Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (16 page)

Fitzgerald’s note seems to confirm the idea expressed in Zelda’s review that his writing had to be justified, even validated, by rapid composition and bountiful payment. It promoted an image of a hasty, superficially brilliant and calculating artist who controls the form as he dominates the commercial market. His self-created image of the story writer is very different from the author of the novels. The real Fitzgerald used the intimate details of his life in his work, struggled to find a form that would express his ideas and would spend years perfecting his novels.

Later on, Fitzgerald took a more serious view of
Tales of the Jazz Age,
which included two of his best stories: “May Day” and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” In his essay “Early Success” he emphasized the tragic aspect of his work and compared his doomed characters to those of a far more pessimistic English novelist. There was “a touch of disaster in them—the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew up, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy’s peasants.” In his
Notebooks
of the 1930s, he stressed his devotion to his craft, and his emotional and artistic exhaustion, punning on the double meaning of “price”—both the payment he received for the stories and the personal cost of writing them: “I have asked a lot of my emotions—one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it is gone.”
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Though it is impossible to reconcile this Romantic view of the artist, wringing his works out of his heart, with the many formulaic pieces he turned out, his best stories express the same themes as the novels. Though not as intimately self-revealing as in
The Beautiful and Damned,
in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922) Fitzgerald does something more interesting: he deliberately imitates and parodies Edgar Poe’s most famous story, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839).

Distancing himself from his youthful hero’s obsession with the rich and disillusion with money, Fitzgerald cast his fable in the form of a fantasy—an extremely odd mixture of fairy tale, social satire, conventional romance and gothic horror. Poe characteristically emphasizes the decay and horror, Fitzgerald the glamour and luxury of the house; Poe’s heroine is diseased and moribund, Fitzgerald’s “the incarnation of physical perfection”; Poe has a tragic, Fitzgerald an ambiguously happy ending, but the numerous parallels, once perceived, are as clever and amusing as they are unmistakable.

Fitzgerald echoes the name of Poe’s Usher by calling his hero Unger. In both stories a young man, Poe’s narrator and Fitzgerald’s naive schoolboy, is invited to visit an “intimate” boyhood friend. The neurasthenic Roderick Usher comes from an ancient family, and Percy Washington boasts to the provincial Unger that his father is the richest man in the world. Both visitors represent a conventional ordinariness, a certain norm of behavior that helps to define the bizarre nature of the events they observe.

The narrator in Poe and the naive hero in Fitzgerald see their friends as part of a doomed family in a cursed house. Both mansions have intricate subterranean passages and are remote, isolated and unreal. Situated near a tarn, or lake, the monstrous houses contain an oppressive secret, and reflect the fearful mood of their inhabitants. Poe rolls out his familiar rhetoric and creaky gothic paraphernalia when describing the gloomy landscape and the decrepit building, with its barely perceptible fissure zigzagging down the facade from the roof to the watery foundation:

[I looked] upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul.

Fitzgerald adjusts his Babylonian fairyland style to match the pathological menace and corrupt attraction evoked by Poe:

The Montana sunset lay between two mountains like a gigantic bruise from which dark arteries spread themselves over a poisoned sky. . . . After half an hour, the twilight had coagulated into dark.

Poe’s hothouse rhetoric: “What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?” is echoed in John Unger’s troubled questions when he first arrives at the mountain house: “What desperate transaction lay hidden here? What moral expedient of a bizarre Croesus? What terrible and golden mystery?” Poe mentions the sentience of vegetable matter—the proliferating fungi that overspread and the decayed trees that surround the house—which reflects the doom of the family. Fitzgerald imitates the idea of the house as prison by describing an old family trapped, stupefied and corrupted by its selfish accumulation of useless wealth and by the enormous diamond that cannot be sold lest it destroy the economic foundations of the world.

