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  I don’t envy him his task. Having received one of Charles’s brochures, gentlemanly Jack Pyle offered a frank assessment of a man who, with a single published novel to his credit, feels qualified to conduct a prose-writing seminar: “He’s got balls.” Jack didn’t know any would-be writer in the mountains who hadn’t gotten the brochure.

  Charles’s blanket mailing has brought him a small group of mostly elderly, mostly amateurish penmen clustered around a table set up in his living room.

  The most aggressive are two men who, respectively, having moved from California and having visited fifty countries in the course of a working career, presume that they are the star attendees and that their writing merits special attention. Charles barely has to nudge them to hear their two-page voice pieces. The Californian reads part of a forty-page story about a big-city policeman whose father is killed during a mugging. Oddly, he stresses to us that the ending will have an Oedipal tone, which seems to be an important point somehow. The world traveler reads part of a story about a May-December romance set on a barge anchored off some exotic island. Neither of these pieces meets Charles’s criterion of having been written especially for the seminar, but since he’s collected his money, he really isn’t in a position to say anything about it.

  One woman reads what she calls a “Gertrude story,” about a character with whom we are all presumably familiar.

  Strangest is the man who reads what sounds like a promotional piece for the Yancey County Chamber of Commerce, though he isn’t associated with that organization. Hard of hearing, he speaks loudly, especially after he gets a couple of courtesy laughs.

  The best excerpt, of course, is by a lady who sits quietly, waits until the end, and even then has to be prodded into reading. Hers is a story of a young American woman living in Pakistan who is threatened by locals on their way home from a religious service. They fear she’s a devil woman sent to tempt them. It is understatedly exotic; I want to hear what comes next.

  There are others, too.

  One starts something like this: “I am sitting at my table looking out my window at a pair of bluebirds stopping to visit every bluebird box in my backyard. Would you like to come along?”

  Charles is obliged to be kind, but I suspect it is his nature anyway. He gets the writers to describe the larger works into which their two-page pieces fit; he deftly extracts the few bits of coal from the heaps of slag; he identifies the places where the voice could be made more personal and the writing more vivid; he sees possibilities; he sets a tone of hope.

  But it isn’t until after lunch and a recess that he takes center stage. During the break, he encourages us to explore what we can of the mountain and to write our impressions of it. Tired from my trip, I do the former but not the latter, walking the stream-skirting gravel track uphill from Charles’s house. Those who do the writing assignment are rewarded with a second critique weighing their new pieces against the ones they brought from home. Charles focuses on what is generally the greater immediacy and the truer voice of the writing done on his mountain.

  Following this, he gives us a couple of concrete examples of how to revise. One comes as a surprise: the closing of Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address. Charles traces Lincoln’s revisions through a couple of drafts, showing point by point how he refined the language. The second example treats the evolution of one of Charles’s own scenes, in which a young boy, attracted by some swarming blue-black butterflies, finds they are hovering about—and even beginning to consume—a human corpse. It isn’t drawn from either Hiwassee or the new novel, though I recognize the boy character. It makes me wonder what else Charles has in reserve.

  Last comes a pep talk about how artistry is less a divine gift for a chosen few than it is a possibility for ordinary people who would only exercise diligence. Then and there, it seems a promise for each of us.

  Altogether, my afternoon of eavesdropping on Charles’s life leaves me reassured of his talent, though I regret he is getting a late start in the game and is having to sing for his supper.

  CHAPTER 5

  Critiquing the Critiquer

  In June 1922, Thomas Wolfe headed home from his graduate studies at Harvard upon learning that his father was gravely ill. He was fifty miles from Asheville when he read in a local newspaper that W. O. Wolfe was dead.

  Wolfe spent that summer at home. There’s an oft-told story of how he and a friend were taking two girls for an outing on Sunset Mountain one day when the car they were driving suffered a flat tire. They were in the process of changing it when an elderly man in dungarees walked out of the forest and offered a hand. They accepted, and the job was soon accomplished. As he and his friends departed, Wolfe handed the old man a quarter, which he welcomed with a bow.

