Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Fitzgerald’s alcoholism led to self-deception, violence and change of personality. His habit of needling people while drunk became a way to test how much Dos Passos, the Murphys, Hemingway and Edmund Wilson really liked him. If they could tolerate his worst behavior, then they were truly his friends. But most people were not very tolerant; and Fitzgerald kept a list of “Snubs,” many of which occurred when he was drunk, that stretched over two decades. Scottie, whose childhood was dominated by alcoholic scenes, called him a boring, megalomaniacal and mean drunk. Liquor also loosened his tongue and released his sexual inhibitions. “When he was drunk,” Sheilah Graham remarked, “he would have had an affair with a tree.” Louis Bromfield gave a vivid account of Fitzgerald’s alcoholic transformation and terrible behavior, which continued until he suddenly collapsed and passed out: “Like many others who got the name of being drunkards, Scott simply couldn’t drink. One cocktail and he was off. It seemed to affect him as much as five or six drinks affected Hemingway and myself. Immediately he was out of control and there was only one end . . . that he became thoroughly drunk, and like many Irishmen, when he became drunk he usually became very disagreeable and rude and quarrelsome, as if all his resentments were released at once.”

  With Fitzgerald, as with Poe, there was a medical explanation for his alcoholism. Both writers suffered from hypoglycemia, or lack of sugar in the blood, which interfered with the supply of glucose to the brain and gave Fitzgerald an abnormal craving, when he was not drinking, for chocolate and Coca-Cola. This disease made it difficult for him to metabolize and tolerate alcohol, which always had an immediate and catastrophic effect on his system. Fitzgerald manifested many of the symptoms of hypoglycemia: insomnia, pallor and fatigue as well as aggressive speech, excessive sweating, visual blurring, muscular tremor, a sense of uncertainty, increasing confusion and, finally, unconsciousness.17 Hemingway might have been more compassionate about Fitzgerald’s alcoholism had he known that it had a physical cause.

  IV

  Like most of Fitzgerald’s friends, Hemingway was physically attracted to Zelda. Describing their first meeting in A Moveable Feast, he praised her creamy complexion and gave her the same penetrating eyes he had attributed to his father in “Fathers and Sons”: “Zelda was very beautiful and was tanned a lovely gold color and her hair was a beautiful dark gold and she was very friendly. Her hawk’s eyes were clear and calm.” But Zelda did not remain friendly for very long. Always wary of writers, Zelda became jealous of her husband’s boyish enthusiasm for his hardboiled new friend. In contrast to Scott, she sensed Hemingway’s disapproval, instinctively disliked him and considered him a threat to her marriage. Hemingway’s self-conscious display of virility both irritated and menaced her. Attracted to more genteel, polished and deferential men, she provoked Hemingway’s hostility by questioning his sexual power. She thought Hemingway was bogus and told him “no one is as masculine as you pretend to be.” She tauntingly called him “a phony,” “a sort of materialist mystic,” “a professional he-man,” “a pansy with hair on his chest.”18 According to Zelda, The Sun Also Rises was about “bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullshitting.”

  Like Dos Passos, Hemingway realized that Zelda’s intelligence was streaked with madness after she shocked him by declaring, with strange intensity: “Ernest, don’t you think Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?” Hemingway agreed with Mencken that “Scott will never amount to a hoot in hell till he gets rid of his wife.” He believed that Zelda encouraged him to waste his talent, and undermined his confidence as a man and writer. He saw Fitzgerald’s energy and creativity dissipated in bursts of self-destruction.

  In 1934, after Zelda had broken down and begun her long series of ineffectual treatments, and Fitzgerald’s career seemed to be in decline, Hemingway told him, with brutal honesty: “Of all people on earth you needed discipline in your work and instead you marry someone who is jealous of your work, wants to compete with you and ruins you.” At the same time Hemingway recognized Fitzgerald’s responsibility for his drinking, his desperate love for Zelda and the overwhelming power of her personality: “It is not as simple as that and I thought Zelda was crazy the first time I met her and you complicated it even more by being in love with her and, of course, you’re a rummy.”19 Zelda may have contributed to Hemingway’s hostile portrait of the beautiful, dominant and destructive Margot Macomber. There was a hardness beneath Zelda’s soft exterior, and underneath that hardness a more vulnerable inner core.

