by Gore Vidal
Precocious talents mature slowly if at all. Despite youthful success, there is something “hurried,” as Fitzgerald put it, about his beginnings. Hurried and oddly inauspicious: the soldier who never fought (at one point he served under Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower—what did they talk about?) and the athlete who never competed. Yet, at twenty-one, Fitzgerald wrote Wilson: “God! How I miss my youth—that’s only relative of course but already lines are beginning to coarsen in other people and that’s the sure sign. I don’t think you ever realized at Princeton the childlike simplicity that lay behind all my petty sophistication and my lack of a real sense of honor.” Even before Fitzgerald had a past to search for, he was on the prowl for lost time, “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
The most curious aspect of Fitzgerald’s early days was his relationship with Monsignor Sigourney Webster Fay at the Newman School. Fitzgerald was an uncommonly bright and pretty boy and, from the tone of the letters that Fay wrote him, pederasty was very much in the air. At one point, in 1917, Fitzgerald was to accompany Fay on a mission to Russia in order to bring the Greek Orthodox Church back to Rome. But the Bolsheviks intervened. Even so, the whole project has a Corvo-esque dottiness that is appealing, and one wonders to what extent Fitzgerald understood the nature of his loving friend whose assistant at the Newman School, Father William Hemmick (“with his silver-buckled pumps and cassocks tailored in Paris”), was to end his days in Rome, surrounded by golden ephebes, a practicing fairy, whose apotheosis was to come that marvelous day when, with all the gravity and splendor that robes by Lanvin can bestow, Monsignor Hemmick, in the very teeth, as it were, of the Vicar of Christ on earth, united in marriage, before the cameras of all the world, Tyrone Power and Linda Christian. One thing about Scott, he was show-biz from the start. Fay appears as Father Darcy in This Side of Paradise. Fitzgerald’s letters to Fay have vanished. Professor Bruccoli tells us that “they are believed to have been destroyed by Fay’s mother after his death.”
Since many of these letters deal with the personality of Fitzgerald (his drinking, marriage, friendships), it is not entirely idle to speculate—but pretty idle, even so—on Fitzgerald’s sex life. There are very few youths as handsome as Fitzgerald who go unseduced by men or boys in the sort of schools that he attended. Zelda’s occasional accusations that Fitzgerald was homosexual have usually been put down to the fact that she was either off her rocker or, mounted on that rocker, she was eager to wound Fitzgerald, to draw psychic blood. In a position paper which Fitzgerald may or may not have sent Zelda when she was hospitalized, he wrote: “The nearest I ever came to leaving you was when you told me you [thought] that I was a fairy in the Rue Palatine….” The answer to that one is, stay away from the Rue Palatine.
Unfortunately, the street had its fascination for both of them. Zelda was drawn to Madame, her ballet teacher, while Fitzgerald made the acquaintance of a Paris tough (in the Rue Palatine?) and brought him back to America as a butler and “sparring partner.” In any case, Zelda managed to so bug her husband on the subject that one day in Paris when he came to take Morley Callaghan’s arm, he suddenly let go. “It was like holding on to a cold fish. You thought I was a fairy, didn’t you?” In That Summer in Paris Callaghan says that he wished that he had been “more consoling, more demonstrative with him that night.”
Whatever Fitzgerald’s sexual balance, there is no doubt that he was totally absorbed in Zelda. There is little doubt that he was impotent a good deal of the time because anyone who drinks as much as Fitzgerald drank will lose, temporarily at least, the power of erection. In Papa: A Personal Memoir, Hemingway’s son, an M.D., has made this point about his own hard-drinking father.
