Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (22 page)

V

Fitzgerald sent
The Great Gatsby
to a number of eminent literary friends, and had the benefit of both a private and public response. On April 11, 1925, the day after the novel was published, Edmund Wilson wrote Fitzgerald, who was then on Capri, with his usual qualifications: “It is undoubtedly in some ways the best thing you have done—the best planned, the best sustained, the best written.” Four years later, in a crucial letter to the novelist Hamilton Basso, Wilson, with uncommon modesty, unfavorably contrasted his own recently published novel,
I Thought of Daisy
(their fictional heroines had the same name), to Fitzgerald’s best work of fiction. For the first time, but privately, he acknowledged Fitzgerald’s superiority, and placed his achievement on a national rather than on a merely personal level: “[I’ve been] thinking with depression how much better Scott Fitzgerald’s prose and dramatic sense were than mine. If only I’d been able to give my book the vividness and excitement, the technical accuracy, of his! Have you ever read
Gatsby?
I think it’s one of the best novels that any American of his age has done.”

Five days later Mencken agreed with Perkins’ judgment about the fine craftsmanship, but found the plot insubstantial: “
The Great Gatsby
fills me with pleasant sentiments. I think it is incomparably the best piece of work you have done. Evidences of careful workmanship are on every page. The thing is well managed, and has a fine surface. My one complaint is that the basic story is somewhat trivial—that it reduces itself, in the end, to a sort of anecdote. But God will forgive you for that.”

The following month Gertrude Stein, who had by then met Fitzgerald in Paris, offered, in her characteristically precious mode, generous praise of his extraordinary sensitivity and style: “Here we are and have read your book and it is a good book. I like the melody of your dedication [‘Once Again, To Zelda’] and it shows that you have a background of beauty and tenderness and that is a comfort. The next good thing is that you write naturally in sentences and that too is a comfort. You write naturally in sentences and one can read all of them and that among other things is a comfort. You are creating the contemporary world much as Thackeray did his in
Pendennis
and
Vanity Fair
and this isn’t a bad compliment.”
²²

In June, Edith Wharton, a Scribner’s author whom Fitzgerald greatly admired, agreed with her colleagues that he had made a notable advance on his previous work. But, like Mencken, she had a serious reservation about the incomplete characterization of Gatsby: “My present quarrel with you is only this: that to make Gatsby really Great, you ought to have given us his early career (not from the cradle—but from his first visit to the yacht, if not before) instead of a short résumé of it. That would have
situated
him & made his final tragedy a tragedy instead of a ‘fait divers’ [news item] for the morning papers.”

Hemingway, who rarely praised his contemporaries, called it “an absolutely first rate book.” And T. S. Eliot, whose
Waste Land
had influenced the desolate Valley of Ashes, provided the finest tribute in the chorus of praise: “it has interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years. . . . It seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.”
²³

All the finest authors and critics of the time had admired
The Great Gatsby,
believed that Fitzgerald had fulfilled his artistic potential and agreed that he had finally produced a great novel. But the sale of about 25,000 copies (far less than his first two novels) did not match his expectations and barely paid off his advance. The dramatic adaptation of the novel by Owen Davis opened in New York in February 1926, ran for 112 performances and earned an unexpected $18,000. It also led to the sale of the film rights for another $17,000. But after
The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald, who found it difficult to live on $36,000 a year, realized that he could no longer count on his novels to pay his considerable expenses. Two weeks after the book was published, he admitted to Perkins that he was trapped by his own extravagance. He mentioned the old conflict between art and money, and said he might have to sacrifice his career and sell out to the movies: “If [
Gatsby
] will support me with no more intervals of trash I’ll go on as a novelist. If not, I’m going to quit, come home [from Europe], go to Hollywood and learn the movie business. I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity.”

