Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Fitzgerald wrote two of his best stories, “The Ice Palace” (Post, May 1920) and “May Day” (Smart Set, July 1920), at the same time that he was turning out weak commercial stuff.29 In “The Ice Palace,” he imaginatively portrayed Zelda’s negative reaction to St. Paul—before she had ever been there. The story opens with a luminous description of Montgomery (called Tarleton, Georgia), which immediately establishes the languorous mood, and uses military metaphors to suggest that the South will be placed in opposition to the North: “The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light. The Butterworth and Larkin houses flanking were intrenched behind great stodgy trees; only the Happer house took the full sun, and all day long faced the dusty road-street with a tolerant kindly patience.”

  After the scene is effectively established, Sally Carrol Happer talks to her visiting fiancé, Harry Bellamy, in a Confederate cemetery, which for Fitzgerald had strong historical and personal associations. It represents courtliness and chivalry, tradition and dignity, and a glorious past. Scott had proposed to Zelda in a Montgomery cemetery. Its atmosphere was evoked in one of her most romantic letters, which influenced his portrayal of Sally Carrol’s feelings about the South:

  I’ve spent to-day in the grave-yard—It really isn’t a cemetery, you know—trying to unlock a rusty iron vault built in the side of the hill. It’s all washed and covered with weepy, watery blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes—sticky to touch with a sickening odor. . . . Why should graves make people feel in vain? . . . All the broken columns and clasped hands and doves and angels mean romances. . . . Isn’t it funny how, out of a row of Confederate soldiers, two or three will make you think of dead lovers and dead loves.

  When Sally Carrol travels to the unnamed northern city (clearly based on St. Paul, which actually had a palace made of ice), Harry boasts about John J. Fishburn (i.e., James J. Hill), the “greatest wheat man in the Northwest, and one of the greatest financiers in the country.” Zelda had complained that Scott repeatedly said she should be locked in a tower like a princess. And Harry proudly shows Sally Carrol the frozen palace, built like a fortified castle, out of blocks of the clearest ice: “It was three stories in the air, with battlements and embrasures and narrow icicled windows, and the innumerable electric lights inside made a gorgeous transparency of the great central hall.” But to Sally Carrol, it is merely a depressing pagan altar to the God of Snow.

  She finds the town dismal; misses the affectionate flattery that a young lady expects to receive in the South; feels hostile to the women in Harry’s family, who disapprove of her smoking and bobbed hair. And she is repelled by the thoroughly repressed, “righteous, narrow, and cheerless [people], without infinite possibilities for great sorrow and joy.” While visiting the ice palace, which she thinks is far more morbid than the cemetery, she gets lost and is terrified to find herself utterly “alone with this presence that came out of the North, the dreary loneliness that rose from ice-bound whalers in the Arctic seas, from smokeless, trackless wastes where were strewn the whitened bones of adventure.”30 Though safely rescued, Sally Carrol realizes that she can never marry Harry Bellamy, who has something of the ice palace in his heart. So she breaks her engagement and returns to the drowsy heat of the South.

  “May Day,” a more complex and ambitious story, has a tragic ending that disqualified it for the Post. It had to be sold for a much lower fee. The story takes place in New York on May 1, 1919, a few months after Fitzgerald had left the army and was trying to start a career in advertising and in writing. The shifting, episodic scenes in this long work capture the chaotic celebration of this holiday as the déclassé hero and his proletarian mistress become involved with a series of upper- and lower-class characters. The dominant themes, which emerge as the mood changes from idealism to disillusionment, are betrayal and violence, moral and financial bankruptcy.

  “May Day,” whose title puns on the international signal for distress, charts the tragic decline of Gordon Sterrett. He has lost his job and, desperate for cash, attempts to borrow money from a rich Yale friend, Philip Dean, so he can pay off a girl who is blackmailing him and begin his career as an artist. The two college friends present a striking contrast in dress, wealth, health and moral well-being, and their mutual embarrassment makes them hate each other. When Philip finally refuses the loan, Gordon, observing him closely, suddenly notices how much his upper teeth project.

