My great grandmother, Pearle Goode Chandley, attended the Normal and Collegiate Institute in Asheville with Tom's sister, Mabel, and the two maintained a close friendship throughout their lives.
Pearle's brother, John Goode, owned a drugstore in Asheville. Most everyone in Asheville knew Goode, Tom Wolfe included.
"I knew John Goode real well," says Wolfe's childhood pal and lifetime friend. Robert Bunn. "Goode's Drugstore was a hangout for all of us boys and girls coming up. Tom and I used to hang out there. That was our headquarters. I've often wondered how John Goode stood all of us kids hanging around his store."
My great grandmother and her brother both passed away before I was born, but I grew up hearing about Thomas Wolfe from my grandmother. Lucile Chandley Hardee.
When she spoke of Wolfe, she usually focused on his return to Asheville in the summer of 1937. She rarely mentioned the hullabloo in 1929. Before she died, I wrote down some of her memories of Wolfe.
During the summer of 1937, Wolfe ivited my grandmother and some other friends to the cabin he was staying at in Oteen.
"He was renting a cabin from Max Whitson. It was near Recreation Park in Oteen," Lucy told me. "While we were all out there that afternoon, Wolfe told us he had been subpoenaed to testify in a murder trial in Burnsville."
In May of 1937, Wolfe witnessed a shooting incident in Burnsville, involving three men. Wolfe testified that two of the men, Philip Ray and Otis Chase, were threatening James Higgins and fired several shots at him. A week later, the two men killed Higgins. Wolfe was called to the stand to testify about the previous threat. Ray and Chase were found guilty of second degree murder, but the trial proved humiliating for Wolfe.
In a letter Wolfe wrote, "I was denounced by one of the defense lawyers in his final plea to the jury as the author of an obscene and infamous book called 'Look Homeward, Angel,’ who had held up his family, kinfolk and town to public odium, and whose testimony, I therefore gathered, was not to be taken into account."
As the gathering at Wolfe's cabin began to break up, Wolfe asked my grandmother if she would drive him back to Asheville.
"I asked him where he wanted me to drop him off, and he said to drive on home, that he would like to go in and see Pearle, and then he would walk to his mother's house."
When they arrived, Pearle invited Wolfe to a dinner of fried chicken, com on the cob and potato salad. My dad. who was just a boy at the time., remembers the tall visitor as "the man who ate all the potato salad"—my dad's favorite food.
'Tom was awe inspiring because of his size," Lucy told me. "Wolfe was the tallest man I've ever seen in my life. He must have been close to seven feet tall." (Wolfe was actually six-six.)
“I told you that the book begins with ‘of wandering forever and the earth again,’ and that these two opposing elements seem to me to be fundamental in people… In my own life my desire has fought between a hunger for isolation, for getting away, for seeking new lands, and a desire for home, for permanence, for a piece of earth fenced in and lived on and private to oneself.”
-Thomas Wolfe to Maxwell Perkins, July 17, 1930, on Of Time and the River
This is the first time in many years that I have visited the grave of Thomas Wolfe, “a beloved American author,” according to the inscription on his stone. Certainly beloved by me. Last fall, I reread “Look Homeward, Angel” and rediscovered Asheville’s most famous native son. It was as a son that Wolfe became famous. "Angel," his first book, is a fictionalized account of his childhood and youth. His persona, Eugene Gant, is the youngest child of WO and Eliza Gant, who are engaged in a titanic struggle that engulfs their offspring: Luke (Wolfe's brother Fred), Helen (Mabel), Steve (Frank), Daisy (Effie), and twins Grover and Ben. The book became a literary sensation when it was published in 1929—and, thanks to its thinly disguised portraits of dozens of Asheville residents, a hometown scandal.
"Although I had been apprehensive about certain things in the book and a quality of naked directness ... upon the people in the town where I was born," Wolfe wrote, "I had honestly not envisioned the kind of effect the book would have there." He thought perhaps 100 Ashevillians would read the novel, and would react with approval, indignation or amusement. Instead, the whole literate population of the town read it and "seethed and boiled with a fury of bitter excitement and passionate resentment," he wrote. "The book and the author were denounced from the pulpits ... Men collected on street corners to debate, discuss, and generally denounce the book. For weeks the women's clubs, bridge parties, teas, receptions, the whole complex fabric of a small town's social life, was absorbed by an outraged clamor. I received anonymous letters full of vilification and abuse, one which threatened to kill me if I came back home."
