Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (12 page)

Nathan—a short, dark, well-dressed and melancholy man—was born in Indiana in 1882. After graduating from Cornell, he made his reputation as a cynical and sophisticated drama critic and literary editor. In
The Beautiful and Damned,
Fitzgerald portrayed him as Maury Noble and compared him to “a large, slender and imposing cat. His eyes are narrow and full of incessant, protracted blinks. His hair is smooth and flat, as though it had been licked by a . . . mother-cat.” Like Nathan, Noble was considered a brilliant and original figure—“smart, quiet and among the saved.”

Henry Louis Mencken, a Baltimore-born journalist and critic, was two years older than Nathan. An intensely Germanic, beer-drinking, cigar-chomping man, he had a squat proletarian face with a pudgy nose and plastered hair divided down the middle of his head. Though notorious for his aggressive iconoclasm and savage satires on philistine life in America, Mencken was enthusiastic about Fitzgerald’s work. Scott thought Mencken had done more for American letters than any man alive and called him one of the greatest men in the country. After Father Fay’s death in 1919, his spiritual influence on Fitzgerald was replaced by Mencken’s violent hostility to Christianity. Scott called Mencken “The Baltimore Anti-Christ” and in letters addressed him ironically (as he had once addressed Fay respectfully) as “the Right Reverend HLM.” Mencken was enchanted by Zelda; Nathan conducted a dangerous flirtation with her. But Mencken also told Cabell that Zelda’s extravagance fueled Scott’s desire for money and pulled him away from serious art: “His wife talks too much about money. His danger lies in trying to get it too rapidly. A very amiable pair, innocent and charming.”
¹³

III

Though Zelda was Protestant and Scott no longer a practicing Catholic, they were married on April 3, 1920—eight days after the publication of his first novel—in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. Zelda, who later became a model for fashionable women in the 1920s, had no taste or style when she first came north. She was even considered a bit cheap and “tacky.” Horrified by her Southern frills and furbelows, Fitzgerald anxiously asked Marie Hersey—his St. Paul friend, Ginevra King’s roommate at Westover School and a graduate of Vassar—to buy Zelda the proper clothes for New York.

As if to emphasize the break the young couple had made with their backgrounds, neither Scott’s nor Zelda’s parents attended the wedding. The only witnesses were Scott’s Princeton friend and best man, Ludlow Fowler, and Zelda’s three older sisters, who were by then married and living in New York. Scott, who was nervous, insisted the ceremony begin before Clothilde arrived. There was no lunch or party after the wedding, which Rosalind considered rude and never forgave, and the couple promptly left for their honeymoon at the Biltmore Hotel.

Though absorbed by the sensations of the moment, Fitzgerald was also keenly aware of the ephemeral nature of happiness. In
This Side of Paradise,
as Amory Blaine put in his collar studs before a party on Long Island, “he realized that he was enjoying life as he would probably never enjoy it again.” When Fitzgerald and his friends left Princeton for the war in June 1917, “some of us wept because we knew we’d never be quite so young any more as we had been here.” And in “My Lost City” he recaptured the manic-depressive emotions of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence”—

But, as it sometimes chanceth, from the might

Of joy in minds that can no further go,

As high as we have mounted in delight

In our dejection do we sink as low—

and remembered that “riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky [which represents his extreme variations of mood]; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.”
¹⁴

Zelda had spent her entire life with her family in Montgomery but, like Sally Carrol Happer in “The Ice Palace,” wanted “to live where things happen on a big scale.” Suddenly thrown into a chaotic existence in New York, she managed to conquer the city. But her life from then on was always rootless and unstable. Scott, whose childhood had been marked by frequent moves, continued to live a nomadic life. The catalogue of temporary rooms in her article “Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number——” describes how they hopped nervously from place to place. They never owned a house of their own, never settled anywhere for very long and were often expelled from the places they rented.

Fitzgerald confused immaturity with youthfulness and boasted to a former St. Paul girlfriend about their weaknesses: Zelda is “very beautiful and very wise and very brave as you can imagine—but she’s a perfect baby and a more irresponsible pair than we’ll be will be hard to imagine.” He immediately set the tone of his marriage by taking his teenage bride to an April weekend at Cottage Club and introducing her to everyone as his mistress. He got a black eye (the first of many) at a rowdy Princeton party, and took it badly when his self-righteous club suspended him for drunken behavior.

Their wild and well-publicized pranks soon became notorious. Watching a comedy in the front row of a theater, they annoyed the actors by laughing appreciatively in all the wrong places. Kicked out of the Biltmore for disturbing other guests, they celebrated their move to the Commodore by spinning through the revolving doors for half an hour. Looking like a figurehead on the prow of a ship, Zelda paid a surcharge to catch the breeze on the hood of a taxi. Out of sheer exuberance they jumped into the fountain in Union Square and into the fountain near the Plaza, and achieved instant fame at the Greenwich Village Follies, whose curtain by Reginald Marsh included a picture of Zelda splashing in these urban pools. During a Hawaiian pageant in Montgomery (which they visited in March 1921), Zelda bent over, lifted her grass skirt and wriggled her pert behind. In May 1920 they rented a house on Compo Road in suburban Westport and hired a Japanese servant. Bored by the suburbs, Zelda summoned the firemen (as she had done as a child in Montgomery). When asked where the blaze was, she struck her breast and exclaimed: “Here!” Like the autobiographical heroine of
Save Me the Waltz,
Zelda lived impulsively: “You took what you wanted from life, if you could get it, and you did without the rest.”

In July 1920 they bought an unreliable second-hand Marmon automobile and had a series of mechanical breakdowns, absurd mishaps and unpleasant confrontations when their twin knickerbockers scandalized small Southern towns en route to Montgomery. Fitzgerald later chronicled this journey in “The Cruise of the Rolling Junk” (1924). He was one of the first writers to use the automobile for dramatic scenes in fiction. In
This Side of Paradise
Amory’s college friend Dick Humbird is killed in a car crash. In
The Great Gatsby
Daisy Buchanan kills her husband’s mistress with her lover’s car. In
Tender Is the Night
Nicole Diver, enraged by jealousy while driving on the Riviera with her husband and children, tries to force their car off a steep, dangerous road. And a key chapter on Fitzgerald in Hemingway’s
A Moveable Feast
describes a disastrous trip from Lyons to Paris in a Renault whose top had been cut off.

The familiar catalogue of infantile pleasures has been admired by the chroniclers of the Fitzgeralds’ legend and accepted as an expression of their youthful vitality. But it also suggests a tiresome self-absorption, self-importance and striving for irresponsibility as well as a rather desperate hedonism that threatened to burn itself out and lapse into boring repetition (five minutes in the revolving door would have sufficed to make the point).

Alcohol fueled most of these uninhibited episodes, which changed from high-spirited to malicious as Fitzgerald’s drinking intensified. David Bruce, the Princeton friend who became an eminent diplomat, was ambivalent about Zelda and reported that she “can drink more than any other woman he has ever seen, and is a trifle ordinary and Alabamian, but has brains.” Scott admitted that he could never get sufficiently sober to endure being sober, but he could get into dangerous trouble even when he was not drunk. In April 1921 (a year after Fitzgerald got the black eye at Princeton) the writer Carl Van Vechten stopped by Scott’s apartment in New York and found him “with two black eyes, one a bleeding mass, discreetly covered by a towel. He had hopefully attacked the bouncer in the Jungle, a New York cabaret, on the previous Friday. When he was completely sober: an unheard of occurrence.”
¹⁵
Van Vechten does not mention that Zelda, to test or punish Scott, had urged him to take on the bouncer.

Their wild behavior was also inspired by more rational, even calculated motives. Fitzgerald had a strong and nervous craving to be liked, and tried to make people happy—even if it meant making a fool of himself. Immense vitality and charm flowed out of him and made the most commonplace encounter seem like a real adventure. The actress Carmel Myers felt that “it required the special quality of Scott’s personality to infuse such sophomoric behavior with an atmosphere of explosive gaiety.” Both Scott and Zelda had a need for drama—or farce. Their public performances, which resembled the Marx Brothers at a debutantes’ cotillion, expressed their desire to act up to their reputation, be seen to lead the revolt against boring conventions and transform a dull experience into a lively occasion. Zelda had few inhibitions and would do almost anything. She had always been the star performer in Montgomery, and her shocking pranks in the North, which she called “exploring her abysses in public,” were meant to compete with Scott, who had stolen top billing, and refocus attention on herself. Like Nicole Diver in
Tender Is the Night,
Zelda believed “we should do something spectacular . . . all our lives have been too restrained.”

