/ Oh now great ships are going down the river!/Great horns are baying at the harbor’s mouth,/great boats are putting out to sea!” (A Stone, A Leaf, A Door, 156)

“Something swift and passing,/almost captured, there below?--/ There in the gulf of night/the mournful and yet thrilling voices/of the tugs?—the liner’s blare?/ Here—there—some otherwhere--/was it a whisper?—a woman’s call?” (A Stone, A Leaf, A Door, 130)

“It had come to him when he had smelled the sea-wrack of the harbor, the clean, salt fragrance of the tides, and it was in cool, flowing tides of evening waters and in deserted piers and in the sliding lights of the little tugs. And it had risen to his lips when he had heard the great ships blowing in the gulf of night, or heard exultantly the shattering baugh of their departure as they slid into line and pointed for the sea at noon on Saturday. And it had come to him each time he saw the proud, white breasts of mighty ships, the racing slant and drive of the departing liners, and watched them dwindle and converge into their shape away from piers, black with crowds of cheering people.” (The Web and the Rock, 610)

“Immense and sudden, and with the abrupt nearness, the telescopic magic of a dream, the English ship appeared upon the coasts of France, and approached with the strange, looming immediacy of powerful and gigantic objects that move at great speed: there was no sense of continuous movement, of gradual and progressive enlargement, rather the visages of the ship melted rapidly from one bigness to another as do the visages of men in a cinema, which, by a series of fading sizes, brings these kinematic shapes of things, like genii unstoppered from a wizard’s bottle, to an overpowering command above the spectator.” (Of Time and the River, 903)

“At first there was only the calm endlessness of the evening sea, the worn headlands of Europe, and the land, with its rich, green slopes, its striped patterns of minutely cultivated earth, its ancient fortresses and its town—the town of Cherbourg—which, from this distance, lay like a solid pattern of old chalk at the base of the coastal indentation.” (Of Time and the River, 903)

“Westward, a little to the south, against the darkening bulk of the headland, a long riband of smoke, black and low, told the position of the ship. She was approaching fast, her bulk widened: she had been a dot, a smudge, a shape—a tiny, hardly noticed point in the calm and immense geography of evening. Now she was there, sliding gently in beyond the ancient breakwater, inhabiting and dominating the universe with the presence of her 60,000 tons, so that the vast setting of sky and sea and earth, in which formerly she had been only an inconspicuous but living mark, were now a background for her magnificence.”   (Of Time and the River, 903)

“The sheer wall of her iron plates scarcely seemed to move at all now in the water, it was as if she were fixed and founded there among the tides, as implacable as the headlands of the coast; yet, over her solid bows the land was wheeling slowly. Water foamed noisily from her sides in thick, tumbling columns: the sea-gulls swarmed around her, fluttering greedily and heavily to the water with their creaking and unearthly clamor. Then her anchors rushed out of her, and she stood still.”  (Of Time and the River, 903-4)

“She lay there, an alien presence in those waters; she had the reality of magic, the realty that is so living and magnificent that it seems unreal. She was miraculous and true—as one looked at her, settled like some magic luminosity upon that mournful coast, a strong cry of exultancy rose up in one’s throat: the sight of the ship was as if a man’s mistress had laid her hand upon his loins.”   (Of Time and the River, 905)