novel

NOVEL
Excerpt features house
ASHEVILLE, N.C. (AP) -- North Carolina author Thomas Wolfe had an enduring relationship -- call it love-hate -- with his boyhood home at 48 Spruce St. in downtown Asheville. Between 1906 and 1916, the young Wolfe lived in the house, which his mother Julia operated as the "Old Kentucky Home" boarding house. Wolfe featured the house as "Dixieland" in his novel "Look Homeward, Angel":
"It was situated five minutes from the public square, on a pleasant sloping middle-class street of small homes and boardinghouses. Dixieland was a big cheaply constructed frame house of eighteen or twenty drafty, high-ceilinged rooms: it had a rambling, unplanned, gabular appearance, and was painted a dirty yellow. It had a pleasant green front yard, not deep but wide, bordered by a row of young deep-bodied maples."
"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."
"As the house filled, in the summer season, and it was necessary to wait until the boarders had eaten before a place could be found for him, he walked sullenly about beneath the propped back porch of Dixieland, savagely exploring the dark cellar, or the two dank windowless rooms which Eliza rented, when she could, to negresses."
"At Dixieland, Eliza slept soundly in a small dark room with a window opening on the uncertain light of the back porch. Her chamber was festooned with a pendant wilderness of cord and string; stacks of old newspapers and magazines were piled in corners; and every shelf was loaded with gummed, labeled, half-filled medicine bottles. There was a smell in the air of mentholatum, Vick's Pneumonia Cure, and sweet glycerine."
"Daisy had been married in the month of June following Eliza's purchase of Dixieland: the wedding was arranged on a lavish scale and took place in the big dining-room of the house. Gant and his two older sons grinned sheepishly in their unaccustomed evening dress, the Pentlands, faithful in their attendance at weddings and funerals, sent gifts and came."
"'Ben's in that room upstairs,' Luke whispered, 'where the light is.' Eugene looked up with cold dry lips to the bleak front room upstairs, with its ugly Victorian bay-window. It was next to the sleeping porch where, but three weeks before, Ben had hurled into the darkness his savage curse at life. The light in the sick room burned grayly, bringing to him its grim vision of struggle and naked terror."
Source: Associated Press
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