Yet that book existed more as a concept than as a body of writing that could be readily turned into one or more novels. The stacks of material left in Aswell’s hands seemed to him a “jigsaw puzzle,” an accurate enough description considering that Wolfe had brought together pieces cut from O Lost/Look Homeward, Angel, stories previously published in magazines, and sketches and dramatic vignettes he wanted to use in a projected work about America at night, The Hound of Darkness. Faced with something he sometimes thought of as a chaotic jumble, Aswell turned to Maxwell Perkins, formerly Wolfe’s editor at Scribner’s and now his literary executor; Elizabeth Nowell, Wolfe’s agent, who was quite familiar with Wolfe’s work in progress; and to members of Wolfe’s family to seek advice and counsel about how to proceed with the chore of editing and publishing. He particularly wanted Fred Wolfe to identify the real-life counterparts of characters based on persons living in Asheville, and he wanted to assure himself that Wolfe’s former mistress, Aline Bernstein, would not file a libel suit if Harper and Brothers published the love story of George Webber and Esther Jack, the fictional embodiments of Wolfe and Bernstein.
Aswell’s efforts, though fruitful in many ways, still left him with a disjointed work, a work needing revision, transitional passages, excision of duplicate materials, fuller realization of characters or scenes, and untangling of names. The task was a daunting one, solved, ultimately, by his becoming a coauthor, a role in part acknowledged in a note appearing at the end of The Hills Beyond, in which Aswell explained that he had added italicized transitional passages between books. But studies of Wolfe’s typescript reveal that Aswell did more than provide bridges. The extent of his creative contribution to the Webber cycle will likely be the work of some doctoral student in American literature, the result of which will be a dissertation or an article in a learned journal. Part of that task has been undertaken and shared by John Halber-stadt. Aswell’s note on his work to bring Wolfe’s stacks of material to print makes the justifiable claim that Wolfe was not thinking of two separate novels, rather one that would be called “You Can’t Go Home Again.” It was a matter of convenience, wrote Aswell, that Harper and Brothers decided to issue the novel in two parts, naming the first installment after a working title Wolfe was using for part of his stack of manuscript, “The Web and the Rock.”
As far as the whole result is concerned, the decision was not a happy one, for Wolfe wished to salvage the love story he had meant to publish as The October Fair. To use it in the Webber cycle would demand heavy revision, for the story was truly Eugene Gant’s and the style was early Wolfe, not the later Wolfe, who had moved to a leaner style and a more objective way of presenting his characters. The first three chapters of The Web and the Rock were later Wolfe, part of the Joyner-Webber cycle, a recasting of Wolfe’s boyhood and family relationships, a deeper and more objective evaluation of the forces of southern Appalachia on his thought and personality.
The decision to issue the three initial chapters of The Web and the Rock rescues a portion of Wolfe’s work that could pass from the American literary scene. As a few of the earliest critical estimates of the whole work asserted, the novel had mismatched, uneven parts, and represented a falling off of Wolfe’s powers. Some reviewers, rightfully, complained that the claim made in the author’s note, about a more objective manner and a pronounced satiric flavor was not an accurate description of the work. That note, shaped from a letter to Aswell, more properly related to the Webber-Joyner cycle. It certainly did not apply to much of the material in the final four books.