Literary Rogues (14 page)

In the United States—the heart of puritanism—Congress passed the first national antidrug bill in 1909 that made the importation and sale of opium for nonmedicinal purposes illegal. The bill was predated by antidrug laws at the state level and was surpassed in scope by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act in 1914, which banned all use of opium, cocaine, and other opiates. Illicit drug use was destructive “
to human happiness
and human life,” according to one of the bill's supporters in the House of Representatives.

The antidrug fervor spread throughout the Western Hemisphere. At the victorious powers' insistence, the International Opium Convention of 1912 was made a condition of peace. The United Kingdom passed the Defence of the Realm Act and the first of several Dangerous Drugs Acts between 1914 and 1920. Even France hopped on the anti-drug bandwagon, banning the Decadents' drink of choice, absinthe, in 1915.

There were many factors that drove the antidrug legislation, including xenophobia and the very real fear that many men were returning from World War I addicts. Whatever the reason, the message was clear: recreational drug use would no longer be tolerated in proper society.

The result of the temporary stop to the worldwide drug trade was that alcohol firmly took hold as the most popular drug in the United States and Europe. The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol, did little to hinder the popularity of booze, except for a nominal decrease during the first two years following its enactment in January 1920.

During the next thirteen years of Prohibition, thousands of Americans died from drinking bootleg alcohol. Relatively few citizens were jailed: the law made it illegal to manufacture, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages, but it was legal to possess and consume them. “We all seemed to feel that
Prohibition was a personal affront
, and that we had a moral duty to undermine it,” Elizabeth Anderson, wife of Sherwood Anderson, wrote.

The forced exuberance of the so-called Jazz Age masked a mood of futility. Out of the despair arose a hedonistic zest for life that permeated American culture. Many of the best American writers and artists fled into self-imposed exile in Europe. “
You are all a lost generation
,” Gertrude Stein told Ernest Hemingway.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
(1896–1940), on the eve of his first book's publication, wrote to a childhood friend that he saw himself as becoming famous within a year and “I hope,
dead within two
.” Though he would exceed even his wildest literary ambitions, he would never shake the specter of despair that hung over his head.

Fitzgerald's unhappiness started when he was a child. “
He wasn't popular with his schoolmates
,” his headmaster observed. “He saw through them too much and wrote about it.” Fitzgerald dressed up in a suit for his sixth birthday party and waited all afternoon for his friends. No one showed. The suave host did the only honorable thing, the six-year-old version of
seppuku
: he “sorrowfully and thoughtfully consumed
one complete birthday cake
, including several candles.” Fitzgerald later wrote, “Parties are a kind of suicide.”

As a young man, he would later miss the biggest party of his generation. While he was waiting to be shipped overseas to join World War I, the fighting abruptly ceased and he never left American soil. In later life, he confessed that he had only two regrets about his younger days: not being big enough (or good enough) to play college football, and not fighting overseas in the war.

Instead of making his way in the world with his physicality, which was compromised by a bout with tuberculosis, Fitzgerald made his way with words. He exploded onto the literary scene with his first novel at the age of twenty-one. The book,
This Side of Paradise
, was little more than thinly veiled autobiography—a struggling Princeton graduate makes a living writing advertising copy—but it was nonetheless an eye-opening look at the young men and women of his generation.

This Side of Paradise
sold fifty thousand copies in hardcover its first year, making its author an overnight celebrity. Perhaps most important, Fitzgerald was credited with popularizing (some might say capitalizing on) the English “flapper” phenomenon in America.

“There was
an outbreak of new heroines
in English life and letters,” he said. “They wanted independence. They loved danger and were excitement-mad and faintly neurotic. They discussed subjects that had hitherto been considered taboo for women; they lived independently of their families. When their actions began to arouse comment, they increased their daring. I had no idea of originating an American flapper when I first began to write. I simply took girls whom I knew very well and, because they interested me as unique human beings, I used them for my heroines.”

With the age of the flapper, Victorian modesty was consigned to the dustbin. Fitzgerald found himself the de facto spokesperson for the Lost Generation. “
The uncertainties of 1919
were over—there seemed little doubt about what was going to happen—America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history,” he said. “The whole golden boom was in the air.” The prohibition of alcohol did little to affect the boisterous feeling in the air. They were living in a new age, Fitzgerald proclaimed: “The Jazz Age.”

While he rode the zeitgeist to literary bestsellerdom, Fitzgerald did little to endear himself to the public. His comments about women are especially grating to the modern ear. “I know that
after a few moments of inane conversation
with most girls I get so bored that unless I have a few drinks I have to leave the room,” he said. “All women over thirty-five should be murdered.” (He was, one hopes, kidding.) He once told a reporter that the average Midwestern girl “is unattractive, selfish, snobbish, egotistical, utterly graceless, talks with an ugly accent and in her heart knows that she would feel more at home in a kitchen than in a ballroom.” Still, he wasn't entirely dismissive of the fairer sex. “The southern girl is easily
the most attractive type in America
,” he said.

His wife,
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald
(1900–1948), was a southern girl, born and raised in Alabama. Scott proposed to her with his mother's ring in 1919. Zelda, however, wasn't yet sure if Scott was marriage material. She locked the ring away and cut off sexual relations with Scott until he showed signs of material success.

At one point, Zelda even returned the ring to her fiancé and called things off. Fitzgerald went on a three-week bender. He wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson, “Since I last saw you, I've tried to get married and then
tried to drink myself to death
.” Fitzgerald's prospects changed for the better after he sold his first novel for publication; Zelda readily agreed to get married as soon as possible.

