Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself, leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.—F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to his daughter, April 27, 1940
April 3, 1920. Biting winds whipped through the streets and neighborhoods of New York City making last-minute preparations difficult for those celebrating Easter the following day. As they made plans and bought food for the celebration, shoppers on West Forty-Second Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues passed by the remains of a large industrial building that had been literally ripped apart by a booming explosion the evening before. The force of the charge, set off by a storehouse of flash powder at a commercial photography studio, basically split the structure down the middle, like tearing apart a squat telephone book. The resulting fire caused even more damage as the winds pushed the flames toward other buildings in the vicinity not built to withstand fire like contemporary structures.
Witnesses to the blast and other onlookers met a rain of shattered glass and debris. In an adjoining five-story apartment building, the force of the explosion blew one unlucky tenant—Emma Corrigan—from her chair by the window and onto the floor. Others faced life-threatening circumstances as the fire spread. At least five engine companies, several fire trucks, and dozens of police officers responded to the devastation in an attempt to control the chaos. Although fire inspectors immediately realized that flash powder caused the fire, they were puzzled about the exact reason the magnesium exploded, since it did not spontaneously combust. Eventually the explosion, fire, and containment efforts landed nine men in the Bellevue Hospital emergency room.
Despite the pandemonium, several heroes emerged from the wreckage. A reporter from the New York Times learned that Robert White, a street cleaner, and bystander Emil Moller ran into the burning building and dragged out three injured men, ensuring that no one would die at the scene. Later, two police officers—simply identified as Nevin and Raddo in newspaper reports—risked their lives by alerting nearby residents of a fire in their building. When they got to the top floor, they found a mother and her three children overcome by smoke. Using blankets, the two men carried the family to safety, which set off a large cheer from the neighboring crowds.[1]
Not far away from the remains of that odd chemical explosion, a young couple in some respects almost as fiery and volatile stood before Father William B. Martin in the vestry of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and became husband and wife. For twenty-three-year-old Scott Fitzgerald and nineteen-year-old Zelda Sayre the day marked a tumultuous on-again, off-again courtship that ended when Scott beat the odds and seemed destined for literary fame on the sales of his first novel, This Side of Paradise. Leaving the church directly after the ceremony, which neither bride’s nor groom’s parents attended, and without holding a traditional postwedding party, the young couple honeymooned at the Biltmore Hotel on Forty-Third Street.[2]
Finally, after what seemed an eternity and through agonizing bouts of self-doubt and pain, Fitzgerald got the rich girl he pined over. Like the flash powder that lit up the night sky, their lives would explode across American popular culture as they became the “it” couple of the 1920s and global celebrities. Young, wealthy, always at the ready for a photo or a quote, the Fitzgeralds rode stardom across the 1920s. Their union—and the endless rounds of negotiations and scheming that led to it—set in motion a whirlwind gallop around the globe.
On the day of their wedding, though, the young couple probably did not have thoughts of explosions, or fires, or storybook endings of everyday people turned into heroes on their minds. In her last letter to the future groom, less than a week before the event, Zelda talked about “living happily every afterward” and called Scott “a necessity and a luxury and a darling, precious lover.”[3] There is innocence in these phrases that validated both her love for him and her youthful exuberance. From today’s more pessimistic perspective it is easy to overlook their youth and decided lack of wisdom. In 1920, neither Scott nor his teenage bride could be easily labeled “worldwise.”
While the news of the day may have passed them by, given the prominence of the occasion, Scott and Zelda did have stardom firmly set in front of them. Caught up in the final capture of his girl and the spectacular sales numbers he received from Scribner’s for This Side of Paradise, Scott wired her just several days before the wedding: “We will be awfully nervous until it is over and would get no rest by waiting until Monday[.] First edition of the book is sold out.”[4] The two events—publication and the wedding—were intimately intertwined, just as the compressed sentences in the wire message accidently revealed. Unlike his future character Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald used his newfound wealth to get his lost love before one of her many Southern suitors beat him to the punch. Luckily for him, no Tom Buchanan—masculine, athletic, and ultrarich—stood in the way.
***
The reader cannot fully understand the birth of The Great Gatsby without grasping Fitzgerald’s pre-Gatsby life and circumstances. In hindsight, perhaps too much is made of Scott and Zelda’s celebrity status and its negative consequences. However, we also do not want to play down this standing, either. As scholar Kirk Curnutt explains, Fitzgerald is one of a small handful of “American writers whose life stories threaten to overshadow their art.” According to Curnutt, most people do not know anything about him outside of Gatsby or Tender Is the Night (1934), but they can describe chunks of his life, intertwining it with the highlights and lowlights of the chaotic 1920s.[5]
Yet there is another perspective here, too: How many writers are well known enough that not one, but two novels are still remembered at all these many decades later? So, we cannot completely divorce Fitzgerald from the episodes in his life or his era, even though the thesis at the heart of this book is that Gatsby has transcended its time to become a cultural touchstone.
