Careless People (52 page)

A
s the Depression bore down, Scott battled to earn enough to pay for Zelda's world-class hospitals and Scottie's boarding schools. After years of extravagance, Fitzgerald suddenly faced financial disaster. He seemed abruptly to lose his knack for commercial fiction just when he needed it most; he no longer believed in his frivolous, silvered tales, and the old spontaneity began to freeze up.
Zelda pictured him, she said, the way he sometimes looked when he was unable to write: forlorn and stranded, as if he couldn't remember why he was there. At the end of 1931, Zelda was released from Prangins. Hopeful that she could make a full recovery and they could piece together the fragments of their lives, they returned to America. Scott began writing retrospective essays on the Jazz Age; “
it was borrowed time,” he'd realized, “the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of chorus girls.”

Six months later Zelda had another breakdown and entered the psychiatric clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. While a patient there, in what certainly sounds a manic burst of energy over just a month, she finished the autobiographical novel she had barely begun a few months earlier. She was proud of
Save Me the Waltz
, she told Scott, and was confident he would like it, for it was decidedly “
École Fitzgerald.” Scott had not read drafts and when he realized that the novel was a barely fictionalized roman à clef of their life together he was furious. In her first draft Zelda called the artist husband Amory Blaine, the name of Fitzgerald's alter ego from
This Side of Paradise
. Fitzgerald wrote to her psychiatrist in a fury: “
This mixture
of fact and fiction is simply calculated to ruin us both or what is left of us and I can't let it stand. Using the name of a character I invented to put intimate facts in the hands of the friends and enemies we have accumulated
en route
—My God, my books made her a legend and her single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a non-entity.”

In particular, he was nettled at the idea she was “expressing herself,” he told Zelda later. Self-expression “
simply doesn't exist. What one expresses in a work of art is the dark tragic destiny of being an instrument of something uncomprehended, incomprehensible, unknown—you came to the threshold of that discovery and then decided that in the face of all logic you would crash the gate,” using only “
the frail equipment of a sick mind and a berserk determination.” But Zelda had written a novel in a few blazing months when Fitzgerald had been unable to complete one in seven years, and she fought hard for her book to be given a chance. In one session with her doctor, Scott told Zelda: “The difference between the professional and the amateur is something that is awfully hard to analyze, it is awfully intangible. It just means the keen equipment; it means a scent, a smell of the future in one line . . . You are a third rate writer and a third rate ballet dancer.” Zelda shot back: “
It seems to me you are making a rather violent attack on a third rate talent then.”

Scott clearly felt threatened by Zelda's incursion into what he considered his territory, but he was also affronted at the temerity of thinking that writing was easy: “She has seen me do it as apparently some automatic function of the human machine,”
he wrote to Zelda's doctor, “lying dormant in everyone; she shares in this way, the American vulgar opinion of the arts: that they are something that people do when they have nothing else to do . . . She clings to the idea that the thing has all been done with a beautiful intention rather than with a dirty, sweating, heartbreaking effort extending over a long period of time when enthusiasm and all the other flowers have wilted.” The beautiful intention, Fitzgerald knew, is merely an apparition that will slowly be murdered in the bloody effort to bring the book to life, for dreams are always more beautiful than reality.

But insisting that the novel be revised, Fitzgerald also helped Zelda to
do so, and wrote to Perkins that the novel was good, and truly original.
Save Me the Waltz
was published in October 1932; it was dismissed critically and sold poorly. The Fitzgeralds had neither the strength nor the appetite for another fight. Zelda would not try to publish another novel.

They had achieved something more than a détente, however; an accommodation had been reached with the new terms that life had set. A few days after his thirty-sixth birthday, in September 1932, Fitzgerald wrote to a friend that he and Zelda “
got through a lot and have some way to go; our united front is less a romance than a categorical imperative.” It was time to recognize that
they could no longer “insist on a world which we will willingly let die, in which Zelda can't live, which damn near ruined us both, which neither you nor any of our more gifted friends are yet sure of surviving.”

Once again, Scott could read the signs: survival was by no means a certainty. In August 1933 Zelda's brother Anthony committed suicide; a month later, Ring Lardner died at forty-eight from tuberculosis exacerbated by acute alcoholism. By the end of that year, Scott finally finished
Tender Is the Night
. It was serialized in early 1934; in February, Zelda had another breakdown and was hospitalized again. She had taken up painting, and Scott helped organize an exhibition in New York that spring. On April 12, 1934, nine years and two days after the appearance of
The Great Gatsby
, Fitzgerald published
Tender Is the Night
, dedicated to Gerald and Sara Murphy for “many fêtes.” In 1933, he showed a visitor a manuscript nearly a foot high, and said: “There's my new novel. I've written 400,000 words and thrown away three-fourths of it. Now I only have 15,000 words to write.” Then he exclaimed: “
It's good, good, good.” He pinned all his hopes on it.

Fitzgerald had plundered Zelda's personal writing for his novel once more, this time taking the letters she had written him from the depths of her breakdown and turning them to useful account in his rendering of Nicole Diver's madness. This took some effrontery, after his outrage at Zelda's daring to use their “common store” of material in her novel. It was the writer at his most solipsistic, prepared to sacrifice anyone on the altar of his art. Doubtless he justified the betrayal with the obvious rationale, that the
money earned would pay for her care. But it was also true that he had begun
Tender
much earlier and read Zelda drafts: from his perspective,
Save Me the Waltz
was often copying his original work.

