Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  In August 1930, the month after he met Wolfe in Vevey, Fitzgerald saw Zelda for the first time since their long separation. Their meeting convinced him that she was still very ill and would remain so indefinitely. So he was particularly responsive to Bijou O’Conor, a sophisticated and scandalous Englishwoman whom he met at the Grand Hôtel de la Paix in Lausanne that fall. Though their affair was brief, and encouraged Fitzgerald’s uncontrolled drinking and wild behavior, it also, during one of the darkest periods of his life, distracted him from his pain. A great character, almost as alcoholic and self-destructive as himself, Bijou was far more reckless, a true bohemian without Fitzgerald’s conscience and capacity for remorse. He found her utterly fascinating, and would enshrine her in his fiction.

  Bijou, whose real name was Violet Marie, was the granddaughter of the second Earl of Minto and the youngest daughter of the diplomat Sir Francis Elliot, a strait-laced, Calvinistic Scot. She was born in 1896 (the same year as Fitzgerald) in Sofia, Bulgaria, where her father was serving as British consul-general. A French nurse provided her nickname just after she was born, but when she was presented to Sir Francis, he exclaimed that she looked more like a toad than a jewel. Educated privately by governesses and tutors, and extremely intelligent, Bijou became an outstanding linguist. Very different from her three older sisters, she passionately rejected her conventional family background.

  During the Great War Bijou entertained her friends, who would have been bored by their very proper elders downstairs, in her bedroom in the Athens legation. Compton Mackenzie (whom Fitzgerald had met on Capri in 1925) was then engaged in espionage in Greece and recalled her arty set in his First Athenian Memories: “She was the youngest of Sir Francis’ daughters and the only one not yet married. In her room tucked away at the top of the Legation the social observer could have discovered the trend of the postwar generation’s decorative taste.” She represented, to Mackenzie, “the restless advance of youth in spite of the war.”

  In 1920 Bijou married Lieutenant Edmund O’Conor, a professional naval officer from Dunleer, County Louth, in Ireland, and accompanied him when he was stationed in China. She acquired an expert knowledge of Chinese and, claiming that she had been given two Pekinese by the former Empress of China, developed a lifelong passion for the pets, which followed her everywhere. Lieutenant O’Conor had been infected with tuberculosis during the war and died of that disease in Australia in 1924. Though widowed at twenty-eight, Bijou never remarried.

  Bijou had abandoned her son, Michael, who was born after her husband’s death. He was brought up in the south of France by her stern Scottish parents and cared for by a nanny until he was sent to school in England. During their rare meetings Bijou always spoke French to the boy. He learned his first spoken word, merde, from listening to Bijou exclaim whenever she made a mistake in typing. Though Bijou felt sorry for the lonely and unsettled Scottie Fitzgerald, who had been ignored and rejected by her mother and also brought up by nannies, she lacked maternal feeling for her own child.

  Bijou resembled Edith Sitwell. She was thin, chic and jolie-laide, with fine features and soft brown eyes. Very social, a bit intolerant and rather snobbish, she had rare charm and an air of mystery. An amusing raconteuse, who kept her circle of intelligent and often homosexual friends riveted by her fascinating conversation, she smoked heavily and enjoyed drinking binges. The publisher Anthony Blond recalled that “she was quite small, quite sharp and quite drunk.”

  In the early 1930s Bijou told her cousin Sir Brinsley Ford that Michael had a bad case of whooping cough and needed to recover in the mild climate of Penzance. Moved by her story, he gave her fifty pounds to take the boy on a recuperative holiday. A few days later a friend, who did not know where Bijou had obtained the sudden windfall, told Sir Brinsley that she had lavishly entertained a group of friends at the Ritz. Wildly extravagant whenever she had any money, Bijou always left a trail of debts behind her and may even have served time in prison for this offense.

  Bijou lived on a small naval pension and on whatever cash she could extract from her unwilling father. She may have caught tuberculosis from her late husband, for she spent some time in a sanatorium in Davos, and was also treated for alcoholism in Switzerland, where she met Fitzgerald. The reckless Bijou—whom he had first met in the south of France and at the Closerie des Lilas in the Latin Quarter in the mid-1920s—reminded Fitzgerald of Zelda. And like Scott, Bijou was often irresponsible, lived beyond her means, borrowed money, drank heavily and did not care what people thought of her. Though she encouraged his worst characteristics, she also alleviated his tormenting guilt about Zelda, provided affection and gave him sexual reassurance in what she described as their “roaring, screaming affair.”

