Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (39 page)

21. D
R
. O
SCAR
F
OREL
WITH
HIS
FATHER
, A
UGUSTE
,
AND
HIS
SON
, A
RMAND
,
C
. 1930:

The exceptionally talented and versatile Forel was a tall, thin, well-dressed and highly cultivated gentleman.
(Armand Forel)

22. F
ITZGERALD
AND
Z
ELDA
, B
ALTIMORE
, 1932:

Zelda looked ravaged and Scott anxious after her mental breakdown.
(Princeton University Library)

23. F
ITZGERALD
AND
S
COTTIE
, B
ALTIMORE
, 1935:

“Don’t let any unreliable Virginia boys take my pet around. Scottie hasn’t got three sisters, she has only got me.”
(Harold Ober Associates)

24. I
RVING
T
HALBERG
AND
N
ORMA
S
HEARER
T
HALBERG
,
MID
-1930s:

“The intellectual high priest of Hollywood” had rare taste, self-assurance, decisiveness and respect for excellence.

25. S
HEILAH
G
RAHAM
,
C
. 1930:

“So much innocence and so much predatory toughness [went] side by side behind this gentle English voice.”

Chapter Ten

La Paix and
Tender Is the Night
, 1932–1934

I

In May 1932, a month before Zelda was discharged from Phipps, Fitzgerald found La Paix, a fifteen-room Victorian house on a large estate in Rodgers Forge, near Towson, just north of Baltimore. The dim, cavernous, rather run-down old place had gables, an open front porch and reddish brown paint fading on the gingerbread trimming. It also had a small swimming pond, a tennis court and a patch of grass, circled by a gravel driveway, that doubled as a boxing ring. Zelda captured the mournful mood of the house in an idiosyncratic letter to Max Perkins: “We have a soft shady place here that’s like a paintless playhouse abandoned when the family grew up. It’s surrounded by apologetic trees and warning meadows and creaking insects and is gutted of its aura by many comfortable bedrooms which do not have to be floated up to on alcoholic inflation past cupolas and cornices as did the ones at Ellerslie.”

The Fitzgeralds’ retreat to the quiet, isolated La Paix was, as Zelda remarked, a notable contrast to the wild weekend parties at Ellerslie. In the fall of 1933 Fitzgerald said they had dined out only four times in the last two years. Zelda remained near Phipps for frequent consultations with her doctors, and the Turnbull family, who owned the property and lived in the main house on the estate, provided another stabilizing influence. Bayard Turnbull, a wealthy architect and graduate of Johns Hopkins, was (according to his younger daughter) a rather distant Victorian gentleman who did not drink and was careful about money. He disapproved of Fitzgerald. But his wife, Margaret, a proper but cultured woman, shared Scott’s interest in literature and became a good friend. The Turnbulls had three children—Eleanor, Frances and the eleven-year-old Andrew, who was the same age as Scottie.

Frances liked Fitzgerald, found him charming and felt he had the rare ability, when he spoke to her, of conveying the impression that she was the most important person in the world. But young Andrew—who became a surrogate son and later wrote a fine biography of Fitzgerald—was closest to Scott. They tossed around a football, went to Princeton football games and lunched at the Cottage Club, played erratic tennis, boxed with squashy gloves on the front lawn, shot a hairtrigger rifle, practiced card tricks, arranged battles with French lead soldiers, read and discussed books, and performed original plays. Fitzgerald even showed Andrew, after an unusually heavy snowstorm, how to make a little igloo—a Baltimore “ice palace” cut by a Minnesota pro. “He was the inventor, the creator, the tireless impresario,” Andrew wrote, “who brightened our days and made other adult company seem dull and profitless.”
¹

When Fitzgerald moved to Baltimore he visited his old friend H. L. Mencken on several occasions, and asked him to recommend a bootlegger and a doctor (in that logical order). But Mencken, late in life, had married Sara Haardt, a girlhood friend of Zelda from Montgomery. Since Sara was an invalid and the Menckens had to live a quiet life, he disapproved of Fitzgerald’s drunken binges and eventually stopped seeing him. Though Fitzgerald continued to drink heavily, he also hired an efficient secretary, Isabel Owens, worked steadily on
Tender Is the Night
and finally completed the book at La Paix.

In February 1933, when T. S. Eliot was lecturing on the Metaphysical poets at Johns Hopkins University, the Turnbulls invited Fitzgerald to dine with him at their house.
The Waste Land
had influenced
The Great Gatsby,
and Eliot had warmly praised the novel. Fitzgerald behaved himself on this august occasion and their meeting was a success. As he told Edmund Wilson, “T. S. Eliot and I had an afternoon and evening together last week. I read him some of his poems and he seemed to think they were pretty good. I liked him fine.” But he was also somewhat disappointed, as he had been with John Galsworthy and Compton Mackenzie, when encountering the great man in person, and added that the forty-four-year-old Eliot was “very broken and sad & shrunk inside.”

