Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  The dapper George Jean Nathan, a well-known ladies’ man, fell so deeply in love with Zelda, after months of apparently innocent flirtation, that Scott felt obliged to terminate their friendship. Zelda, much more unconventional than Scott, evoked hedonism to justify her daring behavior and define the new morality of the flapper: “She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure; she covered her face with paint and powder because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.”19

  The most intimate view of the troubled early months of their marriage appeared in the diary of Scott’s Princeton friend Alexander McKaig, who saw the Fitzgeralds regularly in the summer of 1920 when they were living in Westport and coming down to New York for parties. On September 15, for example, they started to fight in Westport and, after Scott had hastily pursued her on the train to Manhattan, resumed their quarrel (for they liked to have an audience) in front of McKaig: “In the evening Zelda—drunk—having decided to leave Fitz & having nearly been killed walking down RR track, blew in. Fitz came shortly after. He had caught same train with no money or ticket. They threatened to put him off but finally let him stay on—Zelda refusing to give him any money. They continued their fight while here.” After describing the fight, McKaig recorded the advice he may have given Fitzgerald as well as the difficulty of following it, and noted that she had the dominant personality: “Fitz should let Zelda go & not run after her. Like all husbands he is afraid of what she might do in a moment of caprice. . . . Trouble is, Fitz [is] absorbed in Zelda’s personality—she is the stronger of the two. She has supplied him with all his copy for women.”

  A month later McKaig noted that their flat at 38 West 59th Street (which they had rented, when they tired of Westport, from October 1920 until April 1921) was “a pig sty.” Zelda had kept her promise not to think about “pots and kitchens and brooms.” McKaig also stated their insoluble dilemma: “If she’s there Fitz can’t work—she bothers him—if she’s not there he can’t work—worried of what she might do. . . . Zelda increasingly restless—says frankly she wants to be amused and is only good for useless, pleasure-giving pursuits; great problem—what is she to do?” Smitten by Zelda, like most of Scott’s friends, McKaig rather incongruously concluded: “She is without doubt the most brilliant & most beautiful young woman I’ve ever known.” Though deeply disturbed by Zelda’s refusal to restrain herself, Scott remained infatuated. In a letter to Edmund Wilson, he expressed his admiration for “the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness and chillmindedness of Zelda.”20

  IV

  In February 1921 Zelda discovered she was pregnant, and they decided to take their first trip to Europe while she could still travel. They sailed on the Aquitania and docked in Southampton in May 1921. While staying at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand in London, they dined at the Hampstead home of John Galsworthy, a Scribner’s author whom Fitzgerald had met through Alfred Noyes at Princeton. “Tall, austere looking, with a Roman profile and tightly closed lips, always correctly dressed, Galsworthy would not have looked out of place in Downing Street.” In contrast to the easy-going Fitzgerald, Galsworthy was correct, formal and stiff.

  During dinner Fitzgerald, who habitually adopted a self-conscious and self-abasing attitude when encountering established writers, suddenly burst out with: “Mr. Galsworthy, you are one of the three living writers I admire most in the world: you and [Galsworthy’s friend] Joseph Conrad and Anatole France!” He later admitted to Edmund Wilson that Galsworthy had not “liked it much. He knew he wasn’t that good.” But Galsworthy, who was easily as good as Anatole France and later won the Nobel Prize, was probably more embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s gauche flattery than dismayed (as Fitzgerald suggested) by his own sad estimation of his work. Though Galsworthy was kind, the host and guest seemed temperamentally at odds with each other and the evening was not a success. Fitzgerald told Shane Leslie that he was rather disappointed in the older writer and unfavorably compared him to Conrad: “I can’t stand pessimism with neither irony nor bitterness.”

