1920 (38 page)

After years of alcoholism, which fueled the couple's frantic, argumentative, high-volume, bar-hopping, glass-smashing, fountain-bathing mirth, Scott died in the arms of another woman, his Hollywood mistress, in 1940. He was forty-four years old.

Years earlier, Zelda had decided to revive a passion of her youth—although one to which she had not given so much as a thought since she was a little girl—and become a ballet dancer. Never mind that she had reached the over-the-hill age of twenty-eight, she would make up in dedication what she lacked in adolescent suppleness. And she tried, oh how she tried, with a maniacal, pointless energy, working at her exercises with
the zeal of her younger self, as all the while Scott ridiculed her with the zeal of a committed drunk. She “practiced in front of the great ornate mirror,” Milford says, “sweating profusely, stopping only for water, which she kept beside the Victrola, and ignoring Scott's remarks as he watched her leap and bend. He hated the large glass that reflected her, doubling the portraits of angst. He called it their ‘Whorehouse Mirror.'”

Every muscle in her body ached throughout every day of her attempted comeback, and the harder she attempted to execute her moves, the more she realized that she was no longer capable of them, no longer capable of her dreams. But what else was there for her to do? Scott had no answers, and so she kept at it, sometimes screaming at what her body would no longer permit of her. But it was not just her body that had lost its ability to do as she pleased; her mind, which had long been slipping away from her, began to accelerate its pace, until finally she lost it altogether and was committed to a mental hospital. She lived there in a state of dull, medicated felicity until 1948, eight years after her husband died. Then, for reasons unknown, a fire broke out in the kitchen. “There was no automatic fire alarm system in the old stone and frame building and no sprinkler system.” Medical personnel saved a few of the patients, but Zelda was not one of them. The hospital was consumed in flames and burned to the ground so quickly, it might have not been there in the first place.

Engraved on Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald's tombstone are the famous words that bring to a close Scott's shortest but most enduring novel,
The Great Gatsby
. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

BEFORE THE FITZGERALDS CRASHED, THEY
had become the embodiments of the wild side of the twenties, the sin-without-atonement, drunkenness-without-hangovers, war-without-emotional-reckoning side. To look at the photographs of them, so fashionably and expensively attired, is to think of mansions on Long Island, hotel suites overlooking Central Park, villas in the south of France. It is to think of deep blue water in swimming pools, perfectly mown grass on private tennis courts and on gently sloping lawns that reached from the front porticoes of mansions to the edge of Long
Island Sound. It was an image that the Fitzgeralds, Scott in particular, did much to encourage.

But a careful reading of his work reveals that he knew, even accepted, the phrase that Gertrude Stein had coined and passed along to Hemingway. He knew, when he was sober, that he was lost. He knew that his wife was lost. Sobriety, then, was the curse of unbearable knowledge to them both. Never once in 1920 did he use the phrase “lost generation” in his public writing, but in his first novel he didn't have to.

“Here was a new generation,” Fitzgerald mused in
This Side of Paradise
, showing remarkable insight for a man of twenty-four, “shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery [
sic
] of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride: a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all the gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”

It proved the epitaph for an era, written by one of the first men to realize that the era would require one.

THE FRENCH WERE ONE OF
the two countries battered most in the war. More than a quarter of a generation was lost. “1,315,000 [men] had been killed in action—27 percent of all men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven, a figure that does not include the wounded: those left blind, or legless, or armless, or with no limbs at all.”

As for Great Britain, it would mourn the passing of what it referred to as an entire generation; although strictly speaking it was less than that, the death toll was appalling. More than 908,000 men, most of them between their late teens and mid-twenties, gave up their lives on one battlefield or another, while another two million were injured, some seriously and permanently. In his BBC documentary
Voices from the Great War
, Peter Vansittart said that “As a small boy in Southsea, I saw streets disfigured by ragged, unwanted ex-soldiers, medalled, but ill, blind, maimed, selling matches, bootlaces, notepaper, trundling barrel-organs or standing with a melancholy dog or monkey. … Their wretchedness suggested that, in overcoming Germany, they had earned some monstrous penalty now being … enacted.”

In 1914 alone, it has been estimated, more than thirty percent of Englishmen between the ages of twenty and twenty-four were killed. Before the war was over, one out of every eight men of
all
ages who lived in the British Isles would lose his life because of the fighting, either because he was in the midst of it or was too close at the wrong time. Although it is not certain, civilian deaths probably surpassed 100,000.

AMONG THE MOST TROUBLED, AND
talented, of those who did not serve in the war was David Herbert Lawrence, more commonly known by the initials of his first and middle names. He was a schoolteacher in his early thirties, and thus old enough to escape conscription, when England first began to fear not merely defeat but annihilation. Given his nook in academe, there was little he could do other than write about the prospect. But he did not do so in a conventional manner. Even though he worked on his book from 1916 through 1918, the most bruising, brutal, battle-wearying years of them all, Lawrence did not write what one would call an anti-war novel, of which, he knew, scores would be produced in the years ahead. Instead, he reached more broadly. In
Women in Love
, the title notwithstanding, his purpose—or one of them—was to vilify the entire nation in which he lived, its values and ideals, its weaknesses and hypocrisies, all of which, in Lawrence's view, made it susceptible to the Great War's needless violence.

A novel offensive to British society in some manner was to be expected from D. H. Lawrence. His previous book,
The Rainbow
, issued in 1915, contained scenes so sexually explicit for its time, although hardly for ours, that it was declared obscene. The author was not sentenced, but his book was punished to the maximum extent of the law. The publisher was ordered to stop manufacturing it, and authorities seized as many copies already in existence as they could retrieve and burned them. One can only imagine Lawrence's reaction to the expense and energy of so trivial a matter as a book-burning a full year after the war had begun.

