Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (19 page)

The Murphys lived in hedonistic luxury and tended to dissipate their energy in the perfection of trivialities: Gerald’s Zen-like ritual of raking the beach and Sara’s absorption with objects to furnish their house. As Gerald confessed, “we did nothing notable except enjoy ourselves.” But he was also a kind, cultured and exquisitely civilized man, with a serious interest in the arts and a minor talent as a painter. Instead of using his wealth selfishly for himself and his family, he used it generously for his friends and provided lavish hospitality for many of the leading French and American artists of the 1920s. Gerald was a good husband and father, and a loyal friend. When struck by tragedy, he endured it with great courage. To companions like Dos Passos, the elegant couple seemed to be the essence of perfection: “The Murphys were rich. They were goodlooking. They dressed brilliantly. They were canny about the arts. They had a knack for entertaining. They had lovely children.”

In contrast to the Princeton bachelors who had swarmed around Zelda in New York, most of the Fitzgeralds’ friends on the Riviera were married. Scott and Zelda soon became absorbed into the Murphys’ social circle, which included a core of Yale friends: Archibald MacLeish, Cole Porter, the playwrights Philip Barry and Donald Ogden Stewart (whom Fitzgerald had known in St. Paul); expatriate writers like Dos Passos and Hemingway; dancers and designers from the Russian Ballet; and abstract painters like Picasso, Miró and Juan Gris. Scottie remembered the small Braque and Picasso drawings that her parents bought, with the Murphys’ encouragement, and carried with them on their travels through Europe.

The Murphys also introduced them to another lively and cultured couple, Dick and Alice Lee Myers. Dick was a large, jolly, humorous man, an amateur musician who had studied piano with Nadia Boulanger and composed songs, a bon viveur who enjoyed the good things of life. Both Dick and Alice Lee had graduated from the University of Chicago. He had been a soldier during the war, she a nurse; and after a nine-year engagement, they had finally married in 1920. Dick worked for American Express in Paris, had a country house in Normandy, lived comfortably on his American salary and stayed on in France until 1932.

Their daughter Fanny (a lifelong friend of Scottie) remembers Scott ringing their doorbell during lunchtime and staggering into their Paris flat while drunk. When Fanny finished eating and went to her bedroom, she was surprised to find Scott in her bed. Alice, sitting next to him, tactfully explained that he was “having a little lie down.” When Scott recovered, he told Fanny that she was very pretty and she turned bright red upon receiving her first compliment.

Scott’s easy intimacy with the Myerses, allowed free expression of his bizarre sense of humor. In 1928 he annotated a clipping of the murderer Ruth Snyder, strapped into the electric chair, with a touching inscription, ostensibly written by Snyder but actually by Scott. In a similar vein, he gave the Myerses an
enlarged
edition of Marie Stopes’
Contraception
(1928), with a witty and flirtatious inscription to Alice Lee: “I felt you should have this. So that Dick should never have an awful surprise—he is too nice a fellow. Yours in Sin, but, I hope,
sincere
sin. F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
³

The Fitzgeralds and Murphys had little in common apart from the men’s Irish background and love of literature, but they had an abiding affection for each other. In contrast to the spontaneous and chaotic Fitzgeralds, the Murphys (who appear as the Cornings in Zelda’s unpublished novel
Caesar’s Things
) carefully planned every detail of their life and turned every event into a theatrical occasion: “All of the Cornings’ parties have the air of having been rehearsed. . . . He perfects ‘his garden, his gadgets, his graces, his retainers, his dependents, his children.’ ”

Scott was genuinely interested in the Murphys’ three children and named the child in “Babylon Revisited” after their daughter Honoria, who was three years older than Scottie. Noticing Honoria’s favorite red dress and favorite red flowers in her mother’s garden, and curious about her tastes, Scott sweetly asked her: “Why do you like red?” He was full of imagination at Scottie’s birthday party, for which Zelda made elaborate papier-mâché costumes and Scott—down on the floor and playing with the children—conducted a complicated war with armies of toy soldiers and used a large real beetle to play the part of an evil dragon.
⁴

Both Murphys were attracted to Zelda, who shared their passion for swimming and sunbathing, and who would pronounce “Say-reh” to make it sound like her own maiden name. Impressed by Zelda’s intensity and gracefulness, Gerald said “she had a rather powerful, hawk-like expression, very beautiful features, not classic, and extremely penetrating eyes, and a very beautiful figure, and she moved beautifully.” Like most other friends, he was struck by Zelda’s defiant behavior. At the Casino in Juan-les-Pins the exhibitionistic Zelda, who had exposed her bottom during the Hawaiian pageant in Montgomery, suddenly got up from their table, lifted her skirt above her waist and danced like Salomé before a startled audience.