When
The Great Gatsby
failed to bring in what he thought he needed, he was once again forced to return to lucrative stories until he had banked enough money to devote himself to his novels. In April 1925, the month his novel was published, he reviewed the work he had done since completing his book the previous October, regretted his wasted talent and disgustedly told Bishop, as if self-condemnation would justify his sell-out: “I now get $2,000 a story and they grow worse and worse and my ambition is to get where I need write no more but only novels. . . . I’ve done about 10 pieces of horrible junk in the last year that I can never republish or bear to look at—cheap and without the spontaneity of my first work.” Since his fees for stories sold to the
Post
seemed to rise in inverse proportion to their merit, he now became embarrassed about publishing them. Though he always needed money, he actually asked Ober not to push the price up any higher. “I’ve gotten self-conscious,” he told his agent, “and don’t think my stuff is worth half what I get now.”

Most writers could not devote themselves to great art and to popular trash at the same time. If they did, they would have to improve or reject their inferior work. But Fitzgerald, knowing it was trash, published it for the money and condemned himself for doing so. Untroubled by Scott’s conflict and glad to see the money rolling in from any source, Zelda naively remarked: “I don’t see why Scott objected so to those
Post
stories when he got such wonderful prices for them.”
²⁴

The novelist who had written
The Great Gatsby
at the age of twenty-eight and had published seven books between 1920 and 1926 would seem to have a great career before him. But Fitzgerald succumbed to the temptation of easy money. He scarcely considered trying to live on the modest royalties of a serious novelist. Though he had earned a great deal, he and Zelda spent more than he made. Trapped in an increasingly hand-to-mouth existence, he never broke loose from the short story market and brought out only two more books during the last fourteen years of his life.

Chapter Seven

Paris and Hemingway, 1925–1926

I

Exalted by the critical success of
The Great Gatsby
but not yet aware of the disappointing sales, the Fitzgeralds left Capri in early April 1925 and joined the thirty thousand Americans who were then living in Paris. They rented a fifth-floor walk-up flat at 14 rue de Tilsitt, near the Arc de Triomphe, until the end of the year. A photograph taken at Christmas showed an elegantly dressed and apparently happy family in front of an elaborately decorated tree, a pile of presents, a low chandelier and an overflowing bookcase. Scott wore a three-piece suit and thick-soled shoes, Zelda (with slender legs but now wider at the hips) was burdened by a huge corsage, and the beribboned four-year-old Scottie, nervous about the pose, bit her lower lip and showed her knickers as they all did a chorus-line kick.

In reality the Fitzgeralds were not the secure and happy family they appeared to be. The novelist Louis Bromfield, who visited them that year, found their place ornate and pretentious: “It represented to some degree the old aspirations and a yearning for stability, but somehow it got only halfway and was neither one thing nor the other. . . . The furniture was gilt Louis XVI but a suite from the Galeries Lafayette [department store]. The wallpaper was the usual striped stuff in dull colors that went with that sort of flat. It was all rather like a furniture shop window and I always had the impression that the Fitzgeralds were camping there between two worlds.” Zelda, noting their inability to escape the wounds inflicted by her affair with Jozan, recalled that the stale flat “smelled of a church chancery because it was impossible to ventilate” and became “a perfect breeding place for the germs of bitterness they brought with them from the Riviera.” Scottie also remembered that the “apartments were always rather dark and unprepossessing, with their only redeeming feature the views over the rooftops which so fascinated my mother. The elevators were always ‘en panne’ [out of order] and I can feel the heavy chains, suspended from the ceiling, that caused such an uproarious commotion in all our toilets.”
¹

Coming to Paris allowed the Fitzgeralds to escape the scene of their unhappiness on the Riviera and the oppressive atmosphere of Fascist Italy, and to enter the world of American expatriates in this lively and stimulating city. They could sit in cafés, drink in bars, eat in restaurants, see their friends and visit literary salons. Paris enabled many American artists to escape Prohibition as well as the moral and intellectual confinement of American society, and to breathe the freer air of continental culture. But the very freedom of the city, where they could live inexpensively and create their own social roles, did not help the Fitzgeralds. This time in France deepened the rift between them, made Zelda more insecure and propelled her toward her future mental crisis. Scott continued to waste money and drink heavily, spending his time at parties, dances and nightclubs instead of concentrating on his work. His friendship with Ernest Hemingway accentuated Fitzgerald’s personal crises. But Ernest’s harsh yet truthful criticism helped Scott to define his ideas about art and to recognize that his way of life was destructive.