Asheville's reaction taught Wolfe a lesson about "the naked, blazing power of print." For seven years following "Angel's" publication—until two years before its author's untimely death a few days short of his 38th birthday—the fire he had kindled with his words kept Tom Wolfe from going home. When he did, it was to his mother's boarding house at 48 Spruce Street, to Old Kentucky Home (Dixieland in "Angel"), now the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, a North Carolina Historic Site. There's a picture taken during that visit of him sitting on the steps, Julia Wolfe in a rocking chair behind him. An inveterate real estate speculator, she had bought the house in 1906, when Tom was 6. There he lived with her—and a kaleidoscope of boarders—until he left to attend college at age 16. Tom never liked the place. The home he did love was the one he was born in, at 92 Woodfin St., built by his father in 1881. The two houses were within sight of each other, until January 1955 , when the Woodfin Street house was torn down.
"In the young autumn when the maples were still full and green ... Eliza moved into Dixieland. There was a clangor, excitement, vast curiosity in the family about the purchase, but no clear conception of what had really happened. Gant and Eliza, although each felt dumbly that they had come to a decisive boundary in their lives, talked vaguely about their plans, spoke of Dixieland as 'a good investment,' said nothing clearly. In fact, they felt their approaching separation instinctively. ... And however vaguely, confusedly, and casually they approached this complete disruption of their life together, the rooting up of their clamorous home, when the hour of departures came, the elements resolved themselves immutably and without hesitation. Eliza took Eugene with her… Helen stayed with Gant .... As for the others ... they were left floating in limbo .... Thus, before he was eight, Eugene gained another roof and lost forever the tumultuous, unhappy, warm centre of his home."
-- "Look Homeward, Angel"
Steve Hill and I are standing in the dining room of Old Kentucky Home. The rooms are empty of furniture, the walls and floors bright with new paint. For six years—since arsonists broke a window in this room, piled tables and chairs together near an exterior wall and set them ablaze—the house has been closed to visitors. Hill, who grew up in Asheville and majored in history at Mars Hill College, has been site manager at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial since 1979. He calls the day of the fire, July 24, 1998, "the worst day of my life." He arrived at the house around 3:15 a.m, about 15 minutes after the firefighters did, just as the whole roof was lighting up. The fire had raced up through the open space between the interior and exterior wall to bum undetected in the attic for about 30 minutes before part of the slate roof fell in. Someone noticed then, and called the fire department. Five hours later, Hill toured the ruins. Amazingly, he was able to walk through all 29 rooms in the house, though he says "you couldn't recognize the upstairs. The fire had destroyed all the familiar landmarks." Despite the weight of the falling slate, the second floor didn't collapse into the first and the central staircase remained intact enough to climb it. For a house that Wolfe described as "a big cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty high-ceilinged rooms" Qulia Wolfe had added 11 more in 1916), Old Kentucky Home had largely survived.
Not that it didn't look awful. Smoke and thousands of gallons of water damaged walls, ceilings, floors and furnishings in rooms that the fire itself never reached. A roof slate had driven itself through the footboard of a bed in an upstairs bedroom. The rest covered furniture and floors. It took cranes to lift parts of the roof and mechanical equipment installed in the attic off the damaged furniture. The dining room and the sleeping room above it—and all the artifacts they contained—were completely destroyed. But that day, in the visitor center that stands behind Old Kentucky Home, Steve Hill rediscovered the blazing power of the beloved American author's words. As news of the conflagration spread, phones started ringing.
"We got calls from all over the United States and Europe," he says. "The first question people asked, again and again, was, 'ls Ben's room okay?'" Ben's room—the front second story bedroom with the bay window on the northeast corner of the house—wasn't really Ben's room at all. The Wolfe children, when they stayed with their mother, slept in whatever rooms weren't rented out. The room the callers were worried about was the one that Ben died in—in a scene that no one who has read "Look Homeward, Angel" can ever forget. The fire destroyed the ceiling and north wall of Ben's room, but the rest was saved.
Among the calls that poured in that morning were offers of help. The Biltmore House, the National Park Service and the Blue Ridge Parkway volunteered to send their curatorial staffs.
"They did it without being asked, and without pay from us," Hill says. A "sea of volunteers" helped carry everything out of the house. Artifacts were laid out on plastic sheets, examined, assessed, stabilized, cleaned and—eventually—restored. Of the 800 artifacts in the house, 200 were destroyed. All the rest had to be sent out for conservation overhauls. Their restoration is mostly complete, though some work remains.