Roderick Usher’s dissipated artistic endeavors—his dreary dirges, phantasmagoric paintings and morbid poetry—are parodied in Fitzgerald by a kidnapped “landscape gardener, an architect, a designer of stage settings, and a French decadent poet” who fail to create as expected, go mad and are confined to a mental asylum. Only a crude “moving picture fella” from Hollywood succeeds in designing the lavish reception rooms and luxurious baths.

Both visitors briefly glimpse their host’s sister as she passes through the house. Madeline Usher is cursed by the secret sexual guilt she shares with her brother. Kismine Washington (Unger’s girlfriend and
kismet,
or fate) is cursed by the murder of the friends who had visited her in the past, could not be permitted to betray the secret wealth to the outside world, and were sacrificed after they had provided distraction and pleasure for the family.

Fitzgerald echoes the premature entombment of Madeline in one of the numerous vaults beneath the House of Usher in Braddock Washington’s incarceration of the captured aviators in a deep, Poe-like pit, covered by an iron grating. Both young men are suddenly awakened in the middle of the night by a strange, frightening noise. Poe’s familiar physiological description of fear when Usher realizes he has entombed the living Madeline:

there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering manner,

is equaled by Fitzgerald’s fantastic simile when Unger perceives that the Washingtons have murdered their guests:

Stunned with the horror of this revelation, John sat there open-mouthed, feeling the nerves of his body twitter like so many sparrows perched upon his spinal column.

In Poe, Usher throws back the ebony jaws of the huge antique panels to reveal his vengeful, blood-stained sister. In Fitzgerald, the ebony panel of one wall slides aside to reveal a uniformed manservant who assists Unger with his bath. Madeline murders her brother; Percy Washington’s grandfather was also compelled to murder his brother, who had the unfortunate Poe-and-Fitzgerald-like habit “of drinking himself into an indiscreet stupor.” At the end of both stories the evil houses are completely destroyed, but the visitors manage to escape.

If the Ushers’ sin is incest (a dominant theme in
Tender Is the Night
), the Washingtons’ is greed; and both sins lead to the final destruction of their family, dynasty and class. Building on Poe’s story, Fitzgerald shows his hero moving from sheer enjoyment of the overwhelming luxury to an awareness of evil in the House of Washington and to a condemnation of its perverse corruption. Fitzgerald indicates, by the name of the family, that his purpose is allegorical and satirical. The House of Washington represents a vulgar, greedy America where everything—freedom, human values, art and culture—is sacrificed to gross wealth.

In “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” Fitzgerald adds some witty remarks (“There go fifty thousand dollars’ worth of slaves at prewar prices,” cries Kismine, when the servants’ quarters are destroyed by an aerial bombardment. “So few Americans have any respect for property”) and he invents a brilliant scene in which Kismine’s father, like Satan tempting Christ, offers a futile bribe to God. Unlike her father, Kismine has so slight a respect for property that she innocently carries away rhinestones instead of diamonds, and leaves herself and Unger penniless but virtuous at the end of the story. Fitzgerald’s tale is a caustic warning about the American Dream. It reveals the illusory power of great wealth and the impossibility of being both rich and happy.

Fitzgerald’s story, like Poe’s, ends on a disillusioned and despairing note. John Unger realizes that without the diamonds to sustain him he will not be able to love Kismine for more than a few years. In “The Crack-Up” Fitzgerald returned to the bitter conclusion and the dominant symbol of his early Poesque story in order to illustrate the difference between authentic and meretricious experience: “In thirty-nine years an observant eye has learned to detect where the milk is watered and the sugar is sanded, the rhinestone passed for diamond and the stucco for stone.”
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III

When the Minnesota summer had ended and they had been asked to leave the White Bear Yacht Club, the Fitzgeralds became utterly weary of wholesome provincial life and unable to face another dreary season of arctic winds and ice floes. In mid-October 1922 they eagerly returned to the Plaza Hotel, the center of their legendary life in New York. They soon found a comfortable place to rent at 6 Gateway Drive in Great Neck, an affluent town on the north shore of Long Island, about an hour from Manhattan. Alluding to Sinclair Lewis’ bestselling satire on the American businessman, Zelda called it our “nifty little Babbitt-house.”

