They say most people live one life, but authors live as many as they can invent. Local historian Bruce Johnson has pared back the lives (imagined and of legend) of three infamous authors of Asheville’s Gilded Age in his new book, Tom, Scott, and Zelda: Following In Their Footsteps. What he has revealed are the vibrant but flawed cores of these artists and their ties to a little mountain city.
AVL Lit Tour’s own Jim MacKenzie spoke with Johnson recently about his latest book and the hidden gems of Asheville that played such a major role in the lives and deaths of Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Listen to the interview below or continue reading for the transcript.
Bruce Johnson on “Tom, Scott, and Zelda: Following In Their Footsteps”
I’m Jim MacKenzie and this is the Asheville Literary Tour Blog. My guest today is Bruce Johnson, a former teacher turned author and also an historian. Bruce is an expert especially in Western North Carolina authors and literary figures. Let’s get to it. Welcome, Bruce.
Thank you Jim. I really appreciate this opportunity.
JIM: Sure. Thank you for being here. Bruce, you live in Western North Carolina now, correct?
BRUCE: That is correct. I moved to Asheville in 1988, the same year I started the National Arts & Crafts Conference up at the Omni Grove Park Inn. In the year 2000, I moved out to the Fairview area. I wanted to get back to my roots living out in the country.
JIM: How did you get into writing? Have you always been a writer, or is it something you came to recently?
BRUCE: It’s kind of funny. My high school English teacher once told me I never had what it took to be a writer. I think he was goading me. I’m sure what I think what he meant was I was never going to be a novelist. But I didn’t have my heart set on being a novelist.
I don’t consider myself to be a creative person. I’m a researcher. I’m an historian. I love being buried in archives and digging through file folders and letters photographs. I’d much rather be doing that than I would be sitting at my desk trying to be Charles Dickens or Charles Frazier. I’d much rather be an historian, sort of recreating the real lives of historical figures and especially historical figures that I feel haven’t gotten enough attention. Those are the ones that I really love uncovering and writing about.
When I was a high school English teacher for five years, I was a journalist at the same time, writing for a small-town weekly newspaper. I was a sports reporter and just worked my way to the point where I felt comfortable leaving teaching and taking on writing full time, and that was 14 books ago and thousands of articles and columns. That’s what it takes to make a living as a writer. You don’t sit around waiting for that great inspiration that’s going to be the “Great American Novel.” F. Scott Fitzgerald proved that to us many times.
JIM: You said you’ve written 14 books?
BRUCE: Yes. Within one or two. That’s that’s pretty close.
JIM: That’s a good ballpark figure. Let’s talk a little bit about your most recent book, Tom, Scott, and Zelda: Following In Their Footsteps. I’ve read it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I came and met you at one of your book talks. Tell us a little bit about what the book is about and how you came to be interested in the subject matter.
BRUCE: As an English major and an English teacher, I obviously knew who Tom, Scott, and Zelda were 30 or 40 years ago as literary figures. I never thought I would end up in a town that all three of them lived in at one time.
When I came to Asheville in 1988, I was approached by the Grove Park Inn to write their history. As I was researching their history, I discovered that, lo and behold, F. Scott Fitzgerald had spent the greater part of two years living in rooms 441 and 443 at the Grove Park Inn. I put what information I was allowed into the first history because they limited me on on how many pages the book could be. But I kept collecting all of these other stories and anecdotes that I kept coming across about the Fitzgeralds, and doing more research on them not knowing exactly how I was going to use it.
And then I found references to different places: Highland Hospital; the George Vanderbilt Hotel; different places that Fitzgerald had been, and Zelda as well. It occurred to me that it would be nice to have a handy walking or driving guide that would appeal to either someone living in Asheville who has an interest in these literary figures or to a tourist who comes to town and who doesn’t want to buy a 500-page scholarly biography. I’m not knocking those. I use those and I love them. But the typical person doesn’t want to lug around a 10 pound book.
This is the shortest book I think I’ve ever written and it was the most enjoyable, but it was hardest because I had to leave so much out that was just scholarly. People weren’t going to need it if they were just needing to find their way out to Riverside Cemetery and stand there looking at the tombstones of the Wolfe family, and they wanted to know a little bit about each one of them but didn’t want to know a whole chapter about each family member. It required more discipline than many of my other books when I was sort of just given unfettered opportunity to write whatever I wanted to. This one I knew I had to keep it short enough and concise that people could carry it with them and could sit down and find it an enjoyable read at the same time.
JIM: Riverside Cemetery is a famous cemetery in Asheville. Thomas Wolfe is buried there. O. Henry is buried there, as well as a lot of other notable characters.
BRUCE: Architect Richard Sharp Smith. Photographer George Masa. Zebulon Vance. Great stories about Riverside Cemetery. The cemetery itself was designed as a cemetery that was also supposed to serve as a park—so that explains it. And to me, it’s one of Asheville’s underrated gems here. But I think there are some 20,000 people a year who go out there, so it’s not like nobody goes there. It’s just a wonderful experience to go out there just to walk along the paths.
JIM: I fully agree with you. I think it’s one of Asheville’s hidden gems. It’s beautiful. I know it’s a cemetery but it’s also a gorgeous place to visit. You have lived in Asheville long enough. What do you think is so special about Asheville that all of these creative types, especially simultaneously, came to the city at the same time. During the 20s and 30s, it was probably a lot smaller than it is today. It was definitely not discovered as Beer City USA. So what do you think it is about the city that attracted all of these creative types?
