Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (29 page)

The Fitzgeralds hoped the squareness of the rooms and the sweep of the columns would bring “a judicious tranquility.” But instead of bringing peace, the house inspired their riotous and protracted weekend parties, which featured black jazz bands imported for the occasion. The weekends at Ellerslie revived and recreated—in a much grander setting and on a more elaborate scale—their wasteful and often unpleasant parties in Westport and Great Neck. Scott, who could not focus on his writing, encouraged everyone he knew to come down for a visit, and told a boyhood friend: “We have taken an old place on the Delaware River where we live in splendor surrounded by a nubian guard of sling throwers, eunuchs, back-slappers and concubines.” Fitzgerald’s parties parodied both the Murphys’ elegant entertainments and Tommy Hitchcock’s athletic exploits. The playwright Charles MacArthur and other wild guests shot his dinner plates to pieces during target practice on the front lawn, and tried to play polo with croquet mallets and heavy plough horses.

Fitzgerald made strenuous efforts to please his numerous guests: his cousin Cecilia Taylor, Lois Moran, the Irish critic Ernest Boyd, John Dos Passos, Thornton Wilder, Edmund Wilson, Carl Van Vechten, his Princeton classmate Thomas Linneaweaver, John Biggs and Hemingway. But they all found the forced hilarity, the heavy drinking and the chaotic atmosphere distinctly disappointing, and were relieved when the exhausting weekends came to an end. Despite the frequent catastrophes at Ellerslie, Fitzgerald managed to retain the friendship of all these people, who tolerated his faults when drunk because he was so extraordinarily attractive when sober.

Ernest Boyd, the heavy-drinking Irish critic, told Mencken that the pace was too hot for him. Dos Passos, who visited Ellerslie in September 1927, had memories of acute starvation: “Those delirious parties of theirs; one dreaded going. At Wilmington, for instance, dinner was never served. Oh, a complete mess. I remember going into Wilmington—they lived some miles out, trying to find a sandwich, something to eat. A wild time.” Thornton Wilder’s fan letter about
The Great Gatsby
led to an invitation in February 1928 and to a life-threatening incident with one of the guns that had been used to destroy the dinner plates. Mentioning that he had something to show Wilder, the drunken Fitzgerald invited him up to the attic, where he picked up a gun and waved it around. He then fired an accidental shot that narrowly missed Wilder and tore into the wall. When Wilder mentioned the accident the next morning Fitzgerald, who had completely forgotten it, was appalled by his own behavior.
⁴

The fullest account of a weekend at Ellerslie was written by Edmund Wilson, who visited the mansion at the same time as Wilder. Fitzgerald and Wilson had not seen much of each other since Scott’s trip to Europe in 1924. Their relations had suffered a certain chill when Wilson began to inquire about the progress of his novel and Fitzgerald wanted appreciation more than harsh advice. Eager to revive the friendship, he sent Wilson an invitation that began: “All is prepared for February 25th. The stomach pumps are polished and set out in rows, stale old enthusiasms are being burnished.” Wilson arrived at the station with Wilder and the two writers had a lively discussion about the latest novel by Proust. When they reached the house Fitzgerald, who loved to play the squire of the manor, proudly took them on a tour. The butler, hiding behind doors, obediently groaned like a ghost. Fitzgerald then offered his guests the strange choice of either listening to records of Stravinsky’s
The Rite of Spring
or examining a photograph album of horribly mutilated soldiers.

The other visitors that weekend included Esther Murphy; Gilbert Seldes, who had previously visited Fitzgerald in Saint-Raphaël and had enthusiastically praised
The Great Gatsby
; John Biggs, who was about to publish his second novel with Scribner’s; and the dramatist Zoë Akins and several actors in her new play, which was trying out in Wilmington. When Fitzgerald asked Seldes to criticize his character frankly, Seldes told him that “if he had a fault, it was making life seem rather dull.” Scott, missing the joke, seemed annoyed by the remark.

Like Gerald Murphy, Wilson was completely charmed by Zelda’s sparkling but incoherent talk: “She had the waywardness of a Southern belle and the lack of inhibitions of a child. She talked with so spontaneous a color and wit—almost exactly in the way she wrote—that I very soon ceased to be troubled by the fact that the conversation was in the nature of a ‘free association’ of ideas and one could never follow up anything. I have rarely known a woman who expressed herself so delightfully and so freshly.” But when Zelda ambiguously told the designer of Akins’ play: “You’re just homogeneous!,” he took offense and left with his companions.

