Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  The Crash also produced a slow, painful transformation in the artist. Ultimately this destroyed Fitzgerald’s marketability as popular American magazine writer (he received his first rejection slip for a decade, from the Post in January 1931, and thereafter his price fell steadily); but it also gave him the breakthrough into his elusive novel, Tender is the Night.

  Some time in the autumn of 1930 in one of those lonely Swiss hotel rooms, Fitzgerald wrote a brilliant twenty-page short story entitled ‘One Trip Abroad’, which set out a kind of scale-map or blueprint for the full-size work he would eventually complete in America in 1934.

  Nicole and Nelson Kelly are a young, moneyed, intelligent and handsome American couple who come to Europe in search of self-fulfilment. They are gifted, modest and intensely alive. What they lack is simply the toughness and self-knowledge that comes from having to work and struggle to exist. In a series of short, beautifully observed and graduated scenes, their emotions and ideas are progressively bankrupted by the aimlessness of their drifting expatriate life in search of the good life, ‘the carnival by the sea’. With a new, coldly glittering authority, Fitzgerald executes in this story a miniature five-act gothic tragedy, complete with doppelgänger, lavish European backdrops and dramatic weather effects, in a tradition that belongs to the haunted moral tales of Brockden Brown, Hawthorne and Henry James, but which is also something strikingly original – the mature Fitzgerald, post-Gatsby, post-Crash.

  The madness which becomes a central force in Tender is the Night (‘through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways’), as an emblem of the entire decade, here still exists only in the form of an Alpine storm. But Fitzgerald found that his experience, both as a man and an artist, had combined again into a single perception. He had found his subject once more, and now it was tragic.

  This is the story of a trip abroad, and the geographical element must not be slighted. Having visited North Africa, Italy, the Riviera, Paris and points in between, it was not surprising that eventually the Kellys should go to Switzerland. Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

  Though there was an element of choice in their other ports of call, the Kellys went to Switzerland because they had to. They had been married a little more than four years when they arrived one spring day at the lake that is the centre of Europe – a placid, smiling spot with pastoral hillsides, a backdrop of mountains and waters of postcard blue, waters that are a little sinister beneath the surface with all the misery that has dragged itself here from every corner of Europe. Weariness to recuperate and death to die. There are schools here, too, and young people splashing at the sunny plages; there is Bonivard’s dungeon and Calvin’s city, and the ghosts of Byron and Shelley still sail the dim shores by night; but the Lake Geneva that Nelson and Nicole came to was the dreary one of sanatoriums and rest hotels … Often they wondered why, of all those who sought pleasure over the face of Europe, this misfortune should have come to them.

  Fitzgerald is still writing about the rich, the beautiful, idle, rich, but the context is transformed. Their glamour has faded, they are sick, used up, probably doomed. Their failure to understand their own position, their own fate, is presented with cool, almost kindly detachment. The sense of finally reaching the dead centre of the expatriate experience, the Lake of Geneva like a drainhole of wasted emotions, a prettily disguised maelstrom ‘sinister beneath the surface with all the misery that has dragged itself here’ is powerfully suggested.

  Pearl necklaces do not have to be thrown to mark the spot. Nor are the references to Byron and Shelley merely coincidental, renseignements touristiques. They bid farewell to the departing shapes of an entire Romantic tradition, which Fitzgerald had once hoped to emulate in the Gatsby days, to relive and renew by combining literary imagination with commercial wealth, Art and the Good Life, the Old World and the New, in a kind of perpetual carnival, the ‘many fêtes’ with which he was to dedicate Tender is the Night to the Murphys. The Murphys were themselves to become ghostlike denizens of the Swiss sanatoriums, one of their children fatally ill and their business at home failing. The moral, if there is ever a moral, in art, was the one written a century earlier by the expatriate Shelley in Venice: ‘They learn in suffering what they teach in song.’ Almost as a symbol of the passing of the old order, Fitzgerald received a telegram in January 1931 that his beloved father had died in Maryland.

