The Invented Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  † Then, subsequently, the extensive and elusive list of uncomfortable and disagreeable moments starring Fitzgerald or that Fitzgerald invites others to co-star in. It’s enough just to see him with his family. Example: Fitzgerald showing up drunk to a party attended by his adolescent daughter, who does nothing to help him. Days later, a friend of hers who was there reproaches Scottie for not helping her father. Scottie says she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “Nothing happened,” she says. Her friend asks her if she’s trying to be strong, denying what happened: the fact that “your father was so drunk and so helpless and that you behaved as if he wasn’t there . . . Children should worry more about their parents, Scottie.” To which Scottie responds: “Don’t you realize that if I let myself worry I wouldn’t be able to bear it?”

  † “In my next incarnation, I may not choose again to be the daughter of a Famous Author. The pay is good and there are fringe benefits, but the working conditions are too hazardous.”—Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald in the prologue to Letters to His Daughter (1965), by Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

  † One night, he discovers on the Internet an old recording of Fitzgerald reciting “Ode To a Nightingale” by John Keats. The voice, sad and breaking, Fitzgerald’s almost childish solemnity, as if performing for parents or classmates in a school play, trying to convince them and convince himself that he’s a good student: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk” and “was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?”

  Good question.

  † From a letter from Francis Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter Frances “Scottie Fitzgerald, December 1940:

  “But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.”

  † In a letter to Francis Scott Fitzgerald, dated December 31st, 1935, Gerald Murphy concludes, more in the voice of Dick Diver than Gerald Murphy:

  “I know now that what you said in Tender Is the Night is true. Only the invented part of our life—the unreal part—has had any scheme, any beauty.” And, yes, he already wrote this down before, but he’s going to write it here again. Once and again and one more time. Multiplied but perfect to share bijis: like canapés, like repeated figurines, like those little bags of candies that you take home after childhood birthday parties. But the next sentence, even more heartbreaking, will only be included once, here, now: “Life itself has now stepped in and blundered, scarred, and destroyed. In my heart, I dreaded the moment when our youth and invention would be attacked in our only vulnerable spot—the children, their growth, their health, their future.” The children, the children. The children like lightning rods and grounding wire. And the children, also, like unstoppable and strangling lightning bolts. The children who—like it says at the end of that novel that impressed him so much (London Fields, by Martin Amis, read just before the release of his first book, that moment when all the best books seem to possess a nontransferable and personal transcendence)—you look for even though you never had them and let’s see how many you find. The children like the people you always hoped would know you. The children like the people you hoped you would never not know. The children like the people you always hoped would acknowledge you. The children that you raised as an act of true love and true imagination: the children like those characters (though Vladimir Nabokov would’ve spurned such a notion) that escape us. The children like fragile invented parts always poised to attack and always exposed to attack from real parts, never clearly seen until it’s already too late. The children who—contrary to what many believe, especially those who don’t and won’t ever have children, he can imagine it and can imagine what it feels like, that’s why he’s a writer, to not be himself and to be someone else if he needs to be—don’t soften you or make you more sensitive, but elevate or bring you down to the violent level of fierce killing machines, to kill for the children, always ready to attack, teeth and nails bared, paternal and maternal as synonyms for lethal. The Children as the perfect excuse to be a killer or a suicide or killed by children. The children that—if there’s justice, if everything turns out fine—end up rewriting us without giving us a chance to correct them or defend ourselves, because we’re already done, we’re already gone, we’re already about to dot the “i”s of a story that, even though it’s ours, already belongs to them.

  In Calvin Tomkins’s notes and interviews for his profile on the couple for The New Yorker, Gerald Murphy goes into greater depth: “Talking with Scott one time I told him that for me, only the invented part of life was satisfying, only the unrealistic part. Things happened to you—sickness, death, Zelda in Prangins, Patrick in the sanatorium, Father Wiborg’s death—these things were realistic, and you couldn’t do anything about them. ‘Do you mean you don’t accept those things?’ Scott asked. I replied that of course I accepted them, but that I didn’t feel they were the important things really. It’s not what we do but what we do with our minds that counts, and for me only the invented parts of our life had any real meaning.”

  † His childhood recovered not via personal memories but via personal objects and places that evoke them, reinvented real parts: the different houses and the many moves (once he used thumbtacks to mark his locations on a map of the city, hoping to illuminate a cabalistic symbol, but no, nothing), the already antique candies and the revolutionary arrival of Toblerone chocolate, children’s clothes (which, at that time, were still like grown-up clothes, just smaller), the bills that changed name all the time and aged so quickly, the disgust at the film of cream that forms on the surface of warm milk, vitamin C, the ritual of haircuts, the albums of trading cards and metal figurines and the first stick-on tattoos, orthodontic apparatuses, the exceedingly large and exceedingly old automobiles (older than the then-old automobiles), the personal and psychotic revolution of the shopping mall, the spinning of LPs, the grooves on LPs, a double LP with a white cover (that his parents split in half during one of their separations and that he’ll only hear in its entirety when he buys it years later), a museum with dinosaur skeletons, a terrestrial planetarium with paradoxically extraterrestrial architecture, his parents’ friends’ houses, the friends from school who weren’t his parents’ friends’ children (and who wanted more than anything to have parents like his, unaware what it was like, unaware of the fine print and hidden clauses in the contract), some parks and some plazas, the psychedelic posters of rock bands, Holiday On Ice, the massive movie theaters always full and multilevel (that, if he could go back, would probably—unlike most of yesterday’s spaces, like the theater that only showed the movies of Walt Disney Studios—still seem enormous to him), a recurrent dream with chimneysweeps who chase him across the rooftops of an ancient city (product of seeing Mary Poppins?), the childhood magazines and the rite of passage, an encyclopedia about Greco-Roman mythology that he never finishes (he’s missing, forever, the fundamental part that tells of the war between the titans and the gods), Lawrence of Arabia and Les aventuriers and Melody, the barrel of peanuts in a popular bar, classical galleries with ceilings painted with circular paintings and with echoing cupolas (and the hippie galleries with low ceilings where the nebulous odor of patchouli accumulates), the limited number of TV channels where on Saturdays they show movies of all genres and during the weeks series like Zorro, a red tricycle and a green bicycle (that, he thinks, if he could achieve a great velocity, would allow him to go back in time and change and correct so many things), Dracula and Martin Eden and David Copperfield and the always-open bookstores, the seasons that back then are well-delimited and begin and end when they’re supposed to end and begin (in winter it’s never hot and in summer it’s never cold), an urban beach with a Francophone name where his parents and their friends (who act like an adult version of Lord of the Flies while there) insist on taking him, and whose muddy shores are fed by the sewer waters of the whole city, the demolition of his school, the ruins of his school where he play
s and falls and gets hurt (and those so scratchable and peelable and chewable scabs that grow over the wounds), the sunburns and those heavy white creams, the hairspray and hair gel, the ballpoint pens and ink stains and blotting paper and pencils and rubber erasers that burn holes in notebook pages (hardcover and softcover) and new textbooks (and looking at the pictures) and book bags (the Era of Backpacks has not yet arrived), the terrible anxiety of Sunday night, his parents, his grandparents telling him his parents have gone on a trip and that they’re not coming back, the unopened presents that Christmas.

  Ho Ho Ho.

  † And the dead summon the dead. The dead who go up and down chimneys. The dead who are fertile so their bodies get planted in the earth or their ashes scattered in the air so the wind can spread them across crops and fields.

  † Francis Scott Fitzgerald dies on the 21st of December, 1940, in Hollywood, after having been humiliated by producers and having humiliated himself in front of producers on too many crazy Sundays (film people exchange Fitzgerald anecdotes as if they were recounting inverted feats of strength in which the athlete never wins except when it comes to the record for emptying bottles or always falling down before reaching his goal) and failing at writing various film projects, including an adaptation of Tender Is the Night. The film version that Fitzgerald fantasizes about has a happy ending: Dick—neurosurgeon in addition to psychoanalyst—saves Nicole on the operating table. The actors considered for Dick go from Fredric March to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. For the role of Nicole, Katherine Hepburn and Dolores del Río are mentioned. But the thing doesn’t work—Fitzgerald either—and later on the job falls into the hands of another volatile, alcoholic writer, feared by his friends and acquaintances—Malcolm Lowry, who also ends up, in his words, “possessed” by the book. Reading his frustrated screenplay, impossible to film yet so intense to read (published by an American university), he sees Dick Diver undergo a new and final transformation and turn into consul Geoffrey Firmin of Under the Volcano.

  His companion Sheila Graham—a show-business journalist who’d write multiple, maybe too many, books about her years with the writer—tells how Fitzgerald was eating a chocolate and flipping through the pages of the Princeton Alumni Weekly when, suddenly, “he stood up as if jerked by a wire” to subsequently fall down, and scene.

  He’s read all the biographies of Fitzgerald and the one by Andrew Turnbull, from 1962, isn’t the best (his favorite is Inverted Lives: F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, by James R. Mellow, 1984). But Turnbull has the advantage of having been the writer’s friend and attending—with Sara and Gerald Murphy, to whom Fitzgerald had written a short time before, thanking them for everything they’d done for him throughout the years: “the only pleasant human thing that had happened to me in a world where I felt prematurely passed by and forgotten”—his funeral and burial.

  And Turnbull leaves this final image: “The casket was open, and all the lines of living had gone from Fitzgerald’s face. It was smooth, rouged, almost pretty—more like a mannequin’s than a man’s. His clothes suggested a shop window. [. . .] At the last, there was a flurry of boys and girls—Scottie’s friends on their way to or from some party. [. . .] The coffin was closed and we drove to the cemetery in the rain.”

  Beside the tomb, Dorothy Parker says “Poor son-of-a-bitch” and is outraged because everybody misunderstands it and nobody realizes that she’s quoting the scene of Jay Gatsby’s burial. And Dorothy Parker says she feels that: “It was terrible what they did to Scott; if you’d seen him you’d have been sick . . . Like the director who put his finger in Scott Fitzgerald’s face and complained, ‘Pay you. Why, you ought to pay us.’ [. . .] What is it that’s the evil in Hollywood? It’s the people.”

  And someone mentions that, en route to the wake, Nathanael West (to whom Fitzgerald had given a generous blurb for his The Day of the Locust, a novel that can be read and admired as the underworld of The Love of the Last Tycoon, populated by the kind of people with whom, no doubt, the passive-aggressive Kathleen Moore hangs out when she’s not bewitching the doomed Monroe Stahr) is killed in a car accident. Nathanael West was colorblind and he confused red for green at a stoplight. Days before, the two writers had dined together and heard somebody sing “The Last Day I Saw Paris.”

  And someone hears the protestant minister in charge of the service say “the only reason I agreed to all of this was just to see them put his body underground: Fitzgerald was a good for nothing, a drunk, and the world is a better place without him.”

  In Fitzgerald’s final notes for the unfinished The Love of the Last Tycoon there is that thing about “There are no second acts in American lives” and the one about “Don’t wake the ghosts.” And all those loose bijis, running through notebooks, posthumously collected in The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald. There, individual lines like hooks, like goldfish blending into the muddy depths, flashing like lightning: “There was never a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people if he’s any good,” or “An idea ran back and forward in his head like a blind man knocking over the solid furniture,” or “Lived in story,” “Tender: all the more reason for emotional planning,” “I am the last of the novelists for a long time now.”

  All the obituaries coincided on the fact that with Fitzgerald, with his death, an entire age came definitively to THE END, and music and closing credits.

  † Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald dies on the 10th of March, 1948. The woman who never felt she got the recognition she deserved is one of the bodies rendered nearly unrecognizable by a fire at Highland Mental Hospital in Ashville, North Carolina. They were able to identify her remains from a ballet slipper. A short time before dying, Zelda had read the unfinished The Love of the Last Tycoon and wrote to its editor, Edmund Wilson, telling him that reading it “has given me back the desire to live.”

  † Ernest Hemingway dies on the 2nd of July, 1961. One of the last things he was working on and would never finish was a novel titled The Garden of Eden (in his opinion, far and away the best thing Hemingway ever wrote) and which, at moments, sounds like the perverse modernism of writers like Ford Madox Ford and Jean Rhys; it recalls certain psychological thrillers that later Patricia Highsmith would write; and it can also be read like a kind of mirror of Tender Is the Night, the last novel published during his lifetime by his benefactor and friend and rival and ghost to be scorned—but no less frightening to the very end—Francis Scott Fitzgerald. A ghost who has returned and who now enjoys a critical and popular respect among readers that he never knew during his life and who is beginning to eclipse Hemingway, who now is a kind of Papa-brand self-parody. Scott shines brighter dead than he does alive. Scott, rediscovered, unearthed, resuscitated, writes better than Papa ever wrote.

  In the paragraph that closes the heavily edited (very well edited) version of The Garden of Eden, published posthumously in 1986, Hemingway describes a paradise recovered in fiction, but lost forever in reality. That paradise that Hemingway tries to enter again now, knocking on the door, begging on his knees, mercy, mercy:

  “David wrote steadily and well and the sentences that he had made before came to him complete and entire and he put them down, corrected them, and cut them as if he were going over the proof. Not a sentence was missing and there were many that he put down as they were returned to him without changing them. By two o’clock he had recovered, corrected, and improved what it had taken him five days to write originally. He wrote a while longer now and there was no sign that any of it would ever cease returning to him intact.”

  Far away from that—from the past, from Europe, from Africa, from all of that—Hemingway knows then that the only thing left for him in life was the hell of successive interminable manuscripts. Soon, he suspects without needing to confirm it, he wouldn’t even be able to write beginnings. He begins to mistrust the people around him, he’s sure that the FBI is coming for him (and apparently this was true), he tries to commit suicide several times, he gets electroshock therapy, and underst
ands that the hunter is now the hunted. Hemingway is a living legend to everyone else and dead to himself. The last photos show him walking through the snowy forests of Ketchum; kicking cans and smiling at the camera with hollow eyes and an enormous and wide smile full of teeth that had forgotten how to bite. A White House functionary asks Hemingway for a sentence for a commemorative volume that will be given to the recently sworn-in president Kennedy. Nothing comes to him, he can’t write a single word. “It just won’t come anymore,” he says to his wife, weeping.

  Hemingway accepts that he’s no longer a victorious warrior; not even a defeated fisherman; much less a young writer with “memory intact” and happy to recover his gift and his mission in life.

  Hemingway knows that he’s just a dying elephant.

  Hemingway completely absorbs the once incipient knowledge of loneliness.

  In the wee hours of a Sunday morning in the most dangerous of his summers, a final great idea for a final short story occurs to him. A flash fiction, a microstory.

  Hemingway goes down to his studio and in one sitting, in a single shot, writes: “The Old Man and the Rifle.”

  † Gerald Murphy dies on the 17th of October, 1964. A couple years before, in 1962, he goes by himself—Sara refuses to accompany him—to see the film version of Tender Is the Night. It’s a Friday afternoon and Gerald Murphy enters an entirely empty theater in Nyack, near where they live. He realizes quickly that it’s a bad movie. The twenties appear depicted as a series of dioramas from the Museum of Natural History. Directed by Henry King (it turns out to be his last film) and screenplay by Ivan Moffat, a prestigious script-doctor who comes from Paris to be with his friends Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In the movie, Dick has the face of Jason Robards and Nicole that of Jennifer Jones. “It was an extraordinary sensation. [. . .] I couldn’t feel any emotion at all,” Gerald Murphy remembered later.