Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  The work of a brilliant introvert, they were vividly painted, intensely rhythmic. A pinkish reminiscence of her ballet days showed figures with enlarged legs and feet—a trick she may have learned from Picasso. An impression of a Dartmouth football game made the stadium look like portals of a theatre, the players like dancers. Chinese Theatre was a gnarled mass of acrobats with an indicated audience for background. There were two impressionistic portraits of her husband, a verdant Spring in the Country geometrically laced with telephone wires.9

  The sales were as disappointing as the reviews, and all the buyers—including Max Perkins’ wife, Tommy Hitchcock, the Murphys and Dorothy Parker, who bought a portrait of Scott, with piercing blue eyes, wearing a crown of thorns—were loyal friends of the artist. Zelda also gave away several pictures to her doctors and to Gertrude Stein.

  In the spring of 1934, when Zelda was shifting through several mental hospitals and Scott was making frequent trips to New York to deal with the publication of his novel, he had a brief, drunken affair with the troubled and sympathetic Dorothy Parker. They had first met through the Murphys at Juan-les-Pins in the summer of 1926. Born in New York three years before Fitzgerald, half-Jewish and half-Catholic, Parker was an attractive, talented and sardonic satirist. Her most enduring work is her light verse, which wittily confronts loneliness, failure and despair—themes that linked her both artistically and emotionally to Fitzgerald. Parker’s many lovers included the playwrights Elmer Rice and George S. Kaufman as well as several of Scott’s friends—Deems Taylor, Charles MacArthur and Ring Lardner. Her promiscuity had led to several abortions. She was also an alcoholic, prone to depression, who had attempted suicide by slashing her wrists and taking overdoses of Veronal.

  When Scott’s tender obituary of Ring Lardner appeared in October 1933, Parker told him: “I think your piece about Ring is the finest and most moving thing I have ever read.” The following April, Fitzgerald sent her an inscribed copy of Tender Is the Night. Parker later told Lillian Hellman that in the spring of 1934, at the time the novel appeared, she had slept with Scott in a casual and quite spontaneous one or two nights’ affair. “Since he was an alcoholic like herself,” Parker’s biographer observed, “she could feel compassion for him, but he made her uncomfortable for the same reason. She despised in him the very qualities she hated in herself—sniveling self-pity, the way they both wasted their talent, their lack of self-discipline.”10 These two exiles from the Eastern intellectual world would later renew their friendship in Hollywood where both, with different degrees of success, were screenwriters.

  III

  On April 12, 1934, soon after his brief affair with Parker and while Zelda’s disturbing paintings were being exhibited in New York, Fitzgerald finally published his long-awaited novel, Tender Is the Night. A considerable advance on The Great Gatsby, both in narrative technique and psychological depth, it has a dense, dazzling texture that reveals the pains he took and the pain it cost him to write. In this ambitious and complex novel, Fitzgerald attempts to understand why Zelda went mad, how this ruined his life and to what extent he was responsible for their tragedy.

  Parts of the novel could be called (like Ingmar Bergman’s film) Scenes from a Marriage, in its bitter episodes of betrayal and regret, its portrait of a couple locked in mortal combat. It is also Fitzgerald’s season in hell, his descent into alcoholism, his exploration of the death of his own high hopes. During the long period of the novel’s composition, Fitzgerald developed the capacity to write about himself and Zelda with objectivity and insight. This helps to account for the book’s extraordinary power: the combination of psychological conflict and intense introspection with style, wit and literary sophistication.

  The novel’s unusual time scheme—which begins in 1925, loops back to 1917, returns to where the story left off and ends in 1930—shows Fitzgerald’s hard struggle with the task of writing about a fictional hero who revealed so much about the author. He realized that he had to control the point of view very carefully to achieve the requisite blend of sympathy and censure for Dick Diver. Though he tinkered with the novel’s chronology after it was published, he did not improve upon it.

