“Evalina Toussaint,” a story excerpted from an early draft of this novel, was published in Smoky Mountain Living, vol. 10, no. 1, winter 2010.
I also have my own personal knowledge of the landscape of this novel. My father was a patient there in the fifties. And I am especially grateful to Highland Hospital for the helpful years my son, Josh, spent there in the 1980s, in both inpatient and outpatient situations. Though I had always loved Zelda Fitzgerald, it was then that I became fascinated by her art and her life within that institution, and the mystery of her tragic death. I always knew I would write this book.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
Although Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Dr. Robert Carroll and Grace Potter Carroll, and other people who actually lived appear in this book as fictional characters, I wanted to depict them as truly as possible. I have been grateful for a number of sources, starting with the excellent biographies Zelda, by Nancy Milford; Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman’s Life, by Linda Wagner-Martin; and Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, by Sally Cline. Zelda’s own writing is found in her novel Save Me the Waltz and in The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, with an introduction by Mary Gordon; Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks; as well as unpublished writings in several archived collections. Other helpful books for me were F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli; Fitzgerald’s novels The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and the Damned, This Side of Paradise; the nonfiction pieces in The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson; and Exiles from Paradise: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, by Sara Mayfield. Dr. Robert S. Carroll’s books include The Soul in Suffering and The Mastery of Nervousness.
My single most illuminating source was Zelda: An Illustrated Life: The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald, edited and introduced by Eleanor Lanahan, the granddaughter of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who has also written a book about the life of her mother entitled Scottie: The Daughter of . . . An essay by Peter Kurth in Zelda: An Illustrated Life details the Jazz Age world that the Fitzgeralds inhabited, and Jane S. Livingston, formerly the chief curator of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., offers insights into Zelda’s art, which is well represented here with reproductions of eighty of her best paintings from every phase of her life, along with her drawings and constructions, the beautiful and sometimes terrifying paper dolls, plus biographical photographs, artifacts, and other memorabilia. Another big, wonderful book is The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr.
Other books include Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age, by Susan K. Cahn; Clothes for a Summer Hotel, A Ghost Play, by Tennessee Williams; After the Good Gay Times: Asheville Summer of ’35, A Season with F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Tony Buttitta; Gone With the Wind, the Three-Day Premiere in Atlanta, by Herb Bridges; Asylums, by Erving Goffman; Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness, by Elliot S. Valenstein; My Lobotomy, by Howard Dully with Charles Fleming; The Center Cannot Hold, by Elyn R. Saks; Surviving Schizophrenia, by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey; A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway; The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe vs. Wade, by Ann Fessler; Beloved Infidel, by Sheilah Graham and Gerold Frank; Women and Madness, by Phyllis Chesler; The Madwoman in the Attic, by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar; The Writing on the Wall: Women’s Autobiography and the Asylum, by Mary Elene Wood; The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980, by Elaine Showalter; and Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture, by Benjamin Reiss.
Articles: “The Doom of the Mountains,” by Ted Mitchell, Our State magazine, March 1999; “Zelda Sayre, Belle,” by Linda Wagner-Martin, Southern Cultures, summer 2004; “Professional Contributions to Invalidism,” by Dr. Robert S. Carroll, The Scientific Monthly, vol. 2, no.1, Jan. 1916; “Creatures of Fire” by David Allen Joy, Smoky Mountain Living, summer 2010; “Hortitherapy: To Teach the Art of Living,” by Steve M. Coe, Highland Highlights, fall 1973; “Literary Ghosts of Asheville,” by Hal Crowther, American Way, 1992; and “Sacrificial Couples, the Splendor of Our Failures and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald,” draft of a paper given by Allan Gurganus at the International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference in Asheville, North Carolina, in September 1998, which he generously shared with me.
A Shannon Ravenel Book
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2013 by Lee Smith.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
eISBN 978-1-61620-346-7
Lee Smith, Guests on Earth: A Novel
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