Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (20 page)

Scott had good reason to fear Zelda’s infidelity—both before and after he married her. Writing of his superior sexual rivals in “The Crack-Up,” he confessed that he could not “stop thinking that at one time a sort of
droit de seigneur
might have been exercised to give one of them my girl.” Jozan, using his French charm and aeronautic daring, exercised this right. He invited Zelda to his apartment and seduced her. “There was Jozan,” she later admitted, “and you were justifiably angry.” The crisis peaked on July 13 when Zelda told Scott that she loved Jozan and asked for a divorce.

But Jozan—just beginning his career and without any money—wanted a mistress, not a wife. Though he found Zelda a delightful lover, she did not touch his deepest feelings and meant no more to him than a brief fling on the beach. His transfer to Hyères (where the Fitzgeralds had begun the summer) put an end to their relations. But Zelda, more emotionally involved than Jozan, was deeply hurt by his rejection. When Jozan abandoned her, she tried to kill herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. Honoria Murphy remembers a disturbance one night at the Hôtel du Cap. Scott sought help from her parents, and Zelda had to be walked up and down in the hallway and kept awake until the effect of the pills wore off. “That September 1924,” Scott wrote, “I knew something had happened that could never be repaired.”
¹⁰
He now realized that he would have to test himself against Zelda’s lover, that she was not absolutely committed to him (as he was to her) and that he could no longer trust his wife to be faithful. The purity of their marriage had been tainted, their innocence lost.

Jozan went on to have a distinguished naval career. He became a vice admiral, commanded France’s Far Eastern fleet and was decorated with the Legion of Honor. If Zelda had left him for Jozan in 1924, Scott would have had another lost love to inspire his work and been spared the horrors of her insanity in the 1930s.

III

Zelda’s affair with Jozan had spoiled the Riviera for Scott. Their expenses, even in the off-season, were much higher than expected and they had not been able to save any money. As soon as he finished his novel, they had to find a place to heal the wounds of their marriage and attempt to restore their old intimacy. Though they had disliked Italy on their previous trip to Europe, Zelda’s reading of James’
Roderick Hudson
inspired them to spend the winter in Rome. But the cold weather and rampant dishonesty made Italy an even greater disappointment than France, where servants had drained their resources and driven them out of the Villa Marie. “What at first seemed a secluded villa just right for us to live in quietly,” Zelda said, with amused exasperation, “had a habit of developing into a sort of charity institution, owing to the mysterious complaints by which the domestic personnel was stricken down, necessitating the presence of their relations, sometimes down to the third and fourth generations.”

Instead of renting a villa in Italy, they moved into an expensive but uncomfortable thin-walled hotel on the Piazza di Spagna. They ate simple meals and—as Scott revised the novel he had completed in France—gradually found their way to the romantic sights of the city:

In the Hôtel des Princes at Rome [Zelda wrote] we lived on Bel Paese cheese and [Sicilian] Corvo wine and made friends with a delicate spinster who intended to stop there until she finished a three-volume history of the Borgias. The sheets were damp and the nights were perforated by the snores of the people next door, but we didn’t mind because we could always come home down the stairs to the Via Sistina, and there were jonquils and beggars along that way. We were too superior at that time to use the guide books and wanted to discover the ruins for ourselves, which we did when we had exhausted the night-life and the market places and the campagna. We liked the Castel Sant’Angelo because of its round mysterious unity and the river and the debris about its base. It was exciting being lost between centuries in the Roman dusk and taking your sense of direction from the Colosseum.

Their principal distraction in Rome was watching the filming of the spectacular, expensive and accident-prone
Ben-Hur
, and forming a friendship with one of its stars, Carmel Myers. The bright and attractive actress, who was the same age as Scott, was the daughter of a San Francisco rabbi. She began her film career in 1916 as the protégée of D. W. Griffith; starred as a vamp with Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore and John Gilbert; and would retire, shortly after talkies began, in the early 1930s. Scott, who would meet Carmel again when he first went to Hollywood in 1927, told a friend that “she is the most exquisite thing I have met yet, and is just as nice as she is beautiful.”
¹¹

