Thomas Wolfe and Asheville: A Study in Changing Attitudes: Part III: Time and Change: Asheville Attitudes Today

Side view of Wolfe portrait by Nat Werner 4 Thomas Wolfe and Ashevílle: A Study in Changing Attitudes Part III: Time and Change: Asheville Attitudes Today By BETTY LYNCH WILLIAMS If Thomas Wolfe should say today, as he did to Robert Raynolds in 1933, "They talk . . . What are they saying? Good God! What are they saying now?" he could learn of many things in Asheville that would please him.10·1 He would find his "fair Medusa, Fame," here.106 "In the end I had to have her," he said,107 "and all her shifting images, and all the guises of her loveliness, phantasmal, ghostwise, like' something flitting in a wood, I had dreamed of since my early youth — until her image and the image of the loved one had a thousand times been merged together. Now I had her, as she may be had . . ."108 He added, "Fame, like Love, was not enough." But I think that he would find that it is, perhaps, enough. He would find friends like Mrs. Charles Dameron who proudly said, "Thomas Wolfe sat there, in that same chair. We loved him." 109 And he would hear William J. Cocke, who is freely described in the Thomas Wolfe novels along with other members of his family, saying, "Yes, Thomas Wolfe was my friend. He had 'diggs' just outside of Oxford in 1926, near the scholar's suites where I lived in London. He is one of Asheville 's most distinguished citizens. He is, in my opinion, the foremost American writer of all time."110 Not many months ago he would have heard Miss Marjorie Pearson reminisce about the time Tom had held a group of her friends spellbound for three hours in a glittering discussion of Germany on the front porch of Richmond Hill, her home overlooking the French Broad river. "He was an humble, almost apologetic, erudite man, of great knowledge, a genius. His books will always live, his style, his use of words . . . tremendous."111 And then he would have heard her read a bit to me from a letter she received from him, "and I know that no matter how many Asheville people may not like my book, it had not failed in its purpose and weaving as long as it has one such friend as you."112 And with trembling voice, shaken by memories, she would have read a few Wolfian words more, as he tells her of walking as a child with his father along the river bank and looking up at her house, "for after so much water has flowed under the French Broad bridge since the child and his father stood there, and after I have put so many days and months and years and thousands of miles of wandering between that time and this, I come to know one of the people in that house through my book."113 And if Tom were listening now, he would hear a friend he used to date say, "He seemed to me to be an uncomplicated man who found humour and pleasure in simple things. The last time I saw him was just a few days before his last trip west. He came in out of the pouring rain wearing a too short trench coat. "I got this thing at Macy's,' he said 'Bought it with money I got for a piece I wrote for the Yale Review.' and then he laughed heartily. Somehow the Harvard-Yale-Macy sequence did seem hilarious and I laughed, too! I enjoyed his writings tremendously."114 5 Tom would especially be proud to hear Lola Love McCoy, who wrote the first Asheville review of Look Homeward, Angel, say years later, "He loved beauty and presented it with vigor and sensitivity in prose writing. It will last. The gossip has filtered through another generation and has disappeared. Asheville now has an overt feeling of pride in Thomas Wolfe."115 Tom would realize that "Fame" was his if he could only be here long enough to know that his close friend and fellow writer, the man who first wrote that Wolfe had "spat upon the South," has since written a beautiful tribute to...