  Several years afterward, Wolfe’s brother Frank supposedly asked the man, Edwin Wiley Grove, the owner of the Grove Park Inn, if he returned or spent the quarter. “No, I still have it,” Grove said. “First I kept it because it was the only tip I ever received, and then its preciousness grew in proportion to Tom’s fame.”

  Grove died two and a half years before the publication of Look Homeward, Angel—that is, before Thomas Wolfe achieved anything approaching fame. So the question becomes whether Grove was a seer or whether the chance meeting between Asheville’s great literary son and its most influential man was apocryphal.

  E. W. Grove had no need of stray coins from a pauper like Thomas Wolfe. As a young pharmacist in Paris, Tennessee, in the 1870s, he had pioneered a formula for suspending quinine in a liquid and making it nearly tasteless. Malaria was a scourge in the South in those days, but many people resisted quinine because of its bitter flavor. Grove’s compound, Feberlin, was sold by prescription.

  His real breakthrough came when he developed an over-the-counter version of the same formula, plus sugar, lemon flavoring, and iron. He called it Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic. Fortunately for Grove’s pocketbook, quinine hindered the growth of malaria but could not actually kill it. It was therefore recommended that people take four teaspoons of Grove’s elixir daily throughout the entire two-month malaria season. Even when the threat of the disease waned, the tonic was successfully marketed as a product that “restores Energy and Vitality by creating new, healthy blood” and “makes children and adults as fat as pigs.” In the late 1890s, it outsold another recent Southern concoction, Coca-Cola. Grove also developed the first cold tablet, which he sold as Grove’s Laxative Bromo Quinine. He was a millionaire several times over.

  Like many others, Grove came to Asheville for health reasons, hoping the mountain air would provide relief that his own medicines could not from his bronchitis, chronic insomnia, and debilitating bouts of hiccups, which sometimes lasted for months. Grove’s business interests broadened over the years. He founded a newspaper in Atlanta and invested in real estate in Georgia, Arkansas, Florida, and North Carolina. He bought most of Sunset Mountain on Asheville’s northern boundary and began selling residential lots in a development he called E. W. Grove Park.

  It was 1909 when he conceived the Grove Park Inn. Grove favored the great inns of Yellowstone Park—the Old Faithful Inn in particular—but the several architectural firms he auditioned failed to come up with an acceptable plan for a similar hotel on Sunset Mountain. It was Grove’s talented son-in-law, Fred Seely, a man with no training whatsoever in the field, who finally drew the sketch that was followed almost exactly for the inn’s exterior.

  In July 1912, Grove’s architectural engineer began hiring a crew of four hundred local men, many of whom walked away from other employment at the prospect of Grove’s dollar-a-day wage. Mule teams, trucks, a single steam shovel, and hand tools were the workers’ only aids. Grove boldly announced that the inn would be completed in slightly less than a year.

  One of the principal tasks was the hauling of boulders, some weighing five tons, from nearby mountains for the inn’s six-story walls, which were four feet thick at the base. Workers were instructed to set them in place just as they f
ound them, moss and lichen intact. The most spectacular feature of the inn is its great hall, which has a thirty-six-foot-wide fireplace at either end, each of which was assembled from a hundred and twenty tons of granite boulders and could accommodate twelve-foot logs atop its five-hundred-pound andirons. The inn was completed by July 12, 1913, only twelve days behind schedule. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan gave an address at the opening.

  In the early days, the emphasis was on enforced tranquility and hyper-cleanliness. Guests were discouraged from bringing small children. Automobiles were barred from entering the property from ten-thirty at night until nine in the morning. Guests were asked not to run water or make unnecessary noise at night; indeed, the water flow to their rooms was cut off at ten-thirty. Those in the great hall needed to keep their voices low. Anyone who didn’t was handed a printed card requesting compliance. The purity of the inn’s water was checked each month. All dishes were boiled—twice, in fact—after every use. Coins exchanged at the desk were cleaned by machine at night.

