News Release

JUNE 5, 2003
THE ARTS/CULTURAL DESK

A House Restored, An Author Revisited; Thomas Wolfe Shrine Returns
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL (NYT) 1743 words

ASHEVILLE, N.C. -- Flames gorged on Julia Wolfe's prim dining room in the family boarding house that her son Thomas lampooned as the forlorn Dixieland in ''Look Homeward, Angel.'' They devoured the massive Eastlake mantelpiece and Mission chairs and tables, melted the brass clocks and silver, and destroyed 200 of the house's 800 artifacts, while damaging many others throughout the 29 rooms.

Much else, too, was destroyed when the white, gabled 1883 Queen Anne house called Old Kentucky Home was torched by an unknown arsonist in the early hours of July 24, 1998. But firefighters salvaged most of the structure, and the interior is now being restored at a cost of $2.4 million for an anticipated November reopening.

The restoration comes at a time when Wolfe's seesawing literary reputation -- established in 1929 with the searing fictionalized reminiscences of ''Look Homeward, Angel'' -- may once again be on the upswing. If so, part of the credit goes to devotees and their Thomas Wolfe Society, which holds its annual meeting tomorrow and Saturday in Burlington, Vt., where Wolfe took a motor trip in 1933.

But the sense of loss is still acute in this hippie-thronged Blue Ridge Mountain town that Wolfe called Altamont and, later, Libya Hill.

''We can buy pieces that look like Julia's dining room, but the awful truth is the dining room is gone,'' said Steve Hill, manager of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, which is next to the boarding house. An exhibition center at the memorial, with a silhouette of the hulking 6-foot-6 Wolfe, now draws barely a third of the 30,000 visitors a year who flocked to the Old Kentucky Home before the fire to see the sole remaining landmark of the Wolfes in Asheville.

The loss is particularly grievous in the case of Wolfe, the most autobiographical of writers, who called ''Look Homeward, Angel'' not a novel but ''a book made out of my life.'' And a gothic life it was in a houseful of strangers, with a domineering, penny-pinching mother and a father given to drunken rampages, outbursts of poetry, cooking binges and diatribes against ''this damnable, this awful, this murderous and bloody Barn.''

The house had vibes, said Matthew J. Bruccoli, a scholar of Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. He and Arlyn Bruccoli, his wife, edited the restored original version of ''Look Homeward, Angel,'' called ''O Lost'' (2000). ''As I walked the hallways,'' he said, ''I could sense all the tremendous life that had transpired within that building, and I'm not a mystic.''

Aldo P. Magi, a retired paper factory supervisor in Sandusky, Ohio, is a member of the society, a founder of The Thomas Wolfe Review and the largest private collector of materials about Wolfe. The arson was a desecration, he said, ''like burning down St. Peter's.''

Investigators doubt the attack was aimed at Wolfe, though they lack suspects or motive. The blaze coincided with the raucous summer downtown Scottish street festival called Bele Chere.

The house, a National Historic Landmark, has been owned by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources since 1976. The state is paying for part of the restoration, as is insurance and private donations.

Inside the largely gutted shell, with its eerily intact staircase, workers are stringing wires and laying pipe, replastering walls, reglazing windows and restoring woodwork to recreate the home that Wolfe last visited in 1937, a year before his death at 37 from tuberculosis that migrated to his brain.

Having risked a trip back to Asheville then, after the furor that greeted the unsparing portrayals of his clan as the Gants and of other townsfolk in ''Look Homeward, Angel,'' Wolfe was surprised to be warmly embraced, and saluted the house in an article called ''Return,'' which he wrote for The Asheville Citizen, a newspaper he once delivered.

''And again, again,'' he wrote in ''Return,'' ''in the old house I feel beneath my tread the creak of the old stair, the worn rail, the whitewashed walls, the feel of darkness and the house asleep, and think, 'I was a child here; here the stairs, and here was darkness; this was I, and here is Time.' ''

Mr. Hill, 47, who has been the manager for 25 years, called the house ''literally a character in the book.'' With his stupendous powers of recall, Wolfe was masterly at reimagining all he had ever seen and felt, and giving it incantatory voice in torrents of poetic prose that flowed from his stubby pencil by the thousands of pages. (Pushing a pencil, Wolfe said, ''never allows us to forget the grim nature of our occupation.'')

