MAYBE THOMAS WOLFE WAS RIGHT…MAYBE YOU CAN’T – Part One

 

In 1940, after Thomas Wolfe’s death in late 1938, his editor posthumously published the writer’s more than seven-hundred-page novel, You Can’t Go Home Again. The book, in a nutshell, tells the story of writer George Webber, who has written a critically acclaimed novel about his family and hometown. But when he returns to his town, he finds that there is no hero’s welcome awaiting him. On the contrary, he comes back to a town embroiled in their sense of outrage at the revelations that his book has exposed. The same is true of his family, who feel that he has stripped them naked in front of the world and they drive him from their home.

 Thomas Wolfe - You can't go home again...

A veritable pariah, Webber strikes out to find his own identity, divorced from the town and family that have been his main topic. The journey takes him to the hectic social and literary scene in New York, to Paris where he falls in with a bohemian group of artistic expats, and finally, to Berlin, where he finds out first-hand, what it feels like to live in the shadow of the Nazi reign of terror. Eventually, he returns to America, where he rediscovers and embraces his native land with a combined feeling of love, pain, and hope.

I had been away from Wapakoneta for almost eighteen years at the time. And before that, there had been almost four years that I had been around precious little. I had made my first journey to South America the day I turned nineteen. That same year, when I got back, I enrolled at Ohio State. I was going to do what everyone, including myself, expected me to do—study music education and become a high school band director.

By the end of that first year, I had figured out that this probably wasn’t at all what I wanted to do. It was a traumatic revelation. Since junior high school, it was what I had always wanted to do—or thought I did. It was what I focused my greatest effort on, what I had sacrificed for. Moreover, it was what everybody else expected of me.

In concert - that's me, third from left in the
percussion section, back row.

At Wapakoneta Senior High, I had been the pet of two successive band directors and had been a working musician and percussion teacher as well. I had headed the percussion sections in the high school band and the All-Area Band, directed the high school pep band, and helped write some of the arrangements we played at half-time during the football season my senior year. Also that year, I was elected band president. At Band Camp the summer before my senior year, I was both a high school band student and a junior high band instructor at the same time. I had worked for the biggest music store in nearby Lima and gotten to know high school band directors and professional musicians from that city and the surrounding area. They too took it for given that I would go get my diploma and be back in a few years as their colleague. As if to prove it, in the summer between my junior and senior years, I had been granted one of two scholarships offered by our school to attend an Ohio University music workshop for gifted young musicians from all over the state. There too, I had headed the percussion sections of both the symphonic band and the symphony orchestra.

Directing the Pep Band

How could I just turn my back on that? And on all of those people who saw my future already laid out for me? How could I just suddenly walk away and say, “You know what? I don’t want this as badly as I thought I did.” I just wanted to play music. And, to an ever-increasing degree, I wanted to write. The ideal future that I saw for myself was as a nightclub or stage musician by night and a novelist by day.

What kind of an irresponsible fool did that after so much effort and after raising such great expectations? Worst of all, how could I let my father, Whitie, down…again! Whitie and I didn’t have the greatest of relationships. We were always at each other’s throats, but, deep down, I pretty much figured that the fault was mine alone. I hadn’t measured up. I hadn’t embraced what he wanted for me—to be a son he could be proud of, a high-school sports star who would go on to win a full sports scholarship to a top university and end up being an enormous success in business once I graduated.

But that wasn’t in the cards. It wasn’t me. I couldn’t be those things. Had no ambition to

One of two OU Workshop
scholarship winners

be. I couldn’t even be what I’d set out to be, much less what Whitie wanted me to be.

So I dropped out, joined the Army, eloped, and spent more than a year in Europe, courtesy of the US Army, with my new bride, doing a lot of what I wanted to do—playing music, reading, writing and traveling to some of the places I had long dreamed of seeing.

During that time, I discovered that what I most wanted was to be a bohemian, an artist, a vagabond, and for most of my adult life, that would be the dichotomy that plagued me. That constant tug-o’-war between being a rolling stone or a responsible member of traditional society. In the end, I found it impossible to do either. Which made me a loose cannon, someone people thought of as highly dependable and efficient until a culmination of factors would carry me to the point of getting fed-up and simply walking out. Nor was I docile even if I was professional and effective at a job. I was immune to the normal pressures employees undergo, the fear of “losing my job”. If there was a conflict of ideas or ethics between myself and upper management, my answer to any threat of dismissal was always, “Do whatever you feel most comfortable with. I was looking for a job when I found this one.”

Dan in dress blues with the Army Bands

Years earlier the father-and-son relationship with Whitie had reached the point at which, when asked for advice or an opinion, Whitie would say, “Do whatever the hell you want, Dan. You will anyway.”  He had pretty much given up on my “ever making anything of myself.” I was a good team leader, but not a particularly good team player. I was a maverick, and that usually ended up standing in the way of a decades-long career working for anybody but myself.

Whitie figured that was my perennial problem, that I would build a good position for myself and then walk out on it. Throw it all away, as he said. I was a hothead. But, truth be told, if I was, I came by it honestly.