From any vantage point, Fitzgerald became a famous writer after the publication of This Side of Paradise and he enhanced this reputation by publishing widely in slick national magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, then at or near the top of the magazine circulation figures. His success and broad acclaim increased his fame and wealth, which in turn accentuated the positive and negative aspects of his life, whether circulating among the rich to gain background knowledge for what would become Gatsby or, alternatively, engaging in drunken hijinks with Zelda in hotels around the world.
This chapter sets the stage for the publication of Gatsby and its consequences by examining Fitzgerald as he roared across the early 1920s, living out his Jazz Age dreams with Zelda and a growing circle of famous friends and acquaintances both in the United States and Europe. During this period, Fitzgerald not only juggled his family life and celebrity, but dealt with the fulfilling of his own aspirations of becoming a literary great, not just a writer who sold a lot of books. What we will also see in this early stage in the young author’s career are the internal and external struggles he confronted as he searched for solid footing as a husband and father, as well as an international celebrity and ambitious artist.
While there is a great deal of truth to the conventional image of the Fitzgeralds as dapper young sophisticate and beautiful flapper queen, it is important to remember that few prototypes existed for those newly wealthy or famous to follow. The fame business was young when they struck it big. As such, the couple really flew solo—too young, rich, and outrageous to see the bigger picture or understand the long-term consequences of their actions.
Fitzgerald himself longed for fame and celebrity and achieved it, not realizing the costs the victory would claim or the concomitant hit his literary reputation would take as a result. In retrospect, the greatest challenge the young couple faced was a lack of wisdom. Without positive role models for handling the intense scrutiny, their own personal demons were let loose, which resulted in a meteoric rise and spectacular fall.
As representatives of the Jazz Age and participants in the era’s decadence, Scott and Zelda held court in a game that was rigged. What they could not have foreseen is that the spectacular times would end almost as quickly as they began, which initiated a long spiral downward as the world faced economic devastation and world war. In a mere fifteen years from the publication of Gatsby, Fitzgerald would be dead and Zelda the victim of incurable mental illness. If one simply looks at the photographs taken of the couple at each end of this spectrum, the images are shocking. From young and beautiful, Scott and Zelda aged far beyond their years, their physical brokenness seemingly matching their mental exhaustion.
Looking back on Fitzgerald’s experience as a struggling writer, one is struck by his dedication to succeeding as a means of winning young Zelda Sayre’s hand. After his discharge at the end of the Great War, he went to New York City, taking a job in an advertising agency for ninety dollars a month and writing stories, essays, and poetry at night in an attempt to gain a foothold in the literary world. In the approximately four months in New York, he accumulated some 122 rejections from a variety of magazines, which speaks to his determination. However, Fitzgerald also understood that the ad business would not be a road to quick wealth, either. Zelda was not going to marry someone making so little.[6]
The amazing aspect during this period is that the guy who basically flunked out of Princeton and barely survived the rigors of military life suddenly found a sense of purpose that enabled his talent to shine through via the spotlight of a newfound work ethic. Though he left the agency after Zelda broke off the engagement and went home to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with his parents, Fitzgerald continued to rewrite his novel, then titled The Romantic Egotist. He did not let the stacks of rejections or the fact that the novel failed to sell in its initial form stop him from his quest.
In the army, Fitzgerald had written the first draft furiously, convinced that he would be killed in World War I having “left no mark on the world,” so he pushed forth, propelled by “consuming ambition,” explaining, “My whole heart was concentrated upon my book.”[7] In another burst, this time fueled by his desire to win Zelda before a wealthier suitor swooped in to claim her heart, Fitzgerald rewrote the novel in about eight weeks. By mid-September, he got word that Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins accepted the revised, retitled This Side of Paradise. The energy of the approval enabled the young man to concentrate his efforts on short stories, selling nine quickly, including his first to the Saturday Evening Post in November 1919. By February the following year, he had six more accepted by the high-paying glossy.[8]
Scribner’s published Fitzgerald’s first novel on March 26, 1920, which it sold for $1.75. The publisher soon realized that it had a hit book on its hands. The three-thousand-copy first printing sold out in three days and the novel would eventually sell more than fifty thousand by the end of the following year.[9] Although not universally praised, Paradise served as a launchpad for Fitzgerald. Chicago Tribune reviewer Burton Rascoe, for example, exclaimed that the young author wrote “literature . . . [that] bears the impress, it seems to me, of genius.” Realizing Fitzgerald’s role in the wider culture, Rascoe explains, “It is the only adequate study that we have had of the contemporary American in adolescence and young manhood.”[10]
According to scholar Morris Dickstein, “Like Lord Byron in 1812, he awoke and found himself famous. His commercial and literary careers were launched.”[11] In short order, Fitzgerald followed up his literary success with marrying Zelda as discussed earlier. Given the then-shocking content of This Side of Paradise, combined with the youthful beauty and vitality of the couple, and the emerging youth-focused market, Scott found himself in demand as a spokesman for the new generation. Although he admits to being baffled by this role, he relished it and pursued it with vigor. As his fame skyrocketed, Fitzgerald transformed from “a” hot writer to “the” representative writer of his age.[12]
The dashing young novelist and real-life beautiful flapper seemed typecast for stardom
in the early 1920s. In the tradition of many celebrities both then and now, Scott
and Zelda realized that they could get as much, if not more, attention for acting
silly and juvenile. According to Matthew J. Bruccoli, from their initial stay in New
York City, “they were interviewed; they rode on the roofs of taxis; they jumped into
fountains; there was always a party to go to.”[13] After bouncing around the city, generally wearing out their welcome at whatever
hotel they holed up in, the Fitz-
geralds rented a house in Westport, Connecticut, so Scott could get back to the business
of writing. Given the phenomenal sales of Paradise, Scribner’s published Fitzgerald’s first short story collection in September 1920
with the hip title Flappers and Philosophers. Although critics were mixed in the reviews, it sold well and solidified Fitzgerald’s
standing at the time with the general reading public. The young couple seemed on top
of the world.