  Scott and Zelda’s sexual problems, inherent from the beginning of their relationship, came glaringly to the surface during her affair with Jozan and intensified during the late 1920s. Though temperamentally attracted and emotionally attached to each other, they were sexually incompatible. Zelda was sensual; Scott, inhibited by Midwestern puritanism, was not. Other women Scott courted recalled that he could be a witty lover, especially when drink had loosened his tongue, but that he was not especially virile. Elizabeth Beckwith McKie (whom he had known in West Virginia) remembered him cheekily asking: “Are your breasts standing up like that for me?” But she unfavorably compared him to her more aggressive and more physically satisfying Southern beaux, and regretfully reported: “In 1917, I’m afraid, Scott just wasn’t a very lively male animal.”20

  During the winter of 1926 the Fitzgeralds, who wanted to have a son, tried in vain to conceive another child. This failure, probably caused by the after-effects of her abortions, made Zelda increasingly unhappy, and provoked her to lash out at her husband’s inadequacies. Comparing Scott unfavorably with Jozan, she began to complain that his penis was too small to give her sexual satisfaction. It was naive to blame the size of his organ for her lack of sexual orgasm, which was more likely to have had an emotional cause. But Scott’s alcoholism undoubtedly affected his sexual capacity and may even have caused occasional impotence. Later on, as Zelda became obsessed with and exhausted by ballet dancing, their sexual relations gradually petered out and she began to accuse him of homosexuality.

  Zelda also repeated the malicious charge of the homosexual expatriate writer Robert McAlmon, who called Fitzgerald and Hemingway a couple of queers. Though this charge was absurd, it wounded Scott and hurt his comradeship with men. One drunken night he took Morley Callaghan’s arm and then dropped it. “It was like holding on to a cold fish,” Scott told Callaghan. “You thought I was a fairy, didn’t you?” Acknowledging in his Notebooks the effectiveness of McAlmon’s malice, Fitzgerald sadly wrote of Hemingway: “I really loved him, but of course it wore out like a love affair. The fairies have spoiled all that.”

  Fitzgerald had (as Hemingway remarked) “pretty” feminine looks and once posed as an attractive girl in a Princeton musical. But he had failed as an athlete, soldier, drinker, brawler and sexual partner to his wife, was cruelly hurt by Zelda’s accusations and became deeply worried about his masculinity. Edmund Wilson’s diary of 1932 contains the earliest account of Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s response to Zelda’s attempt at psychological castration, and of Scott’s habit of asking strangers: “Do women like a man’s private parts large or small?” Wilson recorded: “Hemingway said, Scott thinks that his penis is too small. (John Bishop had told me this and said that Scott was in the habit of making this assertion to anyone he met—to the lady who sat next to him at dinner and who might be meeting him for the first time.) I explained to him, Hemingway continued, that it only seemed to him small because he looked at it from above. You have to look at it in a mirror.”21

  In a notorious passage in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (set during a lunch in Paris that probably took place in September 1931), Fitzgerald naively confessed: “You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda. . . . Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her.” After a personal inspection in the toilet (where the two men spent a surprising amount of time together), the patronizing Ernest reassured the pathetic Scott about his physical equipment: “ ‘You’re perfectly fine,’ I said. ‘You
are O.K. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ ” When Fitzgerald asked: “But why would she say it?” Hemingway responded: “To put you out of business.” Their exchange ended as Fitzgerald gratefully replied: “I wanted you to tell me truly,” and Hemingway told the terrible truth: “Forget what Zelda said. . . . Zelda is crazy. . . . Zelda just wants to destroy you.”