Wilson was impressed when Fitzgerald read a dazzling passage from the manuscript of
Tender Is the Night.
But he was embarrassed when Fitzgerald asked his chauffeur to report the hostile remarks his guests had made about him on the way to the train station. “It’s only very seldom,” Scott insisted, “that you get a real opportunity to hear what people say about you behind your back.” “The aftermath of a Fitzgerald evening was notoriously a painful experience,” Wilson concluded in his lively memoir. “Nonsense and inspiration, reckless idealism and childish irresponsibility,” he wrote, “were mingled in so queer a way.”
⁵
Wilson found the weekend, which did nothing to revive their friendship, intensely irritating.

The “notoriously painful” festivities were invariably followed by abject letters of apology from both Zelda and Scott. “From the depths of my polluted soul,” she wrote Van Vechten, “I am sorry that the weekend was such a mess. Do forgive my iniquities and my putrid drunkenness.” And Scott (in a letter to a college friend) tried to palliate his offensiveness, which he only vaguely remembered, with a labored attempt at humor: “I’m afraid I was the world’s greatest bore last night. I was in the insistent mood—you know the insistent mood? I’m afraid I irritated both you and Eleanor, and I wanted to please you more than anyone there. It’s all very dim to me but I remember a lot of talk about fairies and the managing kind of American woman, whatever that means. It’s possible that I may be apologizing to the wrong people—anyway if I was lousy, please forgive me and tell Eleanor I can be almost human when sober.”

When the Fitzgeralds went up to New York for the weekend to escape the daily boredom and the exhausting parties at Wilmington, they would wake up in a stupor on Thursday to find they had wasted an entire week. When they stayed at home, they would sometimes have violent fights. In February 1928 (the month of Wilson’s visit), Scott returned home late at night in one of the weeping moods he had described to Hemingway. Scott and Zelda began to argue, he hurled her favorite blue vase into the fireplace, and when she called his father an Irish cop, he slapped her face and made her nose bleed. Zelda’s sister Rosalind witnessed this scene, which intensified her hatred of Fitzgerald. When he became violent outside the house, the police sometimes had to be summoned. Scott was held in custody, his chauffeur was thrown into a cell and John Biggs was called on at least two occasions to get him out of jail. In Delaware as in France, their life of noisy desperation could be described as “1,000 parties and no work.”

Fitzgerald’s proximity to Princeton revived his interest in the college. He wrote a nostalgic essay about Princeton in 1927 and began to attend the football games. In January 1928 he accepted an invitation from Cottage Club to lecture in a series by distinguished alumni. Despite a number of fortifying drinks, he was intimidated by the academic audience. After stumbling through a few sentences on “Gallantry,” he audibly anticipated the response of the audience by exclaiming, “God, I’m a rotten speaker,” and abandoned the lecture soon after he began. Though Dean Christian Gauss had witnessed this debacle, Fitzgerald later asked him to sponsor an official lecture at Princeton—just as, when an undergraduate, he had asked the dean for a letter of recommendation after he had failed out of college.

After a wasted and often destructive year in Ellerslie, the Fitzgeralds traveled to Europe for the third time in April 1928. “We want to go,” Zelda wittily explained to Van Vechten, “because Wilmington has turned out to be the black hole of Calcutta and I simply must have some Chablis and curry and
fraises du bois
[wild strawberries] with peaches in champagne for dessert. Also I want to feel a sense of intrigue which is only in Paris.” But there were also more serious reasons. Provoked by the comparison of herself and Lois Moran and by Scott’s criticism that she did not
do
anything with her life, Zelda, at the late age of twenty-six, had begun ballet lessons in Philadelphia. She intended to become a professional dancer, and was keen to study in Paris with the Russian Ballet. The increasingly restless Fitzgeralds, who also thought that constant travel and change of scene would cure their problems, adopted D. H. Lawrence’s maxim: “When in doubt,
move.
”
⁶

III

In April 1928 the Fitzgeralds began a five-month stay at 58 rue Vaugirard, opposite the Luxembourg Gardens and around the corner from Gertrude Stein on the rue de Fleurus. As usual, they chose a dreary apartment, which Zelda thought would make a good setting for Madame Tussaud’s waxwork figures. Through Sylvia Beach, a charming and generous American who owned the Shakespeare and Company bookshop on the rue de l’Odéon, Fitzgerald made two new literary friends: André Chamson and James Joyce.

