Scribblers (2 page)

I gather with perhaps a hundred others on the memorial's back lawn for the ceremony. In the crowd with me is Wilma Dykeman, author of
The Tall Woman
and grande dame of Appalachian literature. Among the speakers is Dr. Dietz Wolfe, a descendant of one of Thomas Wolfe's brothers. But most everyone, I suspect, has come to hear Pat Conroy.

Spiritual heir of Thomas Wolfe, Conroy shares Wolfe's verbosity and exuberance. Conroy's writing, too, has been known to ride roughshod over the family of his youth.

Ruddy, heavyset, blocklike, his hair gone nearly white, Conroy speaks of his passion for Thomas Wolfe's writing. He tells of the day when, an impressionable South Carolina high schooler, he came with his English teacher to the Thomas Wolfe Memorial. His teacher took him to the backyard where we now stand and made him eat an apple from a tree here, figuratively planting the seed of Conroy's own literary career. He has made numerous pilgrimages to Asheville since. Within the past year, he has traveled to town to write a screenplay of
Look Homeward, Angel.

Well prepared, comfortable in front of his listeners, Conroy calls up his emotions with ease and grace.

As the gathering breaks up, I'd like to make my way to the front to meet him.

“Mr. Conroy, your speech meant a lot to me,” I could say.

I'm sure he's never heard that one.

Or “I love your books.”

That's not exactly true. I've read only a couple, and so long ago that I'm not sure what opinion I'd hold of them today.

Or “Mr. Conroy, I have some reservations about Thomas Wolfe—and his admirers.”

That would be honest, but a bad idea nonetheless, and certainly inappropriate to the occasion.

Or I could simply introduce myself.

I'm sure he'd be honored.

So I skulk away without saying anything to anyone.

The Tapestry Gallery in Biltmore House contains the estate's principal portraits. The John Singer Sargent painting of the man of the house stands out among Vanderbilt portraits because of one object in prominent view: the book in George Washington Vanderbilt's hand, held delicately at his shoulder.

The Vanderbilts were hardly bookish. George was the first intellectual in four generations of America's most acquisitive family. He began collecting books and art at age eleven and eventually amassed twenty-three thousand volumes and learned to read eight languages. His Biltmore library was a source of particular pride. The sixty-four-by-thirty-two-foot Pellegrini painting on its ceiling, disassembled from a palace in Venice, testifies to the room's size. The library holds first-class collections of history, horticulture, travel, and foreign-language titles and nineteenth-century English and American literature.

Moreover, George Vanderbilt had writerly aspirations himself. In his private study at Biltmore, which he called
his “scriptorium” he penned first-person hunting adventure stories that cast him as a dashing figure in the Teddy Roosevelt mold. A couple of those stories still languish, unpublished, in a private archive.

Vanderbilt liked to host famous authors for extended stays at Biltmore.

His unhappiest guest was Henry James, then as now ignored by American readers. James came in February 1905 during his return to the United States after twenty-one years in Europe. Suffering gout, carpal tunnel syndrome that made the act of writing painful, and the aftereffects of a forty-day course of dental work, James grumbled in his correspondence that Vanderbilt's “strange, colossal heartbreaking house” was “a gorgeous practical joke.”

But Edith Wharton, who arrived for the Christmas holiday that same year fresh off the publication of her breakthrough novel,
The House of Mirth,
loved the place.

One guest who is obscure today but may have cast a longer shadow than either James or Wharton in his own time was Paul Leicester Ford. In his scant thirty-seven years, Ford established a national reputation as a printer, historian, biographer, bibliographer, and novelist. His 1899 novel,
Janice Meredith: A Story of the American Revolution,
sold two hundred thousand copies in its first three months, a record to that date. One critic christened it “the great New Jersey novel,” no irony intended. It spawned the Janice Meredith Waltz and a hairstyle, the “Meredith curl.” The first text inside the front cover, it so happens, is a slavish page-long dedication to George Vanderbilt. “My dear George,” it goes in part, “As I have read the proofs of this book I have found
more than once that the pages have faded out of sight and in their stead I have seen Mount Pisgah and the French Broad River, or the ramp and terrace of Biltmore House.… With the visions, too, has come a recurrence to our long talks, our work among the books, our games of chess, our cups of tea, our walks, our rides, and our drives.”

