Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (43 page)

Most importantly, the novel criticizes the capitalistic system that provoked and paid for these wars, and emphasizes the fissure between great wealth and moral values. The vast fortune of the Warren family—which includes trains, factories, stores and plantations—has engendered Devereux’s incest, Nicole’s madness and Baby’s masturbatory self-absorption, and brings about Dick’s corruption. Fitzgerald is once again writing about money and the power of the rich. But here the ducal class represented by the Warrens—and by Mary North’s second husband, a Moslem potentate whose money flows from manganese deposits in southwestern Asia—are viewed from the disillusioning perspective of the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the hardships of the Depression and Fitzgerald’s own financial difficulties.
Tender Is the Night
is a representative between-the-wars novel. It expresses guilt about surviving the Great War, portrays anxiety about the present and senses the menace of the future. When Dick bids farewell to the beach, he also says goodbye to the twenties, to youth and to hope.

The outcome of the novel for Dick is tragic. He is sacrificed so that Nicole can be well, and she is now free to remain in the sun while he is condemned to live as a failure in obscure country towns. This conclusion must have afforded Fitzgerald some private gratification. Dick, at the end of the novel, is no longer tormented by Nicole’s madness. But Scott could never actually escape from Zelda.

IV

Fitzgerald’s friends, well aware of the intensely personal nature of the novel, responded enthusiastically. John Peale Bishop, who had often been condescending to Fitzgerald, was deeply moved by its tragic content: “I come fresh from reading
Tender Is the Night
and overcome with the magnificence of it. It surpasses
The Great Gatsby.
You have shown us, what we have wanted so long and impatiently to see, that you are a true, a beautiful and a tragic novelist. I have only praise for its understanding, its characterization, and its deep tenderness.” James Branch Cabell, Carl Van Vechten and Robert Benchley also admired the novel. Dos Passos, an early witness of Zelda’s madness, found the structure “enormously impressive” and declared: “the whole conception of the book is enormous—and so carefully understated that—so far as I know—not a single reviewer discovered it.”

Gilbert Seldes, who had visited Fitzgerald on the Riviera and had acclaimed
The Great Gatsby,
concluded, in the first important review, that Fitzgerald “has stepped again to his natural place at the head of the American writers of our time.” In the
New York Times
the critic John Chamberlain praised Fitzgerald’s technique and style: “his craftsmanship, his marvelous sense of what might be called social climate, his sheer writing ability. Judged purely as prose,
Tender Is the Night
is a continually pleasurable performance.”
¹⁵
Mary Colum, a perceptive Irish critic, felt the novel was flawed but lauded Fitzgerald’s “distinctive gifts—a romantic imagination, a style that is often brilliant, a swiftness of movement, and a sense of enchantment in people and places.” But Philip Rahv, writing in the Communist
Daily Worker,
obtusely condemned the novel for deviating from the Party line. And William Troy, in the Left-wing
Nation,
found Dick Diver’s character unconvincing and depressing.

D. W. Harding, a professor of psychology at the University of London, felt that Fitzgerald (despite all he had been through) lacked insight into the “pathetic” and “harrowing” subject of the novel. But he thought that Fitzgerald managed to convey the idea that “people who disintegrate in the adult world don’t at all win our respect and can hardly retain even our pity.” Fitzgerald was especially pleased, therefore, by a psychiatrist’s anonymous review in a professional magazine, the
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease,
which extolled his “fascinating” and “valuable” clinical account. “As one grasps fully the scope of the author’s aim,” the doctor wrote, “and his discernment in face of the balance of psychotic cause and effect, the rich endowment of the book in regard to conscious mastery of authentic experience and exceptional descriptive powers becomes increasingly evident.”
¹⁶

The man Fitzgerald most wanted to please remained silent. On May 10, a month after publication, Fitzgerald desperately wrote Hemingway: “Did you like the book? For God’s sake drop me a line and tell me one way or another. You can’t hurt my feelings. I just want to get a few intelligent slants at it to get some of the reviewers’ jargon out of my head.” Two weeks later Hemingway—influenced by personal knowledge of the Murphys and perhaps by jealousy of Fitzgerald’s achievement—bluntly replied that Scott had ruined the novel by conflating his own and Zelda’s characteristics with those of the Murphys, creating an unconvincing composite and wrecking the logical consistency of their behavior:

I liked it and I didn’t like it. It started off with that marvelous description of Sara and Gerald. . . . Then you started fooling with them, making them come from things they didn’t come from, changing them into other people and you can’t do that. . . . Invention is the finest thing but you cannot invent anything that would not actually happen. . . .