  The stories and autobiographical pieces which Fitzgerald fitfully wrote over the next eighteen months are among the most memorable, and for the European reader the most accessible, of his entire work. They include the famous ‘Babylon Revisited’ (December 1930, based on a visit to Scottie in Paris); ‘Echoes of the Jazz Age’ (August 1931); ‘Crazy Sundays’ (December 1931, set in Hollywood); ‘Family in the Wind’ (spring 1932); and ‘My Lost City’ (July 1932, describing New York in a manner comparable to Baudelaire’s prose poems about Paris). They point forward not only to the novel, but also to the series of confessional Crack-up pieces which Edmund Wilson faithfully saved and edited for his old friend, long after in 1945, when he was almost forgotten. Fitzgerald found them increasingly difficult to place in magazines, and his income after reaching the dizzy height of $37,000 in 1931 (most of it absorbed by sanatorium bills), collapsed numbingly to $16,000 in 1932. His own personal Crash was complete.

  At Prangins, Zelda’s temporary cure was at last announced in June 1931. They spent a brief, final holiday at Annecy, and Zelda later wrote a rambling article carefully cut and polished by Scott. ‘We walked at night towards a café, blooming with Japanese lanterns, white shoes gleaming like radium in the damp darkness. It was like the good gone times when we still believed in summer hotels and the philosophies of popular songs. Another night we danced a Wiener waltz, and just simply swept around.’

  Fitzgerald’s new grip on ‘their material’ is even shown in his exacting editing. Zelda had originally written: ‘… another night we learned to Wiener waltz, and once we regimented our dreams to the imperative commands of a nostalgic orchestra floating down the formal paths of the garden of a better hotel’ – but he was having none of it.

  In September 1931 the Fitzgeralds finally took the boat home to America, and the Depression. Even in his personal unhappiness and exhaustion, Scott was acutely aware that they were just one tiny part of some sort of mass exodus, some sort of general American retreat, and that the new decade would be hard, dangerous and uncertain. Edmund Wilson was already stumping the country, writing a set of social conscience articles which would become The American Jitters. Fitzgerald mailed on ahead of him a deadpan story entitled ‘Between Three and Four’, with a wooden plot about a businessman leaping from a skyscraper window. But the opening paragraph had an altogether different, more moving resonance:

  ‘This happened nowadays, with everyone somewhat discouraged. A lot of less fortunate spirits cracked when money troubles came to be added to all the nervous troubles accumulated in the prosperity – neurosis being a privilege of people with a lot of extra money. And some cracked merely because it was in the air, or because they were used to the great, golden figure of plenty standing behind them, as the idea of prudence and glory stands behind the French, and the idea of “the thing to do” used to stand behind the English. Almost everyone cracked a little.’

  The Saturday Evening Post printed it grudgingly. The magazine’s policy had become happy endings, and Fitzgerald was already becoming passé. Soon they stopped putting his name on the cover.

  After a brief stop-over in New York, the Fitzgeralds fled south to Alabama and settled in Montgomery, near Zelda’s parents. They bought a secondhand Stutz car, a white cat called Chopin, and a dog called Trouble. It was time to begin all over again. ‘Vitality’, wrote Fitzgerald for his Notebooks, ‘shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over.’ Surely Zelda would be better; surely the novel would be written; surely America would recover.

  But Fitzgerald never forgot something that had happened at the
moment of their return to America, after all their wanderings, ‘in the dark autumn of two years later’. They had disembarked, on Manhattan Island, to discover a new, portentous shape on the glittering horizon. It was the Empire State Building, just nearing completion, a monument to something that Fitzgerald, like so many New Yorkers, could not yet define – to hope, perhaps, or hubris?

  Just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Room to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood – everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora’s box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits – from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.

  The original draft of ‘My Lost City’ is now lodged in the Rare Manuscripts Department of Scott Fitzgerald’s old university, Princeton, where the scholars come in endless pilgrimage. On the typescript, the word ‘universe’ has been pencilled in by Fitzgerald over a deleted phrase. The phrase was: ‘a magician’s palace’. After 1930, Fitzgerald knew there could be no more palaces.

