Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  WILLIAMS Fine. Processions of Priests and religiosi have for several days past been active in their prayers for rain – but the Gods are either angry, or Nature is too powerful.

  wind, storm and sea

  SHELLEY

  The breath whose might I have invoked in Song

  Descends on me: my spirit’s bark is driven

  Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

  Whose sails were never to the Tempest given;

  The massy earth and spheréd skies are riven!

  I am born darkly, fearfully afar …

  HOLMES Trelawny had been following them with a telescope.

  TRELAWNY It was almost dark, although only half-past six o’clock. The sea was like lead, and covered with an oily scum. There was a commotion in the air, made up of many threatening sounds coming from the sea. Fishing-craft and coasting vessels under bare poles rushed by us, seeking the shelter of the harbour. As yet the din and hubbub was that made by men, but their shrill pipings were suddenly silenced by the crashing voice of a thunder squall that burst right over our heads. When the fury of the storm, which did not last for more than twenty minutes, had abated – I looked seaward anxiously, in the hope of spying Shelley’s boat, amongst the many small craft scattered about. I watched every speck that danced on the horizon. But I saw nothing more of him.

  VI

  Escapes to Paris

  INTRODUCTION

  HEMINGWAY FAMOUSLY SAID that Paris was ‘a moveable feast', and I have spent much of the last ten years trying to get back to that delicious table for refreshment. I think it is still possible to write in a Paris café, if you chose well, and many of my sidetracks have begun on summer mornings at the rustic Café Pomona under the canopy of chestnut trees in the Tuileries Gardens, surrounded by Maillol’s bronze goddesses; or else on wet, somnolent afternoons in the backroom of the old Café Saint Paul, opposite Gautier’s lycee on the boulevard Saint-Antoine, with its smell of coffee and crocque madame and irrepressible Gitanes Non Filtres.

  Not all romantic returns are escapes though, and this is reflected in the first piece here, which traces Scott Fitzgerald’s last visit to Europe with Zelda, when Gatsby’s dream of ‘the carnival by the sea’ turned into the nightmare of bankruptcy and breakdown out of which Tender is the Night was written. This was the end of one kind of modern Romantic dream, though it turned Fitzgerald into a novelist of European stature, with an extraordinary prophetic sense of the great upheavals about to engulf his world.

  Nevertheless, despite the haunted solitude of my earlier expeditions, the idea of happiness and the idea of Paris have now become indissolubly linked in my mind. Perhaps this was because, in the late spring of 1994, I set off with the beloved novelist Rose Tremain to spend four months in the city, looking for some literary expression of the passionate understanding which had brought us, so late and so unexpectedly, together. Officially it was, of course, a professional expedition; unofficially, an extended and secret honeymoon. After much hunting, we discovered an ancient first-floor apartment in the rue Washington, which turned out to be part of the building where Gautier’s daughter, Judith, had lived for the last twenty years of her life. So the gods smiled. Judith Gautier’s book of memoirs, Le Collier des Jours ('The Necklace of Days') set the tone for the long dreamy trail of daily walks and wanderings that followed through every arrondissement from Passy to Belleville. I agreed to write a series of ‘Letters from Paris’ for John Coldstream at the Daily Telegraph (largely to pay for our rent), but finally – and quite unexpectedly – found myself working on a detailed study of Voltaire, part of which was eventually published in the New York Review of Books.

  The theme of all these pieces is a celebration of the city, which has enchanted so many writers, generation after generation. But it is also a practical, working account of how a biographical subject can gradually seize upon the imagination. Paris is seen from a steadily shifting angle of vision, in a simple tourist’s letter home (to my sister), newspaper reportage, and finally emerging as a formal historical essay on the intellectual roots of the city’s greatness. To me Voltaire, in all his struggles and adventures, his persecutions and his triumphs, his exiles and his home-comings, symbolizes much of the genius of Paris. His rational ‘philosophy of happiness’ is an eighteenth-century Enlightenment one, perhaps. Yet I also found in it, especially in his relationship with Madame du Châtelet, something profoundly Romantic and enduring. It is the mature happiness possible between two human beings, and the circumstances that foster or endanger it, which now confirmed itself as a central part of my biographical quest.

