Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Reminiscing in the hospital magazine, a former nurse described the vigorous routine of the clinic and the formidable personality of Dr. Carroll:

  [The patients] started with calisthenics; volley ball in the morning, then gardening for two hours. Then they came in and had lunch around a quarter to one. The patients were always served meals on trays with nice linen tray covers and linen napkins. Each one had a napkin ring and flowers on every tray. . . .

  I didn’t always like [Dr. Carroll] in every way, but I admired him. To tell you the truth, our class was a little frightened of him. He was always kind, considerate and very generous, but all of us were in awe of Doctor.16

  Fitzgerald hoped that the sensitive and athletic Zelda would respond to Highland’s attractive setting and to Dr. Carroll’s emphasis on achieving physical well-being through diet, exercise and manual work. But, as Zelda herself realized after her third breakdown in February 1934, it was now harder than ever to escape the ravages of mental disease. She got no better during her two years in Sheppard-Pratt than she had in any of the other hospitals. When she entered Highland in the spring of 1936 she weighed only eighty-nine pounds and, instead of improving, had been going downhill fast.

  In his first report to Fitzgerald, Dr. Carroll said that Zelda “was entirely irresponsible, highly excitable, and had just emerged from a three-month period of intense suicidal mania.” After two weeks at Highland, Fitzgerald told Beatrice Dance, Zelda had made some improvement but still had a dismal prognosis: “Zelda seems comparatively happy there. She is no longer in a suicidal state but has an equally difficult hallucination which I won’t go into. It seems pretty certain she will never be able to function in the world again.”

  The once-beautiful Zelda, now dull-eyed and frazzle-haired, was a humiliated and broken figure. She had entered a phase of religious mania and become obsessed with the Bible; she believed she was in direct contact with God, imagined her friends were doomed to hell and was zealous in her efforts to save them. Her painting of a Deposition from the Cross (Zelda catalogue, no. 36), which she completed during this phase, portrayed herself as a tortured Christ figure and bore an uncanny resemblance to Stanley Spencer’s great The Resurrection: Cookham (1927).

  One of Zelda’s nurses at Highland emphasized the conservative and “rational methods” that kept her from suicide and gradually diminished her hallucinations, but did not eliminate her mania nor enable her to regain her sanity: “We were careful with Zelda; we never stirred her up. She could be helped, but we never gave her deep psychotherapy. One doesn’t do that with patients if they are too schizophrenic. We tried to get Zelda to see reality; tried to get her to distinguish between her fantasies, illusion and reality.”

  But during her stay at Highland Zelda was given (as she had probably been given at Prangins) a much more extreme form of therapy: thirty to ninety insulin shock treatments. These shocks produced convulsions or coma that lasted from twenty minutes to an hour and were supposed to jolt her out of psychopathic behavior. Her last doctor, Irving Pine, noted an “improvement” in Zelda after these shocks and felt she was “reborn.”17 But she remained in Highland until April 1940 and, with periods of remission, for the rest of her life.

  During the next few years Fitzgerald wrote to many of his friends about Zelda. He felt she was, more than Scottie, his child and that he “was her great reality, often the only liaison agent who could make the world tangible to her.” For this reason, and as long as she was helpless, he would never leave her or allow her to feel she had been deserted. He praised the paternal Dr. Carroll for bringing Zelda, during a very difficult phase of her illness, to a certain level of stability. But when Scott faced reality, he knew her case was hopeless. “With each collapse she moves perceptibly backward,” he told Beatrice Dance in early 1937, “there is no good end in sight. She is very sweet and tragic. For the majority of creative people life is a pretty mean trick.”18

  V

  After settling Zelda in Highland and moving back into the Grove Park Inn in July 1936, Fitzgerald once again came into conflict with Hemingway. Their relations had soured since the great days of their friendship in 1925–26, and he had seen Hemingway only twice since the ill-fated boxing match with Callaghan in 1929. In October 1931 they spent a congenial afternoon at a Princeton football game. But in January 1933, during dinner in New York with Hemingway and Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald got drunk and humiliated himself. In April 1935, a year after his harsh letter about Tender Is the Night, Hemingway asked their intermediary Max Perkins to tell Fitzgerald that the novel, in retrospect, got better and better. Delighted by Hemingway’s approval, Fitzgerald repeated to Perkins what he had told Hemingway a decade earlier, when leaving Europe in December 1926: “I always think of my friendship with him as being one of the high spots of life.”