  In addition to the garden-variety rich, Woodrow Wilson came, as did Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, William Howard Taft, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, the Mayo brothers, John D. Rockefeller, Charles Schwab, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, Enrico Caruso, Harry Houdini, Al Jolson, Will Rogers, Bill Tilden, Bobby Jones, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, and many others through the years. Two major wings—one nine stories, the other eleven—were added at either end of the old inn in the 1980s, bringing the total number of rooms to over five hundred.

  Some guests who knew the inn in years past bemoan the din in the great hall today. But the money and the luminaries keep coming—the elder George Bush, Henry Kissinger, Anthony Hopkins, Jack Lemmon, Arnold Palmer, Michael Jordan, on and on.

  Scott Fitzgerald’s is the best-known author’s stay, but Alex Haley, Helen Keller, Charles Frazier, George Plimpton, and others have also been guests. Margaret Mitchell honey-mooned here.

  Once his great hotel was completed, Grove set about remaking Asheville’s downtown. He bought out and razed his main competition, the Battery Park, where George Vanderbilt had stayed before he began amassing land for the Biltmore Estate. What’s more, Grove chopped off seventy-five feet of the hill on which the Battery Park Hotel stood and hauled off the dirt in trucks. In its place, he built a second Battery Park, taller but less grand and sprawling. In April 1925, Babe Ruth was brought to the new hotel after collapsing at the Asheville train station upon arriving for an exhibition game. His coach scoured the town for a pair of size forty-eight pajamas for decency’s sake, since the Babe normally slept nude. The best he could find was a size forty-two—in hot pink. Ruth’s difficulty was variously explained as the flu, acute indigestion, an intestinal abscess, and a case of poisoning, but he most likely had the clap. Newspapers abroad reported him dead. The incident, known in baseball circles as “the Bellyache Heard Round the World,” kept him off the field for the better part of a season at the peak of his career.

  Grove’s crowning glory was to be the Grove Arcade, a forerunner of today’s shopping malls. It was to occupy a full city block across the street from the Battery Park Hotel. The main entrance, facing north, was guarded by a pair of griffins; grotesque heads were carved all the way around the exterior. Inside was to be an array of oak-fronted shops, mezzanines, and spiral staircases. On top, a roof garden with a band shell was planned. Rising from the center of the arcade was to be a fourteen-story office tower.

  Grove laid the foundation in 1926 and died in 1927, and the central section was built to a height of only four stories. The arcade has just recently been renovated for upscale apartments and shops and opened to the public. Obviously truncated but nonetheless grand, it will likely never be completed as envisioned.

  Having spent my few overnight visits to Asheville in forty-dollar motels, I jump at the chance for a room in the Grove Park Inn, courtesy of the largest writers’ organization in the state.

  Each fall, the eighteen-hundred-member guild sponsors a three-day conference attended by about five hundred writers. The annual event rotates among posh sites around the state.

  I am to be a fourth-tier celebrity. Famous writers are brought in to give talks or readings during the weekend’s luncheons and dinner banquets; they generally arrive and depart quickly and have little personal contact with the attendees. Then come modestly successful authors like my new friend Charles Price, who conduct seminars for classroom-sized groups on sundry topics like “The Scuppernong Connection,” “The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction Writing,” and “Finding Form, or What’s a Nice Sonnet Like You Doing in a Place Like This?” Then come the agents, publishers, and marketing specialists who participate in round-table discussions. Finally come the worker bees like me, who review twenty-page manuscript samples one on one with conference attendees.

  Actually, my presence at the conference is contingent on proof of my popularity. Only a small percentage of attendees will pay the fee to have their work critiqued. Those participating select their editor from a list of six, the other five of whom are from national publishers noted for their fiction. No one comes to such conferences to learn how to write nonfiction, my company’s specialty, which doesn’t bode well for my chances. The guild informs me that if a minimum three people don’t select me, I will have no room at the inn—though, to my possible chagrin, my photograph and capsule biography will have already run in the conference brochure. I served the same function at the previous fall’s conference in a different city. Sure enough, only two writers chose me, and ultimately just one of them was able to attend.

