A VISIT TO DIXIELAND

by Hunter James

In the dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning
—F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Crackup

F. Scott Fitzgerald had crossed the Atlantic and taken a hard, jarring trip by train into
the heart of the North Carolina hill country only to be thrown into the street by a
boarding-house madam who apparently recognized him immediately and her visitor,
even though, to the visitor, she was still a stranger.

“Sorry, we don’t take in drunks,” she said, sweeping dust onto the shoes of the great
man, drunk though he was and had been and would be again, and poking at him with
the end of her broom.

Such is the tale of Fitzgerald’s 1935 visit to the Old Kentucky Home, an Asheville, NC,
rooming house known as the Dixieland of Thomas Wolfe’s early novels.  Wolfe had
lived there, in what has now become a ghostly shrine, almost destroyed in 1995, by
an arsonist whose forebears, like many of his generation, apparently had borne a
heavy grudge against the author for his too-explicit description of Asheville and its
townspeople.

“O house of Admetus,” he once called it, after the abode of a mythical Thessalian
king doomed to an early death by the goddess Diana.  Like Admetus, Wolfe had felt
the sharp sting of alienation and doom, often describing himself  as “forever a
stranger and alone,” drawn relentlessly “inward upon that house of death and tumult,
as the guests came with their dollar a day and their constant rocking on the porch.”

  Fitzgerald had come alone to Asheville, having stopped in Baltimore long enough to
deposit his schizophrenic wife Zelda into an asylum for the incurably insane.  Zelda, a
good old Alabama girl who, like her husband, was seeking to recover from a decade
of Continental binges.   By some accounts she was suffering not only from
schizophrenia, alcoholism and drug addiction, but was also a certified
nymphomaniac.  

What a life they must have had in France!  My experience has been that you have to
spend some time learning how to deal with France before going there for any
extended period of time. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1935 visit to Dixieland  was just one more
ignominious event in what had been just about the worst year of his life, creative
luminary or not.  A drunken and sex-crazed wife for whom he apparently still felt
affection even though she spent every spare moment looking for other men.  

Worst, the book that was supposed to have been his masterwork, Tender is the Night,
had been a critical flop and brought in little money—though now, ironically, Modern
Library  ranks it as one of the top one-hundred novels of the Twentieth century while
consigning Look Homeward, Angel to the scrap heap.  Could the remote, haunted
glens of Asheville banish the ghouls and demons that had all but destroyed Fitzgerald
and his wife during their last years on the Continent?

It was indeed his last great hope.  He had come into these hills hoping to find a
magical restorative: his wife, transferred from Baltimore to Asheville, would recover
her health and youth and beauty and sanity while he—sober again—might at last
begin to produce works that would rival The Great Gatsby and win him back his lost
critical acclaim.

All for nothing.  Fitzgerald’s visit was a mere interlude in more long days of failure—
and somehow symbolic of what his life had become.  He sat drunkenly at his writing
desk, typing out magazine articles that were mostly rejected, novels that went
nowhere.  He turned again to hard liquor and then, repentant, went on the wagon,
which, for him, meant the consumption of anywhere from thirty to forty bottles of beer
a day.

“He would commit himself to write and then say that he needed alcohol for inspiration,
claiming that his writing was sterile and flat if he wrote sober.  But then he would get
drunk and not write anything.”  After a really serious binge he would sometimes
attempt to straighten himself out.  Sometimes, though rarely, he would even try to get
off beer and onto Coke or black coffee.  But beer was still his only real methodone.

The summer of ’35 marked the beginning of what was possible the most debilitating
binge of his life, an experience that eventually found expression in The Crack Up, a
book that was almost as much of a mess as he was. Yet there were some good things
in it, including one of the most memorable lines he ever wrote:  In the dark night of the
soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning.  Mostly the writing was stale, but he
began a half dozen or so short pieces, that also found a place in The Crack-Up, the
best of which were Pasting It Together, Handle with Care and the title piece.  But
mainly the book was little more than the story of his fall to literary mediocrity and
nervous prostration.  

