The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  Scott Fitzgerald wrote novels that hinge on the conceptually softest of visions—less than visions really, more like glimpses. He was preeminently the poet of withdrawn promise—the green light that winks ever less brightly at the end of Daisy’s dock. If there is ultimately something unsatisfying about his work, that may well be because Fitzgerald never ceased to think of life’s wreckage in the most boyishly wondrous of terms. He described Zelda to Scottie, their daughter, as “one of the eternal children of this world,” yet the phrase applies just as easily to him. When Scott could no longer be a child, when debts piled up and Zelda’s mind went off course, he became a drunk. The evidence isn’t all in on their marriage, and it looks as if certain questions—such as how talented a writer Zelda was to begin with—will never be solved other than in a partisan spirit, but Scott and Zelda appear to have been more similar than not. They both believed, rather fatally, in what Scott called “the business of creating illusion”: “Why don’t you come to Tryon?” Zelda wrote in April 1939, on her way back to a mental hospital in North Carolina. “It’s the best place in the world … and we could keep a little house on the lake … We might have a very happy summer in such circumstance—you like it there, and I am very clever at serving birdsong and summer clouds for breakfast.”

  The just-issued Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by the indefatigable Matthew J. Bruccoli and by Margaret M. Duggan, with the assistance of Susan Walker, is as complete a compilation of previously unpublished letters to and from Fitzgerald as one could wish for. More, in fact, than one had wished for. This volume has been put together with a reverential scholar’s eye: no cable is too insignificant, no postcard too slight, no book dedication too flippant to reproduce in full. It is a disappointing collection, partly because many of the truly interesting letters have been published before and are not reprinted here, but mostly because Scott’s was a slim, sterling gift and he knew enough not to tarnish it with overuse.

  “I think you’ll like a series of sketches I’m starting in Esquire next month,” he wrote to Beatrice Dance, a married woman with whom he had a brief affair, “they can tell you more about myself than I ever could in a letter because unfortunately, in my profession correspondence has to be sacrificed to the commercial side of being a literary man and I am probably the worst letter writer in the world.” But it wasn’t simply a matter of good tactics; Fitzgerald was a zealous watch guard of his talent precisely because he sensed that its wellsprings were not all that deep. Although his style was inimitably lovely—indeed, there are sentences in The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night that leave one breathless—he was also one of those writers whose style exceeds their repertoire of perceptions. What he saw he saw, as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote to him, with “that terrible, clear white light you possess.” Even the firmest of admirers must notice, however, that there were startling blind spots in Fitzgerald’s gaze, whole realms that failed to interest him or escaped his attention altogether.

  Still, there are curious and beguiling things to be found here if one is willing to wade through the picayune details that make up much of the correspondence. It is interesting to see, for instance, how early and completely Fitzgerald developed his myth of desire—the gleaming girl whom everyone wants and who, in her infinite suggestiveness, stoked the fires of his dreamy imagination—that propel his novels. “Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it,” Nick Carraway says of his cousin Daisy in The Great Gatsby, “bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.” A nineteen-year-old Scott sent his younger sister, Annabel, a letter that is a short course in the art of seduction as the Jazz Age conceived of it: “You’ve got the longest eyelashes!” and “I hear you’ve got a ‘line’!” are his examples of how a girl should open conversation with a boy. “Don’t be afraid of slang—use it,” suggests this older brother who could not spell, “but be careful to use the most modern and sportiest like ‘line,’ camafluage etc.” “In your conversation,” her worldly sibling goes on to advise, “always affect a complete frankness but really be only as frank as you wish to be.” He gives her some pointers on proper carriage while dancing, then solemnly concludes this paragraph, “And dancing counts as nothing else does.”

