“My God, Tom. I'm forty. Look, bud, we're at a dangerous age. You know in this country we burn ourselves out at the work we are doing, and this is particularly true of writers.”
It was seven and a half years since Wolfe had been home. This was his long-delayed return following the publication of
Look Homeward, Angel,
in which he skewered the mountain town of Altamontâa thinly fictionalized Ashevilleâtelling of its drunks, mulattos, illegitimate children, and prostitutes; exposing hatred and prejudice; and creating a sexual undercurrent that was very frank for its time.
Look Homeward, Angel
was released at the unluckiest time imaginableâon October 18, 1929, five days before the stock-market crashâbut Wolfe overpowered that misfortune with the sweep of his prose. In Asheville, the $2.50 novel rented for $.50 per day. Some local residents were amused to see their neighbors' follies in print; a few were flattered by Wolfe's portrayal of themselves; most were outraged. The local public library didn't shelve the book until 1935, when Scott Fitzgerald, during his first summer in town, purchased two copies, brought them to the library, plunked them down on the desk, and asked that they be put in circulation.
So it was that Wolfe had mixed feelings about coming home after the novel's publication.
His reception proved surprisingly warm. People had bigger concerns than bearing an old grudge. Welcomed as a local boy who'd made good, Wolfe walked his old newspaper route, addressed a local business club, and contributed an article to the paper. Pleased at the attention, he arranged
to rent a secluded cabin in Oteen, just east of Asheville, where he did some writing that July.
A famous letter exchange came out of the meeting between the two great authors in little Tryon. Fitzgerald wrote Wolfe at the cabin in Oteen urging him to stifle his desire to produce expansive books, but rather, like Scott himself, to try a “novel of selected incidents.”
“Don't forget, Scott, that a great writer is not only a leaver-outer but also a putter-inner,” Wolfe replied, “and that Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dostoievsky were great putter-innersâgreater putter-inners, in fact, than taker-outers.”
Fitzgerald departed the Asheville area in late June or early July 1937. Wolfe left on September 2. Neither ever returned. Wolfe died one year later and Fitzgerald three.
There seems to be a problem with my flight.
“Um, your pilot had a dead battery in his car this morning,” Billy says after some hesitation.
“But he's here now?”
“Well, his car was towed. He called in. He's still at the garage.”
This sounds suspicious. It's now midafternoon. My missing pilot has had plenty of time to get his battery recharged or replaced.
“Um, they must have found something else wrong,” Billy ventures.
“So what should I do? Is someone filling in for him?”
“No, but ⦠Here, I'll show you.”
I follow him down the hall to a lounge that looks out on a loading area, taxiway, and runway. Not ten yards from
the window, a teenage boy and a man of about thirty are climbing into a red prop plane.
“Charlie's headed out on a lesson. If he's done by four, maybe he can take you up. Otherwise, we're booked the rest of the day.”
If it proves necessary, I can skip most of the outlying sites. But Connemara, the big, old house on Little Grassy Mountain, remains a must-see.
It was 1945 when Carl Sandburg bought Connemara and its two hundred forty-five acres at Flat Rock. “What a hell of a baronial estate for an old Socialist like me!” he said. He relished the irony that the biographer of Lincoln should spend his declining years in a home that once belonged to Christopher Memminger, the first secretary of the Confederate treasury.
Then in his sixties, Sandburg was thought to have little left to say. Once considered the heir to Walt Whitman, he had seen his poetic style go out of vogue soon after it came in. His sprawling biography of Lincoln won him a Pulitzer but was more remarkable for its enthusiasm than its scholarship. “The crudest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg,” wrote one critic. Poets considered him a good biographer, while biographers judged him a fair poet.
And now he was selling out to the movies. When he arrived at Connemara, Sandburg was deep into an MGM-commissioned novel that the studio hoped to turn into an epic patriotic film. Seventy-five thousand words were what MGM was after, but Sandburg was already up to four
hundred thousand, and the end was nowhere in sight. Alone in his third-floor writer's nest, wearing a shade when his overworked eyes troubled him, which was often, he customarily worked through the night and into the early morning.