You took liberties with peoples’ pasts and futures that produced not people but damned marvelously faked case histories. . . . For God’s sake write and write truly no matter who or what it hurts but do not make these silly compromises.

Fitzgerald defended himself in a letter to Sara Murphy by stating that his theory of fiction, antithetically opposed to Hemingway’s, was that “it takes half a dozen people to make a synthesis strong enough to create a fiction[al] character.” Gerald agreed with Fitzgerald and wrote, a year after the novel appeared, that his imaginative reconstruction of their lives was truer than reality: “I know now that what you said in
Tender Is the Night
is true. Only the invented part of our life—the unreal part—has had any scheme, any beauty.” Four years later Hemingway reread the novel, saw its merits more clearly and revised his opinion. Recognizing Fitzgerald’s deep insight and ability to objectify his own tragic experience, he told Max Perkins: “It’s amazing how
excellent
much of it is. If he had integrated it better it would have been a fine novel (as it is) much of it is better than anything else he ever wrote. . . . Reading that novel much of it was so good it was frightening.”
¹⁷

Fitzgerald had very high hopes for the novel that had evolved from so much suffering. He felt it was his last chance to restore his reputation, his self-confidence and his wealth.
This Side of Paradise
had sold more than 49,000 copies by the end of 1921. But
Tender Is the Night,
partly because of the economic depression and because his subject matter was unfashionable during those politically conscious years, sold only 13,000 copies. It earned just five thousand dollars, which was not even enough to repay his debts to Scribner’s and to Ober. Zelda’s third breakdown in February 1934 and the relative failure of
Tender Is the Night
in April propelled Fitzgerald into his own crack-up, from which he never completely recovered.

Chapter Eleven

Asheville and “The Crack-Up,” 1935–1937

I

When Zelda came out of her catatonic state at Sheppard-Pratt she tried to commit suicide by strangling herself. Despite constant surveillance she made frequent attempts on her life. Once, while walking with Scott on the grounds of the clinic, she tried to throw herself beneath a passing train and he caught her just before she reached the tracks. Gradually she calmed down and became accustomed to institutional living, one of three hundred patients in the huge towered and turreted red-brick Victorian buildings.

Dr. William Elgin—who was born in Cincinnati in 1905, graduated from Washington and Lee University in Virginia and earned his medical degree at Johns Hopkins—found Zelda confused, withdrawn and expressionless. The once active and vibrant woman now seemed to him a colorless “blob” who moved in slow motion and felt threatened by hallucinatory voices. Yet her tender and poignant letter of June 1935 showed that Zelda was all too aware of the devastation her illness had caused. She showed considerable insight into her emotional hollowness and expressed great sadness about all they had sacrificed. She also returned to the themes of lost identity and negation of the self which Scott considered in his “Crack-Up” essays:

Dearest and always Dearest Scott:

I am sorry too that there should be nothing to greet you but an empty shell. The thought of the effort you have made over me, the suffering this
nothing
has cost would be unendurable to any save a completely vacuous mechanism. Had I any feelings they would all be bent in gratitude to you and in sorrow that all of my life there should not even be the smallest relic of the love and beauty that we started with to offer you at the end. . . .

Now that there isn’t any more happiness and home is gone and there isn’t even any past and no emotions but those that were yours where there could be my comfort—it is a shame that we should have met in harshness and coldness where there was once so much tenderness and so many dreams. . . . I love you anyway—even if there isn’t any me or any love or even any life.

Three months later, after one of his heart-wrenching visits to the hospital, Fitzgerald told a friend that they still had, despite Zelda’s insanity, a powerful bond that could never be broken: “she was fine, almost herself, has only one nurse now and has no more intention of doing away with herself. It was wonderful to sit with her head on my shoulder for hours and feel as I always have even now, closer to her than to any other human being.” Friends who saw Scott with Zelda during her visits outside the hospital confirmed the intensity of feeling that both destroyed and sustained him:

He was so dreadfully unhappy [said his Asheville friend Nora Flynn]. Zelda was then in the sanatorium. Once, after she got out, he brought her over to visit. She wore such odd clothes, and looked so ill—and walked about just touching things. Finally she started to dance for us. And Scott sat over there. I shall never forget the tragic, frightful look on his face as he watched her. He had loved her so much—they both had loved each other. Now it was dead. But he still loved that love and hated to give it up—that was what he continued to nurse and cherish, that love which had been, and which he could not forget.