  At twenty-three Fitzgerald would marry the Alabama belle Zelda Sayre. A letter from her, dated two months before their wedding in 1920, contains the following complaint about Frank Norris’s McTeague, a novel she was reading at Scott’s behest: “All authors who want to make things true to life make them smell bad—like McTeague’s room—and that’s my most sensitive sense. I do hope you’ll never be a realist—one of those kind that thinks being ugly is being forceful.” Small chance. Zelda’s letters, by the way—all of them printed here—justify the volume as few of Scott’s do.

  This Side of Paradise was published March 26, 1920, eight days before the Fitzgeralds took their wedding vows in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Thereafter came the high times—tanning on French beaches, famous friends, partying. Throughout those years Scott worked hard, nudging his editor, Max Perkins, with publicity gimmicks and displaying, as book followed book, the “ungodly facility” that John Peale Bishop called his “worst enemy.” In 1930, Zelda had a breakdown and was sent to the first of many psychiatric clinics. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic. As the sunlit world of their first ten years together was cast abruptly into ever-lengthening shadow, Scott sent this terse letter to his mother from Switzerland: “No news. I’m still here waiting. Zelda is better but very slowly. She can’t cross the ocean for some time yet + it’ll be a year before she can resume her normal life unless there’s a change for the better. Address me Paris, care of Guaranty. Actually I’m in Lausanne + migrate to Paris once a fortnight to see Scotty who has a small apartment. So we’re all split up.”

  “Normal life” was never resumed. The Depression was fast approaching; Zelda would get better and then worse; Scott returned to America saddled with the care of “my invalid,” as he called Zelda, and with overseeing the education of their daughter. Money wasn’t coming in as abundantly as it once had from the popular magazines where Fitzgerald’s stories appeared, owing both to his declining literary reputation and to the declining fortunes of the country generally. In 1937 he began writing for Hollywood, and in 1938 Scottie was admitted to Vassar at reduced fees. In a letter to Zelda that same year he described himself as “a pretty broken and prematurely old man who hasn’t a penny except what he can bring out of a weary mind and a sick body.”

  It has been suggested more than once, most recently by Gore Vidal in The New York Review of Books, that Fitzgerald was a whiner. I see few traces of the habitual complainer in him; rather, he seems to have lost—and at an unfairly young age—the ebullience, the shiny-eyed habit of response that had once been his trademark. As he wrote to Beatrice Dance, “My capacity for wonder has greatly diminished.” In its place were only the specters of ruin. “The possibility of dissipation,” he wrote to one of Zelda’s psychiatrists in 1940, a little less than a year before he died, “frightens me more than anything else—which I suppose is poetic justice.”

  What should be remembered is that for all his resentment (call it whining if you want to), Scott never seriously considered the idea of abandoning Zelda—certainly not financially and even less so emotionally. “I loved you,” he wrote to his wife in the fall of 1939, “romantically—like your mother, for your beauty + defiant intelligence; but unlike her I wanted to make it useful.” He continued to alert Zelda’s doctors to her “very extraordinary mind” for as long as he lived. Whether or not he drove her crazy, as her family thought and her biographer, Nancy Milford, seems to think, is not, I believe, an answerable question. Would Zelda have utilized her considerable talents for writing (as evidenced in her no
vel, Save Me the Waltz) and painting more completely if she hadn’t married Scott? My guess is that she would not have; her indulgent Southern upbringing and her temperament—even in its sanest form—militated against it. Instead, she served as an erratically compliant muse. “But don’t fret—if it hadn’t been you,” Scott wrote in one of his last letters to Zelda, “perhaps I would have worked with more stable material.” They were a lavishly misspent pair.

  ON NOT LEARNING TO FLIRT

  2010

  It begins with your father, the First Man in your life, this primal love affair—not sexual in nature, but with the faintest erotic undertone—that will lead to other, more fleshed-out romances. At some moment in time you start to take in the Otherness of him, the ways in which he is different from you, from the muscles in his arms to the scratchiness of his cheeks. It might be on a day when you are rushing past him in your corduroy overalls to rescue your favorite stuffed panda that has gotten stuck behind a bookcase and he swoops down and picks you up, unable to resist your allure. You in turn giggle happily and throw your arms around his neck, lay your head on his reliable shoulder, the two of you basking in mutual adoration. Or it might be on a summer afternoon when he carries you in your striped bathing suit with the sweet ruffles into the ocean, tall and strong, stronger than the waves, and coaxes you into the water, the first step toward learning how to swim. “Don’t be afraid, Princess,” he says. “I’m here.”

  Years later, you begin to realize that the power is more two-way than you had once thought, with his being in the position of knowing how to do everything, from science experiments to driving a car, and you in the position of willing acolyte. You begin to realize, that is, that you actually have some power over him, can wheedle him into overriding your mother’s refusal to let you meet up with some friends on a school night. Somewhere in adolescence or just before, when boys come into your life bearing their weirdness and their desirability, you try out some of your father-proven feminine wiles on them, smile and play with your hair and talk in that soft, slightly unsure-of-itself voice that your father always responds to. And so the pattern is set, encoded early on before you are aware of it, to be called upon later in earnest when the dance of the sexes heats up.

  Or so, at least, is how I imagine it happens: how one learns to flirt. Your father sees you through the rapt gaze of paternal love, and you in turn borrow from that gaze, envision yourself as covetable, expecting the males who come in contact with you to share this point of view. Admittedly, I base this developmental scenario on secondary rather than primary sources—on observation and induction rather than my own experience, seeing as how my father never called me Princess, although I conceived a desire to be addressed like a royal when a friend at sleepaway camp received a postcard addressed thusly. Nor do I remember ever catching the moonlight in his eye. My father’s interest lay firmly elsewhere, in his work, in the life of the synagogue, in my mother. I recall trying to inveigle him into focusing on me, clambering on his lap when I was little, where I languished; writing him a poem when I was older, which I was the only one to be moved by.

  So no, it never clicked for me the way it’s supposed to, this first of all love affairs. This maladaption is something I think about from time to time, but especially around this time of year, with Valentine’s Day hovering round the corner, wrapped up in red roses and heart-shaped boxes of chocolate, gooey with official sentiment. The holiday itself leaves me cold, but I’m not sure whether this reaction is a critique of consumer culture or merely an ingrained defensive posture on my part because of a lack of “sweetheart” sentiment early on.

  I was, for all intents and purposes, a fatherless girl, looking for a male presence that was mostly an absence. And whereas this lack might have caused someone else to redouble her efforts, might have created an ever-stronger wish to coax forth an engagement with or at the very least a minimal awareness of herself, things didn’t happen that way for me. By the time I was an adolescent, I had pretty much given up the fight. I decided to ignore my father’s relevance to me, if only to minimize the impact of my irrelevance to him. I pretended that we were passing ships in the night, two people who just happened to be related and could be found peering into the same near-bare fridge at the midnight hour only because of proximity.

  More important, I refused to woo the attention of my male peers the way I saw other girls doing: playing dumb, playing with their hair, acting all admiring. I told myself that I didn’t see the point: What were boys, after all, but posturing members of the opposite sex, unknowable (despite the fact that I had three brothers), unpredictable, insatiable in their need for admiration? Looking back, it would be more truthful to say that I never learned how to stoop to conquer, how to stroke the male ego and get my own stroked in return. And so I decided to preemptively reject before I could be rejected.

  Oh, there were the occasional boys who got through my armamentarium beginning in high school, who saw through my defenses and stirred my interest. There was Victor, who was intense and moral to the point of self-righteousness; David, who made me bootlegged tapes of Bob Dylan and tried to get me to enjoy smoking pot as much as he did by rolling me enormous roaches that I, in turn, would let rot in my desk drawer. And then there was Alan, whom I found immensely sexy—sexy enough to kiss in the presence of some ancient stone-carved onlookers in a room at the Met when I was sixteen—even though I didn’t agree with his reverent feelings about Ayn Rand. More than thirty years later I still think of all three of them, gone off into the vast recesses of adult life, wonder if they ever think of me.

