Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (14 page)

Fitzgerald’s art, like the phoenix, was nourished and consumed by the same source. His only material was his own life, so he meticulously observed and recorded his family and friends, and created his fiction out of his personal experience. He repeatedly stressed the autobiographical nature of his fiction. His most powerful works—“Babylon Revisited,”
Tender Is the Night
and “The Crack-Up”—were searingly confessional. But he was often limited as a writer by his inability to get outside or beyond himself. “I never did anything but live the life I wrote about,” he declared. “My characters are all Scott Fitzgerald. Even the feminine characters are feminine Scott Fitzgeralds. . . . Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves—that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives. . . . Whether it’s something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday, I must start out with an emotion—one that’s close to me and that I can understand.”
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Fitzgerald’s best stories were hard to write and hard to sell. His trivial work could be cranked out mechanically, once he had invented the formula, and easily placed in the
Saturday Evening Post.
This magazine could well afford to pay him high fees, for every issue had nearly three million readers and earned five million dollars from advertising. His typical stories have a glittering surface, are fanciful and fantastic, comic and mildly satirical, and portray the sophisticated manners and mores of well-off, usually idle and always attractive youths in bars and balls, sleek cars and swimming pools.

“The Popular Girl,” published in the
Saturday Evening Post
in February 1922 and never reprinted in his lifetime, contains many elements of his characteristic stories: a Minnesota setting, a contrast between Midwestern and Eastern values, a country club dance, a handsome and well-dressed young hero with charming manners, who has been elected to Bones at Yale and has inherited great wealth, another poor but worthy suitor, a seventeen-year-old girl of exquisite beauty and (to add pathos and drama) her drunken father. The girl practices familiar and rather transparent deceits to capture the hero. But there are complications and sudden reversals. Her father dies, leaving her penniless; she is forced to spend her very last cent; and she is predictably rescued, just in time to avert disaster, by the wealthy heir.

Fitzgerald tried to justify such stories by claiming that the high fees they earned bought him time to concentrate on the ambitious novels that would establish his reputation as a serious artist. Though his fees continued to soar, they never bought quite enough money or time. He published three novels between 1920 and 1925, then took nine years to complete
Tender Is the Night
and was unable to finish
The Last Tycoon.

His older friends, well aware of the insoluble conflict between money and art that had obsessed Fitzgerald since his Princeton days, tried to warn him about the danger of corruption. In a letter of April 1920 to George Jean Nathan, the critic Burton Rascoe presciently remarked: “I hope you are able at all events to dissuade Fitzgerald from writing
too many Saturday Evening Post
stories. Since writing you I have read one of his yarns in the
Post:
it is not to be differentiated from the stories of Nina Wilcox Putnam, Mrs. [Mary Roberts] Rinehart or any of a half dozen others. Clever enough but that’s all. Trouble is that he is likely to begin, with the money rolling in, to think that
that
is literature.” The following year Charles Norris, whose novel
Brass
Fitzgerald had favorably reviewed in the
Bookman,
warned him directly that catering to the trivial taste of the
Post
would destroy him as a writer: “You can re-christen that worthy periodical ‘The Grave-Yard of the Genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald’ if you go on contributing to it until [the editor George Horace] Lorimer sucks you dry and tosses you into the discard where nobody will care to find you.”
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Despite these salutary warnings Fitzgerald—extravagant in the Twenties and desperate in the Thirties—continued to write for the
Post
until it began to reject his work in 1937.

Fitzgerald wrote two of his best stories, “The Ice Palace” (
Post,
May 1920) and “May Day” (
Smart Set,
July 1920), at the same time that he was turning out weak commercial stuff.
²⁹
In “The Ice Palace,” he imaginatively portrayed Zelda’s negative reaction to St. Paul—before she had ever been there. The story opens with a luminous description of Montgomery (called Tarleton, Georgia), which immediately establishes the languorous mood, and uses military metaphors to suggest that the South will be placed in opposition to the North: “The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light. The Butterworth and Larkin houses flanking were intrenched behind great stodgy trees; only the Happer house took the full sun, and all day long faced the dusty road-street with a tolerant kindly patience.”

