At 10:00 A.M. on May 3, 1924, armed with seventeen pieces of luggage and a full set of Encyclopedia Britannica, F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife Zelda, and their two-year-old daughter Scottie departed from Pier 58 on the North River in New York for Cherbourg, France, on board the SS Minnewaska. The ship’s brochure promised “richly decorated public rooms and staterooms” and a full orchestra; some cabins came with private sitting room and bath. There was no steerage; the Minnewaska was entirely first-class, which is how the Fitzgeralds preferred things. After four years, off and on, in New York, Scott and Zelda had tired of dissipating across Manhattan and Long Island Sound. They would leave that side of paradise for France, where Americans were rumored to live well on the strength of the postwar dollar.
When they boarded the Minnewaska, Fitzgerald had with him a few draft chapters of his third novel. In the summer of 1922 he had written his editor, Max Perkins, his initial ideas about his next book: “Its locale will be the middle west and New York of 1885 I think. It will concern less superlative beauties than I run to usually & will be centered on a smaller period of time. It will have a catholic element.” But he was also working on a play and the high-paying magazine stories that (almost) supported his family in their luxurious lifestyle. And then there were the parties: an art deco world of kaleidoscopic cocktails in basement dives, rooftop nightclubs, and estates in the forested hills of Long Island.
In April 1924 Fitzgerald told Perkins: “much of what I wrote last summer was good but it was so interrupted that it was ragged & in approaching it from a new angle I’ve had to discard a lot of it.” The new angle most likely involved abandoning 1885 and the “catholic element,” and shifting to a modern setting. It was time to put the devil and temptation behind him, and get back to work. He’d spent four months writing enough magazine stories to save seven thousand dollars, and he and Zelda were sailing for Europe, where he was going to write his new novel; it would be “purely creative work—not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere yet radiant world,” “a consciously artistic achievement.” Leaving for Europe meant they’d “escaped from extravagance and clamor and from all the wild extremes among which we had dwelled for five hectic years,” he said later that year. “We were going to the Old World to find a new rhythm for our lives, with a true conviction that we had left our old selves behind forever.” Their old selves still seemed in fine fettle on board the Minnewaska, however: they drank champagne cocktails and had to apologize to an old lady they kept awake.
When they landed, they made their way south to the Riviera, ending up at St. Raphaël, which Scott described as “a red little town built close to the sea, with gay red-roofed houses and an air of repressed carnival about it; carnival that would venture forth into the streets before night.” They bought a car that they were assured was six horsepower—although “the age of the horses was not stated”—and in nearby Valescure found Villa Marie, clean and cool, on a hill overlooking the town. “It was what we had been looking for all along. There was a summerhouse and a sand pile and two bathrooms and roses for breakfast and a gardener,” who called Fitzgerald “milord.”
His existence having acquired this gratifyingly seigneurial tone for the bargain price of about eighty dollars a month, Fitzgerald settled down to serious work on his novel. With his neat stack of loose white paper in front of him on the table, a pile of freshly sharpened pencils ready, he began to remember the Long Island atmosphere of two years before—to bring its familiar material to life under unfamiliar azure skies.
At the Villa Marie, the breeze floated up from the blue-drenched sea, while her husband’s artistic sensibilities “rose in wild stimulation on the barbaric juxtapositions of the Mediterranean morning,” Zelda wrote later. Serrated terra-cotta cliffs stretched down to the water; twisted silver trees made pointed gestures among the dusty roses. A winding gravel drive extended back out into the world, and a terrace of blue-and-white Moroccan tiles overlooked the sea. Lemon, olive, and pine trees mingled with the scent of roses in the air. They drank Graves Kressmann at lunch, and got into political arguments with the English nurse.
While he composed, Fitzgerald tended to pace around the room, trying words and phrases aloud, impelled by the urgency of putting language into motion, as if the ideal words lurked in the corners, awaiting discovery. Most of the novel’s earliest drafts have been lost, and Fitzgerald didn’t date the subsequent ones, but the novel appears to have been composed roughly in sequence. As Fitzgerald imagined its opening scenes, he would not have found it difficult to summon the swampy heat of a New York summer two years earlier, while staring out over the baked-clay cliff tops of southern France.
Fitzgerald had always been a fast, extravagant writer, propelled by humor and his zest for words into shooting off in all directions. Now he was writing more carefully than ever before, sculpting prose out of a past so recent it was hardly past at all. “My novel grows more and more extraordinary,” Scott wrote a friend. “I feel absolutely self-sufficient & I have a perfect hollow craving for loneliness, that has increased for three years in some arithmetical progression & I’m going to satisfy it at last.” His fierce appetite for the gorgeous was being nourished by his romantic surroundings; white palaces glittered over the water and glass doors opened over terraces to which they were loosely bound by a breeze blowing through, as he evoked the mansions of Long Island. Blue after blue stretched into the sea of the happy future. He would call his novel, he thought, “Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires.”