The amalgam of his life and art would seem to offer tantalizing insights into the creative process, as if retracing Wolfe's footsteps here might reveal the secrets of his unruly genius. But in the end, of course, they are lost -- lost! in Wolfe's recurring lament -- leaving only the mystery of a place that left an indelible mark on American culture.

Young Tom, the eighth and last child, was not yet 6 in August 1906, when Julia Wolfe, a relentless real estate speculator, bought the yellowing boarding house at 48 Spruce Street from a Kentucky minister for what today might be close to $200,000. Her mercurial husband, William Oliver Wolfe, a tombstone maker with a weakness for alcohol and disdain for his wife's business obsessions, stayed petulantly behind with the other children in their nearby homestead on Woodfin Street.

That house was torn down in 1955, with a Y.M.C.A. now occupying the site. Also demolished was W. O. Wolfe's marble shop on Pack Square, in the center of the city, where pivotal scenes in ''Look Homeward, Angel'' were set, and where, Wolfe wrote, the square dipped sharply down ''as if it had been bent at the edge.'' Julia Wolfe sold the shop, and the city's tallest building, a 13-story office tower, replaced it in 1924.

That leaves the boarding house as the commemorative center for Wolfe pilgrims, although it was hardly revered by Wolfe, who recalled it distastefully in ''Look Homeward, Angel'': ''In winter, the wind blew howling blasts under the skirts of Dixieland: its back end was built high off the ground on wet columns of rotting brick.''

Relegated to kitchen leftovers and with no room of his own, Tom slept in his mother's bed in her closet-size room off the kitchen until he was 8. He was repelled by the dreary quarters and ''a silent horror of selling for money the bread of one's table, the shelter of one's walls, to the guest, the stranger, the unknown friend from out the world; to the sick, the weary, the lonely, the broken, the knave, the harlot, and the fool.'' Unknown to him at the time, one of those tubercular boarders may have infected him with disease that eventually killed him.

But here, at 16, Wolfe also found tormenting first love, a plain girl of 21 whom he rhapsodized as the bewitching Laura James in ''Look Homeward, Angel.'' Here, too, the boy dodged his mother's ire to risk sexual trysts with some of the older female boarders who set his youthful blood aboil, ''slow-bodied women from the hot rich South, dark-haired white-bodied girls from New Orleans, corn-haired blondes from Georgia.''

And here, in an upstairs bedroom off the sleeping porch, in a scene harrowingly recounted in the book, his brother Ben died of Spanish influenza in 1918 at age 26. The room was scorched by the fire, but the flames spared the original stained-glass bay window and the iron bed in which Ben died.

Wolfe's account of Asheville in ''Look Homeward, Angel'' was followed by a sequel, ''Of Time and the River,'' published in 1935. After his death, his mountainous manuscripts were carved into two other enduring novels, ''The Web and the Rock'' (1939), recounting his volatile romance with Aline Bernstein, a married theatrical designer some 20 years his senior, and ''You Can't Go Home Again'' (1940), along with many shorter pieces. Editing his work was likened to putting a corset on an elephant.

Julia Wolfe, whose initial dismay at the family's portrayal was quickly replaced by pride in her son's success, lived in the boarding house until she died in 1945. Her eldest son, Frank, savaged by Wolfe as the wastrel Steve Gant, was the house's last occupant, until 1949, when the family sold it so that it could become a memorial.

Wolfe remains an enigmatic figure, a giant of tempestuous loves and ugly furies who mixed sublime prose and puerile overwriting with crude caricatures of blacks and Jews, and who jettisoned his most devoted ally, his tireless Scribner's editor, Maxwell Perkins. Sooner or later he alienated almost everyone, including Sinclair Lewis, who said, ''You couldn't be a friend of Tom's, any more than you could be a friend of a hurricane.'' Wolfe came off as less than sympathetic at the hands of his last full-length biographer, David Herbert Donald, in ''Look Homeward''(1987).

Dr. Bruccoli said that Wolfe had suffered in recent years at the hands of ''lazy English teachers who stopped assigning 'Look Homeward, Angel' because it was long and hard to teach.'' But he said that he sensed a turnaround now: ''If this was the Dow Jones average, Wolfe is now in the beginning of a bull market.''

''Great literature is great realism, and the most important thing that fiction does is get it right -- where it was, how it was,'' he said. ''Wolfe combines photographic accuracy with the greatest flow of eloquence and the richest vocabulary any writer ever had.''