Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

The Murphys could apparently take anything: practical jokes, figs down backs, broken stemware, flying ashtrays, thrown garbage, kicked trays, drunken brawls, passing out and tedious analytical questions as well as Zelda’s public disrobing and attempts at suicide. No matter what the Fitzgeralds did, they were always forgiven by their devoted friends. Gerald’s moving letter of farewell, for example, echoed the second chapter of the Song of Solomon to express the intensity of their affection for the Fitzgeralds and—though the hush and emptiness must have been a welcome relief—the genuine sorrow they felt when their friends had left the Riviera:

  There really was a great sound of tearing heard in the land as your train pulled out that day. Sara and I rode back together saying things about you both to each other which only partly expressed what we felt separately. Ultimately, I suppose, one must judge the degree of one’s love for a person by the hush and the emptiness that descends upon the day,—after the departure. We heard the tearing because it was there,—and because we weren’t able to talk much about how much we do love you two. We agreed that it made us very sad, and sort of hurt a little—for a “summer holiday.”34

  VIII

  Fitzgerald’s third volume of stories, All the Sad Young Men, was published in February 1926, ten months after The Great Gatsby. There was a striking difference between the three best stories—“Absolution” (1924), “Winter Dreams” (1922) and “The Rich Boy” (1926)—and the six mediocre ones that filled out the collection. It is significant that none of his best works was published in the Saturday Evening Post.

  “Absolution,” Fitzgerald’s most Catholic story, was originally intended to explain Jay Gatz’s background, but was deleted from the novel because Fitzgerald wished to preserve a sense of mystery about his hero. This story—with its disillusioned, ironic tone; its pure, detached style; its oblique, suggestive technique; and its subtle, elusive themes—is deeply indebted to Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). The homosexual temptation and death of the priest, in fact, evolve directly from “An Encounter” and “The Sisters” in that volume, just as the prurient priest and the insincere confession of sexual offenses derive from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in the last chapter of Ulysses.

  The opening paragraph of “Absolution” is brilliantly evocative:

  There was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears. He wept because the afternoons were warm and long, and he was unable to attain a complete mystical union with our Lord. Sometimes, near four o’clock, there was a rustle of Swede girls along the path by his window, and in their shrill laughter he found a terrible dissonance that made him pray aloud for the twilight to come. . . . He had found the scent of cheap toilet soap desperately sweet upon the air. He passed that way when he returned from hearing confessions on Saturday nights, and he grew careful to walk on the other side of the street so that the smell of the soap would float upward before it reached his nostrils as it drifted, rather like incense, toward the summer moon.

  The cold eyes of the tormented Father Schwartz contrast with the warm night of the town and intensify the irony of his impossible desire to attain complete mystical union with Jesus. In a similar fashion, the scent of the cheap toilet soap undermines the ironic comparison to incense as the priest, aroused by the sexual secrets of the confessional, is torn between spiritual yearning and sensual desire. The summer moon, which symbolizes his temptation at the beginning of the story, concludes the tale by shining on the scented Swede girls, lying amidst the wheat with their young farmboys and achieving the physical gratification denied to the priest.

  The priest’s vague but powerful desire immediately focuses on the beautiful, blue-eyed, eleven-year-old Rudolph Miller. In a flashback at the end of section I, to three days earlier, Rudolph dutifully confesses seven sins. But he then lies in the confessional by stating that he never tells lies. Like the young Fitzgerald, Rudolph considers himself too good to be his parents’ son and invents a suave alter ego, with the absurd name of Blatchford Sarnemington, which allows him to escape from sin and from the need to deceive God. Rudolph plans to evade communion, while in a state of sin, by drinking a glass of water before church. But when his father catches him in the act, he tells the truth (when he could easily have lied, as he had lied to the priest) by admitting that he has not yet tasted the water.

