Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  In her novel Zelda, with considerable insight, equated dancing with exorcism and tried to control her wild emotions by disciplining her body: “It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her—that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self—that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions.”8 Zelda had hoped to join the Diaghilev troupe; Egorova said she was capable of secondary roles in the Massine Ballet in New York; and she was asked—and refused—to join the San Carlo Opera Ballet in Naples. But most of the emissaries who came to Egorova’s studio, on the top floor above the Olympia Music Hall on the rue Caumartin, were from the Folies-Bergère. They all wanted to make Zelda into an American shimmy dancer.

  Like Zelda, the wife in Fitzgerald’s story “Two Wrongs” (1930) is bravely but hopelessly struggling to succeed against younger competitors and impossible obstacles: “she plunged into her work like a girl of sixteen—four hours a day at barre exercises, attitudes, sauts, arabesques and pirouettes. It became the realest part of her life, and her only worry was whether or not she was too old. At twenty-six she had ten years to make up, but she was a natural dancer with a fine body—and that lovely face.” Watching Zelda dance in 1929, the Murphys—who sympathized with her ambitions but were embarrassed by her efforts—felt she would never achieve her goal: “Zelda was awkward, her legs were too muscular, there was something about her intensity when she danced that made her look grotesque.” The distorted legs and tortured feet in Zelda’s painting Ballerinas (1938), which evoke the suffering of a crucifixion, suggest that she was pushing her mind and body far beyond what they could bear. Looking back on the sad history of their marriage, Fitzgerald later told Sheilah Graham that Zelda, temperamentally unsuited to be his wife, was jealous of his success and destroyed herself by trying to compete with him:

  Zelda and I never should have married. We were wrong for each other. She would have been happier married to almost anyone else. She was beautiful and talented. It was her tragedy that she could not bear to be overshadowed by the attention I received from my early books. For instance, she hated it when Gertrude Stein talked only to me, while her companion Alice B. Toklas talked to her. She had a compulsion to compete with me. She could not as a writer, so she decided to be a famous ballerina and studied with the Russian ballet in Paris. But it was too late for her. And when she realized this, instead of accepting the fact and bending with it, she broke.9

  IV

  In September 1928, after five months in Paris, the Fitzgeralds returned to Ellerslie to complete their two-year lease. In a grand gesture, Fitzgerald brought back to America a former boxer and taxi driver, Philippe, as his butler, chauffeur, sparring partner and drinking companion. Scott would summon Philippe from the distant kitchen with a blast from a brass automobile horn. But Zelda disliked Philippe, and found him disrespectful and intimidating. Their French nanny added to the chaos by falling in love with and becoming hysterical about Philippe, whose name Fitzgerald borrowed for the hero of his “Count of Darkness” stories. The second stay at Ellerslie was a reprise of the first. Zelda set up a bar in front of a “whorehouse” mirror, played “The March of the Toy Soldiers” over and over and over again, and practiced dancing all day long. Scott did very little work, took long solitary walks and, according to his neighbors, looked lonely and miserable.

  In mid-November 1928 Francis Godolphin, Hemingway’s Oak Park friend, saw Ernest with Scott in New York before the Princeton-Yale football game. Godolphin described their comradely contentment in much the same way as Booth Tarkington had portrayed them in Paris in 1925: “On that particular morning when they landed in our apartment together they were both a bit tight and very cheerful, very pleasant and very happy. They both seemed very harmonious, enjoying each other and having a hell of a fine time. They were at the apartment for a time, then they went off to the Cottage Club and to the game.”

  When they returned to Ellerslie, which Hemingway found surprisingly impressive, Fitzgerald uncorked six bottles of expensive Burgundy just for his friend. Ernest was flattered by his generosity but found the gesture wasteful. Content to be in Hemingway’s company, Fitzgerald had behaved well all day. But he got drunk that evening and made Hemingway uncomfortable by insulting the attractive black maid who served dinner. According to A. E. Hotchner, who heard the story from Hemingway, Fitzgerald, imitating what he took to be Ernest’s manly swagger, exclaimed: “ ‘Aren’t you the best piece of tail I ever had? Tell Mr. Hemingway.’ The girl never answered him and kept her composure. He must have said it to her ten times. ‘Tell him what a grand piece of pussy you are.’ Like that, over and over.” Hemingway felt bull-fights were sedatives compared to weekends with Fitzgerald.