After the scene is effectively established, Sally Carrol Happer talks to her visiting fiancé, Harry Bellamy, in a Confederate cemetery, which for Fitzgerald had strong historical and personal associations. It represents courtliness and chivalry, tradition and dignity, and a glorious past. Scott had proposed to Zelda in a Montgomery cemetery. Its atmosphere was evoked in one of her most romantic letters, which influenced his portrayal of Sally Carrol’s feelings about the South:

I’ve spent to-day in the grave-yard—It really isn’t a cemetery, you know—trying to unlock a rusty iron vault built in the side of the hill. It’s all washed and covered with weepy, watery blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes—sticky to touch with a sickening odor. . . . Why should graves make people feel in vain? . . . All the broken columns and clasped hands and doves and angels mean romances. . . . Isn’t it funny how, out of a row of Confederate soldiers, two or three will make you think of dead lovers and dead loves.

When Sally Carrol travels to the unnamed northern city (clearly based on St. Paul, which actually had a palace made of ice), Harry boasts about John J. Fishburn (i.e., James J. Hill), the “greatest wheat man in the Northwest, and one of the greatest financiers in the country.” Zelda had complained that Scott repeatedly said she should be locked in a tower like a princess. And Harry proudly shows Sally Carrol the frozen palace, built like a fortified castle, out of blocks of the clearest ice: “It was three stories in the air, with battlements and embrasures and narrow icicled windows, and the innumerable electric lights inside made a gorgeous transparency of the great central hall.” But to Sally Carrol, it is merely a depressing pagan altar to the God of Snow.

She finds the town dismal; misses the affectionate flattery that a young lady expects to receive in the South; feels hostile to the women in Harry’s family, who disapprove of her smoking and bobbed hair. And she is repelled by the thoroughly repressed, “righteous, narrow, and cheerless [people], without infinite possibilities for great sorrow and joy.” While visiting the ice palace, which she thinks is far more morbid than the cemetery, she gets lost and is terrified to find herself utterly “alone with this presence that came out of the North, the dreary loneliness that rose from ice-bound whalers in the Arctic seas, from smokeless, trackless wastes where were strewn the whitened bones of adventure.”
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Though safely rescued, Sally Carrol realizes that she can never marry Harry Bellamy, who has something of the ice palace in his heart. So she breaks her engagement and returns to the drowsy heat of the South.

“May Day,” a more complex and ambitious story, has a tragic ending that disqualified it for the
Post.
It had to be sold for a much lower fee. The story takes place in New York on May 1, 1919, a few months after Fitzgerald had left the army and was trying to start a career in advertising and in writing. The shifting, episodic scenes in this long work capture the chaotic celebration of this holiday as the déclassé hero and his proletarian mistress become involved with a series of upper- and lower-class characters. The dominant themes, which emerge as the mood changes from idealism to disillusionment, are betrayal and violence, moral and financial bankruptcy.

“May Day,” whose title puns on the international signal for distress, charts the tragic decline of Gordon Sterrett. He has lost his job and, desperate for cash, attempts to borrow money from a rich Yale friend, Philip Dean, so he can pay off a girl who is blackmailing him and begin his career as an artist. The two college friends present a striking contrast in dress, wealth, health and moral well-being, and their mutual embarrassment makes them hate each other. When Philip finally refuses the loan, Gordon, observing him closely, suddenly notices how much his upper teeth project.

At this point the focus shifts to two proletarian soldiers, Gus Rose and Carrol Key (who has the middle names of Sally Happer and of Scott Fitzgerald). Just back from the war in Europe, they are trying to get some bootleg liquor from Key’s brother, a waiter at Delmonico’s, where the major characters converge. At this restaurant Edith Bradin, a former girlfriend of Gordon, has come to a Yale prom. As Edith admires herself and dances with her many beaux, her drunken date Peter Himmel talks to the two soldiers. Hearing about Edith from Philip Dean, the gloomy Gordon seeks her out, confesses his troubles and is rejected by her as brusquely as he had been by Dean. Edith then decides to visit her brother Henry, the editor of a Socialist newspaper, and Gordon is taken away from the party by his blackmailing girlfriend Jewel Hudson. While Edith is in the newspaper office, a mob of soldiers, who dislike the pacifistic and (in their eyes) pro-German Socialists, charge in, break Henry’s leg and kill Key by pushing him out of a high window.

