Sara later connected the selfishness and insensitivity in Scott’s character to a defect in his work, and bluntly told him: “consideration for other people’s feelings, opinions or even time is Completely left out of your makeup.—I have always told you you haven’t the faintest idea what anybody else but yourself is like. . . . Why,—for instance should you trample on other people’s feelings continually with things you permit yourself to say & do—owing partly to the self-indulgence of drinking too much.” Confronted with this harsh truth, Scott was forced to agree that he only knew himself: “My characters are all Scott Fitzgerald.”6
Scott severely tested the Murphys’ patience. He had to prove to himself, again and again, that they would, no matter how badly he behaved, always forgive him and love him. As Gerald, moved by Scott’s charming and good-natured apologies, generously wrote in 1928: “we are very fond of you both. The fact that we don’t get on always has nothing to do with it.” Scott, who valued Gerald’s forgiveness and treasured his friendship, later praised his social charm and paid tribute to him along with his intellectual, moral and artistic mentors, Edmund Wilson, Sap Donahoe and Ernest Hemingway: “a fourth man had come to dictate my relations with other people when these relations were successful: how to do, what to say. How to make people at least momentarily happy.” In a simple, honest and moving statement, Scott told Gerald, “as a friend you have never failed me.”7
In the 1920s, however, offended by the heavy drinking and bad manners that spoiled many of their fêtes, the Murphys did not recognize either Scott’s genius or his problems with Zelda. “The one we took seriously was Ernest, not Scott,” Gerald said. “I suppose it was because Ernest’s work seemed contemporary and new, and Scott’s didn’t.” Yet Scott’s work, not Ernest’s, influenced Gerald. Gerald loved giant eyes and in the late 1920s absorbed a central symbol of The Great Gatsby, the gigantic eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, into his own life and art. Gerald “designed a flag for his custom-made schooner, Weatherbird, with a schematic eye that appeared to blink as it flapped in the wind, and in 1928 he included a large human eye in his painting, Portrait.”8
II
Minimizing the marriage problems he had portrayed in The Beautiful and Damned and ignoring the exemplary harmony of the Murphys, Fitzgerald told Bishop, with an odd mixture of candor and concealment: “Zelda and I sometimes indulge in terrible four-day rows that always start with a drinking party but we’re still enormously in love and about the only truly happily married people I know.” In the summer of 1924, when Scott was absorbed in The Great Gatsby and Zelda was bored and restless, they experienced the severest crisis of their crisis-filled marriage and forced the Murphys to witness the agonizing aftermath of Zelda’s infidelity.
In June 1924, on the beach at Saint-Raphaël, Zelda met a handsome French naval aviator, Édouard Jozan. The son of a middle-class family in Nîmes with a long military tradition, he was a year and two days older than her. The antithesis of Fitzgerald, Jozan was a dark, romantic man with curly black hair and a Latin profile. He wore a smart uniform (as Scott had done when he first courted her), was muscular and athletic, and led the small group of officers who surrounded Zelda. He regretted having missed the war, longed to smoke opium in Indochina and wrote a few things for his own pleasure.
Attracted at first to both Scott and Zelda, Jozan found them “brimming over with life. Rich and free, they brought into our little provincial circle brilliance, imagination and familiarity with a Parisian and international world to which we had no access.” But he soon focused his attention on the vibrant Zelda, “a creature who overflowed with activity, [and was] radiant with desire to take from life every chance her charm, youth and intelligence provided so abundantly.”
With no friends in Saint-Raphaël, Scott was eager as always for a bit of social life. Behaving like a man of the world, he invited Jozan to dine with them and met him at cafés in the evenings. Scott was excited and flattered when men fell in love with his wife—as long as she did not reciprocate their feelings. Left alone, with nothing to amuse her, Zelda went to the beach with Jozan while Scott stayed at home and worked on his novel.
After five years of marriage and the experience of motherhood, Zelda feared she had passed the peak of her beauty and had to prove that she was still attractive to men. She felt her life was empty, resented Scott’s successful career, wanted to make him jealous and, as Save Me the Waltz makes clear (Scott considered the novel proof of her adultery), was overwhelmed by the courageous Frenchman. Like the American pilots in wartime Montgomery, Jozan made daredevil flights over her luxurious villa.
