They had achieved something more than a détente, however; an accommodation had been reached with the new terms that life had set. A few days after his thirty-sixth birthday, in September 1932, Fitzgerald wrote to a friend that he and Zelda “got through a lot and have some way to go; our united front is less a romance than a categorical imperative.” It was time to recognize that they could no longer “insist on a world which we will willingly let die, in which Zelda can’t live, which damn near ruined us both, which neither you nor any of our more gifted friends are yet sure of surviving.”
Once again, Scott could read the signs: survival was by no means a certainty. In August 1933 Zelda’s brother Anthony committed suicide; a month later, Ring Lardner died at forty-eight from tuberculosis exacerbated by acute alcoholism. By the end of that year, Scott finally finished Tender Is the Night. It was serialized in early 1934; in February, Zelda had another breakdown and was hospitalized again. She had taken up painting, and Scott helped organize an exhibition in New York that spring. On April 12, 1934, nine years and two days after the appearance of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald published Tender Is the Night, dedicated to Gerald and Sara Murphy for “many fêtes.” In 1933, he showed a visitor a manuscript nearly a foot high, and said: “There’s my new novel. I’ve written 400,000 words and thrown away three-fourths of it. Now I only have 15,000 words to write.” Then he exclaimed: “It’s good, good, good.” He pinned all his hopes on it.
Fitzgerald had plundered Zelda’s personal writing for his novel once more, this time taking the letters she had written him from the depths of her breakdown and turning them to useful account in his rendering of Nicole Diver’s madness. This took some effrontery, after his outrage at Zelda’s daring to use their “common store” of material in her novel. It was the writer at his most solipsistic, prepared to sacrifice anyone on the altar of his art. Doubtless he justified the betrayal with the obvious rationale, that the money earned would pay for her care. But it was also true that he had begun Tender much earlier and read Zelda drafts: from his perspective, Save Me the Waltz was often copying his original work.
Like Gatsby, however, Tender Is the Night received mixed reviews, more good than bad overall, but the book sold poorly and for Fitzgerald it was a crushing disappointment. The New York Times said the novel displayed Fitzgerald’s “most engaging qualities”: it was “clever and brilliantly surfaced, but it is not the work of a wise and mature novelist.” Once again his readers could not see past Fitzgerald’s bright surfaces. John Bishop said the book “was no advance on Gatsby”; Fitzgerald responded that its intention was entirely different. Whereas Gatsby was a “dramatic novel,” a “kind of tour de force,” Tender was “a philosophical or psychological novel,” a “confession of faith.” Comparing the two was like comparing a sonnet sequence and an epic. In Tender, he’d underplayed his “harrowing and highly charged material,” including incest and madness, whereas in Gatsby, “dealing with figures as remote as are a bootlegger-crook to most of us, I was not afraid of heightening and melodramatizing any scenes.”
Tender’s failure would push Fitzgerald over the edge—the edge over which Zelda, too, kept falling, as she continued intermittently to attempt suicide. In 1934, Scott wrote Zelda’s doctor, painfully trying to make sense of her illness, asking for a theory that might predict her breakdowns and discussing the psychiatric textbooks he’d been reading. The letter surely banishes any facile accusation that Fitzgerald was shoving Zelda into hospitals: “My great worry is that time is slipping by, life is slipping by, and we have no life. If she were an anti-social person who did not want to face life and pull her own weight that would be one story, but her passionate love of life and her absolute inability to meet it, seems so tragic that sometimes it is scarcely to be endured.” But no theories to explain Zelda’s illness emerged; they remained unable to help her in any consistent, meaningful way.
When Tender failed, Zelda wrote to Scott protectively, “Don’t worry about critics—what sorrow have they to measure by or what lilting happiness with which to compare these ecstatic passages?” Scott replied that she should focus only on recovering: “You and I have had wonderful times in the past, and the future is still brilliant with possibilities if you will keep up your morale . . . The only sadness is the living without you, without hearing the notes of your voice.” Hers was the only opinion that mattered, he said. All he hoped for was for her to come back to him: “I can carry most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand—and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and—I find it to be you and you only . . . Forget the past—what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven for ever and ever—even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you—turn gently in the waters through which you move and sail back.”
But Zelda could only continue to eddy in her dark waters: often lucid, calm, unfathomably brave; and then suddenly withdrawn into depression, aural hallucinations, or hysteria. “I wish I had been what I thought I was,” she wrote Scott: “and so debonnaire; and so debonnaire.”
Struggling to sell his writing, Fitzgerald plunged into an abyss of liquor. He was hospitalized four times by the end of 1935; trying to recover, he began to write the Esquire articles that would help invent confessional journalism. In the now-famous “Crack-Up” essays, published in early 1936, Fitzgerald describes how he had suddenly “cracked like an old plate,” losing all his illusions. In the three short articles he never mentions Zelda’s illness and flatly denies his own alcoholism, but spells out the effects of his defeat and tries to redefine himself as an artist. Three months later, his friend Hemingway, whose career he had helped launch and whose admiration he had always sought, mocked him publicly in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as “poor Scott Fitzgerald,” pathetically defined by his “romantic awe” of the rich. When Fitzgerald read the Esquire story, he demanded that Hemingway “please lay off me in print,” but his innate honesty and instinctive respect for art made him add, with his often astonishing generosity: “It’s a fine story—one of your best.”
