SOURCE: "Thomas Wolfe's First Triumph: 'An Angel on the Porch'," in The Thomas Wolfe Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall, 1989, pp. 53-62.
In the following essay, Johnston looks at the publication history and literary technique of "An Angel on the Porch, " calling it "a far more complexly crafted and important piece . . . than it has been credited with being."
In Hendersonville, NC, stands not an angel, but THE ANGEL: THE ANGEL that stood on the front porch of the Wolfe marble shop on Pack Square and which now, in some kind of mad irony, adorns the grave of the very proper wife of a Methodist minister; THE ANGEL that served as the original for the titles of Thomas Wolfe's first nationally published story and his first novel; THE ANGEL that in its description mimics the one that W. O. Gant first spied in a Baltimore shop window and that made him want to become a stonecutter; THE ANGEL of white Carrara marble that he sold decades later to the proprietor of a house of ill-repute; THE ANGEL that walks to and fro like a huge wound doll of stone—at best a mute and mechanical representation of death—as Eugene confers with the reality of death, his brother's ghost, in the last chapter of Look Homeward, Angel; THE ANGEL whose inscrutable smile stands for the unverifiable promise of salvation—at once the marker of death and the covenant of life; THE ANGEL poised clumsily upon cold phthisic feet, holding a stone lily in one hand and wearing "a smile of soft stone idiocy" on its face that Gant both cursed and loved—the marble focus of his life's intensity and waste: the art never mastered, the ideal never achieved, the romanticized vision of life and death that misleads him, the wife—long dead—and cold, the harlot buried, the ambition thwarted, the lifeblood of sexuality—frozen, the spiritual design perverted into commodity, the artistic dream corrupted both by the warm temptation of women and the cold, parsimonious nature of wife; THE ANGEL that, more than any other symbol, has become identified with the work of Thomas Wolfe—not with the marbles of the father's failed art and life, but with the transformation of all the beauty and passion of that failure into art—into a novel that his son would call Look Homeward, Angel.
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