Zelda took the chance that life—or Jozan—provided. A masochistic and sensual passage in her novel describes how “he drew her body against him till she felt the blades of his bones carving her own. He was bronze and smelled of the sand and sun; she felt him naked underneath the starched linen.” In her unpublished novel, Caesar’s Things, Zelda explains that the heroine is drawn to the Frenchman not only because he is attractive but also because she is afraid of love, and must confront and overcome her fear. “She told her husband she loved the French officer and her husband locked her up in the villa”9—just as the anxious Scott, during their turbulent courtship, kept repeating (to Zelda’s annoyance) that he now understood why they always locked up princesses in towers.
Scott had good reason to fear Zelda’s infidelity—both before and after he married her. Writing of his superior sexual rivals in “The Crack-Up,” he confessed that he could not “stop thinking that at one time a sort of droit de seigneur might have been exercised to give one of them my girl.” Jozan, using his French charm and aeronautic daring, exercised this right. He invited Zelda to his apartment and seduced her. “There was Jozan,” she later admitted, “and you were justifiably angry.” The crisis peaked on July 13 when Zelda told Scott that she loved Jozan and asked for a divorce.
But Jozan—just beginning his career and without any money—wanted a mistress, not a wife. Though he found Zelda a delightful lover, she did not touch his deepest feelings and meant no more to him than a brief fling on the beach. His transfer to Hyères (where the Fitzgeralds had begun the summer) put an end to their relations. But Zelda, more emotionally involved than Jozan, was deeply hurt by his rejection. When Jozan abandoned her, she tried to kill herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. Honoria Murphy remembers a disturbance one night at the Hôtel du Cap. Scott sought help from her parents, and Zelda had to be walked up and down in the hallway and kept awake until the effect of the pills wore off. “That September 1924,” Scott wrote, “I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.”10 He now realized that he would have to test himself against Zelda’s lover, that she was not absolutely committed to him (as he was to her) and that he could no longer trust his wife to be faithful. The purity of their marriage had been tainted, their innocence lost.
Jozan went on to have a distinguished naval career. He became a vice admiral, commanded France’s Far Eastern fleet and was decorated with the Legion of Honor. If Zelda had left him for Jozan in 1924, Scott would have had another lost love to inspire his work and been spared the horrors of her insanity in the 1930s.
III
Zelda’s affair with Jozan had spoiled the Riviera for Scott. Their expenses, even in the off-season, were much higher than expected and they had not been able to save any money. As soon as he finished his novel, they had to find a place to heal the wounds of their marriage and attempt to restore their old intimacy. Though they had disliked Italy on their previous trip to Europe, Zelda’s reading of James’ Roderick Hudson inspired them to spend the winter in Rome. But the cold weather and rampant dishonesty made Italy an even greater disappointment than France, where servants had drained their resources and driven them out of the Villa Marie. “What at first seemed a secluded villa just right for us to live in quietly,” Zelda said, with amused exasperation, “had a habit of developing into a sort of charity institution, owing to the mysterious complaints by which th
e domestic personnel was stricken down, necessitating the presence of their relations, sometimes down to the third and fourth generations.”
Instead of renting a villa in Italy, they moved into an expensive but uncomfortable thin-walled hotel on the Piazza di Spagna. They ate simple meals and—as Scott revised the novel he had completed in France—gradually found their way to the romantic sights of the city:
In the Hôtel des Princes at Rome [Zelda wrote] we lived on Bel Paese cheese and [Sicilian] Corvo wine and made friends with a delicate spinster who intended to stop there until she finished a three-volume history of the Borgias. The sheets were damp and the nights were perforated by the snores of the people next door, but we didn’t mind because we could always come home down the stairs to the Via Sistina, and there were jonquils and beggars along that way. We were too superior at that time to use the guide books and wanted to discover the ruins for ourselves, which we did when we had exhausted the night-life and the market places and the campagna. We liked the Castel Sant’Angelo because of its round mysterious unity and the river and the debris about its base. It was exciting being lost between centuries in the Roman dusk and taking your sense of direction from the Colosseum.
