Babylon Revisited (39 page)

Authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald,JAMES L. W. WEST III

BOOK: Babylon Revisited

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Backed by this success, Fitzgerald rekindled his romance with Zelda. They renewed their engagement and were married in St. Patrick’s cathedral in New York on April 3, 1920, just a week after publication of
This Side of Paradise.
The novel was an immediate hit, with enthusiastic reviews and excellent sales, and the Fitzgeralds became famous overnight. Fitzgerald found that he was in demand as a writer; his price for stories rose quickly, and he began to write much commercial short fiction—a dependable source of money for the extravagant life that he and Zelda now were leading. These triumphs in literature, love, and finances gave Fitzgerald great faith in his talent and luck. “The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter,” he later wrote. “In the best sense one stays young.”

For Fitzgerald the early 1920s were productive. He published a second novel,
The Beautiful and Damned,
in 1922; it marked an advance over
This Side of Paradise
in form and style, though it lacked the energy and charm of the earlier book. Fitzgerald also wrote some of his best short stories during these years—prophetic tales like “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and perceptive character studies like “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong” and “The Ice Palace.” He and Zelda lived near New York City, in a cottage in Westport, Connecticut; later they rented a house on Great Neck, Long Island, where they socialized with the Manhattan literati and the Broadway theater crowd of the day.

In the spring of 1924 the Fitzgeralds and their young daughter Scottie, born in 1921, traveled to Europe and settled on the French Riviera. Fitzgerald needed quiet and freedom from distraction in order to compose his third novel. He labored through the summer and by October had completed a narrative called “Trimalchio”—a short, well-crafted novel of manners set on Long Island. His hero was a hazily depicted parvenu from the Midwest named Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald mailed the novel to Perkins in New York, and Perkins had it set in type for spring publication. Fitzgerald continued to work on the text in galley proofs, however,
rewriting two chapters, focusing Jay Gatsby’s character more sharply, and infusing the story with an aura of myth and wonder. The novel, now titled
The Great Gatsby,
was published in April 1925. Reviews were good but sales disappointing. In the years that followed, however,
Gatsby
would win much praise and ascend to a very high place in the American literary canon. Today it is probably the most widely read American novel of the twentieth century.

The Great Gatsby
established Fitzgerald as a skilled professional. This is one of the paradoxes of his life: though he was sometimes frivolous and irresponsible in his personal behavior, he was thoroughly serious as an artist. He had a good understanding of the marketplace and was ambitious and self-critical, aiming to create a body of writing that would survive him. His struggles to balance work against amusement, popular appeal against literary artistry, energized his career and gave complexity to the fiction he wrote.

The Fitzgeralds remained in Europe during the late 1920s. These were years of growth for Fitzgerald; he read and traveled and observed, “seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea” and capturing in his fiction the exoticism of the great European cities. He knew James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Sinclair Lewis, and Archibald MacLeish; his and Zelda’s closest friends were Gerald and Sara Murphy, a sophisticated American couple who later served as partial models for Dick and Nicole Diver in
Tender Is the Night.
Fitzgerald also met a talented young writer named Ernest Hemingway, and they became intimate friends for a time. Their relationship, however, was eventually eroded by competition and jealousy, mostly on Hemingway’s part.

The Fitzgeralds’ marriage began to disintegrate during their last few years in Europe. Fitzgerald’s drinking increased as he struggled to produce a new novel; he managed to write some excellent short fiction, including the Basil Duke Lee stories of 1928 and 1929, but failed to make much progress on the manuscript of his book. Zelda’s health deteriorated as she worked fervently to construct a life of her own as a ballet dancer. Talented and restless, she wanted an identity apart from her role as Fitzgerald’s wife. The strain of ballet training helped to bring about a mental breakdown in 1930 from which she never entirely recovered.

The family returned to America in 1931. Fitzgerald managed to complete his novel
Tender Is the Night
while living in Baltimore. Scribners published the book in April 1934 to generally good reviews but, again, to only
moderate sales. Fitzgerald was greatly disappointed; he had worked on the book over a nine-year period, putting the manuscript through some seventeen drafts.
Tender Is the Night
shows evidence of this labor on every page; it is a brilliantly written study of expatriate life, but its flashback structure causes difficulty for readers, and the fall of its hero, Dick Diver, seems overly precipitate.

