Dixieland: A Fugue in Time

THE HOUSE, it seems, is more important than the characters. me you exist, says the house. For almost a hundred years, for ninety-nine years, it has enhanced, embraced and sheltered the family, but there is no doubt that it can go on without them. Well, the family might have retorted, we can go on without you. There should be no question of retorts, nor of acrimony. The house and family are at their best and most gracious together. --Rumer Godden (1) The house in British writer Rumer Godden's 1945 novel, Take Three Tenses: A Fugue in Time, using the present tense throughout to indicate past time, does much of the talking, or so it seems, just as Thomas Wolfe's Dixieland does much of the talking to those who visit its real-life model. When I first visited Dixieland, in 1961, Asheville seemed a sleepy southern town. The house itself seemed one among many in a neighborhood little different from what it had probably been a quarter century before: 1936 seemed real years from 1961, and not, as now, light years away. I was fifteen. Trains, running regularly, took people from my home in northern Wisconsin to Milwaukee, Chicago, and beyond. Buses offered adventure, and people more readily accepted the pain of riding in them. In some places, drive-ins and drugstores still served 15 [cents] malts. A pack of cigarettes cost under 20 [cents], a gallon of gas a little over that amount. Downtowns, even in small communities, were busily astir; outskirt shopping malls didn't much exist. The first book of Thomas Wolfe's I remember seeing was Of Time and the River. I was four or five years old; the print appeared dauntingly small to me, and there were no pictures, just these wavy lines on a stern-looking dust jacket. Every year I would pick up that book, and each time the print got bigger. I could make out a word here and there, and soon a sentence, usually in the dialogue of one character or another. After a time, I could make out what all the words said and, by 1960, I knew, or thought I knew, what the words meant. This Thomas Wolfe had, in a way, grown up with me; I didn't believe that people who were so alive on the page could actually be dead. New paperback editions of The Web and the Rock and You Can't Go Home Again made it seem he was still out there, writing, and I wanted to meet him. Buses were the main link from my somewhat remote home to the world beyond. For long journeys one didn't joyously hop onto one, as you might a slow chugging train that promised dashing speed once into the hinterland; one rather submitted to its slowly administered pains. Mercy for these pains was tendered only to the young, and, mercifully, I was young. On board I read, and smoked cigarettes, the while cheerfully soaking up discomfort and getting a well-earned sense of distance. Early in July 1961, very late at night, the last of several buses that I had successively boarded in my long southward plunge, delivered me, aching, to Asheville. Released from the moving torture device, I walked for hours about the quiet vicinity of the bus depot, then spent additional hours at the bus depot coffee shop, asking the locals about the town and, as if he were my one friend there, talking about Wolfe. Without friend or family to lean on, I was as much in wonderment over my bravery as in fear over my folly. The obsession to find Wolfe, however, kept me strong and from being, in a sense, homeless. The sun rose, and I eagerly walked outside, going further distances than earlier, sitting down here, then there. Asking one stranger, then another, I made my way to Dixieland, which was just opening its doors. Like a librarian, a tall, Junoesque woman with glasses and fading blond hair showed me in and had me sign a ledger. I think I put my name down on that ledger twice. Meekly reverent, I then looked about the premises and stepped about as if in a church, wondering even if I should take my shoes off, and wondering too if I were safe in this strange new environment. …

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