Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  All the finest authors and critics of the time had admired The Great Gatsby, believed that Fitzgerald had fulfilled his artistic potential and agreed that he had finally produced a great novel. But the sale of about 25,000 copies (far less than his first two novels) did not match his expectations and barely paid off his advance. The dramatic adaptation of the novel by Owen Davis opened in New York in February 1926, ran for 112 performances and earned an unexpected $18,000. It also led to the sale of the film rights for another $17,000. But after The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald, who found it difficult to live on $36,000 a year, realized that he could no longer count on his novels to pay his considerable expenses. Two weeks after the book was published, he admitted to Perkins that he was trapped by his own extravagance. He mentioned the old conflict between art and money, and said he might have to sacrifice his career and sell out to the movies: “If [Gatsby] will support me with no more intervals of trash I’ll go on as a novelist. If not, I’m going to quit, come home [from Europe], go to Hollywood and learn the movie business. I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity.”

  When The Great Gatsby failed to bring in what he thought he needed, he was once again forced to return to lucrative stories until he had banked enough money to devote himself to his novels. In April 1925, the month his novel was published, he reviewed the work he had done since completing his book the previous October, regretted his wasted talent and disgustedly told Bishop, as if self-condemnation would justify his sell-out: “I now get $2,000 a story and they grow worse and worse and my ambition is to get where I need write no more but only novels. . . . I’ve done about 10 pieces of horrible junk in the last year that I can never republish or bear to look at—cheap and without the spontaneity of my first work.” Since his fees for stories sold to the Post seemed to rise in inverse proportion to their merit, he now became embarrassed about publishing them. Though he always needed money, he actually asked Ober not to push the price up any higher. “I’ve gotten self-conscious,” he told his agent, “and don’t think my stuff is worth half what I get now.”

  Most writers could not devote themselves to great art and to popular trash at the same time. If they did, they would have to improve or reject their inferior work. But Fitzgerald, knowing it was trash, published it for the money and condemned himself for doing so. Untroubled by Scott’s conflict and glad to see the money rolling in from any source, Zelda naively remarked: “I don’t see why Scott objected so to those Post stories when he got such wonderful prices for them.”24

  The novelist who had written The Great Gatsby at the age of twenty-eight and had published seven books between 1920 and 1926 would seem to have a great career before him. But Fitzgerald succumbed to the temptation of easy money. He scarcely considered trying to live on the modest royalties of a serious novelist. Though he had earned a great deal, he and Zelda spent more than he made. Trapped in an increasingly hand-to-mouth existence, he never broke loose from the short story market and brought out only two more books during the last fourteen years of his life.

  Chapter Seven

  Paris and Hemingway, 1925–1926

  I

  Exalted by the critical success of The Great Gatsby but not yet aware of the disappointing sales, the Fitzgeralds left Capri in early April 1925 and joined the thirty thousand Americans who were then living in Paris. They rented a fifth-floor walk-up flat at 14 rue de Tilsitt, near the Arc de Triomphe, until the end of the year. A photograph taken at Christmas showed an elegantly dressed and apparently happy family in front of an elaborately decorated tree, a pile of presents, a low chandelier and an overflowing bookcase. Scott wore a three-piece suit and thick-soled shoes, Zelda (with slender legs but now wider at the hips) was burdened by a huge corsage, and the beribboned four-year-old Scottie, nervous about the pose, bit her lower lip and showed her knickers as they all did a chorus-line kick.

  In reality the Fitzgeralds were not the secure and happy family they appeared to be. The novelist Louis Bromfield, who visited them that year, found their place ornate and pretentious: “It represented to some degree the old aspirations and a yearning for stability, but somehow it got only halfway and was neither one thing nor the other. . . . The furniture was gilt Louis XVI but a suite from the Galeries Lafayette [department store]. The wallpaper was the usual striped stuff in dull colors that went with that sort of flat. It was all rather like a furniture shop window and I always had the impression that the Fitzgeralds were camping there between two worlds.” Zelda, noting their inability to escape the wounds inflicted by her affair with Jozan, recalled that the stale flat “smelled of a church chancery because it was impossible to ventilate” and became “a perfect breeding place for the germs of bitterness they brought with them from the Riviera.” Scottie also remembered that the “apartments were always rather dark and unprepossessing, with their only redeeming feature the views over the rooftops which so fascinated my mother. The elevators were always ‘en panne’ [out of order] and I can feel the heavy chains, suspended from the ceiling, that caused such an uproarious commotion in all our toilets.”1

