by Stephen Kirk
As should a man with three well-received novels and a pair of midlevel awards to his credit, Charles begins by contacting agents in the hope of making a sale to a national publisher. But like me, he’s not as persistent as he ought to be. One agent tells him he’s “clearly a wonderful writer” who is “fully deserving of representation and a larger potential readership,” then declines to take him on as a client because of the difficulty in getting publishers to accept “a writer such as yourself.”
What kind of writer would that be, exactly? He’s understandably discouraged by such mixed messages.
Charles submits the manuscript directly to an editor at one noted house, only to receive a faux-personal reply saying it has been read “with care and interest”—though his package appears not to have been opened at all—and that it is being rejected because “we are a small publishing company and we have to limit our list to only a few new titles each year.” Charles fires off a reply mimicking the letter line by line, describing himself as “a small author” who must limit himself to a few rejections per annum. It’s funny and probably justified. It’s his way of saying good-bye to commercial concerns, to the whole set of conditions that combine to turn aside good work.
The novel finally finds a home with a new, small publisher in the mountains. The staff there is thrilled to have Charles and promises to involve him in every phase of the process. As a gesture of their developing relationship, the publisher even presents him a three-foot chainsaw-carved figure of a bear.
A couple of times, I try to draw him out on the subject of Charles Frazier.
Feelings in the mountains toward Frazier are complex. When someone like Robert Morgan scores an Oprah-sized coup, it’s acknowledged that he’s gotten lucky, of course, but the consensus is that he’s fought the noble fight over a long career and that his good fortune is to be celebrated. But Frazier’s success has so far exceeded everyone else’s, and it’s come by such a different path, that there’s no agreement on what to make of him. He’s a man whose manuscript likely would have mildewed in a basement if his wife hadn’t taken part of it without his knowledge and shown it to her friend Kaye Gibbons, who in turn recommended it to her agent. He’s also a man whose one-page outline for a second novel, based on the life of white Indian Will Thomas—a well-known figure in the mountains whose story anyone might have fictionalized—brought him an eight-million-dollar book deal and another three million for movie rights.
Those who’ve met Frazier or heard him speak seem to like him. But there’s also a great deal of jealousy. I know one author who disparages him rather bitterly as “Dr. Frazier” and feels his fame is wholly due to advantages not enjoyed by working writers. I know another who swears irrationally that Frazier stole his stuff in writing Cold Mountain, even though Frazier was solidly within his rights in his use of historical material.
Charles Price would figure to have as much cause as anyone to resent Frazier. They write of the same people in the same locales during the same time frame. They write the same long paragraphs in the same carefully crafted period language.
But Charles Price won’t take the bait when I offer it to him. In fact, when he learns I’m interested in Frazier, he tries to put me in touch via a friend who supposedly knows Frazier’s address. Though it comes to nothing, I appreciate the effort. And Cold Mountain appears prominently on the reading list Charles Price gives to the people who come to his seminars.
Coincidentally, the release of the Cold Mountain movie is only a month or two away when I enter the bookstore that’s hosting the publication party for Charles Price’s fourth novel. Cold Mountain won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award two years before Freedom’s Altar did.
Coming to the big screen simultaneously with Cold Mountain is the Tim Burton movie Big Fish, adapted from the novel of the same name by North Carolinian Daniel Wallace. That novel was a nominee for the Sir Walter the year Freedom’s Altar won.
In a way, I regret that the movies are raining gold all around Charles Price while he collects pennies. But that denies that good writing is a sufficient end unto itself, the very point I’ve argued to him on several occasions.
I intend to talk with Charles after his presentation and maybe even join him for a bite to eat, but I understand that won’t be possible when I see the crush of people. Forty or more of them have come out tonight to pack the small store, and they seem to be familiar with Charles’s whole body of writing. Everyone bypasses the free food and drink to get a good seat for the reading.
Since I spoke with her, Sharyn McCrumb has written a couple more of her Ballad novels.
In The Songcatcher, she uses her own family history to further some of her favorite themes. It centers around a country singer trying to recollect a song she heard years ago. While traveling home to the Appalachians to be with her dying father, she’s trapped inside her small plane when it crashes. Those chapters are alternated with the story of her—and Sharyn’s—eighteenth-century ancestor as he makes his way from a Scottish isle to the mountains of western North Carolina. Having learned the song aboard ship, he passes it to his descendants, who in turn teach it to succeeding generations.
But just when you think you know Sharyn well enough to map out the rest of her career, she comes up with the concept for her new novel, to be called St. Dale, which will give a nod to The Canterbury Tales in following a group of bus-touring NASCAR fans on their pilgrimage to Dale Earnhardt sites.
Fred Chappell has written a couple of new poetry volumes and retired from his teaching job.
Robert Morgan is still quietly adding quality work to the literature, having published a volume of poetry and a pair of novels, the latter of which, Brave Enemies, tells of the circumstances that lead a young couple to end up on opposite sides at the Revolutionary War battle at Cowpens, the woman disguised as a boy.
Gail Godwin continues to stretch herself, writing her first nonfiction work, Heart: A Personal Journey Through Its Myths and Meanings, and the elegant autobiographical novella Evenings at Five, inspired by the passing of her longtime companion, composer Robert Starer.