  On this visit to England, Fitzgerald observed the poor and was entertained by the rich. Leslie, who had done social work in Wapping, took them on a nighttime tour of the London docks (with Zelda, in that rough district, protectively dressed in men’s clothing). He also invited them to dinner with his half-American first cousin Winston Churchill, who was then head of the Colonial Office. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald ordered quantities of English suits and shirts. And he was tremendously impressed by Oxford, “the most beautiful spot in the world,” and by its evocative associations with Compton Mackenzie, Max Beerbohm and Thomas Hardy. But when he returned there two months later, after visiting Paris and Rome, he was fearful that the once-impressive English, exhausted by the war, might soon become a dying breed: “We’d been to Oxford before—after Italy we went back there, arriving gorgeously at twilight when the place was fully peopled for us by the ghosts of ghosts—the characters, romantic, absurd or melancholy, of Sinister Street, Zuleika Dobson and Jude the Obscure. But something was wrong now—something that would never be right again. . . . In how many years would our descendants approach this ruin with supercilious eyes to buy postcards from men of a short, inferior race—a race that once were Englishmen.”21

  The Fitzgeralds had scant interest in museums and monuments. They knew no one in France and Italy, quickly grew weary of sightseeing and rejected Edmund Wilson’s sober advice to “settle down and learn French and apply a little French leisure and measure to that restless and jumpy nervous system.” Instead, they waited outside Anatole France’s house, hoping to see and perhaps speak to the distinguished author, but were disappointed when he failed to appear. And they were asked to leave the Hôtel de Saint-James et d’Albany because Zelda repeatedly tied up the cage-style elevator with her belt so that it would always be ready when she had dressed for dinner.

  Impelled by piety—or by mere curiosity—Fitzgerald had asked Archbishop Dowling of St. Paul to arrange an audience with the Holy Father in Rome. The archbishop, acceding to Fitzgerald’s request and remembering the family’s beneficence, told a Vatican official that “none have merited more of the Church in this city than [the Fitzgeralds] have through several generations—staunch, devout, generous.” Though Fitzgerald noted “women weeping in Vatican” and “the loot of 20 centuries,”22 he did not mention seeing the pope, who by late June may have moved to his summer residence outside Rome.

  Fitzgerald enjoyed himself hugely in Venice, but had a “rotten time” in France. Influenced by Mencken’s pro-German attitudes and bitterly disillusioned by the decadent state of postwar Europe, he assumed a superior attitude and (in a letter to the Francophile Edmund Wilson) condemned Latin culture with an uneasy ferocity that anticipated the rantings of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby:

  God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest. Rome is only a few years behind Tyre and Babylon. The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. . . . France made me sick. . . . I think it’s a shame that England and America didn’t let Germany conquer Europe. It’s the only thing that would have saved the fleet of tottering old wrecks. My reactions were all philistine, anti-socialistic, provincial and racially snobbish. I believe at last in the white man’s burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro.

  Proud of his philistine thought and bohemian behavior, Fitzgerald told Robert Bridges, the editor of Scribner’s Magazine, when they returned from Europe, that “there were legends enough current to supply three biographers.”23

  The Fitzgeralds sailed home on the Celtic in early July and made a brief visit to Montgomery. They then rented a house in Dellwood, on White Bear Lake, about ten miles northeast of St. Paul. They had contracted to stay for a year, but were asked to leave in November (as they had been asked to leave the Biltmore, Cottage Club and the Hôtel de Saint-James). They had ca
relessly allowed a pipe to freeze and burst, which had caused severe water damage. The following summer their rambunctious parties led to expulsion from the White Bear Yacht Club. The Fitzgeralds never seemed troubled by all these evictions and merely shifted their chaotic household to the next convenient place.

  In the summer of 1921 Zelda met Fitzgerald’s parents for the first time, and settled down to await the birth of their first child. Zelda, who loved swimming and sunbathing, evoked the Minnesota scene with an image that suggested both protection and entrapment: “When summer came, all the people who liked summertime moved out to the huge, clear lake not far from town, and lived there in long, flat cottages surrounded with dank shrubbery and pine trees, and so covered by screened verandas that they made you think of small pieces of cheese under large meat safes.” A childhood friend of Fitzgerald vividly recalled how Zelda had loathed and mocked St. Paul.

