What Nicolson had in mind when he wrote this were
natural landscapes. But countries, cities, towns—even homes—can play just as
important a role in exciting the imagination.
I can think of few better examples than "Old Kentucky Home," a boardinghouse in Asheville, NC, that was the boyhood home of novelist Thomas Wolfe—now preserved as the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site.
In his classic 1929 coming-of-age novel Look
Homeward, Angel, Wolfe transformed this environment into "Dixieland," a place so chaotic that he slept in a different bed each night because of his
mother’s need to accommodate the stream of visitors who, she believed, represented the only means she had of keeping the family from poverty.
As I explained in a May 2012 post, Wolfe recalled to
his favorite teacher that he had been “a vagabond since I was seven—with two
roofs [his stonecutter father, vehemently opposing wife Julia’s purchase of the property,
refused to leave their former house in town] and no home. I moved inward on
that house of death and tumult from room to room, as the boarders came with
their dollar a day, and their constant rocking on the porch.”
As a youngster, Wolfe dreamed of a life beyond this
environment and the hills of western North Carolina. Little could he have
imagined that he had already received a lifetime’s worth of material, in the
form of his own large and larger-than-life family and the boarders
whose stories he couldn’t help overhearing at night—and remembering years later.
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