Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (24 page)

III

Some of Fitzgerald’s Paris friends found him sympathetic and convivial when in his cups, but most of them could not tolerate his alcoholism. The humorist James Thurber first met him in the summer of 1925. Imitating Fitzgerald’s series of adjectives in his obituary of Ring Lardner, Thurber affectionately described Scott with a string of contradictory words: “witty, forlorn, pathetic, romantic, worried, hopeful and despondent.” And the composer Deems Taylor, Fitzgerald’s Great Neck friend, joined him in some lively, Lardner-like pranks in a Paris nightclub. Taylor’s daughter recalled that “my father did mention several drinking sprees with Scott in Paris, and what he considered Scott’s outrageous sense of humor. I remember he said that once they were together at Zelli’s, surrounded by
poules
[whores], and Scott said, ‘Let’s get rid of these girls.’ ‘Fine,’ said my father. So Scott turned to the ladies and said, ‘I like only men. And this is my friend.’ The girls went away, all right.”
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But Hemingway, unlike Fitzgerald, did not drink until after his daily stint of writing was completed and never allowed alcohol to interfere with his work. Much of the trouble between them came from Fitzgerald’s attempts to keep up with Hemingway’s drinking. Fitzgerald’s worst qualities, Hemingway thought, were his inability to hold his liquor—a crucial test of manhood—and his compulsion to humiliate himself and others when he inevitably got drunk. Fitzgerald passed out on the very first evening they spent together, and the memory of Scott’s waxen death’s-head remained rooted in Hemingway’s mind.

Writing from Minnesota in August 1921, Fitzgerald had gloomily told Perkins: “I should like to sit down with ½ dozen chosen companions and drink myself to death.” Three years later, in his “Imaginary Conversation” between Fitzgerald and Van Wyck Brooks, Edmund Wilson had the enthusiastic Fitzgerald, then living in Great Neck, say: “Think of being able to give a stupendous house party that would go on for days and days, with everything that anybody could want to drink and a medical staff in attendance and the biggest jazz orchestras in the city alternating night and day!” Fitzgerald must have also said something like this to Hemingway, who wrote from Spain in July 1925 defining the differences in their tastes and values. He portrayed Fitzgerald as empty, faithful, snobbish and alcoholic; himself as experienced, athletic, fantastically adulterous and sober: “I wonder what your idea of heaven would be—A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families, all drinking themselves to death. . . . To me heaven would be a bull ring with me holding two
barrera
[front-row] seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children . . . the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses.”
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Hemingway thought it bad enough that Fitzgerald’s drinking was ruining his life, but found it absolutely intolerable when it began to interfere with his own sleep and work. Hemingway felt Fitzgerald did not know how to behave—either socially or morally. He would come drunk to Hemingway’s flat (as he had come to the Myers’) at any time of the day or night and insult anyone he considered inferior. When little Scottie had to pee and Hemingway’s landlord directed them to the toilet, Fitzgerald, angered by his intrusion, exclaimed: “Yes, and I’ll put your head in it too, if you’re not careful.” Though Hemingway hated Fitzgerald’s late-night visits, he used the opportunity to observe his alcoholic behavior. Later on, however, he became intensely irritated with Fitzgerald’s pranks and their friendship began to cool. He refused to tell Scott his address, lest his drunken antics endanger Hemingway’s lease, and insisted they meet only in cafés and restaurants.

Fitzgerald sometimes seemed to welcome the chance to display the worst side of his character. He was particularly unpleasant in June 1926 when he broke up an elegant party the Murphys gave to welcome the Hemingways to Antibes. Jealous of the attention paid to Hemingway, Fitzgerald threw ashtrays at the other tables, laughed hilariously and drove the disgusted Gerald away from his own festivities. In January 1933, after Hemingway had achieved great success with
A Farewell to Arms
and Fitzgerald’s career was stagnant, Scott turned up drunk in New York for a dinner with Hemingway and Edmund Wilson. Fitzgerald’s behavior shocked the two hardened drinkers, who would never have used liquor as an excuse to degrade themselves in public. Wilson thought this incident illustrated Fitzgerald’s habitual self-humiliation, his combination of childishness and cunning, which enabled him to excuse his own failings and attack others without provoking retaliation: “The last time I ever saw [Hemingway],” Wilson wrote, “I had dinner with him and Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway was now a great man and Scott was so much overcome by his greatness that he embarrassed me by his self-abasement, and he finally lay down on the restaurant floor, pretending to be unconscious but actually listening in on the conversation and from time to time needling his hero, whose weaknesses he had studied intently, with malicious little interpolations.” At regular intervals, Hemingway and Wilson would take Scott to the toilet and hold his head while he vomited. When he recovered, Scott insulted his friends and then asked if they still liked him.

