Subject: (urth) Wolfe on PEACE

From: Robert Borski <rborski at charter.net>
Date: Sun, 05 Nov 2000 17:24:17 +0000

I've been enjoying immensely the recent series of posts on PEACE--quite
possibly my all-time favorite list discussion--so please accept my thanks
and congratulations to everyone who has participated. Perhaps someday
someone (all right, mantis) could gather the material and publish it in a
handy reference guide.

I also thought I'd pass on a few comments Wolfe made about PEACE in a 1983
THRUST interview conducted by Robert Frazier that some of you may not have
seen or read before.

**********
Wolfe: When Tom Disch reviewed ["The Hero as Werwolf"], he pointed out the
missing E of _werewolf_ on the end of my own name. I wasn't conscious of
that when I wrote the story, but I suspect he's right. _Werwolf_ is a valid
old spelling. I used it to point up the fact that _werewolf_ means
"man-wolf." _Wergild_ is the price of a man's life. Note also that the
protagonist of PEACE is Alden Dennis _Weer._ I've always been conscious, you
see, that I am neither exemplary nor popular, and every so often I try to
tell my side of the story.

Thrust: I found the material in PEACE fresh and wondrous; was it
autobiographical?

Wolfe: Some, but not a lot. My father came from Logan, Ohio. I went there
several times as a boy for more or less extended visits, and lived there
once for a year or so. Those memories gave me a great deal of background,
but that was about the end of it.

Thrust: PEACE seems to to be told by a _sidhe,_ mentioned in the last pages
of the book. As if some immortal creature lives by constantly reliving. What
exactly _is_ going on with Alden Weer?

Wolfe: Weer is dead. In spirit, he is reliving his life, which he confuses
with the house he built during his final years. Note that at the end of the
book Miss Bold asks permission to plant a tree on his grave. It is the fall
of that tree, at the beginning of the book, that has freed his ghost--an old
superstition.

**********

Robert Borski

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2000 11:44:02 +0000

> of that tree, at the beginning of the book, that has freed his ghost--an old

Many thanks for posting this, Robert.

It's a bit difficult to reconcile what Wolfe says here with his
statements re the house in the Jordan interview that I cited earlier. 
The best I can do is to say that he did build a house, but didn't put
"memory rooms" in it.  The other alternative, of course, is that Wolfe
was mistaken in one of the interviews.  (Although I tend to regard
Wolfe's exegeses of his own work as authoritative, I've never been
completely at ease about it.  That part of the People On-line Chat where
Wolfe is asked whether Weer is a mass murderer, and has to pause and
think before saying "no," suggests that has memory of the book may have
become fuzzy over the years.)

Assuming that this interview is indeed reliable, we can also infer that
Weer is not actually haunting his house, which means that we don't have
to place his grave in his backyard.  I'm unclear as to how to reconcile
the statement that Wolfe's ghost was freed at the start of the book with
Weer's memories of having been "sick" for some time before the book
begins.  Are we to take these memories as doubly unreliable--false
"memories" of hallucinatiions that were never hallucinated, so to speak?

--Adam

---

From: Urash, Tom <turash at firstam.com>
Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2000 11:27:36 +0000

-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Stephanides [mailto:adamsteph at earthlink.net]
Sent: Monday, November 06, 2000 1:44 PM
To: urth at lists1.ba.best.com
Subject: Re: (urth) Wolfe on PEACE

--Adam

Could Weer's "sickness" be the ghost's interpretation of whatever travails
or confusion of being it experienced between physical death and the release
brought on by the felling of the elm? How would this being interpret a prior
purgatorial state if given a chance to reflect, and isn't it traditionally
the case that ghosts are ghosts because of attachments to the physical
universe they are unable or unwilling to let go of? I don't read a great
deal of horror or supernatural fiction, so this may be a stretch, but if you
were to relate the condition of being a ghost to the condition of most
individuals when dreaming, I think there are some parallels, e.g.,
volitional control of movement and context are often severely limited, and
critical examination of surroundings and events is practically non-existent,
otherwise we'd all be lucid dreamers (aware that we are dreaming during
every dream). So, instead of "false 'memories' of hallucinations", etc.,
maybe we have the ghost's best (or most comfortable, soothing)
interpretation of an otherwise non-sense-ical state of being, one that would
be neither true nor false in the usual sense of those words.  

...tom

---

From: Urash, Tom <turash at firstam.com>
Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2000 13:32:11 +0000

-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Stephanides [mailto:adamsteph at earthlink.net]
Sent: Monday, November 06, 2000 1:44 PM
To: urth at lists1.ba.best.com
Subject: Re: (urth) Wolfe on PEACE

--Adam

...tom

---

From: Urash, Tom <turash at firstam.com>
Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2000 11:27:36 +0000

-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Stephanides [mailto:adamsteph at earthlink.net]
Sent: Monday, November 06, 2000 1:44 PM
To: urth at lists1.ba.best.com
Subject: Re: (urth) Wolfe on PEACE

--Adam

...tom