BRUCE: If we’re speaking specifically about Scott and Zelda, we almost have to start the sentence with the word “unfortunately.” Unfortunately, it was health reasons that brought them here. Fitzgerald convinced himself that he had tuberculosis. Fitzgerald’s favorite poet was John Keats, who of course died young tragically from tuberculosis back in an age when they didn’t know how to treat it. I think Fitzgerald always thought that he was going to follow in the path of John Keats and die of tuberculosis. Of course, he didn’t. He never had tuberculosis. He came to Asheville thinking that the mountain air here would cure him.
And then, the next year he brought Zelda here thinking that Doctor Carroll at Highland Hospital would cure Zelda of her schizophrenia. That was to mixed results. And of course, Thomas Wolfe was born here. He has a strong medical link here, as well. His brother died of tuberculosis, who probably contracted it in his mother’s boarding house. Tom Wolf probably contracted tuberculosis there as a child, which remained dormant in his lungs until 1938, when he got that severe cold and the coughing reactivated the tuberculosis cells and led to his death. In their cases, it wasn’t that Asheville was some great artist colony, because it was not in the 1930s. It was more of a health resort reason for the Fitzgeralds to be here.
JIM: You said that you were not a novelist. You write a lot of non-fiction and historical books, so you know the endings many times before you even begin digging. But in the research process, especially for your latest book with Tom and F. Scott and Zelda, did anything surprise you that you didn’t know going in?
BRUCE: There always are. That’s what keeps the historian going.
You’re absolutely right, Jim. You start writing about each of these characters knowing exactly what their demise was. A lot of times in the big biographies, that’s what gets all the attention. I love going back and digging out the little facts.
I found two surprising things and they run parallel to each other. Number one: I did not know that F. Scott Fitzgerald went to Julia Wolfe’s boarding house in 1935. This is a story in Tony Buttita’s After the Good Gay Times. The story of F. Scott being led through Tom Wolfe’s house, who he knew as a fellow literary Scribner’s author. And then having Julia Wolfe basically throw him out because she smelled alcohol on his breath. That was a story I didn’t know until I started diving into it. Nor did I know that Zelda stayed at the Wolfe boarding house for a whole week. They have her signature on record. She paid $3.50 to spend a week there. Two little tidbits there. Did they change the course of our perceived history? No. But they bring people to life.
As a historian and a writer, I’ve written about Frank Lloyd Wright and Gustav Stickley and Elbert Hubbard. One of the things I always try to do is to portray them as real people with flaws and weaknesses and biases that make them more human to us and not just literary statues that people think they’ve lived the ideal perfect life. You know these people are often times tragic characters, which to me makes their achievements all the more remarkable when you consider some of the obstacles they had to deal with.
JIM: You mentioned earlier Scribner’s and Sons. A lot of these authors, including Zelda with her novel, shared Maxwell Perkins as an editor—Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott, and also Ernest Hemingway. Recently, it appears the stars of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda and Hemingway are going to go on and on. They may be more famous today than when they were alive. But Thomas Wolfe—his star might be fading. I have my own theories on why, but I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on why people like the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway burn brighter today and Thomas Wolfe doesn’t?
BRUCE: I do. I have my own theories. It’s just readability. I don’t even know if that’s a word.
JIM: We’ll make it a word. It’s a word.
BRUCE: Thomas Wolfe is a challenge to read. There is no doubt about it. Whereas Hemingway’s style—that clipped, very concise style, which many people have parodied over the years—and Fitzgerald, as well, are very easy to read. I think that we today live in a world of text messages. Our children grow up and are trained on text messages and emails.
JIM: And Twitter.
BRUCE: Hence, they are not trained to have the patience and fortitude to make their way through a novel like Thomas Wolfe or Charles Dickens to throw another name out there. Charles Dickens is someone who is only taught in college and no one reads his books because they are hard to read. We are a totally different society than the mid-nineteenth century England was when people took the time to read long, descriptive passages. Today, the audience has no patience for it.
I think that Thomas Wolfe will always be studied, but I do agree with you in terms of his popularity. He is always going to be in the shadow of Hemingway and Fitzgerald only because it was a different style of prose than people are accustomed to reading today.
JIM: That is an interesting theory. I like it.
We’ve talked a little bit today about Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott and Zelda and their time in Asheville. Did you want to mention anything else that maybe I didn’t ask you about?
BRUCE: I really like people to think about these characters as real people.
I want to put a plug for the Thomas Wolfe Memorial. Just like the Riverside Cemetery, both are gems. The Thomas Wolfe Home has a great mini museum there filled with memorabilia. Of course, you can go through the home and see the rooms that he was in. To me that’s really important. I’m one of those researchers that are drawn to wanting to be in the same place that my subject was in so I can actually get a sense of their surroundings. Most of your readers probably already know about the Grove Park Inn, but it’s still one of those places that never fails to make me stand in awe as an architectural masterpiece on par with the Biltmore Estate. Totally different styles, but what an amazing achievement.
JIM: My guest today has been Bruce Johnson. His latest book is called Tom Scott and Zelda: Following In Their Footsteps. I could not recommend it more. Go out and pick up a copy. It’s a great little handy guide to carry around with you while you’re in Asheville to experience all these wonderful places that our classic literary figures inhabited. Bruce, I want to thank you for being with me today.
BRUCE: Thank you, Jim.
About Bruce Johnson
Bruce Johnson is an author and columnist. He has been the director of the National Arts & Crafts Conference at the Omni Grove Park Inn since 1988.
Bruce Johnson’s books are available at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Home, the Battery Park Book Exchange, and the Omni Grove Park Inn. Follow Bruce’s writings and projects at artsandcraftscollector.com.
Our theme song was written and performed by David Treadway. His music can be heard here: youtube.com/user/mississippidavemusic