I still receive automated e-mail updates from Ann B. Ross and Joan Medlicott, whose Miss Julia and Covington series, respectively, proceed apace. At last word, Miss Julia was trying to decide whether to accept her suitor’s marriage proposal, while the Covington ladies were departing the mountains to take a cruise in the Caribbean, their creator’s native territory.
And though he’s not the biggest name among Asheville-area authors, I’m impressed with the progress of Bill Brooks’s career. Bill took on a staggering workload, beginning a new series of genre Westerns and a series of bad-guy literary novels simultaneously, and he’s delivered well on both fronts. His latest in the latter series, Bonnie and Clyde: A Love Story, is perhaps his best work. For Bill, writing is a learned craft first and a God-given talent second, and his novels are evidence that even a veteran author can make great strides in his skills.
CHAPTER 12
Unfinished Business
I tell my daughters how important it is that they look out for each other, how they’ll go much farther as allies than enemies.
I tell them to be sure to take care of their mother.
When it’s their time, they should choose boys who care about them and have a future. Character and intelligence are more important than style and looks.
I tell my daughters that, all our petty squabbles notwithstanding, they’ve never disappointed me.
I tell them they should never doubt their ability, and that all possibilities are open to them depending on their willingness to work.
I’ve cornered them at bedtime, so they’re groggy and a little slow on the uptake. But they’re bright kids, and I can see the recognition begin to hit them. If I’ve got such great advice, they’re thinking, then why haven’t I followed it to success and happiness myself?
“You’re just taking a plane ride, Dad,” one of them says.
But the next afternoon at the Asheville air
port, it appears my vision of an early death may not be far-fetched.
First, Mike, my pilot, can’t get his door open. I see him through the windows from where I’m stooped under the wing on the passenger side. He rattles the handle, then starts pulling on it hard. Mike’s a big, strong guy, and the whole plane shakes slightly. It’s thirty or forty seconds before the latch finally gives.
And then another light plane—identical to the one we’ll be flying—taxis into the spot just beyond us. Mike leaves off his preflight check and looks on quizzically as the other pilot shuts down, gets out, and approaches with his flight student in tow.
“A screw from the engine cowling came flying off on takeoff,” he informs Mike. “I had to bring us back in.”
And then, when we’re at the end of the taxiway ready to be cleared for takeoff, we’re told to wait while a maintenance vehicle examines the runway for the lost engine-cowling screw. We look left and, sure enough, a pickup truck speeds down the runway with its lights flashing. It must be doing fifty, way too fast to spot an object as small as a screw—which indeed it doesn’t.
“Something like that could pop a tire on landing,” Mike says matter-of-factly.
While we’re waiting, he mentions that the turbulence can get pretty strong close to the mountains.
“Try to give me a little notice if you feel you’re going to be sick,” he says.
A friendship between two of the most unlikely writers in the South began in 1948, when Harry Golden was among a small group of reporters who came to Connemara to interview seventy-year-old Carl Sandburg and then escort him to a speech.
When he later returned to Connemara for a private interview, Golden was nervous, not wanting to present himself as the kind of newspaperman who asked mundane questions about how Sandburg enjoyed living in North Carolina and about what he was presently writing. To break the ice, he presented a bottle of whiskey as a gift. Sandburg was so delighted that it thereafter became a tradition for guests to bring him whiskey—and for Sandburg to make a show of having glasses carried in, which he filled not with the whiskey but with goat’s milk from his wife’s herd. He got a laugh at people’s reactions. Most of them bravely drank.
Harry Golden stayed a full eight hours at Connemara that day. Sandburg kissed him on both cheeks when he left.
The Ukrainian-born, New York-raised Golden had moved to North Carolina in 1941 and soon thereafter started a conventional small newspaper in Charlotte. Unhappy with his efforts after a couple of years, he decided to remake that paper, the Carolina Israelite, in the form of a personal journal. Save for the section of letters to the editor, he wrote the whole thing himself, fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand words a month. It contained no news; the only obituary he ran, Golden liked to tell people, treated the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. Rather, each issue was a collection of editorials covering everything from Jewish culture to New York politics to Southern attitudes to ancient civilizations. These drew on Golden’s massive reading in history, literature, and philosophy, but all his writing was off the top of his head, as he never left his chair to consult any other person’s work or any reference book. He wrote on random subjects as the spirit took him and pitched his finished pages into a barrel, from which he would draw a selection when it came press time.
This may sound like an amateurish way to run a paper, but that underestimates Golden’s intelligence, wit, and writing skills. Among his fourteen thousand subscribers nationwide were a good many influential people. Golden once attended a session of the House Un-American Activities Committee and was dismayed—and maybe secretly proud—to note that all eight witnesses called were Israelite subscribers. His editorial outlining the “Golden Vertical Negro Plan” is a classic humorous antisegregation piece. Indeed, Martin Luther King identified Golden as one of four white journalists whose work played a significant role in the civil-rights movement.