  The novel begins on a French Riviera beach when Dick and Nicole Diver, a wealthy and glamorous couple, are in their twenties. We see them through the eyes of the teenage movie actress, Rosemary Hoyt, who observes and envies their apparently perfect social life, and who instantly falls in love with him. Dick is an ideal figure: a doctor, handsome, charming and kind, an “organizer of private gaiety, curator of a richly incrusted happiness.” Dick also falls in love with Rosemary, despite his sense of responsibility and protectiveness about Nicole, and in his desire to save Rosemary from a bizarre scandal, precipitates Nicole’s mental breakdown.

  At this point, just as we begin to lose sympathy for Dick, Part I of the novel ends and we go back in time to 1917, when Dick is a medical student in Zurich, at the tail end of his “heroic period,” and when he can still approve of himself. Nicole’s breakdown also signals the beginning of Dick’s decline, but Fitzgerald turns our attention away from the harm Dick is doing and takes us back to the beginning of the story to explain how this situation has developed.

  From the beginning of Part II Dick’s point of view predominates. We learn that Nicole Warren has suffered previous mental illness, that Dick has been her doctor, that he married his beautiful patient and that they live on her money in the South of France. The narrative then continues up to events in Paris and beyond. When Dick becomes a partner in a sanatorium in Switzerland (financed by the Warren family as a way to control Dick and deal with Nicole’s increasing madness), Nicole has a retaliatory affair, and Dick gradually descends into drink and degradation. The novel ends on the same beach on the Riviera as Nicole, now well, prepares to marry another man and Dick takes his leave of the luxurious world of the South to bury himself in an obscure town in upstate New York.

  The narrative scheme reveals the harm each does to the other. At first it seems that Dick is responsible for Nicole’s madness. Then we learn about her incestuous relationship with her father, and how Dick has been ensnared by her love and money; how they waver between health and sickness, sobriety and drunkenness, in control and out of it. Nicole’s mental illness forms the emotional core of the novel just as Dick’s responsibility for his wife is its moral center. As in André Gide’s The Immoralist, the narrative traces the recovery of the sick at the expense of the healthy. In “The Choice” W. B. Yeats had declared: “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work.” Dick tries to have both—ignoring the necessity to choose, trying to perfect Nicole’s life through his work as a doctor—and fails at both.

  In 1932 Fitzgerald had drawn up his plan for the final version of the long-projected novel and suggested some of the reasons for Dick Diver’s descent from a brilliant young doctor to a weak failure: “The novel should do this: Show a man who is a natural idealist, a spoiled priest, giving in for various causes to the ideas of the haute Bourgeoisie, and in his rise to the top of the social world losing his idealism, his talent, and turning to drink and dissipation. Background one in which the leisure class is at their truly most brilliant & glamorous, such as Murphys.” The phrase “spoiled priest,” which describes Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), suggests the similarities between the roles of the psychiatrist and the priest. Toward the end of the novel, when he rescues Lady Caroline and Mary North from the French police and is disgusted by their behavior, “Dick nodded gravely, looking at the stone floor, like a priest in the confessional.”11 On the last page he repeats the “apostolic gesture” he had made at the beginning of the book and “blessed the beach.” This beach had originally been compared to the concentrated brilliance of a “bright tan prayer rug,” used by Moslems for worship of God and by the American hedonists for pagan worship of the sun. Dick’s blessing is a final, ritualistic gesture of renunciation and farewell that releases Nicole from his Prospero-like spell
and at the same time calls her back to him.

  The hero as psychiatrist is also a metaphor for the novelist. As his name suggests, Dick Diver (like Fitzgerald) is an explorer of inner lives who unlocks the secrets of minds and hearts. Fitzgerald saw that the rise of modern psychiatry had made doctors and analysts the successors to priests. His choice of Dick’s profession is a sardonic parallel to his own unhappy role in Zelda’s treatment.

  Dick’s confessional mood and sense of a lost religion, his role as the moral center of an elite group of restless and dissipated American expatriates, ruined by drink and money, recall Hemingway’s hero Jake Barnes and the themes of The Sun Also Rises (1926). Both novels contrast groups of appealing and unattractive people, one of which obeys and the other ignores an unwritten moral code. Both have minor European characters—the hotel owners, Montoya in Spain and Gausse in France—who express traditional values. Both novels portray the destructive force of beautiful, aristocratic women who dominate and wound the weaker heroes. Both are filled with sexual disorder and uncontrollable violence. Both conclude with the collapse of desperately unhappy love affairs that were doomed from the start.