During World War II, Whitie was such a disciplinary problem that his superiors in the Army were appalled at his utter lack of subordination. But they were equally impressed by his ability to do a great job whenever he was placed in charge of a project and left to his own devices without having somebody over him breathing down his neck. A wise captain—who had been a schoolteacher in another life—decided to put that quality to good use. He got Whitie a field promotion to technical sergeant (what today would be a spec-5), placed him in charge of a nine-man demolition squad, and sent him on his way. From then on until nearly the end of the war, he and his team, activated with the Eighty-Second Airborne and attached to the Seventh Army, would be given a set of orders and would be sent out on their own to destroy abandoned Nazi ordnance, vehicles and anything else the enemy might be able to use again, in case they managed to come back after being driven from an area by the Allies. Sometimes Whitie and his team even blew up bridges or rail trestles to make sure that didn’t happen. He was now an effective member of the Army and there was never another disciplinary problem with him.

Demolition Tech-Sgt Whitie

In later life, as a route salesman for a cheese manufacturer and wholesaler, Whitie was provided with a sixteen-ton truck and a mandate to build a territory that, until then, had been a dead loss. Within a few short years he bolstered that route from yearly sales revenues of a scant hundred thousand dollars to one that generated millions. All the company had to do was pay him a small commission and get out of his way, and they suddenly had a major money-maker.

One day, however, in the mid-afternoon, Whitie had to stop by home for some reason—to pick up his route book or to retrieve an order, something he would rather not have done because it was sure to put him behind. Once there, however, Reba Mae was home, had just brewed a fresh pot of coffee, and talked him into having a cup before he was again on his way. It was while he was taking five and having that cup of coffee that the CEO of the company happened to drive by the house and saw his truck in the driveway.

Oblivious to this, Whitie finished his coffee, got back into his truck, and completed his route a bit later than usual, He drove out to the plant, parked his truck and plugged the refrigeration unit in for the night. The next morning when he climbed into his truck again, he saw that there was a note tucked under the windshield wiper. He climbed back down out of the cab, walked around front, retrieved the note and read it.

It was addressed to my father’s given name, and read:

Norm,

“Let this be the last time that I drive past your house at 2:30 in the afternoon and see your truck parked in the driveway!”

It was signed by the CEO.

Incensed, Whitie turned off his engine, plugged the truck back in, strode inside the building and directly to the management offices. He marched past the secretary as if she weren’t there.

“Good morning, Norman,” she said to his back. And then, as he reached the CEO’s door and placed his hand on the doorknob, the secretary said, “Hey wait, Norman! You can’t just barge in there. He’s in a meeting!”

“Don’t worry,” Whitie said over his shoulder. “This’ll only take a second.” And with that, he marched into the room.

Surprised, the CEO was sitting behind his desk, clearly caught in mid-sentence, talking to several men in business suits who were seated in armchairs in front of him.

“Norm! Can’t this wait? As you can see, I’m in a meeting here,” the boss said.

Whitie made his way on over to the desk, muttered, “’xcuse me,” to the three guests, then tossed the CEO’s note, which was now a paper-wad, on the desk in front of him and, in a confidential tone, said, “Just came to tell you this. Next time you put a little note scoldin’ me on my truck instead of comin’ and talkin’ to me like a man, I’m gonna come in here and personally shove it up your ass!”

Then he turned on his heel and walked out of the office, out of the building, back to his truck and was off to sell cheese like he’d never sold it before. Whitie bowed to no man, and in that sense, I was clearly my father’s son. But it didn’t always work out.  

In my office at the newspaper, 1981

Three years before I returned to the US, after reaching the post of managing editor at the newspaper where I worked in Buenos Aires, I abruptly walked out on a thirteen-year career. It was a job I loved and from which I had planned to retire after a couple more decades at the daily’s helm. But ever-increasing policy conflicts between myself and the new CEO made my continuing there untenable, unless I was willing to compromise my ethics and my vision for the paper. So, from one day to the next, I walked. And except to go collect my severance pay, I never went back.

It was a huge loss, as much emotional as financial. But the whole time I had been at the paper, I had also been a free-lancer, and in the process, had written for a lot of well-known newspapers and magazines in the US and Britain. There didn’t seem to be any reason I couldn’t keep doing that. Besides, I had my severance pay and a little money saved. I figured we would be all right.

But it seems that there are always extenuating circumstances—and in Argentina, extenuating circumstances are a given. It was no longer the seventies when Argentina’s bloody military regime placed the country on international news schedules daily. Nor was it the early eighties, when the Falklands War between Argentina and Britain, the subsequent fall of the military regime, and the country’s return to democracy made headlines worldwide. I couldn’t have walked out on my job at a worse possible time.

It was the very end of 1987, and the Southern Cone of South America was barely a blip on the international news radar. Free-lance work all but dried up, and if it weren’t for a few translations I picked up to do here and there, I would have had no work at all.

But I still had some money left. I devoted my mornings to writing fiction and my afternoons to planning what I hoped would be my breakthrough into adventure tourism. I made trips to the wilderness in Patagonia with a well-known nature photographer and created a folder of photos and write-ups to carry to independent tour operators in the Midwestern US. Once I had polished my pitch, I flew back to the US and visited more than thirty of those tour operators and got positive feedback from a dozen of them. If I could deliver on my proposal of Patagonian adventure tours for groups of no more than six people at a time, they would market it as an exclusive product for discerning travelers.

But I hadn’t counted on the Argentine political factor. I returned to a country that had plunged into a sudden economic crisis, in which currency was being devalued against the dollar by the day and in which annual hyper-inflation soared to nearly a thousand percent. We lost everything but our home, which, thank heaven, was paid for. I fell ill, was bed-ridden for a month, and with nothing to do but mull my life over during those days, decided that it was time to go “home”.

To be continued…