Sara noticed that Zelda, who became upset if Scott was criticized, loyally came to his defense and backed him up in everything. She still quarreled with Scott. But, in contrast to their violent early rows (which were recorded in Alex McKaig’s diary), they now closed ranks and no longer fought in public. Philip Barry’s wife, Ellen, thought they managed to conceal their marriage problems, but competed openly to attract their friends’ attention. Scott would slip into the pantry to throw down a secret gin, then reappear to exclaim, “you all like Zelda better than me” and express self-pity by rolling in the dust of the garden. Ellen found Scott rather pathetic and desperately in need of reassurance.

Gerald, at times exasperated with Fitzgerald, frankly declared: “I don’t think we could have taken Scott alone.” Scott’s childish insecurity and desire to be the center of interest led him, during the 1920s, to abuse the kindness and test the friendship of the Murphys just as he had done with his fellow officers in the army. But Gerald, amazingly tolerant of Scott’s drunken antics and deeply concerned about him, was more worried than angry about his behavior. Once, when they were leaving the dance floor at the Casino, Scott deliberately fell down and expected Gerald to pick him up. But Gerald, adopting the role of a strict father with a naughty child, told him: “We’re not at Princeton, I’m not your roommate, get up yourself.” On another occasion, irritated by the formality of the Murphys’ dinner party, Scott provocatively threw a soft fig at the bare back of a titled guest and became furious when she and everyone else ignored his boorish behavior.

Scott’s worst offense, which stretched Gerald’s tolerance to the breaking point, led to temporary banishment from the Villa America. It seemed to justify Gerald’s angry statement that “he really had the most appalling sense of humor, sophomoric and—well, trashy.” Feeling that his fellow guests were not paying sufficient attention to him, Scott seemed determined to destroy the formal dinner party. He “began throwing Sara’s gold-flecked Venetian wineglasses over the garden wall. He had smashed three of them this way before Gerald stopped him. As the party was breaking up, Gerald went up to Scott (among the last to leave) and told him that he would not be welcome in their house for three weeks.”
⁵
While exiled from their parties, Scott made his presence felt by throwing a can of garbage onto the patio as the Murphys were dining.

Scott had another extremely irritating habit, which led the gentle Sara to censure him. To compensate for his lack of insight and satisfy his curiosity, he would grill friends—even when sober—with tedious and often embarrassing personal questions. Both Donald Stewart and Dos Passos had objected to this habit, which Zelda described as “nagging and asking and third-degreeing his acquaintances.” Sara, in a frank, exasperated yet sympathetic and well-intentioned letter, also criticized his naive interrogation, and used the same word as Gerald to describe his intolerable behavior: “You can’t expect anyone to like or stand a
Continual
feeling of analysis & sub-analysis, & criticism—on the whole unfriendly—such as we have felt for quite a while. It is definitely in the air,—& quite unpleasant.—It certainly detracts from any gathering. . . . We
Cannot
—Gerald & I—at our age—& stage in life—
be bothered
with Sophomoric situations—like last night.”

Sara later connected the selfishness and insensitivity in Scott’s character to a defect in his work, and bluntly told him: “consideration for other people’s feelings, opinions or even time is
Completely
left out of your makeup.—I have always told you you haven’t the faintest idea what anybody else but yourself is like. . . . Why,—for instance
should
you trample on other people’s feelings continually with things you permit yourself to say & do—owing partly to the self-indulgence of drinking too much.” Confronted with this harsh truth, Scott was forced to agree that he only knew himself: “My characters are all Scott Fitzgerald.”
⁶

