Thomas Wolfe Comes Calling: An Imagined Visit with Vardis Fisher
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Dialogue: Mark Canada playing Thomas Wolfe, and Joseph M. Flora playing Vardis Fisher. (1) The date: early evening, 6 June 1938. The nation is experiencing some of the darkest days of the Great Depression. Wolfe, optimistic about his career, is on vacation. We catch him en route to Portland, Oregon, anticipating exploration of the Northwest, a region of the nation he has not yet experienced. Passing through Idaho, Wolfe would naturally wish to call on his friend Vardis Fisher, an authentic man of the West if there ever was one. They haven't seen each other in more than seven years. Wolfe first met Fisher in spring 1929 when, after his fourth trip to Europe, he returned to teach at Washington Square College of New York University. Fisher had joined the English Department during Wolfe's absence. The two soon became friends; they were at similar places in their careers. Fisher's first novel had been published the previous year, and Scribner's had just agreed to publish Look Homeward, Angel. Now, in June 1938, the two are at or near the zenith of their fame. Fisher has gained national attention with his autobiographical Vridar Hunter tetralogy, and now reviewers were lauding Idaho, A Guide in Word and Pictures, the first volume of the American Guide Series sponsored by FDR's Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration. Fisher, director of the Federal Writers' Project in Idaho, had written almost everything in the guide. [Loud knocks are heard.] WOLFE: Vardis, open up!!! Hurry!! I'm thirsty!! [The door opens.] WOLFE: You old bastard, I thought I'd never find you! FISHER: Tom Wolfe! What a surprise! Come on in. WOLFE: I had the devil of a time finding you. When I couldn't find you in the phone book, I asked a fella in the lounge at the Boise Hotel where I could find the most irascible curmudgeon in Idaho. Thought you'd live out your days here in this abomination of desolation and never see me or anyone else ever again, eh? (2) FISHER: I'd had New York--the hordes of people, the smells, the hypocrisy. Besides, you had taken your leave from NYU. There wasn't anyone else on the faculty I enjoyed testing wits with as I had with you. [Pause.] Somehow we couldn't match that in our sporadic letters, you mostly in Europe, mostly in Germany. WOLFE [good-naturedly]: Vardis, you haven't changed a bit. FISHER: You know why I'm here. The question is why you're here. What brings you to Idaho, Tom? WOLFE: Other than you? [He looks out the window and responds, still looking out.] Nothing ... Nothing. That's all you have out here, Vardis. I've never seen so much of nothing. FISHER: Yes, isn't it marvelous? WOLFE: It explains a lot about you. FISHER: Let me pour you a drink, and we can explore that. [Brings out a bottle, pours two glasses. Hands one to Wolfe. They drink.] WOLFE: Thank God the whole West isn't like the barren Idaho terrain I passed through before getting to Boise! FISHER: What would you know about it? How much of it can you see from your flat on the Upper East Side or wherever you're living these days? WOLFE: Oh, I've been a whole lot closer than New York. I've spent the last two weeks devouring the West. The Far West took hold of me in '35 at the Colorado Writers' Conference. Met some grand folks there. My trip to the Grand Canyon that August convinced me that I'd be returning to the West. (3) FISHER: Wolfe taking on the West! Imagine that! [Pause.] You've tired of Europe? Of your beloved Germany? WOLFE: Oh, Vardis, it's getting rough over there. And bad as things are in America right now, I know that the future is America. You've made a big splash with the Idaho Guide and must know that, and so I follow your lead. I've got relatives in Washington state. (4) A man can't be in the West without wanting, needing to write about it. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".