Asheville Day 3: Thomas Wolfe's House

...a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

• Thomas Wolfe, 1929 Look Homeward, Angel

As you may remember from part I of this series, Chris was supposed to contact the recruiter from Mission Hospital in Asheville. She had contacted him to let him know that his application for a position within their organization had been passed up to the hiring committee. So he called on Tuesday and set up a 9am meeting with her for Thursday morning.

Thursday morning dawned and we headed out to find Mission Hospital. It has a really good reputation and it's Asheville--we'd both love to live there. We were seriously early so we walked around a bit and then I settled down to text Whimsy and he headed in to his meeting.

The recruiter was apparently very nice, but kept insisting that Chris needed a nursing degree and at least 1 YEAR of nursing experience if he wanted any administrative job. Please believe me when I tell you that this IS INSANE. He has a MASTERS degree in Healthcare Administration--administrative work in hospitals is what he's MADE for. UNC has the #3 program in the ENTIRE NATION. Graduates routinely get jobs doing exactly what he's applied for, and let me tell you that MOST of them do NOT come from a background in nursing.

Chris is convinced that she really has no clue what a Masters in Healthcare Administration even IS, much less what he's qualified to DO. They promote people with nursing experience because that's what they've ALWAYS done, not necessarily because it's what's best.

I was BEYOND MAD. Firstly, this is precisely what I HATE about the South. This reluctance for change of any kind, even change for the better. Second, she informed Chris that they had hired the interum person who had been doing the job he applied for--which, if that's the case, then WHY, WHY bother calling other people and telling them that you've passed their materials on to the hiring committee? And while we're asking obvious questions, how hard is it to GOOGLE UNC School of Public Health MHA? You can see at a glance the degree requirements and even sample syllabi to find out what kind of course work they do. GAH!!!

I ranted A LOT on the way home. I'm still a bit FLOORED that they want him to have a background in nursing for ADMINISTRATIVE/LEADERSHIP work. I think nurses do important work, I'm grateful for them, but that doesn't mean that they know how to make a hospital viable.

Anyway. I have ascended my soap box.

Whimsy introduced me to Thomas Wolfe years ago when I lived in Seattle. She had read some of his Look Homeward, Angel to me and it made my eyes go all soft and out of focus. I started it, but then I also started grad school and well, one thing pushes out another. I spent three years reading my way through the 19th century and then when I finished I didn't quite know what to do with myself so I just sort of kept on reading my way through the 19th century. I've always studied the Europeans and just never quite made my way over to America.

Let me tell you, after seeing his house and hearing about him, I just might make that jump.

He wasn't born here. He was born just down the block, but when he was six his mother moved here (it was her boarding house, she owned and operated it) with him in tow. He had no room of his own, he was regularly shuffled around the house and around the paying guests, who for all their respectability were still only strangers.

He lived here until the age of 16 when he went off to university at UNC-Chapel Hill. When he eventually turned to writing "fiction" he wrote of this place, Old Kentucky Home, and the people he met here. Look Homeward, Angel immortalizes the house and its inhabitants but also the entire city of Asheville and many of it's locals.

The house has never been privately owned, it stayed in the Wolfe family and was eventually sold to the city of Asheville and set up as a historic site, so all of the furnishing are original. Let me tell you, it was amazing!

This is one of the sun porches immortalized in the book. He stayed in this room the summer he was 16 and became enamored of the young, beautiful girl staying in the room next door. The light is amazing, I couldn't stop wondering what Asheville must have looked like from those windows in the early 20th century.

Part of the problem with Thomas Wolfe is that he wrote the story of his life as "fiction" but he made no effort whatsoever to disguise any of the characters, so the good people of Asheville read the book and were completely offended at having their dirty laundry aired in such fashion. It was so bad that he couldn't return to Asheville for 7 years after the publication of his novel. He received death threats, people, and nasty ones. He actually wrote to one of his brother's to inquire if it was safe to return.

He was partly raised by his older brother. Knowing how displaced he felt by living in the boarding house, he would come and take little Thomas out on outings around town--just get him out of the chaos of the house in general.

He contracted Spanish Influenza and Thomas was sent for from university. He took the train and the whole way home he kept thinking "It can't be that bad, he's so young." Thomas arrived home (to this room) to watch his beloved brother pass away. It became one of the formative tragedies of his youth.

So then what happened? What happens to us all. He grew up. He went to Harvard to study playwriting, only to learn that he was awful at it. He seduced an older woman who urged him to write fiction. She did more than urge, she supported him financially so that he could write. And what did he write? He wrote Look Homeward, Angel. At a time when Hemingway and Fitzgerald were kings, Thomas Wolfe ascended the ranks. And how, you might ask?

By looking homeward.