In the Footsteps of Tocqueville (Part IV)

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Elegy for F. Scott Fitzgerald

Imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald in Asheville.

Imagine Zelda, first of all. Imagine her in the asylum, Highland Hospital, the location of which I finally found, after much searching. Highland? you ask. Zelda? Asheville has its excuses, given that the asylum burned, and Zelda with it, the night of March 10 to 11, 1948, and nothing remains of it. But I would have no excuse if I hadn't set out this morning in search of some trifle, some ruin, some ashes, maybe a museum, at least a plaque. America makes museums of everything; why shouldn't it have erected a Zelda museum in Asheville? So I looked. And I eventually discovered the spot, after wandering for a long time along Elizabeth, Magnolia, and Cumberland. But no plaque. Not a word. Not the least shadow of a memory, either in passersby or in the neighbors. And for the oblivion to be complete and the obliteration total, another clinic, Fine Psychological Associates, built—but without anyone's acknowledgment—on the site of Zelda's burned-down deathtrap: the perfect crime.

So I have to imagine Zelda here, on the top floor, on a foggy morning like today—yellow foliage beyond her barred window, cries of insanity, convulsions. I imagine her paintings, her exasperated drawings, her severe self-portrait, the sketch of the young Scott in which he appears like an old Baudelaire, the letters reproaching him for plagiarizing her, sterilizing her, killing her slowly, having her locked up—that was convenient, wasn't it! Disposing of a real madwoman to inspire the madwomen in his novels! Never does her memory become clouded; never does she loosen her grasp; it's 1936, but she hasn't turned in her weapons … And you have to imagine him, Scott—a good boy, really, a good husband, unless she's right and he really can write only when he's near her—raiding her inner depths, drawing from her diaries and her letters. You have to imagine him settling down here, in contact with his despoiled muse, a few miles away, on Macon Avenue, in this frightful Grove Park Inn, half hotel, half hunting lodge, which still exists. If the memory of Zelda has been lost, the memory of Scott has been reinforced. Scott? Of course, a guy at Reception says to me. Everything's here. Nothing's been changed: the paneling in the lounges, the immense terrace looking out onto the void. And then, at the entrance to 441—443, the brass plaque indicating that this was a "place of solace" for the ruined Scott "during frequent visits in 1935 and 1936." And the obscene insistence with which I am asked to believe that the author of The Great Gatsby came here just to look after his mad wife. He had come here by himself in 1935, one year before Zelda, to cure his lung disease. Asheville is a pretty town; Asheville is a radiant town; he came from Baltimore to Asheville because Asheville is a town that does writers good—that was his idea.

What is he really doing at the Grove Park Inn?

Since Dr. Slocum has told him it isn't healthy either for him or for her if he sees Zelda too often, what does he do to fill those long days in the summer of '36, and in the winter, and in the following summer?

He sees the young Pauline Brownell, whom the biographers barely mention, but who is looking after his shoulder, dislocated in an absurd diving accident in July.

He is playing Pygmalion to Dorothy Richardson, his other nurse, whose presence the hotel required after his most recent suicide threat, and whose main mission is to prevent him from drinking.

He is flirting with Laura Guthrie, his typist, to whom he dictates whatever he writes. Soon he will be producing the first drafts of scripts that his new slave drivers in Hollywood have ordered and which he hopes will give him one more shot at glory.

He spends long afternoons locked up in one of his two rooms with Beatrice Dance, a rich Texan. According to Asheville rumors, he seduced her.

He reads psychiatric manuals.

He goes to his friend Tony Buttita's place, the best bookstore in town, and buys all kinds of psychiatric books from him. Schizophrenia? Manic depression? Is it iron she needs? Salt? Is it merely a fluke that her remissions have always coincided with her asthma attacks? For a long time now he's been trying to understand …

And then he goes to see her.

Whatever the doctors say, he can't prevent himself from traveling the few hundred feet. I am Francis Scott Fitzgerald, the ex—famous writer; I'm coming to visit my wife.

I imagine him then, as in the Carl Van Vechten photo, his knitted tie a little short, wide-lapeled jacket a little long, handkerchief in pocket like an aging dandy, cheerless gaze, hair still carefully slicked back, but the part is on the side. The charm has gone flat.

I imagine him with Zelda. Endless arguments. Bitter memory of happier times: Antibes; Murphy; charades in towels; grant me this waltz; the day when, to please her, he ate an orchid; the night in Saint Paul de Vence when Isadora Duncan gave him the address of her hotel on the sly, and so to punish him Zelda threw herself down the steps of the Colombe d'Or restaurant.

And then I imagine him just outside Asheville, prowling like a child around the Vanderbilts' mansion at Biltmore, touted as the most beautiful house in America. He loved the rich so much! There are writers who write to seduce women; he wrote to get closer to the rich, and to live a bit like them. These rich here, then … This combination, in one place, of Loire chateaux and the Villa Borghese! This intersection, in one family, of the Vanderbilt side and the Gatsby side! I visit this mansion. I look at the portrait, in the tidy ground-floor living room, of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the first offspring of that name. I can't imagine Fitzgerald's not being irresistibly drawn to this blending of pomp and style, easy money and austere rectitude. I can't imagine that living here, in Asheville, he didn't do everything—really everything, as he used to in his prime—to get himself invited. At the same time, I know—and it was from him I learned it—that there's never a second chance for American heroes. And I know that they most likely ignored him, even rejected him outright: Who? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Oh … the failed writer. The former dandy. The husband of the madwoman. The outcast. Get lost!

Forgive me, Asheville. Forgive me, all you in Asheville who welcomed me so warmly. Those days, in my eyes, will have the lasting perfume of a wretched past. This town will remain linked with the image of this great writer destroyed, reduced to obscurity, disowned. Poor Belgium, said Baudelaire toward the end. Poor North Carolina, the F. Scott Fitzgerald of the last days might have said. In his name, and in the name, too, of so many writers that America has humiliated or driven mad, I say it.

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Bernard-Henri Lévy is a writer and philosopher who lives in Paris. He is the author of many books, including Barbarism With a Human Face, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, and War, Evil, and the End of History. This is the fourth of several articles.