Despite the public displays of giddiness and devil-may-care attitude, however, Fitzgerald’s insecurities got him into trouble—from drinking too much and making a spectacle of himself to worrying about what shenanigans Zelda instigated when she left him alone to write and went off searching for amusement. Throughout their courtship, she held the power. After the wedding, however, Scott’s budding fame pushed him to the forefront. The situation grew increasingly volatile. Zelda could not play second fiddle and may have used her more dominant personality to keep Scott in check. Making him jealous and using his friends as pawns offset his blossoming celebrity. The cracks that would eventually expand into full-sized chasms started appearing in their marriage, from wandering or being forced from one hotel or rental to the next to the ever-present money issues.
Neither the birth of their daughter Frances Scott “Scottie” Fitzgerald on October 26, 1921, nor the publication of Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, in early 1922 seemed to get the couple back on track. Over time, even the most fun-loving antics run their course, and the Fitzgeralds grew more and more desperate in their pranks and hijinks. Eventually, they started to alienate their friends and acquaintances, starting a cycle of alcohol-fueled fighting that led to later apologies and reversals. Their manic energy pushed the envelope; each crazy lark had to be outdone by one or the other on the next binge or drunken outing.
Fitzgerald, already experiencing the money problems that would plague him for the
rest of his life, thought that Beautiful would sell well enough to alleviate his economic woes and provide more time for writing
novels. He had taken an advance of $5,643, which meant that much of his royalties
from book sales would go toward repaying the debt before he reaped any additional
gain. Eventually Beautiful would sell in the forty- to fifty-thousand-copy range, a figure that would have delighted
most authors, but not one with expectations (and debts) as high as Fitz-
gerald’s.[14] Caught up in the competing maelstroms of being a famous writer, a new father, young
husband, and celebrity, Fitzgerald probably did not realize the different trajectories
these moves necessitated. There were too many dichotomies, whether the major conflict
between the time required to write and the urge to drink and party or more minute
challenges, like balancing the household economy.
Literary admirers, detractors, and those who fell somewhere in the middle all judged each new Fitzgerald novel or story with the voracity of a lion pride on raw meat. Given Fitzgerald’s internal demons and sensitivity, this reaction had consequences on his psyche and output. Even his friends, like H. L. Mencken, eagerly pointed to his development and areas where they felt the young author remained stunted. Shockingly, it may have been Fitzgerald’s Princeton classmate Edmund Wilson (who the novelist once called his “intellectual compass”) who served up the harshest criticism, while also using his insider status against the writer.
Wilson, for example, in an unsigned overview of Fitzgerald’s career for Bookman magazine, prattled on about Fitzgerald not understanding or being capable of using his talents. The review originally indicted the young writer for his difficulties with alcohol, but Wilson cut those sections after showing a draft to Fitzgerald who pleaded with him to take it out. Wilson’s abrasive critique of Fitzgerald’s intellect, rather than merely his writing, set the tone for much critical abuse he would face. Bruccoli concludes:
The effects not only damaged Fitzgerald’s contemporary reputation but perhaps also impeded the fulfillment of his genius by depriving him of the critical respect he sought. The popular or mythic view of Fitzgerald still retains the idea that he threw away his genius in orgiastic revelry.[15]
When one considers the kind of critical bashing that Wilson and others served up, combined with the picture painted by the burgeoning tabloid culture, it is no wonder that Fitzgerald’s image in many respects outweighs his standing in literary history. Scholar Ruth Prigozy explains, “A public greedy for stories about celebrity hijinks relished the dramatic antics of the Fitzgeralds which gossip columnists painted in expectedly sensational colors.”[16] The eventual fall, then, in terms of Fitzgerald’s deteriorating health and addictions and Zelda’s insanity and continual hospitalization served to cement the two as fallen stars of the Roaring Twenties, a physical manifestation of the wasteland left in the wake of the indulgence of the era, soon swept away by the Great Depression and Second World War.
