Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  At that time Stein, who had praised The Great Gatsby, admired Fitzgerald’s work as much as she did Hemingway’s. She was then preoccupied with generations, lost and new. In her third-person narrative The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—written after she had quarreled with Hemingway, who refused to remain her disciple—she demoted Hemingway and placed Fitzgerald above him: “Gertrude Stein had been very much impressed by This Side of Paradise. . . . She said of it that it was this book that really created for the public the new generation. She has never changed her opinion about this. She thinks this equally true of The Great Gatsby. She thinks Fitzgerald will be read when many of his well-known contemporaries [i.e., Hemingway] are forgotten.”27 Toklas herself adored Fitzgerald, considered him her favorite young American writer and declared that “his intelligence, sensibility, distinction, wit and charm made his contemporaries [i.e., Hemingway] appear commonplace and lifeless.”

  Zelda, however, disliked Stein as much as she disliked Hemingway, and thought her involuted conversation was “sententious gibberish.” Zelda irreverently told Edmund Wilson, who would write perceptively about the portentous mandarin in Axel’s Castle (1931): “We went to Gertrude Stein’s where a young poet vomited from sheer emotion and the atmosphere was hazy and oracular.” Though Zelda avoided Stein in Paris, she received her in Baltimore in December 1934. Andrew Turnbull, then living in Baltimore, gave a dramatic account of Scott’s attempt to dominate Zelda, her lively resistance to his demands and Stein’s tactful acquiescence to Zelda’s wishes:

  During the visit, Zelda came in with some of her paintings, and Fitzgerald asked Miss Stein to take any ones she pleased. She chose two which Zelda had promised her doctor.

  “But dear,” said Fitzgerald, “you don’t understand. Gertrude will hang them in her salon in Paris and you will be famous. She’s been kinder to me than almost anyone and I’d like to give her something.”

  “If she has been as kind to you as my doctor has been to me,” said Zelda, “you should give her everything you own but she can’t have those paintings.” In the end Miss Stein chose two others.

  Turnbull also mentioned Stein’s characteristically regal demeanor: “When Scottie appeared, Miss Stein drew from the pocket of her homespun skirt a handful of hazel nuts which she had gathered on her afternoon walk. She gave one to Scottie, who wanted it autographed. ‘That would be appropriate,’ said Miss Stein, inscribing it.”28

  The bohemian Stein, though a formidable personality, was less intimidating than Edith Wharton, who was then a much grander figure in the world of letters. While the egoistic Stein felt Fitzgerald’s deferential reverence was entirely appropriate, the respectable and autocratic Wharton was embarrassed by his awkward and self-abasing homage. His behavior was intended to express his youthful admiration and respect for her art. But Fitzgerald could never quite bridge the gulf between himself and his artistic heroes. Instead of living up to the dramatic occasion, he nervously erupted in gaucherie with Galsworthy, Dreiser, Conrad and Wharton just as he later would with Isadora Duncan and James Joyce.

  When Fitzgerald first met Wharton in Charles Scribner’s office, just after his first novel was published in the spring of 1920, he impulsively threw himself at her feet and exclaimed: “Could I let the author of Ethan Frome pass through New York without paying my respects?” In July 1925, after receiving The Great Gatsby and complimenting him on the novel, Wharton invited the Fitzgeralds to tea at her home outside Paris. Zelda, remembering the boredom at Stein’s salon and fearing she would be patronized by the grande dame, refused to go. So Scott took the young American composer Theodore Chanler. They had a few drinks on the way; and, as Zelda later wrote, “the nights, smelling of honeysuckle and army leather, staggered up the mountain side and settled upon Mrs. Edith Wharton’s garden.”