  Coming to Paris allowed the Fitzgeralds to escape the scene of their unhappiness on the Riviera and the oppressive atmosphere of Fascist Italy, and to enter the world of American expatriates in this lively and stimulating city. They could sit in cafés, drink in bars, eat in restaurants, see their friends and visit literary salons. Paris enabled many American artists to escape Prohibition as well as the moral and intellectual confinement of American society, and to breathe the freer air of continental culture. But the very freedom of the city, where they could live inexpensively and create their own social roles, did not help the Fitzgeralds. This time in France deepened the rift between them, made Zelda more insecure and propelled her toward her future mental crisis. Scott continued to waste money and drink heavily, spending his time at parties, dances and nightclubs instead of concentrating on his work. His friendship with Ernest Hemingway accentuated Fitzgerald’s personal crises. But Ernest’s harsh yet truthful criticism helped Scott to define his ideas about art and to recognize that his way of life was destructive.

  In October 1924, six months before the Fitzgeralds settled in Paris, Edmund Wilson had reviewed Hemingway’s pamphlet in our time. He told Fitzgerald about the young writer who had begun to publish his strikingly original stories and poems with small private presses in Paris. Fitzgerald’s meeting with Hemingway in the Dingo Bar in late April 1925, two weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby and six months before the enlarged trade edition of In Our Time, led to the most important friendship of Scott’s life. He was then writing for the three million readers of the Saturday Evening Post while Hemingway’s work was still confined to little magazines. Fitzgerald was three years older, had gone to Princeton, published three successful novels and made a great deal of money. But Hemingway—an athlete, war veteran and foreign correspondent who had established a reputation as a dedicated writer before he had actually published anything—became his heroic and artistic ideal.

  Six inches taller and forty pounds heavier than Fitzgerald, Hemingway was a literary version of the bloodied and bandaged football heroes Scott had worshiped in college. Hemingway later told Arthur Mizener, to exemplify Fitzgerald’s immaturity and naïveté, that he remembered “one time in N.Y. we were walking down Fifth Avenue and [Scott] said, ‘if only I could play foot-ball again with everything I know about it now.’ ” But Hemingway, who did not meet Fitzgerald in New York until after he had published The Sun Also Rises in 1926, actually attributed to Fitzgerald a statement made by his own fictional anti-hero, Robert Cohn: “I think I’d rather play football again with what I know about handling myself, now.” Hemingway was so fond of this phrase that he recycled it in Across the River and into the Trees (1950), published the same year as his letter to Mizener, when his hero Richard Cantwell thinks about the war: “I wish I could fight it again, he thought. Knowing what I know now.”2

  Hemingway had the masculine
strength, capacity for drink, athletic prowess and experience in battle that Fitzgerald sadly lacked and desperately desired. And his impressive achievements seemed to magnify Fitzgerald’s failures. Both writers were fascinated by the war. Hemingway had suffered a traumatic wound when serving with the Red Cross in Italy while Fitzgerald had merely experienced “noncombatant’s shell shock.” Fitzgerald owned a bloodcurdling collection of photograph albums of horribly mutilated soldiers, stereopticon slides of executions and roasted aviators, and lavishly illustrated French tomes of living men whose faces had been chewed away by shrapnel. In a remarkably morbid letter of December 1927, he told Hemingway: “I have a new German war book, Die Krieg Against Krieg, which shows men who mislaid their faces in Picardy and the Caucasus—you can imagine how I thumb it over, my mouth fairly slathering with fascination.” The photographs in Ernst Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege! (Berlin, 1924) stimulated his pathological curiosity about the war—a subject he had ignored at Princeton and evaded in his first two novels—and allowed him to confront in his imagination scenes of violence, mutilation and death. Hemingway also took perverse pleasure in emphasizing the grisly details of war wounds in works like “The Natural History of the Dead” (1932). He too was fascinated by gruesome photos of maimed bodies. In 1935 he took and collected pictures of bloated corpses after the Matecumbe hurricane in the Florida Keys, and during the Spanish Civil War reproduced some astonishing horrors in “Dying, Well or Badly” (1938).