  The aristocratic Bijou smoked cigarettes in a long amber holder, carried around a half-paralyzed Pekinese, and frightened all the hotel guests and servants. She remembered Fitzgerald typing away in her hotel room, fueled by bottle after bottle of gin. Bijou later claimed, in a taped interview, that she and Fitzgerald had visited Prangins together (though they could have precipitated another breakdown if Zelda had guessed they were lovers), where she saw all the patients dressed for a formal dinner and seated between the doctors and nurses. Bijou also recalled that Fitzgerald bought a Persian kitten for Zelda, who, in a moment of uncontrolled rage, killed it by bashing its head against a wall.

  Fitzgerald portrayed Bijou and her friend Napier Alington—whose birth and death dates (1896–1940) were the same as his own—as the widowed Lady Capps-Karr and Bopes, the Marquis of Kinkallow, in “The Hotel Child” (1931). Alington, a dark, good-looking baron and wealthy landowner, belonged to a fast set and was regarded by some as a wicked man. He was painted by Augustus John in 1938, wearing an elegant smoking jacket and bow tie, with a long face, creased cheeks, full lips and prominent oval chin.

  “Practically the whole damn [story] is true, bizarre as it seems,” Fitzgerald said. “Lord Alington and the famous Bijou O’Conor were furious at me putting them in.”12 In real life, in about 1918, Bijou, careless with a cigarette, had burnt the ceiling of the guest room in her uncle’s house. She must have told Fitzgerald about this embarrassing incident, for in his story Lady Capps-Karr and the Marquis of Kinkallow are ejected from the Swiss hotel for starting a fire while attempting to cook some potato chips in alcohol.13

  In “The Hotel Child” the sympathetic heroine Fifi Schwartz, a wealthy Jewish-American teenage girl, is courted by the bogus Hungarian Count Borowki, who wants to elope with her. But when she discovers he has slipped into their hotel room and stolen her mother’s money, she rejects him. (A bogus East European count who lies and steals money from the heroine’s room had also appeared in “The Swimmers.”) So Borowki elopes instead with a snobbish English girl, Miss Howard, who has been extremely rude to the young American. When they are caught by the Swiss police, the count is arrested and Miss Howard’s reputation is ruined. Fifi then moves on to Paris and America to find a suitable husband.

  The young Fifi, whose flashy style has been created by her mother, is repeatedly wounded by the bitchiness of Lady Capps-Karr and the other English guests. They audibly whisper about her “ghastly” and “rotten” taste, about the “gratuitous outrage” (a phrase borrowed from Conrad’s “Author’s Note” to The Secret Agent) of her noisy parties and about the undesirable acquaintances who, they fear, will “contaminate” the public rooms of the hotel.

  When the Marquis Kinkallow, a tall, stooped Englishman familiarly known as Bopes, appears in the hotel bar, Lady Capps-Karr, the widow of a baronet, pathetically begs him to “Stay here and save me!” But he abandons her, pursues the much-younger Fifi and, like the count, tries to persuade her to run away with him. After a hasty courtship by Kinkallow, who is fired by “smoldering resentment” because “the whole world had slid into your power,” Fifi fights off his crude advances by scoring his face with her nails. At the end of the story Fifi is triumphant, and Lady Capps-Karr and the Marquis Kinkallow are ejected from the h
otel. “The whole thing’s an outrage and Bopes is furious,” she indignantly exclaims. “He says he’ll never come here again. I went to the consulate and they agreed that the whole affair was perfectly disgraceful, and they’ve wired the Foreign Office.”14 The satiric caricatures of Lord Alington and Bijou O’Conor seem to have been inspired by Fitzgerald’s powerful reaction against Bijou after their stormy affair had ended.