Yet one also cannot oversell the hype that both Fitzgeralds relished or that they worked diligently to attract more. Bruccoli wisely concludes: “They were collaborators in extravagance and dissipation.”[17] It seems clear, in retrospect, that the young couple desperately needed parental guidance or mentorship that may have left them better able to traverse the uncharted rapids they entered. But these kinds of relationships did not exist for them, nor is it clear that they wanted to change their ways. Most of Fitzgerald’s male friends were individuals he looked up to or admired, while Zelda found most women boring. In the mostly carefree flirting of the day, it is no stretch either to say that many of Fitzgerald’s friends were smitten with Zelda’s dashing looks and carefree persona. Before the contemporary days of Oprah Winfrey Show celebrity confessionals and the modern-day rehab culture, the Fitzgeralds bopped along, letting alcohol and the next party guide them.
On paper in the early 1920s, Fitzgerald’s ambition to become one of the world’s greats outpaced what he had yet accomplished. His books sold well and the instant fame that came via Paradise and the slick magazines pushed him into a place on the nation’s consciousness. Many reviewers had even anointed Fitzgerald as one to watch or a potential superstar. It would have been a stretch, however, to chart his path to that point and say confidently that here stood a candidate that might just write the greatest novel of all time. If the public and others knew the extent of his drunken binges at the time, they may have more seriously wondered if he would outlive the 1920s.
Despite the production of “popular” work (rather than novels considered “literary”), Fitzgerald sensed something in himself that would lead to literary fame. According to Matthew J. Bruccoli, the young author felt he could achieve both: “to make a great deal of money while bringing him artistic satisfaction and acclaim.”[18] In mid-1922, while living in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, Fitzgerald wrote to his Scribner’s editor Max Perkins that he had begun conceptualizing a new novel. His initial thoughts centered on a story set in New York City and the Midwest in the late 1800s. A month later, in July, he told Perkins, “I want to write something new—something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned.” From this bold declaration, one clearly sees the highlights of Gatsby’s style and potency, although it would be a torturous several years before the young writer could complete his masterwork.[19]
In fall 1922, Fitzgerald returned to a central theme in his fiction in the short story “Winter Dreams,” which explored the love between a poor young man and a rich girl he desired. Combined with another move, this time to Great Neck, New York, which placed him near and among great wealth on Long Island, the novel in progress that would become Gatsby began to take a different shape. Although Fitzgerald considered himself a novelist, the manuscript took a backseat to more pressing concerns, which meant that the young writer had to churn out short story after short story to pay for the family’s lavish lifestyle in the last months of 1923 and early 1924. The Vegetable, a play he had written and expended a great deal of energy creating, turned out to be a flop, which also diverted his attention from the novel and left him $5,000 in debt.[20]
When Fitzgerald emerged from the financial difficulties in early 1924, he and Zelda decided to leave Long Island for the less costly France, where they hoped they could stretch their money. The nonstop parties and extravagant lifestyle of Great Neck left them burned out physically and emotionally and without much money to their names, despite all Scott’s hard work. Other crises and tragedies were on the horizon, despite the couple’s optimism about the kind of lives they would live in Europe, but they left the United States full of hope.
Far from American shores, Fitzgerald nonetheless labored over the complexity of his
new novel. This book would stand apart from his earlier novels and stamp him as one
of the world’s great literary stars, not just another “popular” author who rode on
the back of sales and publicity successes. Every decision about scene, place, and
character seemed to hang the entire novel in the balance, yet he carried forth, throwing
himself completely into its creation. Reality also pounded its way into Fitz-
gerald’s work life when Zelda began an affair with a suave French aviator named Edouard
Jozan. The relationship scarred Scott forever, changing the way he felt about his
wife and the way she lived.[21]
Despite the intrusion of Zelda’s affair, Fitzgerald reported to Perkins that progress continued on the new novel, which meant that he was not drinking and instead settling into a lifestyle based on hard work. Clearly, as he drafted and redrafted the story, Fitzgerald must have felt delighted in working on the manuscript. He realized he was onto something big.
Later, after the first working draft emerged, the young writer spent about two months in September and October 1924 reworking the typed version, essentially rewriting much of the book. Even long after most writers stop fiddling with the text and the publishers demand as much, Fitzgerald continued to revise. At the galley stage, in early 1925, he still worked on the structure of Gatsby and worried about the title right up to publication on April 10, 1925. In some ways, the constant revision and uncertainty regarding the title foreshadowed the general public’s reaction to the novel.[22]
What the work of textual analysts and bibliographers reveals, however, is the level of determination and dedication Fitzgerald put in the revision process. Bruccoli states, “The duplicate set of reworked galleys retained by Fitzgerald reveals that The Great Gatsby achieved greatness through extensive proof revisions.”[23]
Although he faced intense pressures resulting from keeping the family afloat financially, the fallout of Zelda’s affairs, and his dissatisfaction with expatriate life, Fitzgerald found the strength to bring Gatsby to life in spite of this bedlam. The portrait of Fitzgerald as a hardworking young writer stands at odds with the popular culture picture of him swinging from the ceiling on gold-gilded chandeliers. Thankfully, the work of scholars like Bruccoli provides a truer appraisal of the writer’s process and its eventual outcome.