  A SUMMER WITH THE NOVELIST

  30 rue Washington

  Thursday 26 May 1994

  Dearest Tess–

  To you the first letter from Paris. I’m at my little wooden desk at the window, overlooking the courtyard, which an hour ago was full of sunlight and is now shiny with rain. Opposite are five storeys of white shutters (we are the only geranium people) and a patch of Paris sky. Sometimes the old concierge lady, Madame Bonnel, crosses in her flowery apron, followed faithfully by her black poodle, her brindled cat, and her drunken, wall-eyed, but v. charming son (aged 50) who manages the dustbins. Rose has a slight flu – une petite grippe Parisienne – and has gone to bed with orange juice and aspirins, after lunching delicately off a tarte au pomme (one of those delicious, glowing, yellow pastries with a lattice of glazed apple on top). Despite this, we are in very good form. We divide our days between one bout of English work (writing at our separate desks) and one French event outside. The French ‘events’ have so far included a monster session in PrisUnic (the Tescos of the Champs Elysées); the flower market on the Île de la Cité; the food market near the Bastille (four kilos of tomatoes for 10 francs); the monumental new Arche de La Défense built in the Paris financial district; and a fantastic supper with Rose’s publishers at a hotel near the Arc de Triomphe besieged by white Rolls Royces. Tomorrow we are going to a concert at the Chêtelet, in cheap seats where ‘you can see absolutely nothing Monsieur, but the sound is perfect’. The rue Washington is like a village street (you can’t believe the Champs is 100 metres away), with a tabac just under our drawing-room window, a butcher, a baker (baguette-run is my first task each morning before the hot coffee and Bon Maman jam), a Felix Potin grocery, a laundry, a hairdo, a photocopy shop, a chemist, and a flower-shop full of refined blooms on exquisite stalks, white peonies, lilies, tremulous roses. In the evenings we have thirty different cinemas within ten minutes’ walk, but actually have only had time for one film so far (an English, ‘4 Weddings and a Funeral’, brilliant, Hugh Grant has a part in the film of Rose’s Restoration). Sometimes we just go and walk in the Parc Monceau, full of lovely copper beech trees – though ‘you cannot lie down on the grass, Monsieur, that is your English picnic, we respect our lawns differently’. Sometimes we sneak up to the Champs for an aperitif, where I found myself saying in a gentle haze of pastis, ‘Oh look, the sun is setting over Fouquet’s.’ (That’s one of the ultra chic old cafés in Paris.) Anyway, that gives you something of the flavour; it’s all rather strange and wonderful, and we are still getting the feel of it, but it does seem ok for work, and we hope to ‘impose our rhythm’ further as we settle in.

  LETTERS FROM PARIS

  I

  MOST VISITORS TO PARIS soon discover the daily flower market on the Île de la Cité. It’s in the Place Louis Lépine, near the Palais de Justice, a sort of gypsy encampment of green potting-sheds where you can buy anything from a geranium to a 9-foot cactus. But early on Sunday mornings someone waves a wand, and like a Jacques Prévert poem all the plants sprout wings and start to chirp and trill.

  The flower market becomes a bird market, with hundreds of nightingales, mynahs, parrots, finches and budgerigars, all perched in little wooden cages, waiting anxiously to be bought, bright-eyed and frantic. Their singing drifts down the Quai like confetti. Some of the Japanese nightingales are already paired, in wire boxes marked ‘couples inséparables’. I’m not sure what Jacques Prévert – the most amiable, ironic and freedom-loving of writers – would have made of it: ‘un seul oiseau en cage/La liberté est en deuil‘. He himself got through two wives, and several girlfriends, as well as the screenplays of Le Quai des Brumes and Les Enfants du Paradis (which is still showing after twenty years at the same cinema in Passy). It is strange to learn that he left Paris after the war, abandoning his Montmartre flat with Boris Vian, and died in a tiny village in Brittany in 1977, the legendary Gauloise still stuck to his bottom lip.