The real problem was not simply his binge drinking.  He had not cared enough about
his writing apparently to keep up with the times.  He was still writing about the
Twenties, flappers, speakeasies, the Jazz age, when people wanted to read about the
Great Depression, the woes of the working class, the wars in Europe.  Drunk or
sober, nothing seemed to work for him in those days. Long after he left Asheville he
began to recover some of the old fire in The Last Tycoon, a novel that remained
unfinished when, in his early forties, he died of a heart attack.

Free at last, though still proclaiming love for his wife, Fitzgerald had taken a room at
Grove Park Inn, lavish haunt of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Enrico Caruso, William
Jennings Bryan and many another creative giant of turn-of-the-century America.  He
would spend the summer there, being drunk, pretending to write, and, with Zelda still
ill and more than a little crazy, bedding down at least one wealthy young married
woman who came his way. Rosemary he called her, a lovely creature, so we are told,
who was visiting Asheville with her sister. Rosemary began to talk of marriage, of
leaving her husband, a prospect that the author did not relish.  Yet he could not bring
himself to break off the affair.   That was left up to Rosemary’s sister, who threatened
to carry news of this tawdry business back to her home in Memphis and to the ear of
her husband.

He attempted a second affair with a certain Laura Guthrie Hearne, a palm reader and
journalist of sorts, who had also come South for her health.  She kept a journal, and
worked as a secretary for the author during his rare sober moments.  But the affair
went nowhere, at least as we have it from Mrs. Hearne, who published a part of her
journal in the December 1964 issue of Esquire. (italic cq) Of course, we do not have
Fitzgerald’s side of the story.

For all his failings Grove Park has nevertheless honored him by placing his photo
along side those of Harvey Firestone, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Enrico Caruso,
and many others, though little enough it was that he accomplished during his stay.

Wolfe’s mother was still renting out rooms—though no longer providing three meals a
day—on the afternoon that Fitzgerald came knocking.  He had been close to Wolfe in
Paris and had once asked him “why he felt that he needed to put everything in his
work.”  Wolfe is said to have replied: “Why did Shakespeare?”

Anyway, there he was, with dust all over him, having taken time out from a blazing
affair and from his feeble attempts at writing, in the hope of getting a good look at the
inside of the house that Wolfe had described so eloquently in Look Homeward, Angel.
(italic cq)  All he got for his trouble was an ignominious scolding from Wolfe’s mother,
the formidable Eliza Gant of his first work and its sequel Of Time and the River.
(italaic cq).

“You just go on now.  We don’t cater to your kind around here.”

Built in 1883, The Old Kentucky Home was for many years a popular historic shrine,
drawing as many as 18,000 visitors a year.  The house was old enough to claim a
certain renown of its own, but it would have been lost to the bulldozer long ago if
there had been no Thomas Wolfe to transform it into an enduring part of America’s
literary heritage.  The youngest of seven children, Wolfe was the only one to know
the place as home.  His brothers and sisters came each day to help with the chores.
But at night they would escape to their father’s Woodfin Street home, the “warm
center” of the author’s own early life.

Wolfe had lived at The Old Kentucky Home from the time he was eight until he went
away to Chapel Hill and later to graduate school at Harvard.  It is the last of its kind on
a street once crowded with other high, brooding mansions much like Wolfe’s
Dixieland.  

I had often heard of its numerous hauntings, of the “alien presences” that had
haunted the author’s childhood.  I began to wonder how much of what I had heard
was true.  I had barely stepped into the gloom of the front hall when—already—I
began to feel that same dark feeling of “death and tumult,” and something even more
palpable: A quick fleeing sound of footsteps upstairs, perhaps even a low hum of
voices.  

“Hardly,” said the site manager Steve Hill.  For I was his only visitor.  He at once
dragged me to the upper story, perhaps thinking to put me at ease.  I’m not sure that
is what happened.  In the upstairs bedrooms an even more oppressive spell of
premonitory gloom fell over me with an insistence that could not be easily explained
away—maybe because I had been told that that was where all the ghosts were.  The
ones that kept staring at you out of all the old news photographs.

