Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (35 page)

He also wrote (but did not send) a much harsher response that distinguished between Rosalind’s and her husband’s view of the matter, counterattacked more vigorously and threatened to satirize her in a story: “Your sanctimonious advice was well received. I think without doubt Newman’s instincts were to do the decent thing, but knowing the very minor quantity of humanity that you pack under that suave exterior of yours I do not doubt that you dissuaded him. Do me a single favor. Never communicate with me again in any form and I will try to resist the temptation to pass you down to posterity for what you are.”
¹⁷

Fitzgerald was willing to accept his share of responsibility for Zelda’s breakdown. But when attacked by her family, he quoted the eminent Professor Bleuler, who had wanted to keep Scott as stable as possible and had truthfully declared: “Stop blaming yourself. You might have retarded [your wife’s illness] but you couldn’t have prevented it.” As Scottie later explained to Mizener, though Fitzgerald had contributed to Zelda’s tragedy, his guilt was excessive: “Daddy knew he hadn’t
caused
it, and that no events after the age of twelve could possibly have
caused
it, but he felt a sense of guilt at having led exactly the wrong kind of life for a person with such a tendency.” In one of his most lucid letters Fitzgerald, trying to come to terms with the problem of her recrimination and his remorse, told one of Zelda’s doctors that he was being torn apart by her illness and wondered how long they would have to go on paying for their mutual destruction: “Perhaps 50% of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane—the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink. . . . Liquor on my mouth is sweet to her; I cherish her most extravagant hallucinations.”
¹⁸

While turning out a string of tales that he called “absolute junk,” amidst family strife and conflicting accusations, Fitzgerald wrote his greatest story. The deeply moving and perfectly realized “Babylon Revisited” appeared in the
Saturday Evening Post
in February 1931. The immediate inspiration for this story—which concerns his own responsibility, guilt and retribution—was Scottie’s visit, during Zelda’s illness, to her Aunt Rosalind and Uncle Newman Smith, who worked for the Guaranty Trust bank in Brussels. Rosalind and Newman Smith were the models for Marion and Lincoln Peters, just as Scottie was for Honoria Wales, who is given the unusual first name of the Murphys’ daughter. Fitzgerald could not resist the temptation to satirize Rosalind in a story that expresses his fears that she might try to take Scottie away from him.

The title of the story is complex and allusive. Babylon is not only modern Paris. It is also the decadent and corrupt city in ancient Iraq where the exiled Jews, longing to return to the Promised Land, have been enslaved. The surname of the hero, Charlie Wales, puns on “wails” and suggests the lamentation in Psalm 137 of the Jews in Babylonian captivity. Wales is not only captured and enslaved by his past. He also, by adopting “the chastened attitude of the reformed sinner,” recalls Saint Luke’s description of the return of the Prodigal Son. In this story, however, he is punished rather than rewarded for his virtuous change of character.

The opening pages vividly evoke the mood of Paris. But they are shot through with nostalgia for the happier times before the Wall Street Crash and the Depression destroyed American expatriate life. Yet Wales, like Fitzgerald, also thinks: “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.” After leaving the Ritz Bar, Wales goes to his sister-in-law’s flat on the rue Palatine (where Scott and Zelda had lived unhappily in the spring of 1929) to see his daughter. But his happiness is ruined when he encounters the “unalterable distrust” and “instinctive antipathy” of Marion Peters. At the end of section I, as Wales rejects the offer of a prostitute but treats her to supper, we learn that Honoria had been taken away from him after his wife’s death and during his treatment for alcoholism in a sanatorium.

Wales’ lunch with Honoria (who, like Scottie in 1930, is nine years old and speaks excellent French) recalls the tenderness and insight of “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s.” Their affectionate conversation is defined, as in the earlier story, by a series of adverbs—expectantly, resignedly, politely, vaguely, tranquilly—that suggest they have inevitably grown apart during their year-and-a-half separation. Their brief idyll is interrupted by the unwelcome appearance of the drunken and parasitic Duncan Shaeffer and Lorraine Quarrles, who (like the characters who feed on the vitality of Dick Diver in
Tender Is the Night
) are attracted to Wales “because he was functioning, because he was serious; they wanted to see him because he was stronger than they were now, because they wanted to draw a certain sustenance from his strength.” These intrusive friends ultimately prevent Wales from putting a little of his own character and values into his daughter “before she crystallized utterly.”