  In the spring of 1935 Perkins had urged Fitzgerald to accompany him on a visit to Hemingway in Key West. But Fitzgerald—drinking heavily and in poor health—was unwilling to compete with Hemingway on his own sporting turf and refused to see him except under the “most favorable circumstances.” Despite Hemingway’s attacks, Fitzgerald—who craved Hemingway’s good opinion and had been crushed by his criticism—praised him that summer to Tony Buttitta. Though Hemingway had mistreated him, Fitzgerald felt he deserved it. He believed that his own character and art, when measured against Hemingway’s, were not much good.

  As Fitzgerald dropped into despair and Hemingway’s reputation continued to rise, Ernest’s criticism seemed to increase Scott’s admiration for his rival. He thought Ernest exemplified the highest standard of personal courage and would always be read for his great studies of fear. He urged the teenage Scottie to read A Farewell to Arms and then quizzed her on the poem (“Blow, blow, ye western wind”) that haunted Frederic Henry during the retreat from Caporetto. He considered Hemingway the “final reference” as an artist and called him, after the death of Kipling in 1936, the greatest living writer in English. But this generous praise had a discouraging effect on his own work. He believed that Hemingway had surpassed him and would last longer than Fitzgerald himself. “I don’t write any more,” he confessed to Thornton Wilder in 1937. “Ernest has made all my writing unnecessary.”19

  Just as Anthony Patch, the hero of The Beautiful and Damned, planned to devote his life to writing a history of the Middle Ages, so Fitzgerald—who was fascinated by Hemingway’s Byronic intensity—chose to glorify him in the Count of Darkness stories, which he forced himself to write in 1935. Yet, as Edmund Wilson observed, Fitzgerald also had a sharp eye for Hemingway’s weaknesses. Noting Hemingway’s tendency to attack rivals, especially those who had once helped him, Fitzgerald wrote that “Ernest would always give a helping hand to a man on a ledge a little higher up.” Recalling how their fortunes had become reversed since their first meeting, and perhaps forgetting that he had crawled under the table during their last, embarrassing dinner, Fitzgerald also stated: “I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the table again.” In September 1936—when Hemingway appeared to be at the height of his powers and had displayed his overweening ego in works like Death in the Afternoon (1932) and Green Hills of Africa (1935)—Fitzgerald made an astonishingly prescient remark about his friend’s psychological vulnerability: “He is quite as nervously broken down as I am but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.”

  Few writers were more accident-prone than Hemingway. But his injuries—from football and boxing, bulls, boats and bullets, car and plane crashes—always seemed testaments to his stoic heroism. In late July 1936, just before his conflict with Hemingway flared up in public, Fitzgerald had his own, distinctly unheroic accident, which made him more dispirited and vulnerable than ever. In “Winter Dreams” (1922), Dexter Green imagined himself “surrounded by an admiring crowd, [giving] an exhibition of fancy diving from the spring-board of the club raft.” At Juan-les-Pins in the summer of 1
926 Fitzgerald had accepted—and somehow survived—Zelda’s challenge to make dangerous dives from the high cliffs into the sparkling sea. At the end of Tender Is the Night (1934) Dick Diver avoids high diving, tries to show off for Rosemary by lifting a man on his shoulders while riding an aquaplane, but reveals his physical deterioration (and suggests his loss of sexual potency) by failing to perform the stunt he had once done with ease.