Their principal distraction in Rome was watching the filming of the spectacular, expensive and accident-prone Ben-Hur, and forming a friendship with one of its stars, Carmel Myers. The bright and attractive actress, who was the same age as Scott, was the daughter of a San Francisco rabbi. She began her film career in 1916 as the protégée of D. W. Griffith; starred as a vamp with Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore and John Gilbert; and would retire, shortly after talkies began, in the early 1930s. Scott, who would meet Carmel again when he first went to Hollywood in 1927, told a friend that “she is the most exquisite thing I have met yet, and is just as nice as she is beautiful.”11
Fitzgerald’s humorous but bitter account of his winter in Rome during 1924–25, “The High Cost of Macaroni,” is—like D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod (1922), Hemingway’s “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” (1927) and Thomas Mann’s “Mario and the Magician” (1929)—a disillusioned and dispirited response to oppressive life in Fascist Italy. The conclusion of this essay describes a humiliating reprise to his black eye at Princeton in 1920 and his savage beating at the Jungle Club the following year. Fitzgerald’s petty midnight quarrel with some extortionate taxi drivers about the fare back to their hotel ended, when he refused to be cheated, in a brutal street fight:
First there was one taxi driver, and I had a little the best of it; then there were two and I was having a little the worst of it. But I didn’t think I was, and when the meddlesome stranger stepped between us I was in no mood to have it stop there, and I pushed him impatiently out of the way. He came back persistently, lurching in between us, talking in a stream of Italian, doing his best, it seemed to me, to interrupt my offensives—and to the advantage of the taximan. Once too often he caught at my arm. Blind with anger I turned on him quickly and (with more success than I had so far had with the others) caught him under the point of the chin; whereupon, rather to my surprise, he sat down.
The unfortunate interloper turned out to be a plainclothes policeman. Fitzgerald was arrested for assaulting an officer, taken to a police station and savagely beaten.
Fitzgerald called this degrading experience “just about the rottenest thing that ever happened to me in my life.” It aroused his hostility, provoked his prejudices and inspired his violent fantasies about the country, the politics and the people. “I hate Italians,” he told Carmel Myers. “They live in tenements and don’t have bathtubs!” When Harold Ober asked him to write a piece about his travels for the Post, he rather childishly replied that he could not write anything acceptable to that audience unless they wanted an article on “Pope Syphilis the Sixth and his Morons.” He imagined filling a theater with the flower of Italy, coming on stage with a machine gun and murdering the entire audience. He thought Italy was trying to live on its glorious past and saw through the histrionic absurdities of Fascism. “Italy depressed us both beyond measure,” he wrote to an editor at Scribner’s, “a dead land where everything that could be done or said was done long ago (for whoever is deceived by the pseudo activity under Mussolini is deceived by the spasmodic last jerk of a corpse).”12
The unexpected cold, Zelda’s painful ovarian infection and Scott’s brutal encounter with the police drove them out of Rome. In February 1925 they crossed the Bay of Naples and settled in the fashionable Hotel Tiberio on Capri. Fitzgerald’s hero Joseph Conrad, who had visited the highly praised island in 1905, said the air was too stimulating for consumptives and complained of hot winds, violent contrasts and sexual scandals: “Too much ozone they say: too exciting and that’s why no lung patients are allowed to come here. . . . This place here, this climate, this sirocco, this transmontana, these flat roofs, these sheer rocks, this blue sea—are impossible. . . . The scandals of Capri—atrocious, unspeakable, amusing, scandals international, cosmopolitan and biblical.” In February 1920 D. H. Lawrence, more succinctly, condemned Capri as “a stewpot of semi-literary cats.” Fitzgerald, repelled by the thriving colony of English homosexuals—including Norman Douglas, Somerset Maugham and E. F. Benson—agreed that “this place is full of fairies.”
