Boardinghouse Guests: Ensign Kennedy
In the guest register at Julia Wolfe’s Old Kentucky Home, written under the date June 26, 1943, is Ensign Richard Kennedy, Los Angeles, California. Richard Sylvester Kennedy was born in October 1920 in Minnesota, the son of a chemist in the food industry who founded Kennedy Mayonnaise Products in St. Paul. He recalled at age 16 reading Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River and identifying with Eugene Gant’s hunger to devour literature. He was excited to learn that one of his teachers had heard Thomas Wolfe speak at the Writer’s Conference in Colorado in 1935. After finishing Central High School, Richard went west to Los Angeles to attend college. During his undergraduate work, studying English at UCLA, he found his literature professor had visited Julia Wolfe’s boardinghouse. His desire to begin graduate studies was interrupted by WWII. He volunteered for the US Navy in 1942 and graduated from the Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s School at Columbia University in 1943, an expedited officer training program. He was awarded the rank of Ensign. Like many new officers, he married his college sweetheart, Ella Dickinson, shortly after graduation at the Riverside Church in New York City on March 31, 1943. Stationed at Norfolk, VA, he received orders to deploy overseas in July.
With 72 hours of leave to spend, he decided to hitch-hike south to meet Julia Wolfe and see the Old Kentucky Home. Reaching Asheville, Kennedy called Julia Wolfe and introduced himself. She said, “Why, you jest come right out here.” He wrote about the experience in several letters to his wife. It was one of the most interesting weekends of his life. He found the boardinghouse to be “a ramshackle old place with an enormous number of rooms, about 20, plain with iron beds, old fashioned pitcher and bowl on the dresser and even a chamber pot. No plumbing facilities — a couple of old bath tubs & and two toilets in the whole place. The carpets were worn, wallpaper stained and cracked, whitewashed plaster ceilings.” Also visiting the house that weekend Kennedy recorded were James Stokely from Tennessee and his lovely wife (Wilma Dykeman). Sneaking a peek at the kitchen he found it to resemble “a catch-all or a general store — there was an old fashioned stove with a few pots on it, but all available chairs & tables were stacked with old clothes, newspapers, tools, medicines, canned goods, — a sewing machine in the corner with clothes piled around it.” Inspired by his new knowledge of the Wolfe story, two weeks later Kennedy traveled to New York University and met Wolfe family friend John Skally Terry. Kennedy was disappointed to find Terry not the ideal person to write Thomas Wolfe’s biography. Although chosen by Julia Wolfe to write the book, Terry never did.
One year later Ensign Richard Kennedy would be witness to the invasion at Normandy Beach and before the war was over, cross the Rhine River, and receive a Purple Heart. After the war, he completed his studies, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1953. While a teaching fellow at Harvard he wrote “Thomas Wolfe at Harvard 1920–1923,” published in the Harvard Library Bulletin. His 1953 dissertation was the beginning of an extensive examination of Wolfe’s literary career. He hoped to publish a two-volume work about Wolfe, the first portion to be called “The Long Apprenticeship.” Initially, access to Wolfe’s letters and manuscripts at Harvard’s Houghton Library was denied Kennedy by Edward Aswell who had become the second executor of Wolfe’s literary estate. Aswell died in 1958 and in 1962 after twelve years of study, Kennedy completed his work The Window of Memory: A Literary Biography of Thomas Wolfe. In the work, Kennedy acknowledged visiting with Julia Wolfe in 1943, and in 1954 with Mabel Wolfe Wheaton and Frank Wolfe. Aline Bernstein shared stories and letters with Kennedy, as well as Elizabeth Nowell who wrote the first biography of Thomas Wolfe. Nowell also reviewed and commented on the manuscript. Kennedy joined the faculty at Temple University in 1964 where, upon retirement in 1988, he became Professor Emeritus.
While he may be best known for his 1980 work Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings, Kennedy wrote and edited publications about Thomas Wolfe throughout his career. With Pascal Reeves, he edited the Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe (UNC Press, 1970), and Beyond Love and Loyalty: The Letters of Thomas Wolfe and Elizabeth Nowell (UNC Press, 1983). In retirement, he went to Holland on a Fulbright fellowship and edited the collection Literary New Orleans: Essays and Meditations. He died at age 82 in Marion, Pennsylvania in December 2002. Many of his personal papers related to his life’s research about Wolfe are housed at the special collections of the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina. The collection includes letters from many of Thomas Wolfe’s friends, agent Elizabeth Nowell, and second editor Edward Aswell.
For more information: https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/cw2.5/
Richard S. Kennedy “From Wolfe Enthusiast to Wolfe Scholar,” The Thomas Wolfe Review (Spring 2000).