"We lost 20 percent of the house, but 100 percent of it was damaged," Hill says Restoring the building began with stabilizing the structure and installing an enormous set of specially constructed tarpaulins to cover the missing roof, a six-week process aided by a dry summer. Because floors had buckled and doors and windows wouldn't open and close, the house underwent a slow drying process with fans that ran every day for two years. In October 1998, Winston-Salem restoration architect Joe Opperman was hired for his expertise in restoring burned historic structures.
"We did a thorough study of the house, back to 1883, when it was built, though we're restoring it to 1916," Hill says. Among the things the study revealed was that parts of the house had been covered by 17 layers of paint. The 30 colors used in the restoration—Including the bright yellow exterior paint and paler yellow trim—are all historically accurate to the house's appearance in 1916. Restorers salvaged as much of the original structure—Including 4,000 square feet of the original plaster—as they could. Still, building codes dictated some changes, and the house is now protected by smoke detectors, sprinkler and alarm systems.
The house reopens this spring, with a Grand Reopening Celebration planned for May 28-31. It can't come too soon for Hill, who has sometimes felt frustrated at the slow pace of the $2.5 million restoration.
"It took George Vanderbilt five years to build Biltmore House and we're in our sixth year of this project and not done yet," he says. "But we had to proceed methodically. The payoff is going to be the final product—a museum-quality restoration." Hill sometimes worried that the house might have lost something that seemed even more important to him than the silver service that melted in the heat or the artifacts reduced to cinders. "Look at how much this house has borne witness to," he says. "You could feel that in here, before the fire. I was afraid that we' d lost so much of the original that that feeling would be gone. But you know, the other night I was in here working, and I felt it again. The fire didn't destroy it after all."
"Where shall the weary rest? When shall the lonely of heart come home? What doors are open for the wanderer? And which of us shall find his father, know his face, and in what place, and in what time, and in what land? Where? Where the weary of heart can abide forever, where the weary of wandering can find peace, where the tumult, the fever; and the fret shall be forever stilled. Who owns the earth? Did we want the earth that we should wander on it? Did we need the earth that we were never still upon it? Whoever needs the earth shall have the earth: he shall be still upon it, he shall rest within a little place, he shall dwell in one small room forever."
-Of Time and the River
"What most people want to do after coming here is to go see Wolfe's grave," historical site interpreter Chris Morton tells me. This is what I want to do, after talking to Hill and walking through the house. Following Morton's directions, I find the Wolfe family plot easily. In the years since my last visit, I have forgotten that the whole family, with the exception of Effie, who is buried in Anderson, South Carolina, is gathered here in a space about the size of my living room. Even WO. Wolfe's second wife Cynthia Hill Qulia was his third) is buried here. The gravestones are very close together, so close it makes my head swim. For months, I've been living in the midst of this clamorous crowd, painfully aware of the way that stammering Fred, hysterical Helen, dissolute Steve, tightfisted Eliza and histrionic, drunken WO., alternately raging and lamenting, rub salt into one another's wounds.
And then there's Tom. All winter, I have been transfixed by him—by his novels, his letters, his confessions about his "hopeless attempt" not only to record "the million complex forms of human experience," but to "read all the books, to know all the people, to see all the countries of the world—in short, to eat the world and have it too." Day after day, Tom, who's 6 feet 4-1/2 inches tall, has been standing beside his refrigerator, using its top as a desk. He writes in a frenzy, pushing each filled sheet of paper out of his way as he plunges desperately on. Before one sheet has floated to the floor, he's at work on another. At night, mind aflame, exhausted but unable to sleep, he abandons whatever hotel, rooming house or apartment he's been holed up in to pace the streets of Paris, London, Brooklyn or Manhattan. He walks until dawn. He is a volcano erupting, a flood tide surging. He's driven, hurled, flung, always moving, never—In mind or heart or body - still.
And yet. Here is this stone. Here are all these stones. They indicate that Tom, Mabel, Ben, Grover, WO., Julia, Fred and Frank are not where I think they are. They're here, resting within this little place. They've been here for quite some time. Fred, who outlived the others, was buried in 1980. And Tom, whose blazing words bestowed immortality on his whole cantankerous clan—who rendered them as real and recognizable to me as my own mother, father and brothers—has been here since 1938, under earth I can lay my hand upon. I can read what the stones say I can see what's in front of my eyes. But try as I may, I cannot get these people into the ground.
Note: These archival articles are presented exactly as they appeared at the time of the issue in which they appeared. As such, all quotes, as well as references to temporal facts, artifacts and other items are contemporaneous to the date of original publication.