  Fitzgerald redeemed himself the following month when Hemingway, traveling south on a train from New York to Florida, received a telegram announcing his father’s death (by suicide) and asking him to go west to Oak Park. Hemingway asked Fitzgerald for a hundred-dollar loan, which he delivered in person to the North Philadelphia station. And Hemingway praised him for his prompt response: “You were damned good and also bloody effective to get me that money.”10

  When the two-year lease on Ellerslie ended in March 1929 the Fitzgeralds—still restless and undecided about where to live—took their fourth and final trip to Europe. They sailed to Genoa, traveled along the Riviera to Paris, and spent April and May in an apartment on the rue Palatine, on the Left Bank, near Saint-Sulpice and their old flat on the rue Vaugirard. They had spent the previous summer in Paris, but from June to October 1929 they rented the Villa Fleur des Bois in Cannes. They returned to Paris in October, when the weather began to turn cold, and rented their last apartment at 10 rue Pergolèse, off the avenue de la Grande Armée, near their first flat on the rue de Tilsitt.

  In the spring of 1929, following Max Perkins’ suggestion, Fitzgerald looked up the young Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan, who shared his Irish Catholic background and had published his first novel with Scribner’s the previous year. Callaghan liked Fitzgerald’s “shrewd opinions, quick fine intelligence, extraordinary perception and tireless interest.” But he thought Scott was reckless and prodigal when straining to live up to his legend. Fitzgerald loved the vicarious excitement of glamorously recounting Hemingway’s exploits, prowess and courage (which were so unlike his own): Ernest’s war, his wound and the time Ernest thought he was dead. But Fitzgerald, as Edmund Wilson noted, had also carefully studied Hemingway’s weaknesses. In 1929 he made one of the most perceptive and accurate predictions about his friend, who in 1927 had divorced Hadley and married Pauline Pfeiffer: “I have a theory that Ernest needs a new woman for each big book. There was one for the stories and The Sun Also Rises. Now there’s Pauline. A Farewell to Arms is a big book. If there’s another big book I think we’ll find Ernest has another wife.” Following the pattern Fitzgerald had predicted, Hemingway acquired a third wife, Martha Gellhorn, for his next big book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as a fourth, Mary Welsh, for Across the River and into the Trees, which he hoped would be his big book about World War II.

  Fitzgerald’s occasional sparring with his chauffeur, Philippe, revived his interest in boxing. There was no question of the delicate Fitzgerald actually getting into the ring with Hemingway, who disdainfully declared: “There’s no distinction in punching Scott on his [‘almost beautiful, unmarked’] nose. Every taxi driver in Paris has done it.” In June 1929 Hemingway used to box at the gym of the American Club with Callaghan, whom he had first met at the Toronto Star in 1923. After a lunch together at Prunier’s, Scott decided to participate vicariously in their combat by assuming the grave responsibility of timekeeper.

  The powerful Hemingway was not troubled by his friends’ fear that he would “hurt his brains” in boxing. Callaghan noted that Hemingway had thought a good deal about boxing while he himself had actually worked out with fast college fighters. Hemingway took the sport se
riously, was extremely aggressive and hated to lose. When Callaghan punched Hemingway’s lip, he retaliated by spitting a mouthful of blood in his opponent’s face and solemnly exclaiming: “That’s what bullfighters do when they’re wounded. It’s a way of showing contempt.”11

  There were several versions of the notorious incident involving Fitzgerald and Hemingway. According to Callaghan, Fitzgerald, supposed to be keeping time, became so absorbed in the action that he unintentionally allowed the round to go well past the prescribed one-minute period. After Callaghan knocked Hemingway down, Fitzgerald woke up and screamed: “ ‘Oh, my God! . . . I let the round go four minutes.’ . . . ‘All right Scott,’ Ernest said savagely. ‘If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don’t say you made a mistake.’ . . . ‘Don’t you see I got fascinated watching? [Fitzgerald said]. I forgot all about the watch. My God, he thinks I did it on purpose. Why would I do it on purpose?’ ” Hemingway believed Fitzgerald was using Callaghan as a surrogate to punish him for his superiority in athletics, drinking, war and art. But it is unlikely that Fitzgerald, who genuinely admired Hemingway, wanted to see him hurt. He probably was distracted from his duties by seeing his hero unexpectedly beaten by the smaller Callaghan.

