"A Flash of Fire": Illness and the Body in Look Homeward, Angel (Critical Essay‪)‬

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag describes illness as the "night-side of life" (3). Everyone, she explains, by virtue of being born, "holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick" (3). It is a realm, according to Sontag, that has been "landscaped" by fantasy and metaphor (4). For Thomas Wolfe, illness fueled the literary imagination. The untimely deaths of twin brothers Grover and Benjamin Wolfe had an enormous impact on the writer and his family. Grover's death from typhoid fever at age twelve is thought to have been one of Wolfe's earliest childhood memories. Ben's death fourteen years later during the 1918 influenza epidemic brought Wolfe, according to Richard S. Kennedy, "the greatest grief of his early life"(53-54). The sense of loss associated with these deaths is exquisitely recounted in The Lost Boy (1992) (1) and Look Homeward, Angel (1929), as is the physical suffering of each brother. The death of Wolfe's father finds similar expression and meaning in his fiction as well. As W. O. Wolfe was dying at home, his son was en route from Harvard but failed to arrive in time (Nowell 64-65). He learned of his father's death from an Asheville newspaper bought during a train stop in Morganton, North Carolina, about sixty miles away. Later, Wolfe heard the story of his father's death many times from his mother, Julia, and sister Mabel. Eventually, the death of Gant in Of Time and the River would constitute that novel's "finest and most moving section" (Nowell 65). In his accounts of the deaths of Grover, Ben, and W. O. Gant, Wolfe successfully transformed family narratives of illness and loss into art.