Scribblers (27 page)

But the name of Thomas Wolfe was nowhere to be found.

“It kind of boggles the mind to think that of the 100 best titles in 20th century English literature, Thomas Wolfe
isn't there,” Ted Mitchell, a historian at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, told the
Asheville Citizen-Times.
“I can't imagine a list of 20th century novels being complete without a classic like
Look Homeward, Angel.”

“It isn't exactly a John Grisham novel,” explained Tom Burkhart, a volunteer at the memorial. “It's childhood emotion, impressions about an extremely dysfunctional family. Not everyone likes that.”

“It doesn't really surprise me that Wolfe is not on there,” said Steve Hill, the manager of the memorial. “He's never going to attain the popularity of Hemingway or Fitzgerald.”

“What's in a list, anyway?” asked Mitchell. “He'd be on mine.”

Less than four days later, around two o'clock in the morning on Friday, July 24, someone tossed a burning object through the dining-room window of the memorial—or at least that is the best conjecture of Asheville investigators. The act occurred on the eve of Bele Chere, the city's principal public celebration, and some suspect it was a reveler leaving a local bar after last call.

Ironically, the memorial had recently received a large appropriation for renovations, the first twenty thousand dollars of which were to buy a fire alarm, scheduled for installation just a few weeks later. Had the alarm been operational, the fire would have been confined to the dining room and done relatively little damage. As it was, it smoldered for perhaps an hour before the heat grew intense enough to break additional windows. The increased supply of oxygen set the blaze running up the walls to the upper floor and the attic, where it destroyed the support for the slate roof.
The fire was called in shortly after three. It took crews two hours to extinguish it.

Though Wolfe himself characterized the 1883 structure as “cheaply constructed,” its protection as a state historic site had brought it a level of care never known during the author's day. Nearly every one of the twenty-odd rooms was described in
Look Homeward, Angel.
Indeed, the place was elevated to the status of a character.

In the minds of many, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial was the quintessential writer's home. Visitors could bring a book and read on the porch where Mabel Wolfe's guests once talked and argued, or browse the premises and examine the four thousand cataloged objects. Workers preparing for the renovation had gone to such pains as to remove up to seventeen coats of paint to determine the color scheme in Wolfe's day. Luckily, many of the most important objects, like Wolfe's typewriter, had been removed from the house preparatory to the renovation, and so were spared from the fire.

The following morning, a small crowd of spectators gathered outside the memorial to watch the firemen complete their work, to hear shock-stricken staffers try to explain what had happened, and to see a crane tear away sections of the weakened roof and lift smoke-, soot-, and water-damaged items like Ben Wolfe's bed from the upper level, then deposit them on the front lawn.

Fifteen hundred feet above Asheville, I'm having an easy time picking out downtown landmarks—the Art Deco City Building and the seventeen-story Buncombe County
Courthouse side by side not far off Pack Square; the fingerlike Jackson Building, located on the site of W. O. Wolfe's old monument shop; the Flatiron Building; McCormick Field, where Babe Ruth almost played; the Battery Park, where he convalesced, and the Grove Arcade across the street; the Basilica of St. Lawrence, said to have the largest unsupported dome in North America.

“There it is,” Mike says. “Right over there. To the right of that big white building. Just behind it.”

I'm ahead of him this time.

The Thomas Wolfe Memorial, newly painted its original yellow instead of its recent white, is so bright it glows. The blue tarps are gone from the outer wall of the dining room and the roof, the beautiful slate restored or—more likely—replaced. I don't see any scaffolding. It's nearly ready to go. The place looks better than it ever has.

Pat Conroy has written a wonderful twenty-page defense of Thomas Wolfe. He describes how his English teacher presented him a copy of
Look Homeward, Angel
at Christmas 1961, how he ripped straight through it three times consecutively, how he frequently caught himself holding his breath while reading. He tells about falling so deeply under Wolfe's spell that the same teacher, now worried, gave him Ernest Hemingway's
The Old Man and the Sea
as an antidote. Believing
Look Homeward, Angel
was written specially for him, he planned to present himself to Wolfe as his personal assistant, only to be devastated to learn the author had died twenty-odd years earlier. For Conroy, Wolfe is the Babe Ruth of literature, a man who swung for the fence, who wrote like his hair was on fire, who was battered by
critics but never cowed, who was more courageous than other writers because he refused to hold himself back, even for his own protection.