  IV

  Soon after he left Bijou, Fitzgerald heard that his seventy-seven-year-old father had died of a heart attack in Washington. In January 1931 he sailed home to attend the funeral in Rockville, Maryland. Arthur Miller has perceptively observed that most modern American male authors—from Fitzgerald and Hemingway to Lowell and Berryman—have tried to compensate for their own weak fathers: “One rarely hears of an American writer . . . whose father was to be regarded as, in any way, adequate or successful. The writer in America is supplanting somebody, correcting him, making up for his errors or failures, and in the process he is creating a new world. He is the power that the father had lost.” In Tender Is the Night Fitzgerald describes Dick Diver’s shock when he receives a telegram, forwarded through Zurich—“Your father died peacefully tonight”—as well as Dick’s fond memories of his childhood and of his gentle father, who taught his son to believe in “honor, courtesy, and courage.”

  Sailing on the New York, Fitzgerald noticed a small, dark, attractive and vivacious young woman, who played bridge all day and night with the entourage of a Texas oil man. When they all stood on the deck to see the new liner Bremen pass in the night, Fitzgerald overheard her say: “Papa, buy me that!” He was even more intrigued when she convinced him, for a time, that she earned her living as a professional card sharp. Fitzgerald thought she would have many good stories to tell and, impressed by her dramatic impersonation of a gambler, urged her to collaborate with him. The woman, who called herself Bert Barr, was born Bertha Weinberg in a Brooklyn slum in 1896. She was the sister of Sidney Weinberg, who became a powerful Wall Street investment banker and adviser to several presidents. Bert later married Louis Goldstein, a prominent Brooklyn judge.

  In his story “On Your Own” (1931) Fitzgerald portrayed the attractive Bert as Evelyn and described her as a “girl of twenty-six, burning with a vitality that could only be described as ‘professional.’ . . . She had enormous, dark brown eyes. She was not beautiful but it took her only about ten seconds to persuade people that she was. Her body was lovely with little concealed muscles of iron. She was in black now and overdressed—but she was always very chic and a little overdressed.” It seems, from Fitzgerald’s letters to Bert, that they were attracted to each other, but that their clash of temperaments and egos precluded a shipboard romance: “It was too bad about us this time—we met like two crazy people, both cross & worried & exhausted & as we’re both somewhat spoiled we took to rows & solved nothing. . . . All of which doesn’t mean that my tenderness toward you is diminished in the slightest but only that I want it to go on, & one more siege like those three days would finish us both & spoil everything for ever.”15

  After his father’s funeral in St. Mary’s Church, Fitzgerald traveled south to Montgomery to try to reassure the Sayres about Zelda. Despite his bereavement, he received more hostility than sympathy from her family. They could not conceive how much he had suffered, and secretly thought that Scott was the crazy one. Ignoring the pervasive history of mental illness in their family, the Sayres blamed him for Zelda’s insanity and accused him of putting her in an asylum in order to get rid of her. In December 1930, a month before Edward Fitzgerald’s death, Scott had defended himself in a letter to the Sayres by alluding to one of his father’s moral touchstones: “I know you despise certain weaknesses in my character and I do not want during this tragedy that fact to blur or confuse your belief in me as a man of integrity.”

  Scottie later idealized Fitzgerald’s uneasy relations with Zelda’s mother (the judge had always disapproved of him). In a letter to Mizener, she said that Grandmother Sayre “always trusted and loved Daddy. She liked his writing and she never blamed him for anything that happened to Mamma.” But Fitzgerald, contradicting this view, told Zelda’s doctor that the sweet old lady had quite a ruthless streak: “Mrs. Sayre, when it comes to Zelda, is an entirely irrational and conscienceless woman with the best intentions in the world.” When questioned about Fitzgerald late in life, after both Scott and Zelda had died, Mrs. Sayre praised his good looks. But she criticized his character and ignored all the sacrifices he had made for Zelda after her breakdown: “He was a handsome thing, I’ll say that for him. But he was not good for my daughter and he gave her things she shouldn’t have. He was a selfish man. What he wanted always came first.”16

