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Thomas Wolfe’s Evocative Setting for Look Homeward, Angel Rises from the AshesBy Murray D. LaurieAsheville, North Carolina’s favorite author wasn’t all that popular when his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, came out in 1929. Local folks looked behind Thomas Wolfe’s fictional characters and found themselves skewered like pin-mounted insects. But they forgave him in time and now dote on “The Old Kentucky Home,” the boarding house he called “Dixieland” in his overtly autobiographical novel. Wolfe spent his childhood in this “rambling, unplanned” house of “eighteen or twenty drafty, high-ceilinged rooms” run by his mother, Julia. And this is the setting in which his fictional Gant family lived their turbulent, dramatic lives.
On a recent tour of the freshly painted yellow house with white trim, which re-opened in May of 2004, I noticed not a whiff of charred wood or any other evidence of the devastating catastrophe. My guide pointed out some barely detectible evidence of the furniture restoration and noted which rooms had to be completely rebuilt. But some of my fellow visitors, who had been there many times in the past, thought they remembered it as an all-white building. That’s because, during the five-year restoration process, conservation experts discovered by paint analysis that the old boarding house was painted yellow when it was Thomas Wolfe’s boyhood home early in the twentieth century. In fact, Wolfe described it as “painted a dirty yellow.” The tables in the boarders’ dining room are all set for an early supper and the parlor is stuffed with comfortable furniture, a piano and a small organ. Each bedroom, including the one the fictional Eugene Gant’s beloved brother, Ben, died in, is furnished as it was when Julia Wolfe reigned over her domain—and her youngest son, Tom.
I had watched the video in the adjacent Thomas Wolfe Center and walked through the exhibit area before touring the house, so the life of the author was fresh in my mind. Even the small shop of Wolfe’s father, a stonecutter who displayed marble angels for his clientele that suggested the Angel in the book’s title, is on display, as is a remarkable array of everyday objects saved by the Wolfe family.
Yet visitors to the refurbished Old Kentucky Home will have to turn to the novel for these dire descriptions of “Dixieland.” For the house seems for the most part a cherry maze of rooms, some eccentrically furnished, some lavishly or charmingly decorated. Rockers line up on the broad front porch facing Spruce Street, and those passing by will see a comfortable-looking old house with sparkling windows set with colored glass and other ornate Victorian embellishments. The tour guides are very well versed in the saga of the house itself, the lives of the Wolfe family, and the works of Thomas Wolfe, so literary buffs as well as those interested in historic homes and furnishings will not be disappointed when they make a visit to the Thomas Wolfe Memorial a part of their Asheville, North Carolina, experience. The modern visitor center, which opened in the
mid-1990s, is located at 52 North Market Street, directly behind the
historic Old Kentucky Home boarding house. The facility houses an exhibit
hall featuring personal effects from the Wolfe family home. An audio-visual
program on Thomas Wolfe's life and writing is shown every hour, and guided
tours around the boarding house leave from the visitor center once an hour.
The building also houses a gift shop. Hours of operation are as follows:
April - October: 9:00am - 5:00pm Tuesday-Saturday, 1:00pm - 5:00pm Sunday,
Closed Monday; November - March: Visit the website http://www.wolfememorial.com/ for more information. Photos of house courtesy of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial,
Asheville, SC |
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A
devastating fire, thought set by an arsonist, almost destroyed the sprawling
two-story wood frame building and its contents in July of 1998. Asheville
dowagers wept, English majors wrung their hands, antique buffs agonized, and
the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, which runs the Thomas
Wolfe Memorial, got busy with plans for the building’s restoration.
One
chamber, his mother’s room off the kitchen, is still “a small, dark room
with a window opening on the uncertain light of the back porch,” and the
kitchen seems appropriately dreary and foreboding. Like Julia Wolfe, Eliza
Gant in the book was less interested in comfort than in making a profit from
her boarding house. (picture #2 here)
Thomas
Wolfe, as Eugene Gant, wrote of “the bleak horror of Dixieland,” and called
it a “mean, cramped huddle of brick and stone.” His vivid, detailed
descriptions of the house, even the “front room upstairs, with its ugly
Victorian bay-window” in which Ben, wracked with pneumonia, breathes his
last, suggest the anguished, sensitive frame of mind from which great
literature is created. Wolfe continued to write splendidly sprawling
novels inspired by his own experiences: The Web and the Rock and You Can’t
Go Home Again have the same epic force as Look Homeward, Angel.