Fitzgerald’s humorous but bitter account of his winter in Rome during 1924–25, “The High Cost of Macaroni,” is—like D. H. Lawrence’s
Aaron’s Rod
(1922), Hemingway’s “Che Ti Dice La Patria?” (1927) and Thomas Mann’s “Mario and the Magician” (1929)—a disillusioned and dispirited response to oppressive life in Fascist Italy. The conclusion of this essay describes a humiliating reprise to his black eye at Princeton in 1920 and his savage beating at the Jungle Club the following year. Fitzgerald’s petty midnight quarrel with some extortionate taxi drivers about the fare back to their hotel ended, when he refused to be cheated, in a brutal street fight:

First there was
one
taxi driver, and I had a little the best of it; then there were two and I was having a little the worst of it. But I didn’t think I was, and when the meddlesome stranger stepped between us I was in no mood to have it stop there, and I pushed him impatiently out of the way. He came back persistently, lurching in between us, talking in a stream of Italian, doing his best, it seemed to me, to interrupt my offensives—and to the advantage of the taximan. Once too often he caught at my arm. Blind with anger I turned on him quickly and (with more success than I had so far had with the others) caught him under the point of the chin; whereupon, rather to my surprise, he sat down.

The unfortunate interloper turned out to be a plainclothes policeman. Fitzgerald was arrested for assaulting an officer, taken to a police station and savagely beaten.

Fitzgerald called this degrading experience “just about the rottenest thing that ever happened to me in my life.” It aroused his hostility, provoked his prejudices and inspired his violent fantasies about the country, the politics and the people. “I hate Italians,” he told Carmel Myers. “They live in tenements and don’t have bathtubs!” When Harold Ober asked him to write a piece about his travels for the
Post,
he rather childishly replied that he could not write anything acceptable to that audience unless they wanted an article on “Pope Syphilis the Sixth and his Morons.” He imagined filling a theater with the flower of Italy, coming on stage with a machine gun and murdering the entire audience. He thought Italy was trying to live on its glorious past and saw through the histrionic absurdities of Fascism. “Italy depressed us both beyond measure,” he wrote to an editor at Scribner’s, “a dead land where everything that could be done or said was done long ago (for whoever is deceived by the pseudo activity under Mussolini is deceived by the spasmodic last jerk of a corpse).”
¹²

The unexpected cold, Zelda’s painful ovarian infection and Scott’s brutal encounter with the police drove them out of Rome. In February 1925 they crossed the Bay of Naples and settled in the fashionable Hotel Tiberio on Capri. Fitzgerald’s hero Joseph Conrad, who had visited the highly praised island in 1905, said the air was too stimulating for consumptives and complained of hot winds, violent contrasts and sexual scandals: “Too much ozone they say: too exciting and that’s why no lung patients are allowed to come here. . . . This place here, this climate, this sirocco, this transmontana, these flat roofs, these sheer rocks, this blue sea—are impossible. . . . The scandals of Capri—atrocious, unspeakable, amusing, scandals international, cosmopolitan and biblical.” In February 1920 D. H. Lawrence, more succinctly, condemned Capri as “a stewpot of semi-literary cats.” Fitzgerald, repelled by the thriving colony of English homosexuals—including Norman Douglas, Somerset Maugham and E. F. Benson—agreed that “this place is full of fairies.”

Fitzgerald was also disappointed by his former literary hero, Compton Mackenzie, whose
Sinister Street
had influenced
This Side of Paradise.
He sat up half the night talking to the good-looking and extremely successful Scottish novelist, who wore striking clothes and owned two luxurious villas on the island. Though Mackenzie would go on to write his finest work, he now seemed exhausted as an author. “I found him cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane,” Scott told Bishop. “You get no sense from him that he feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war [in which Mackenzie had had a distinguished career in the Secret Service] wrecked him as it did Wells and many of that generation.”
¹³

IV

In late October 1924, just before he left Saint-Raphaël for Rome, Fitzgerald had sent Perkins the typescript of
The Great Gatsby,
which he continued to revise throughout his stay in Italy. Three weeks later Perkins, recognizing its greatness, enthusiastically praised its themes, narrative technique, symbolism, characters, drama, style and art:

I think you have every kind of right to be proud of this book. It is an extraordinary book, suggestive of all sorts of thoughts and moods. You adopted exactly the right method of telling it, that of employing a narrator who is more of a spectator than an actor: that puts the reader upon a point of observation on a higher level than that on which the characters stand and at a distance that gives perspective. In no other way could your irony have been so immensely effective, nor the reader have been enabled so strongly to feel at times the strangeness of human circumstance in a vast heedless universe. In the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg various readers will see different significances; but their presence gives a superb touch to the whole thing: great unblinking eyes, expressionless, looking down upon the human scene. It’s magnificent! . . .