  But Hemingway’s account is highly suspect. Fitzgerald may have felt the need to humiliate himself before the intimidating Hemingway, but it is very doubtful that he would risk the possibility of a devastating confirmation of Zelda’s charges. Fitzgerald’s convincing statement in “The Crack-Up” that he slept with prostitutes at Princeton in 1917 and his affair with the English actress Rosalinde Fuller two years later cast serious doubt on Hemingway’s assertion that Fitzgerald told him he had “never slept with anyone except Zelda.” The phrase “tell me truly” sounds much more like Hemingway than like Fitzgerald. The “Matter of Measurements,” as Hemingway called it, was rather meaningless without an erection. And if Fitzgerald was unwilling to hold Callaghan’s arm, it is extremely unlikely that he would expose and arouse himself in front of Hemingway. In 1935 Fitzgerald told Lottie, a prostitute of mixed race in Asheville, North Carolina, that he had discussed the size of his penis with Hemingway. In Hemingway’s version, they began with Scott examining Ernest’s manuscripts and ended with Ernest examining Scott’s cock. But there is a more plausible scenario. Hemingway, with characteristic exaggeration, probably transformed talking about Fitzgerald’s small member at the table into actually showing it in the toilet. Hemingway may have magnified Fitzgerald’s sexual innocence. But he was telling the truth about Zelda, who had undoubtedly attacked Scott’s sexual capacity.

  There is a surprising amount of evidence about Fitzgerald’s sexual organ and sexual performance. The Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich, Fitzgerald’s mistress Sheilah Graham and the prostitute Lottie all saw Fitzgerald’s penis and agreed that it was adequate, perfectly normal and like that of other men.22 His problem was therefore more psychological than physical. He told Edmund Wilson that after Zelda’s breakdown he had affairs with other women and worried because he “didn’t get very excited by them.” And he told another friend that he disliked those casual affairs and could not enjoy sex unless he was emotionally involved with the woman.

  Lottie, in an unusual revelation, both described and explained the reasons for Scott’s premature ejaculation, which had provoked Zelda’s complaints:

  He was nervous and I thought maybe that was why he was so quick about it. I asked him if that was his usual way and he said, yes. . . . I remember him telling me that he only made love to help him write [through excitement and release]. No wonder he was so quick. He might know how to write but he sure doesn’t know about this other thing. . . . He believed the real reason for his hasty climax was fear and guilt, both going back to his boyish years of masturbating, a time when he thought sex was dirty and sinful.

  Fitzgerald’s perceptive St. Paul friend Oscar Kalman (in an interview with Arthur Mizener) confirmed Scott’s puritanical inhibitions, lack of a powerful sexual urge and belief—which extended from adolescence into adult life—that sex was “dirty and sinful”:

  Scott was at bottom a very conventional man who shocked rather easily, who had some compulsion to shock, and who shocked himself more than he did others. He did things, or liked Zelda to do things, which did shock him. Scott had told [Kalman] about Zelda’s living with him before they were married; a common enough thing, but Scott never got over being impressed by it. Scott liked the idea of sex, for its romance and daring, but was not strongly sexed and told Kalman—and a number of friends of his, including females—about his anxiety over the shortness of his penis. Kalman said that Scott was inclined to feel the actual act of sex was messy.23

  V

  Fitzgerald’s flaws of character and sexual problems were not fully apparent in 1925, when Hemingway still trusted him as craftsman and critic, and deferred to him as the more experienced writer. They read and revised each other’s work, and the passionate discussions about the art of fiction transcended their differences and drew them together. In A Moveable Feast Hemingway misleadingly stated that Fitzgerald “was upset because I would not show him the manuscript of the first draft of The Sun Also Rises.” In fact, Fitzgerald read and corrected the novel. He had deleted what became his story “Absolution” from the original opening of The Great Gatsby and shrewdly advised Hemingway, who followed his advice, to delete the first two chapters of his new novel before sending it to the printer.

  Their first novels, This Side of Paradise and The Sun Also Rises (1926), had much in common. Fitzgerald called his somewhat pretentious novel “A Romance and a Reading List,” and characterized Hemingway’s novel, which takes place in France and Spain, “A Romance and a Guide Book.” Both books had bold heroines who defied moral conventions and influenced the social behavior of the postwar generation. But Hemingway’s Brett Ashley—who lives from hand to mouth, cuts her hair like a boy’s, gets drunk, has several adulterous affairs and loves a sexually incapacitated man—is, unlike Fitzgerald’s flirtatious but chaste debutantes, a truly wild and reckless bohemian. In “Homage to Switzerland” (1933), Hemingway gently mocked Fitzgerald’s sexless preppy girls when a traveling American asks a Swiss waitress, who has been to language school: “Were the Berlitz undergraduates a wild lot? What about all this necking and petting? Were there many smoothies? Did you ever run into Scott Fitzgerald?”24