As Sandburg was wrestling with his novel, the colony of artists at nearby Black Mountain College was undergoing a crisis of identity. I'd like to see the college's two former campuses, both of which ought to be visible from the air.
I watch the airport traffic while I wait in the lounge. Billy takes good care of me, coming back down the hall a couple of times to make sure I'm comfortable, apologizing for my pilot's absence, pouring me cups of coffee I don't want but drink anyway, chatting about the new aircraft the school is to receive next week.
Black Mountain was a Euro-Yankee experiment in the Southern highlands, the majority of its faculty being from abroad and its student body from the Northeast. People at the college wanted nothing to do with hillbillies. And the school's willful isolation was fine with the locals, who saw the place as a haven for free love, godlessness, homosexuals, and egotists.
For a college in the middle of nowhere that teetered on the brink of financial ruin, that existed for only twenty-three years, and whose enrollment never reached a hundred students, Black Mountain attracted a remarkable collection of talent. Its instructors included Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham. Among its visitors were Albert Einstein, Thornton Wilder, Henry Miller, Aldous Huxley, Zora Hurston, and Langston Hughes.
When enrollment dipped to two dozen in the early 1950s,
faculty and students hit upon the idea of creating a magazine as a means of publicizing the college. The
Black Mountain Review
started out small and ingrown, pieces by instructors Charles Olson and Robert Creeley front and center.
Even as the student body fell to single digits and it grew obvious the college was a lost cause, the magazine took flight. Carl Jung and Jorge Luis Borges submitted material.
Black Mountain Review
#7, the final issue, ran well over two hundred pages and included original pieces by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and sections from William S. Burroughs's unpublished
Naked Lunch.
By the time it came out in the fall of 1957, the college had disbanded.
A mix of poetry, short fiction, criticism, essays, letters, and photography, the
Review
was one of only a handful of print outletsâand probably the premier forumâfor avant-garde artists in the political climate of the mid-1950s. Its influence on the next generation of writers was considerable. It is still admired today.
Carl Sandburg and the college, though neighbors, found little common ground.
“Where is the Sandburg who talked of picket lines?” Black Mountain poet Kenneth Rexroth asked. “Where is the Sandburg who sang of whores?”
“I am not going to talk about whores at my age,” Sandburg remarked upon hearing Rexroth's queries.
But radicals come in different stripes.
Sandburg's MGM-contracted novel weighed in at over a thousand printed pages. An attempt to encompass the entire American experience, it spanned the years from the Pilgrims through World War II. He called it
Remembrance
Rock.
It was a critical failure lambasted for its clunky structure, its tangle of subplots, and its woodenly allegorical characters. “As dull and tedious a literary performance as has been foisted on the public in many months,” one reviewer wrote. “An amazing exhibition of how not to write a novel.” Commissioned for screen adaptation, it was entirely unusable for that purpose.
Yet there is something heroic about a man with little to gain and much to risk who tackled a new form in his late sixties and tried to write something for the ages.
Still energetic in his seventies, Sandburg published his
Complete Poems,
which won him a second Pulitzer; wrote the autobiography of his early years; condensed his Lincoln opus into a single-volume edition; and wrote the prologue for
The Family of Man,
Edward Steichen's landmark photographic collection. A man of humble origin who considered himself poor even when he was rich, Sandburg grabbed whatever financial opportunities came his way, intent on building an inheritance for his two invalid daughters, one of whom was epileptic and the other of whom was hit by a car when she was sixteen, suffered a fractured skull, and lived the rest of her life on the level of a twelve-year-old.
But what really moved him was a lifelong desire to teach himself how to write. “Before you go to sleep at night, you say, âI haven't got it yet. I haven't got it yet,' ” he once remarked.
Billy is standing with me at the window when he spies the little red plane off in the distance to our right. “Just on time,” he says.
It's a moment before I spot it; looked at edge-on, it's
like trying to see a knife in the sky. The plane comes in right wing low but finally straightens when it's just beyond the edge of the runway and maybe fifty feet off the ground. Unlike the jets that rumble the windows of the lounge, the little red plane is completely silent to us. It touches down opposite where we're standing, then lifts back up, climbs, and starts to bank left past the far end of the runway.