Eliot inscribed a copy of
Ash-Wednesday
“with the author’s homage,” and later provided a statement that was used on the dust jacket of
Tender Is the Night:
“I have been waiting impatiently for another book by Mr. Scott Fitzgerald with more eagerness and curiosity than I should feel towards the work of any of his contemporaries except that of Mr. Ernest Hemingway.” Eliot, a director of Faber & Faber, was interested in publishing the English edition of the novel but wary of poaching on his rival. So he wrote Fitzgerald a sly letter that left the initiative to him: “Chatto and Windus is a good firm, and it would in any case be contrary to publishing ethics to attempt to seduce you away from them, but of course you are quite free in this matter, it is up to you to send the manuscript first to whatever firm you elect.”
²
In the end Scribner’s decided to stay with Chatto & Windus, which had published
The Great Gatsby
in England.

Margaret Turnbull not only introduced Fitzgerald to Eliot, but also advised him about how to bring up the adolescent Scottie, who was then a day student at a local prep school. Zelda’s frequent hospitalizations and absorption in her own illness made it difficult for her to express interest in Scottie. Her withdrawal from her husband and daughter placed the burden of caring for Scottie entirely on Fitzgerald, who had always felt that Scottie was more his daughter than Zelda’s. In any case, she had always neglected her domestic duties (a constant source of contention), and revealed her very limited conception of maternal responsibility by telling Scott: “All you
really
have to do for Scottie is see that she does not go to Bryn Mawr [School] in dirty blouses. Also, she will not voluntarily wash her ears.” When his younger sister Annabel was fourteen, Scott had written her a long letter instructing her about how to attract boys. But Fitzgerald, who felt he had been spoiled and weakened by his mother, was usually strict and puritanical with Scottie—though he would also neglect her when he was drinking. He tried to make up to Scottie for Zelda’s lack of affection and to compensate for his own lack of self-discipline by directing Scottie’s behavior, social life and education.

Fitzgerald encouraged Scottie to invite her friends to the house and then became irritated when their noise interfered with his work. He also got annoyed when the bored and exhausted Scottie kept falling asleep during his “background briefings” on Walter Scott’s medieval novel,
Ivanhoe.
“Very little of my extra-curricular education took,” Scottie later wrote, “some of it backfired, in fact, for I was made to recite so much Keats and Shelley that I came to look up on them as personal enemies.”

Margaret “Peaches” Finney, the daughter of Fitzgerald’s Princeton friend Eben, was Scottie’s closest friend at Bryn Mawr School. She first saw Fitzgerald in his “office,” which consisted solely of a desk in the corner and a chair in the middle of a large, bare room. He made her feel awkward by asking her to sit in the chair, telling Scottie to leave the room and then questioning Peaches about what she was going to do when she grew up. In contrast to Andrew Turnbull, who idolized Fitzgerald, Peaches felt that he never should have had children, that he did not understand them or know how to reach them. Fitzgerald’s intense love for Scottie and anxiety about her future often quelled his sense of fun and zest for play where his own child was concerned. His rigid attitudes and harsh judgments on her behavior and academic performance were to cause her unhappiness later on.

When Honoria Murphy and then Peaches Finney asked Scottie if she was embarrassed by her parents’ violent quarrels and bizarre conduct, she ingenuously replied: “Oh, no! That’s mommy and daddy. All parents are like that.” Scottie would pretend that Zelda’s insanity and Fitzgerald’s drunkenness were simply not there, and this protective veneer allowed her to distance herself from their dreadful problems. When things became intolerable at home, Scottie would move in with the Finneys. Fitzgerald’s secretary, Isabel Owens, the Turnbulls and later on the Obers also helped in times of crisis and provided an element of domestic tranquillity in Scottie’s life. Despite all this, Scottie loved her parents very much. She once told Peaches that she seemed immune to their malign influence and remarked on how strange it was that such a mundane child could be the product of two fanciful Peter Pans.
³

In
Tender Is the Night
Fitzgerald ignored his neglect of his daughter and defended his strictness with Scottie, whom he portrayed as Topsy Diver: “She was nine and very fair and exquisitely made like Nicole, and in the past Dick had worried about that. . . . [She was] not let off breaches of good conduct—‘Either one learns politeness at home,’ Dick said, ‘or the world teaches it to you with a whip and you get hurt in the process. What do I care whether Topsy “adores” me or not? I’m not bringing her up to be my wife.’ ”