  Fitzgerald made two new friends that summer. He spent many hours drinking and arguing with Thomas Boyd, the owner of the Kilmarnock Book Shop in St. Paul and the literary editor of the St. Paul Daily News. Born in Ohio two years after Scott, Boyd had been a marine hero, and was then working on his war novel Through the Wheat (1923). He favorably reviewed three of Fitzgerald’s books and interviewed him twice. Xandra Kalman, an old friend and contemporary of Scott, had a summer place in Dellwood and had found a house for him. Though Catholic, in 1917 she had married a divorced banker, Oscar Kalman, a wealthy and generous man who was twenty-five years her senior. Since Zelda had made no preparations for the baby, the practical Xandra bought all the necessary clothing and supplies.

  Frances Scott Fitzgerald, at first called Patricia but always known as Scottie, was born in St. Paul on October 26, 1921. When Zelda first saw the new baby she exclaimed: “I hope it’s beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool”—a sentence attributed to Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s telegram to the Sayres hyperbolically announced that their baby daughter had already eclipsed the most dazzling silent film stars: “Lillian Gish is in mourning; Constance Talmadge is a back number; and a second Mary Pickford has arrived.” Nick Carraway responds in the same witty tone as this telegram when Daisy asks him if they miss her in Chicago: “The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night long along the north shore.”24

  In January 1922 Zelda became pregnant again, but decided not to have another child just after Scottie. Though she had refused to take pills to terminate her pregnancy before she was married, Zelda decided in March to have the first of her three abortions in New York. A cryptic, undated entry in Fitzgerald’s Notebooks grimly states: “His son went down the toilet of the XXXX hotel after Dr. X—Pills.”

  In Rome, in the fall of 1924, an operation to help Zelda conceive caused a lingering infection. By the fall of 1930, when this infection had damaged her reproductive organs, she had abandoned hope of more children and despairingly told Fitzgerald: “Dr. Gros said there was no use trying to save my ovaries. I was always sick and having piqûres [injections].”25 It is not surprising, in view of her medical history, that Zelda greatly admired Hemingway’s fine story “Hills Like White Elephants,” in which a selfish man bullies his reluctant girlfriend into having an abortion.

  V

  All Fitzgerald’s friends recounted his mad escapades. But very few of them remembered him actually writing, which was done in spurts and completely absorbed him for weeks at a time. His daughter Scottie, stressing his dedication to his craft, recalled that “my father was always sitting at his desk in his bathrobe and slippers, writing, or reading Keats or Shelley—although there was often a faint aroma of gin in the air to dispel too romantic a picture.”

  Sinclair Lewis had predicted as early as 1920 that “Fitzgerald is going to be a writer the equal of any young European.” Shane Leslie had compared him to the sacrificial and mythic Rupert Brooke. And the English critic Cyril Connolly, writing in 1951, observed that the legendary rise and fall of Fitzgerald’s literary career and reputation seemed to epitomize both the celebration of the Twenties and the gloom of the Thirties: “Fitzgerald is now firmly established as a myth, an American version of the dying God, an Adonis of letters born with the century, flowering in the ’twenties, the Jazz Age which he perfectly expressed and almost created, and then quietly wilting away through the ’thirties to expire—as a deity of spring and summer should—on December 21st, 1940, at the winter solstice and the end of an epoch.”

  The difference in quality between Fitzgerald’s best and worst work is exceptionally wide. He wrote two of the best novels in American literature and some of the most memorable stories. He also, like most authors, pursued a number of unfortunate dead ends: his unsuccessful play The Vegetable, the abandoned versions of Tender Is the Night, his absurd and lifeless “Philippe, Count of Darkness” stories, his scores of trashy tales for commercial magazines, and virtually all the Hollywood scenarios and screenplays.

