Look Homeward, Angel

“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.” 

The novel begins with commentary on the universality of the human experience and the connections that make us human across history and time. Human identity is defined by the accumulation of hidden experiences shared in the cycle of birth and death. Eugene explores these ideas of identity throughout the novel as he ponders his own place in the world.

“He felt that he wanted more than anything in the world, to carve delicately with a chisel. He wanted to wreak something dark and unspeakable in him into cold stone. He wanted to carve an angel’s head.” 

Gant discovers his passion in a stonecutter’s shop in Baltimore. He desires to create something from the dark depths of his intense emotions, to take something ugly—like a rock or a dark feeling—and transform it into something intricate and beautiful.

“She knew there had been glory in it: insensate and cruel as he had often been, she remembered the enormous beating color of his life, and the lost and stricken thing in him which he would never find. And fear and a speechless pity rose in her when at times she saw the small uneasy eyes grow still and darken with the foiled and groping hunger of old frustration.” 

Eliza bears the brunt of Gant’s frustration at his lack of fulfillment and serves as primary witness to his unraveling. She remembers the vivacious nature of his passion, but now his restless eyes are dark and narrow. She sees Gant’s inability to find what he is searching for, and she pities him.

“He was the complete male in miniature, the tiny acorn from which the mighty oak must grow, the heir of all ages, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown, the child of progress, the darling of the budding Golden Age and, what’s more, Fortune and her Fairies, not content with well-nigh smothering him with their blessings of time and family, saved him up carefully until Progress was rotten-ripe with glory.” 

Born at the turn of the century in 1900, Eugene enters the world at a time of great change and growth in America as well as in his family. His entry into the world is paved with expectations of glory and progress that foreshadow his indelible mark on the Gant family. His birth is timely, intentional, and full of purpose.

“He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know anyone, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.” 

The use of the collective pronoun “we” connects to the commentary on the universal human experience from the beginning of the novel. The sense of alienation is palpable here, as even the comforting figure of the mother is deemed a stranger; this lack of intimacy is cemented in the repetition of “never” five times. Aware of this utter isolation as a child in his crib, Eugene understands from an early age that he is a stranger within the world and within his family.

“But he knew that her sorrow at that moment was not for him or for herself, or even for the boy whom idiot change had thrust in the way of pestilence, but that, with a sudden inner flaming of her clairvoyant Scotch soul, she had looked cleanly, without pretense for the first time, upon the inexorable tides of Necessity, and that she was sorry for all who had lived, were living, or would live, fanning with their prayers the useless altar flames, suppliant with their hopes to an unwitting spirit, casting the tiny rockets of their belief against remote eternity, and hoping for grace, guidance, and delivery upon the spinning and forgotten cinder of this earth.” 

As Gant and Eliza mourn the death of their son Grover, they reflect on the inevitability of death, a theme that pervades the novel. Here Gant ponders the futility of religion and attempting to avoid death. Grover’s tragic fate reveals the cruelties of human life and the hopelessness every human experiences when confronted with the certainty of death.

“He mourned for all the men who had gone because they had not scored their name upon a rock, blasted their mark upon a cliff, sought out the most imperishable objects of the world and graven there some token, some emblem that utterly they might not be forgotten.” 

Eugene admires his father’s work, especially in comparison to the work of his peers’ fathers. The lasting nature of Gant’s work, which Eugene considers an artistry, appeals to him as he seeks acknowledgement and recognition throughout his life. Gant’s lasting work as an artist influences Eugene’s own development as a writer.

“He was a stranger, and as he sought through the house, he was always aprowl to find some entrance into life, some secret undiscovered door—a stone, a leaf—that might admit him into light and fellowship.” 

Wolfe describes Ben as a stranger in his own home who moves furtively through the familiar halls in search of something more. This endless search plagues Ben until his final minute of life. The symbols of the stone and the leaf, featured in the epigraph, represent this endless search for peace and happiness.

“And from the mellow gloom of the church, the rich distant organ, the quiet nasal voice of the Scotch minister, the interminable prayers, and the rich little pictures of Christian mythology which he had collected as a child under the instruction of the spinsters, he gathered something of the pain, the mystery, the sensuous beauty of religion, something deeper and greater than this austere decency.” 

As a child Eugene experiences a period of religious devotion. Religion’s attempt to explain that which is invisible to the human eye appeals to Eugene, who understands from an early age that there is more than reality. He explores the fantastical and abstract through religion and his intense devotion to reading.

“He rushed at the wall like an insane little goat, battered his head screaming again and again, wished desperately that his constricted and overloaded heart would burst, that something in him would break, that somehow, bloodily, he might escape the stifling prison house of his life.” 

Helen, disturbed by Eugene’s secretive and mysterious ways, goads him into harrowing demonstrations of emotion and takes pleasure in disrupting his heavily internal way of being. Here Eugene erupts in an uncontrollable display of emotion and resorts to violence against himself. To Eugene, his life is a metaphor for a prison, and he feels unable to escape the traits and circumstances he was born into.

“The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.” 

The natural world provides Eugene with a constant sense of comfort. He personifies the mountains as masters who maintain power and control over all below them, the people who are born and die, who disappear and reappear. Aware of the inevitability of change through aging and death, Eugene finds comfort in the mountains that surround Altamont, and they are the last thing he sees at the end of the novel.

