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Just a couple of miles down-town from the Biltmore's regal gate is the Old Kentucky Home, a comparatively spartan 29-room boardinghouse that provided early shelter to a wanderer of more plebeian proportions, star-crossed novelist Thomas Wolfe.
Recently my wife, Donna, and I (tourists of more mundane dimension than either Vanderbilt or Wolfe) visited Asheville on a mission of rediscovery that touched the two historic residences both physically and symbolically.
Donna spent her girlhood fewer than 50 miles from here in a house that probably would have fit comfortably into one of Vanderbilt's kitchens. But much of her actual growing up occurred right here, after she had decamped to an Asheville business college at age 18. This hilly municipality she found both a wondrous and a financially forbidding place.
She began her life-away-from-home in an Asheville dormitory as impersonally bleak as the rooms of the Wolfe house, which she passed daily on the street during her Asheville days but never had the extra pittance to enter. And when her $37.50-a-week first job came along, it was at no less than Biltmore Forest Country Club, a re-creational adjunct to the great Vanderbilt home.
Asheville was and still is note-worthy in itself, of course. South-ern terminus of the Blue Ridge Parkway, which winds a leisurely way through eye- (and ear-) pop-ping mountains all the way to Virginia's Shenandoah National Park, this largest city in western North Carolina looks out on the surrounding summits of the Great Smokies as an equal, thanks to its elevation of 2,340 feet. From its early days, not surprisingly, its panoramic scenery has attracted the vacationing rich.
Since such people require appropriate hostelries, Asheville afforded, and still affords, them several � most notably the elegant Grove Park Inn, a resort offering 510 pricey rooms ($121-$285, de-pending on size, view and season) and a guest book whose signers have included, among others, presidents and literary lions. Over the years, in fact, the town's cultural atmosphere has grown with its clientele, and Pack Square downtown now boasts artistically inclined restaurants, coffee shops and book-shops.
Asheville's literary air is genuine, having been breathed by such national notables as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who reputedly whiled away many hours here drinking and hitting on the Grove Park's female guests while his Zelda received psychiatric treatment in the local hospital in which she finally died. Short story specialist O. Henry, a North Carolinian buried in Riverside Cemetery here, be-came an Ashevillian for a
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while after marrying one of its residents. Connemara, a 263-acre farm 26 miles down Interstate 40 at Hendersonville, became home in 1945 to historian-novelist-poet Carl Sandburg.
This city has not only hosted but birthed noted writers; the natives include novelists Wilma Dykeman, Gail Godwin and John Ehle. By far the city's best-known literary icon, however, is the word-factory Wolfe, a torrentially prolific and erratically brilliant author whose 1929 novel, "Look Home-ward, Angel," brought Asheville admiration and embarrassment.
Searching in vain for Donna's business college, which since her student days apparently has bowed to the pressures of real estate development and the curricular demands of computer technology, we took North Spruce Street past the Asheville Community Theatre to the Old Kentucky Home, now a state-operated land-mark called the Thomas Wolfe Memorial.
For $1 each, we joined a modest gaggle of the out-of-state curious queuing up inside the door. Wolfe's mother, a local real estate speculator of considerable ambition, operated the home over the objections of her husband, a well-educated tombstone manufacturer who felt keeping boarders was beneath the family's station. Touring the place, with its naked light bulbs hanging from cords, its chamber pots and wash pitchers, its beds crammed into corners and even hallways, one infers the monotonous loneliness of traveling salespeople and others in the early 1900s who occupied this three-story jumble of places of rest.
Next morning we were among the earliest arrivals at Biltmore House, presenting our two $25 ad-mission tickets at the ornate stone gatehouse and then winding a lei-surely 3 miles in a procession of cars to a parking area facing the fabulous stone mansion, which is still owned by the family and run as a private business (it has not been lived in since the 1950s).
There is no way to convey in the space here anything but random glimpses of the tasteful luxury inside:
An entrance hall flanked by the Winter Garden, a stunning skylighted area boasting exotic plants and French rattan and bamboo furniture; the 90-foot-long Tapestry Gallery, a sitting area exhibiting three silk-and-wool wall hangings woven in Brussels circa 1530; the 70-by-42-foot Banquet Hall, complete with barrel-vaulted ceiling and an oak table accommodating 64 people; the Salon for women and the Billiard Room for men; and an awe-inspiring 10,000-volume Library, which required the services of a paid librarian � and which American author Henry James, a 1905 guest, fretted was situated at least a half-mile away from his bedroom.
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