Boyd’s words would prove to be prophetic.
After publishing his second novel, Fitzgerald was ready to throw in the towel. Fitzgerald and Zelda shuffled themselves back and forth across the country from St. Paul to New York and back again. “I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky in New York City: I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again. My third novel, if I ever write another, will I am sure be black as death with gloom,” he wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins in 1921. “I am sick alike of life, liquor and literature.” Two years later, he drove Perkins into a pond “because it seemed more fun” than following the curve of the road. (Neither drowned.)
His next book, The Great Gatsby, is now regarded as his masterpiece. The book was not initially as commercially successful as his earlier novels. Not that it mattered: Fitzgerald bragged to his friend Ernest Hemingway that the Post was paying him “$4000 a screw” for his short stories.
Hemingway in turn tried to dissuade his friend from wasting his talents writing for magazines, which demanded cheap melodrama. “You could have and can make enough to live on writing novels,” Hemingway wrote. “You damned fool.”
While Lord Byron’s legacy spread across Europe in part because he did little to dissuade the public that the dashing, fast-living heroes of his books were stand-ins for the author, Fitzgerald was well aware of the pitfalls of such a strategy. “The public always associates the author with the principal character in the books he writes,” he said in a 1922 interview. “So, if the principal character takes an occasional drink or winks an eye at a pretty woman the author of the book necessarily must be a low fellow with a morality of a libertine and the taste of a barfly. Any extraordinary person in the mind of the ordinary man must have a thirst like a camel and a belly the size of an elephant.”
Fitzgerald couldn’t write while drinking. “For me, narcotics are deadening to work. I can understand anyone drinking coffee to get a stimulating effect, but whiskey—oh, no,” he said. When a reporter told him that This Side of Paradise didn’t read as if it were written on coffee, Fitzgerald said, “It wasn’t. You’ll laugh, but it was written on Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola bubbles up and fizzes inside enough to keep me awake.”
In 1926, journalist John Chapin Mosher wrote, “The popular picture of a blond boy scribbling off bestsellers in odd moments between parties is nonsense. Fitzgerald is a very grave, hardworking man, and shows it.” As if to disprove Mosher’s point, after receiving a movie offer for one of his novels, Fitzgerald got drunk in his hotel room and left the bath water on, flooding the entire room.
From 1924 through 1930, the Fitzgeralds bounced back and forth between their homeland and Europe. They were fond of Paris, a popular home away from home for many of the Lost Generation writers and artists. But the good times wouldn’t last.
By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the United States was mired in the Great Depression. In 1936, Fitzgerald talked about New York City’s decline in the 1920s, but he could very well have been talking about his own career. “The tempo of the city had changed sharply. The uncertainties of 1920 were drowned in a steady golden roar,” he said. As the decade roared on, the parties grew bigger. “The morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper. Most of my friends drank too much—the more they were in tune to the times the more they drank.”
“It was very strange the way Fitzgerald’s career was so much a function of the decade,” Jay McInerney told Salon. “His twenties were the twenties. By the time the stock market crashed, Zelda was losing her mind and he was disappearing inside the bottle basically. It’s a terrible story. He became a symbol of the time, then he was crucified when people became disenchanted with their own excesses. The gin-swilling golden boy morphed into the apocryphal stockbroker jumping out of the window.”
When Fitzgerald was interviewed by Michel Mok for the New York Post on his fortieth birthday, he had long been stripped of his bravado. “A writer like me must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star,” he said. “It’s an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothing-can-happen-to-me, nothing-can-harm-me, nothing-can-touch-me. I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip.”
His two-decade-long romance with Zelda is undoubtedly one of the blows that caused him to lose his grip on life. Fitzgerald struggled to support the lavish lifestyle that his wife expected, supplementing his novel-writing income with short stories and screenplay work that made him a sellout in Hemingway’s eyes.
Zelda engaged in an extramarital affair that shook Scott to his core. During a couples therapy session, Fitzgerald told his wife, “Our sexual relations were very pleasant and all that until I got the idea you were ditching me. They were all very nice to you, weren’t they?”
Zelda’s response: “Well, I am glad you considered them satisfactory.”
Fitzgerald’s drinking problem was also well documented. “Of course you’re a rummy,” Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald. “But no more than most good writers are.” In his later years, Fitzgerald would introduce himself as “F. Scott Fitzgerald, the well-known alcoholic.”
Fitzgerald went in and out of hospitals for years, as various doctors tried to treat him for his alcoholism. One time a doctor in New York gave him a quarter-pint measuring cup to ration out his daily intake of gin. He was headed to an early grave, the doctor warned. Fitzgerald nodded, and took the measuring cup with him on his train ride home. In Baltimore, he stopped at a friend’s house and drank two pints of gin—carefully rationed out into separate quarter-pint cups, of course.