“One of the many ironies that inform the career of F. Scott Fitzgerald is that the writer who died ‘forgotten’ in 1940 is the most fully documented American author of this century.” Professor Bruccoli rather smacks his lips in the introduction to the Correspondence. “We know more about Fitzgerald than about any of his contemporaries because he preserved the material….The best Fitzgerald scholar of us was F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Typing out these words I have a sense of perfect madness. Scholar of Fitzgerald? One sees the need for scholars of Dante, Rabelais, Shakespeare. But scholar of a contemporary popular writer who needs no introduction? Isn’t this all a bit out of proportion? Are the academic mills now so huge and mindless that any writer of moderate talent and notoriety is grist? All the time wasted in collecting every scrap of paper that Fitzgerald scribbled on might be better spent in trying to understand, say, the nature of that society which produced the Fitzgerald who wrote those letters. But today’s literary scholars are essentially fact-collectors, scholar-squirrels for whom every season’s May.
That said, one must be grateful to this particular scholar-squirrel for publishing sixty-two of Zelda’s letters to Fitzgerald. Like all her other writings, the letters are both beautiful and evocative. After a frantic attempt to become a ballerina, Zelda went clinically mad. From various sanitariums she did her best to tell Fitzgerald what going mad is like: “Every day it seems to me that things are more barren and sterile and hopeless—In Paris, before I realized that I was sick, there was a new significance to everything: stations and streets and façades of buildings—colors were infinite; part of the air, and not restricted by the lines that encompassed them and lines were free of the masses they held….Then the world became embryonic in Africa—and there was no need for communication. The Arabs fermenting in the vastness; the curious quality of their eyes and the smell of ants; a detachment as if I was on the other side of a black gauze—a fearless small feeling, and then the end at Easter….” (This quotation is from Nancy Milford’s Zelda.) “I would have liked to dance in New York this fall, but where am I going to find again these months that dribble into the beets of the clinic garden?” And “I have been living in vaporous places peopled with one-dimensional figures and tremulous buildings until I can no longer tell an optical illusion from a reality…that head and ears incessantly throb and roads disappear….Was it fun in Paris? Who did you see there and was the Madeleine pink at five o’clock and did the fountains fall with hollow delicacy into the framing of space in the Place de la Concorde and did the blue creep out from behind the Colonades of the rue de Rivoli through the grill of the Tuileries and was the Louvre gray and metallic in the sun and did the trees hang brooding over the cafés and were there lights at night and the click of saucers and the auto horns that play de Bussey….”
A master of weather and landscape, Zelda was almost as good with people. She was one of the first to realize that Hemingway was “phony as a rubber check.” When she read A Farewell to Arms in manuscript, she said that the prose sounded “pretty damned Biblical” while The Sun Also Rises was “bullfighting, bull-slinging and bullshit.” Of Edmund Wilson, she wrote: “Bunny’s mind is too speculative. Nothing but futures, of the race, of an idea, of politics, of birth control. Just constant planning and querulous projecting and no execution. And he drinks so much that he cares more than he would.” No doubt, Fitzgerald was as charmed by the letters as we are. But he also understood her almost as well as he did his lifelong subject, himself. “Her letters,” he wrote, “are tragically brilliant on all matters except those of actual importance. How strange to have failed as a social creature—even criminals do not fail that way—they are the law’s ‘Loyal Opposition’ so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers, carrying around broken dialogues that they cannot read.”
Zelda and Scott. In a curious way Zelda and Scott were meant to be perfectly combined in Plato’s sense. Since this is not possible for us, each became shadow to the other and despite mutual desire and pursuit, no whole was ever achieved.
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In July of 1922, Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald were offered the leads in a movie version of This Side of Paradise. Andrew Turnbull says that they turned down the offer. In 1927, Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald spent
two months in Hollywood where he was contracted to write an original screenplay for Constance Talmadge. Although the screenplay was not used, Fitzgerald got his first look at the place where he was to live and die. In 1931, he came back to Hollywood for five weeks’ work on Red-Headed Woman at MGM. Although Fitzgerald’s script was not used, he got to know the boy genius Irving Thalberg, whose “tasteful” films (The Barretts of Wimpole Street) were much admired in those days. On one occasion (recorded in the story “Crazy Sunday”) Fitzgerald held riveted a party at the Thalbergs with a drunken comedy number. Movie stars do not like to be upstaged by mere writers, especially drunk writers. But next day, the hostess, the ever-gracious Norma Shearer, wired Fitzgerald (no doubt after an apologetic mea culpa that has not survived), “I thought you were one of the most agreeable persons at our tea.” In Hollywood that means you’re fired; he was fired.