  Their conversation was slow and awkward. Swaying against the mantelpiece, Fitzgerald proposed to enliven the dull tea party by telling a couple of “rather rough stories.” After Wharton, by no means as stuffy as Fitzgerald imagined, had encouraged him to proceed (writes Wharton’s biographer), he “got entangled in an anecdote about an American couple [perhaps himself and Zelda] who by mistake spent a night in a Paris bordello. His hostess, listening attentively, commented at last that the story ‘lacks data’—the kind of rounded realistic information and description that the flustered Fitzgerald was unable to provide.”29

  Wharton made no effort to put her nervous guest at ease, deliberately led him into an awkward situation, which he was not quite drunk enough to ignore or to brazen out, and seemed to enjoy his discomfort. Though he certainly had the necessary “data,” he felt he could not, under the circumstances, provide it. So his performance fell completely flat. After he left, Wharton remarked: “there must be something peculiar about that young man.” But, according to Janet Flanner, Wharton maintained her admiration of his work and later spoke appreciatively of Fitzgerald.

  VII

  In August 1925 the Fitzgeralds rejoined the Murphys, who had completed the Villa America, and moved into the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes. Fitzgerald celebrated this idyllic place and its devout sun worshipers in the alluring, chromatic opening paragraphs of Tender Is the Night: “The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of the old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water.” He sent Bishop a characteristically sparkling list of celebrities who gathered in Antibes that summer and who seemed to re-create the Great Neck parties in a more exotic setting: Esther, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Dos Passos, MacLeish, Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, the screenwriter Charlie Brackett, the mystery writer E. Phillips Oppenheim, Rudolph Valentino, the French singer Mistinguett, the actress Alice Terry and her husband, the film director Rex Ingram, the violinist David Mannes, the soprano Marguerite Namara, ex-premier Vittorio Orlando of Italy and the art connoisseur Count Étienne de Beaumont. A real place to rough it, he added, and escape from the world. The Fitzgeralds almost made their escape complete one drunken evening when their car stalled and they fell asleep on some dangerous trolley tracks. Early the next morning, a peasant awakened them minutes before a trolley smashed their car to pieces. Fitzgerald described their life during this pleasant but wasteful period as “1,000 parties and no work.”

  In November 1925 the Fitzgeralds returned to England, once again equipped with useful introductions to well-placed people. Through Tallulah Bankhead, a girlhood friend of Zelda, they went to some “high tone” parties with the Mountbattens and the Marchioness of Milford Haven. “Very impressed, but not very,” Fitzgerald told Perkins, with newly acquired English nonchalance, “as I furnished most of the amusement myself.” Fitzgerald’s visit to his new London publisher, Chatto & Windus, without first making an appointment, was more significant. The novelist Frank Swinnerton, who received him, recalled:

  I went from my office to the waiting-room, where a young man sat, with his hat on, at a small table. He did not rise or remove his hat, and he did not answer my greeting, so I took another chair, expressing regret that no partner was available, and asking if there was anything I could do. Assuming, I suppose, that I was some base hireling, he continued brusque to the point of truculence; but we spoke of the purpose of his visit, and after a few moments he silently removed his hat. Two minutes later, looking rather puzzled, he rose. I did the same. I spoke warmly of The Great Gatsby; and his manner softened. He became an agreeable boy, quite ingenuous and inoffensive, and finally asked my name. I told him. If I had said “The Devil” he could not have been more horrified. Snatching up his hat in consternation, he cried: “Oh, my God! Nocturne’s one of my favorite books!” and dashed out of the premises.30

  In this encounter between a poised Englishman and a bumbling American, Swinnerton, completely in control of the situation, brought Fitzgerald round from rudeness to adoration. Their meeting revealed the uncomfortably defensive and effusive aspects of Fitzgerald’s character, and suggested that far f
rom being at ease in English society, he got on with Swinnerton no better than he had with Galsworthy, Mackenzie and Rebecca West. In the end, he had to rush out of the room in acute embarrassment.