  Despite his dissipation, Fitzgerald was a very hard worker. During his lifetime he published four novels (another remained unfinished and appeared posthumously), four volumes of short fiction, a play, and three hundred stories, articles and poems in magazines. He wrote in pencil with his left hand and had a large, loopy handwriting that looked like a child’s. He often composed in the evenings, clouded by the smoke of Chesterfields and propelled (according to whether or not he was drinking) by astonishing quantities of gin or Coca-Cola. He made several drafts, depending on the importance of the work, before sending it out to a secretary to be typed. In 1922 his St. Paul friend Thomas Boyd reported that Fitzgerald’s original drafts were (like his character) spontaneous and impulsive:

  [Fitzgerald’s] writing is never thought out. He creates his characters and they are likely to lead him into almost any situation. His phrasing is done in the same way. It is rare that he searches for a word. Most of the time words come to his mind and they spill themselves in a riotous frenzy of song and color all over the page. Some days he writes as many as 7,000 or 8,000 words; and then, with a small Roget’s Thesaurus, he carefully goes over his work, substituting synonyms for any unusual words that appear more than once in seven or eight consecutive pages.26

  Fitzgerald’s art, like the phoenix, was nourished and consumed by the same source. His only material was his own life, so he meticulously observed and recorded his family and friends, and created his fiction out of his personal experience. He repeatedly stressed the autobiographical nature of his fiction. His most powerful works—“Babylon Revisited,” Tender Is the Night and “The Crack-Up”—were searingly confessional. But he was often limited as a writer by his inability to get outside or beyond himself. “I never did anything but live the life I wrote about,” he declared. “My characters are all Scott Fitzgerald. Even the feminine characters are feminine Scott Fitzgeralds. . . . Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves—that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives. . . . Whether it’s something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday, I must start out with an emotion—one that’s close to me and that I can understand.”27

  Fitzgerald’s best stories were hard to write and hard to sell. His trivial work could be cranked out mechanically, once he had invented the formula, and easily placed in the Saturday Evening Post. This magazine could well afford to pay him high fees, for every issue had nearly three million readers and earned five million dollars from advertising. His typical stories have a glittering surface, are fanciful and fantastic, comic and mildly satirical, and portray the sophisticated manners and mores of well-off, usually idle and always attractive youths in bars and balls, sleek cars and swimming pools.

  “The Popular Girl,” published in the Saturday Evening Post in February 1922 and never reprinted in his lifetime, contains many elements of his characteristic stories: a Minnesota setting, a contrast between Midwestern and Eastern values, a country club dance, a handsome and well-dressed young her
o with charming manners, who has been elected to Bones at Yale and has inherited great wealth, another poor but worthy suitor, a seventeen-year-old girl of exquisite beauty and (to add pathos and drama) her drunken father. The girl practices familiar and rather transparent deceits to capture the hero. But there are complications and sudden reversals. Her father dies, leaving her penniless; she is forced to spend her very last cent; and she is predictably rescued, just in time to avert disaster, by the wealthy heir.

  Fitzgerald tried to justify such stories by claiming that the high fees they earned bought him time to concentrate on the ambitious novels that would establish his reputation as a serious artist. Though his fees continued to soar, they never bought quite enough money or time. He published three novels between 1920 and 1925, then took nine years to complete Tender Is the Night and was unable to finish The Last Tycoon.

  His older friends, well aware of the insoluble conflict between money and art that had obsessed Fitzgerald since his Princeton days, tried to warn him about the danger of corruption. In a letter of April 1920 to George Jean Nathan, the critic Burton Rascoe presciently remarked: “I hope you are able at all events to dissuade Fitzgerald from writing too many Saturday Evening Post stories. Since writing you I have read one of his yarns in the Post: it is not to be differentiated from the stories of Nina Wilcox Putnam, Mrs. [Mary Roberts] Rinehart or any of a half dozen others. Clever enough but that’s all. Trouble is that he is likely to begin, with the money rolling in, to think that that is literature.” The following year Charles Norris, whose novel Brass Fitzgerald had favorably reviewed in the Bookman, warned him directly that catering to the trivial taste of the Post would destroy him as a writer: “You can re-christen that worthy periodical ‘The Grave-Yard of the Genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald’ if you go on contributing to it until [the editor George Horace] Lorimer sucks you dry and tosses you into the discard where nobody will care to find you.”28 Despite these salutary warnings Fitzgerald—extravagant in the Twenties and desperate in the Thirties—continued to write for the Post until it began to reject his work in 1937.