Scribblers (26 page)

For such a pretty place, the Tryon area has drawn notable writers for all the wrong reasons. Just a few miles farther east is the home where Georgia poet Sidney Lanier came to die in 1881 at the age of thirty-nine, of the tuberculosis that had dogged him since he contracted it in a prison camp during the Civil War.

Instead of heading east from Connemara, we make the momentary jog west to Hendersonville.

In November 1935, Fitzgerald came to Hendersonville and took a room at the Skyland Hotel. “It was funny,” he
wrote, “coming into the hotel and the very deferential clerk not knowing that I was not only thousands, nay tens of thousands in debt, but had less than 40 cents cash in the world and probably a $13 deficit at my bank.” He washed his own laundry and subsisted on canned food.

It was at the Skyland that winter that he wrote his “Crack-Up” series of articles. The three confessional pieces, published in
Esquire
in early 1936, detailed his emotional emptiness and the downward spiral of his creative powers. Though they were the best writing of his later years, his public admission that he was a broken man only served to further damage his reputation.

The hotel building still stands on Main Street, though it has been converted to other uses.

Mike comes low and circles over Hendersonville's Oakdale Cemetery and the famous Wolfe Angel—a marble angel from the monument shop of Thomas Wolfe's father, said to be the inspiration for the central image in
Look Homeward, Angel
I knew of its existence but had forgotten all about it until Mike reminded me.

Mike and I seem to be kindred spirits. He's lived in the area for only a few years and seems genuinely interested to hear my stories of famous authors. And for my part, I envy people in his line of work. Years ago, Mike was one of those kids flying banner-dragging planes at the beach. He put himself through aeronautical college and got certified all the way up through good-sized corporate jets, all on his own dime. He now flies a good many business charters.

“I just like flying,” he tells me, “whether it's high and fast or low and slow.”

I'd hire him and his plane for the entire afternoon if I could. He's flattened out the countryside for me and finally given me some perspective on a place that's proven hard to grasp from ground level. Moreover, it's a pleasure dealing with someone who loves his work and is good at it. He's long since put me at ease. He interrupts our conversation only to talk to the controllers. He guides the plane with his left hand and uses the right to dial in new course headings and punch in radio codes and to point things out to me.

On our way north to Asheville, we pass east of and parallel to the runway from which we departed forty minutes ago. I remark that it looks awfully long for a town Asheville's size. Mike chuckles. He tells me that it measures eight thousand feet and is designated an alternate landing site for the space shuttles, though it has never been put to that use. But a Concorde actually landed here once and was stranded for three days because of the snow, he says.

The Biltmore Estate lies near the south edge of town.

“I can circle here all day if you like,” Mike says.

I'm inclined to move onward.

I don't think he minds a bit, as he's no doubt done Biltmore many times.

Mike is unfamiliar with Riverside Cemetery, where Wolfe and O. Henry are buried, but he picks it out quickly when I tell him it lies along the French Broad River north of the center of town. I'm unused to identifying things from this height. I do well enough with major sites like Biltmore and the distant, orange-roofed Grove Park Inn, but in some cases there's a lag of fifteen or twenty seconds from the time Mike spots what I'm looking for until it finally comes clear
to me. Though the trees are fully out, the cemetery is much more sparsely vegetated than I thought. It looks as deserted today as every time I've been there by car.

Just five or six blocks farther out Montford Avenue is the former site of Highland Hospital. I don't know the area well enough to pick out much from the air, except for some of the old structures bordering the taller, newer Mountain Area Hospice that were probably part of the hospital. There's really not much to see from the ground either, save for a portion of the stone steps of the building that burned and a small marker by the porte-cochere of Highland Hall on Zillicoa Street.

“I don't need anything except hope, which I can't find by looking backwards or forwards. So I suppose the thing to do is to shut my eyes,” the inscription on the marker reads, a quote from Zelda Fitzgerald.

Zelda lived such a complex, eventful, sad life that it's possible to select something from it to buttress just about any point you care to make. She can be interpreted to mean many different things. For me, her time in Asheville says something about the indomitability of the artistic spirit.

