The last time I moved, I discovered a box of books that I had pilfered from my father (I am invariably stealing his books without notice: I give no notice and he never takes notice). To my delight, inside there were books that had been in our family for generations. What tickled me the most was a 1940 copy of The Web and the Rock by Thomas Wolfe.
Thomas Wolfe is perhaps North Carolina’s most famous writer. William Faulkner thought him the greatest talent of their generation, which speaks volumes to his genius. Tuberculosis cut his life short, though, and we are left with an abbreviated literary legacy.
Faulkner was right to assess Wolfe as a genius, for in ways his gifts exceed the creator of Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner has a persisting element of artifice to him, creating the life of one locale within a very modernist narrative structure. One could say that is what makes works like The Sound & The Fury such inventive works. Wolfe, though, doesn’t have that jarring, existential quality to his prose. Wolfe is lyrical, almost like a classical bard. He has incredible powers of description, each detail named and set in its place in a whirled-up tableau. He has an innate sense of a long-winded story and launches into it with every ounce of his forceful personality.
That being said, you are very conscious that Wolfe is telling a story. There is no suspension of disbelief. You read Wolfe to get his effect, his description, his bardic truth, but not to dive into the story and emerge later having lived a different life. In Wolfe, you know how a room creaks, what perfume a certain kind of woman uses, over which mountain the evening breeze comes, but you rarely have the feeling that you were there experiencing the same.
Unless you are from “Old Catawba,” that is. Having grown up in Western North Carolina, I recognize instantly a sensation or a tendency that Wolfe describes as being characteristic of his people:
“We must have coolness, dankness, darkness; we need gladed green and gold and rock-bright running waters . . . We like dark shade, and cool, dark smells, and cool, dark, secret places . . . If we go out, we want to go out in green shade and gladed coolnesses, to lie down on our bellies underneath the maple trees and work our toes down into the thick green grass.”
I know exactly what he means and would never be able to describe much better myself. Equally so, I understand exactly what he means when he describes the character of the denizens of Western North Carolina:
“The people in the East used to think they were better than the people in the West because they had been there a little longer. But they were not really better. In the West, where the mountains sweep around them, the people have utterly common, familiar, plain, Scotch-Irish faces, and names like Weaver, Wilson, Gudger, Joyner, Alexander, and Patton. The West is really better than the East. They went to war in the West, and yet they didn’t want to go to war. They didn’t have anything to go to war about: they were a plain and common people and they had no slaves. And yet they will always go to war if Leaders tell them to — they are made to serve. They think long and earnestly, debatingly; they are conservative; they vote the right way, and they go to war when the big people tell them to. The West is really a region of good small people, a Scotch-Irish place, and that, too, is undefined, save that it doesn’t drawl so much, works harder, doesn’t loaf so much, and shoots a little straighter when it has to. It is really just one of the common places of the earth, a million or two people with nothing very extraordinary about them. . . . They are just common, plain, and homely — but almost everything of America is in them.”
This describes my father’s family on both his father and mother’s side. One side came from the mountains, an ever-evolving lot of backwoods settlers, farmers, circuit preachers, Congressmen, bankers, lawyers, and businessmen. The other side came from the western Piedmont, small farmers and store clerks who eventually moved to the big city. Despite the differences brought by distance, especially once one ascends the grade at Old Fort (where my ancestors built their frontier fort), there is remarkable similarity in character between these two branches. One ended up a little higher up the social ladder, the other remained plain folk, but they were still close enough in temperament for Wolfe’s description to touch precisely the glue that held such a people together.
Remarkably, too, is that these plain people could be readers of men such as Wolfe. Inscribed inside the cover of this particular book is the name of my great-great grandmother, who was from Davie County and certainly did not possess a college education. Nonetheless, Bessie was literate enough to have such a book in her library and eventually pass it down to her grandson.
This commonality is one reason why I chose the place I did to set my book Victory Ruins. Because while there are certainly differences between a wheat and corn farmer on the banks of the Catawba and a one-mule backwoodsman of deep Haywood County, the basic similarities are there. Their instincts are the same, their habits almost identical. What differences there are merely add a welcome flavor of individuality. Understanding this personally, I could choose where to set my book as I wished. And I chose Catawba County (or rather it chose me, almost by accident) because its history is a microcosm of those Western and Piedmont plain folk, and a microcosm of the South, and of the whole progress of America to this day. I had much to learn, but I had much that came naturally simply because I knew it without ever having opened a book.
I cannot say that Victory Ruins will be anything like The Web and The Rock. But I can say it will be of the same people, only ones who lived out different lives than Wolfe’s autobiograhical characters. But I hope that between the two, you will be able to see what we know of our own people, a people that hoped their state might be like in the toast, a place “where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great.”