Wolfe picked up his suitcases and began his trek up Vermont Avenue (there were no early-morning taxis in Southern Pines in the late '30s) to the entrance of the Boyd estate, the gate's sculpted foxhounds beckoning into the pine-dark obscurity beyond.
James and Katharine Boyd and their children were asleep at that hour, so after passing by the Boyds' kennels and stables, Wolfe mounted the veranda and rather than knocking on the door, discovered an unlocked window, eased it open, and climbed into the Boyds' great room where he fell asleep on a sofa.
"I came down to breakfast one morning and Thomas Wolfe was asleep on the couch," James Boyd Jr. recalled in a 1998 interview. "There was this disheveled creature lying on the sofa. 'Who are you?' I asked him. 'Don't you talk to me like that!' Wolfe replied. Later, Wolfe read my father and me some of his writing, and I must have been a real SOB because I said that it was too wordy. Wolfe got angry. 'What do you mean, too wordy?' Wolfe was uncouth, but he was funny."
It had been a long, exhausting journey for Wolfe — not so much the rail trip from New Orleans to Atlanta and then into North Carolina, the fallow fields of the Sandhills stretching dimly into the January darkness — but his precipitous rise from Asheville's precocious son to world-class novelist.
His epic first novel, "Look Homeward, Angel," was eight years in the past, and his second novel, "Of Time and the River," lingered still on the bestseller list. Thomas Wolfe was an international literary celebrity.
He'd come to Southern Pines to visit with his friend and literary colleague, novelist James Boyd. They'd met eight years before through their editor Maxwell Perkins, the literary nurturer of Hemingway, Anderson, Boyd, Fitzgerald and Wolfe.
Boyd had endeared himself to Wolfe early on by writing to Perkins that Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel" was "a great inchoate bellow of the human soul" and stating emphatically he had an uneasy feeling that "the little fellows had better move over for this bird…. And on personal grounds there's no writer I'd rather move over or down for myself."
Perkins, always anxious to share good news, passed along the letter to Wolfe, who was as hypersensitive to praise as he was to criticism. Shortly thereafter, Wolfe and Boyd dined together in New York, and Wolfe wrote to a friend that he thought Boyd "a fine fellow."
Friendship Blooms
In December 1929, Wolfe applied for a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and Boyd wrote a letter of recommendation, describing Wolfe as having "the temperament from which great writers are made." When Boyd's "Long Hunt" was published in 1930, Wolfe returned the compliment by writing to Boyd that "There was not a poor line or a shoddy page in it…."
Happenstance further strengthened their friendships when Wolfe entered the Guaranty Trust Co. in Paris in June 1930 and ran into Boyd.
"I was so happy and surprised I could not speak for a moment," Wolfe wrote Perkins. The two writers spent a day together, dining at a café on the banks of the Seine while "Mrs. Boyd shopped around town."
In 1934, Boyd wrote Wolfe in New York to say that Wolfe's story, "The Sun and the Rain," which appeared in Scribner's Magazine, was "near perfect."
"I don't think that there is any other writing man whose good opinion would mean so much to me," Wolfe hastened to respond, "and your letter gives me hope that I may finally be learning something about my job." Wolfe and Boyd had visited that spring in New York and Wolfe wished in his letter that they could "get together again in those Atlantean chairs at the Plaza…."
In responding effusively to Boyd's letter, Wolfe was keenly aware that Boyd was no literary novice. Boyd's first novel, "Drums," had outsold both Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's early efforts.
Exchange of Letters
These expressions of mutual admiration continued when the two authors exchanged letters concerning Wolfe's publication, "Of Time and the River," and the Scribner's Magazine's serialization of Boyd's novel, "Roll River." Wolfe was especially buoyant:
"Your letter, and a few others, fill me with such a sense of joy and confidence and power that I'll swear to you that I'm going to hit this next book like a locomotive…."
Wolfe's solicitous opinion of Boyd's talents as a novelist was sincere. When a reviewer for the Saturday Review compared “Of Time and River” with Boyd’s “Roll River,” Wolfe wrote to a friend: "I think the author of the book in question, which was 'Roll River' by James Boyd, is certainly a very fine artist, and the book a very fine book."
His friendship with Boyd and his respect for Boyd's writing were out of character for Wolfe. He had few friends in the literary world. He kept up an acquaintance with Fitzgerald, who had visited with Boyd in June 1935, out of respect for Maxwell Perkins. He held Thornton Wilder in contempt. He never met Steinbeck or Conrad Aiken, and Wolfe spoke with Hemingway on only one occasion.
In the fall of 1936, Wolfe met Faulkner, but other than their proclivity for depicting Gothic and oddly contradictory visions of a fictional South, the two had little in common.
Dos Passos spent only one evening with Wolfe, whom he described as a "gigantic baby." And Anderson and Wolfe were, on nonliterary grounds, determined enemies. So the Wolfe-Boyd literary friendship was an anomaly.
How often Wolfe and Boyd visited in New York is difficult to establish. Boyd was plagued by sinus infections, and he consulted frequently with specialists in New York. Otherwise, their paths rarely crossed, and they didn’t correspond on a regular basis. There's no evidence Wolfe visited with the Boyds in Southern Pines on more than one occasion.
Visit to Weymouth
But there's no doubt as to the date of Wolfe's visit. On Jan. 21, 1937, Boyd wrote to Maxwell Perkins:
"Tom Wolfe just left last night after a 3-day visit. He arrived Mon. (at 4.47 a.m.) totally whipped down by New Orleans & Atlanta cheer & in his state was disposed to take the roles of Prometheus Bound &, having refreshed himself, Ajax defying the Literary Agents. But after two long sleeps the Great Bear emerged ruddy & benign & altogether in the best form I've seen him in. He plans only a brief stop in Chapel Hill & Warrenton & will I hope get back to N.Y. in fine shape…."