Scott had been in the advertising business and knew how to create an attractive public image. Like Hemingway, he exploited his good looks, wit and charm. He would not have been nearly as successful if he had called himself Francis, been as ugly as Dreiser and as bald as Dos Passos, and had a dowdy wife who looked and dressed like Gertrude Stein. His outrageous acts were often quite deliberate. He misbehaved to arouse attention and gain publicity. And he was very successful (as his scrapbooks of press cuttings indicate) in getting into the newspapers, keeping his name in the public eye and helping to sell his books. In contrast to disillusioned and embittered writers like Hemingway, Robert Graves, Richard Aldington and Erich Maria Remarque, all of whom published their war books in 1929, Fitzgerald helped his generation recover from the war by emphasizing and embodying the joyous and hopeful possibilities at the beginning of the 1920s. Zelda felt that Scott’s greatest contribution, in both his life and works, was to endow “a heart-broken and despairing era” with a “sense of tragic courage.”
¹⁶

Scott deliberately encouraged Zelda’s madcap role so that he could write about the bizarre things she had done. He was attracted by the qualities that were at first essential to his work and later helped to destroy it. Writing about what had happened to them seemed to define—or recover—their real selves, which were hidden beneath their self-conscious role-playing and image making. As he ingenuously observed: “I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels.” After he had created the public personae which he and Zelda felt obliged to imitate, and which revealed the disparity between their projected and actual lives, he admitted: “we scarcely knew any more who we were and we hadn’t a notion what we were.”
¹⁷

Though Fitzgerald’s literary image was daring, nonconformist and unconventional, he could never quite extinguish his provincial, puritanical streak. He told one friend: “Parties are a form of suicide. I love them, but the old Catholic in me secretly disapproves.” Another friend agreed that Fitzgerald had to make a deliberate effort to misbehave: “Poor Scott, he never really enjoyed his dissipation because he disapproved intensely of himself all the time it was going on.”
¹⁸
His corruption was always tempered by innocence.

As they whirled from party to party their chaotic and dissipated mode of life seemed to sustain them in a cataclysmic sort of way. But it put an enormous strain on their marriage. Zelda’s extravagance and flirtations, which had once seemed so delightful, soon became intolerable. Zelda resembled the spoiled wife in Hemingway’s story “Cat in the Rain,” though she craved much more expensive things: “And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes.” The spoiled and acquisitive Zelda, who had to be courted with feather fans and expensive jewelry, believed “having things, just things, objects, makes a woman happy. The right kind of perfume, the smart pair of shoes. They are great comforts to the feminine soul.” Dorothy Parker agreed with Zelda’s mother that she had a petulant streak and would begin to sulk if something displeased her. Zelda’s craving for luxuries (as Mencken had noted) kept Fitzgerald turning out poor stories for good money.

Like Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s
Ulysses,
Fitzgerald was sexually excited by Zelda’s flirtations with other men and liked to possess a woman who was universally admired. The first fault in the unstable landscape of their marriage occurred when Zelda, who still needed to exert her sexual power and remain the center of attention, began to embrace and kiss his friends in public. When she rushed into John Peale Bishop’s room as he was going to bed and said she wanted to spend the night with him, when she lured Townsend Martin into the bathroom and insisted he give her a bath, Fitzgerald became disturbed by her seductive behavior. It made his friends uncomfortable and put everyone in a compromising position.

The dapper George Jean Nathan, a well-known ladies’ man, fell so deeply in love with Zelda, after months of apparently innocent flirtation, that Scott felt obliged to terminate their friendship. Zelda, much more unconventional than Scott, evoked hedonism to justify her daring behavior and define the new morality of the flapper: “She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure; she covered her face with paint and powder because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.”
¹⁹