I saw Biltmore from the air some years ago, when I visited Asheville for a previous employer. Ignorant of where the estate lay in relation to the airport but knowing it was out there somewhere, my fellow passengers and I searched for it out the right side of the cabin as that wing lowered briefly during the climb, then swung our heads left as the aircraft banked the opposite way. Everyone let out a collective “Ah”—there it was, closer than I'd hoped, right where I might have landed at the front door had I rolled out the plane's window. It remains one of the most spectacular sights of my life.

Arriving by air is the best introduction to Asheville. Following wave upon wave of rolling green mountains, the bright downtown is a revelation. So striking is its architecture that on the heels of the city's christening as “America's Magic Mountain” came a nickname even more hifalutin: “the Paris of the South.” That's too grand by a factor of twenty, but the point is taken. Instead of defaulting on its loans after the stock-market crash of 1929, Asheville made good on every cent, which meant it was still paying its Depression debt as late as 1976. The positive side of this was that the city lacked the funds or the will to remake its downtown during the urban-renewal boom. When good times returned to the area, the architectural gems of the Roaring Twenties were waiting to be dusted off.

To try to re-create my first experience of the mountains, I've booked a private tour flight. At a cost of a hundred and thirty dollars for an hour's time, it's an extravagance I can't justify. I tell myself it will clarify my purpose and give me perspective.

The office of the flight school lies at the end of a long hall in an outbuilding at Asheville's airport. One of the two men working there introduces himself as Billy and asks me what it is, exactly, I've come to see. I was vague over the phone.

“Well, is the person who'll be taking me up pretty familiar with the area? Geographically, I mean.”

“All our instructors are.”

“And he'll show me whatever I ask?”

“As far as he can.”

I tell him I want to see Asheville proper, but also Oteen, Canton, Cold Mountain, Tryon, Hendersonville, Flat Rock, Black Mountain, Montreat, and maybe as far north as Mount Mitchell and Burnsville.

Billy takes a quick glance at his coworker. “Um, you know your hour begins as soon as the propeller starts spinning. By the time you're cleared for takeoff, then have to taxi back to the building afterwards, that's a significant amount of time right there.”

I hadn't figured on that. “Of course,” I say. “Obviously. Those are the places on my wish list, I mean. We'll just do the most significant. The ones we have time for, I mean.”

Not everything I want to see will be as easily spotted as Biltmore—like Riverside Cemetery, which lies under tree
cover on the bank of the French Broad River north of downtown. All the same, it's worth a look, as the grave of William Sydney Porter—O. Henry—lies not a hundred yards from that of Thomas Wolfe.

In 1909, warned by his New York doctor to pay attention to his failing health, O. Henry came south to stay with the family of his wife, Sara Lindsay Coleman, an Asheville native.

After examining America's most popular story writer, a local physician diagnosed him as having high blood pressure and an enlarged heart and liver, along with mental and nervous exhaustion, all of which he ascribed to alcoholism.

“Mr. Porter, how many drinks do you take in a day?” the doctor asked.

“Oh, four or five,” the author conservatively estimated.

“When do you take the first one?”

“When I first get up.”

“The next one?”

“Well, sometimes that does not seem to take hold, and I take another while I'm shaving.”

O. Henry began a program of exercise and may have forsworn alcohol for the first time in many years. His health responded.

His stay in Asheville had another purpose, too. Jack London had recently made the transition from short-story writer to novelist, and O. Henry planned to do the same. He took an office on the fifth floor of Asheville's American National Bank Building, where he spent hours looking out his window at the people in the streets. Among the passersby was undoubtedly the young Thomas Wolfe, nine years old and with hair cascading below his shoulders.

The novel form proved hopelessly daunting. O. Henry's preference was to write a complete piece at a single sitting, a habit that served him ill now. And the public loved him for his light, quick, clever, formulaic stories, not the kind of serious, deeply personal narrative he had in mind.