Fitzgerald understood the potential negative consequences of writing a novel that skirted potentially controversial topics, including illicit sex, multiple adulteries, and murder/suicide. These challenges kept magazine editors who feared public backlash from serializing the book. Fitzgerald thought sales would offset the lack of an additional revenue stream from a monthly, but serialization would have at least alleviated some of his financial burden.
Despite this misstep, the author possessed a keen understanding of the general reading public, as evidenced by his phenomenal success as a short story writer for some of the nation’s most popular magazines and early literary success with his first two novels. Fitzgerald’s knowledge may have in part led to the bold (often-quoted and basically accurate) declaration: “An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the school masters of ever afterward.”[24] Although there were challenges, Fitzgerald believed the book would sell, raising his boat financially and as a literary star.
Yet, ten days after publication, Perkins cabled his young star with the cold, hard truth: “Sales situation doubtful excellent reviews.”[25] The first printing of 20,870 copies did not sell quickly and the second printing some four months later totaled an additional 3,000 copies. Bruccoli’s research indicates the vast gap between Gatsby and 1925’s best-sellers, which sold in the hundred-thousand-copy range. A mere two weeks after Gatsby appeared, Fitzgerald penned Perkins a note blaming the commercial doldrums on the poor title and the fact that female readers were not interested in a novel without positive female characters.[26]
Given his hard work crafting the novel, past successes, and the overwhelmingly positive response by Perkins, Fitzgerald’s dreams of financial and critical success were smashed upon the rocks when the novel did not fly off the bookshelves. After expending so much, the mediocre sales figures struck a horrible blow to Fitzgerald’s ego and financial status. Almost any freelance writer would have felt the liability of a novel that did not sell, particularly when the time spent on it meant diverting one’s efforts from more lucrative work. With Fitzgerald dancing gingerly on and around the financial break-even point, never really getting himself righted, it became clear that he would not get the kind of boost from Gatsby that would enable him to concentrate on writing novels full-time, particularly given his and Zelda’s lifestyle.
Though the novel did not sell the way Fitzgerald wanted, he did receive ringing endorsements from some of the era’s greatest literary lights, including T. S. Eliot, Edith Wharton, and Gertrude Stein. Some of his other friends, such as Ernest Hemingway and H. L. Mencken, were less enthusiastic about specific aspects of the work but still found the novel fresh, innovative, and a positive step for Fitzgerald.
***
The enduring portrait of Fitzgerald as sage of the Roaring Twenties and flapper king grew out of a combination of astounding early success and both self-sustained and external marketing campaigns that kept the young star in the spotlight with his beautiful, offbeat wife Zelda. Fitzgerald represented the bawdiness of the 1920s and the growing press corps eagerly anointed him its shining star. He welcomed the crown and gave the press sound bites and content that filled newspapers and magazines with insight into the young generation fueling the Jazz Age.
However, the image of Scott and Zelda as obnoxious, drunken clowns who were more annoying
than charming does not hold up to the sentiments of those who knew the young couple.
Edmund Wilson, Fitz-
gerald’s longtime friend (and otherwise famous curmudgeon), for example, wrote about
their mutual appeal. Scott and Zelda were able to walk the fine line between drunken
revelry and playfulness in the early 1920s, he believed. Wilson highlighted the couple’s
“spontaneity, charm, and good looks.”[27] Like most stars, the Fitzgeralds delighted in the attention, which took on a life
of its own.
In retrospect, some of the stories and legends enlarged as time passed. Yet it is certain from the reminisces of people who were around them then that the young couple often put on a show, thus earning an inordinate amount of press interest. Some of these hijinks were alcohol fueled and spontaneous, but no small amount took place to entertain those around them and to give the press its nourishment.
The failure of Gatsby, though, was serious business and sent Fitz-
gerald into a tailspin. When the novel did not live up to the sales figures he imagined,
the resulting depression and sadness depleted the young man of both the energy and
confidence necessary to sustain the heights he now haunted as one of the very best
writers of his age. The personal letters about the book’s success buoyed him for some
time and served to validate his notions of the novel’s literary value, but doubts
crept in as the reality of low sales figures forced him back to pumping out short
stories to stay afloat financially. All Fitzgerald’s hopes were in one basket, so
much so that to conceive of a different life left him deflated.
The difficulty with Fitzgerald is in attempting to distinguish between the writer as product and the works he produced. Once the publicity machine grabbed hold of Scott and Zelda it kept them in its firm grasp until the times changed and they were no longer useful, just like the fame business has gobbled up and eventually discarded celebrities for centuries. From all the information available to the researcher, it seems as if there is simply no way to extricate these sides of Fitzgerald.
Writing just two years after Fitzgerald’s death, the great American literary critic Alfred Kazin realized that the author’s legend and his storytelling went hand in hand, saying, “The legend actually was his life, as he was its most native voice and signal victim; and his own career was one of its great stories, perhaps its central story.”[28] Similarly, as writer Scott Donaldson explains, both were extremely young and immature: “Like an insecure child he needed approval. Like a willful one she demanded attention. Both sought to occupy the center of the stage, sometimes in collaboration but often in competition.”[29] Fitzgerald as husband, writer, celebrity, drunk, friend, and foe are contained within this human vessel, each facet essential in his complete essence.