  His biography has just been published by the journalist Marc Andry (Editions de Fallois), a wonderful evocation of café life between the wars, with ‘its distinctive odeur: a mixture of cigarette smoke, garlic, hot chocolate, cognac and water, and the Guerlain perfume called “L’Heure Bleue” ‘.

  Prévert’s book of poems, Paroles, with its sad love songs and surreal cityscapes, is still popular. And in the famous photograph taken at a Montparnasse café table by Robert Doisneau, where Prévert sits meditating (with battered hat, battered cigarette and battered dog) on a single brimming glass of red wine, he has become a sort of symbol of Left Bank literary Paris.

  But symbols change. Few writers could now afford the price of a regular ballon de rouge at the Flore or the Deux Magots, and Sartre’s stock is low. All the more surprising that Albert Camus’s last novel, Le Premier Homme (Gallimard), is the hit of the season and has been at the top of the best-seller lists (170,000 copies) for weeks. The unfinished manuscript, 144 uncorrected pages, was disinterred from the wreckage of the car in which he died in January 1960, meticulously edited by his daughter Catherine, and shrewdly withheld by Gallimard for thirty-four years. Now it has caught something in the self-questioning mood of France, a crisis of identity and moral commitment, which seems familiar to everyone.

  Camus planned it as a big book, his War and Peace he said jokingly, but what he had time to achieve emerges as a largely autobiographical sketch of his Algerian upbringing, brilliantly clear and intensely moving. The hero is a man of forty, full of doubt and tenderness, who goes in search of his roots, his lost father, his kindly school-teacher, his beloved but inexpressive mother (who like Camus’s was illiterate). What he finds is his own childhood. The book includes Camus’s working spiral-bound notebook entries, in an Appendix, and one is taken deep into the creative process itself, the projected story-lines, the key dialogues, the anxious meditations and slow thematic developments. ‘At forty, he came to realize that he needed someone to show him the way, to give him praise or blame: a father. Authority and not power.’

  Writing in the Nouvel Observateur, Jean Daniel remarked that few young French readers would now bother with Sartre’s Les Chemins de la Liberté or Malraux’s L’Espoir, but that Camus still speaks to the new generation with its profound distrust of progressive ideologies. Camus’s search for identity and individual commitment has remained universal. L’Etranger has currently sold 7 million copies.

  Several French critics have speculated on what Camus would have said about Bosnia. The Bosnian crisis has become a kind of test-case
among the present generation of French ‘intellos’, and the young media-philosopher Bernard-Henry Lévi (known to every commentator as ‘BHL’) briefly entered the European elections on a ‘list’ or party ticket entitled ‘Europe begins at Sarajevo’. His philosophic proposition was the immediate removal of the arms embargo. This created a furore among the socialists and progressives. Handsome and impassioned, a storm of long black hair over a white marble brow, he was described at pressconferences as ‘le nouveau lord Byron en polo anthracite’. This could be translated, perhaps, as ‘a latter-day Robert Southey in a charcoal woolly’. BHL rather blew his credibility by resigning a few days before the elections on the 12 June. His ‘list’ or party eventually polled less than 2 per cent of the vote. Camus once said at an international conference in 1948: ‘There is no life without dialogue. But in a large part of the world today, dialogue has been replaced by polemic. The 20th century is the age of polemic and insult. It dominates the relations between nations and individual people, just as it dominates those academic disciplines that were once held to be disinterested, and where thoughtful dialogue and exchange were once the traditional currency.’

  In the middle of all this, an impressively thoughtful dialogue was taking place just across from the bird market at the Palais de Justice. Organized by the ‘Paris Bar of Barristers’, it was an open debate on the theme of the ‘New French Family’, held for a whole day in the First Court of Appeal. Attended largely by women journalists, women professors and women barristers (in their elegant black robes with white cotton cravats), it took a calm and authoritative look at the increasing divorce rates (now one marriage in three) and the high proportion of one-parent families. It concluded that whatever the toll of unhappiness in the ‘black box’ of modern marriage, the ‘new extended family’ with its generation of enlightened grandparents was coping surprisingly well with the legal rights and emotional well-being of its children.