  After being beaten by his father (like the innocent child in Joyce’s “Counterparts”), Rudolph goes to a second confession. But he does not admit that he lied in the first one, and takes communion in a state of sin. When the story returns to the present in the final section, Father Schwartz, instead of providing discipline and giving penance, tells Rudolph about “the glimmering places,” which the priest associates with amusement parks (like the one in Joyce’s “Araby”). But the priest also brings himself back to reality by warning the boy: “don’t get up close . . . because if you do you’ll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life.” This lesson conveyed, Father Schwartz collapses into death. Unable to live up to his religious ideals, the priest cannot provide the necessary comfort during the spiritual crisis of a confused, guilt-ridden boy. Both fathers, natural and spiritual, have failed Rudolph, who never receives the long-sought absolution.

  The plots and themes of “Winter Dreams” and “The Rich Boy” are similar. In the former, a poor boy, Dexter Green, falls in love with a rich girl, Judy Jones. He loses her, becomes engaged to and then abandons a poor substitute for his true love. At the end of the story, he discovers that Judy is unhappily married and that her looks have faded. Dexter is shattered by this news because he too has lost his illusions of beauty and perfection: “He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at last—but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes. The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. . . . Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.”

  In the latter story, a rich boy, Anson Hunter, loves a rich girl, Paula Legendre, but loses her and becomes involved with an inferior girl, Dolly Karger. Hunter retaliates for his own emotional vacuity by abandoning Dolly and by driving his aunt’s lover to suicide. Later on, he encounters Paula, who has had an unhappy first marriage but is now contentedly pregnant by her second husband. At the end of the story, Hunter learns that Paula has died in childbirth.

  In one story differences in money and class are the obstacles to love; in the other, the obstacles are great egoism and great wealth. Both works describe the hero’s life from boyhood to his early thirties. Both stories portray the destructive power of beautiful women, ephemeral happiness, the reluctance to abandon illusory dreams, the sense of loss and the impossibility of achieving true love. But Anson Hunter is a more fully developed character than Dexter Green and is portrayed in a more substantial social context. Like the Patches in The Beautiful and Damned, the Buchanans in The Great Gatsby and the Warrens in Tender Is the Night, Hunter expresses Fitzgerald’s fascination with the superiority, the selfishness and the emptiness of the rich. “They are different from you and me,” he writes at the beginning of the story. “They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”35 Hunter also shows that money can fatally weaken the will and lead to a meaningless life.

  Dexter Green is cruelly manipulated by Judy Jones (based on Ginevra King) who “treated him with interest, with encouragement, with malice, with indifference, with contempt.” Though Anson Hunter dominates his women, he is incapable of emotional commitment and deprives himself of a married life and a settled—rather than a dissipated—existence. Fitzgerald based “The Rich Boy” on the confidential revelations of his hard-drinking Princeton friend, Ludlow Fowler. Though Hunter is portrayed negatively, Fitzgerald somehow thought Fowler would be pleased by
the tale. “It is in a large measure the story of your life,” he wrote Fowler in 1925, “toned down here and there and simplified. Also many gaps had to come out of my imagination. It is frank, unsparing but sympathetic and I think you will like it—it is one of the best things I have ever done.” When Hemingway read the story, Fitzgerald told Fowler, he said the real Anson would have raped Dolly instead of abandoning the seduction. And, Fitzgerald added, “I hadn’t the privilege of telling him that, in life, he did!”36

  The reviews of All the Sad Young Men were generally favorable. In Fitzgerald’s hometown paper, the Minneapolis Journal, Thomas Boyd loyally wrote that “Absolution” reveals a “perfection of mood, of form and implication. . . . Everything that Scott Fitzgerald writes contains something that is worth reading.” Harry Hansen, in the Chicago Daily News, was enthusiastic about Fitzgerald’s versatility and style, but rightly thought the deeper meaning and greater art made In Our Time superior to Fitzgerald’s collection. The stories give, he wrote, “excellent proof of his ability to write well in half a dozen manners. It is a joy to read these tales. They lack sameness; they are ironical, and sad, and jolly good fun by turns; they scintillate.” And in the Saturday Review, William Rose Benét, more perceptive than the other critics, admired Fitzgerald’s originality, but saw that he was torn by the conflict between money and art: “His ingenuity at evolving marketable ideas is extraordinary. But one naturally feels, behind most of the writing in this book, the pressure of living conditions rather than the demand of the spirit. As a writer of short stories the author more displays his astonishing facility than the compulsions of his true nature.” The positive reviews helped to sell more than 16,000 copies in 1926, and the collection earned nearly four thousand dollars.

