One of Maud's excellent guest bloggers, Carrie A.A. Frye, has dropped a line to alert us to a troika of interesting articles about the reopening of the Thomas Wolfe house. (We rather publicly admired her handling of the subject during her tenure at Maud's place.)
The pieces all come courtesy of MoutainX.com, and start with this chat with Henry Rollins who donated $10,000 to the rebuilding effort. Carrie's favorite bit, and mine:
"Look Homeward, Angel is a pretty mighty tome – it's a wounded-dog-sized book – and I guess it's a little intimidating," Rollins finally allows.
After a dose of Rollins, you can check out this article by Jeff Ashton, who worked on the restoration.
The great challenge of the Wolfe house restoration was to salvage and duplicate those frugal measures and sometimes shoddy workmanship. required examining each flaw (such as the unlevel rear-hall floor) or substandard piece of workmanship (such as a door bottom that had been radically trimmed to fit in an askew opening) to determine whether it stemmed from half-baked workmanship circa 1916 or merely from decades of neglect and normal wear.
After the fire, a fitted blue tarp placed on the home's roof was such a shocking shade of blue that airplane passengers flying over downtown could easily spot it. Restoring the roof to its current splendor involved scrutinizing pre-aerial photos with a magnifying glass, reviewing old tax records, researching the region of Pennsylvania where the original slate shingles came from – and installing them in the traditional manner.
But before we could even begin to address such complex issues, we had to tackle more pressing concerns. The heat and flames had compromised the entire roof and second floor ceiling, and a demolition contractor was hired to remove all framing, plaster and roofing materials from the second-floor ceiling up.
And last but not least, Carrie's own piece, a charming essay of "Wolfe-arcana" ...
• Wolfe's unwieldy manuscript was reined in by Scribner's famed editor, Maxwell Perkins. Perkins was an undisputedly brilliant editor, working with such literary lights as Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But many Wolfe fans feel Perkins did Look Homeward a disservice. Wolfe's intention for the book was to recreate a microcosmos of his universe (starting in the knot of his family, then rippling outward to the city, then still further outward to encompass the South). Under Perkins' direction, the novel became more of a traditional bildungsroman focusing on the coming of age of Eugene.
Thanks ever so much, Carrie! And now, back to our regularly scheduled mediocrity.
