It's probably the most famous passage ever written by this great American writer. But have we all been misquoting it for the last 91 years after a typist misread his original manuscript?
I'm talking about Thomas Wolfe, and his stirring opening paragraphs for
Look Homeward, Angel.
". . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again."
Is there a secret clue hidden in a photo
in a recent book which published Wolfe's original manuscript?
Wolfe's original manuscript was
famously shortened by the legendary editor at Charles Scribner's Sons, Maxwell Perkins. But nearly seven decades later, a professor of English at the University of South Carolina decided to work with his wife to publish Wolfe's
original manuscript, "as an act of resurrection and preservation." They spent three years together recreating the complete original text from copies of its typewritten version as well as from the original manuscript (which Wolfe had written in pencil). The work was finally published in 2000 under Wolfe's original title --
O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life.
But is there still one more buried secret that's waiting for resurrection?
I've always loved those opening paragraphs, and the 2000 version even includes a photograph of them in Thomas Wolfe's own handwriting. (He'd crossed out the words "Part 1" and then also crossed out the words "Chapter 1" before he'd started writing them...) But savoring the grand and looping scrawls, I realized one word was still different in Wolfe's handwritten original:
. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face: from the prison of her flesh born we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and...
The 2000 edition even specifies this kind of error had happened before in the typed version of Wolfe's manuscript . (The book's "Manuscript and typescript" section notes specifically that "The second loop of a
b is sometimes missing, especially when the letter is followed by an
o...") In fact, it reports that four times the word "bony" was incorrectly typed as "long" in an error that apparently then made its way into the finished manuscript, all four times.
It also looks like Wolfe used a colon (and not a semi-colon) after "our mother's face". (Fortunately, in this case the 2000 book did make the necessary update.) It's interesting to see how these two changes affected the impact of this exhilarating burst of prose.
- The published version -- "have we come" -- has that deliberately-spread-out feeling, like an orator lingering over the echoes of an earlier word, letting their voice trail off to an implicit pause. Using a weak word like "have" leaves the emphasis in that sentence on an earlier word -- prison. (You can almost imagine a speaker saying "from the PRISON of her flesh have we come...")
- But "born" (in the original version) is instead a more dramatic action verb, used here as a kind of grand adverb describing exactly how it was that we came into the unspeakable incommunicable prison of earth. It almost sardonically strikes a hopeful, anticipatory note ("born we come!") before then leading readers back to yet another prison.
- That's also where a colon makes a difference. That's such a grand clause that it could work very well on its own, as the separate-but-related clause that a semi-colon always indicates. Yet if instead that punctuation mark is a colon, it implies that the clause is something even more -- almost a definition, an illustration of that solitary and outsidery distance implied by "In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face." And as a subsidiary clause, it leaves the emphasis on "In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face." (After which the next sentence is "Which of us has known his brother?")
That makes the whole passage hue much more closely and tightly to its larger message that faces forgotten and relatives unknown are part of what's leaving us "forever a stranger and alone."
Or maybe I just want to believe I've finally taken my own one step closer to recovering that precious forgotten language, lost and grieved by the wind. My very own unfound door...
Here's Wolfe's original, one more time:
". . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face: from the prison of her flesh born we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again."
4:30 PM