Stinking drunk, Thomas Wolfe once got to experience the joys of Greenville’s jail

Here’s part of a great column at GreenvilleOnline.com regarding Asheville author Thomas Wolfe’s link to Greenville, S.C. Click the link to read the whole story:

It’s a slim and somewhat awkward link, admittedly, but it was celebrated last week when members of the International Thomas Wolfe Society held their annual meeting in Greenville. (Last year they met in Paris.) They did so in part because once, almost 90 years ago, Wolfe spent a memorable night in the Greenville County Jail.

In “Of Time and the River,” published in 1935, Wolfe fictionalized that experience. His alter ego, the character Eugene Gant, is jailed in Blackstone, S.C., for disorderly conduct brought on by a lethal combination of Scotch whisky and cheap moonshine.

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Autobiographical details make the time of the action October 1923, when Wolfe/Gant is home in Asheville/Altamont after three years (1920-1923) at a playwriting workshop at Harvard.

Gant, despondent because a play he has written has been rejected for production, suddenly decides to visit a sister living in a small town in South Carolina. He has only $3 in his pocket, so he decides take a “public car” to Blackstone where he will meet his brother, Luke (Fred Wolfe) at the Blackstone Hotel.

(“Public cars” were U.S. Post Office delivery vehicles driven by rural postmen over a specified route like that from Asheville to Greenville. They were cheap – it cost 25 cents to go from Marietta to Greenville — and convenient, with two round trips daily.)

When the postal car makes its first stop about 25 miles south of Altamont, Gant encounters three loudmouthed acquaintances bound for a football game in a fancy new roadster. They invite him to join them. He does; they pass around a half bottle of scotch, and when that is consumed, start working on a quart of white lightning.

By the time the young men, “careening heedlessly” down the winding mountain roads, reach the cotton fields and shabby shacks lining the road north of Blackstone, they are thoroughly soused. The weaving car terrorizes pedestrians and drivers alike, and the police have been alerted long before they get to downtown. There, six “beefy” policemen dressed in “gaudy but slovenly” uniforms line up across Main Street to stop the out-of-control roadster. Two officers jump in the car to escort the vehicle and its unsteady occupants to the county jail.