A month later, a reporter named Michael Mok interviewed Fitzgerald on his fortieth birthday. The result was a brutal exposé, describing the former golden boy as a wasted man with trembling hands and pallid, “twitching face with its pitiful expression of a cruelly beaten child,” who made “frequent trips to a highboy, in a drawer of which lay a bottle.” Asked to comment on his generation, Fitzgerald told Mok: “‘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 . . . Successful authors!’ he cried. ‘Oh, my God, successful authors!’ He stumbled over to the highboy and poured himself another drink.’” When Fitzgerald saw the headline story (“THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE: SCOTT FITZGERALD, 40, ENGULFED IN DESPAIR”), he swallowed a handful of morphine pills, but survived.
Zelda had moved to Highland Hospital, in Asheville, North Carolina. After years of watching her try to recover, Fitzgerald no longer had any confidence that she would be able to resume an independent life: “I cannot live in the ghost town which Zelda has become,” he admitted. But still, he would not abandon her; they would remain joined in vital ways, and they would always love each other: “Supposing Zelda at best would be a lifelong eccentric, supposing that in two or three years there is certain to be a sinking, I am still haunted by the fact that if it were me, and Zelda were passing judgment, I would want her to give me a chance . . .” Zelda continued to write him loving letters from the hospital, concerned for his health, asking to see Scottie and expressing her devotion. Around the time of his breakdown she wrote to Scott remembering the days of their courtship, when they were “gold and happy all the way home.” But now happiness and home were lost, and even the golden past was being taken from her. She wished he were living in a picturesque cottage with Scottie nearby, and that he could have t
he happiness he deserved, she told him, because she loved him anyway, even though she was gone, and nothing else was left.
They were all clinging to the wreckage. “Me caring about no one nothing,” Fitzgerald wrote in his ledger for April 1936, as the last of the Crack-Up essays was published. Ring Lardner was dead, Zelda was lost. Hemingway had succumbed to his own myth; his drinking and depression would take longer to conquer him, but he would not escape either. Edmund Wilson was embarking on his third marriage, to Mary McCarthy; his alcoholism, while more functional than Fitzgerald’s, was also gathering pace and victims. The Murphys lost two of their three children in less than two years, one to meningitis, the other to tuberculosis. When Fitzgerald heard about the death of their second son in 1937, he wrote to the Murphys: “I can see another generation growing up around [their daughter] Honoria and an eventual peace somewhere, an occasional port of call as we all sail deathward. Fate can’t have any more arrows in its quiver for you that will wound like these.” In 1936, Burton Rascoe’s twenty-two-year-old son committed suicide at their home in upstate New York; filling out a Guggenheim application three years later, Rascoe wrote that his permanent address was Ferncliff Cemetery, Scarsdale—where his son was buried. Six months before his son’s suicide, Rascoe had written Fitzgerald a generous letter about the Crack-Up articles: “it is a magnificent and salutary thing for you to have written them,” Rascoe said, not for Fitzgerald’s readers but for the therapeutic value to Fitzgerald. They would surely inaugurate “a new period in which your enviable talents will flower into deeper and lovelier things than you have created hitherto.” Fitzgerald saved Rascoe’s letter, replying: “That was darn nice of you to write me that letter. Those kinds of gestures mean more to the recipient than he can well say. Best wishes always, Scott Fitz.”
Amid the sadness, Fitzgerald’s markets continued to shrink, and he needed to pay for Zelda’s care and for Scottie’s education and living expenses; she would soon enroll at Vassar. In 1937, deeply in debt, Fitzgerald went to Hollywood to try to reverse his fortunes once more. “I feel a certain excitement,” he wrote Scottie from the train, remembering his first “Hollywood venture” exactly ten years earlier. “Hollywood made a big fuss over us and the ladies all looked very beautiful to a man of thirty. I honestly believed that with no effort on my part I was a sort of magician with words—an odd delusion on my part when I had worked so desperately hard to develop a hard, colorful prose style. Total result—a great time & no work.” This time would be different, that was clear—not least because no one was making a fuss over Scott Fitzgerald anymore; he was finding it difficult to get published at all. A train’s movement had the rhythm, he wrote, of finding and losing, finding and losing.
In Hollywood Fitzgerald suddenly faced a ghost from the past. Ted Paramore had been working for some years as a screenwriter and was assigned to collaborate with Scott on an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades. The association was not happy. Fitzgerald would not give the dilettante he had known equal say; viewing Paramore as a hack, he was determined to retain control. “I didn’t write four out of four best sellers or a hundred and fifty top-price short stories out of the mind of a temperamental child without taste or judgment,” he told Paramore angrily. Three Comrades became one of the biggest hits of 1938 and would be Fitzgerald’s only screen credit. When Zelda heard that they were working together after all those years, she told Scott, “Give Paramour my regards and affectionate remembrances—Tell him how good looking he is—We used to have a lot of fun.”