  Fitzgerald, to his intense irritation, had much less of a reputation in England than in America. He was virtually ignored by the critics from the early 1920s until after World War II and none of his books sold well there during his lifetime. Though Thomas Hardy, shortly before his death, said he “had read and been greatly impressed by This Side of Paradise” and that Fitzgerald “was one of the few younger American writers whose work he followed with any interest,” the Times Literary Supplement correctly stated that “when Fitzgerald died in 1940 his work, outside a small circle, was hardly known in this country.”

  Fitzgerald had been in London when William Collins brought out This Side of Paradise in May 1921 and had told an editor friend that the book was “having a checkered career in England.” The Manchester Guardian dismissively concluded: “But what people! What a set! They are well lost.” And the Times Literary Supplement disagreed with the American critics who had found the novel original and exuberant. Setting the critical tone for the next twenty years, its anonymous reviewer rejected the novel as trivial, unconvincing and “rather tiresome; its values are less human than literary, and its characters . . . with hardly an exception, a set of exasperating poseurs, whose conversation, devoted largely to minute self-analysis, is artificial beyond belief.”31 The novel, which had required twelve printings and sold 49,000 copies during its first year in America, bombed in England with a sale of only 700.

  Flappers and Philosophers, The Beautiful and Damned and Tales of the Jazz Age, also published by Collins, did not receive serious critical attention. When Scribner’s sent Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, to Collins, he invented a rather absurd reason to reject an author whose books had been losing money for the firm. “We do not at all like to part with Scott Fitzgerald, but we feel very strongly that to publish The Great Gatsby would be to reduce the number of his readers rather than to increase them,” he explained to Perkins, who passed the bad news on to Fitzgerald in October 1925. “The point is, that the atmosphere of the book is extraordinarily foreign to the English reader, and he simply would not believe in it, and therefore I am regretfully returning it to you.” Fitzgerald justly complained that the publisher had rejected his serious and encouraged his frivolous work: “Collins never believed in me. (He always wanted me to write [another] ‘Offshore Pirate.’) I know my public in England is small—but I have had enough enthusiastic letters to know it exists.” Though Chatto & Windus published The Great Gatsby in 1926, his last two collections of stories, All the Sad Young Men and Taps at Reveille, have never appeared in England.

  The Great Gatsby received excellent notices from two American critics, Gilbert Seldes and Conrad Aiken, in T. S. Eliot’s magazine, The Criterion. Eliot himself, an editor at Faber, had been enthusiastic about the novel and hoped his firm would publish it. But the English reviewers were much less keen. The Times Literary Supplement acknowledged that it was “undoubtedly a work of art and of great promise”—though its promise had surely been fulfilled—but complained about the unpleasantness of the characters. And the novelist L. P. Hartley offered a condescending admonition: “Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.” Fitzgerald, perhaps unduly touchy, as he had been with Swinnerton, continued to feel that Chatto & Windus was snubbing him. In January 1930 he complained to Perkins about a commonplace business reply: “they answered a letter of mine on the publication of [The Great Gatsby] with the signature (Chatto & Windus, per Q), undoubtedly an English method of showing real interest in one’s work.”32 Though Fitzgerald admired Oxford, which had played a prominent role in The Great Gatsby, he lost interest in England after Collins dropped him. He never returned there after his second visit and was consistently hostile to the English in his work.

  Two months after their visit to England, in January 1926, the Fitzgeralds left Paris again. Zelda had been suffering from colitis and persistent gynecological problems; and they decided to spend a cold and restful winter in the western Pyrenees between Bayonne and Pau. In January Fitzgerald wrote to Harold Ober: “We have come to a lost little village called Salies-de-Béarn in the Pyrenees where my wife is to take a special treatment of baths for eleven months for an illness that has run now for almost a year. Here they have the strongest salt springs in the world—and out of season nothing much else—we are two of the seven guests in the only open hotel.” After the excitement of Paris and London, however, the place was too boring to endure. Scott told a friend that the other inhabitants were two goats and a paralytic, and Zelda’s rest cure was reduced from eleven months to only one. In June 1926 Zelda, on a quick trip to Paris, had her appendix out at the American Hospital, but continued to feel unwell.