In one paragraph, Boyd provides the literary voyeur an uncurtained window on a pivotal moment in 20th century American literary history.
During January 1937, Wolfe was in the process of severing his relationship with Maxwell Perkins and Charles Scribner's Sons, the editor and publishing house that had made him famous.
It was Perkins who'd taken a chance on Wolfe's first novel, "Look Homeward, Angel." More importantly, he had edited Wolfe's gigantic, chaotic manuscripts down to publishable size, a task of Herculean proportions.
If Wolfe was short-tempered and given to fits of paranoia and jealously, he was also a wellspring of sense experience and a writer who was acutely attuned to the subtler ironies of life. Written words poured from him in torrents, and his ego, much inflated by the success of his first and second novels — "Of Time and the River" was published to much acclaim in 1935 — was no doubt difficult to suffer.
In alluding to "Prometheus Bound," Boyd was probably stating the obvious to Perkins — that Wolfe was on an egotistical tear. Wolfe had subtitled sections of "Of Time and the River" using classical and historical allusions. Boyd was poking gentle fun at Wolfe's literary pretensions.
There was also a degree of truth in Boyd's use of Greek mythology. Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and gave it to the mortals in their dark caves, and when Zeus discovered the treachery, he had Prometheus chained to a cliff to be tormented by eagles that tore at his immortal flesh.
The allusion is concise and unambiguous — and a trifle overstated: Wolfe is Prometheus whose flesh is being torn by the critics; Perkins is Zeus.
As for "Ajax Defying the Literary Agents," Wolfe's European royalties for "Look Homeward, Angel" had been embezzled by his first literary agent, Madeleine Boyd (no relation to James Boyd). When he finally found an honest agent, Elizabeth Nowell, Wolfe remained suspicious of the profession.
Complaints
Moreover, Perkins had become the singular object of Wolfe's scorn. On Jan. 10, eight days before his early-morning arrival in Southern Pines, Wolfe had posted a lengthy letter to Perkins detailing his real and imagined grievances against his editor and Scribner's Sons. Since Perkins was also Boyd's editor, it's likely that the complaints enumerated in the letter found their way into the conversation between Wolfe and Boyd during those three days in January. It's also possible that Boyd, always the good citizen, believed he'd had a moderating influence on Wolfe: "…after two long sleeps the Great Bear emerged ruddy & benign…."
The news conveyed in Boyd's Jan. 21 letter doesn't end with Wolfe's departure for Chapel Hill. He writes on:
"Sherwood Anderson & his wife spent a few days last week and Paul Green was down not long before, so I've been too busy to think or even work, but Sun. I take Kate to Nassau to escape the 10 week rainy season that has plagued her. I hope to get busy down there, there being for me no temptation to have a good time in a place where people go for that purpose…."
Wolfe's sojourn in Southern Pines did not go completely unnoticed by the community. The Jan. 29 issue of The Pilot reported briefly in "This Week in Southern Pines":
"Thomas Wolfe of New York is the guest of Mr. and Mrs. James Boyd for a few days at their home in Weymouth Heights." (And with a sweet touch of serendipity the same issue notes that 11-year-old Tom Wicker of Hamlet, who would become a New York Times columnist and the author of many novels, "was the weekend guest of his grandmother, Mrs. Mary C. Cameron.")
On Feb. 1, 1937, Wolfe wrote to Garland Porter, an old college friend:
"I stayed three or four days with Jim Boyd after leaving Atlanta and had a grand time there. They are fine people. They have a beautiful place right in the pine woods. I can't tell you how good it was to be back in my own home state and just to get my number fourteens [Wolfe's shoe size] down on North Carolina clay."
Careers on Wane
What both writers didn't know at the time of Wolfe's visit to Southern Pines was that their writing careers were on the wane.
Boyd's historical novels had fallen out of favor with the reading public. After "The Long Hunt," his novels sold fewer copies, and in late '39, Boyd sank into a deep depression. Katharine Boyd wrote to Perkins enlisting his aid in lifting her husband's spirits, but to no avail.
In 1940, Boyd organized the Free Company of Players, a group of American writers that produced original radio plays in response to antidemocratic attitudes prevalent in America due to the war in Europe.
Wolfe left his editor, Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's, and signed with Edward Aswell at Harper & Brothers, but his next novel, "The Web and the Rock," did not see publication during Wolfe's lifetime.
In 1938, Wolfe set out on a trip across the United States and fell ill in Seattle. His condition steadily worsened and Wolfe was transported by train to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore to undergo exploratory surgery on his cranium. His condition was diagnosed as inoperable tuberculosis of the brain.
Thomas Wolfe died on Sept. 15, 1938. He was 38 years old. His abundant manuscripts continue to be posthumously edited into collections of short stories and novels, and he's now recognized as one of the great American writers of the 20th century.
James Boyd survived Wolfe by six years. He died of a heart attack in February 1944 while on a visit to his alma mater, Princeton University. His historical novels are long forgotten, but his literacy legacy lives on in the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities.
During Boyd's lifetime, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Maxwell Perkins, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, James Galsworthy, Paul Green and many other writers and literary figures visited with the Boyds at their home on the corner of Vermont and Connecticut, inspiring journalist Jonathan Daniels' claim that the Boyds and their Southern Pines estate had served as "a springboard for the Southern literary renaissance."
Stephen Smith can be reached at travisses@hotmail.com.