Wales’ second visit to the rue Palatine, to discuss the custody of his daughter, provides a striking contrast to the happy lunch and visit to the theater with Honoria. It also reveals the difference between Marion’s hostile and Lincoln’s sympathetic attitude. Wales insists that he has radically changed. Marion still holds him responsible for his wife’s pneumonia and death, which occurred after he had worked himself into a jealous rage and locked her out of the house during a snowstorm. Marion also resents the fact that she and Lincoln had been pinched for money while Charlie and Helen Wales were living a wildly extravagant life. Echoing Rosalind’s bitter letter to Fitzgerald, Marion exclaims: “I think if it were my child I’d rather see her [dead].” Despite her anger, Wales eventually persuades Marion that he has expiated his sins. He has become a successful businessman, has invited his sister to live with him, will hire a governess and be a responsible father. After some discussion, Marion finally agrees to let Honoria live with him.

When Wales returns to Marion’s flat for the third time, they are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Duncan and Lorraine, who have found the address he had left at the Ritz Bar. Wales desperately tries to dissociate himself from his disreputable friends and persuade them to leave the flat. But Marion—a nervous wreck who dominates her weak husband—is convinced that he has returned to his dissipated way of life. She suddenly changes her mind and refuses to surrender custody of his daughter. Her distrust has indeed been “unalterable,” and their bitter family quarrel has been, in Fitzgerald’s striking simile, “like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material.”

The emotionally compressed and extremely effective story ends, as it began, at the Ritz Bar. Its circular structure suggests that Wales is irrevocably trapped by his own past. Without the hope of reunion with his daughter to sustain him, he well may revert (as Marion suspects) to his self-destructive existence. His present life in Paris now seems as unreal as his past life had been: “The men locked their wives out in the snow because the snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money.”
¹⁹
But the snow was real enough to kill Wales’ wife, who, like Michael Furey in Joyce’s “The Dead,” died after standing outside in the snow. Repeating what Fitzgerald had said to Zelda’s doctor, Wales, who has lost more in the boom than in the bust, thinks “they couldn’t make him pay forever.” But Wales has ironically caused his own destruction by leaving his address at the bar, and the story ends in a mood of bitterness, desolation and loss. Though Charlie Wales brought himself back from bankruptcy, alcoholism and broken health, Fitzgerald was never able to achieve this kind of regeneration. Zelda remained permanently ill, and he
did
have to pay forever.

V

In the midst of bitter disputes between her husband and her family, and after more than fifteen months of treatment, Zelda seemed to recover sufficiently to be discharged from Prangins on September 15, 1931. By this time, Zelda’s breakdown had affected her appearance as well as her mind and she was no longer the great beauty she had been when she entered the clinic. Her expression, once romantic and innocent, was now cynical and embittered. Her face, having lost its softness and gentleness, was now tense, coarse and severe. Her hair was roughly cut, her clothes plain; and she now looked institutional rather than chic. Though Fitzgerald had not followed Dr. Forel’s advice about dealing with his own problems, he trusted and respected the doctor, and sought his counsel about Zelda’s treatment long after she had left his clinic.

In
Save Me the Waltz
Zelda described their return to Montgomery in late September and suggested that the sluggishness, even entropy of the place might soon overwhelm the new arrivals: “The Southern town slept soundless on the wide palette of the cotton fields. Alabama’s ears were muffled by the intense stillness as if she had entered a vacuum. Negroes, lethargic and immobile, draped themselves on the depot steps like effigies to some exhausted god of creation. The wide square, masked in velvet shadows, drowned in the lull of the South, spread like soft blotting paper under man and his heritage.” They rented a large, comfortable house at 819 Felder Avenue, near her parents’ home, and tried to settle down to a quiet, recuperative life of golf and tennis with a few old friends. Fitzgerald, suffering the steely glances of the Sayres, hoped they would relieve him of some of the anxious burden of caring for Zelda.