We all know (at least roughly) the trajectory of the Fitzgeralds’ lives, so it is impossible to approach them completely objectively. However, this chapter asks that the reader try to imagine both the Roaring Twenties and the Fitzgeralds as they intersected, which resulted in an explosion of wealth, fame, and notoriety that would fuel the Fitzgerald legend to the present day. They are more than flapper queen and dandy king of the age. Their lives are a case study in numerous traits that demonstrate the importance of culture in American life.
Scott’s experiences in total invigorated the world he recreated and reported on in Gatsby. That novel’s greatness germinated in his own life preceding it, as well as his deep commitment to what this crazy world of the 1920s might mean for his own generation and those in the future.
“Fire and Explosion Rock 42D Street,” New York Times, April 3, 1920, 1.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2nd revised ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 128.
Quoted in Nancy Milford, Zelda: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 61–62.
Quoted in Milford, Zelda: A Biography, 62.
Kirk Curnutt, ed., A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 84–85.
Fitzgerald, Afternoon of an Author, 85.
Fitzgerald, Afternoon of an Author, 85.
Jackson R. Bryer, “F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940: A Brief Biography,” in A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Kirk Curnutt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 29.
From Fitzgerald’s personal clipping file, in Matthew Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr, eds., The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 59.
Morris Dickstein, A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 78.
Bryer, “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” 30.
Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 131.
Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 159.
Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 161.
Ruth Prigozy, “Introduction: Scott, Zelda, and the Culture of Celebrity,” in The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Ruth Prigozy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11.
Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 189.
Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 141.
Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, eds., Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1980), 112.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), x–xv.
Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, 178.
For a detailed examination of Fitzgerald’s writing and revising process, please see Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: A Documentary Volume, vol. 219 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Group, 2000), 7, 67–75.
Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, xix.
Bruccoli, Smith, and Kerr, Romantic Egoists, 240.
Quoted in Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, xx.
Quoted in Fitzgerald, Gatsby, ed. Bruccoli, xx–xxi.
Quoted in Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 132.
Alfred Kazin and Ted Solotaroff, Alfred Kazin’s America: Critical and Personal Writings (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 117.
Quoted in Scott Donaldson, Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Congdon & Weed, 1983), 66.
Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth . . . it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were—and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” 1931
In an ironic, cruel twist of fate for a writer foisted into superstardom on the back of the growing media fascination with celebrity, a tabloid reporter named Michel Mok wrote a hatchet job article on Fitzgerald in September 1936 for the New York Post. The piece accentuated Fitzgerald’s drunkenness, loss of faith, and that he existed in “broken health.”[1] Mok put Fitzgerald back in the public spotlight, but as a pathetic, washed-up version of the 1920s golden boy. Adding to the insult, Time used the story, too, which gave it national circulation.
Fitzgerald, in despair over the long-term consequences of the articles on what was left of his literary reputation, reportedly attempted suicide by taking an overdose of morphine, but he threw it up.[2] The incident, on one hand, took place at Fitzgerald’s own doing. His past reputation as the main party animal of the Jazz Age and ongoing alcoholism combined to lead to the ghost of a man that Mok profiled.
Yet the writer also took advantage of Fitzgerald, emphasizing the sensational aspects by playing up to the writer’s vanities and woes to create a kind of confessional situation. This is the kind of celebrity gossip that passed for news in the 1930s and would continue to grow into a mega-industry as the century progressed. So typical of Fitzgerald’s later life, the incident with the Mok profile symbolized the mix of his own ills, the reputation that hung like an anchor around his neck, and an outside force that blindsided him. What we certainly know at this point in his life, whatever he had been when he wrote Gatsby or what he dreamed he would become after its publication was long gone.
The hard-charging, frenetic lifestyle of the 1920s and 1930s turned Fitzgerald old beyond his years. Although still a young man, Fitzgerald’s poor health from 1935 to 1937—when only thirty-nine to forty-one years old—had dire consequences. He could not physically write much of the time, which compounded his writer’s block and put him further behind financially. Nearly destitute and living under the umbrella of constant pain, Fitzgerald basically snapped, declaring in early 1937 to his agent Harold Ober, “My biggest loss is confidence.”[3] The numerous letters to Ober from this period are filled with Fitzgerald’s anxiety, pleas for loans to keep the writer afloat, and a swelling angst that seems to consume his every moment.
The simple fact, if there could be such a thing when applied to Fitz-
gerald, is that he faced immense stress for this entire fifteen-year time frame. The
clues that divulge the high levels of strain are apparent across his extant letters,
in the nonfiction essays he penned, and at the core of Tender Is the Night, the novel from this period that many scholars and experts consider his best work.
That book’s main character, Dr. Dick Diver, experiences a catastrophic rise and fall,
with Fitzgerald drawing quite a bit of this material from his own life.