For more than a decade, a copy of
The Rainbow
could not be legally secured in Great Britain. In New York it was available legally, but in privately published editions, which sold in small numbers and only to those who knew the book existed in the first place. As far as the author was concerned, he was left where he had so long dwelt, on the perilous brink of poverty.

In
The Rainbow
, Ursula Brangwen finds the British educational system to be “sham, spurious”; she rages, with her country on the battlefield, that such “organised fighting” might send the whole universe “tumbling into the bottomless pit”; and decides that “[s]he hated religion, because it lent itself to her confusion. … There was then no Jesus, no sentimentality.” For good measure, if even more bad publicity, Lawrence threw in a lesbian affair for Ursula and a few hints of heterosexual sodomy.

And then, five years later, in 1920, came
Women in Love
, the sequel to
The Rainbow
. In the main,
Women in Love
is concerned with the affairs between two couples. One is Ursula and a troubled intellectual named Rupert Birkin, whom Lawrence might have based at least partly on himself; the other is Ursula's sister Gudrun and the business tycoon Gerald Crich. As might be expected, the love scenes were even bolder than those published five years earlier. For instance, Ursula and Birkin, in the midst of foreplay:

She traced with her hands the line of his loins and thighs, at the back, and a living fire ran through her, from him, darkly. It was a dark flood of electric passion she released from him, drew into herself. She had established a rich new circuit, a new current of passional electric energy, between the two of them, released from the darkest poles of the body and established in perfect circuit. It was a dark fire of electricity that rushed from him to her, and flooded them both with rich peace, satisfaction.

Ironically, though, it was the hint of men in love that most upset at least some of the readers of
Women in Love
and almost all of the authorities. At one point in the story, Birkin is ill and Gerald comes to see him. “The two men had a deep, uneasy feeling for each other,” Lawrence tells us. And a few lines later:

Gerald really loved Birkin, though he never quite believed in him. Birkin was too unreal;—clever, whimsical, wonderful, but not practical enough. Gerald felt that his own understanding was much sounder and safer. Birkin was delightful, a wonderful spirit, but after all, not to be taken seriously, not quite to be counted as a man among men.

If it had been Gerald who had traced with his hands the loins and thighs of Birkin, the British Isles would have exploded with indignation. As it was, the book created controversy enough for its time. Most reviews were negative, and even many of those that were positive criticized Lawrence for going too far. Said one commentator, throwing his share of logs onto the furor, “I do not claim to be a literary critic, but I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps—festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven.”

As Lawrence wrote
Women in Love
, his apparent bisexuality erupted. All around him young men were dying—lean and strapping, handsome and bold; the criminality of such waste left him unhinged, and would in time go so far as to affect his physical well-being. In 1912, at the age of twenty-seven, he met a married woman named Frieda Weekley, and he would spend the rest of his life with her. They lived in adulterous sin for two years, making Lawrence an even more disdainful figure to many, before marrying, after her divorce became final, in the summer of 1914. That he loved her is undeniable. But Frieda believed that, within a few years of their vows, her husband had had at least one affair with a man, a farmer named William Henry Hocking. Lawrence's discovery of his attraction to men as well as women, which had been building in him for years, left him secretly tortured, painfully ambivalent.

On the one hand, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I should like to know why nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not.” And, “I believe the nearest I've come to perfect love was with a young coal miner when I was about 16.”

On the other hand, Lawrence professed to despise the men who loved the Brandwens in
Women in Love
, claiming that it was difficult to write about them, as he found their latent homosexuality malodorous and filthy. He dreamed of beetles, he said, when he thought of Crich and Birkin, and would awaken in the black of night disgusted with himself. In an earlier draft of the book, Lawrence was more transparent about homosexuality, writing about two would-be male lovers who engaged in a wrestling match not for the sport of it but for the romance of coupling.

Frieda stayed with him through it all. But just before
Women in Love
was published, their lives took a turn. Frieda did not see it coming; her husband might have surprised himself as well.

Lawrence decided that he could no longer live in a place like England. He pronounced himself an exile, escaping not just the war's terrible aftermath, but the criticism that his books and essays had already aroused and the controversy that he knew lay ahead from
Women in Love
. He and Frieda went first to Italy, but Lawrence soon grew restless and Frieda, ever compliant, was willing to uproot herself before they had even settled. The two of them then began to drift aimlessly, their destinations often determined by the smallness of the sums of money that they could afford. They sailed in steerage to the United States, and from there traipsed on foot into Mexico. Also ahead of them lay Australia, Malta, France, Germany, Monte Cassino, and Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. It was a “savage enough pilgrimage,” Lawrence wrote to another friend, one that enabled him to find no peace, no geographical basis for contentment.

He kept writing all the while, but his health began to fail now, and the only book of significance that he produced after 1920 was
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, in 1928, four years after the savagery of his travels had ended and he had returned to England. He managed to squeeze two more novels of uneven merit into the next two years, but in 1930 he died in France, an exhausted and tormented man who looked as if he had lived more of life than his years suggested. He was forty-five, only one year older than Fitzgerald.

Lawrence's was not what people were used to thinking about when they thought of the literary life. It was more the life of an escaped prisoner, one who had managed to extricate himself from his cell but was unable to free himself from the ceaseless punishment meted out by the years in which he lived.

NOT ALL, HOWEVER, WAS BLEAK
or lascivious on the world's bookshelves in 1920. As it happened, that was the year when an author who would go on to become an industry, and remains one almost a century later, published her first book. The author, like Lawrence, was a Britisher but had virtually nothing else in common with him, including gender. But although Agatha Christie was a woman, she published her first novel in the voice of a man, Captain Hastings, one of thousands of small-town English police officers.