In the summer of 1937, Fitzgerald met the twenty-eight-year-old Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham. He was immediately struck by her resemblance to Zelda and would use the uncanny likeness in The Last Tycoon: “Smiling faintly at him from not four feet away was the face of his dead wife, identical even to the expression. Across the four feet of moonlight, the eyes he knew looked back at him, a curl blew a little on a familiar forehead; the smile lingered, changed a little according to pattern; the lips parted—the same. An awful fear went over him, and he wanted to cry aloud.” Sheilah Graham was, as it happened, a self-invented woman, the platonic conception of Lily Shiel, a girl who had grown up in a slum in the East End of London before inventing an aristocratic background for herself as an upper-class English woman and moving to Hollywood.
Over the seven years since Zelda’s breakdown, Scott had had a few brief affairs, but Sheilah Graham was the first with whom he entered a comparatively stable relationship. She tried to help him stop drinking; in the beginning these attempts always ended in failure, and often in violence: he still turned nasty when drunk. Making it clear to Sheilah and others that divorce was not in question, Scott continued to support Zelda, who was lobbying to be released from Highland Hospital and go live with her mother in Montgomery, and to travel. Fitzgerald was wary, and frustrated by the expense this would entail. He wrote her a chastising letter explaining the dire state of their finances, which ended: “Oh, Zelda, this was to have been such a cold letter, but I don’t feel that way about you. Once we were one person and always it will be a little that way.” But Zelda was turning in her isolation and despair to God, embracing a religious zeal that would color the rest of her life.
On Christmas Eve 1938 Fitzgerald wrote to Max Perkins from California. His once-golden hair had faded to the ashy color of dying straw; his smile was deprecating, tremulous, uncertain, his eyes wilted and bloodshot. He would have been chain-smoking, as he always did those days, a filtered Raleigh providing the slight veil through which he now viewed the scene. He was not having a merry Christmas.
I have come to feel somewhat neglected. Isn’t my reputation being allowed to slip away? I mean what’s left of it. I am still a figure to many people and the number of times I still see my name in Time and New Yorker etc. make me wonder if it should be allowed to casually disappear—when there are memorial double-deckers to such fellows as Farrell and Steinbeck . . . The recession is over for awhile and I have the most natural ambition to see my stuff accessible to another generation . . . Unless you make some gesture of confidence I see my reputation dying on its feet from lack of nourishment . . . You can imagine how distasteful it is to blow my own horn like this but it comes from a deep feeling that something could be done if it is done at once, about my literary standing—always admitting that I have any at all.
What had prompted this protest was hearing that This Side of Paradise, which had launched his career with such verve almost twenty years earlier, had recently been allowed to go quietly out of print. “My God I am a forgotten man,” he wrote to Zelda. “Gatsby had to be taken out of the Modern Library because it didn’t sell, which was a blow.” Increasingly elegiac and wistful, he composed essays, letters, and stories memorializing his own life. “We have our tombstones to chisel,” he told Zelda in a letter he probably never sent, “and can’t blunt our tools stabbing you back, you ghosts, who can’t either clearly remember or cleanly forget.”
Meanwhile the voices grow fainter and fainter, he added in his notebooks: How is Zelda, how is Zelda—tell us—how is Zelda.
As The Great Gatsby draws to a close, Nick decides to leave the East, where he has discovered he doesn’t belong, and return home to the Middle West. West Egg now seems warped and phantasmagoric to him: “I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house—the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.” The tableau resembles a bacchanalian morality play, the spirit of the age embodied in the beautifully dressed corpse on a funeral bier, carelessness personified. Nick finds the East “haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction.”
Before he leaves Nick feels bound to end things with Jordan, although he has not seen her since the night of the accident that killed Myrtle. He is trying to be careful, he says, “and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.” The ocean may sweep you toward a new destiny, but Nick is going back, not forward. When they meet, Jordan reminds him of a conversation they once had about driving a car: “You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.” Jordan thinks she was careless, but that they were both bad drivers. Nick won’t accept the charge of having been dishonorable: “I’m thirty,” he says. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.” But Jordan may have a point: she certainly made a wrong guess.
The last person Nick sees before he leaves is Tom Buchanan. They bump into each other, and Nick asks Tom what he said to George Wilson the afternoon that Wilson shot Gatsby and then himself. Nick is just guessing, but Tom’s expression shows him that he’s guessed right. On the fatal day, George Wilson came to the Buchanans’ house looking for the driver of the yellow car, and Tom gave him Gatsby’s name. Tom says defiantly: “What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car.” Nick takes refuge in the incommunicable one final time: “There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.” The final mistake in identity hovers, uncorrected: Daisy never told her husband that she was driving the car. Daisy was the person who truly sacrificed Gatsby, as she deceived even Tom.
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby Page 34