Scribblers Page 2

  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.”

  “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 Altamont—a thinly fictionalized Asheville—telling 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 imaginable—on October 18, 1929, five days before the stock-market crash—but 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 eas
t 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-inners—greater 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 outlets—and probably the premier forum—for 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, ‘I 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.

  CHAPTER 2

  Authors Anonymous

  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.