16 September 2021

Scott and Zelda in My Own Backyard



The Grove Park Inn is a fancy old mountain resort in my neck of the woods, Asheville, North Carolina. Each year the hotel allows visitors to wander free through adjoining rooms 441 and 443 on a weekend that falls close to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthday, September 24th. An English professor from one of the local universities, serving as a docent of sorts, shares with guests the unusual circumstances that brought Fitzgerald to the Inn during the summers of 1935 and 1936.


The inn’s staff always “decorates” the room with period props, conveying the impression that Mr. Fitzgerald has just stepped out. A typewriter is among the artifacts, but that doesn’t mean Fitzgerald ever got any serious writing done while here.

His life and career were tanking fast by the time he occupied these rooms. For years he’d been the darling of the big magazines. Editors paid him thousands—yes, thousands of actual U.S. dollars—for stories that might have been a subscribing family’s only weekly entertainment in the days before radio. But by the 1930s, Fitzgerald’s glittering take on society folks reeked of elitism in the harsh light of the Depression. 

On those summer visits to the Grove Park Inn, Fitzgerald was struggling to keep himself afloat financially, and to pay for his wife Zelda’s stays at a nearby Asheville psychiatric facility, Highland Hospital. While Zelda battled her demons, Scott battled his. Determined to reduce his gin intake, he switched to drinking beer. His beverage of choice were so-called “pony” bottles of beer, which contained 7 U.S. fluid ounces. The bizarre sobriety plan might have worked, if it weren’t for the fact that he consumed 50 of those bottles a day—a total of 2.7 gallons of beer.


The inn's staff always litters the suite with empty beer bottles.
(This is not a pony-sized bottle.)

You would think things could not get much worse. Then Fitzgerald broke his shoulder in a swimming pool dive, passed out in his bathroom, and was discovered by the staff the next morning. In a later incident, he nearly fired a handgun, but was stopped by a bellman. These two incidents fueled rumors that he’d tried to commit suicide. His biographers are not so sure about that. He wrestled with thoughts of suicide for the rest of his life, but especially after a scathing newspaper article about him appeared in The New York Post and ran in syndication around the nation.

The reporter, Michael Mok, had visited Fitzgerald in his Asheville rooms, and could not help notice how far the Jazz Age icon had fallen. While this trembling, 40-year-old wreck of a man tried to present himself as on top of his game, a nurse (presumably hired by the hotel) hovered and surveilled his every move, trying to limit his alcohol intake and ensure a sensible diet. Mok’s article was devastating. It portrayed this voice of the Lost Generation as a washed-up has-been.

Fitzgerald eventually moved on to other (cheaper) hotels in the region. He wrote his famous essay, “The Crack-Up,” at a hotel in nearby Hendersonville, a town about 30 minutes south that I’ve talked about in a previous post. He went to Hollywood in 1937, hoping to turn his fortunes around. The money he made there was lucrative, but he spent most of it on his wife’s medical bills and their daughter’s education. He was dead by 1940, at the age of 44, a victim not of suicide but his own ailing heart.


Brian Railsback, professor and author, shares Fitzgerald's story with visitors.

At death he no doubt considered himself a failure, and never lived to see what we now all take for granted: that at some point in every young American’s life, you’re going to read The Great Gatsby, whether you like it or not. The book Fitzgerald conceived as his sparkling masterpiece sold poorly during his lifetime, but today racks up about a half million sales a year, has been translated into 42 languages, and has sold nearly 30 million copies worldwide. That’s just one book. Perhaps more impressive is his short fiction output: 181 stories, published and unpublished, that we know of.

One of those short pieces was written with Zelda, who, I might add, survived Fitzgerald by nearly eight years. She died in a kitchen fire that swept through one of the buildings in the Highland Hospital complex in 1948. Nine women lost their lives that night.

Bus tours swing through the leafy historic neighborhood here on a daily basis to share her story with tourists. On its own, her tale is painful enough, but the full Fitzgerald Asheville saga approaches an almost crushing poignancy.


A stone marker on Zillicoa Street in Asheville marks the site.


* * *


If you can indulge me the mention of yet another alcoholic writer, Dashiell Hammett, I promise to cloak it in a more cheerful wrapper. These Nomi notebooks are fashioned from recycled paper, and are fountain pen-friendly. I couldn’t resist backing the Kickstarter as soon as I glimpsed the noir-themed endpapers. New Yorker cartoonist Shuchita Mishra created these two images as a salute to the city of San Francisco. The building depicted at the bottom is 891 Post Street, where Dashiell Hammett once lived, wrote most of his famous works, and where he sited Sam Spade’s apartment. Check out the Kickstarter for these notebooks and the hilarious video here.