Fitzgerald’s personal life went into decline after the novel was published. His health, never strong, had been damaged by the push to finish the novel, and his personal troubles had left him creatively and financially drained. Zelda was being treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital and later in clinics near Asheville, North Carolina. In good periods she and Fitzgerald lived together, but the reconciliations were never successful or lasting. Zelda had begun to paint and write, producing an autobiographical novel called
Save Me the Waltz.
She and Fitzgerald had quarreled bitterly about her use of autobiographical material in the novel. Scribners had published the book in 1932, but not before Zelda, at Fitzgerald’s insistence, had reworked the narrative in manuscript. Fitzgerald himself revised the text in galleys. Scottie, the Fitzgeralds’ daughter, had flourished during the years in Europe, but now her parents could not provide her with a stable home. She spent her teenage years in eastern boarding schools; during most vacations she stayed with the family of Harold Ober, Fitzgerald’s literary agent.

Fitzgerald reached a professional crisis in the mid-1930s. He found that he could no longer manufacture the light, entertaining tales of love that had sold for many years to
Redbook, Metropolitan,
and the
Saturday Evening Post.
While living in North Carolina he began to write for a new magazine, Esquire, and published three autobiographical “Crack-Up” essays there, famous today as dissections of the American Dream and as measured reflections on failure and loss. At the age of forty he found himself emotionally bankrupt, “standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down.”

Fitzgerald was rescued in the summer of 1937 by Harold Ober, who arranged a lucrative Hollywood contract for him. He went to the West Coast in July and worked as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for eighteen months, paying off large debts to Scribners and Ober. He established a relationship with the newspaper columnist Sheilah Graham, who took care of him and endured his sometimes erratic behavior. Fitzgerald began his stint in Hollywood with high hopes but quickly
became disillusioned. He was temperamentally unsuited for movie work and resented the requirements of the studio system, which dictated that he collaborate with other scriptwriters. Despite his frustrations Fitzgerald was a diligent breadwinner, sending Scottie to Vassar College, where she wrote plays and was a popular student. Zelda lived intermittently with her family in Montgomery; her health was fragile, and she spent periods of instability, by her own choice, in the Highland Hospital in Asheville.

MGM declined to renew Fitzgerald’s contract at the end of 1938, and he returned to magazine writing. In October 1939 he began a novel about Hollywood; his hero, called Monroe Stahr, was based on the movie producer Irving Thalberg. Fitzgerald was excited about the project and made good headway on his manuscript, but his health began to fail in 1940 and in late November of that year he suffered a mild heart attack. After a brief convalescence he resumed work on the novel; he died unexpectedly of a second heart attack on December 21. The drafts of the novel were published as
The Last Tycoon
in 1941. These chapters show great promise and provide a tantalizing glimpse of Fitzgerald’s spare, mature style. He was buried in Rockville, Maryland, a town not far from his father’s birthplace. Zelda lived on until March 1948, when she perished in a fire at the Highland Hospital. She was buried beside her husband in Rockville.

In his working notes for
The Last Tycoon,
Fitzgerald wrote, “There are no second acts in American lives”—but his own life has been resurrected and reexamined by two generations of biographers and historians. His victories and defeats (as he knew) mirrored the triumphs and downfalls of American society during the boom years of the twenties and the bust years that followed. His writings embody lessons of ambition and disappointment, idealism and disenchantment, success and failure and redemption, that are central to the American experience. During his short professional career he won a wide audience and helped to establish American authors as deserving of serious attention. His romantic readiness for life and his gift for hope have come to embody important aspects of the American identity; he was among the first to recognize his country’s dreams of infinite possibility. Fitzgerald’s works and life still fascinate us, and his reputation continues to grow.

James L. W. West III

Pennsylvania State University

BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
NOVELS

THE LOVE OF THE LAST TYCOON (UNFINISHED)

TENDER IS THE NIGHT

THE GREAT GATSBY

THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

STORIES

BITS OF PARADISE

THE BASIL AND JOSEPHINE STORIES

THE PAT HOBBY STORIES