  Fitzgerald’s suggestions about Hemingway’s later work were less successful than his ideas about The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway also took his advice about cutting the opening anecdote of “Fifty Grand” (1927), though he later quoted the passage and regretted the deletion of “that lovely revelation of the metaphysics of boxing.” But he rejected Fitzgerald’s ludicrous recommendations about how to improve the ending of A Farewell to Arms (1929). Fitzgerald thought the novel would be more popular if Hemingway brought in the U.S. Marines and suggested that Frederic Henry read about their victory at Belleau Wood as Catherine Barkley is dying. Hemingway said that he had revised the ending of this novel thirty-two times, but he did not mention that a sentence from The Great Gatsby—“Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain”—directly inspired the famous conclusion of A Farewell to Arms: “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.” Hemingway acknowledged, however, as Glenway Wescott later observed, that Fitzgerald, a loyal and devoted friend, “was truly more interested in my career at this point than in his own.”25

  Hemingway, who admired The Great Gatsby, tried to repay Fitzgerald by encouraging him during the long, difficult nine years between the publication of that novel and Tender Is the Night: “You just have to go on when it is worst and most [hopeless]—there is only one thing to do with a novel and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.” Hemingway, with much less money than Fitzgerald, had recently given up a salaried job on the Toronto Star in order to concentrate on serious art. He doubted Fitzgerald’s claim that he wrote for eight hours a day, and thought the real problem was that Scott wasted his talent on stories for the Post and had nothing left over for his novel. Fitzgerald accepted Hemingway’s idealistic belief that you had to worship at the altar of art “on your knees” and “with a pure heart,” and told Perkins: “there’s no point in trying to be an artist if you can’t do your best.” But he found it difficult to live up to these ideals and in 1929 confessed to Hemingway that he had sold out for money: “the Post now pays the old whore $4,000 a screw. But now it’s because she’s mastered the 40 positions—in her youth one was enough.” Genuinely shocked by Fitzgerald’s changing good stories to make them more salable (as he had suggested Hemingway do with the ending of A Farewell to Arms), Hemingway adopted Fitzgerald’s word and called it “whoring.” When Hemingway collected his stories in 1938 he rightly felt that all of them were worth reprinting. Fitzgerald, by contrast, deliberate
ly included inferior stories to fill out his collections and, even then, reprinted less than one-third of the ones he had written. Hemingway’s stories were not all first rate, but his standard was much higher than Fitzgerald’s.

  Hemingway felt that Fitzgerald was uneducated, unaware of the immutable laws of fiction and “did everything wrong,” but managed to succeed because of his great natural talent. When Tender Is the Night finally appeared in 1934, Hemingway thought it was too autobiographical, too full of self-pity about Zelda’s breakdown and madness, Scott’s alcoholism and deterioration. The following year, in Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway used the unnamed Fitzgerald to exemplify an author who had declined and dried up: “Our writers when they have made some money increase their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop. . . . Or else they read the critics. . . . At present we have two good writers [Fitzgerald and Anderson] who cannot write because they have lost confidence through reading critics.”26

  VI

  Fitzgerald also met two important women writers when he moved to Paris in the spring of 1925. Hemingway introduced him to Gertrude Stein, who had studied with William James while at Radcliffe and had been trained as a doctor at Johns Hopkins, though she did not complete her medical degree. Rich and domineering, she weighed two hundred pounds, was one of the leading lesbians of the Left Bank and was still struggling to establish her literary reputation. Hemingway’s description compared her Jewish features to those of an Italian and concentrated on her sensual hair: “Miss Stein was very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She had beautiful eyes and a strong German Jewish face that could also have been Friulano and reminded me of a northern Italian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobile face and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair.” Stein’s companion, Alice Toklas, an amiable gargoyle, resembled (according to Hadley Hemingway) “a little piece of electric wire, small and fine and very Spanish looking, very dark, with piercing dark eyes.” Emphasizing Fitzgerald’s rather appealing lack of self-confidence, Toklas remembered Stein’s “unfailing appreciation of his work and belief in his gift—which he would not believe. I mean he did neither believe in his gift nor believe she meant what she told him about his work.” The less tolerant Hemingway was actually annoyed about Fitzgerald’s perverse refusal to accept Stein’s sincere compliment and his attempt to distort her praise into a slighting remark.