“But he became passionately bored with them, plunged into a miasmic swamp of weariness and horror, after a time, because of the dullness and ugliness of their lives, their minds, their amusements. Dull people filled him with terror...He was filled with terror and anger against them because they were able to live, to thrive, in this horrible depression that sickened him.” 

Eugene loses interest in his peers and separates himself from them as he grows older. Though for a while he is able to join in their sometimes cruel ways of playing, soon he can no longer tolerate them. Here he compares his feelings toward them to a dark and disgusting swamp that threatens to swallow him.

“She was like some great general, famous, tranquil, wounded unto death, who, with his fingers clamped across a severed artery, stops for an hour the ebbing of his life—sends on the battle.” 

Eugene feels an immediate kinship with Margaret Leonard, who takes on heroic qualities within Eugene’s mind. He compares her to a noble general who relentlessly pursues glory even at the cost of his own life. Margaret is a Christ-like figure who sacrifices herself for the good of others, and Eugene is her dutiful disciple.

“They thought of sons and lovers: they drew closer in their communion, they drank the cup of their twin slavery as they thought of the Gant men who would always know hunger, the strangers on the land, the unknown farers who had lost their way. O lost!” 

Witnessing Ben’s forays with older, and often married, women, Gant and Eliza recognize the common traits that have passed on from generation to generation. Wolfe describes the Gant men as slaves to their hunger, unable to refuse the call of their desires. Connected by a lack of direction, neither Gant nor Ben can escape their master, and both are doomed.

“She did not know that every boy, caged in from confession by his fear, is to himself a monster.” 

Eugene grows older and struggles with his sexual desires. He expresses the shame of these desires, which he feels toward the nurturing Margaret, by calling himself and every boy a monster caged by fear. Eugene feels like he cannot escape his desires or control how they manifest.

“He was reading Euripides, and all around him a world of white and black was eating fried food.” 

In his first year at college Eugene reads more and more and sees the contrast between his rich internal world and the stagnant external world around him. As he reads Euripides, he is drawn even further away from the familiar world around him, until all he sees is the stark white and black of printed text on a page.

“She seized his hand almost gratefully and laid her white face, still twisted with her grief, against his shoulder. It was the gesture of a child: a gesture that asked for love, pity, and tenderness. It tore up great roots in him, bloodily.” 

Eugene and Eliza share of a moment of tenderness after he admonishes her for not tending to Gant, who is dying of cancer. The roles of mother and son reverse in this moment, as Eugene comforts Eliza. There are no moments in which Eliza comforts Eugene with similar tenderness; he is typically left to fend for himself.

“In this great camp of vagrant floaters he lost himself: he came home into this world from loneliness. The hunger for voyages, the hunger that haunts Americans, who are a nomad race, was half assuaged here in this maelstrom of the war.” 

Eugene escapes to Virginia in search of independence and chooses to become one of many transient men who toil. Fueled by Virginia’s unfamiliar and chaotic energy, Eugene finds relief from his loneliness by joining the larger crowd of workers rather than standing out, as he has for most of his life. Eugene finds a connection to the American spirit of independence during this summer away from Altamont.

“To go alone, as he had gone, into strange cities: to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth—it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.”

After his summer of independence, Eugene is proud that he navigated a strange city on his own. He leaves Virginia resolved to break free from his family completely and satisfied that his experiment was so successful. He returns to Altamont and university certain that he has achieved greatness.

“We can’t turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are flash of fire—a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three cents worth of lime and iron—which we cannot get back.” 

In response to Helen’s question of how long he knew Ben’s lungs were weak, Dr. Coker reflects on the ephemeral nature of life. Coker predicted Ben’s demise during his physical examination years before. He reduces human life to three universal parts—the brain, the heart, and the spirit—and compares the passion and emotions of a human life to a “flash of fire.” The collective nature of the human experience is again demonstrated through the use of “we.”

“They remembered the strange flitting loneliness of his life, they thought of a thousand forgotten acts and moments—and always there was something that now seemed unearthly and strange; he walked through their lives like a shadow—they looked now upon his gray deserted shell with a thrill of awful recognition, as one who remembers a forgotten and enchanted word, or as men who look upon a corpse and see for the first time a departed god.” 

Here the Gant family remembers Ben, who is compared to a shadow throughout the novel. Like a shadow, Ben’s life lacks color and detail, as he exists in a liminal space of constant yearning. The comparison of Ben’s corpse to a departed god represents the lack of recognition and acknowledgement Ben received throughout his lifetime. It is only in death that Ben’s power and significance is understood.

“The terrible and beautiful sentence, the last, the final wisdom that the earth can give, is remembered at the end, is spoken too late, wearily. It stands there, awful and untraduced, above the dusty racket of our lives. No forgetting, no forgiving, no denying, no explaining, no hating.” 

Eugene leaves his mother’s house for Harvard and reacts to her last statement of love to him. This focus on love is both terrible and beautiful in its simplicity. The parallel phrases of “no” list the actions that often define the complexities of human relationships. Spoken at the end of the novel, this expression of love is too late and useless.

“And as he spoke, he saw that he had left the million bones of cities, the skein of streets. He was alone with Ben, and their feet were planted on darkness, their faces were lit with the cold high terror of the stars.” 

Eugene speaks with the figure of Ben, who greets him on his way out of Altamont forever. While Eugene becomes distracted by memories of him and Ben and the cities of the past connected by human experience, Ben reminds him to stay rooted in the present. Their grounded feet and lit faces convey a sense of understanding that reiterates Ben’s ultimate message.