In October 1924, six months before the Fitzgeralds settled in Paris, Edmund Wilson had reviewed Hemingway’s pamphlet
in our time.
He told Fitzgerald about the young writer who had begun to publish his strikingly original stories and poems with small private presses in Paris. Fitzgerald’s meeting with Hemingway in the Dingo Bar in late April 1925, two weeks after the publication of
The Great Gatsby
and six months before the enlarged trade edition of
In Our Time
, led to the most important friendship of Scott’s life. He was then writing for the three million readers of the
Saturday Evening Post
while Hemingway’s work was still confined to little magazines. Fitzgerald was three years older, had gone to Princeton, published three successful novels and made a great deal of money. But Hemingway—an athlete, war veteran and foreign correspondent who had established a reputation as a dedicated writer before he had actually published anything—became his heroic and artistic ideal.

Six inches taller and forty pounds heavier than Fitzgerald, Hemingway was a literary version of the bloodied and bandaged football heroes Scott had worshiped in college. Hemingway later told Arthur Mizener, to exemplify Fitzgerald’s immaturity and naïveté, that he remembered “one time in N.Y. we were walking down Fifth Avenue and [Scott] said, ‘if only I could play foot-ball again with everything I know about it now.’ ” But Hemingway, who did not meet Fitzgerald in New York until after he had published
The Sun Also Rises
in 1926, actually attributed to Fitzgerald a statement made by his own fictional anti-hero, Robert Cohn: “I think I’d rather play football again with what I know about handling myself, now.” Hemingway was so fond of this phrase that he recycled it in
Across the River and into the Trees
(1950), published the same year as his letter to Mizener, when his hero Richard Cantwell thinks about the war: “I wish I could fight it again, he thought. Knowing what I know now.”
²

Hemingway had the masculine strength, capacity for drink, athletic prowess and experience in battle that Fitzgerald sadly lacked and desperately desired. And his impressive achievements seemed to magnify Fitzgerald’s failures. Both writers were fascinated by the war. Hemingway had suffered a traumatic wound when serving with the Red Cross in Italy while Fitzgerald had merely experienced “noncombatant’s shell shock.” Fitzgerald owned a bloodcurdling collection of photograph albums of horribly mutilated soldiers, stereopticon slides of executions and roasted aviators, and lavishly illustrated French tomes of living men whose faces had been chewed away by shrapnel. In a remarkably morbid letter of December 1927, he told Hemingway: “I have a new German war book,
Die Krieg Against Krieg
, which shows men who mislaid their faces in Picardy and the Caucasus—you can imagine how I thumb it over, my mouth fairly slathering with fascination.” The photographs in Ernst Friedrich’s
Krieg dem Kriege!
(Berlin, 1924) stimulated his pathological curiosity about the war—a subject he had ignored at Princeton and evaded in his first two novels—and allowed him to confront in his imagination scenes of violence, mutilation and death. Hemingway also took perverse pleasure in emphasizing the grisly details of war wounds in works like “The Natural History of the Dead” (1932). He too was fascinated by gruesome photos of maimed bodies. In 1935 he took and collected pictures of bloated corpses after the Matecumbe hurricane in the Florida Keys, and during the Spanish Civil War reproduced some astonishing horrors in “Dying, Well or Badly” (1938).

But the two writers had very different ideas about the use of violent experience in art. In December 1925 Hemingway defined his attraction to the intensity of war by telling Fitzgerald: “the reason you are so sore you missed the war is because war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you would have to wait a lifetime to get.” Hemingway believed you had to live the actual experience before you could write about it honestly. Fitzgerald believed (as he had to, given his lack of experience in war) that imagination could serve the artist’s purpose just as well, that “if you weren’t able to function in action you might at least be able to tell about it, because you felt the same intensity—it was a back door way out of facing reality.”