  In March they returned to the Riviera for a nine-month stay in Juan-les-Pins, just next to Antibes. They spent the first two months in the Villa Paquita, which Fitzgerald found too damp and uncomfortable. When the Hemingways arrived for the summer, Fitzgerald generously gave them the villa and moved to the more suitable Villa St. Louis. The large house was wonderfully situated on the coast, with the beach and the Casino nearby, and they looked forward to a marvelous summer.

  At a farewell party for the critic Alexander Woollcott and other friends, Zelda (chirpy again) did her by-now-familiar but always welcome striptease. After speeches had been made, she daringly declared: “I have been so touched by all these kind words. But what are words? Nobody has offered our departing heroes any gifts to take with them. I’ll start off”—and she stepped out of her black lace panties and threw them at the grateful men. Not content with her own performance, Zelda also dared Scott (as she had dared him to fight the bouncer in the Jungle Club) to make some dangerous high dives from the cliffs into the sea—and forced him to accept her challenge.

  One evening when the Fitzgeralds were dining outdoors with the Murphys at the Colombe d’Or in Vence, a lovely village in the Maritime Alps above Juan-les-Pins, Zelda took an even more dramatic dive. “Isadora Duncan was giving one of her last parties at the next table,” Zelda wrote. “She had got too old and fat to care whether people accepted her theories of life and art, and she gallantly toasted the world’s obliviousness in lukewarm champagne. There were village dogs baying at a premature white exhausted August moon and there were long dark shadows folded accordion-like along the steps of the steep streets of Saint-Paul.”33 Zelda portrayed the dancer who provoked the scene as unattractive and described the fateful evening as if nothing extraordinary had occurred. But the steep stone steps and the long dark shadows suggest an ominous event. Isadora, reputed to be free with her favors, had summoned Fitzgerald to her table. He sat at her feet while she ran her jeweled fingers through his blond hair and called him “my centurion.” Zelda, who liked to be the center of attention and resented this seductive behavior, suddenly got up from the table and—in her second attempt at self-destruction—threw herself down a long flight of steps. Though cut and bleeding, she was not badly hurt and offered no explanation for her bizarre act. The Murphys knew something was seriously wrong with Zelda, but did not suspect that she was mentally ill.

  Though Fitzgerald was nearly thirty, he continued his heavy drinking and ludicrous pranks. During the summer of 1926 Scott and his Riviera friends lured a hotel orchestra to his villa, locked them in a room with a bottle of whiskey and sat down outside the closed door for a private concert of their favorite music. They made an amateur silent film, with an incestuous Japanese hero, on the grounds of the Hôtel du Cap, and painted the obscene titles on the walls of a friend’s villa. Some of these high-spirited adventures found their way into Tender Is the Night. Abe North, for example, kidnaps a waiter from a café in Cannes in order to saw him in two
and find out what is inside. “ ‘Old menus,’ suggested Nicole with a short laugh. ‘Pieces of broken china and tips and pencil stubs.’ ‘Exactly [said Abe]—but the thing was to prove it scientifically. And of course doing it with that musical saw would have eliminated any sordidness.’ ”

  But the pranks that had once been playful and innocent now became menacing and malicious. They raided a restaurant in Cannes, captured the owner and waiters, and threatened to push them off a cliff. One late night outside the Casino at Juan-les-Pins an old lady offered them a tray of daintily arranged nuts and candies. As they stopped to admire the display, Fitzgerald made an ugly scene by kicking the tray and sending all the sweetmeats into the street. He was repentant, Sara Murphy recalled, and immediately tried “to make amends by offering her his apologies and hundreds of francs. He always realized when he had gone too far, & was very sorry & mortified.” But the damage had been done—both to the old lady and to his reputation. Fitzgerald certainly helped create the image of the rich and vulgar American in France.