Fitzgerald apologized in a letter to Wilson the following month. He completely agreed with Wilson’s interpretation of his behavior, and tried to explain how his admiration for and resentment of Hemingway brought out his self-destructive impulse: “I came to New York to get drunk and swinish and I shouldn’t have looked up you and Ernest in such a humor of impotent desperation: I assume all responsibility for all unpleasantness—with Ernest I seem to have reached a state where when we drink together I half bait, half truckle to him.”
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Unlike Hemingway, Fitzgerald was both boring and boorish when drunk. Hemingway vaguely remembered an awful night in New York when he had to bribe the doorman at the Plaza Hotel to compensate for Scott’s terrible behavior. He then told Fitzgerald that he would not dine out with him unless he stopped insulting the waiters. Writing in a confessional mood in September 1929, Fitzgerald innocently emphasized the maudlin aspect of his character that Hemingway so despised: “My latest tendency is to collapse about 11:00 and, with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven’t a friend in the world.”

Four years later Fitzgerald told Perkins, who often received Scott’s confidences and Ernest’s condemnations, that he felt compelled to live up to the defensive persona he had established with Hemingway. Ernest “has long convinced himself that I am an incurable alcoholic, due to the fact that we almost always meet at parties. I am
his
alcoholic just like Ring is mine and do not want to disillusion him.” Yet alcohol had formed a bond between Scott and Ring (a “good” drinker) that never existed with Ernest. Fitzgerald later tried to equate his drinking with Hemingway’s: “An inferiority complex comes simply from not feeling you’re doing the best you can—and Ernest’s ‘drink’ was simply a form of this.” But their tolerance for alcohol was very different. Fitzgerald got drunk and passed out after only a few drinks; Hemingway could down several bottles of wine without showing the effects. Their striking similarities (which Fitzgerald hinted at) did not emerge until the end of Hemingway’s life, when he began to drink and damage himself as much as Fitzgerald had done. In 1930 Fitzgerald told Zelda’s doctor: “Give up strong drink permanently I will. Bind myself to forswear wine forever I cannot.” In 1957 Hemingway told MacLeish: “Wine I never thought anybody could take away from you. But they can.”
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Fitzgerald’s alcoholism not only alienated his friends and interfered with his writing, but also limited his understanding and choked off his lifeline to fictional material. “How could he know people except on the surface,” Hemingway (repeating Sara Murphy’s criticism) asked the critic Malcolm Cowley, “when he never fucked anybody, nobody told him anything except as an answer to a question and he was always too drunk late at night to remember what anybody really said.” He believed that Fitzgerald’s troubles were self-inflicted and that he almost took pride in his shameless defeat. In his gloomier moments of self-analysis, Scott agreed with Ernest and admitted: “At the last crisis, I knew I had no real courage, perseverance or self-respect.”