The pull of the big city was irresistible. His final word on Asheville? “There was too much scenery and fresh air. What I need is a steam-heated flat with no ventilation or exercise.” His only literary production during his time in the mountains was “Let Me Feel Your Pulse,” an unfunny humorous story that sought to make light of his alcoholism and other health problems. He returned to New York to try to adapt some of his stories for Broadway. He resumed his old habits and died within five months, at age forty-seven.

A short hop east from Riverside Cemetery is the Grove Park Inn, which lies atop Sunset Mountain within the city. I'll have no trouble spotting its famous orange roof from the air.

In early 1935, F. Scott Fitzgerald left Baltimore for Asheville when he learned that his tuberculosis, long inactive, was beginning to damage his lungs. Not wanting word of his disease to harm his publishing prospects, he didn't check into a clinic but rather took up residence at the Grove Park Inn, an exclusive resort well beyond his means, and placed himself under the care of a local specialist.

He had previously mentioned Asheville in his fiction. It was the hometown of Monsignor Darcy, Amory Blaine's confessor in
This Side of Paradise.
Fitzgerald, a master stylist but no spelling-bee champ, wrote it as both
Ashville
and
Asheville
in the same paragraph. The book is still printed that way today.

An icon to the previous generation, Fitzgerald was being forgotten by the present one. Sales of
Tender Is the Night,
published in 1934, were disappointing.
Taps at Reveille,
his 1935 short-story collection, was doing worse yet. The stories he wrote that year—among them one narrated by a dog—brought little money. He was on the wagon, which for Fitzgerald meant forsaking gin and drinking beer instead, as many as thirty-five bottles per day. He took sleeping pills to go to bed at night and Benzedrine to get up in the morning.

He still had his charm and his delicate good looks, though. He began simultaneous affairs with a local prostitute and a young, married, wealthy Texan staying at the inn.

When the married woman's husband arrived in North Carolina, Fitzgerald felt the urge to seek new lodgings. The first place he tried was the Old Kentucky Home, still operated as a boardinghouse by Julia Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe's mother. In a gregarious mood, Mrs. Wolfe showed him around the place and spoke at length of her famous son. It was only after they were back on the porch that she noticed Fitzgerald's tipsy state. “I never take drunks—not if I know it,” she said. She stepped inside and slammed the screen behind her.

Fitzgerald left North Carolina late that summer. He was back the following April, when he transferred Zelda from an asylum in New York to Asheville's Highland Hospital and resumed his residence at the Grove Park Inn. That July, Scott took her swimming at nearby Lake Lure. In performing a swan
dive off a fifteen-foot board, he broke his shoulder. Fitzgerald was placed in a body cast with his right arm elevated, after which he had to dictate what little writing he did.

In September, a reporter from the
New York Post
traveled to the Grove Park Inn to profile Fitzgerald on his fortieth birthday. The front-page article born of that interview described Fitzgerald as a despairing drunk who wore the “pitiful expression of a cruelly beaten child,” who “stumbled over to the highboy [to pour] himself another drink.” Upon reading the piece, Fitzgerald attempted to kill himself by ingesting an overdose of morphine, which he vomited up. When he fired a revolver during a subsequent suicide threat, the management refused to let him remain at the inn unless he kept a nurse in attendance.

Several Scribner's authors sought to aid him during his dark days. Ernest Hemingway headed north for Asheville from Key West but had to change his plans. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, holed up at Banner Elk in the North Carolina mountains while she wrote
The Yearling,
visited Fitzgerald in the fall of 1936. At lunch, Fitzgerald started with a bottle of white wine and one of sherry, then ordered “a bottle of port, and as the afternoon wore on, another and another,” according to Rawlings.

Most significantly, Thomas Wolfe came in May 1937. The two authors met in nearby Tryon, where Fitzgerald was temporarily staying. They discussed
Gone With the Wind,
which Wolfe pronounced “too damn long”—an odd criticism from a man of his verbiage.

“Tom,” Fitzgerald asked as they were preparing to part company, “how old are you now?”

“Why, Scott, I'll soon be thirty-seven.”