  Fitzgerald had completed The Great Gatsby in Europe in 1924. But he had become blocked on an early—and subsequently rejected—draft of Tender Is the Night and had done no serious work since then. He had squandered his money, his life was chaotic, his marriage was disintegrating and he was drinking heavily. Just before he sailed from Genoa in December 1926 on the Conte Biancamano—with the familiar intention to save money and devote himself to fiction—he wrote Hemingway (as Murphy had written him): “I can’t tell you how much our friendship has meant to me during this year and a half—it is the brightest thing in our trip to Europe for me.”37 For the rest of his life Hemingway was his ideal reader. Scott always sought and respected his good opinion, and was desperately eager to know if Ernest approved of his work.

  Chapter Eight

  Ellerslie and France, 1927–1930

  I

  The Fitzgeralds barely had time to visit his parents, who had moved to Washington, D.C., and hers in Montgomery, when he received an offer from United Artists in Hollywood. They wanted a modern flapper story for the popular and vivacious comedy star Constance Talmadge, whom Fitzgerald had jokingly called “a back number” in the telegram that announced Scottie’s birth. He was offered an advance of $3,500, and $12,500 more if the film story was accepted. Movies had been made from two of his stories (“Head and Shoulders” and “The Offshore Pirate”) and two of his novels (an awful The Beautiful and Damned and an equally awful version of The Great Gatsby); and he had done titles (to convey dialogue), a scenario and a screenplay for three silent movies in 1923–24. With his flair for dialogue and facility as a writer, he felt confident that he could easily master the art of screenwriting. Always in need of money and eager to explore a social scene that had even more celebrities than the French Riviera, he decided to carry out his earlier plan to “go to Hollywood and learn the movie business.” In January 1927 the Fitzgeralds left Scottie with his parents and took a train across the country on their first, two-month trip to Hollywood.

  Enthusiastically received by the film community, the Fitzgeralds were immediately caught up in the swirl of parties. They shared a four-apartment “bungalow” on the grounds of the luxurious Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard with the actress Carmel Myers, their friend since Rome; with the novelist Carl Van Vechten, whom they had met in Great Neck; and with the handsome and hard-drinking actor John Barrymore. Fitzgerald gave a copy of The Great Gatsby to Barrymore, who had read his earlier work and wrote an unusually perceptive letter about the novel. “The advance on The Beautiful and Damned seems to me enormous in all respects,” Barrymore wrote. “Your new book has a cohesion and unity—somewhat lacking in the other. You have hit upon a style admirably suited to your subject—; your own style, that is, your own personality. . . . I had not expected you could write so well.”

  The Fitzgeralds attempted to live up to their glamorous legend, but instead got drunk and acted outrageously. They turned up uninvited at Sam Goldwyn’s party, got down on their hands and knees outside the front door, and barked like dogs until they were reluctantly admitted to the house. Armed with huge sewing shears, they made a late-night visit to the screenwriter and ladies’ man John Monk Saunders and threatened to solve all his romantic problems by castration. During the 1919 May Day celebrations Fitzgerald had mixed ketchup and eggs in a friend’s hat. In 1927, during tea with Carmel Myers, Scott went even further and boiled a couple of watches and assorted jewelry belonging to several of the guests in a can of tomato soup. No one could understand why he behaved in this bizarre fashion, and none of the guests dared to taste the expensive stew. Ronald Colman was particularly annoyed, but no one else seemed to object to the destruction of valuable property. “Of course they behaved badly,” the actress Lois Moran observed, “but they were never mean or cruel or unkind.” Nevertheless, these pranks must have angered and alienated many people besides Ronald Colman. They reinforced Fitzgerald’s reputation as an alcoholic, hurt his professional standing in Hollywood and made it more difficult for him to get lucrative film work.

