Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography
Page 46
19. Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, pp. 74, 172; Quoted in Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 143.
20. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 218; T. S. Eliot, “Gerontion” (1920), Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York, 1952), p. 22; James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Gabler (New York, 1986), p. 178 (for the names in the execution scene, see p. 252); Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, pp. 93, 97.
The shirt display may have been partly inspired by Zelda. Speaking of Zelda in a letter of January 17, 1950, Sara Murphy told Mizener: “Cleanliness and order were a sort of fetish with her.—Bureau drawers the admiration of all” (Princeton).
21. Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, pp. 131, 133, 134, 180.
22. Wilson, Letters on Literature and Politics, pp. 121, 173; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 158; Stein, in Fitzgerald, Crack-Up, p. 308.
23. Edith Wharton, Letters, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York, 1988), pp. 481–482; Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 163; Eliot, in Fitzgerald, Crack-Up, p. 310.
24. Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 102; Fitzgerald, Letters, pp. 375–376; As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 175; Quoted in Henry Dan Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 126.
Chapter Seven: Paris and Hemingway
1. Quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 193; Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 95; Frances Fitzgerald Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest M. Hemingway in Paris, n.p.
2. Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 689; Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926; New York, 1954), p. 44; Ernest Hemingway, Across the River and into the Trees (New York, 1950), p. 45.
3. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 322; Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 176; Fitzgerald, “Author’s House,” Afternoon of an Author, p. 186; Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939, ed. Irving Drutman (New York, 1972), p. xix.
4. Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 194; Hemingway, Selected Letters, pp. 162–163; Fitzgerald, Letters, pp. 503–504; Quoted in James Woodress, Booth Tarkington, Gentleman from Indiana (Philadelphia, 1954), p. 265.
5. Meyers, Hemingway, p. 159; Glenway Wescott, in Fitzgerald, Crack-Up, p. 325; Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 78.
6. Fitzgerald, In His Own Time, pp. 148–149; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 183; Dear Scott/Dear Max, pp. 127, 131.
7. Ernest Hemingway, The Torrents of Spring (1926; London, 1966), p. 92; Fitzgerald, In His Own Time, p. 275.
8. Fitzgerald, Notebooks, p. 319; Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 483; Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964; New York, 1965), p. 147.
9. Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 438. Clemenceau, whom Hemingway had interviewed in 1922, said: “America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization” (John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations, 15th ed., Boston, 1980, p. 643). Henry Adams has also been credited with this mot: “American society was the first in history to go from barbarism to decadence without passing through an intervening stage of civilization” (quoted in Aldrich, Old Money, p. 46). And in his essay on A. E. Housman in The Triple Thinkers (1938), Edmund Wilson wrote that the poet “has managed to grow old without in a sense ever knowing maturity” (London, 1962, p. 84). Fitzgerald may actually have said something like this to Hemingway, for in unpublished notes Scott wrote that growing up was “a terribly hard thing to do. It is so much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another” (quoted in Donaldson, Fool for Love, p. 214).
10. James Thurber, “Scott in Thorns,” Reporter, 4 (April 17, 1951), 36; Letter from Joan Kennedy Taylor to Jeffrey Meyers, April 22, 1992.
11. Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 41; Wilson, “Imaginary Conversations,” p. 254; Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 165. Hemingway came close to realizing this fantasy in the early 1930s when he had a house with wife and children in Key West and a beautiful American mistress, Jane Mason, in Havana.
12. Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, p. 182; Edmund Wilson, “That Summer in Paris” (1963), The Bit Between My Teeth (New York, 1965), p. 522; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 365.
13. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 326; Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 177; Fitzgerald, Notebooks, p. 326; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 243; Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 877.
14. Quoted in Sotheby Parke Bernet, Fine Modern First Editions (New York, October 25, 1977), lot 425, letter of September 16, 1951; Quoted in Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 41; Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, p. 179.
15. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; New York, 1958), p. 297; Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, p. 103; Fitzgerald, “A New Leaf,” Short Stories, p. 637.
16. Laura Hearne, “A Summer with Scott Fitzgerald,” p. 260; William Styron, Darkness Visible (New York, 1990), p. 40; Corey Ford, Time of Laughter (Boston, 1967), p. 164.
17. Quoted in Donaldson, Fool for Love, p. 214; Quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, pp. 84–85; The Oxford Textbook of Medicine, ed. D. J. Weatherall et al. (Oxford, 1987), 9:95.
18. Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, pp. 183–184; Quoted in Esther Murphy Arthur, “A Farewell to Hemingway,” 1961, BBC Archives; Quoted in Sara Mayfield, Exiles from Paradise: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (1971; New York, 1974), pp. 137, 141.
19. Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 156; Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, p. 184; Charles Angoff, H. L. Mencken: A Portrait from Memory (New York, 1956), p. 99; Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 408.
20. Quoted in Donaldson, Fool for Love, p. 52; Elizabeth Beckwith MacKie, “My Friend, Scott Fitzgerald,” Fitzgerald-Hemingway Annual, 2 (1970), 20–21.
21. Callaghan, That Summer in Paris, p. 207; Fitzgerald, Notebooks, p. 17; Quoted in Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 272; Edmund Wilson, The Thirties (New York, 1980), p. 303.
22. Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, pp. 188–189. See Arnold Gingrich, “Coming to Terms with Scott and Ernest,” Esquire, 99 (June 1983), 56; Sheilah Graham, A State of Heat (New York, 1972), p. 146; and Buttitta, Lost Summer, p. 113.
23. Mizener’s notes on his conversation with Wilson, Princeton; Quoted in Buttitta, Lost Summer, pp. 56, 113, 134; Mizener’s notes on his conversation with Oscar Kalman, Princeton.
24. Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, p. 182; Fitzgerald, Notebooks, p. 158; Hemingway, Short Stories, p. 426.
25. Ernest Hemingway, “The Art of the Short Story,” Paris Review, 79 (1981), 89; Letter from Hemingway to Mizener, February 1, 1951, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland; Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, p. 97.
26. Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 306; Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 102; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 327; Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (New York, 1935), p. 23.
27. Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, p. 14; Ruth Sokoloff, Hadley: The First Mrs. Hemingway (New York, 1973), p. 50; Alice B. Toklas, Staying on Alone: Letters, ed. Edward Burns (New York, 1973), p. 169; Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York, 1933), p. 218.
28. Alice B. Toklas, “Between Classics,” New York Times Book Review, March 4, 1951, p. 4; Yorke, “Zelda: A Worksheet,” p. 220; Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, pp. 258–259.
29. Quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 168; Zelda Fitzgerald, “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number——,” Crack-Up, p. 43; R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton (New York, 1975), p. 468. In an appendix to his biography, Lewis prints “Beatrice Palmato,” Wharton’s astonishing pornographic fragment. Had Fitzgerald known about her taste for louche anecdotes, he would surely have provided the necessary data.
30. Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, p. 3; Fitzgerald, Ledger, p. 179; Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 127; Frank Swinnerton, Figures in the Foreground (New York, 1964), p. 158.
31. Henry Dan Piper, “Fitzgerald, Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy,” Fitzgerald Newsletter, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (Washington, D.C., 1969), p. 31; “Power Without Glory,” Times Literary Supplement, January 20, 1950, p. 40; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 84; “Young America?” Manchester Guardian, May 27, 1921, p. 5; “New Novels—This Side of Paradise,” Times Literary Supplement, June 23, 1951, p. 402.
32. Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 121; “New Novels—The Great Gatsby,” Times Literary
Supplement, February 18, 1926, p. 116; L. P. Hartley, “New Fiction,” Saturday Review, February 20, 1926, p. 234; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 237.
33. As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 84; Grace Moore, You’re Only Human Once (Garden City, New York, 1944), p. 114; Zelda Fitzgerald, “Auction—Model 1934,” Crack-Up, p. 58 (this work is attributed to Zelda in Scott’s Ledger).
34. Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, p. 32; Letter from Sara Murphy to Mizener, January 17, 1950, Princeton; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 178.
35. Fitzgerald, “Absolution,” Short Stories, pp. 259, 271; Fitzgerald, “Winter Dreams,” Short Stories, pp. 235–236; Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy,” Short Stories, p. 318.
36. Fitzgerald, “Winter Dreams,” Short Stories, p. 228; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, pp. 152, 182.
37. Thomas Boyd, “Genius and Pains,” Minneapolis Journal, March 7, 1926, Editorial section, p. 11; Fitzgerald, In His Own Time, p. 365, 368; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 318.
Chapter Eight: Ellerslie and France
1. Letter from John Barrymore to Fitzgerald, n.d. (c. early 1927), Princeton; Letter from Lois Moran Young to Mizener, c. April 1948, Princeton; Quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 348; Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, pp. 3–4.
2. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, pp. 247, 240; Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, p. 10; Quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, p. 227; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 206.
3. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 480; Quoted in Donaldson, Fool for Love, p. 54; Quoted in Milford, Zelda, pp. 269, 215, 300; Letter from Lois Moran Young to Mizener, February 26, 1951, Princeton. In 1935 Lois married Clarence Young, who became assistant secretary of commerce and vice president of Pan American Airlines. She had one son and later lived in Sedona, Arizona, where she died in 1990. See “Lois Moran Young Dead at 81; Musical Star and Movie Actress,” New York Times, July 15, 1990, 1:22.
4. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 217; Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 168; See Gilbert Harrison, The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder (1983; New York, 1986), pp. 109–110.
5. Edmund Wilson, “A Weekend at Ellerslie” (1952), The Shores of Light (1952; New York, 1961), pp. 373, 378–380, 382–383.
6. Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 168; Fitzgerald, Letters, pp. 511–512; Quoted in Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 186; D. H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl (1920; New York, 1968), p. 318.
7. André Chamson, “Remarks of André Chamson,” Fitzgerald-Hemingway Annual, 5 (1973), 74; Fitzgerald, “A Night at the Fair,” Afternoon of an Author, pp. 15–16. See James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; New York, 1964), p. 16; Herbert Gorman, “Glimpses of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Fitzgerald-Hemingway Annual, 5 (1973), 116.
8. Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 114; Letter from Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan to Mizener, July 5, 1950, Princeton; Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, pp. 79, 118. See Gennady Smakov, “Lubov Egorova,” The Great Russian Dancers (New York, 1984), pp. 19–25, which reproduces several photographs of Egorova.
9. Fitzgerald, “Two Wrongs,” Taps at Reveille, p. 205; Quoted in Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 338; Sheilah Graham, The Rest of the Story (New York, 1964), p. 234. Zelda’s Ballerinas is reproduced in Mellow’s biography.
10. Quoted in Dennis Brian, The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Ernest Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him (New York, 1988), p. 79; Quoted in A. E. Hotchner, Papa Hemingway (New York, 1966), p. 121; Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 291.
11. Callaghan, That Summer in Paris, pp. 189, 161, 157, 126.
12. Ibid., pp. 214–215; Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 302; I. M. P. [Isabel Paterson], “Turns with a Bookworm,” New York Herald Tribune, November 24, 1929, sec. XII, p. 27; Callaghan, That Summer in Paris, pp. 243, 247. This fight had assumed epic proportions in Hemingway’s mind by 1951, when he told Mizener: “Scott let the first round go thirteen minutes” (Selected Letters, p. 716). In 1964, after even greater distortions, Archibald MacLeish had to refute a claim that Fitzgerald had injured Hemingway’s head with a jagged piece of skylight! See MacLeish, “The Bruiser and the Poet,” Times Literary Supplement, September 3, 1964, p. 803.
13. Fitzgerald, Ledger, p. 183; Quoted in Mellow, Invented Lives, p. 353; Quoted in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, pp. 229, 220.
14. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, pp. 291, 248–249; Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York, 1964), p. 5.
15. Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, p. 235; Fitzgerald, “One Trip Abroad,” Afternoon of an Author, pp. 144, 161, 162, 164.
16. Milford, Zelda, pp. 318–319; Interview with Scottie’s friend Marie Jemison, Birmingham, Alabama, January 12, 1992; Fitzgerald, “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s,” Afternoon of an Author, pp. 138, 141.
17. Zelda Fitzgerald, “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number——,” Crack-Up, pp. 51–52; Interview with Ellen Barry; Henry Dan Piper’s interview with John Biggs, Wilmington, June 22, 1945, courtesy of Professor Piper; Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 130.
18. Quoted in Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 173; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 241.
Chapter Nine: Madness
1. Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” Crack-Up, p. 21; Arthur Miller and Company, ed. Christopher Bigsby (London, 1990), p. 201; Fitzgerald, Notebooks, p. 204. For a chronology of Zelda’s illness, see Appendix II.
2. Quoted in Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 199; Quoted in Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 293; Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, p. 183.
3. Quoted in Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, pp. 199–200; Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, p. 181; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 253.
4. The information about Dr. Oscar Forel, who has hitherto been a shadowy figure, is based on a long letter of June 4, 1992, from his son, Dr. Armand Forel, to Jeffrey Meyers, and on Armand Forel’s fascinating autobiography, Médecin et homme politique: Entretiens avec Jean-Bernard Desfayes (Lausanne: Éditions de L’Aire, 1991), which he kindly sent me. See also “Oscar Louis Forel,” Macmillan Biographical Encyclopedia of Photographic Artists and Innovators, ed. Turner Browne and Elaine Partnow (New York, 1983), p. 202.
5. Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 222; Quoted in Thomas Campbell, Dr. Campbell’s Diary of a Visit to England in 1775, ed. James Clifford (Cambridge, England, 1947), p. 58.
6. Quoted in Milford, Zelda, pp. 205–207; Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, p. 183; Quoted in Milford, Zelda, pp. 226, 213, 209, 217.
7. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, pp. 247–248; Quoted in Elizabeth Spindler, John Peale Bishop: A Biography (Morgantown, West Virginia, 1980), p. 223; Fitzgerald, Letters, pp. 46, 117, 95.
8. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 279; Dos Passos, Best Times, pp. 209–210; Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 228; Fitzgerald, Notebooks, p. 131; Quoted in Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, pp. 201–202.
9. Fitzgerald, “One Trip Abroad,” Afternoon of an Author, p. 161. Fitzgerald’s statement was also prophetic, for a great many foreign writers, seeking both refuge and first-rate doctors, have ended their lives in Switzerland: Rilke, Stefan George, Joyce, Musil, Mann, Hesse, Remarque, Nabokov, Silone, Irwin Shaw, Borges, Simenon and Graham Greene.
10. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 364; Fitzgerald, “One Trip Abroad,” Afternoon of an Author, p. 162; Thomas Wolfe, Letters, ed. Elizabeth Nowell (New York, 1956), p. 263; Sinclair Lewis, quoted in Hamilton Basso, “Thomas Wolfe,” in After the Genteel Tradition, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York, 1937), p. 202; Hemingway, Selected Letters, p. 726.
11. Dear Scott/Dear Max, p. 168; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 572; Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (New York, 1941), p. 715.
12. Compton Mackenzie, First Athenian Memories (London, 1931), p. 320; Letter from Anthony Blond to Jeffrey Meyers, September 7, 1992; For a portrait of Lord Alington, see John Rothenstein, Augustus John (Oxford, 1945), plate 53; As Ever, Scott Fitz, p. 174.
13. The intriguing Bijou has received very little attention from Fitzgerald’s biographers. Mizener, Turnbull, Milford and Mellow do not even mention her. Bruccoli devotes one sentence, LeVot and Donaldson one paragraph each to her. My account of Bijo
u’s life is based primarily on her taped interview, Bijou O’Conor Remembers Scott Fitzgerald (London: Audio Arts, 1975) and on interviews in England during August 1992 with her cousins The Earl of Minto and Sir Brinsley Ford; her son, Michael O’Conor; her former daughter-in-law, Gillian Plazzota; and her great-nephew, Sir William Young.
Bijou, a great gossip, told Fitzgerald many interesting stories about her cosmopolitan background. He refers to two of them, as well as to her imperious character, in his Notebooks, pp. 219, 104, 18: “Sir Francis Elliot, King George, the barley water and champagne”; “Bijou as a girl in Athens meeting German legacy [?Legation] people in secret. Representing her mother”; “Bijou, regarding her cigarette fingers: ‘Oh, Trevah! Get me the pumice stone.’ “ For more on Bijou, see Appendix III.
14. Fitzgerald, “The Hotel Child,” Bits of Paradise, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (1974; New York, 1976), pp. 273–274, 289.
15. Arthur Miller and Company, p. 15; Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, pp. 203–204; Fitzgerald, “On Your Own,” The Price Was High, p. 325; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 262. Matthew Bruccoli, “Epilogue: A Woman, a Gift and a Still Unanswered Question,” Esquire, 91 (January 30, 1979), 67, reproduces a photograph of Bert Barr.
16. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 254; Letter from Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan to Mizener, March 10, 1950, Princeton; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 488; Helen Blackshear, “Mama Sayre, Scott Fitzgerald’s Mother-in-Law,” Georgia Review, 19 (Winter 1965), 467.
17. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 236; Letter from Fitzgerald to Rosalind Smith, n.d. (c. June 1930), Princeton.
18. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 255; Letter from Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan to Mizener, July 5, 1950, Princeton; Quoted in Milford, Zelda, p. 269.
19. “Babylon Revisited,” The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York, 1951), pp. 386, 391, 396, 399, 402.
20. Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz, Collected Writings, p. 181; Interview with Budd Schulberg; Interview with Ring Lardner, Jr.; Fitzgerald, Poems, p. 141; Dwight Taylor, Joy Ride (New York, 1959), pp. 242, 244–246.