Margaret Banning—a Minnesota novelist and graduate of Vassar, who also saw them in Asheville—noted that Zelda had completely lost her elegance and displayed a greedy urge for alcohol. “She came in looking like Ophelia, with water lilies she had brought, and in a sagging and not very stylish bright-colored dress. Wine was served and she drank it in an eager gulp and right away it set her off. Then Fitzgerald sat down and played a game with her, pretending she was a princess in a tower and he was her prince—so tragic it was heartbreaking to watch. He still loved her.”
¹
Scott’s reckless princess was, at last, safely locked away in a tower.

Their love was now undermined by a tragic and increasingly clearsighted despair. Zelda, who would remark, “Well, I guess it’s time to go back to my incarceration,” realized that all Scott’s brave efforts to find the best doctors, hospitals and treatments were hopeless. To someone as sick as she was, one place was much the same as another. Writing to his confidants Margaret Turnbull and Harold Ober in the summer of 1935, Scott confessed that Zelda now seemed more pitiful than ever, that he could scarcely endure “the awful strangling heart-rending quality of this tragedy that has gone on now more than six years, with two brief intervals of hope.”

In February 1935, depressed about Zelda and by a flare-up of tuberculosis, Fitzgerald left the house on Park Avenue in Baltimore. He went down to Tryon, a tiny health resort thirty-five miles south of Asheville in the Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina (where the Georgia-born poet Sidney Lanier had died of tuberculosis in 1881). He spent a month in a top-floor room of the Oak Hall Hotel, on a bluff above the main street.

He chose Tryon because his wealthy friends Maurice and Nora Flynn held court there. The tall, handsome Maurice, who was always called Lefty, had many of the qualities Fitzgerald admired in Tommy Hitchcock. He had been an All-American football star at Yale, a cowboy actor in silent films and (like Scott’s brother-in-law) a naval aviator during the war. Lefty, once an alcoholic, had been cured by Nora, a Christian Scientist, after she left her first husband to marry him in 1931. (Nora’s daughter by her first marriage became the British actress Joyce Grenfell.) Fitzgerald’s story “The Intimate Strangers” (1935) is a fictionalized account of their romantic courtship.

The glamorous and vivacious Nora, the youngest of the five beautiful Langhorne sisters of Virginia, was born in about 1890. Her father was a wealthy tobacco auctioneer and railroad builder. Her older sister, Nancy, who married Viscount Astor, succeeded her husband as Conservative M.P. for Plymouth in 1919 and became the first woman in Parliament. Nancy’s biographer, Christopher Sykes, writes that Nora was (like Bijou O’Conor) the disreputable bohemian of the family: “During her life she became involved in many scandals and ran up many debts, from both of which she was rescued regularly by the Astors, on conditions which were regularly broken. She shared three principal things with Nancy, comic acting ability, an extraordinary power to attract affection so that everyone who knew her, including her numerous and often infuriated critics, loved her, and an ardent faith in Christian Science.” Unlike Fitzgerald, the bold and exciting Nora “never looked behind” and would raise his flagging spirits by announcing: “tighten up your belt, baby, let’s get going. To any pole.”
²

Nora also attracted Fitzgerald’s affection, and Edmund Wilson told Mizener that they apparently had an affair. Zelda, who met Nora in Asheville, may have instinctively sensed Fitzgerald’s attachment, realizing that Nora provided an antidote to her own deep depressions: “Nora Flynn—he loved her I think—not clandestinely, but she was one of several women he always needed around him to turn to when he got low and needed a lift.” The well-born and elegant Nora noticed Scott’s sense of social inferiority and found “a certain streak of something queer in him—gaudy, blatant, almost vulgar.” But it seemed to friends in Tryon that Nora—who loved to rehabilitate alcoholics—was also attracted to Scott and led him on.