  Fitzgerald’s relations with Zelda’s older sister Rosalind—who had witnessed their drunken quarrel at Ellerslie when Scott slapped Zelda and gave her a bloody nose—were infinitely worse. While the Sayres merely hinted at Fitzgerald’s guilt, the strait-laced, moralistic Rosalind exacerbated the tragedy by condemning Scott’s past behavior and forcing him to justify himself. On June 8, 1930, four days after Zelda entered Prangins, Fitzgerald told Rosalind that the breakdown had taken him by surprise and destroyed his life:

  After three agonizing months in which I’ve given all my waking & most of my sleeping time to pull Zelda out of this mess, which itself arrived like a thunderclap, I feel that your letter which arrived today was scarcely necessary. The matter is terrible enough without your writing me that you wish “she would die now rather than go back to the mad world you and she have created for yourselves.” I know you dislike me, I know your ineradicable impression of the life that Zelda and I led, and your evident dismissal of any of the effort and struggle, success or happiness in it.

  He also wrote (but did not send) a much harsher response that distinguished between Rosalind’s and her husband’s view of the matter, counterattacked more vigorously and threatened to satirize her in a story: “Your sanctimonious advice was well received. I think without doubt Newman’s instincts were to do the decent thing, but knowing the very minor quantity of humanity that you pack under that suave exterior of yours I do not doubt that you dissuaded him. Do me a single favor. Never communicate with me again in any form and I will try to resist the temptation to pass you down to posterity for what you are.”17

  Fitzgerald was willing to accept his share of responsibility for Zelda’s breakdown. But when attacked by her family, he quoted the eminent Professor Bleuler, who had wanted to keep Scott as stable as possible and had truthfully declared: “Stop blaming yourself. You might have retarded [your wife’s illness] but you couldn’t have prevented it.” As Scottie later explained to Mizener, though Fitzgerald had contributed to Zelda’s tragedy, his guilt was excessive: “Daddy knew he hadn’t caused it, and that no events after the age of twelve could possibly have caused it, but he felt a sense of guilt at having led exactly the wrong kind of life for a person with such a tendency.” In one of his most lucid letters Fitzgerald, trying to come to terms with the problem of her recrimination and his remorse, told one of Zelda’s doctors that he was being torn apart by her illness and wondered how long they would have to go on paying for their mutual destruction: “Perhaps 50% of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane—the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink. . . . Liquor on my mouth is sweet to her; I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations.”18

  While turning out a string of tales that he called “absolute junk,” amidst family strife and conflicting accusations, Fitzgerald wrote his greatest story. The deeply moving and perfectly realized “Babylon Revisited” appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in February 1931. The immediate inspiration for this story—which concerns his own responsibility, guilt and retribution—was Scottie’s visit, during Zelda’s illness, to her Aunt Rosalind and Uncle Newman Smith, who worked for the Guaranty Trust bank in Brussels. Rosalind and Newman Smith were the models for Mario
n and Lincoln Peters, just as Scottie was for Honoria Wales, who is given the unusual first name of the Murphys’ daughter. Fitzgerald could not resist the temptation to satirize Rosalind in a story that expresses his fears that she might try to take Scottie away from him.

  The title of the story is complex and allusive. Babylon is not only modern Paris. It is also the decadent and corrupt city in ancient Iraq where the exiled Jews, longing to return to the Promised Land, have been enslaved. The surname of the hero, Charlie Wales, puns on “wails” and suggests the lamentation in Psalm 137 of the Jews in Babylonian captivity. Wales is not only captured and enslaved by his past. He also, by adopting “the chastened attitude of the reformed sinner,” recalls Saint Luke’s description of the return of the Prodigal Son. In this story, however, he is punished rather than rewarded for his virtuous change of character.

  The opening pages vividly evoke the mood of Paris. But they are shot through with nostalgia for the happier times before the Wall Street Crash and the Depression destroyed American expatriate life. Yet Wales, like Fitzgerald, also thinks: “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.” After leaving the Ritz Bar, Wales goes to his sister-in-law’s flat on the rue Palatine (where Scott and Zelda had lived unhappily in the spring of 1929) to see his daughter. But his happiness is ruined when he encounters the “unalterable distrust” and “instinctive antipathy” of Marion Peters. At the end of section I, as Wales rejects the offer of a prostitute but treats her to supper, we learn that Honoria had been taken away from him after his wife’s death and during his treatment for alcoholism in a sanatorium.