  But those were the exceptions, the boys who might have appreciated my looks—for all my radiating hostility, I had long, straight hair, large breasts, and almond-shaped “bedroom” eyes—and were willing to overlook the tensions that marked my interchanges with the opposite sex in favor of my barbed wit and diverting if melancholic line of thinking. In the main, I remained resistant, refusing to flirt with the gorgeous Israeli who taught us Hebrew and whom all my friends vied for in my junior year of high school, then acting hesitant several years later with the brainy Shakespeare professor at Columbia who clearly warmed to me. (And I to him, truth be told.) The problem was that, caught up as I was in self-protective measures lest I be made a fool of, imagining myself the apple of an eye that had barely noticed me to begin with, I could never figure out a way to indicate the attraction the male sex held for me.

  The apotheosis of that attitude—its defining moment, so to speak, after which things began to thaw—came in my early twenties. I was invited one summer to spend a weekend in New Hampshire with the writer Saul Bellow at the behest of his agent, who had recently taken me on as a client. Bellow was his larger-than-life, oxygen-eating self, as charming a host as you could wish for, discoursing on everything from Bach to his secret recipe for tuna fish salad that called for a tablespoon of ketchup. He was solicitous of me, praising what writing of mine he had read, and in general conspiring to make me a happy guest. But his very assumption of masculine irresistibility, which his agent had succumbed to long ago, put my teeth on edge, and I spent a good deal of time taking walks by myself so as not to have to be an audience to his sweltering ego.

  Toward the end of the stay, Bellow and I were talking outside, just the two of us, while he tilled his bounteous garden. I could swear he did an imitation of Marlon Brando in The Godfather by cutting an opening into a piece of orange skin, sliding it over his teeth, and then smiling at me ghoulishly, but whether I am inventing this in retrospect or it really happened, I know I suddenly felt tenderhearted toward him. As Bellow was seeing us off, I leaned over to give him a hug, and after we had said our goodbyes, he added, in a quiet voice, “Be kinder to the male gender.” This suggestion, in the simplicity of its appeal and the vulnerability that lay behind that appeal, broke through my already-wobbly defenses, opening up vistas of affection withheld and received that I mostly had shied away from. I cried all the way to the airport and then throughout the plane ride, feeling
that I had been seen and understood, that the once-ignored little girl was now an adult woman whose feelings and responses left their mark on the male beholder.

  And yet even that is not the whole story. My father may not have known the names of any of my friends or bothered to attend my college graduation, but he did keep copies of almost everything I wrote—the extent of which I only discovered after both my parents had died. Although it was not his style to make encouraging noises, I knew he respected my work—indeed, that he shared my interest in singular words and the construction of shining sentences, notwithstanding (or, perhaps, precisely because of) the fact that English was his third language.

  According to psychological findings, one of the most positive effects of a good father-daughter relationship is in the way it equips girls with a sense of mastery, helping to make young women effective in the outside world. Somewhere along the way I must have imbibed from my father that writing was a worthwhile occupation and that my thoughts—at least on books—were not to be sneered at. Indeed, some months ago, a woman doing research for a book about successful women and their fathers came to interview me. In my conversation with her, casting about for memories, I was suddenly reminded of the birthday cards my father used to send me, which always included a little witticism or play on words. (I recall one such card he signed “Enchanté,” shortly after my novel Enchantment had come out.)

  So you might say that if I failed to learn how to flirt in the more obvious, Hugh Hefner–ordained ways, I learned an alternate means of flirting—flirting with my mind, which was the part of me my father honored. And although that is a more rarefied form of seduction, leaving out whole swaths of the male population, for those men to whom it does speak, it tops a glimpse of décolleté or fawning questions about his day at the office each and every time. This approach may not pan out in the conventional way, and it certainly won’t bring you roses on Valentine’s Day. But you can always look ahead and buy yourself some daffodils in time for spring.