† “People always want to be their best selves and behave as well as possible when with the Murphys,” John Dos Passos reflected.
And here come the Fitzgeralds.
The exception that confirms the rule.
But Scott and Zelda are a colossal exception, one of those sudden bicephalous summer storms, a biblical plague.
Scott and Zelda have heard the myth of Villa America and want to live it first-hand, from inside, and first they stay in Hôtel du Cap, and later rent a villa in Juan-les-Pins, and soon turn into a nuisance for locals and visitors. A none too attractive yet fascinating local attraction. Gerald and Sara Murphy become—they have no choice: they intervene out of proximity plus good manners and, so, extinguish the blazes of the most fiery of couples—their guardians and protectors for a good part of 1925 and 1926. It’s no simple task. Zelda has an affair with a young pilot from a nearby airbase and Fitzgerald gets drunk and gets down on all fours and howls at the moon that shines down on the Murphys, as if to say, “I told you so . . .” Zelda, to shake off of a hangover, jumps from the cliffs, explaining to her hosts, on the verge of nervous breakdown, that she doesn’t believe “in conservation” and, soaked, dances as if possessed to Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong records. Alcohol and pills to sleep and Ernest Hemingway taking note of everything, wearing that oh so Hemingwayesque smile, while the next morning Fitzgerald is also taking notes, though not for a cruel and vengeful and psychotic memoir (Hemingway forces Gerald Murphy to test his manliness by jumping into a ring with a bull and, of course, seems unimpressed with his performance), but for what he thinks will be a great novel, a novel better than the unsurpassable The Great Gatsby. His favorite of his own novels, Tender Is the Night, which he’d publish in 1934, and by 1940, the year he died, would already be out of print and lost.
† Sara admired The Great Gatsby. To Gerald Murphy it was nothing special. “The one we took seriously was Ernest, not Scott. I suppose it was because Ernest’s work seemed contemporary and new, and Scott’s didn’t,” he commented.
† “The Murphys liked Zelda better than me.”—Francis Scott Fitzgerald.
† “I don’t think we could have taken Scott alone.”—Sara and Gerald Murphy.
† Gerald and Sara always seemed to marvel a bit—without ever fully understanding it—at their long relationship with the Fitzgeralds, at how much they loved each other and that they loved them despite feeling that they were their opposites—distant, self-destructive. “We four communicate more by our presence than by any other means,” Gerald Murphy diagnosed it to Fitzgerald.
† “What we loved about Scott was the region in him where his gift came from, and which was never completely buried. There were moments when he wasn’t harassed or trying to shock you, moments when he’d be gentle and quiet, and he’d tell you his real thoughts about people, and lose himself in defining what he felt about them . . . Those were the moments when you saw the beauty of his mind and nature, and they compelled you to love and value him,” Gerald Murphy told Calvin Tomkins.
† At a dinner with the Murphys (“My only rich friends,” Fitzgerald would write, who rode the derailed train of a life of greater luxury than that of the Murphys), the writer begins to mock the caviar and champagne that’s served him and stares unremittingly at an older man accompanied by a younger girl at the next table. He keeps watching them, with his eyes half-closed, as if taking aim and focusing before firing a rifle or taking a photograph. The Murphys deem it an unacceptable form of discourtesy and ask that, please, he stop; but (it often happens with people who aren’t writers, with people who “are people exactly”) they can’t know or even imagine that Fitzgerald, lidless, with eyes wide open now, is watching, reading in the soft twilight air, the beginning of a novel that’ll be called Tender Is the Night.
† Fitzgerald never stops telling the Murphys about the great novel he’s writing. But the Murphys never see him write.
† “One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”—Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, Book 2, chapter XI.
† “Absence . . . it’s no solution,” says Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night. More than the theme, he understands suddenly, absence is the content in Tender Is the Night. The Great Absence. Or the small successive absences that The Great Absence comprises (the characters that don’t stop leaving, departing) and that end up piling up, in the novel, like fallen petals, like dead stars, in the way of everything that’s put off until, suddenly, you discover that it’s already too late. The Great Absence is, also, the theme of one of his favorite albums: Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, whose non-chronological, three-block structure is similar to Tender Is the Night. (Note: locate and speak with that great childhood friend of his with whom he listened to Wish You Were Here for the first time, so many times, when there was still time and space.)
† “Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives.”—Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night.
† Time passes even for the Murphys. “Living well is no longer the best revenge.” And the thirties bring The Depression and the end of the long vacations and the Murphys put Villa America up for rent. Time to go home and take over the family business. And two of their children—Baoth and Patrick—die in 1935 and 1937. Fitzgerald—who has been expatriated by the expatriates after he “betrayed” them when he published Tender Is the Night—sends his condolences to Gerald, evoking Henry James: “The golden bowl is broken indeed but it was golden; nothing can ever take those boys away from you now.”
† “The best way to educate children is to keep them confused,” Gerald Murphy recommended. And, somewhere, in the air or underwater, his own confused and confusing parents nod, indicating their complete agreement.