Golden was rotund and liked fat cigars. The rail-thin Carl Sandburg was so frugal that he cut his thin stogies in half and smoked them so low that it looked like his lips were smoldering. Other than that, the bleeding-heart Jew and the battle-toughened old socialist had a great deal in common.
Mike takes us around Connemara in a low circle—clockwise, so my side is banked low and I have the better view. The place is beautiful in springtime, from the dammed lake at the base of the property to the front porch where Sandburg and Golden met. Beyond the main structure is the steep-roofed “Swedish House,” to which Sandburg exiled the books that overflowed his six-thousand-square-foot home. Some distance beyond that is the goat barn. I can’t see the mountain trails the two friends walked during Golden’s frequent visits, when Sandburg would leave the man twenty-four years his junior puffing in his wake.
In 1958, Golden put together a book of his editorials culled from the Israelite. In acknowledgment of the run of success by which a transplanted Jew had become the best-known man in his corner of the South, he called it Only in America. Sandburg wrote the foreword. Books of warmed-over newspaper columns almost always sell poorly, but Golden’s became a number-one bestseller. Even today, decades after it should be badly outdated, its insightful snippets of culture, history, and local color still make it one of the all-time-great bathroom reads.
And then the roof fell in—or should have. Someone sent an anonymous letter to his New York publisher asking, “Do you know that your author … is a swindler, a cheat, and an ex-con and jail bird who has victimized widows and orphans?”
It was true. The man known as Harry Golden was Herschele Lewis Goldhirsch, who had started a New York brokerage in the mid-1920s and declared bankruptcy within a few years, at which time he was unable to return his clients’ investments following unsuccessful market speculation. He pled guilty to mail fraud and stock manipulation and spent three years in prison—where he began to develop his journalistic skills editing the jailhouse rag.
It’s unclear how far Golden discussed this with Sandburg, who’d done some jail time himself when he was caught hopping a train in his hoboing days. Sandburg most likely would have ascribed Golden’s offense to youthful indiscretion.
In any case, Golden again defeated the odds by parlaying the scandal into greater fame.
Though Sandburg is credited with coining the phrase idiot box, he and his guitar had been television favorites since the mid-1950s. Many consider Sandburg to have had the largest public persona of any American author save Mark Twain. Harry Golden didn’t have a passable singing voice and a repertoire of one-chord songs like his mentor, but he, too, became a TV figure, appearing regularly with Jack Paar on The Tonight Show.
In 1961, Golden published a biography of Sandburg. The same editorialist’s sensibility that made the Carolina Israelite and Only in America such successes doomed the biography to mediocrity. Partly a chronological account of Sandburg’s life, partly a generous overview of his poetry, the book is mainly a grab bag of disconnected anecdotes. Its usefulness is only as a supplement to serious works on Sandburg. Golden would have been wise to leave his chair long enough to do some hard research with a view toward organizing a continuous work.
Not far east of us is Tryon, where F. Scott Fitzgerald came to dry out at least a couple of times between 1935 and 1937. Local people will tell you he stayed at the Pine Crest Inn, though some written sources say it was the Oak Hall Hotel, no longer in business.
“Shall we head over in that direction?” Mike asks. “It’s only a few minutes.”
Sensitive to running over my hour’s time and incurring costs I can’t afford, I decline.
Mike may sense this pressure on me. He points to a large, grand structure on a hill some distance away. “Could that be it?”
Probably not. The Pine Crest is green with a white roof, and the main inn isn’t particularly large, most of the guest rooms being in the eight or so cottages scattered around the property. Though there’s a Fitzgerald Room in one of the other cottages, Fitzgerald is believed to have stayed in the 1760s-vintage Swayba
ck Cottage. It may have been there that Thomas Wolfe visited him on his return to the Asheville area in 1937. Ernest Hemingway is said to have stayed in the Sway-back, too, perhaps having come for the same reason as Fitzgerald. That visit is even harder to pin down.
For such a pretty place, the Tryon area has drawn notable writers for all the wrong reasons. Just a few miles farther east is the home where Georgia poet Sidney Lanier came to die in 1881 at the age of thirty-nine, of the tuberculosis that had dogged him since he contracted it in a prison camp during the Civil War.
Instead of heading east from Connemara, we make the momentary jog west to Hendersonville.
In November 1935, Fitzgerald came to Hendersonville and took a room at the Skyland Hotel. “It was funny,” he wrote, “coming into the hotel and the very deferential clerk not knowing that I was not only thousands, nay tens of thousands in debt, but had less than 40 cents cash in the world and probably a $13 deficit at my bank.” He washed his own laundry and subsisted on canned food.
It was at the Skyland that winter that he wrote his “Crack-Up” series of articles. The three confessional pieces, published in Esquire in early 1936, detailed his emotional emptiness and the downward spiral of his creative powers. Though they were the best writing of his later years, his public admission that he was a broken man only served to further damage his reputation.
The hotel building still stands on Main Street, though it has been converted to other uses.
Mike comes low and circles over Hendersonville’s Oakdale Cemetery and the famous Wolfe Angel—a marble angel from the monument shop of Thomas Wolfe’s father, said to be the inspiration for the central image in Look Homeward, Angel I knew of its existence but had forgotten all about it until Mike reminded me.