In yet another shift of mood, from tragedy to farce, Gus Rose, Peter Himmel, Philip Dean, Gordon Sterrett and Jewel Hudson, after drunken all-night parties, turn up the next morning at Childs’. Dean and Himmel, who has replaced Sterrett as Dean’s friend, are ejected from the restaurant for throwing hash at the customers—as Fitzgerald sometimes did. They then go to the Biltmore for breakfast, remove the signs from the coatroom doors and adopt the vaudevillian roles of Mr. In and Mr. Out. In this unreal “segment of a whirring, spinning world,” they practice their comic routine on the elevator man and conclude their surrealistic dialogue with Fitzgerald’s rare bilingual pun on Himmel’s German name:

“What floor, please?” said the elevator man.

“Any floor,” said Mr. In.

“Top floor,” said Mr. Out.

“This is the top floor,” said the elevator man.

“Have another floor put on,” said Mr. Out.

“Higher,” said Mr. In.

“Heaven,” said Mr. Out.

In ironic counterpoint to this witty dialogue, Gordon Sterrett wakes up in a cheap hotel room with a hangover and realizes that he has been trapped into marriage with Jewel. He buys a gun and—leaning on his drawing materials—shoots himself.

Though the ending is rather forced and unconvincing, “May Day” remains an impressive story with a great number of carefully delineated characters. The subtly complicated plot is effectively placed in the social and political context of the May Day riots of 1919 when, Fitzgerald wrote, “the police rode down the demobilized country boys gaping at the orators in Madison Square.”
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But the story is personal as well as political. It conveys a powerful sense of loneliness and alienation, and poignantly describes what might have happened to Fitzgerald if he had failed to write his novel, lost his girl and succumbed to despair.

Flappers and Philosophers,
his first collection of stories, was dedicated to Zelda and appeared in September 1920 to capitalize on the tremendous success of
This Side of Paradise.
It contained “The Ice Palace” but not “May Day,” which was published too late to be included. The reviewers, slightly puzzled by this extremely uneven volume, were not nearly as enthusiastic as they had been about the novel. The
New York Times
complained that the “blatant tone of levity” almost drowned out “the perception of the literary substance” of Fitzgerald’s work, but acknowledged that he “is working out an idiom, and it is an idiom at once universal, American and individual.” The Chicago
Sunday Tribune
identified Fitzgerald as the laureate of the high-spirited younger generation: “There is something far more important than his popularity about Scott Fitzgerald. It is youth, uncompromising, unclothed, but not, as youth often is, dour and morbid. It is youth conscious of its powers and joyous in them.” But the New York
Herald
perceived the superficiality beneath Fitzgerald’s snappy dialogue and slick technique. His “faculty of characterizing people in a sentence in a way to make one thank Heaven one is not related to them; his facility in the use of the limited but pungent vocabulary of his type; his ingenuity in the hatching of unusual plots, all point to a case of cleverness in its most uncompromising form.”
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The next few years would test Fitzgerald’s ability to go beyond mere cleverness and prove that he could fulfill his potential as a serious writer.

Chapter Five

The Beautiful and Damned
and Great Neck, 1922–1924

I

In November 1921 the Fitzgeralds moved from their water-damaged summer home in Dellwood to a late-Victorian house at 626 Goodrich Avenue, three blocks south of Summit Avenue, in St. Paul. While awaiting the appearance of his new novel, Fitzgerald worked on his play,
The Vegetable.
The winter was long, cold and melancholy. Sobered by the repressive atmosphere and by the responsibility of caring for a new baby, Zelda was not in the mood for parties and discouraged visitors. Both she and Scott found provincial life very boring. In early March 1922 they made a brief visit to New York for the publication of Scott’s novel.