  The characters that surround Dick Diver exemplify his temptations and weaknesses: Baby Warren, money; Abe North, liquor; Tommy Barban, anarchy; Albert McKisco, self-betrayal; Rosemary Hoyt, infidelity. The immorality of the class that leads Dick from idealism to corruption is symbolized by sexual perversions: Luis Campion and Royal Dumphrey are homosexuals, Mary North and Lady Caroline pose as lesbians, Baby is onanistic, Dick is mistaken for a rapist and Devereux Warren has committed incest with his daughter, Nicole. Warren’s actual incest is symbolically repeated by Dick: first with Nicole, whom he meets when she is sixteen, then with Rosemary—the daughter of a deceased doctor and the star of Daddy’s Girl—whom he meets when she is seventeen.

  The essential unreality of Dick’s life is subtly expressed through the theme of illusion that pervades the novel. As the characters lounge endlessly on the beach, which the Divers “invented,” “the true world thundered by” up north. All the characters seem to live in a dream world; and as the novel progresses, their infantile search for “fun” (a recurrent theme) becomes increasingly hopeless and meaningless. Dick has a dangerously inflated idea of himself as a doctor, husband, athlete, leader and love. Abe North is usually in a drunken stupor. Rosemary can never free herself from her role-playing profession. Nicole is a schizophrenic with a precarious hold on reality. And in the risky and potentially fatal duel, both Barban and McKisco manage to miss their shots and escape without wounds.

  In Part I of the novel Fitzgerald shows that the Divers know each other intimately, that they have a great capacity to hurt each other and that, in such a relationship, they must hide their deepest insights about each other. In Paris, after they have put Abe North on the boat train and witnessed a crime of passion at the railroad station, they have lunch in a restaurant. Nicole has been simmering with jealousy of Rosemary. Dick “saw a flash of unhappiness on her mouth, so brief that only he would have noticed, and he could pretend not to have seen.” But Nicole is also silently assessing Dick’s weaknesses. She acknowledges that “there was a pleasingness about him that simply had to be used,” that people with such charm had to “go along attaching people that they had no use to make of.” Dick’s charm and narcissism inspire his attraction to Rosemary.

  When Rosemary (provoked by her ambitious but reckless mother) naively tries to seduce Dick, who has kissed her in a taxi on the way to their hotel, he is both surprised and frightened, and reverts to his safe paternal role with “Daddy’s Girl.” Eager for sexual experience despite her considerable fears, Rosemary assumes a stagey voice, audaciously emphasizes her innocence and, in her parody of bedroom intimacy, assumes the role of a spoiled nun:

  She came close up against him with a forlorn whisper.

  “Take me.”

  “Take you where?”

  Astonishment froze him rigid.

  “Go on,” she whispered. “Oh, please go on, whatever they do. I don’t care if I don’t like it—I never expected to—I’ve always hated to think about it but now I don’t. I want you to.”

  She was astonished at herself—she had never imagined she could talk like that. She was calling on things she had read, seen, dreamed through a decade of convent hours. Suddenly she knew too that it was one of her greatest rôles and she flung herself into it more passionately.

  Both Dick and Rosemary are more excited by hearing about each other’s sex life than by experiencing it. When lunching in the Parisian restaurant with the Divers, Rosemary overhears Dick expressing his sexual desire for Nicole and arranging a time to make love to her. Involving herself in their secret intimacy, Rosemary “stood breathless” in response to Nicole’s orgasmic “gasping sigh,” and feels an unidentified but profound current of emotion pulsing through her virginal body.