† Painful question: another little boy taken from my side, Penelope, how to deal with this? Deal with it? Show me a tragedy and . . . what do I write then? DANGER, WARNING: the chair that approaches the desk that might also be the precipice. The desk’s sharp edges. Yes: the true hero of this story is outside this story. And reality, like in Tender Is the Night, complicates everything. Reality, which can cause a fiction to fail just for the fun of it. Reality, which raises its head, like a serpent, to hiss, hypnotically, a “Really . . .”
† Gerald Murphy tells Calvin Tomkins that Fitzgerald spent hours questioning him and Sara. “Studying them.” Gerald Murphy never considered himself the model for anything; but he does remember Fitzgerald’s stare, his lips pressed together, his whole face tense like a spring about to be sprung, as if he wanted to catch him in a lie. To irritate and discourage him, Sara Murphy answered Fitzgerald with whatever random thing, giving him absurd answers, until one night she could no longer take it and in the middle of a party and in front of everyone she said: “Scott, you think if you ask enough questions you’ll get to know what people are like, but you won’t.” Fitzgerald was livid and, pointing at her with a trembling index finger, said that nobody had ever dared to say something like that to him and challenged her to repeat it. And Sara Murphy repeated it, word for word, in front of everybody, without making a single mistake. And, without a doubt, writers aren’t people exactly, Fitzgerald memorized it on the spot so he could write it down later in the margin of some page.
† And in a letter (find date), Sara Murphy was even more explicit: “You ought to know at your age that you can’t have Theories about your friends, Scott.” And her sign off: “Your infuriating but devoted and rather wise old friend, Sara.”
† “The book was inspired by Sara and you, and the way I feel about you both and the way you live, and the last part of it is Zelda and me because you and Sara
are the same people as Zelda and me.”—Francis Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to Gerald Murphy (find date).
† “When I like a man, I want to be like him.”—Francis Scott Fitzgerald (find where he wrote this); and, suddenly, he realizes that the surname Fitzgerald includes a “Gerald” among its letters.
† “At certain moments, one man appropriates to himself the total significance of a time and place.”—Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s notes for The Last Tycoon.
† “I didn’t like the book when I read it, and I liked it even less on rereading. I reject categorically any resemblance to us or to anyone we knew at any time,” Sara Murphy wrote to Calvin Tomkins, with the same rage that would be roused decades later, in other previously languid society women, by Truman Capote with his Answered Prayers. Remember: Truman Capote, between hurt and surprised, wondering how none of his “swans” had realized that it wasn’t a buffoon they had among them, but a writer. And that that writer was studying.
† On the other hand, Gerald Murphy was impressed by the way Fitzgerald used everything he saw with great fidelity to obtain something that hadn’t happened, but that did perhaps happen when nobody but Fitzgerald was paying attention.
† Fitzgerald in a letter to Gerald Murphy, 1938: “I don’t care much where I am any more nor expect very much from places. You will understand this. To me, it is a new phase, or rather, a development of something that began long ago in my writing—to try and dig up the relevant, the essential, and especially the dramatic and glamorous from whatever life is around. I used to think that my sensory impression of the world came from outside. I used to actually believe that it was as objective as blue skies or a piece of music. Now I know it was within, and emphatically cherish what little is left.”
And he reads that letter in a collected book of Fitzgerald’s letters and he can’t help but think about how at some point they wrote like that, with paper and ink, and put all of it in an envelope and sealed it and let it drop through the slot of a mailbox. And all of it took several days to arrive to the hands of the recipient. And the velocity of things was different. And they thought more about things before putting them in writing. And Gerald Murphy received that letter but never showed it to Sara Murphy. Sara didn’t understand those things, Gerald thought. Sara was so different from him.
† “Sara is in love with life and skeptical of people. I’m the other way. I believe you have to do things to life to make it tolerable. I’ve always liked the old Spanish proverb: ‘Living well is the best revenge.’”—Gerald Murphy in conversation with Fitzgerald (when?).
† “Dearest Sara, I love you very much, Madam, not like in Scott’s Christmas tree ornament novels but the way it is on boats where Scott would be seasick.”—Letter from Ernest Hemingway to Sara Murphy. And yet, behind their backs and treacherously, in a fragment not included in the first version of his very selective memoirs, A Moveable Feast (1964), Hemingway would remember the Murphys, as always, only as suited his character: “I had hated these rich because they had backed me and encouraged me when I was wrong . . . the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila’s horses’ hooves have ever scoured . . . It was not their fault. It was only their fault for coming into people’s lives . . . They collected people then as some collect pictures and others breed horses . . . They were bad luck for people but they were worse luck to themselves and they lived to have all of their bad luck finally to the very worst end that all bad lucks could go.”
The fact that the preceding paragraph doesn’t appear in the final version of A Moveable Feast doesn’t, however, free the Murphys from more than one standard barb and from humiliation. Absurd accusations like that they made him read aloud the manuscript of his book The Torrents of Spring (1926), where Hemingway viciously parodies his mentor Sherwood Anderson. Request and offense—reading aloud to enliven the soirée—that, for Hemingway, “is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the winter snowfall has set over the crevices.”
