Most of us have read The Great Gatsby by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald, or one of his other novels such as This Side of Paradise, Tender is the Night or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. But did you know that he has a tumultuous connection to Asheville?
Fitzgerald spent two summers in the city that draws the rich and famous to its clear mountain air for rest, relaxation and repair of body and soul. It was 1935 and 1936. Fitzgerald rented two rooms at the famous Grove Park Inn, one for sleeping and the other for writing. They say he rented those particular rooms so he could see the main entrance to watch the cars pulling up and observe interesting people and how they were dressed—probably for material for stories that never got written—characters that he could portray in the age he belonged to when gin was the national drink and sex was an obsession. It was about jazz and flappers.
Unfortunately, his Asheville stay was neither a productive nor a happy one. His glamorous life of parties and jazz clubs was falling apart as was his marriage. His wife, the once beautiful, brilliant Zelda Fitzgerald, diagnosed as schizophrenic, was wrestling with her demons just across the valley from the Grove Park Inn at Asheville’s Highland Hospital. While it is a different story, one I will tell in another piece, she would die there in a tragedy of the type that gives rise to the haunted reputation of the historic Montford district of Asheville.
Brian Railsback, who was dean of the Honors College at Western Carolina University, says, “Fitzgerald was at a low point. He was drinking 50 ponies of beer a day — the “beer cure” — in an attempt to wean himself off gin. His writing, 10 years after The Great Gatsby, had gone flat. He was churning out hack stories for magazines, trying to pay off debts and the bills… This was a place where he hoped that he would be restored, find discipline and then maybe find subject matter.”
While Railsback’s explanation for the reasons Fitzgerald came to Asheville may be correct, there was another one. He was suffering from tuberculosis, and Asheville is where one went for relief. Nevertheless, it appears that Fitzgerald, who turned forty while at the Grove Park Inn, spent much of his time in an alcoholic haze. That may explain the bad dive into the Inn’s swimming pool that left him with a broken shoulder, or the separate incident where he fell in the bathroom and was found on the floor the next morning, and yet another time when he fired a pistol in one of the two rooms he rented.
F. Scott Fitzgerald packed his bags and left Asheville in 1937 for Hollywood to accept a writing job for the movies. It was there, with the encouragement of a woman lover, that he began drinking less and writing seriously. He started work on The Last Tycoon. He died there in 1940 after a heart attack leaving The Last Tycoon to be finished and published posthumously by his friend Edmund Wilson, a critic and writer. His wife, Zelda, outlived her husband by eight years, much of them spent in Asheville’s Highland Hospital where she, along with the other patients, died in a tragic fire that destroyed the hospital. The two, husband and wife, were rejoined together in a small Catholic cemetery in suburban Maryland.