Chamson, born into a Protestant family in Nîmes, wrote novels about austere rural life in the Cévennes. Just starting his literary career, he worked as a reporter in the Chamber of Deputies and was very poor. (Later on, he was elected to the French Academy.) When Chamson, the only French writer who became Scott’s friend, visited the Fitzgeralds on the rue Vaugirard, Scott, like Gatsby, rather tactlessly exhibited their luxurious possessions—drawers full of lingerie, monogrammed handkerchiefs and silk ties—and insisted that Chamson accept some of them as gifts. Chamson also remembered receiving antialcohol postcards from Fitzgerald, which had “on one side the liver of a healthy man, and on the other side the liver of an alcoholic. On the liver of the healthy man, he wrote ‘yours,’ and on the liver of the alcoholic he wrote ‘mine.’ ” Fitzgerald convinced Perkins to translate and publish Chamson’s
The Road
(1929), but the French writer never became popular in America.

Fitzgerald was desperately eager to meet the Irishman James Joyce, whom he revered and whose works had had a significant impact on his own fiction.
Ulysses
had influenced
The Great Gatsby, Dubliners
had influenced “Absolution.” In “A Night at the Fair” (1928), which has the same setting as Joyce’s “Araby,” the inscription in the boy’s history textbook—“Basil Duke Lee, Holly Avenue, St. Paul, Minnesota, United States, North America, Western Hemisphere, the World, the Universe”—imitates the address in Stephen Dedalus’ geography textbook in the first chapter of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916).

Fitzgerald behaved as foolishly with Joyce in July 1928 as he had in all his would-be or actual encounters with great artists. Fitzgerald, who did not know how to express his adulation, was extremely awkward and embarrassed the rather reserved James Joyce. While drunk, Fitzgerald had threatened to jump out the window of the Yale Club in 1919. He had recently climbed on the iron window railing of Chamson’s seventh-floor flat and, struggling to keep his balance, had screamed out: “I am Voltaire! I am Rousseau!”

In a similar fashion, according to Joyce’s biographer Herbert Gorman who was present at the time, Fitzgerald rushed forward to greet Joyce, sank down on one knee, kissed Joyce’s hand as if he were a bishop and declared: “How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir? I am so excited at seeing you, Sir, that I could weep.” Instead of weeping, Fitzgerald “enlarged upon Nora Joyce’s beauty, and, finally, darted through an open window to the stone balcony outside, jumped onto the eighteen-inch-wide parapet and threatened to fling himself to the cobbled thoroughfare below unless Nora declared that she loved him.” Fitzgerald, who felt that ordinary conversation would not sustain so momentous a meeting, had to resort to more dramatic devices. Just as Edith Wharton had said: “There must be something peculiar about that young man,” so the bewildered Joyce observed: “I think he must be mad. . . . He’ll do himself an injury some day.”
⁷

In the late 1920s Zelda (who was not impressed by Joyce) began to publish talented and amusing stories and sketches. With her permission, Scott usually signed these pieces as his own. She thus earned infinitely higher fees than if she had sold them as her own work. Zelda used this money to establish her independence and to pay for her ballet lessons. Her ambition to succeed as a dancer, despite her late start, partly accounted for her extreme touchiness about both Isadora Duncan and Lois Moran.

Zelda took lessons from the head of the Diaghilev ballet school, Lubov Egorova, a lovely little figure whose fine hair was tied in a chignon. Egorova was born in St. Petersburg in 1880, graduated from the Imperial School at the age of eighteen, was created a ballerina in 1914 and danced many of the leading roles, including
Sleeping Beauty
with Nijinsky, for the next seven years. She had married Prince Trubetskoy, begun teaching in Paris in 1923 and replaced Zelda’s father as the presiding deity in her life. In
Save Me the Waltz
Zelda described her teacher’s appearance—and inner strength—with deep affection: “The eyes . . . were round and sad and Russian, a dreamy consciousness of its own white dramatic beauty gave the face weight and purpose as if the features were held together by spiritual will.” Zelda would throw herself at her teacher’s feet (as Scott did with Joyce), and forced the six-year-old Scottie to take ballet lessons with Egorova “until Daddy put a stop to it.”