  Two years later in Asheville, Fitzgerald tried to repeat his past performance. But alcoholism and tuberculosis undermined his attempt to show off for Zelda. He fractured his right shoulder while diving and woke up in a massive plaster cast that began below his navel, left his stomach bare, rose up to his neck and kept his right arm extended in a half-hearted salute. In September he told Beatrice Dance how the injury had been compounded by what seems to have been a drunken accident: “I got the broken shoulder from diving from a fifteen-foot board, which would have seemed modest enough in the old days, and the shoulder broke before I hit the water—a phenomenon which has diverted the medicos hereabout to some extent; and when it was almost well, I tripped over the raised platform of the bathroom at four o’clock one morning when I was still surrounded by an extraordinary plaster cast and I lay on the floor for forty-five minutes before I could crawl to the telephone and get rescued.”20

  Fitzgerald’s injury and weakness made him long, more than ever, to absorb into himself some of the qualities that made Hemingway so attractive, to lean on him in times of physical and psychological distress. But Hemingway despised Fitzgerald’s weakness and self-pity, and tended to bully him. In one of his own megalomaniacal moments, Fitzgerald told Laura Guthrie: “I never knew any person but one . . . who is as strong as I am. That is Ernest Hemingway.” And, writing of their friendship in his Notebooks, he said: “Ernest—until we began trying to walk over each other with cleats.” But these statements were absurd. He still hero-worshiped Hemingway and was destined to be trampled upon in their unequal combat.

  Hemingway (as we have seen) took pot-shots at Fitzgerald in “Homage to Switzerland” (1933) and Green Hills of Africa (1935). In 1935 he sent Fitzgerald a poem with the grandiose and demeaning title: “Lines to Be Read at the Casting of Scott Fitzgerald’s Balls into the Sea from Eden Roc (Antibes, Alpes Maritimes).” And his disturbing letter about the falsity of Tender Is the Night repeated Sara Murphy’s serious charge about Scott’s naive approach to understanding others: “You think if you just ask enough questions you’ll get to know what people are like, but you won’t. You don’t really know anything at all about people.” Hemingway also attacked Fitzgerald with some well-meant but painful truths about his personal limitations which, Ernest felt, explained the defects of his work: “A long time ago you stopped listening except to the answers to your own questions. . . . That is where it all comes from. Seeing, listening. You see well enough. But you stop listening.”21 Fitzgerald implicitly accepted this criticism when he told Laura Guthrie, an aspiring writer: “In the first place, listen. Just listen to how people talk,” and when in 1937 he told Hemingway: “I wish we could meet more often. I don’t feel I know you at all.”

  In “The Crack-Up” Fitzgerald had called Hemingway his “artistic conscience”; and Hemingway chose to exercise that prerogative when he wrote Fitzgerald “a furious letter” and told him that he “was stupid to write that gloomy personal stuff.” Like Sara Murphy, Hemingway also disapproved of Fitzgerald’s fatuous former belief that “Life was something you dominated if you were any good.” A key passage in A Farewell to Arms, which Fitzgerald greatly admired, exalted, by contrast, the stoic acceptance of tragic defeat: “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. . . . It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.” Hemingway’s “furious letter” to Fitzgerald seems to be lost; but he expressed his strong views about “The Crack-Up” in a letter to Max Perkins that condemned Scott’s self-exposure and accused him of self-pity: “He seems to almost take a pride in his shamelessness of defeat. The Esquire pieces seem to me to be so miserable. There is another one coming too. I always knew he couldn’t think—he never could—but he had a marvellous talent and the thing is to use it—not whine in public. Good God, people go through that emptiness many times in life and come out and do work.”

  Hemingway’s angry advice to Fitzgerald—“you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it”22—helps to explain the personal attack on him in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” For Hemingway, Fitzgerald was a frightening example of a good writer who had—like the hero of his story—betrayed his talent and been destroyed by literary fame. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” appeared with Fitzgerald’s “Afternoon of an Author” in the August 1936 issue of Esquire, four months after the publication in that magazine of his third “Crack-Up” essay and one month after his diving accident. This story, though written at the height of Hemingway’s worldly success, reveals his anxiety about his incipient moral corruption (symbolized by the hero’s gangrene) and predicts his failure as a writer and his spiritual death. One of Hemingway’s greatest works, it is in fact a more subtle, covert and artistically sophisticated version of “The Crack-Up”: an incisive confrontation of failure and analysis of what had caused it. Fitzgerald’s essays hit Hemingway at a vulnerable point and provoked him to violate fictional norms by cruelly attacking Fitzgerald in the Esquire version of the story.

