64
2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
guests on earth, eternal strangers, and lost souls a review by John Hough, Jr. Lee Smith. Guests on Earth: A Novel. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2013.
In addition to three books of nonfiction, John Hough, Jr. is the author of five novels, including The Last Summer (Simon & Schuster, 2002), Seen the Glory: A Novel of the Battle of Gettysburg (Simon & Schuster, 2009), and Little Bighorn (Arcade, 2014). In 2010, he won the W. Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction. Lee Smith is Professor Emeritus of English at NC State University. She has written twelve novels, including On Agate Hill (Algonquin Books 2006; reviewed in NCLR 2007) and four collections of short stories, including News of the Spirit (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1997; reviewed in NCLR 1998). Her novel Oral History (G.P. Putnam’s, 1983) is discussed in essays in NCLR 1998 and 2008. See the print issue of NCLR 2014 for an essay on her novel The Last Girls (Algonquin Books, 2003).
1
Matthew J. Bruccoli, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (New York: Scribner, 1994) 475.
2
See NCLR 2009 for Annette J. Saddik’s essay on Tennessee Williams’s play Clothes for a Summer Hotel, another literary work inspired by Zelda Fitzgerald’s time at Highland Hospital.
The title of Lee Smith’s somber and ruminative new novel is from a letter F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter Scottie in 1940: “[T]he insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.”1 Fitzgerald was referring, of course, to his wife, Zelda, the Southern belle whose fame and glamor had blazed as brightly as his and whose descent was as inexorable and, in the end, as pathetic. Scott died at the age of forty-four, alcoholic and broken. Zelda burned to death four years later in the terrible and mysterious fire at Highland Hospital for the insane in Asheville, NC. She was fortyeight and had been in and out of Highland for twelve years. Highland Hospital during Zelda’s intermittent residency is the setting of Guests on Earth,2 with a brief prelude in New Orleans and a six-year interlude in a miscellany of venues that Smith folds into thirty pages. The narrator is Evalina Toussaint, daughter of a club dancer and high-end prostitute. Evalina is a born pianist and a loner, “a slight ratty sort of child with flyaway hair and enormous pale eyes that made people uncomfortable” (4). Her mother, Louise, dotes on her and fashions a pleasant, if unconventional, life for the two of them. Enter Arthur Graves, cotton broker, family man, munificent client of Louise Toussaint. Mr. Graves, it turns out, is unstable, often absent, and by turns abusive and abjectly contrite. Louise has his child, who becomes ill and dies. The despair that lurks around every corner of this novel comes calling, and Louise slits her wrists. Mr. Graves takes Evalina into his home where his haughty wife and sullen daughter realize why this introverted
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adolescent has come to live with them and treat her accordingly. Evalina, seized by a willfulness she doesn’t understand, refuses to eat and burns herself with matches. Eventually, she is sent to Highland Hospital, courtesy of Mr. Graves. “We shall give you a place to grow up a bit, and keep you safe,” the director greets Evalina (21). Highland, in Smith’s telling, is enlightened for its time and humane by any standard. Lobotomies are never performed, no small exception to the norm in those days, and the convulsion and shock therapies are, by contrast, “the most effective and humane treatment for mental illness found in America at that time” (99). The Highland grounds are green and beautiful, the staff compassionate, sensible. No wonder Zelda Fitzgerald returns here willingly with each new bout of depression. And she is Highland’s star patient. Her thoughts may be impenetrable, her behavior often capricious and baffling, but she has a queenly aura that draws people to her, even in her episodes of willfulness and pique. Evalina is captivated by this lovely and mercurial woman, who seems to mistake her for her daughter. “This is not my story,” Evalina advises us, “in the sense that Mr. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was not Nick Carraway’s story, either – yet Nick Carraway is the narrator, is he not? Is any story not always the narrator’s story, in the end?” (3). One could argue the point, but in any case Evalina is the heroine of Guests On Earth, even if she doesn’t know it. Mrs. Fitzgerald’s role is catalytic, inspirational; her “extraordinary beauty, that quality of intense and shimmering life that animated her when she was truly ‘on’” awakens something