  At this point the focus shifts to two proletarian soldiers, Gus Rose and Carrol Key (who has the middle names of Sally Happer and of Scott Fitzgerald). Just back from the war in Europe, they are trying to get some bootleg liquor from Key’s brother, a waiter at Delmonico’s, where the major characters converge. At this restaurant Edith Bradin, a former girlfriend of Gordon, has come to a Yale prom. As Edith admires herself and dances with her many beaux, her drunken date Peter Himmel talks to the two soldiers. Hearing about Edith from Philip Dean, the gloomy Gordon seeks her out, confesses his troubles and is rejected by her as brusquely as he had been by Dean. Edith then decides to visit her brother Henry, the editor of a Socialist newspaper, and Gordon is taken away from the party by his blackmailing girlfriend Jewel Hudson. While Edith is in the newspaper office, a mob of soldiers, who dislike the pacifistic and (in their eyes) pro-German Socialists, charge in, break Henry’s leg and kill Key by pushing him out of a high window.

  In yet another shift of mood, from tragedy to farce, Gus Rose, Peter Himmel, Philip Dean, Gordon Sterrett and Jewel Hudson, after drunken all-night parties, turn up the next morning at Childs’. Dean and Himmel, who has replaced Sterrett as Dean’s friend, are ejected from the restaurant for throwing hash at the customers—as Fitzgerald sometimes did. They then go to the Biltmore for breakfast, remove the signs from the coatroom doors and adopt the vaudevillian roles of Mr. In and Mr. Out. In this unreal “segment of a whirring, spinning world,” they practice their comic routine on the elevator man and conclude their surrealistic dialogue with Fitzgerald’s rare bilingual pun on Himmel’s German name:

  “What floor, please?” said the elevator man.

  “Any floor,” said Mr. In.

  “Top floor,” said Mr. Out.

  “This is the top floor,” said the elevator man.

  “Have another floor put on,” said Mr. Out.

  “Higher,” said Mr. In.

  “Heaven,” said Mr. Out.

  In ironic counterpoint to this witty dialogue, Gordon Sterrett wakes up in a cheap hotel room with a hangover and realizes that he has been trapped into marriage with Jewel. He buys a gun and—leaning on his drawing materials—shoots himself.

  Though the ending is rather forced and unconvincing, “May Day” remains an impressive story with a great number of carefully delineated characters. The subtly complicated plot is effectively placed in the social and political context of the May Day riots of 1919 when, Fitzgerald wrote, “the police rode down the demobilized country boys gaping at the orators in Madison Square.”31 But the story is personal as well as political. It conveys a powerful sense of loneliness and alienation, and poignantly describes what might have happened to Fitzgerald if he had failed to write his novel, lost his girl and succumbed to despair.

  Flappers and Philosophers, his first collection of stories, was dedicated to Zelda and appeared in September 1920 to capitalize on the tremendous success of This Side of Paradise. It contained “The Ice Palace” but not “May Day,” which was published too late to be included. The reviewers, slightly puzzled by this extremely uneven volume, were not nearly as enthusiastic as they had been about the novel. The New York Times complained that the “blatant tone of levity” almost drowned out “the perception of the literary substance” of Fitzgerald’s work, but acknowledged that he “is working out an idiom, and it is an idiom at once universal, American and individual.” The Chicago Sunday Tribune identified Fitzgerald as the laureate of the high-spirited younger generation: �
��There is something far more important than his popularity about Scott Fitzgerald. It is youth, uncompromising, unclothed, but not, as youth often is, dour and morbid. It is youth conscious of its powers and joyous in them.” But the New York Herald perceived the superficiality beneath Fitzgerald’s snappy dialogue and slick technique. His “faculty of characterizing people in a sentence in a way to make one thank Heaven one is not related to them; his facility in the use of the limited but pungent vocabulary of his type; his ingenuity in the hatching of unusual plots, all point to a case of cleverness in its most uncompromising form.”32 The next few years would test Fitzgerald’s ability to go beyond mere cleverness and prove that he could fulfill his potential as a serious writer.