Aha.
Having read A Moveable Feast, Gerald Murphy (“I never could stand Gerald,” Hemingway noted in a letter to McLeish) commented with elegance: “Contre-coeur feelings about Ernest’s book. What a strange kind of bitterness—or rather accusitoriness. Aren’t the rich (whoever they are) rather poor prey? What shocking ethics! How well written, of course.” (Find date and propose to publisher a voluminous volume that collects all the disagreeable things that at some point Hemingway said or wrote about his acquaintances, writers in general, and Fitzgerald in particular.)
It’d be a great book, a very big book.
† “I’m sorry, but Scott’s book is not good.”—Letter from Ernest Hemingway to Gerald Murphy (find date).
† “I liked it and I didn’t like it.”—Letter from Ernest Hemingway to Francis Scott Fitzgerald (May 10th, 1934).
† And later, subsequently, Ernest Hemingway proceeds to destroy Tender Is the Night and its author, accusing him of having vampirized the Murphys to turn them into the Fitzgeralds and, finally, firing off point-blank lines like “In the first place I’ve always claimed that you can’t think” and “Forget your personal tragedy” and “Jesus it’s marvelous to tell other people how to write, live, die, etc.”
† “Dear Ernest: Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it (the story) in a book would you mind cutting my name? It’s a fine story—one of your best—even though the ‘Poor Scott Fitzgerald etcetera’ rather spoiled it for me. Ever Your Friend, Scott. PS: Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.”—Letter from July 16th, 1936, from Francis Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway after reading the story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which he is offhandedly and humiliatingly mentioned. And in the margin of a Thomas Wolfe book: “Ernest was always ready to lend a helping hand to the one on the rung above him.”
† “A strange thing is that in retrospect his Tender Is the Night gets better and better. [. . .] It’s amazing how excellent much of it is. . . . (I always had a very stupid little boy feeling of superiority about Scott—like a tough little boy sneering at a delicate but talented little boy.) But reading that novel much of it was so good it was frightening.”—Letter from Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, his and Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s editor (date?).
† The story told by the reading of Tender Is the Night is, also, the story of the writing of Tender Is the Night.
† There are almost as many biographies of Francis Scott Fitzgerald as there are of The Beatles. Point this out in the book, he says to himself. And to clarify the why: the stories of The Beatles and of Francis Scott Fitzgerald are paradigmatic lives and works with the quality and qualities of certain myths. Rises and falls, friendships and enmities. And Great Art. And so—even though he knows their plotlines by heart—he always buys them and reads them again, like a child rereading fairy tales and witch tales to infinity, whenever he runs across one that he missed or when a new one comes out.
The excess of Fitzgeraldiana isn’t random and it has an added incentive, he thinks: the epic of Fitzgerald’s fall—the formidable success of achieving, in his words, “the authority of failure” faced with “the authority of success” of Ernest Hemingway—functions like a great moral tale. For any writer, Francis Scott Fitzgerald occupies the altar of one who died (of his own initiative and bad choices) as a result of having screwed up everything a writer can screw up outside of his or her books. So, Francis Scott Fitzgerald as an example, like the best of the bad examples. Like a manual of Destructions and Self-destructions to study while—in tandem—he rereads Fitzgerald’s fiction over and over again, feeding tirelessly of
f his nonfiction until he reaches the ground zero and the absolute point of communion between the two: the autobiographical essays subsequently collected by Edmund Wilson in The Crack-Up (1945), after their initial publication in 1935 in Esquire, which, of course, gets Hemingway fired up, who doesn’t delay in sending Fitzgerald another of his kindly letters, reproaching his debility and offering to contract an assassin to have him killed in Cuba so that Scottie and Zelda can cash in his life insurance. In the same vein, Hemingway suggests that parts of Fitzgerald be spread around throughout the important places in his life: his liver to the Princeton Museum, his heart to the Plaza Hotel, and his balls, if they can be found, thrown into the sea off Eden Roc and, being small, they’ll barely make a splash. Very funny. Desperate, Fitzgerald undertakes the most pathetic and impotent of revenges: writing a series of awful and alcoholized stories where Hemingway appears transformed into the Gothic and medieval, tormented and tormenting “Philippe, Count of Darkness.”
Over the years, he’s gathered a great deal of Fitzgeraldian material: the volumes of sad letters to Zelda, the melancholic letters to Scottie, the indecisive letters to his editor Maxwell Perkins, the almost pleading letters to his Agent Harold Ober, three collections of letters to everyone else, various of his last wife’s memoirs and a very hard to find memoir by his secretary in Hollywood, essays about his dangerous relationship with Ernest Hemingway, alternate versions of The Great Gatsby and The Love of the Last Tycoon, collections of his early writings, and random pieces and interviews.
In one of them, one of the last ones, a certain Michel Mok converses with him in his home. In the moment of saying goodbye, the reporter asks him what has become of the jazz generation, the generation to which he gave voice and brilliance and the most musical and romantic prose.
The Invented Part Page 29