  While in Hollywood Fitzgerald met and fell in love with the extraordinary eighteen-year-old Lois Moran, who became the model for Helen Avery in “Magnetism” (1928) and for Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night (1934). Born in Pittsburgh in 1908, Lois, as an infant, had moved to Paris with her mother, who was (as in Fitzgerald’s novel) a doctor’s widow. Lois soon fulfilled her mother’s own ambition to become an actress. She joined the Paris Opera Corps de Ballet as a professional ballerina at the age of thirteen, acted in her first film in France at fourteen, starred with Ronald Colman as the daughter in Stella Dallas (1925) and made four films for Fox before she was twenty. In the 1930s she starred in several Broadway musicals, including George S. Kaufman’s Of Thee I Sing. Unlike most film stars, Lois was a cultured and refined young lady with a cosmopolitan background. She had spent many years in Europe and spoke fluent French. In 1922 Scott and Zelda had discussed the possibility of starring in a film version of This Side of Paradise. In 1927 Lois, who wanted Scott to be the leading man in her next picture, arranged a screen test—which he failed.

  Lois’s virginal, blond, blue-eyed Irish beauty, Fitzgerald wrote in “Princeton” (1927), inspired the stags to line up for a hundred years to cut in on her dances. In his plan for Tender Is the Night, he emphasized that the character based on Lois “differs from most actresses by being a lady, simply reeking of vitality, health, sensuality.” And he conveyed these qualities in his romantic exaltation of Rosemary at the beginning of the novel: “Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood—she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew still on her.”1

  Lois, who had absolutely no idea that Zelda was jealous of her, used to worry because all the attractive men she knew were married. Zelda complained that Scott would not allow her to go anywhere without him while he himself “engaged in flagrantly sentimental relations with a child.” But Zelda undermined, while Lois strengthened, his self-esteem
. Scott, whose self-confidence was also eroded by failure in Hollywood, defended his friendship with Lois by explaining that he would do “anything to be liked, to be reassured not that I was a man of a little genius but that I was a great man of the world. . . . Anybody [who] could make me believe that, like Lois Moran did, was precious to me.”

  The telegram Lois sent Scott after he had left Hollywood in mid-March 1927 closely imitated the sophisticated style of The Great Gatsby. In the novel, when Daisy asks Nick if people miss her in Chicago, he replies with flattering exaggeration: “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 along the north shore.” In real life Lois, referring to Scott’s drinking and adopting Nick’s mournful tone, exclaimed: HOLLYWOOD COMPLETELY DISRUPTED SINCE YOU LEFT. BOOTLEGGERS GONE OUT OF BUSINESS. COTTON CLUB CLOSED. ALL FLAGS AT HALF MAST. . . . BOTTLES OF LOVE TO YOU BOTH. In a letter that followed this telegram, Lois aroused his jealousy by being both playful and seductive, disclaiming interest in her now-dull life while mentioning that she was sexually attracted to her handsome leading man: “Darling Scott—I miss you enormously—Life is exceedingly dull out here now—Have just been bumming around the studios and seeing people I am not in the least interested in—Maybe I will play with William Haines in his next picture—I rather hope so because I admire him enormously and he gives very satisfactory kisses.”2

  There is conflicting evidence about Scott’s relations with Lois. In a letter of October 1937 he mentioned an “AFFAIR (unconsummated) with ACTRESS (1927).” But he was apparently eager to advertise as well as to conceal his liaison with Lois. The illustrator Arthur Brown, who was then living at the Ambassador Hotel, reported that one morning Fitzgerald burst into his room, woke him up and said: “ ‘Say hello to Zelda.’ But it was Lois Moran, and not Zelda, on his arm. Scott asked Brown to cover for him [while he secretly spent time with Lois]. If any questions were asked, Brown was to say that they’d spent the day together at First National Studios.”