  Chapter Five

  The Beautiful and Damned and Great Neck, 1922–1924

  I

  In November 1921 the Fitzgeralds moved from their water-damaged summer home in Dellwood to a late-Victorian house at 626 Goodrich Avenue, three blocks south of Summit Avenue, in St. Paul. While awaiting the appearance of his new novel, Fitzgerald worked on his play, The Vegetable. The winter was long, cold and melancholy. Sobered by the repressive atmosphere and by the responsibility of caring for a new baby, Zelda was not in the mood for parties and discouraged visitors. Both she and Scott found provincial life very boring. In early March 1922 they made a brief visit to New York for the publication of Scott’s novel.

  The Beautiful and Damned was gratefully dedicated to three early mentors—Shane Leslie, George Jean Nathan and Maxwell Perkins—“in appreciation of much literary help and encouragement.” The book covers the same prewar to postwar period (approximately 1910 to 1920) as This Side of Paradise, and also describes the personal history and genteel Romanticism of a wealthy and attractive young man. But while the earlier novel is witty, flippant and lighthearted, the later is ponderous and tragic, twice as long, less “literary” and more static. Its title suggests the protagonists’ movement from the pampered life of the beautiful to the suffering of the damned.

  The damnation (such as it is) is mainly caused by alcohol. Toward the end of the book the broken, debt-ridden hero, Anthony Patch, “awoke in the morning so nervous that Gloria [his wife] could feel him trembling in the bed before he could muster enough vitality to stumble into the pantry for a drink. He was intolerable now except under the influence of liquor, and as he seemed to decay and coarsen under her eyes, Gloria’s soul and body shrank away from him.” Anthony’s drunken decline and unhappy marriage reflect Fitzgerald’s personal problems and anticipate those of Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night.

  Money plays as dominant a role in this novel as it does in the Naturalistic works of Dreiser and Norris, whom Fitzgerald greatly admired. Anthony’s relentless pursuit of money is very different from Amory Blaine’s long denunciation of capitalism in This Side of Paradise. The middle name of the cynical, decadent and potentially wealthy hero, Anthony Comstock Patch, ironically alludes both to Anthony Comstock, a fierce contemporary crusader against vice, and to the Comstock Lode, the most valuable silver deposit in America, found near Virginia City, Nevada, in 1859. Anthony is born into a wealthy family, graduates from Harvard and lives on the expectation of a multi-million-dollar fortune. He is ruined, however, by having sufficient income so that he does not have to work, but not quite enough to maintain his luxurious way of life. The word “clean” recurs throughout the novel to describe beautiful or elegant women and mornings of hard work. But at the very end of the book, when the Patches are corrupted by inheriting thirty million dollars, Anthony overhears a fellow passenger describing the luxuriously dressed Gloria as “unclean.”

  Wealth—or the promise of wealth—turns Anthony into a facile mediocrity. He believes nothing is worth doing and refuses to work, dabbles with a medieval essay and rejects his grandfather’s offer to make him a war correspondent. As friends succeed in their own careers, Anthony dissipates himself in wild and finally repulsive parties during which “people broke things; people became sick in Gloria’s bathroom; people spilled wine; people made unbelievable messes of the kitchenette.” When his rich, priggish grandfather sees Anthony at one of these parties, he is horrified at his deterioration and disinherits him. After failing as a salesman, Anthony becomes seedy and unhealthy, and—like Gordon Sterrett in “May Day”—is cruelly rejected when he tries to borrow money from his old friend Maury Noble.

  Before his precipitous decline, Anthony courts and marries the beautiful, vain, selfish and stupid Gloria Gilbert, who “took all the things of life to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter.”1 She hates staying home in the evening, always eclipses other women at parties and wants to marry a lover rather than a husband. Her marriage to Anthony is predictably wrecked by boredom and wastefulness, futile fighting and joyless parties.

  Gloria’s unhappy marriage makes her responsive to Joseph Bloeckman, the vice president of a film company, who does business with her father and who rises in the course of the novel as the more genteel characters decline. Like Samuel Goldwyn, Louis Mayer and most other movie executives of Fitzgerald’s time, Bloeckman was a Jewish immigrant who started life in the humblest circumstances. After managing a side-show and owning a vaudeville house, he entered the film industry, in which his ambition, money and knowledge of show business propelled him to the top. When first introduced in the novel, he is insensitive, ingratiating and self-assured—and hopelessly in love with the wealthy and stylish Gloria.