In the early 1920s, before the film industry moved to Hollywood, many millionaires and celebrities from show business—Sam Goldwyn, Eddie Cantor, Ed Wynn, the actress Mae Murray and the songwriter Gene Buck as well as General John Pershing and Herbert Swope, the editor of the
New York World,
whose lavish parties inspired Jay Gatsby’s—lived in Great Neck. At one party that October, Fitzgerald proudly told his cousin Cecilia Taylor, he met the English novelist Hugh Walpole, the columnist Franklin P. Adams, the Irish tenor John McCormack, the composers Rudolf Friml and Deems Taylor. His neighbors also included the popular actor Ernest Truex, who would star in Fitzgerald’s play
The Vegetable,
and the sportswriter Ring Lardner, who became Scott’s close friend.

Born in Niles, Michigan, in 1885, Lardner had been a journalist in Chicago and New York. He had written baseball stories in
You Know Me, Al
(1916), and had also published books of verse, satirical stories and a comic novel. “A tall sallow mournful man with a high-arched nose . . . dark hollow eyes and hollow cheeks,” Lardner had a long, somber face that resembled Buster Keaton’s. His son recalled that Ring, a puritan in his attitudes, found Zelda quite different from anyone he had ever known. He was impressed by her unconstrained speech and behavior, intrigued by her startling eyes and her pure complexion. Ring flattered Zelda with witty poems just as Nathan had done with seductive letters. But the courtly tributes of the married Lardner, unlike those of the bachelor Nathan, seemed harmless. Zelda found Ring less interesting than Nathan and, in a letter to Xandra Kalman, dismissed him as “a typical newspaper man whom I don’t find very amusing.” She probably thought Ring was a bad influence on her husband.

Ring found Scott a stimulating and responsive friend as well as a great admirer of his work. They shared a Midwestern background, an interest in sports, a dedication to the craft of writing and an addiction to drink. But they were affected very differently by alcohol. While Ring remained solemn and dignified, Scott became aggressive and vulgar. An alcoholic who could hold his drink, Ring became a model for the kind of drinker Scott would have liked to be. But he was also the mirror image of the doomed drinker that Scott feared he might become. The two congenial neighbors would stay up all night, talking and drinking gin, until Ring staggered to his feet and announced: “Well, I guess the children have left for school by this time—I might as well go home.”
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His son recalled that his father would often arrive home in a taxi as he was leaving for school and would have to be helped into the house.

In May 1923 Scott heard that Joseph Conrad, on a visit to America, was staying at the estate of his publisher, Frank Doubleday, in nearby Oyster Bay. Scott, who had kept a vigil outside Anatole France’s house in 1921, now got drunk with Ring and, in a typically high-spirited but childish episode, danced on Doubleday’s lawn in order to pay homage to the great novelist. But they were apprehended by a vigilant caretaker and thrown off the grounds for trespassing before they could gate-crash the house and attract Conrad’s attention. Too timid to arrange a serious conversation, Scott did not seem to realize that a drunken dance was not the best way to impress the formal old sea captain, who always insisted on correct behavior.

Fascinated by the Fitzgeralds’ personalities, Ring portrayed them in his work. In
What of It?
(1925) he said: “Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald is a novelty.” In his burlesque of a popular fairy tale, he portrayed Scott as Prince Charming and colloquially wrote: “Her name was Zelda but they called her Cinderella on account of how the ashes and clinkers clung to her when she got up noons.” And, exaggerating Scott’s precocious literary debut, Ring remarked: “Mr. Fitzgerald sprung into fame with his novel
This Side of Paradise
which he turned out when only three years old and wrote the entire book with one hand. Mr. Fitzgerald never shaves while at work on his novels and looks very funny along towards the last five or six chapters.”
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During the Christmas season of 1923 the two friends exchanged witty poems that expressed their mutual affection. Parodying the spirit of Christmas giving, Ring wrote: