Even as he marched in closer rank with American writers, he looked to foreign writers for models of what he hoped to do in developing a new avatar, variously christened Paul Spangler, Joe Doaks, and George Webber. Spangler would be a kind of modern-day Gulliver, Don Quixote, or Werther, a man who discovered that the real world was quite different from the one he had imagined. Joe Doaks would not have a celebrated literary model but rather would be a man of the people, just one of those stumbling, bumbling humans trying to make his way through the world and getting bumped and bruised but nonetheless hanging tough and exposing—through his common touch, falsity, meanness, and pretense, and expressing, out of a hopefulness that the goodness of the American people would finally prevail—a conviction that the true greatness of the nation lay before it. George Webber would inherit traits from Spangler and Doaks but would acquire a lineage linking him to a western North Carolina folk hero and a Pennsylvania brick mason.
The folk hero was Zebulon Vance, like Wolfe a native of Buncombe County, North Carolina, who served the state as congressman, governor, and senator. Wolfe reaches back before Vance’s time to trace the rise of the mountain-bred Joyner family, the founding member of which, William “Bear” Joyner, appears in the mold of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Mike Finn: a lusty, rough-edged fellow who fathers many children, one of whom, Zach, takes on the trappings of Vance in his climb to political power and heroic stature. It is from the Joyners that George Webber traces his maternal side, and it is that Joyner side, split in its views of morals, religion, and regard for the supernatural, that spawns much of the musing of young George as he stretches out on his Aunt Maw’s lawn at three o’clock one fine afternoon. But readers of Wolfe have to go to The Hills Beyond to find an account of George’s Joyner side, since Edward Aswell, his editor at Harper’s, chose to start George’s narrative with George and not his forebears, thereby repeating a move Maxwell Perkins made in cutting Wolfe’s account of Eugene Gant’s ancestors in Look Homeward, Angel. Much as he had worked to put together a connected narrative and to develop a cast of characters since early 1936, Wolfe delivered into Aswell’s hands portions of the Joyner-Webber material in various states of completion or mere drafts along with a rough outline and statement of purpose when he left New York to give a talk at Purdue University and to travel further west. That trip, crowded by sightseeing with a team of journalists wanting to prove that many of the great Western parks could be visited in a few days, further exhausted an already fatigued Wolfe, and precipitated a hospital stay in the Seattle area and his death in Baltimore on 15 September 1938, a victim of tuberculosis of the brain. Wolfe had intended, he had assured Aswell, to work hard and long to make this new work, now being called You Can’t Go Home Again, the best piece of writing he had ever done, more objective, more truthfully autobiographical, without the preening and posturing of Eugene Gant, with less of a Joycean flavor, and with more of America as Wolfe had seen it, reveled in it, been disappointed and inspired by it. This means he would sometimes be naturalistic, hard-nosed, intent upon dramatizing how Americans came to act and believe as they did. But there would be jollity mixed with somberness, pessimism lightened by optimism, disgust mitigated by a deeply felt conviction that Americans would not let the dream of a democratic nation die. In Wolfe’s expansive way of thinking, he was writing one book, one in which he would wreak his vision of America as he positioned himself as a truth-telling protagonist, one more faithful and thoroughly autobiographical than he had drawn in depicting Eugene Gant.