NYT book blog: Did Thomas Wolfe contract tuberculosis at his mother’s boarding house?

3 Comments

1. 

   JBo May 5, 2009

   Interesting –
   I’m currently in my first reading of Look Homeward Angel, exploring the description Asheville 100 years ago compared to today. I’m loving Wolfe’s rich writing style even with the fact that there are passages you have to plod through, which can at times make it a ‘slow’ read.

   I regretfully admit that I’ve yet to officially visit the inside of Old Kentucky Home despite being a 16 year long resident of Altamont – I mean Asheville. Surprisingly, none of my lit courses in high school or college covered Wolfe’s voice or the fact that he heavily influence the most important movement of literature in 20th century American. (Yet I remember talking about O. Henry on multiple occasions, and the fact that he was regional, despite living here a very brief amount of time before separating from his wife Sarah Coleman & relocating to NYC while he died of stomach cancer.) As soon as I get through my current section of Look Homeward Angel, I plan properly visit ole Dixieland.

   But while reading, I have noticed that Julia (Eliza) was often fool-hearted in money over mind matters, often putting her family at risk. That is partially what caused Tom’s older brother Grover to pass-on at an early age when Tom himself was still a young child; and probably contributed to the death of Grover’s twin – Ben – some many years later.

   I hadn’t considered that Thomas’ visit to the Asheville boarding house in 1937 was the cause of his death in 1938, but the dates link up and logically it does make sense. I wonder if Julia Wolfe ever pondered on the notion that her boarding house(s) may have contributed to the deaths of three of her very own sons, as she would often allow some very sickly people with money to board with her rather than send them on to the local sanitariums that were so popular at the time in the Montford & Chestnut Hill districts.
   It seems death was often a visitor at Dixieland. If Josh Warren wants to do another book on ghosts, spooks, and regional haunts – looking inside the Old Kentucky Home might be a good place to start.

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2. 

   Soni May 4, 2009

   The whole concept of life before the golden age of modern medicine is well beyond the understanding of most people, I think.

   I’m currently reading Steven Johnson’s "The Ghost Map" about one of London’s deadliest cholera outbreaks. In it, he makes the chilling point about how, before antibiotics and widespread public sanitation, everyone lived with the certain knowledge that each and every twinge of indigestion, flutter of upset stomach or hint of intestinal distress brought with it the possibility that you could very well be dead within 24 hours of cholera – for which there was, at the time, no understanding of how it spread nor any functional cure. And that was, as he also points out, in a time when pre-germ-theory food safety and production virtually guaranteed you’d be dyspeptic on an almost constant basis.

   It’s amazing how much stress that must have created in every day life, and how people managed to function anyway. I can’t even imagine how I could cope with that.

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3. 

   Asheville_Pubcrawler_in_Exile May 2, 2009

   Interesting.It’s long been my understanding that the house is where he most likely caught the disease. I believe the guides at the house and museum tell visitors this information. My high school teacher said it as well, back in the day. Of course, there’s no way to know for certain.where he became infected, but this is hardly a new theory.

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