In November 1931 Fitzgerald, bored with Montgomery, accepted an offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to adapt
Red-Headed Woman,
a light sexual comedy, for $1,200 a week. He was particularly eager to work under the producer Irving Thalberg, who had a genius for developing stars and scripts. Thalberg had been put in charge of production at Universal Studios when he was only twenty and had created MGM with Louis Mayer in 1923. Three years younger than Fitzgerald, he was a small, sickly, middle-class Jewish boy from Brooklyn who had received very little education beyond high school. But he had rare taste, self-assurance, decisiveness, respect for excellence and a shrewd commercial sense; and was responsible for the actors, screenplays, shooting and editing of fifty films a year.

Budd Schulberg, who called Thalberg “the intellectual high priest of Hollywood,” thought he
was
superior to the other studio heads, but had more ability to use literary works than to understand them. Ring Lardner, Jr., agreed that Thalberg, though brighter and more intellectual than the other producers, was just as interested in achieving box office success and just as ruthless in getting his own way. Thalberg believed the more writers who worked on a script the better, and felt that
he
, as producer of the film, would provide the necessary unity. Fitzgerald was moved by the knowledge that Thalberg had a damaged heart and would probably die young.

In mid-December 1931, about a month after he arrived in Hollywood for the second time, Fitzgerald was invited to join a group of distinguished guests at the house of Thalberg and his actress wife, Norma Shearer. Fitzgerald’s awareness of what was at stake made him nervous. Bolstered by drink and reverting to behavior that had once endeared him to others (he had been forced to sing for company as a child), he rashly tried to upstage a roomful of movie stars with one of his old party turns: a ludicrous song called “Dog! Dog! Dog!” which he had written in the early 1920s. Buttoning up his jacket, posing as a dog lover and gesticulating wildly, he sang it with “imbecile earnestness.” The second stanza suggests the sophomoric flavor of the song:

Dog, dog—I like a good dog—

Towser or Bowser or Star—

Clean sort of pleasure—

A four-footed treasure—

And faithful as few humans are!

Here, Pup: put your paw up—

Roll over dead like a log!

Larger than a rat!

More faithful than a cat!

Dog! Dog! Dog!

Dwight Taylor, the son of the stage actress Laurette Taylor, has left a lively account of Fitzgerald’s humiliating performance. Fitzgerald first insulted the actor Robert Montgomery, who appeared at the party in riding breeches and high boots, by asking: “why didn’t you bring your horse in?” After several drinks, Fitzgerald drew attention to himself by announcing that he wanted to sing a song about a dog, and Norma Shearer’s pet was brought downstairs as a live stage prop. The other guests, surprised by his strange offer, gathered round the piano like people “at the scene of an accident” and watched him plunge into an awkward situation from which he was unable to escape:

The song was so inadequate to the occasion, or, indeed, to any occasion that I could think of, that the company stood frozen in their places, wondering how to extricate themselves from an unbearable situation. Scott seemed to sense by this time that he was not a success and small beads of perspiration appeared on his forehead. But he was no more able to break the tension than the others and he plunged into the fourth verse of this interminable song like a desperate man plunging into the rapids. . . .

I could see the little figure of Thalberg standing in a doorway at the far end of the room, with his hands plunged deep into his trouser pockets, his shoulders hunched slightly in that characteristic posture of his which seemed to be both a withdrawal and a rejection at the same time. There was a slight, not unkind smile on his lips as he looked down toward the group at the piano.
²⁰

After the party Norma Shearer graciously tried to soften the pain by sending him a telegram that said:
I
THOUGHT
YOU
WERE
ONE
OF
THE
MOST
AGREEABLE
PERSONS
AT
OUR
TEA
. But as soon as Fitzgerald sobered up, he realized he had made a fool of himself in front of a group of influential people and had irrevocably damaged his film career.