Born in July 1900, Zelda was four years younger than her husband and two and a half months older than Thomas Wolfe. As the original flapper and a woman whose mission it was to test cultural boundaries, she lived a life that had the status of public art—or at least spectacle. But she reached a point in her late twenties when, wanting to see whether any substance lay behind her style, she resolved to draw out whatever talent she had. She put so much pressure on herself to make up for her frivolous years, and her
efforts were such a bitter issue in her marriage, that her desire to create art was one of the factors that pushed her into mental illness.

By the time Scott checked her into Highland Hospital in April 1936, Zelda was a shell of a human being. She had suffered nervous collapses, made numerous suicide attempts, and been hospitalized in Paris, Switzerland, Baltimore, and New York. Her troubles had been variously diagnosed as nervous exhaustion, religious mania, severe depression, and schizophrenia. She had hallucinations, heard voices, suffered delusions, experienced homosexual yearnings, and believed she communicated with Jesus, Apollo, and William the Conqueror.

In Europe in the early 1930s, she was given ovarian extracts, thyroid-gland powders, and potassium bromide. She was injected with her own blood, with a serum made from the brain of a mentally fit person, with morphine to bring sleep, with belladonna for pain, with luminal for sedation. She submitted to the “Swiss Sleeping Cure,” according to which she received morphine and bromides rectally, which immediately brought about narcosis for two weeks. One of the treatment's side effects was eczema on her neck and face and in her eye sockets so severe that she was confined to bed for five weeks on one occasion. A famously vain woman, Zelda had her face swaddled in bandages and her hands bound to stop her compulsive masturbating.

During her institutionalization in the United States in the mid-1930s, she was given stramonium for mania, digitalis as an antidepressant, and chloral hydrate and sodium amytal as tranquilizers. Her Metrazol convulsive treatments
induced epileptic-type seizures so severe that she had to be held down so she wouldn't fracture her hips, spine, or jaw.

Scott brought her to Asheville partly because the care at Highland Hospital was cheaper than at her previous institution. It cost twelve hundred dollars a quarter, but Scott claimed hard times and paid only a little over half that. He took her to lunch at the Grove Park Inn on occasion.

Under Dr. Robert Carroll, Highland had a reputation for progressive treatment. Carroll recruited his staff from the ranks of the “cured.” He was the author of popular books on the treatment of nervous disease and also of an autobiographical novel about a caring young doctor. He believed that mental illness could be controlled through diet and exercise. Like the other hospital residents, Zelda was forbidden alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and rare meat and was allowed few sweets. She played volleyball and did calisthenics in the mornings and walked up and down a nearby hill a certain number of times a day, as prescribed by Dr. Carroll.

Beneath that veneer, however, the treatment was more horrific than ever. Zelda took injections of honey, hypertonic solutions, placental blood, and horse blood, the latter of which induced aseptic meningitis. She also underwent a therapy that combined insulin shock and electroshock. During insulin-shock therapy, patients were given insulin injections to bring about hypoglycemic shock and coma. The more profound the coma—so the theory went—the greater the number of “sick neurons” in the brain were killed. The goal was to induce fifty to a hundred such comas over a three-month period. Electroshock involved the firing of 180 to 460 volts of electricity through the brain from temple to
temple or from front to back on one side, the object being to induce grand-mal convulsions. The typical treatment was twenty consecutive shocks three times a week.

What emerged from all of this was a completely different person. Zelda's attractiveness had always been a product more of flair than beauty, but now she was prematurely aged and homely. More importantly, the woman who was once the foremost socialite of her generation was no longer able to function in society.

It's hard to guess what Zelda might have become under different circumstances. Her greatest love was ballet. Though she didn't take it up until the age of twenty-seven, she still possessed enough ability to have made herself a modest professional career. But that prospect only maddened her.

As for her writing, Scott considered her a third-rate talent—and told her so—yet made use of passages from her letters and diaries in his own work. Her mental illness, thinly disguised, was put forward for public consumption in
Tender Is the Night,
but when she sought to treat their marriage in her own novel, Scott tried to suppress her efforts. By some accounts, that 1932 novel of Zelda's,
Save Me the Waltz,
was also sabotaged by Maxwell Perkins, who let Scribner's print it containing convoluted metaphors, knee-jerk similes, and numerous misspellings and grammatical and typographical errors. The book was likely never proofread at all. It was judged a failure, as was Zelda's play,
Scandalabra.