  But the two writers had very different ideas about the use of violent experience in art. In December 1925 Hemingway defined his attraction to the intensity of war by telling Fitzgerald: “the reason you are so sore you missed the war is because war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you would have to wait a lifetime to get.” Hemingway believed you had to live the actual experience before you could write about it honestly. Fitzgerald believed (as he had to, given his lack of experience in war) that imagination could serve the artist’s purpose just as well, that “if you weren’t able to function in action you might at least be able to tell about it, because you felt the same intensity—it was a back door way out of facing reality.”

  There were also considerable differences in their characters and way of life. Janet Flanner, the Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, found Fitzgerald’s manner “remote” and thought he was “set apart by his elegance.”3 Fitzgerald always stayed in luxurious hotels; and his expensive apartment in Paris isolated him from ordinary life and placed him among the rich American tourists of the Right Bank. Hemingway preferred small pensions and modest flats, which in Paris put him in touch with local people on the more bohemian Left Bank. Fitzgerald had an English nanny for his daughter; Hemingway had a French peasant to look after his son. In the summers, Fitzgerald went to the Riviera to lie on the beach; Hemingway went to Spain to see the bullfights and live the experience he would write about in The Sun Also Rises. Fitzgerald could compete with Hemingway as a writer but not as a sportsman. Unlike the Murphys, Dos Passos, Don Stewart and Max Perkins, Fitzgerald never followed Hemingway to Spain or went fishing with him in Key West.

  But Fitzgerald, who emphasized his extravagance, seemed wealthier than he actually was while Hemingway, who exaggerated his poverty, was not as poor as he claimed to be. Though his wife had a comfortable trust fund, Hemingway said he had to catch pigeons in the public park so they could have some food for dinner. When they first met, Hemingway must have envied and desired Fitzgerald’s literary fame, material success and luxurious way of life, which provided a striking contrast to his own obscurity and rather pinched existence. But he made a virtue of this difference, compared his own frugality to Fitzgerald’s wastefulness and ironically offered to send all his royalties to his friend’s villa on the Riviera.

  Fitzgerald lived lavishly and squandered his talent; Hemingway (who lectured him about this, as Fitzgerald had lectured Lardner) lived in relative poverty so that he could dedicate himself to art. Hemingway was absolutely sure of himself; Fitzgerald was full of self-doubts. While Fitzgerald had unbounded admiration for Hemingway’s talent, Ernest (like Edmund Wilson) was extremely critical of Scott’s faults. Though Fitzgerald seemed to toss off stories while Hemingway struggled to perfect every word, Scott contrasted his own plodding struggle to Ernest’s natural ability. As he later wrote Perkins: “I told [Hemingway], against all the logic that was then current, that I was the tortoise and he was the hare, and that’s the truth of the matter, that everything I have ever attained has been through long and persistent struggle while it is Ernest who has a touch of genius which enables him to bring off extraordinary things with facility.”

  Fitzgerald seemed to have a much weaker character, but he was actually more courageous than Hemingway when faced with adversity. Hemingway was ruthless with anyone who interfered with his work or his wishes. When his marriages went bad, he selfishly discarded a series of sometimes rich and always devoted wives. Ill equipped to deal with disease and depression, he finally shot himself. Fitzgerald, by contrast, endured poverty and neglect during the 1930s and remained loyal to Zelda in her madness.

  II

  Despite these significant differences, Fitzgerald and Hemingway initially had a good deal in common. Both writers came from a middle-class Midwestern background, had a strong mother and weak father, were close in age, were married, had one small child, lived an expatriate life in Paris and were devoted to the craft of writing. They traveled in the same social circles and, through mutual introductions, shared many of the same friends. Ezra Pound had introduced Hemingway to Scott’s Princeton classmate Henry Strater. Don Stewart ran with Hemingway and the bulls in Pamplona and went trout fishing in Burguete, was instrumental in getting In Our Time published in New York and was a model for Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises. After Hemingway joined Scribner’s, Max Perkins also became his close friend, and often acted as intermediary between the two writers. Both Hemingway and Fitzgerald sat at the feet of Gertrude Stein and—along with Dos Passos and Dorothy Parker—enjoyed the hospitality of the Murphys. In the late 1920s both writers became friendly with the Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan.