  But maybe news of my diligent work is spreading and I am finally making a name for myself in the business. Word comes back that I’ve been chosen by six aspiring authors, the maximum number allowed—wise souls all.

  I make the drive to Asheville and wind my way up Sunset Mountain to the great stone inn. I am to be housed in the Vanderbilt Wing, Room 4057, which happens to be the Cyd Charisse Room. My antennae raised to all things writerly, I note the George Will Room and the Deepak Chopra Room on my way there.

  I reread my manuscript samples after settling in. It’s difficult to spend a thirty-minute private session critiquing a scant twenty pages of material without schoolmarming the writer about punctuation and grammar. This will be especially true in four of my six cases, since the writers haven’t provided synopses and I have no idea where their stories are headed and therefore little to talk about.

  One sample is from a murder mystery whose heroine works in the insurance industry and also happens to be a champion golfer. The author has broken her opening scene into two separate chapters for no good reason I can discern.

  Another is from a New York novel about two twenty-something, high-aspiring black girls who meet through their dead-end office jobs. Since one of the heroines starts a new position, makes a best friend, goes out with her boyfriend, and begins an involvement with another man all within the span of twenty pages, I’ll advise the writer to slow the pace and spend more time establishing her characters and setting.

  Another has just the opposite problem. A “grit lit” story of a Southern family dealing with a visiting wayward uncle, it is all personal background and no forward movement.

  Another concerns the friendship between a professional woman and a mental patient. It’s self-consciously literary and transparently autobiographical.

  Another tells of hard times in an enclave of Norwegian immigrants. The author begins her sample with page 43, which makes it difficult to pick up on the action.

  The best of the samples by far comes from a kind of retro/techno thriller set on an air-force base in West Germany during the Cold War. The antihero, a decorated American fighter pilot, murders his underage German lover and has to dispose of the body. A conflicted man whose patriotism overlays a family history of suicide, a cigar-chomping enigma in his trademark cucumber-green sunglasses, he makes a promising villain indeed
. The writer’s cover letter takes pains to explain that, while he understands that his submission is not to exceed twenty pages, he has taken the liberty of including additional pages to close out a chapter.

  Apology accepted. I wouldn’t have stopped reading anyway.

  A keynote presentation by Jan Karon, open-mike readings by conferees, “Three Uses of the Knife: How the Blues Works As a Literary Device,” “Feeding the Ancient Fires: American Indians Writing Their Own Literature,” “Romance Sells!”—all this takes place before my arrival.

  My first obligation is a session called “Meet and Greet with Editors and Agents,” in which hopeful writers are set loose en masse upon a small number of publishing professionals. The inn’s countless meeting rooms notwithstanding, the event only merits space in a crowded hallway around two tables of crackers and cheese and soft drinks. It is the kind of thing people in the business approach with trepidation—an open-air market of bad ideas, shouted above a din.

  I’ve barely pinned on my nametag before a manuscript sample is thrust at me—some kind of mountain memoir by an instructor at a community college. She says she spoke to me about it some months previously, though I have no such recollection. I tuck the sample under my arm.

  Then comes a nattily dressed black couple, the man in a preacher’s collar. They have a fifty-five-page complete manuscript that the woman starts reading to me unbidden; I gather it has to do with Jesus but can’t understand much of what she’s saying because of the noise. I suggest that they’ll need more than fifty-five pages to make a book and tell them how to compile a list of publishers of religious material. The looks on their faces indicate that they’ve understood me about as well as I have them. I’m starting to sweat.

  Rescue comes in an unlikely form. “You’re Stephen Kirk,” a sixtyish man with close-cut hair and glasses informs me. “I recognize you from your picture.”