  In Hemingway’s version, which he related to Perkins (no doubt alarmed about the battering of his literary properties), he was drunk at the time, lost his wind, was beaten by Callaghan and prevented by pride from asking the time. He was convinced that Fitzgerald had been motivated by hidden animosity and had acted with deliberate malice:

  I couldn’t see him hardly—had a couple of whiskeys en route. Scott was to keep time and we were to box 1 minute rounds with 2 minute rests on acct. of my condition. I knew I could go a minute at a time and went fast and used all my wind—then Morley commenced to pop me and cut my mouth, mushed up my face in general. I was pooped as could be and thought I had never known such a long round but couldn’t ask about it or Morley would think I was quitting. Finally Scott called time. Said he was very sorry and ashamed and would I forgive him. He had let the round go three minutes and 45 seconds—so interested to see if I was going to hit the floor!

  The matter would have ended with Callaghan victorious, Hemingway embittered and Fitzgerald guilt-stricken. But a journalist—either Pierre Loving or Caroline Bancroft—heard about the incident from either Callaghan or Fitzgerald and belatedly sent a grossly distorted version of the story to the Denver Post. The “amusing encounter” was then reprinted by Isabel Paterson in the New York Herald Tribune of November 24, 1929:

  One night at the [Café] Dôme Callaghan’s name was mentioned and Hemingway said: “Oh, you can easily see he hasn’t any practical background for his fight stories—shouldn’t think he knew anything about boxing.” Callaghan, hearing of it, challenged Hemingway. After arranging for rounds and a considerable audience, they entered the arena. Not many seconds afterward Callaghan knocked Hemingway out cold. The [unnamed] amateur timekeeper was so excited that he forgot to count and the deflated critic [Hemingway] had to stagger up and finish the round.

  When Callaghan read this piece two days later, he sent a denial to Isabel Paterson. He then received an “arrogant” collect cable from Fitzgerald (under considerable pressure from Hemingway, who was sensitive about his reputation as a boxer and furious that one of his friends had spread this damaging story): HAVE SEEN STORY IN HERALD TRIBUNE. ERNEST AND I AWAIT YOUR CORRECTION. SCOTT FITZGERALD. A correction duly appeared on December 8; and Hemingway, in a letter to Callaghan on January 4, 1930, blamed the story—though not the lapse in timekeeping that had inspired it—on the Paris-based Pierre Loving. But the real loser in this boxing match was Fitzgerald. Hemingway had compelled him to send the telegram and, as Callaghan wrote, Scott, “having been insulted by Ernest that day in the American Club, was now insulted by me because he had acted to please Ernest.”12

  V

  The estrangement from Hemingway and Callaghan was compounded by drunken quarrels with many other friends, few of whom were as tolerant as the Murphys. The summary in Fitzgerald’s Ledger for 1929, when he and Zelda began their precipitous slide into alcoholism and madness, was extremely grim: “Ominous. No Real Progress in ANY way and wrecked myself with dozens of people.” Worst of all were the increasingly frequent and bitter arguments with Zelda. Robert Penn Warren, who met them in Paris that year, remembered “the frightful hissing quarrel, well laced with obscenities, which went on between them.”

  Both somewhat spoiled egoists needed precisely what the other could not give—sympathy, support, love. In the mid-1920s Zelda had recovered from nearly two years of colitis, appendicitis and gynecological problems resulting from her abortions. Since then, driven by demonic intensity, she had desperately tried to make up for lost time in her ballet career. John Biggs compared her frenzied obsession, which both frustrated and tormented her, to “the dancing madness of the middle ages.” As Zelda withdrew into an unreal, hypersensitive world of her own, Scott drank more than ever. Louis Bromfield, always perceptive about the Fitzgeralds, contrasted their drinking habits and revealed that Scott’s responsibility for her alcoholism was a source of profound guilt: “Of the two Zelda drank better and had, I think, the stronger character, and I have sometimes thought that she could have given it up without any great difficulty and that she was led on to a tragic end only because he could not stop and in despair she followed him. I have sometimes suspected that Scott was aware of this and that it caused remorse which did nothing to help his situation as it grew more tragic.”13