What the popular culture caricatures of Fitzgerald as a scion of the Roaring Twenties or washed-out bum of the 1930s often forget, however, is that the responsibility for Zelda and Scottie remained, regardless of his mental state or ability to work. He realized as much, writing his friend Ceci Taylor in early 1937 about quitting drinking and refocusing on work, which he found “more appalling than ever,” but “Scottie must be educated + Zelda can’t starve.”[4] Yes, it is true that if he could have actually gotten off the booze, he may have alleviated much of his personal misery, but he did not leave them or disband the family completely by abandoning Zelda to a state-run sanitarium or forcing Scottie to go to a public school.
Perhaps the best words to describe the final phase of Fitzgerald’s life are unsettled and anxious. In retrospect, it seems that he traipsed from one locale to the next, either searching for a better treatment facility for Zelda or in an attempt to focus on his work from a place that would be more affordable. Even when he went west to Hollywood and had a high-paying screenwriting job that would enable him to erase his debts, Fitzgerald’s letters and notes are filled with angst. He complained about the energy it took to work for the studio, which then left him too drained to work on his long fiction. Also, always lurking in the background was the threat of alcoholism and the next binge that might put him out of commission.
Ultimately, when examining the last decade and a half of Fitzgerald’s life, the amount of tragedy and sadness he encountered is nearly overwhelming for the contemporary researcher. Here stood a great writer, one of the best America ever produced, reduced to groveling to Hollywood studio hacks and megalomaniacs for his meal ticket because he could not make ends meet otherwise. At the same time, he exuded a certain type of nobility that few could comprehend—the utter mental collapse of his true love and soul mate—compounded by their daughter Scottie’s racing through adolescence and young adulthood. Fitzgerald had to be a single parent in an era that did not openly acknowledge that status, especially if the father were the remaining parent. Furthermore, the responsibility for supporting the entire rickety structure financially never abated. To do so, Fitzgerald often turned to “loans” from his close business associates and friends, which embarrassed him and broke his spirit a little on each subsequent request.
Perhaps America’s version of Mozart, but for the literary world, Fitzgerald burned brightly, creating some of the great masterpieces in history. Yet one cannot wonder if the price he paid would have satisfied him in the end. The wonderful writing abides, but he traded it for his life. Unfortunately, what the contemporary cultural scholar also notes is that if Fitzgerald would have come of age later in American history and had a similar career, he would have been celebrated for many of the chances he took, such as penning the memoir-ish pieces for Esquire. It is hard to imagine Fitzgerald making more money since he made so much as a short story writer and selling his work to Hollywood and Broadway, but there would have been other help to get him righted emotionally, physically, and in supporting Zelda.
Yes, I believe that Fitzgerald would have been okay, if he could have just lived through the excesses of the Jazz Age. His bill came due, however, and at his death, his friend Dorothy Parker echoed the owl-eyed man at Gatsby’s funeral, muttering, “The poor son of a bitch.”[5]
***
From the outside, Fitzgerald’s decline seemed somewhat quick, though over the ensuing decades, as the details leaked into the mainstream, observers understood the numerous challenges he faced. Yet, despite the memoirs of those close to him and indications that the writer had turned a corner prior to his death, the national mind-set continued to hold on to the 1920s Fitzgerald—young, handsome, and swinging from chandeliers without letting a drop of bootleg champagne spill. The impression of Scott the life of the party took hold and grew into legend; according to literary critic Clive James, “He became the focal point of numberless journalistic stories about the waste of a literary talent.”[6]
This chapter observes Fitzgerald’s decline after the commercial failure of Gatsby, the agonizing publication of Tender in 1934, and carries through to his death in late 1940. The emphasis here is that Fitzgerald, like much of the nation, experienced a roller coaster of highs and lows in this era, compounded at times by national and international forces he could not control, like the onset of the Great Depression. Other calamities centered on his own family and intimate circumstances. Sometimes the demons at his doorstep appeared out of the blue, while at times he stood welcoming them, fanning the chaos with drink and delirium.
It is hard not to conclude that the failure of Gatsby, a work Fitzgerald knew in his soul to be a masterpiece, served up a knockout blow that the young man never overcame. The commercial failure, after he had pinned his family’s hopes and dreams on its success, ignited a fifteen-year slide that ultimately led to his early demise.
In March 1930 a bone-chilling wind assaulted two thousand men standing outside an Episcopal church on Twenty-Ninth Street in Manhattan. The long line twisted its way up Fifth Avenue, filled with people who had heard that the church dispensed food to the poor. A quarter of them were turned away when the rations ran out.
The sight of these needy New Yorkers unnerved the city’s residents. Many of those waiting for food were clearly in anguish over accepting charity to survive. Those filling bread lines and taking handouts carried a deep psychological burden as unwilling participants in the economic breakdown. They did not want to take charity, wanted to work, and believed they would be rewarded for this attitude. Most who received welfare aid, from clothing to food and medical supplies, did so reluctantly.
The idea that the national economy could collapse at the hands of Wall Street corruption left the country mentally whipped. Money stood at the center of American culture in the 1920s, and the era’s brokers and investment bankers reigned as society’s new heroes—the kind of man that Nick Carraway might have become if he had stayed in New York. Wall Street fluctuations, hot stocks, and trading exploits served as juicy gossip.