If not Wolfe himself, surely his father would have been the happiest fellow in town to
see the Old Kentucky Home go up in flames.  If the arsonist had got there in time, the
old stone-carver no doubt would have hewn him out a special “angel” for his
mantelpiece.  The elder Wolfe refused to join his wife in her infamous abode for a
good fourteen years before falling ill and being forced to come there to die.  As the
author has his fictional father say:

“Woman, you have deserted my bed and board, you have made a laughing stock of
me before the world . . . Fiend that you are, there is nothing you would not do to
torture, humiliate and degrade me . . . Ah, Lord!  It was a bitter day for us all when
your gloating eyes first fell upon this damnable, this awful, this murderous and bloody
barn . . . “

Many of the townspeople of the day shared his contempt for the “murderous and
bloody barn,” which apparently did not always enjoy the best of reputations.  The
whole family came off much the worst for it.  “You will still find strongholds of people
who detested the entire family,” said Hill on the afternoon of my visit.  “Many people
considered the family kind of rowdy.  They were into things that they didn’t want their
kids exposed to.  They were often told ‘Don’t play with the Wolfe children!’  And there
is one old gentleman in Asheville who says he was always told to walk on the other
side of the street from the boarding house.”

Mrs. Wolfe’s forebears, however, had been respected and relatively well-to-do.  Some
were among the first settlers of this remote mountain country.  Nor was she herself
altogether the flinty moneygrubber depicted in Look Homeward, Angel. (italic cq)  But
her neighbors—and in time all of Asheville, to say nothing of Scott Fitzgerald—knew
her only as the hard-eyed proprietress of the faintly disreputable boarding house at
48 Spruce Street, known for many years before the arsonist got to it not as The Old
Kentucky Home or Dixieland but simply as the Thomas Wolfe Memorial.

The darkly varnished floors, the stark eerie whiteness of the plastered walls, the high,
dim ceilings, the dining room set as though to receive guests, the chairs and tables
and settees that seemed almost too heavy for their delicately carved cabriole legs—
all remained as Wolfe knew them in the first days of the last century.

It was one of those houses that never seemed quite light enough even at the
brightest part of the day.  Hew down all the great oaks that crowded in upon it, throw
open all the doors and windows and it would have still been the same: some lingering
hint of primordial darkness that could never be quite banished.

Indeed, to Wolfe the very idea of light and warmth were alien to the house.  The most
autobiographical of novelists, he once wrote of how young Eugene Gant, his alternate
persona, had fled in panic and dismay from all those alien presences:  “He went into
the hall where a dim light burned and the high walls gave back their grave damp chill.  
This, he thought, is the house.”

The feeling presses itself on you even more profoundly as you wander the upper
halls, something invisible yet ever-present, ominous, at once seductive and
repugnant, some of the old anguish and pain and unspoken yearning, as you hear
again the forgotten voices, the murmurous echoes of those long ago summer
evenings, the guests rocking and talking on the veranda, the clink of silverware and
hearty laughter as the dining room filled for an early dinner—yet the feeling of death
always there, in summer, yes, and even more so in winter, with the “remote,
demented howlings of the burly winds” raging about the house.  And always those
haunting refrains that, once heard, can never be quite forgotten:

Which of us has known his brother?  Which of us has looked into his father’s heart?  
Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent?  Which of us is not forever a
stranger and alone? (italic cq)

After all that how easy to forget that Dixieland was occasionally the scene of good
times as well as bad.  Wolfe fanciers will remember no doubt that he—or young
Gant—returned from college one spring to enjoy a love affair, his first, with a girl he
called Laura James.  The affair ended badly.  But it inspired one of the most
memorable flights of lyricism in all of American literature, a quality found everywhere
in Wolfe and too-seldom matched even by our finest poets:

Come up into the hills, O my young love.  Return!  O lost, and by the wind grieved,
ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where she shall feel
ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June. (italic cq)

Laura James, or Clara Paul in real life, died soon after leaving Dixieland, from what
we are never told, only that her passing was for Wolfe a reminder of how quickly all
life flies:

Quick are the mouths of earth, and quick the teeth that fed upon this loveliness.  You
who were made for music, will hear music no more; in your dark house the winds are
silent.  Ghost, ghost, come back from that marriage . . . we did not foresee, return not
into life, but into magic, where we have never died, into the enchanted wood, where
we still lie, strewn on the grass . . . (italic cq)

Wolfe’s verbal excesses—his tendency to over explain, his sprawling, adjective-laden
sentences—were often as great as his virtues.  Yet few contemporary writers have
been more frequently quoted.  And when he chose to set flight into pure lyricism he
had few, if any peers, among American novelists—or poets.  No, he did not have bow
even to Whitman, another undisciplined literary giant whose few excellent poems
have made the world forget the many that are beyond redemption.

He died too soon, a mere thirty-eight, of a rare type of Tuberculosis, just as he was
beginning to gain control over his stylistic eccentricities.  The Thomas Wolfe Society
keeps his name alive after a fashion, and, of course, the house is always there, to
remind one of the tumult it created in the young man’s life, as well as in the life of his
father.

Lamentable though it may be, it appears that we are about to lose him again.  Once a
giant among American writers, more than a match for the Fitzgeralds and
Hemingways and Steinbecks despite his excessive wordiness, he now ranks pitifully
low among 20th century American writers. Modern Library did not select Look
Homeward, Angel (italic cq) or any of his other books for its list of the one-hundred
best novels of the twentieth century.  Neither did a Modern Library poll of readers put
him there.  Angel, (italic cq) however, has never been out of print.  Still, like the Italian
composer Salieri, in his competition with Mozart, his voice grows fainter and fainter
until “almost no one reads him anymore.”    His books remain as little more than
literary curiosities, despite the best efforts of his editors to pare down the bloat; and
no longer, as he said in another context, “make new magic in a dusty world.”   

Much of his best work deals, naturally enough, with the themes of escape.  As a
young man he thought of himself as “speeding world-ward, life-ward, Northward out of
the enchanted, time-far hills, out of the dark heart and mournful mystery of the South
forever.”  For all that he never really escape the spell of “the house.”  With the
undoubted exception of Ernest Hemingway, he would become the most traveled of
authors, leaving his footprint on all the great cities of America and the Continent.  But
always his thoughts, willingly of not, turned toward home, toward the indomitable hills,
toward the house that had infused him with a “grave-damp chill” and premonitions of
early doom.

One would always wonder, while wandering those massive halls and hearing the
echoes of that far-off time, the muted voices, whether Wolfe could every have been
quite the author he was—if he could ever have been any sort of author at all—had it
not been for the house he called Dixieland.  Yet, like Wolfe himself, a visitor was
never disposed to linger overlong.  The house, dark even at midday, cast its
inexorable spell, and as one meandered from floor to floor the twilight seemed to
come ever more quickly.  Like the young Thomas Wolfe, one began to think of
escape, of fleeing “worldward” and “lifeward,” putting the “dark and mournful mystery”
of the house forever behind him.



                                            -*-



So it was and so it is again, on another summer’s day as you walk the halls of a now
restored Old Kentucky Home, the gloom once more settling over you as though the
alien presences remain ever present despite the best work of the arsonist. Your
footsteps quicken and your breath comes hard as you turn toward the door, toward
sunlight, the voice of your tour-guide mingling dimly with the not-quite-heard voices
that still abide—yes, you are sure of it now—amid the ruinous clutter of the
“murderous and bloody barn.”  Outside, you pause to look back, at the high gabled
roof half hidden in the trees and untouched by the fire, at the young man busily
painting a new set of balusters, at the wrap-around porch where Eliza’s summer
guests—men and women not always of the best character—sat rocking away those
long ago August evenings.

It was good to have seen it again, to have known, however briefly something of the
moods that helped shape the life and work of a man destined to become one of the
nation’s most enigmatic novelists.  To have been there, yes, and felt much of what the
author had felt; but there would always be more than just an ordinary sense of relief
that you had now put it all behind you—that you , too, had escaped into a world
where light and warmth were no longer mere “alien presences” and where the traffic
and clamor of a busy Asheville afternoon seems a most welcome reprieve.

-*-