It's enough to get you to send in your fan-club dues—until you actually read some Wolfe, that is.

In May 1937, at the end of his long-awaited visit seven and a half years after the publication of
Look Homeward, Angel,
Wolfe wrote a piece for the
Asheville Citizen-Times.
It was called, simply, “Return.”

“My visit home was better than I had a right to expect,” Wolfe meant to say. “I know my book hurt some feelings, but that was not my intention. At the time I wrote it, my prospects for publication were slim, and I was simply using the best material I had. I have always loved the mountains and their people, and the graciousness with which I was received these past weeks showed me how much I've missed the place.”

Or something like that.

But here's how it came out: “I have been seven years from home, but now I have come back again. And what is there to say?

“Time passes, and puts halters to debate. There is too much to say; there is so much to say that never can be told;—we say it in the impassioned solitudes of youth, and of ten thousand nights and days of absence and return. But in the end, the answer to it all is time and silence: this answers all; and after this, there is no more to say.”

Several columns later, he returned to wrestle with the same point: “For now I have come home again—and what is there to say? I think that there is nothing—save the silence
of our speech. I think that there is nothing—save the knowledge of our glance. I think that there is nothing—save the silent and unspoken conscience in us now that needs no speech but silence, because we know what we know, we have what we have, we are what we are.”

In between was an impressionistic interpretation of his boyhood, reading in part, “Here, from this little universe of time and place, from this small core and adyt of my being where once, hill-born and bound, a child, I lay at night, and heard the whistles wailing to the west, the thunder of great wheels along the river's edge, and wrought my vision from these hills of the great undiscovered earth and my America—here, now, forevermore, shaped here in this small world, and in the proud and flaming spirit of a boy, new children have come after us, as we: as we, the boy's face in the morning yet, and mountain night, and starlight, darkness, and the month of April, and the boy's straight eye.”

He's like a freshman trying to fill a blue book, desperately hoping windiness and obfuscation will cover for a dearth of substance.

I've never been inside the Thomas Wolfe Memorial. One time, I arrived just after closing. Another, I was so low on money that I couldn't afford the nominal tour fee. And then I planned a visit for what turned out to be the weekend of the fire. When I woke that Saturday morning and learned the news, I decided against making the trip. By the next time I was in Asheville, the tarps were up, boards were nailed over the windows, a chain-link fence was in place, and the house was closed.

And so, too, am I absent from the grand reopening,
which falls on the same weekend my manuscript is due. I miss the rededication and ribbon cutting, the historic photograph exhibit, the celebration banquet, the guided trolley tours of Wolfe's Asheville, and the authors' presentation featuring Fred Chappell, Gail Godwin, Sharyn McCrumb, and others.

But I vow not to always be on the outside looking in. I'll give the man another chance. I'll tour the memorial. Meanwhile, I'll continue reading. I'll try to judge him by his best work instead of his worst.

I hear his short stories are good.

Acknowledgments

I've heard stories beyond number of the kindness of authors and book people, and I've witnessed many of their charitable acts firsthand. Still, I was surprised at the level of goodwill I found when writing this book.

I thank Gail Godwin, Sharyn McCrumb, Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan, Charles Price, Bill Brooks, Ann B. Ross, Joan Medlicott, Randy Russell, Jill Jones, James Seay, Bryan Aleksich, Eileen Johnson, Frankie Schelly, Steve Brown, Jack Pyle, Taylor Reese, Mart Baldwin, Susan Snowden, the unnamed members of the writer's group, Duncan Murrell, Darcy Lewis, David Toht, Bob Klausmeier, Jane Voorhees, Jerry Burns, Rob Neufeld, Mike Vidotto, Steve Hill, Peter Caulfield, Carolyn Sakowski, Elizabeth Woodman, Debbie Hampton, Tony Roberts, Martin Tucker, Ed Southern, Anne and Andrew Waters, Kim Byerly, Sue Clark, Jackie Whitman, Heath Simpson, Margaret Couch, and Pat and Ed Kirk.