Fitzgerald was also disappointed by his former literary hero, Compton Mackenzie, whose Sinister Street had influenced This Side of Paradise. He sat up half the night talking to the good-looking and extremely successful Scottish novelist, who wore striking clothes and owned two luxurious villas on the island. Though Mackenzie would go on to write his finest work, he now seemed exhausted as an author. “I found him cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane,” Scott told Bishop. “You get no sense from him that he feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war [in which Mackenzie had had a distinguished career in the Secret Service] wrecked him as it did Wells and many of that generation.”13
IV
In late October 1924, just before he left Saint-Raphaël for Rome, Fitzgerald had sent Perkins the typescript of The Great Gatsby, which he continued to revise throughout his stay in Italy. Three weeks later Perkins, recognizing its greatness, enthusiastically praised its themes, narrative technique, symbolism, characters, drama, style and art:
I think you have every kind of right to be proud of this book. It is an extraordinary book, suggestive of all sorts of thoughts and moods. You adopted exactly the right method of telling it, that of employing a narrator who is more of a spectator than an actor: that puts the reader upon a point of observation on a higher level than that on which the characters stand and at a distance that gives perspective. In no other way could your irony have been so immensely effective, nor the reader have been enabled so strongly to feel at times the strangeness of human circumstance in a vast heedless universe. In the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg various readers will see different significances; but their presence gives a superb touch to the whole thing: great unblinking eyes, expressionless, looking down upon the human scene. It’s magnificent! . . .
The presentation of Tom, his place, Daisy and Jordan, and the unfolding of their characters is unequalled so far as I know. The description of the valley of ashes adjacent to the lovely country, the conversation and the action in Myrtle’s apartment, the marvelous catalogue of those who came to Gatsby’s house,—these are such things as make a man famous. And all these things, the whole pathetic episode, you have given a place in time and space, for with the help of T. J. Eckleburg and by an occasional glance at the sky, or the sea, or the city, you have imparted a sort of sense of eternity. You once told me you were not a natural writer—my God! You have plainly mastered the craft, of course; but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this.14
Ring Lardner, aware of the carelessness of both Fitzgerald and Perkins, and eager to repay Scott for his generous help with How to Write Short Stories, volunteered to read the proofs. His experienced eye caught a number of m
inor errors about the levels in Penn Station, the elevated train in Queens, the “tides” in Lake Superior and the railroads that ran out of the La Salle Street station in Chicago.
The Great Gatsby, as both Perkins and Lardner perceived, is Fitzgerald’s most perfectly realized work of art. The novel reveals a new and confident mastery of his material, a fascinating if sensational plot, a Keatsian ability to evoke a romantic atmosphere, a set of memorable and deeply interesting characters, a witty and incisive social satire, a surprisingly effective use of allusions, an ambitious theme and a silken style that seems as fresh today as it did seventy years ago.
In 1925—the year Dreiser published An American Tragedy, Dos Passos Manhattan Transfer and Hemingway In Our Time—Fitzgerald made an impressive leap from his deeply flawed early novels to his first masterpiece. Unlike his previous novels, The Great Gatsby is imaginative rather than autobiographical, unified rather than episodic. In place of the loosely constructed story of a young man’s life, influenced by Compton Mackenzie and H. G. Wells, Fitzgerald set out to capture a social scene and satirize a social class in the manner of Henry James and Edith Wharton. As John Dos Passos noted, in the three years since his early success Fitzgerald had thought seriously about his art. His careful study of the works of Joseph Conrad—who died in August 1924 while Fitzgerald was writing his novel—was mainly responsible for his astonishing technical and intellectual advance.
In June 1925 Fitzgerald told H. L. Mencken that he had “learned a lot” from Conrad and had consciously imitated him in The Great Gatsby. Conrad’s influence can be seen in Fitzgerald’s evocative symbolism (the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the desolate wasteland of the Valley of Ashes, the God-like judgment of the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg), in his resonant style, revelation of the story by moving forward and backward in time, themes of romantic illusion and corrupted idealism. Fitzgerald’s confidential narrator Nick Carraway, like Conrad’s Charlie Marlow in Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1900), provides distance and credibility by retrospectively telling a story that he, a character in the novel, has personally observed. He combines disapproval of and sympathy for Gatsby just as Marlow does for Lord Jim.
Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography Page 15