Though Fitzgerald ruthlessly observed and accurately portrayed his own alcoholism in
Tender Is the Night,
“The Crack-Up,” the Pat Hobby stories and “The Lost Decade,” he never convincingly explained what compelled him to drink. He never found the cause of his addiction and never (until the last year of his life) brought it under control. Though his alcoholism got worse after Zelda’s mental breakdown in 1930, she was also partly responsible for his drinking before she became ill. Instead of restraining him for his own good, Zelda encouraged him for her own pleasure. She was, Hemingway believed, insanely jealous of Scott’s work. Whenever Fitzgerald decided to write instead of drink, she treated him as if he were a killjoy or spoilsport. “He would start to work,” Hemingway wrote, “and as soon as he was working well Zelda would begin complaining about how bored she was and get him off on another drunken party.”
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Fitzgerald drank to heighten his feelings and put himself in the proper mood for a party; to attract attention, charm, upset, disrupt and shock. As William James observed: “Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. . . . It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core.” Liquor inspired Fitzgerald’s conviviality, extinguished his remorse and compensated for his feelings of inferiority. It prolonged his state of irresponsibility, provided useful if temporary comfort and gave the illusion of happiness. “Drink made past happy things contemporary with the present,” he explained in
Tender Is the Night,
“as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.” The best explanation of the social motives for drinking and of the futile attempt to transform himself into a pleasure-giving Gerald Murphy appeared in “A New Leaf,” a minor story of 1931: “I found that with a few drinks I got expansive and somehow had the ability to please people, and the idea turned my head. Then I began to take a whole lot of drinks to keep going and have everybody think I was wonderful. Well, I got plastered a lot and quarreled with most of my friends.”
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Alcohol prevented Fitzgerald from writing. But it also helped compensate for physical and emotional exhaustion, gave him courage to return to his work and enhanced the power of his imagination. “Drink heightens feeling,” he declared. “When I drink it heightens my emotions and I put them in a story.” He found liquor a relief from the oppressive strain of writing as well as an anodyne from the even greater torments of creative sterility.

Most often, however, Fitzgerald sought relief in alcoholic binges during times of emotional stress. He drank to keep up morale—to shield himself from torturing memories, from insupportable loneliness and from a dread of impending doom. During the 1930s alcohol allowed him to forget for a time his guilt about Zelda, his wasted potential, disappointing expeditions to Hollywood, weakening powers, declining sales, lack of money and psychological depression. Like William Styron, Fitzgerald used alcohol both “as the magical conduit to fantasy and euphoria and . . . as a means to calm the anxiety and incipient dread that I had hidden away for so long.”

Well aware of the terrible effects of drink, Fitzgerald was unable to control his addiction and saw himself in the tradition of self-destructive American writers that had been initiated by Poe. When Scottie was in college he gave her dire warnings about liquor and threatened to go on his greatest nonstop binge if she ever touched a drink before she was twenty. When on the wagon, he would give his friends little lectures. “Drinking is slow death,” he warned Robert Benchley, who promptly replied: “who’s in a hurry?”
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Fitzgerald even collected photographs put out by a temperance society that showed the terrible effects of alcohol on the inner organs, and would morbidly study them—as he had pored over the ghastly photos of the war wounded—and joke about them in a menacing fashion.

Fitzgerald’s alcoholism led to self-deception, violence and change of personality. His habit of needling people while drunk became a way to test how much Dos Passos, the Murphys, Hemingway and Edmund Wilson really liked him. If they could tolerate his worst behavior, then they were truly his friends. But most people were not very tolerant; and Fitzgerald kept a list of “Snubs,” many of which occurred when he was drunk, that stretched over two decades. Scottie, whose childhood was dominated by alcoholic scenes, called him a boring, megalomaniacal and
mean
drunk. Liquor also loosened his tongue and released his sexual inhibitions. “When he was drunk,” Sheilah Graham remarked, “he would have had an affair with a tree.” Louis Bromfield gave a vivid account of Fitzgerald’s alcoholic transformation and terrible behavior, which continued until he suddenly collapsed and passed out: “Like many others who got the name of being drunkards, Scott simply couldn’t drink. One cocktail and he was off. It seemed to affect him as much as five or six drinks affected Hemingway and myself. Immediately he was out of control and there was only one end . . . that he became thoroughly drunk, and like many Irishmen, when he became drunk he usually became very disagreeable and rude and quarrelsome, as if all his resentments were released at once.”

With Fitzgerald, as with Poe, there was a medical explanation for his alcoholism. Both writers suffered from hypoglycemia, or lack of sugar in the blood, which interfered with the supply of glucose to the brain and gave Fitzgerald an abnormal craving, when he was not drinking, for chocolate and Coca-Cola. This disease made it difficult for him to metabolize and tolerate alcohol, which always had an immediate and catastrophic effect on his system. Fitzgerald manifested many of the symptoms of hypoglycemia: insomnia, pallor and fatigue as well as aggressive speech, excessive sweating, visual blurring, muscular tremor, a sense of uncertainty, increasing confusion and, finally, unconsciousness.
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Hemingway might have been more compassionate about Fitzgerald’s alcoholism had he known that it had a physical cause.