Other days, when he wanted to dry out from gin, he would down as many as thirty twelve-ounce bottles of beer in a day. “I have drunk too much and that is certainly slowing me up,” Fitzgerald wrote. “On the other hand, without drink I do not know whether I could have survived this time.” Blind to the massive quantities of liquor that he was imbibing, he mocked the idea that he was an alcoholic. “The assumption that all my troubles are due to drink is a little too easy,” he once wrote. But it would be impossible to deny the hundreds of empty beer bottles that were piling up in his office.
Zelda was absent as her husband cracked up. Her illness—believed to be exhaustion or hysteria at first, and later diagnosed as schizophrenia—slowly sucked the life out of her. During inpatient treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore in 1932, she spent her time working on a novel, which she finished in under thirty days. The resulting manuscript, a semiautobiographical account of her life with her husband titled Save Me the Waltz, was published later that year by Scribner, which was also her husband’s publisher.
The novel failed to sell half its printing of three thousand. Zelda had begun work on a second book about her psychiatric experiences, but she abandoned it after Scott called her a “third-rate writer.”
Zelda was hospitalized again and again, each time for longer and longer periods of time. Eventually she was so ill that she was permanently hospitalized. In a heartbreaking letter, Zelda wrote:
I am sorry too that there should be nothing to greet you but an empty shell. The thought of the effort you have made over me, the suffering this nothing has cost would be unendurable to any save a completely vacuous mechanism. Had I any feelings they would all be bent in gratitude to you and in sorrow that of all my life there should not even be the smallest relic of the love and beauty that we started with to offer you at the end.
Now that there isn’t any more happiness and home is gone and there isn’t even any past and no emotions but those that were yours where there could be my comfort—it is a shame that we should have met in harshness and coldness where there was once so much tenderness and so many dreams ...
I want you to be happy—if there were any justice you would be happy. Maybe you will be anyway ...
I love you anyway even if there isn’t any me or any love or even any life.
> I love you.
Scott never gave up hope on Zelda, at least not entirely. He would kidnap her away from the hospital when she was well, but her ability to function in the real world decreased over the years. On one occasion, Scott watched Zelda dance by herself. Nora Flynn, a friend of Scott’s, said of the incident, “I shall never forget the tragic, frightful look on Scott’s face as he watched her. They had loved each other. Now it was dead. But he still loved that love and hated to give it up—that was what he continued to nurse and cherish.”
Fitzgerald’s downward spiral, both in his life and in his writing, was obvious to those around him. “Scott died inside himself at around the age of thirty to thirty-five and his creative powers died somewhat later,” Hemingway wrote. After Fitzgerald penned a series of self-deprecating articles for Esquire exposing his broken character to the world, Hemingway wrote a poem about his friend, “to be read at the casting of Scott Fitzgerald’s balls into the sea.”
Affairs with Dorothy Parker and Sheilah Graham during the final years of Fitzgerald’s life failed to revive any of his lost spirit. As he watched his wife vanish and saw his own health decline, he tried, several times, to commit suicide. Even though he never succeeded, he never fully recovered his zest for life after his failed attempts. “When you once get to the point where you don’t care whether you live or die—as I did—it’s hard to come back to life,” he wrote.
The New York Post’s Mok asked Fitzgerald what happened to the gin-soaked flappers who populated his novels This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby, the men and women he had immortalized as the Jazz Age. “You know as well as I do what has happened to them,” Fitzgerald said. “Some became brokers and threw themselves out of windows. Others became bankers and shot themselves. Still others became newspaper reporters. And a few became successful authors.” At this last mention, his face twitched. “Successful authors!” he cried, pouring himself a drink. “Oh, my God, successful authors!”
Fitzgerald died four years later at the age of forty-four after suffering two heart attacks. His four novels were out of print and his name forgotten. His final royalty statement was in the amount of $13.13.
Scholars are split on whether he was killed by his alcoholism or by tuberculosis. He had been expecting a visit from death. He’d come a long way since his heyday, when he lit cigarettes with burning five-dollar bills. About his final years spent working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, he wrote, “What I am doing here is the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better.”
At his funeral, his friend Dorothy Parker stood over his casket. “The poor son of a bitch,” she said, quoting a famous line from The Great Gatsby.
Zelda died in a fire at an Asheville, North Carolina, mental hospital in 1948, and is buried with her husband. “The story of their marriage is one of the great love stories of our time,” their granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, said. “We should all be so lucky to stay so in love through so many tragedies. The tragedies were there, but the love survived it.”
12
Flapper Verse
“I don’t care what is written about me so long as it isn’t true.”
—DOROTHY PARKER
Before Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) became the talk of the town (and the country), she was simply Dorothy Rothschild, a native Manhattanite who had the “misfortune” of being born in New Jersey at her family’s summer home. She went on to experience worse misfortunes, however: her childhood was riddled with the specter of death. By the time she was twenty, she had lost her mother, her stepmother, her uncle (on the Titanic), and, finally, her father.
In 1914, she sold her first poem (to Vanity Fair) and became an editorial assistant at Vogue, the beginning of a long career in magazine publishing. Parker published her short fiction in The New Yorker and worked as an editor for various magazines. Vanity Fair managing editor Frank Crowninshield said that Parker had “the quickest tongue imaginable, and I need not to say the keenest sense of mockery.” Among Parker’s early influences were Decadents such as Verlaine and Rimbaud. She was especially fond of Oscar Wilde, whom she considered a kindred spirit.
She married Edwin Pond Parker II, a stockbroker, in 1917. They were only together for a brief time (“five minutes,” she joked) when he went to Europe to fight in the First World War. In 1919, Parker joined her colleagues Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood (among others) for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan—almost every day, for nearly ten years. They became known as the Algonquin Round Table (also known as the Vicious Circle). This merry band of misfit writers and reporters played up each other’s witty personalities in their separate syndicated newspaper columns.
Meanwhile, Edwin returned home from the war a morphine addict and alcoholic. Parker separated from him shortly thereafter, though she too would soon descend into alcoholism.
While Parker began the Roaring Twenties a teetotaler who had rarely taken more than a sip of alcohol, she slowly increased her drinking to the point where she was using tuberose—a perfume used by undertakers to mask the stench of death—to hide the smell of alcohol that lingered on her breath. She also smoked three packs of Chesterfield cigarettes a day.
In her autobiographical short story, “Big Blonde,” she described her own descent into alcoholism. “She commenced drinking alone, little short drinks all through the day,” Parker wrote. “She was never noticeably drunk and seldom nearly sober. It required a large daily allowance to keep her misty-minded. Too little, and she was achingly melancholy.”
Parker’s drink of choice was scotch, though any drink would do. When she was asked once what she would like for breakfast, she said, “Just something light and easy to fix. How about a dear little whiskey sour? Make it a double, while you’re up.”
She had affairs with playwright Charles MacArthur and publisher Seward Collins, among others. Parker loved them, she said, until they loved her. She played off her sex life as a joke. “One more drink and I’ll be under the host,” she wrote in a poem.
Soon, Parker learned she was pregnant. The father was MacArthur, whom she had already broken off relations with. After aborting the pregnancy, Parker deadpanned, “Serves me right for putting all my eggs in one bastard.”
She became seriously depressed following the abortion and affair, attempting suicide (her first of at least half a dozen tries). When someone suggested (as a joke) that she should have cut deeper if she had really meant to kill herself, she responded that it was her estranged husband’s fault. “The trouble was Eddie hadn’t even been able to sharpen his own razors,” she said.
It’s difficult to gauge how serious her attempts were. One time, she ordered room service before slitting her wrists, thereby ensuring that she would be found in her hotel room in time to save her from bleeding to death. Another time, she threw a glass through her bedroom window first so that someone would show up to investigate the commotion. When Benchley visited her in the hospital after one of her attempts, he told her, “Dottie, if you don’t stop this sort of thing, you’ll make yourself sick.” Yet outside of one doctor who treated her in the 1920s, Parker never sought psychiatric treatment for her ongoing battle with depression. “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” she is alleged to have said—a misattribution, but a fitting one given Parker’s love of wordplay and alcohol.
She moved to France in 1926. “Everybody did that then,” she said. Parker’s objective in France was to collect her poems and write new verse for her first book, under contract to Scribner.
She left New York City on the same ship as Ernest Hemingway, who had been visiting the city to sell his novels to Scribner, publisher of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald. Parker was an enormous fan of Hemingway. “He is, to me, the greatest living writer of short stories,” she once wrote. When someone claimed her praise was overblown, she quipped, “Maybe this would do better: ‘Ernest Hemingway is, to me, the greatest American short story writer who lives in Paris most of the time but goes to Switz
erland to ski, served with the Italian Army during the World War, has been a prizefighter and has fought bulls, is coming to New York in the spring, is in his early thirties, has a black mustache, and is still waiting for that two hundred francs I lost to him at bridge.’”
When Hemingway deboarded the ship in Normandy, he shouted up to Parker that he didn’t have a typewriter with him—so she tossed hers overboard to him. Of course, this now meant that she didn’t have one. “Good god,” she said, realizing this. “I have just thrown away my only means of livelihood!”
Thankfully, she purchased a new typewriter in France in order to finish her poetry collection. The resulting book, Enough Rope, was published in December 1926. At a time when a modest-selling book was likely to sell no more than five thousand copies, Parker’s book of poetry sold a remarkable forty-seven thousand copies in its first year. The critical response was more ... measured. The New York Times dismissed Enough Rope as frivolous “flapper verse,” and Hemingway satirized her in an unpublished poem of his own dedicated to “a Tragic Poetess—Nothing in her life became her like her almost leaving of it.”
Parker’s success built upon that of Pulitzer Prize winner Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), who had also raised eyebrows by flaunting her promiscuous sex life and airing her dirty laundry in verse. “I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” Parker once said, “unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.”
“In America it has always been extremely difficult to cause a sensation by publishing a poem,” Millay biographer Daniel Mark Epstein wrote. But Poe did it with “The Raven” in 1845, and Millay did it in 1912 with a 214-line poem called “Renascence.” The poem, published in a literary anthology, thrust the twenty-year-old Millay into the spotlight.
Literary Rogues Page 10