  It was not coincidental that during this same summer in Paris, Rose began the novel that became The Way I Found Her, and certain places and incidents from the early part of that magical fiction can be glimpsed here in their first, mundane and tender occurrence. But do the biographer and the novelist live in the same world? – happily, I am still wondering about that. But certainly their worlds touch, and never was a Paris apartment full of so many imaginary figures demanding to pull up a creaking faux Louis Seize armchair and join in the endless, candlelit conversations.

  SCOTT AND ZELDA: ONE LAST TRIP

  ACROSS HIS DIARY LEDGER for 1930, F. Scott Fitzgerald scrawled: ‘The crash! Zelda and America’. For Fitzgerald, then thirty-four, the two catastrophes – psychological and economic – were mysteriously involved. He coined a phrase to link them: ‘Emotional bankruptcy’. It meant that the party was over, the summer palaces were closing, it was time to go home.

  The Fitzgeralds embarked on one last trip to Europe in the brittle spring of 1929. They docked at Genoa and took a set of rooms at Bertolinis, with a green tile bathroom suite and a big brass bedstead, where Zelda obsessively practised her ballet exercises. Scott began a story called ‘The Rough Crossing’ about a successful American playwright, his drunken jealous wife and a heavily symbolic mid-Atlantic tempest. ‘Looking out at the night, Eva saw that there was no chance for them unless she could make atonement, propitiate the storm. It was Adrian’s love that was demanded of her. Deliberately she unclasped her pearl necklace, lifted it to her lips – for she knew that with it went the freshest, fairest part of her life – and flung it out into the gale.’ Such gestures still came easily to him, to everyone.

  The story was rapidly published in the Saturday Evening Post, a popular illustrated weekly for smart East Coast families, which paid him $3,500. This was then Fitzgerald’s standard fee, making him the highest-earning pure fiction writer in America with an annual income comfortably over $30,000 and still climbing.

  They motored leisurely up through the Riviera in an open Renault towards Paris, turning aside as far as Villefranche in pursuit of a salade niçoise. To his agent back in New York, Harold Ober, Scott wrote: ‘We arrive in Paris April 1st … The Rough Crossing has been sent plus I’ve almost finished another. I hope to God the novel will be done this summer.’ But it wasn’t, because first of all there had to be the Crash. The Fitzgeralds’ whole world had to break down with it and a new kind of writing had to emerge from the ruins, with a new kind of story to tell: not Boom, but Bust.

  The strange thing was that Scott Fitzgerald seemed to see it coming from a long way off. Even before The Great Gatsby, in his least-remembered novel of 1922, Fitzgerald had plotted out the moral destruction of Anthony and Gloria Patch, an exemplary couple of the Jazz Age, artists by temperament but useless shimmering socialites by force of economic circumstance.

  ‘I wish The Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book’, Fitzgerald said long after, ‘because it was all true. We ruined ourselves – I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.’

  Many of the forgotten newspaper interviews that he gave at the very height of his success also pointed unexpectedly to some imminent catastrophe of a more than personal nature. Ambushed once by a young reporter from New York World among the potted glories of the Plaza Hotel in 1927, he was congratulated on the success of Gatsby and politel
y questioned about his Hollywood script for United Artists’ latest flapper girl, Constance Talmadge, rumoured to be entitled Lipstick. Byway of reply, Fitzgerald started talking fluently about Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. ‘The idea that we’re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous’, he announced.

  ‘Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war in the Pacific or against some European combination! … It is impossible for an American to have a real credo yet … There has never been an American tragedy. There have only been great failures.’

  The reporter was genuinely puzzled, then disbelieving, then slickly amused. He confided to his readers: ‘Here I was interviewing the author of This Side of Paradise, the voice and embodiment of the jazz age, its product and its beneficiary, a popular novelist, a movie scenarist, a dweller in the gilded palaces, a master of servants, only to find F. Scott Fitzgerald, himself, shorn of these associations, forecasting doom, death and damnation to his generation in the spirit, if not in the rhetoric, of your typical spittoon philosopher. In a pleasant corner of the Plaza tea garden he sounded like an intellectual Samson prophesying the crumbling of its marble columns.’