  Later in the novel, as Anthony becomes bored and Gloria disillusioned, Bloeckman reappears—now “infinitesimally improved, of subtler intonation, of more convincing ease”—and tempts her with a screen test. At the end of the long novel, the impoverished and humiliated Anthony has been rejected by all his friends. In a desperate attempt at blackmail, he impulsively phones Bloeckman (now called Joseph Black), who has usurped Anthony’s rightful place in society and tried to steal his wife. He finds Bloeckman in a nightclub and falsely accuses him of keeping Gloria out of the movies. When Anthony calls him a “Goddamn Jew,” Bloeckman beats him up and has him thrown into the gutter.

  The Beautiful and Damned, like most of Fitzgerald’s fiction, is extremely autobiographical. The Fitzgeralds’ house in Westport, their servant Tana (who also appears in Save Me the Waltz) provided by the “Japanese Reliable Employment Agency,” their extravagance, quarrels and drinking all appear in the novel. The long-awaited fortune is based on the sudden wealth acquired after the publication of This Side of Paradise, Gloria’s movie test on an offer made to Scott and Zelda to star in the film version of that novel, Bloeckman’s courtship of Gloria on Nathan’s of Zelda, the laconic discussion about whether or not the pregnant Gloria should have a child (“If you have it I’ll probably be glad. If you don’t—well, that’s all right too”) on Zelda’s decision to have her first abortion. Anthony has the same name as Zelda’s father; and Gloria seems to have all Zelda’s worst features without any of her redeeming qualities. As Scott later told their daughter: “Gloria was a much more trivial and vulgar person than your mother. I can’t really say there was any resemblance except in the beauty and certain terms of expression she used, and also I naturally used many circumstantial events of our early married life. . . . We had a much better time than Anthony and Gloria had.”2

  The novel powerfully expresses Fitzgerald’s fear of failure, sense of lost happiness and feeling of imminent collapse. Anthony’s friend Richard Caramel, who publishes a decent novel and then becomes a contemptible example of a commercial and Hollywood hack, prefigures Fitzgerald’s career as a compromised writer. Fitzgerald clearly saw Zelda’s threat to his future as a writer, but could neither change his domestic life nor stop writing about it. Confused at times between his imaginative and his real existence, he behaved like his own fictional characters and would eventually be overcome by the very doom he had foreshadowed in The Beautiful and Damned.

  The reviewers were kind to the novel and felt it
represented a considerable improvement on This Side of Paradise. The liveliest notice, “Friend Husband’s Latest” in the New York Tribune of April 2, 1922, was written by Zelda. In her first published work, she wittily urged readers to buy the book because Scott needed a winter overcoat and she craved an expensive cloth-of-gold dress and platinum ring with a complete circlet. She revealed, for the first time, that Scott—with her permission—had absorbed bits of her writing into his novel: “On one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” Two years later, after Zelda had published two articles, an interviewer in the Smart Set emphasized her idiosyncratic style and exaggerated his use of her material: “Mrs. Fitzgerald writes also. She has a queer, decadent style, luminous in its imagination, and very often Scott incorporates whole chapters of his wife’s writing into his own books. He steals all her ideas for short stories and writes them as his own.” Critics realized, early in Fitzgerald’s career, that his novels ruthlessly exposed their emotional conflicts and made Zelda a participant in his fiction as well as a partner in his marriage.

  Writing more seriously about The Beautiful and Damned in the Nation, Carl Van Doren concluded that “its excellence lies in the rendering not of the ordinary moral universe but of that detached, largely invented region where glittering youth plays at wit and love.” In the Smart Set, the normally acerbic H. L. Mencken provided loyal praise: “Fitzgerald discharges his unaccustomed and difficult business with ingenuity and dignity. . . . If the result is not a complete success, it is nevertheless near enough to success to be worthy of respect. There is fine observation in it, and much penetrating detail, and the writing is solid and sound. . . . [With this novel] Fitzgerald ceases to be a Wunderkind and begins to come into his maturity.”