Journalist B. F. Wilson, writing in 1923, spoke rosily about the couple as newlyweds. “As I left the house I carried with me
a rather pleasant picture
. As handsome a young author as I ever hope to see, this F. Scott Fitzgerald of twenty-five or six. As pretty a young wife as rarely falls to the lot of any man.” Early on in his career, Fitzgerald said, “
We were married and we've lived
—happily—ever afterwards. That is, we expect to.”

But then came the parties, and then came Zelda's madness.

Ah, the parties ... Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald perfected the art of professional party crashing. They were prone to show up at the door uninvited, on all fours and barking like dogs. If they tricked the host into letting them into the house, they might strip naked and take a bath in the master bathroom tub. Zelda frequently shed her clothing in public, and stories abound of her panties or bra coming off at parties. Dorothy Parker found them “
too ostentatious for words
. Their behavior was calculated to shock.”

Occasionally, the Fitzgeralds' antics turned dangerous. One night after they had been drinking heavily, their car stalled on a trolley line. They leaned back in their seats and promptly fell asleep for the evening. Someone came across them in the morning and pulled them out of the car twenty minutes before a trolley came bustling down the tracks, smashing their car to pieces. On another occasion Zelda lay down in front of their car, daring her husband to run her over. He didn't, but not for lack of trying: the car just wouldn't start.

Suicide, it turns out, was something of a running gag with the couple. When Fitzgerald met his literary idol, James Joyce, at a dinner party in Paris, Fitzgerald offered to toss himself out of a window to prove his devotion to the famous writer. “
That young man must be mad
,” Joyce said. “I'm afraid he'll do himself some injury.” If that was how Fitzgerald reacted when he met someone he idolized, how would he react when meeting someone he had no respect for? “
There's no great literary tradition
,” said Fitzgerald. “The wise literary son kills his own father.”

Fitzgerald spent no small amount of time taking his contemporaries down a peg. “
If I knew anything
I'd be the best writer in America—which isn't saying a lot. English novelist Hugh Walpole was the man who really started me writing,” Fitzgerald told a
St. Paul Daily News
reporter. “One day I picked up one of his books when I was riding on a train. I thought, ‘If this fellow can get away with it as an author, I can too.' His book seemed to me to be as bad as possible, but I knew they sold like hot cakes. I dug in after that and wrote my first novel.” Fitzgerald, on a roll, trashed his contemporaries Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, and Floyd Dell. “Floyd Dell has reached the depth of banality in his book
Moon-Calf
,” he said. The reporter, Thomas Alexander Boyd, wrote, “Scott Fitzgerald is a youth that American literature will have to reckon with. To how great an extent depends upon himself.”

Boyd's words would prove to be prophetic.

After publishing his second novel, Fitzgerald was ready to throw in the towel. Fitzgerald and Zelda shuffled themselves back and forth across the country from St. Paul to New York and back again. “I remember
riding in a taxi one afternoon
between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky in New York City: I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again. My third novel, if I ever write another, will I am sure be black as death with gloom,” he wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins in 1921. “I am sick alike of life, liquor and literature.” Two years later, he drove Perkins into a pond “
because it seemed more fun
” than following the curve of the road. (Neither drowned.)

His next book,
The Great Gatsby
, is now regarded as his masterpiece. The book was not initially as commercially successful as his earlier novels. Not that it mattered: Fitzgerald bragged to his friend Ernest Hemingway that the
Post
was paying him “
$4000 a screw
” for his short stories.

Hemingway in turn tried to dissuade his friend from wasting his talents writing for magazines, which demanded cheap melodrama. “
You could have and can make enough
to live on writing novels,” Hemingway wrote. “You damned fool.”

While Lord Byron's legacy spread across Europe in part because he did little to dissuade the public that the dashing, fast-living heroes of his books were stand-ins for the author, Fitzgerald was well aware of the pitfalls of such a strategy. “
The public always associates the author
with the principal character in the books he writes,” he said in a 1922 interview. “So, if the principal character takes an occasional drink or winks an eye at a pretty woman the author of the book necessarily must be a low fellow with a morality of a libertine and the taste of a barfly. Any extraordinary person in the mind of the ordinary man must have a thirst like a camel and a belly the size of an elephant.”

Fitzgerald couldn't write while drinking. “For me,
narcotics are deadening to work
. I can understand anyone drinking coffee to get a stimulating effect, but whiskey—oh, no,” he said. When a reporter told him that
This Side of Paradise
didn't read as if it were written on coffee, Fitzgerald said, “It wasn't. You'll laugh, but it was written on Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola bubbles up and fizzes inside enough to keep me awake.”

In 1926, journalist John Chapin Mosher wrote, “
The popular picture of a blond boy
scribbling off bestsellers in odd moments between parties is nonsense. Fitzgerald is a very grave, hardworking man, and shows it.” As if to disprove Mosher's point, after receiving a movie offer for one of his novels, Fitzgerald got drunk in his hotel room and left the bath water on, flooding the entire room.

From 1924 through 1930, the Fitzgeralds bounced back and forth between their homeland and Europe. They were fond of Paris, a popular home away from home for many of the Lost Generation writers and artists. But the good times wouldn't last.

By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the United States was mired in the Great Depression. In 1936, Fitzgerald talked about New York City's decline in the 1920s, but he could very well have been talking about his own career. “
The tempo of the city had changed
sharply. The uncertainties of 1920 were drowned in a steady golden roar,” he said. As the decade roared on, the parties grew bigger. “The morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper. Most of my friends drank too much—the more they were in tune to the times the more they drank.”

“
It was very strange the way
Fitzgerald's career was so much a function of the decade,” Jay McInerney told
Salon
. “His twenties were the twenties. By the time the stock market crashed, Zelda was losing her mind and he was disappearing inside the bottle basically. It's a terrible story. He became a symbol of the time, then he was crucified when people became disenchanted with their own excesses. The gin-swilling golden boy morphed into the apocryphal stockbroker jumping out of the window.”