Like
Gatsby
, however,
Tender Is the Night
received mixed reviews, more good than bad overall, but the book sold poorly and for Fitzgerald it was a crushing disappointment. The
New York Times
said the novel displayed Fitzgerald's “most engaging qualities”: it was “
clever and brilliantly surfaced, but it is not the work of a wise and mature novelist.” Once again his readers could not see past Fitzgerald's bright surfaces. John Bishop said the book “was no advance on
Gatsby
”;
Fitzgerald responded that its intention was entirely different. Whereas
Gatsby
was a “dramatic novel,” a “kind of
tour de force
,”
Tender
was “a philosophical or psychological novel,” a “confession of faith.” Comparing the two was like comparing a sonnet sequence and an epic. In
Tender
, he'd underplayed his “harrowing and highly charged material,” including incest and madness, whereas in
Gatsby
, “dealing with figures as remote as are a bootlegger-crook to most of us, I was not afraid of heightening and melodramatizing any scenes.”

Tender
's failure would push Fitzgerald over the edge—the edge over which Zelda, too, kept falling, as she continued intermittently to attempt suicide. In 1934, Scott wrote Zelda's doctor, painfully trying to make sense of her illness, asking for a theory that might predict her breakdowns and discussing the psychiatric textbooks he'd been reading. The letter surely banishes any facile accusation that Fitzgerald was shoving Zelda into hospitals: “
My great worry is that time is slipping by, life is slipping by, and we have no life. If she were an anti-social person who did not want to face life and pull her own weight that would be one story, but her passionate love of life and her absolute inability to meet it, seems so tragic that sometimes it is scarcely to be endured.” But no theories to explain Zelda's illness emerged; they remained unable to help her in any consistent, meaningful way.

When
Tender
failed, Zelda wrote to Scott protectively, “
Don't worry about critics—what sorrow have they to measure by or what lilting happiness with which to compare these ecstatic passages?” Scott replied that she should focus only on recovering: “
You and I have had wonderful times in
the past, and the future is still brilliant with possibilities if you will keep up your morale . . . The only sadness is the living without you, without hearing the notes of your voice.” Hers was the only opinion that mattered, he said. All he hoped for was for her to come back to him: “I can carry most of contemporary literary opinion, liquidated, in the hollow of my hand—and when I do, I see the swan floating on it and—I find it to be you and you only . . . Forget the past—what you can of it, and turn about and swim back home to me, to your haven for ever and ever—even though it may seem a dark cave at times and lit with torches of fury; it is the best refuge for you—turn gently in the waters through which you move and sail back.”

B
ut Zelda could only continue to eddy in her dark waters: often lucid, calm, unfathomably brave; and then suddenly withdrawn into depression, aural hallucinations, or hysteria. “
I wish I had been what I thought I was,” she wrote Scott: “and so debonnaire; and so debonnaire.”

Struggling to sell his writing, Fitzgerald plunged into an abyss of liquor. He was hospitalized four times by the end of 1935; trying to recover, he began to write the
Esquire
articles that would help invent confessional journalism. In the now-famous “Crack-Up” essays, published in early 1936, Fitzgerald describes how he had suddenly “cracked like an old plate,” losing all his illusions. In the three short articles he never mentions Zelda's illness and flatly denies his own alcoholism, but spells out the effects of his defeat and tries to redefine himself as an artist. Three months later, his friend
Hemingway, whose career he had helped launch and whose admiration he had always sought, mocked him publicly in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as “poor Scott Fitzgerald,” pathetically defined by his “romantic awe” of the rich. When Fitzgerald read the
Esquire
story, he demanded that Hemingway “
please lay off me in print,” but his innate honesty and instinctive respect for
art made him add, with his often astonishing generosity: “It's a fine story—one of your best.”

A month later, a reporter named Michael Mok interviewed Fitzgerald on his fortieth birthday. The result was a brutal exposé, describing the former golden boy as a wasted man with trembling hands and pallid, “twitching face with its pitiful expression of a cruelly beaten child,” who made “frequent trips to a highboy, in a drawer of which lay a bottle.” Asked to comment on his generation, Fitzgerald told Mok: “‘
Some became brokers and threw themselves out of windows. Others became bankers and shot themselves. Still others became newspaper reporters. And a few became successful authors . . . Successful authors!' he cried. ‘Oh, my God, successful authors!' He stumbled over to the highboy and poured himself another drink.'” When Fitzgerald saw the headline story (“
THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE: SCOTT FITZGERALD, 40, ENGULFED IN DESPAIR
”), he swallowed a handful of morphine pills, but survived.

Zelda had moved to Highland Hospital, in Asheville, North Carolina. After years of watching her try to recover, Fitzgerald no longer had any confidence that she would be able to resume an independent life: “I cannot live in the ghost town which Zelda has become,” he admitted. But still, he would not abandon her; they would remain joined in vital ways, and they would always love each other: “
Supposing Zelda at best would be a lifelong eccentric, supposing that in two or three years there is certain to be a sinking, I am still haunted by the fact that if it were me, and Zelda were passing judgment, I would want her to give me a chance . . .” Zelda continued to write him loving letters from the hospital, concerned for his health, asking to see Scottie and expressing her devotion. Around the time of his breakdown she wrote to Scott remembering the days of their courtship, when they were “
gold and happy all the way home.” But now happiness and home were lost, and even the golden past was being taken from her. She wished he were living in a picturesque cottage with Scottie nearby, and that he could have the happiness he deserved, she told him, because she loved him anyway, even though she was gone, and nothing else was left.