Billy taps his foot three, four, five times before he speaks. “Touch-and-go's,” he says.
“What?”
“They're doing touch-and-go's. The student must have the plane till five.”
“Oh.”
“We can fit you in tomorrow, no problem.”
“But I live out of town. I'm heading home tonight.”
And so I do, but not before Billy pours and caps me a coffee for the road, walks me to the parking lot, and elicits my promise to contact the flight school when I'm coming to the mountains again.
I doubt I'll take him up on his offer.
I doubt he means it anyway.
It's hardly his fault my trip has been a failure. A hundred-and-thirty-dollar flight probably wasn't going to buy me much understanding anyway. What I really need to do is meet some actual writers.
When you write a book, you expect it to impact the world in some small way, though you ought to know better. If you hope to see your achievement celebrated and instead find yourself a lonely supplicant, it is profoundly discouraging.
My first book came out some years ago.
I've never happened across anyone reading it on the beach, on an airplane, or in a library.
I've never witnessed anyone buying it in a bookstore except at my autographings.
I've watched boxes of my book leave the publisher's warehouse in October and return unopened after the holidays. I've seen individual copies trickle back unsold, be-stickered, and battered.
I've been politely declined when I offered to speak about being an author to my daughter's fourth-grade class.
At one autographing, I had a group of children feel sorry enough that they pooled their resources and bought postcards for me to sign, since they couldn't afford the price of a book, intended for adult readers anyway.
Eighteen months after publication, bookstore returns of unsold copies were so strong that I received a semiannual royalty check for exactly $1.01, meaning that, over the preceding six months, sales had exceeded returns by exactly one unit. I never cashed that check. I have it still.
But I say it's a pretty good book nonetheless. And I shouldn't disparage its sales. It's been through three printings and one foreign-language edition and remains a staple in its niche nearly a decade after publication.
When the book-writing spirit again moves me, I decide to take as my subject mountain writers, from the iconic to the unknown. I return to Asheville several weeks after the Thomas Wolfe Festival to seek out a local writers' support group. The largest such organization in the area is The Writers' Workshop. On its advisory board, I see from its professional-looking newsletter, are such luminaries as John Le Carré, Peter Matthiessen, and Reynolds Price. Oddly, Alex Haley is listed as a member of the boardâat the bottom and in smaller typeâthough it is years since his death; someone from the workshop apparently took pains to cultivate his acquaintance and will be damned if they'll let him out of a commitment. The Writers' Workshop offers seminars for beginning writers, children's writers, screenwriters, short-fiction writers, teenage writers, and single writers. It sponsors a short-story contest with a first prize of six hundred dollarsâgood money for that sort of thing.
When I see that the workshop is putting together a new critique group, I arrange to take half a day off work to attend the organizational meeting. It is my first long venture from home since replacing my car's water pump, so I keep an eye on the temperature gauge on the hard slog up the mountains. But it isn't until I'm idling College, Patton, and the other downtown streets futilely looking for a parking spot that the needle starts rising. I leave my car in the deck behind the civic center and walk.
Downtown Asheville provides a colorful contrast to the traditional, conservative values of the high country. Those expecting the Bible Belt are in for a funky surprise.
This area of the mountains has been a spiritual center since the time of the Cherokees. Asheville sits atop America's most powerful vortexâthis according to metaphysical author Page Bryant and local swami Nostradamus Virato. Vortexes are bioelectric energy points spread across the globe like acupuncture points on the human body. A vortex occurs at the junction of “ley lines” on the earth's surface. Twenty-four vortexes have been identified between Black Mountain, to the east, and Waynesville, to the west. A vortex is a place of high energy in a small geographical area, whereas a “power spot” is the site of a lesser concentration of energy in a larger space. Mount Pisgah is the area's principal power spot. As such, it is home to Asheville's “Watcher,” or guardian angel. How all of this came about is not entirely certain. Some say the quartz-filled mountains exert a “piezoelectric effect.” Others maintain the area is blessed because the people of Atlantis settled here upon evacuating their dying continent.