Scott severely tested the Murphys’ patience. He had to prove to himself, again and again, that they would, no matter how badly he behaved, always forgive him and love him. As Gerald, moved by Scott’s charming and good-natured apologies, generously wrote in 1928: “we are very fond of you both. The fact that we don’t get on always has nothing to do with it.” Scott, who valued Gerald’s forgiveness and treasured his friendship, later praised his social charm and paid tribute to him along with his intellectual, moral and artistic mentors, Edmund Wilson, Sap Donahoe and Ernest Hemingway: “a fourth man had come to dictate my relations with other people when these relations were successful: how to do, what to say. How to make people at least momentarily happy.” In a simple, honest and moving statement, Scott told Gerald, “as a friend you have never failed me.”
⁷

In the 1920s, however, offended by the heavy drinking and bad manners that spoiled many of their fêtes, the Murphys did not recognize either Scott’s genius or his problems with Zelda. “The one we took seriously was Ernest, not Scott,” Gerald said. “I suppose it was because Ernest’s work seemed contemporary and new, and Scott’s didn’t.” Yet Scott’s work, not Ernest’s, influenced Gerald. Gerald loved giant eyes and in the late 1920s absorbed a central symbol of
The Great Gatsby,
the gigantic eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, into his own life and art. Gerald “designed a flag for his custom-made schooner,
Weatherbird,
with a schematic eye that appeared to blink as it flapped in the wind, and in 1928 he included a large human eye in his painting,
Portrait.
”
⁸

II

Minimizing the marriage problems he had portrayed in
The Beautiful and Damned
and ignoring the exemplary harmony of the Murphys, Fitzgerald told Bishop, with an odd mixture of candor and concealment: “Zelda and I sometimes indulge in terrible four-day rows that always start with a drinking party but we’re still enormously in love and about the only truly happily married people I know.” In the summer of 1924, when Scott was absorbed in
The Great Gatsby
and Zelda was bored and restless, they experienced the severest crisis of their crisis-filled marriage and forced the Murphys to witness the agonizing aftermath of Zelda’s infidelity.

In June 1924, on the beach at Saint-Raphaël, Zelda met a handsome French naval aviator, Édouard Jozan. The son of a middle-class family in Nîmes with a long military tradition, he was a year and two days older than her. The antithesis of Fitzgerald, Jozan was a dark, romantic man with curly black hair and a Latin profile. He wore a smart uniform (as Scott had done when he first courted her), was muscular and athletic, and led the small group of officers who surrounded Zelda. He regretted having missed the war, longed to smoke opium in Indochina and wrote a few things for his own pleasure.

Attracted at first to both Scott and Zelda, Jozan found them “brimming over with life. Rich and free, they brought into our little provincial circle brilliance, imagination and familiarity with a Parisian and international world to which we had no access.” But he soon focused his attention on the vibrant Zelda, “a creature who overflowed with activity, [and was] radiant with desire to take from life every chance her charm, youth and intelligence provided so abundantly.”

With no friends in Saint-Raphaël, Scott was eager as always for a bit of social life. Behaving like a man of the world, he invited Jozan to dine with them and met him at cafés in the evenings. Scott was excited and flattered when men fell in love with his wife—as long as she did not reciprocate their feelings. Left alone, with nothing to amuse her, Zelda went to the beach with Jozan while Scott stayed at home and worked on his novel.

After five years of marriage and the experience of motherhood, Zelda feared she had passed the peak of her beauty and had to prove that she was still attractive to men. She felt her life was empty, resented Scott’s successful career, wanted to make him jealous and, as
Save Me the Waltz
makes clear (Scott considered the novel proof of her adultery), was overwhelmed by the courageous Frenchman. Like the American pilots in wartime Montgomery, Jozan made daredevil flights over her luxurious villa.

Zelda took the chance that life—or Jozan—provided. A masochistic and sensual passage in her novel describes how “he drew her body against him till she felt the blades of his bones carving her own. He was bronze and smelled of the sand and sun; she felt him naked underneath the starched linen.” In her unpublished novel,
Caesar’s Things,
Zelda explains that the heroine is drawn to the Frenchman not only because he is attractive but also because she is afraid of love, and must confront and overcome her fear. “She told her husband she loved the French officer and her husband locked her up in the villa”
⁹
—just as the anxious Scott, during their turbulent courtship, kept repeating (to Zelda’s annoyance) that he now understood why they always locked up princesses in towers.