  Yet the cracks were everywhere in the late Twenties for those who had eyes to see. It is true that Fitzgerald was not really capable of a sustained social or intellectual analysis, like his old friend from Princeton University, the critic Edmund Wilson, then at the New Republic. Perhaps he did make a faintly comic prophet of the cocktail hour. But as an artist, in the pale hung-over mornings of endless silent hotel rooms, he could glimpse the ominous shapes and put them down.

  In the first of his post-Crash essays published for a few hundred dollars in Scribner’s Magazine, he would write: ‘By 1928 Paris had grown suffocating. With each new shipment of Americans spewed up by the Boom the quality fell off, until towards the end there was something sinister about the crazy boatloads. They were no longer the simple Ma and Pa and son and daughter, infinitely superior in their qualities of kindness and curiosity to the corresponding class in Europe, but fantastic neanderthals who believed something, something vague, that you remembered from a very cheap novel. I remember an Italian on a steamer who promenaded the deck in an American reserve officer’s uniform, picking quarrels in broken English with Americans who criticized their own institutions in the bar.’ The critics in the bar certainly included Fitzgerald himself; and the very cheap novel stood in for the one he could not bring himself to write until nine years after Gatsby.

  In Paris in the summer of 1929 everyone was talking of James Joyce going blind, the undercover edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop soirées, Joan Miró’s paintings and Ernest Hemingway boxing in the basement of the Club Americain and not giving his private address to the Fitzgeralds because he was drunk and she was mad.

  It was the year in which the American novel made its decisive bid for serious European attention: A Farewell to Arms; Look Homeward, Angel; The Sound and the Fury. In 1930 it would be recognized and the Nobel Prize for Literature go to Sinclair Lewis, whom nobody had ever read outside of Minnesota and Main Street.

  Hemingway’s novel sold 70,000 copies inside the year, and he finally knew he had the edge on old Fitz. As for bankruptcy, he was toting his own theories. A young man should make love very seldom, said Hemingway, or he would have nothing left in middle age. The number of available orgasms was fixed at birth and could be expended too soon. As for a novel, the only thing to do with one was to finish it. ‘The good parts of a novel might be something a writer was lucky enough to overhear or they might be the wreckage of his whole damned life. The artist should not worry over the loss of his early bloom. People were not peaches.’ The Fitzgeralds hurried south again, to ripen off in the sun at Cannes.

  Relations between Scott and Zelda were strained to breaking point. In the daytime there was their daughter Scottie and the beach; but at night it was a war of attrition. For a moment, Hemingway became Fitzgerald’s confessor. He wrote: ‘My latest tendency is to collapse about 11pm and, with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven’t a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody, generally implying Zelda, and often implying current company – after which the current company tend to become less current and I wake up in strange rooms and strange places. The rest of the time I stay alone working or trying to work or brooding or reading detective stories.’

  Loss of grip on his writing haunted Fitzgerald like a nightmare or a wasting fever. ‘Your analysis of my inability to get my serious work done is too kind in that it leaves out the dissipation, but among acts of God it is possible that the five years between my leaving the army and finishing Gatsby (1919–1924), which included three novels, about 50 popular stories and a play and numerous articles, movies, may have taken all I had to say too early, adding that all the time we were living at top speed in the gayest worlds we could find. This au fond is what really worries me.’

  But Fitzgerald also saw the same sickness and emptiness in those around him. He took to quizzing and questioning their rich friends, the Gerald Murphys, with a detached ‘supercilious scrutiny’, as if they had suddenly stopped being old acquaintances and become rare members of a dying species. ‘You can’t expect anyone to like or stand a continual feeling of analysis, and sub-analysis, and criticism – on the whole unfriendly,’ wrote Sara Murphy, and stopped inviting him round.

  As autumn came, hot and dusty over the corniches, and the swimming was over and ‘the year’s octopi had grown up in the crevices of the rocks’, the Fitzgeralds moved restlessly from resort to resort. On the night of the Wall Street Crash in October they were staying at the hotel Beau Rivage in St Raphael, which had stained-glass windows to keep out the glare of the Mediterranean. ‘Off there in a little village, we had such a horrible feeling of insecurity,’ Fitzgerald said later. ‘We had so little information from home, and we kept hearing these reports about business conditions until we didn’t know but that at any moment the United States would go smash and we’d be cut adrift.’ But they were far adrift already.

  Letters arrived from New York, from his publisher Maxwell Perkins, from Edmund Wilson, begging them to come home. But it was not yet time. They returned to Paris and wintered miserably in a luxurious apartment at 10 rue de Boulogne. Zelda danced and danced for hours each day at Madame Egarova’s unheated studio, and typed Flapper articles for College Humor; Scott drank at the Ritz bar with wide-eyed Princeton juniors and wrote disjointed social sketches for The New Yorker and McCalls, followed by odd communications to Harold Ober.

  ‘New Yorker offer OK but uninteresting – as for Mrs Argyll (whoever she is) I will gladly modify my style and subject matter for her but she will have to give me her beautiful body first and I dare say the price is too high.’ When McCalls turned down a piece entitled ‘Girls Believe in Girls’ he threatened to sue them. His fee for Post stories rose to $4,000. Then the cruellest month finally came round.

  On 23 April, 1930, Zelda Fitzgerald, aged twenty-nine, was admitted en case d’urgence to the Malmaison hospital outside Paris, suffering from nervous exhaustion and delusions. Two months later she had been moved to a large country-house asylum called Les Rives de Prangins, 12 miles outside Geneva on the shores of the lake. The initial diagnosis by Dr Otto Forel was schizophrenia, aggravated by Scott’s drinking and intense mutual competitiveness. A plan to consult Carl Jung in Zurich (recommended by Edmund Wilson) was abandoned since Jung was reputed only to treat neurotic cases. Zelda was to remain at Prangins for fifteen months, sometimes skiing and basket-weaving, at other times suffering terrible relapses, hallucinations and agonizing eczema. A short story she had written ‘would be incomprehensible’, Scott told Maxwell Perkins, ‘without a Waste Land footnote’. Now the Crash had really come, and Fitzgerald found himself in a new kind of Europe, chilly and al
ien and brooding, the world of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and T. S. Eliot’s sombre poetry.

  For five months Fitzgerald wrote virtually nothing except two Post stories. His visits to Prangins were strictly limited. He spent his time sending notes and flowers to Zelda and assembling a diagnostic dossier for Dr Forel. He lived in hotels in Lausanne, and commuted monthly to Paris, where little Scottie was staying with in-laws.

  In the whole of his well-publicized career since 1920 this is the most obscure, the least-documented, the most private episode. He saw almost nobody. One of the few exceptions was a night he got drunk with Thomas Wolfe in a little Alpine village and dreamed Wolfe had reached up and fused all the power-lines and they ran away over the hill.

  Edmund Wilson, who had himself recently recovered from a minor breakdown, received a brief letter in New York. ‘The thought that you’d survived it helped me through some despairing moments in Zelda’s case … She was drunk with music that seemed a crazy opiate to her, and her whole cerebral tradition was something locked in such an absolutely impregnable safe inside her, that it was months before the doctors could reach her at all. We hope to get home for Christmas.’ But not yet, not yet.

  Blame, responsibility, guilt – these questions were to torture what remained of the Fitzgeralds’ private lives together. Clearly there had been some element of a lover’s self-destructive pact. Years later Scott was to write to an American psychiatrist at Zelda’s clinic in Baltimore: ‘Liquor on my mouth is sweet to her; I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations.’

  Equally clearly they had exploited each other – and the professional exploiter, the writer, had won, if only because his craft ultimately gave him the greater self-discipline, the greater survival power. Indeed one can sometimes believe that Zelda deliberately sacrificed herself to provide Scott with literary material. (The issue is examined in depth in a remarkable biography of Zelda by Nancy Milford, drawing on both Prangins and Baltimore clinical files.) Yet the photograph albums they kept during this whole period show a different, simpler human truth: they show Zelda’s drawn, dark dissatisfaction with herself and Scott’s ever-anxious, ever-hopeful, wounded kindness.