  Shortly after they met, Fitzgerald persuaded Hemingway to accompany him on a trip to Lyon to recover the Renault he and Zelda had abandoned on the way to Paris. Under the heading “Most Pleasant Trips” in his Notebooks, Scott listed “Auto Ernest and I North.” And in June 1925 Hemingway told Perkins: “Scott Fitzgerald is living here now and we see quite a lot of him. We had a great trip together driving his car up from Lyon through the Côte d’Or.” Thirty years later, in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway, who had no tolerance for weakness or for behavior he considered unmanly, gave a radically revised and contemptuously affectionate account of that ludicrous car trip. In his posthumous time bomb he portrayed Fitzgerald as hostile to the French, childish and gauche, wasteful and irresponsible, quarrelsome and irritating, hypochondriac and insecure, dependent upon and dominated by Zelda, a complacent and self-confessed cuckold, a drunkard, an artistic whore, a destroyer of his own talent.

  Fitzgerald, however, at that time and later on, had nothing but admiration for Hemingway’s integrity and fiction, and adopted him as his artistic conscience. After their drive through Burgundy, he told Gertrude Stein: “He’s a peach of a fellow and absolutely first-rate” and called himself (with a characteristic sense of inferiority in relation to Hemingway) “a very second-rate person compared to first-rate people.” When Booth Tarkington met the traveling companions in Paris that year, he thought they got on splendidly—though Hemingway (in his eyes) lacked the Princeton polish: “My impression was of a Kansas University football beef; but I rather liked him. Fitzgerald brought him up and was a little tight—took him away because Hemingway was to have a [boxing] fight that afternoon at three o’clock, though I gathered they’d both been up all night.”4

  Fitzgerald liked to tell admiring stories of Hemingway and invest his l
ife with a special touch of glamour. The hero of his four absurd “Count of Darkness” stories was modeled on Hemingway as he might have existed in the Middle Ages. In these tales Fitzgerald portrayed Hemingway as a medieval knight; in A Moveable Feast Ernest portrayed the sickly Scott as “a little dead crusader.” Fitzgerald said that he “had always longed to absorb into himself some of the qualities that made Ernest attractive, and to lean on him like a sturdy crutch in times of psychological distress.” The novelist Glenway Wescott, who would soon be satirized as the homosexual Robert Prentiss in The Sun Also Rises, exaggerated Fitzgerald’s artistic irresponsibility and personal abasement when he claimed that Scott cared more about Hemingway’s work than about his own. But there is no doubt that Fitzgerald (like Murphy and Archibald MacLeish) hero-worshiped Hemingway. According to Wescott, Fitzgerald “honestly felt that Hemingway was inimitably, essentially superior. From the moment Hemingway began to appear in print, perhaps it did not matter what he himself produced or failed to produce. He felt free to write just for profit, and to live for fun, if possible. Hemingway could be entrusted with the graver responsibilities and higher rewards such as glory, immortality. This extreme of admiration—this excuse for a morbid belittlement and abandonment of himself—was bad for Fitzgerald.”

  Fitzgerald took several practical steps to advance Hemingway’s career and introduced him to Scribner’s just as Shane Leslie had once introduced him to that firm. In October 1924, six months before he met Hemingway and while living in Saint-Raphaël, Fitzgerald (still vague about details) told Perkins about the first in our time. It had been published, with Pound’s help, by William Bird’s Three Mountains Press in the spring of 1924. “This is to tell you,” Fitzgerald wrote, “about a young man named Ernest Hemingway, who lives in Paris, (an American) writes for the transatlantic review & has a brilliant future. Ezra Pound published a collection of his short pieces in Paris, at some place like the Egoist Press. I haven’t it here now but it’s remarkable & I’d look him up right away. He’s the real thing.”5