  Scott drank when Zelda was ill and when she danced away her life; he drank to stimulate his work and compensate for his idleness, to prepare for parties and keep them going, to soothe his loneliness and eradicate his guilt. And he had to pay all the penalties for getting drunk: quarrels with friends, terrible hangovers, blurred memory, poor health and inability to write. Zelda bitterly rejected his friends, who she felt had exploited her. She also ignored her family and—determined to create an independent life—cared about no one but her dance teacher. “As for my friends,” she told Scott, “first, I have none; by that I mean that all our associates have always taken me for granted, sought your stimulus and fame, eaten my dinners and invited [themselves to] ‘the Fitzgeralds’’ place.”

  They also had sexual problems, which were exacerbated by growing disaffection and hostility, by Zelda’s physical weariness and Scott’s inability to satisfy her, by her complaints about his physical inadequacy and by his wounded pride. With caustic clarity, Zelda told him: “You made no advances toward me and complained that I was un-responsive. You were literally eternally drunk the whole summer. I got so I couldn’t sleep and I had asthma again. . . . You didn’t want me. Twice you left my bed saying ‘I can’t. Don’t you understand’—I didn’t.” Fitzgerald was hurt in the same way as Saul Bellow’s fictional hero: “Herzog himself had no small amount of charm. But his sexual powers had been damaged by Madeleine. And without the ability to attract women, how was he to recover?”14

  Despite domestic chaos, dissipation, frustration and compromise, Fitzgerald continued to—had to—write. Between 1924 and 1934 he worked on seven different versions of Tender Is the Night but, after many broken promises, had managed to send only two chapters to Max Perkins. In 1929, he had not touched his novel for a year. But he eventually abandoned the theme of matricide, which had blocked him, changed the focus to Zelda’s mental illness and finally managed to complete the novel during 1932–34. Meanwhile, to support his extravagant way of life, he turned out increasingly lucrative stories for the Saturday Evening Post and reached a peak payment of $4,000 per story in 1929. In this fashion, he earned nearly $30,000 in 1927, $31,500 for nine Basil Duke Lee stories about his childhood and prep school years in 1928, and $27,000 in 1929.

  During this time, amidst much mediocre work, Fitzgerald wrote two first-rate stories: “The Swimmers” in 1929 and “One Trip Abroad” in 1930. These stories portray unhappy marriages and are linked, both
thematically and by specific passages, to Tender Is the Night. The second paragraph of “The Swimmers,” which describes a series of signs in French in order to create the melancholy atmosphere of Paris and to juxtapose “Life and Death” ironically, is repeated almost verbatim on page 91 of the novel. Similarly, the symbolic invasion of locusts, which the chauffeur euphemistically calls bumblebees, the naked Ouled Naïl dancers, the vivid evocation of the noises of Algeria and the allusion to “the Sepoys at the gate” in “One Trip Abroad” all reappear—contrary to Fitzgerald’s usual practice—on pages 160–161 and 271 of the novel.

  In “The Swimmers” Henry Clay Marston, who has an unfaithful French wife and is recuperating from an illness in St. Jean-de-Luz, helps rescue a drowning American girl, who teaches him how to swim. When his wife is unfaithful again, in America, they quarrel about the custody of the children. He eventually gains custody by threatening to let his wife and her lover drift out to sea in a stalled motorboat. On the ship back to Europe, he meets the young girl who had taught him to swim. Fitzgerald may have adopted the idea of regeneration through swimming from the last chapter of The Sun Also Rises when Jake Barnes—to cleanse himself of his friends’ sordid behavior during the bullfight festival—achieves purification and self-knowledge during a solitary swim at La Concha beach in San Sebastián. Hemingway suggestively writes: “As a roller came I dove, swam out under water, and came to the surface with all the chill gone. . . . Then I tried several dives. I dove deep once, swimming down to the bottom. I swam with my eyes open and it was green and dark.” In “The Swimmers” the unnamed but regenerative American girl swims “to get clean.” She helps Marston to find “refuge” in the water and to shed the symbolic odor of gasoline exhaust that foreshadowed the “black horror” of his nervous breakdown in Paris.