After Scott's death in 1940, she divided her time between her mother's home in Alabama and Asheville. In August 1944, she even stayed with Thomas Wolfe's mother, who had
once slammed her boardinghouse door in Scott's face. “The house is so dirty I think it best to go before atrification sets in” was Zelda's comment on the Old Kentucky Home. But it was Highland more than the city itself that brought her back. Periodically, when she sensed her condition deteriorating, she checked herself in for therapy.

One of the effects Scott's death had on Zelda was to free her to pursue her interests without recrimination. At a time when the long-term damage caused by her treatment should have left her creativity at an ebb, she began what was perhaps her most productive period. Until the end of her life, an artist kept trying to break through the fog and into the light.

Though ballet was her love, painting was her greatest talent. In the early 1940s, she produced a watercolor cycle of seventeen scenes from New York and Paris. Following this were cycles of nursery-rhyme illustrations, fairy-tale paintings, and
Alice in Wonderland
illustrations. At the end came a set of biblical tableaux created as moral lessons for her first grandchild. Her work was exhibited in both Montgomery and Asheville. It didn't place her among the first rank of artists, but she certainly didn't embarrass herself either. She also painted and decorated bowls and baskets and designed a paper-doll collection. She'd done an earlier set of dolls in which the Fitzgeralds themselves were the subjects, a ticked-off-looking Scott standing there in nothing but his underwear and a pair of fancy shoes, waiting for someone to come along and give him a set of clothes. The characters in the new set were from fairy tales.

Zelda also embarked on a second novel, “Caesar's
Things.” In content, it was not far different from
Save Me the Waltz
—that is to say, it was her life story, though now with a heavy overlay of religion and psychological illness. By all accounts, her blend of surrealism and abstraction was much more successful on canvas than in a book. The deterioration of her mental powers also showed itself more clearly on the page. Zelda left forty thousand words at the time of her death.

Around eleven-thirty on the night of March 10, 1948, a fire started in the diet kitchen of Central Building at Highland. The structure had no sprinkler system or automatic alarm.

The nurse who found the blaze unlocked doors and woke patients on the lower floors, then called another building on the campus to report the situation. She did not, however, try to extinguish the flames, and she didn't notify the fire department until about a half-hour after the discovery.

Flames climbed the dumbwaiter shaft, spilled onto the landing at each floor, and ran to the roof. The stairways were blocked by fire and smoke. The exterior fire escapes, made of wood, burned quickly.

Some accounts say that the women on the uppermost floor were asphyxiated in their beds without ever having the chance to attempt an escape. Others say they tried to get out but were prevented by room doors locked from the outside and windows chained and padlocked. The only woman who managed to flee the top floor broke a window and jumped.

Twenty-two women on the lower floors escaped. Some
of them were found wandering in the woods. Altogether, nine women on the top floor perished.

According to some accounts, Zelda had until then been staying in an unlocked room and traveling freely about Asheville. What a voluntary patient was doing in a sealed ward that night is not entirely clear.

She was identified by dental records and by a single slipper trapped beneath her charred remains.

Thomas Wolfe's memory suffered a bad run of luck in July 1998, just a couple months shy of the sixtieth anniversary of his death.

On Monday, July 20, Modern Library released its list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. F. Scott Fitzgerald received a boutonniere for his dapper lapel,
The Great Gatsby
checking in at lofty number two and
Tender Is the Night
at twenty-eight. Ernest Hemingway landed at forty-five for
The Sun Also Rises
and seventy-four for
A Farewell to Arms.
Other members of the Max Perkins stable were there—John Dos Passos for the
U.S.A.
trilogy and James Jones for
From Here to Eternity.
Henry James had three titles in the top thirty-two. Dimly remembered authors were well represented, too—Arthur Koestler, James T. Farrell, Anthony Powell, Max Beerbohm, Richard Hughes, Elizabeth Bowen, Arnold Bennett, Henry Green.