All Americans born between 1890 and 1945 wanted to be movie stars. On Scott Fitzgerald’s first trip to Hollywood, he was given a screen test (where is it?). As early as 1920, Fitzgerald tells how “summoned out to Griffith’s studio on Long Island, we trembled in the presence of the familiar faces of the Birth of a Nation….The world of the picture actors was like our own in that it was in New York, but not of it.” Later, Zelda’s passion to become a ballerina was, at its core, nothing except a desire to be A Star. But like so many romantics, then and now, the Fitzgeralds did not want to go through the grim boring business of becoming movie stars. Rather they wanted to live as if they were inside a movie. Cut to Antibes. Dissolve to the Ritz in Paris. Fade to black in Hollywood. Each lived long enough and suffered enough to realize that movies of that sort are to be made or seen, not lived. But by then she was in a sanitarium full-time and he was a movie hack.
In “Pasting It Together” (March 1936) Fitzgerald, aged forty, made note of a cultural change that no one else seemed to have noticed.
I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration. As long past as 1930, I had a hunch that the talkies would make even the best-selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures.
Fitzgerald was right. Forty-four years later, it is the film school that attracts the bright young people while the writers’ workshop caters to those whose futures will not be literary but academic. Today, certainly, no new novels by anyone commands the sort of world attention that a new film automatically gets. Yet, for reasons obscure to me, novelists still continue to echo Glenway Wescott, who wrote that Fitzgerald’s hunch was “a wrong thought indeed for a novelist.” I should have thought it was not wrong but inevitable.
A decade later, when I wrote that the film had replaced the novel as the central art form of our civilization, I was attacked for having said that the novel was dead and I was sent reading lists of grand new novels. Obviously, the serious novel or art-novel or whatever one wants to call the novel-as-literature will continue to be written; after all, poetry is flourishing without the patronage of the common reader. But it is also a fact that hardly anyone outside of an institution is ever apt to look at any of these literary artifacts. Worse, if the scholar-squirrel prevails, writers will not be remembered for what they wrote but for the Cautionary Tales that their lives provide. Meanwhile the sharp and the dull watch movies; discuss movies; dream movies. Films are now shown in the classroom because it is easier to watch Pabst than to read Dreiser. At least, it was easier. There is now some evidence that the current television-commercial generation is no longer able to watch with any degree of concentration a two-hour film without breaks. Thus, Pabst gives way to the thirty-second Oil of Olay spot.
In our epoch, only a few good writers have been so multitalented or so well situated in time and place that they could use film as well as prose. Jean Cocteau, Graham Greene….who else? Certainly not Faulkner, Sartre, Isherwood, Huxley. In the heyday of the Hollywood studios no serious writer ever got a proper grip on the system. But then few wanted to. They came to town to make money in order to buy time to write books. But Fitzgerald was more prescient than many of his contemporaries. He realized that the novel was being superseded by the film; he also realized that the film is, in every way, inferior as an art form to the novel—if indeed such a collective activity as a movie can be regarded as an art at all. Even so, Fitzgerald was still enough of an artist or romantic egotist to want to create movies. How to go about it?
In those days, the producer was all-powerful and everyone else was simply a technician to be used by the producer. Naturally, there were “stars” in each technical category. A super-hack writer like Ben Hecht could influence the making of a film in a way that, often, the director-technician could not or, as Fitzgerald put it in a letter to Matthew Josephson (March 11, 1938),
In the old days, when movies were a stringing together of the high points in the imagination of half a dozen drunken ex-newspapermen, it was true that the whole thing was the director. He coordinated and gave life to the material—he carried the story in his head. There is a great deal of carry-over from those days, but the situation of Three Comrades, where Frank Borzage had little more to do than be a sort of glorified cameraman, is more typical of today. A Bob Sherwood picture, for instance, or a Johnny Mahin script, could be shot by an assistant director or a script girl, and where in the old days an author would have jumped at the chance of becoming a director, there are now many, like Ben Hecht and the aforesaid Mahin, who hate the eternal waiting and monotony of the modern job.
