The Far and the Near (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Like much of Thomas Wolfe's short fiction, the stories in From Death to Morning, including "The Far and the Near," were formed from leftover material that did not fit into his novels — in this case, 1935's Of Time and the River. Although the novel sold well, the collection of stories did not. In addition, as Ladell Payne notes in his 1991 entry on Wolfe for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, although Wolfe was famous in 1935, "he also was stung by the criticism that he was too wordy, too autobiographical, and too dependent upon Perkins." Payne is referring to Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe's editor at Charles Scribner's & Sons.

These three criticisms were brought up again the next year by Bernard DeVoto. In his now-famous piece for the Saturday Review of Literature, "Genius Is Not Enough," DeVoto used the review of Wolfe's essay The Story of a Novel as an opportunity to discredit Wolfe himself. "Mr. Wolfe is astonishingly immature," says DeVoto, adding that Wolfe has not mastered "the psychic material out of which a novel is made nor the technique of writing fiction." In addition, DeVoto says that if Wolfe "gave us less identification and more understanding," people would stop "calling him autobiographical." Finally, DeVoto criticized the influence of Perkins and the other editorial staff who helped Wolfe with his novels, calling them "the assembly line at Scribner's."

Although others had brought up these concerns before, most acknowledge that DeVoto's influential review helped guide criticism of Wolfe in general for much of the twentieth century. As Terry Roberts notes in his 2000 article for the Southern Literary Journal, DeVoto's essay "set the tone for critics ever since who wished to establish their own intellectual superiority by attacking Wolfe in print." Despite this fact, however, Wolfe did regain some critical favor. In his 1970 article for the South Atlantic Quarterly, Martin Wank notes one of the first events that helped inspire this revival: the 1953 publication of The Enigma of Thomas Wolfe, a collection of critical essays. Wank notes that this collection was followed by several other biographical and critical works on Wolfe. One of these was B. R. McElderry, Jr.'s 1964 Thomas Wolfe. In this work, McElderry notes that, amidst all of the negative critical attention given to Wolfe's longer works, not much has been said about his short fiction. Says McElderry: "The detailed study of these shorter pieces, their precise relation to the novels, and to such manuscripts as survive, has not been carried very far."

Over the next decade, more critics started to notice Wolfe's stories, although the attention was not always positive. In his 1947 book, Thomas Wolfe, Herbert J. Muller notes of Wolfe's From Death to Morning that it "is a collection of short pieces which, with a few exceptions, add little to his stature or to our understanding of him." Muller also says that many stories seem incomplete and singles out "The Far and the Near," saying that it is "a bare outline for a potentially good short story." Others disagree. In his 1974 entry on Wolfe for American Writers, C. Hugh Holman, a noted Wolfe scholar, says that From Death to Morning "has never received the attention it deserves." Holman also notes that, contrary to the belief that Wolfe's works lacked structure, "he showed a control and an objectivity in his short stories and his short novels that effectively belie the charge of formlessness."

For the short stories, this positive criticism has continued to increase. In her 1981 entry on Wolfe for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Leslie Field notes that From Death to Morning "contains many fine pieces." In his 1983 article for Thomas Wolfe: A Harvard Perspective, James Boyer cites the quality of Wolfe's story collection, saying that this quality is largely due to the influence of his agent at the time, Elizabeth Nowell. Boyer singles out Wolfe's "The Cottage by the Tracks" (the original title of "The Far and the Near"). As Boyer notes, stories like this "represent units complete in themselves." In her 1984 book, Thomas Wolfe,

Elizabeth Evans calls "The Far and the Near" "a sentimental story" and notes how the destruction of the engineer's "idyllic scene" leaves him "disappointed and lonely, since the reality of the unfriendly cottage inhabitants precludes his hopes of friendship with them and indeed ruins his memory." With the 1987 publication of The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, Wolfe's short stories received even more attention.

Although Wolfe's overall literary reputation is still in question, several critics, like Roberts, continue to focus on Wolfe's short fiction. As Roberts notes:

in the short fiction he wrote during the nine brief years between the publication of Look Homeward, Angel and his death, Wolfe managed to turn almost all of the critical stereotypes about his work inside-out.

Compare & Contrast

• 1930s: The United States is in the midst of the Great Depression. The unemployment rate reaches more than 23 percent, and poverty and hunger are common in many areas.
  Today: The United States is in the midst of an economic downturn. The unemployment rate rises from a thirty-two-year low of 4 percent in 2000 to hover in the 5 to 6 percent range in 2002.
• 1930s: Following the widespread adoption of trucks in the United States in the 1920s, the railroads lose business on their freight trains.
  Today: Although the railroads' percentage of domestic freight traffic has decreased at a relatively steady rate since World War II, their higher percentage of freight traffic than trucks has been maintained.
• 1930s: During the Great Depression, many railroads fall into bankruptcy. Those that survive do so in part because of their adoption of new technologies, such as the diesel locomotive, which help make the trains faster and more efficient.
  Today: In the United States, subways and passenger trains are popular options for daily commuting, although subways exist only in large cities such as New York, Boston, and Chicago. In Western Europe and Japan, however, railroads are experiencing a renaissance, thanks in part to the availability of technologically advanced, high-speed trains.