A Prodigious “Putter-Inner”

Like the subject of her biography (Thomas Wolfe, Doubleday, $5.95), Elizabeth Nowell is a “putter-inner,” not a “leaver-outer.” Her method, which is to substantiate the purely factual data derived from document and conversation by quoting at length from the more obviously autobiographical portions of Wolfe’s novels, will inevitably revive the old quarrels about art which caused Wolfe himself so much anguish.

These quarrels are themselves an eloquent part of the biography. In a barbed exchange of letters with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who took Flaubert as his guide in insisting that an artist should use his “defined inner tendencies” selectively and in “rarefied” form, Wolfe insisted that “Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dostoevsky were great putter-inners— greater putter-inners, in fact, than taker-outers—” and were immortal precisely because of the “unselected quality” of their selection. They produced books that “boil and pour,” as Wolfe picturesquely put it while telling Fitzgerald to “Flaubert me no Flauberts, Bovary me no Bovarys, Zola me no Zolas, and exuberance me no exuberances.”

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

Like the subject of her biography (Thomas Wolfe, Doubleday, $5.95), Elizabeth Nowell is a “putter-inner,” not a “leaver-outer.” Her method, which is to substantiate the purely factual data derived from document and conversation by quoting at length from the more obviously autobiographical portions of Wolfe’s novels, will inevitably revive the old quarrels about art which caused Wolfe himself so much anguish.

These quarrels are themselves an eloquent part of the biography. In a barbed exchange of letters with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who took Flaubert as his guide in insisting that an artist should use his “defined inner tendencies” selectively and in “rarefied” form, Wolfe insisted that “Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dostoevsky were great putter-inners— greater putter-inners, in fact, than taker-outers—” and were immortal precisely because of the “unselected quality” of their selection. They produced books that “boil and pour,” as Wolfe picturesquely put it while telling Fitzgerald to “Flaubert me no Flauberts, Bovary me no Bovarys, Zola me no Zolas, and exuberance me no exuberances.”