The presentation of Tom, his place, Daisy and Jordan, and the unfolding of their characters is unequalled so far as I know. The description of the valley of ashes adjacent to the lovely country, the conversation and the action in Myrtle’s apartment, the marvelous catalogue of those who came to Gatsby’s house,—these are such things as make a man famous. And all these things, the whole pathetic episode, you have given a place in time and space, for with the help of T. J. Eckleburg and by an occasional glance at the sky, or the sea, or the city, you have imparted a sort of sense of eternity. You once told me you were not a
natural
writer—my God! You have plainly mastered the craft, of course; but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this.
¹⁴

Ring Lardner, aware of the carelessness of both Fitzgerald and Perkins, and eager to repay Scott for his generous help with
How to Write Short Stories,
volunteered to read the proofs. His experienced eye caught a number of minor errors about the levels in Penn Station, the elevated train in Queens, the “tides” in Lake Superior and the railroads that ran out of the La Salle Street station in Chicago.

The Great Gatsby,
as both Perkins and Lardner perceived, is Fitzgerald’s most perfectly realized work of art. The novel reveals a new and confident mastery of his material, a fascinating if sensational plot, a Keatsian ability to evoke a romantic atmosphere, a set of memorable and deeply interesting characters, a witty and incisive social satire, a surprisingly effective use of allusions, an ambitious theme and a silken style that seems as fresh today as it did seventy years ago.

In 1925—the year Dreiser published
An American Tragedy,
Dos Passos
Manhattan Transfer
and Hemingway
In Our Time
—Fitzgerald made an impressive leap from his deeply flawed early novels to his first masterpiece. Unlike his previous novels,
The Great Gatsby
is imaginative rather than autobiographical, unified rather than episodic. In place of the loosely constructed story of a young man’s life, influenced by Compton Mackenzie and H. G. Wells, Fitzgerald set out to capture a social scene and satirize a social class in the manner of Henry James and Edith Wharton. As John Dos Passos noted, in the three years since his early success Fitzgerald had thought seriously about his art. His careful study of the works of Joseph Conrad—who died in August 1924 while Fitzgerald was writing his novel—was mainly responsible for his astonishing technical and intellectual advance.

In June 1925 Fitzgerald told H. L. Mencken that he had “learned a lot” from Conrad and had consciously imitated him in
The Great Gatsby.
Conrad’s influence can be seen in Fitzgerald’s evocative symbolism (the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, the desolate wasteland of the Valley of Ashes, the God-like judgment of the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg), in his resonant style, revelation of the story by moving forward and backward in time, themes of romantic illusion and corrupted idealism. Fitzgerald’s confidential narrator Nick Carraway, like Conrad’s Charlie Marlow in
Heart of Darkness
(1899) and
Lord Jim
(1900), provides distance and credibility by retrospectively telling a story that he, a character in the novel, has personally observed. He combines disapproval of and sympathy for Gatsby just as Marlow does for Lord Jim.

Gatsby’s attempt to reinvent himself, move into the upper class and win Daisy from Tom is heroic but doomed. But Gatsby’s effort is also treated satirically because he is (or has been) a liar and a crook. Yet his lies are sad because they are all meant for Daisy, who is really “hollow at the core” and unworthy of his sacrificial quest. And Gatsby becomes as disillusioned with Daisy as Marlow does with the hollow Kurtz. In
The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald still uses fiction to tell his own story—reflecting on the superior and brutal qualities of the rich and on the impossibility of becoming one of them—but it is now truly
invented
fiction, not something carelessly cobbled together from diaries and letters and clever remarks.