Although Fitzgerald underplays the power of the producer (in the case of Three Comrades the witty and prodigious writer-director Joe Mankiewicz), he is right about the low opinion everyone had of the director and the importance, relatively speaking, of the super-hack writers who pre-directed, as it were, each film by incorporating in their scripts the exact way that the film was to be shot. This was still pretty much the case when I was a writer under contract to MGM a dozen years after Fitzgerald’s death. Scott was still remembered, more or less fondly.
“But,” as the Wise Hack at the Writers’ Table said, “there wouldn’t’ve been all this revival stuff, if he’d looked like Wallace Beery.” The Wise Hack had only contempt for Edmund Wilson’s labors to restore Fitzgerald’s reputation. “The Emperor’s tailor,” he snapped. At the Writers’ Table we all snapped or riposted or even, sometimes, like Fitzgerald, shrilled.
When I said that I’d never much liked Fitzgerald’s face in the early photographs but found the later ones touching because he always looked as if he was trying very hard not to scream, the Wise Hack said, “No. Not scream, whimper. There was never such a whiner. God knows why. He had a good time around here. Joe admired him. Got him a credit. Got his contract renewed. Whole thing started with Eddie Knopf who was queer for writers. It was him who talked the studio into taking Fitzgerald, the trick of the week after all that shit he shoveled in Esquire about what a drunk he was. Then Joe puts him on Three Comrades because he thought he could get some good period stuff out of him. Then when that didn’t work, Joe got old Ted Paramore to help out on the script. But that didn’t work either. First day on the set, Maggie Sullavan says, ‘I can’t say these lines,’ and so Joe has to rewrite the whole damned thing. So why should Scott be pissed off? He knew enough to know that in this business the writer is the woman.”
But Scott was pissed off at what Mankiewicz had done to the script of the only film on which Fitzgerald’s name was ever to appear and for him to get what is known in the trade as a credit (debit is usually the better word) was a giant step toward big money, autonomy, freedom or, as Fitzgerald wrote Zelda (Fall 1937), “If I can finish one exc
ellent picture to top Three Comrades I think I can bargain for better terms—more rest and more money.” To Beatrice Dance he wrote (November 27, 1937), “I’ve been working on a script of Three Comrades, a book that falls just short of the 1st rate (by Remarque)—it leans a little on Hemingway and others but tells a lovely tragic story.” To the same woman, a sadder if no wiser Fitzgerald wrote four months later, “Three Comrades, the picture I have just finished, is in production and though it bears my name, my producer could not resist the fascination of a pencil and managed to obliterate most signs of my personality.” To his mother-in-law, Fitzgerald wrote in the next month (April 23, 1938): “Three Comrades should be released within ten days, and a good third of that is absolutely mine.” But a few weeks later he wrote his sister-in-law: “Three Comrades is awful. It was entirely rewritten by the producer. I’d rather Zelda didn’t see it.”
But Zelda saw it and thought that a lot of it was very good even though
there isn’t any dramatic continuity—which robs the whole of suspense. I know it’s hard to get across a philosophic treatise on the screen, but it would have been better had there been the sense of some inevitable thesis making itself known in spite of the characters—or had there been the sense of characters dominated by some irresistible dynamic purpose. It drifts; and the dynamics are scattered and sporadic rather than cumulative or sustained.
Even in the loony bin, Zelda was a better critic than the ineffable Frank Nugent of The New York Times (who loved the picture) or Fitzgerald, who had written a so-so first draft of a film that was to be altered not only during a collaboration with one Ted (The Bitter Tea of General Yen) Paramore but, finally, redone by the producer Joe Mankiewicz.