  A few chapters later Dick also feels a throb of jealousy as his imaginative reconstruction of reality becomes more powerful than reality itself. Rosemary’s Southern boyfriend Collis Clay excites Dick’s imagination by describing an incident in which Rosemary and another young boyfriend, Bill Hillis, had locked themselves in a train compartment and had “some heavy stuff going on” before they were interrupted by an angry train conductor. Though this love scene is twice removed, since both Clay and Hillis stand between Dick and Rosemary, Dick becomes emotionally distraught. He vividly pictures the “hand on Rosemary’s cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.” Dick then invents a scenario in which Hillis uses and Rosemary acquiesces in an old seducer’s ruse: “Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?” “Please do. It’s too light in here.”12 This motif recurs throughout the rest of the novel.

  When Dick finally consummates his affair with Rosemary in Rome, he discovers that his lack of real feeling for her actually increases his desire and his jealousy. This experience also reminds him of his far deeper love for Nicole, “a wild submergence of soul, a dipping of all colors into an obscuring dye. . . . Certain thoughts about Nicole, that she should die, sink into mental darkness, love another man, made him physically sick.” When Rosemary no longer loves him, his vanity is hurt and he characteristically expresses his disappointment in narcissistic terms: “ ‘I guess I’m the Black Death,’ he said slowly. ‘I don’t seem to bring people happiness any more.’ ” Dick has taken pride in his vitality and sexual prowess, but now gradually declines into emotional vacuity, physical deterioration and self-hatred, while Nicole becomes increasingly stronger and self-assured.

  Dick and Rosemary’s first attempt to make love is interrupted by the arrival of Abe North, and leads to the climax of Part I, the greatest crisis of the novel. When Rosemary discovers that a Negro has been murdered and dumped in her bedroom, Dick carries the bloody sheets into the room he shares with Nicole, who then breaks down completely. In his Notebooks Fitzgerald recorded: “Went into the bathroom and sat on the seat crying because it was more private than anywhere she knew.” In the novel Nicole retreats into a traditionally inviolable sanctuary, cracks up and—like the fool in King Lear—screams out the truth in her madness. Realizing that Dick has sacrificed her to save Rosemary from scandal, Nicole exclaims: “I never expected you to love me—it was too late—only don’t come in the bathroom, the only place I can go for privacy, dragging spreads with red blood on them and asking me to fix them.”13 Dick’s three desperately rational repetitions of “Control yourself!” reveal at last his true relationship with Nicole: that he is her doctor, she his only patient. His guilty impulse to protect Rosemary has sacrificed Nicole’s sanity.

  Dick has forced Nicole to associate what she imagines to be the bedsheets bloodied by Dick’s defloration of Rosemary with the even more horrible bloody sheets she had lain on when seduced by her own father. And, like her father, Dick is more concerned with covering up the problem than acknowledging his guilt. Nicole’s mental breakdown, like t
he earlier one witnessed by Violet McKisco at the Villa Diana, has been caused by her sexual jealousy of Rosemary. Dick has therefore been fully aware of the consequences of continuing the affair.

  Nicole’s third breakdown, in another unbearably intense scene, is again caused by sexual jealousy. The mother of a mental patient writes a wounding letter to Nicole explaining that she has withdrawn her fifteen-year-old daughter from the clinic because Dick has kissed and tried to seduce her. This time Nicole cracks up at a Swiss fair while riding on a ferris wheel—a metaphor for both the up and down phases of her madness and for the Catherine-wheel torture of her existence. As they drive home with their two children on the steep curving road that leads to the clinic, “the car swerved violently left, swerved right, tipped on two wheels and, as Dick, with Nicole’s voice screaming in his ear, crushed down the mad hand clutching the steering wheel, righted itself, swerved once more and shot off the road. . . . She was laughing hilariously, unashamed, unafraid, unconcerned. No one coming on the scene would have imagined that she had caused it; she laughed as after some mild escape of childhood. ‘You were scared, weren’t you?’ she accused him. ‘You wanted to live!’ ”

  This incident is described from Dick’s point of view, with all the confusion of violence and screams. The steering wheel, which recalls the ferris wheel, becomes the symbol of their marriage as Dick tries to wrest control from Nicole and she—who had once been disfigured by eczema—tries “to tear at Dick’s face.” When Dick recognizes that Nicole truly wanted to kill him at that moment, even if it meant killing herself and her children, he decides to separate from her temporarily.