See you in three weeks!

Joe



Some sources for this article:

Read excerpts from the letters of Fitzgerald’s nurse here and here.

An NPR article on Fitzgerald’s days in Asheville.

The Fitzgerald episode is also recounted in my wife’s book, The Last Castle.








18 comments:

  1. What a charming and poignant display at the hotel. Someone had a creative idea there!

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  2. The Grove Park Inn is one of my favorite places in the whole world--and quickly became one of our son's favorite places too! The Fitzgerald connection was always fascinating to me as well. We're hoping for a trip back soon.

    And love that notebook too--thanks for sharing (and ending on a happier note). :-)

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    1. It's a wonderful place, and I've often thought they should have a Fitzgerald cocktail on the menu. Considering the circumstances, it should probably be a mocktail. This year they got a little creative for the Fitzgerald weekend, which they celebrated earlier in the month. Besides the room tours, they had an audio tour available, a documentary on their inn TV channel, and you could enjoy an $80-a-head "Gin & Jazz Social," at which celebrants were encouraged to dress in 1920s-period attire.

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  3. The sheer level of heavy drinking that runs through the lives of the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, Thurber, Benchley, Parker, Hammett, and so many others of the paragraphing-by-drinks school of writing in those days is mindboggling. Throw in mental health issues, and, well - none of it ended happily. But a fantastic hotel.

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    1. Eve:
      Yes -- that's exactly the thing that hits me whenever I visit those rooms each year. It's not just Scott -- it was and is a ton of writers. I think I understand why they were such heavy drinkers, but not entirely, and I am left both curious and confused.
      Joe

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    2. The phrase "paragraphing-by-drinks" is an interesting one! I keep pondering over it!

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    3. Joe, I stole the idea, if not the phrase "paragraphing-by-drinks" from either Florence King or James Thurber, I'm not sure which. But the idea was basically that whenever the author(s) hit the carriage return and then 5 spaces, they took another drink.

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    4. Then there's Thorne Smith, alas.

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  4. Interesting, Joe! Great post.

    As if Asheville didn't already have enough fascinating history.

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  5. Reading this, I was transported back to Hemingway's A MOVEABLE FEAST, and his utterly vicious, highly readable (and likely more accurate than not) take-down of Fitzgerald, his drinking and the ensuing mayhem they experienced on a trip together from Paris to Lyon.

    It's astonishing to me that someone that soused could even pick up a pen, let alone use it to give us "Gatsby," "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," "The Birthday Party," and so many other insightful, lucid gems.

    Such a sad ending for such a glittering pair (Scott and Zelda).

    Thanks for sharing, Joe. Have you turned your keen eye on to Asheville's favorite son, Thomas Wolfe? Would love to learn anything about his actual connection (if any) with his home town. Still recall the image of Wolfe, so tall he used the icebox in his New York apartment as his writing desk.

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    1. I have Wolfe post planned, but thanks for the nudge. The city's response to his books in his lifetime was fascinating.

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  6. The first American authors to win the Nobel Prize for Literature were Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. All but Buck (and, debatably, Steinbeck) were alcoholics. Both drinking and smoking were socially accepted, maybe even encouraged, until the latter part of the twentieth century. Fitzgerald told his daughter Scotty "you do not find inspiration in the bottom of a bottle." Hemingway said he never wrote drunk. Scotty, I believe, was also an alcoholic, and Hemingway wrote early in the day so he could start drinking. Creative people are even better than the rest of us at finding ways to lie to themselves...

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  7. I hope somewhere Scott and Zelda are together, giving nary a thought to the woes of this world. (Maybe dancing to some of that wonderful music the 20s were famous for!)

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  8. "Why they drank?" Alcoholism is an illness. A lot of factors may combine to cause it, but once it starts, taking them away won't stop it. Neither will switching from booze to beer or big bottles to little bottles or loving someone enough or getting the Nobel Prize. Amazing to me that people are still surprised and confused. I did my best, including keeping my sense of humor, on the Booze Panel one Bouchercon. I was invited as the token spokesperson for sobriety and the moderator drank half a bottle of gin before noon.

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    1. Liz, has there been work to investigate whether alcoholism is prevalent among people in creative fields? Or is the perceived prevalence due to the fact that they/we leave a paper trail?

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  9. It took me two days to take it all in, the links as well as the article. Fascinating post, Joe. Thank you.

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