  The hostile reference to Fitzgerald originated in a sharp exchange between Hemingway and the quick-witted Irish writer Mary Colum when they were dining in New York in 1936. After Hemingway declared: “I am getting to know the rich,” Mary Colum replied: “The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.” Hemingway avenged himself by appropriating the remark and victimizing Fitzgerald when he was particularly vulnerable: “He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of [the rich] and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.” (Scott’s name was changed to “Julian” when “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” appeared in The Fifth Column and The First Forty-Nine Stories in 1938.)

  Hemingway’s luxurious house, boat and African safari had been paid for by his wife’s wealthy uncle, Gus Pfeiffer, and he had also befriended the rich while hunting big game in Kenya and fishing for marlin in Key West. But he felt he could define himself in opposition to the rich, who lived on unearned income, because he wrote for a living and made enough money to support himself. He justified the passage in the story by stating that Fitzgerald’s revelation of his personal failure in “The Crack-Up” left him open to the kind of public castigation that Hemingway had previously given—with Fitzgerald’s encouragement—to the declining Sherwood Anderson. Though Hemingway had made his own personal confession in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” he convinced himself that the brutal truth in the story would give Fitzgerald a salutary jolt and shake him out of his self-pity.

  A passage mercifully deleted from To Have and Have Not (1937), which also deals with the corruption of the rich, summarizes Hemingway’s view of Fitzgerald’s weaknesses and anticipates the more extensive critique of Scott’s character in A Moveable Feast. Hemingway said that Scott wrote too much when he was very young, lacked good sense and had a great deal of bad luck that was not his fault. He had charm and talent, but no brains, was romantic about money and youth, and went directly from youth to senility without passing through manhood. He thought old age came right after youth—and for him it did. If he gave up self-pity, he still might pull himself together.

  Fitzgerald, deeply humiliated by Hemingway’s criticism, admired the art of his story but expressed anger about the personal at
tack. He justified his own work by alluding to Oscar Wilde’s apologia and told Hemingway: “If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. . . . It’s a fine story—one of your best—even though the ‘Poor Scott Fitzgerald, etc.’ rather spoiled it for me. . . . Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.” Fitzgerald told Max Perkins (who later persuaded Hemingway to delete the reference to Fitzgerald) that he still loved Ernest, no matter what he said or did, but admitted that he had been wounded by Hemingway’s statement that he was “wrecked”: “It was a damned rotten thing to do, and with anybody but Ernest my tendency would be to crack back. Why did he think it would add to the strength of his story if I had become such a negligible figure? This is quite indefensible on any grounds.”23 If Fitzgerald had answered his own question, he might have realized that Hemingway had attacked him so that Scott would share his own guilt about selling out to the rich.

  Hemingway’s charge continued to rankle, especially when another old friend, John Peale Bishop, repeated it in a critical essay, “The Missing All” (1938). When responding to the essay, Fitzgerald ignored his own past friendships with the millionaires in Gatsby-like Great Neck and with the heiress Emily Vanderbilt (whom he had met in Paris in 1928), as well as his lifelong fascination with the luxurious life of Hollywood film stars. Instead, he expressed his sense of betrayal by another rich friend whom he had also helped at the beginning of his literary career. And he defended himself, when down and out in Hollywood, in a letter to Edmund Wilson:

  [Bishop] reproached me with being a suck around the rich. I always thought my progress was in the other direction.—Tommy Hitchcock and the two Murphys are not a long list of rich friends for one who, unlike John, grew up among nothing else but. I don’t even know any of the people in “café society.” It seems strange from John. I did more than anyone in Paris to help him finish his Civil War book [Many Thousands Gone, 1931] and get it published. It can’t be jealousy for there isn’t much to be jealous of any more.