The growing consumer culture required massive infusions of money. The impulse to live it up necessitated an ever-growing cash flow. Thus, many in the newly moneyed class relied on stocks and a line of credit to finance their lifestyles. The banking industry held a great deal of power determining the economic fortunes of the nation. The “get rich quick” mentality—similar to the go-go days of the Internet bubble in the late 1990s—lured people into the market who hoped for the big score that would take them away from everyday toil. World War I bond drives demonstrated the power of investment and the idea of a quick hit that would put an investor on easy street. Large commercial banks willingly facilitated the transactions. Win or lose, big banks and brokerages received their cut.
The national media also followed Wall Street closely, trumpeting its successes. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal kept tabs on the stock market’s movers and shakers. Despite the widespread panic gripping the nation after the collapse, newspapers across the region brimmed with reassuring stories about the long-term viability of the market system.
Wall Street represented a new religion in the United States. Its priests were the men who ran Wall Street’s successful brokerages and investment banks. They formed a sort of exclusive gentleman’s club, each belonging to the same clubs, vacationing together, and mainly living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. These are the men one can imagine attending Gatsby’s galas, chugging out to Long Island in fancy new automobiles with beautiful women in tow. The ultimate club was the New York Stock Exchange, with a mere 1,100 seats. The only way in was to purchase an existing seat from one of the members or investment banks that owned the seat. The men who controlled Wall Street had deep ties to the Northeast. Most had attended the private schools and elite colleges dotting the region.
While Wall Street’s leaders breezed through an insulated world high above the trading floor, an entirely different kind of trader fueled the stock overspeculation that would lead to the crash. Many traders only cared about stock fluctuation, borrowing enough money to buy and sell, then quickly moving the stock to make money on the difference. Timing, not knowledge, mattered most. By the summer of 1929, stock market value hit $67 billion, up from $27 billion two years earlier.
The economic free fall that took place in and after October 1929 decimated the American economy. Within three years, 75 percent of the value of all securities—a whopping $90 billion—disappeared. The year after the crash, more than twenty-six thousand businesses went bankrupt, surpassed in 1931 by more than twenty-eight thousand failures. In December 1930, the Bank of the United States went bankrupt, wiping out the funds of about four hundred thousand depositors.
As debilitating as the stock market crash was to the nation’s economy, the crushing blow came from the way it demoralized the American people. The collapse shocked everyone and shook people’s faith in the national economic system. Businessmen and corporations, many headquartered in New York, reacted by making drastic cuts, while anxious consumers virtually stopped spending on anything beyond bare necessities. Millions of workers lost their jobs as businesses desperately cut their operations to the bare essentials. Construction in New York City, for example, came to a near halt as 64 percent of construction workers were laid off soon after the stock market collapsed. Unemployment in 1929 was slightly over 3 percent, but by 1932 the figure had reached 24 percent. Millions more involuntarily worked in part-time roles.
Two years after the crash, some two hundred thousand New Yorkers faced eviction for failure to pay rent. Many who were not evicted sold off their valuables so they could raise the money. Others trekked from apartment to apartment. If their furniture had been purchased on credit, many owners left it behind when they could no longer make payments. In Philadelphia some 1,300 evictions occurred per month in the year following the crash.
The psychological toll unemployment took on the American people caused high levels of stress and anxiety. While some took to the streets to sell whatever they could gather, others turned to crime in an effort to find food. In Pittsburgh, a man stole a loaf of bread to feed his children, and then later hanged himself in shame. In New York City, hundreds of thousands of unemployed or underemployed workers turned to soup kitchens. By October 1933, New York City counted 1.25 million people on relief. Even more telling is that another one million were eligible for relief but did not accept it. Some six thousand New Yorkers attempted to make ends meet by selling apples on the streets. But by the end of 1931, most street vendors were gone. Grocery store sales dropped by 50 percent during the Depression. Many urban dwellers scoured garbage cans and dumps looking for food. Studies estimated that 65 percent of the African American children in Harlem were plagued by malnutrition during the era.
Tens of thousands of people in New York City were forced to live on the streets or in shantytowns located along the banks of the East River and the Hudson River. These clusters of makeshift abodes were dubbed “Hoovervilles”—a backhanded tribute to the president. The city’s largest camp was in Central Park. Ironically, the Central Park shantytown became a tourist attraction and featured daily performances by an unemployed tightrope walker and other out-of-work artists.
Even the rich were not immune to the harsh realities of the Great Depression. From his Manhattan palace, steel king Charles M. Schwab openly admitted his fear. By the early 1930s, the situation was so glum that it became fashionable among the wealthy to brag about how much they had lost in the crash. Even professions one would think were insulated from economic hardship were affected during the Depression. In Brooklyn, one-third of all doctors were forced out of business.
When people learned of the role business leaders had played in the stock market crash, they quickly changed their formerly favorable opinions to outright scorn. The Wall Street collapse proved that these exalted financial leaders did not know what they were talking about in the years leading up to that fateful October as they continually hyped the market. Remarkably, in the days immediately after the collapse, the nation’s business leaders (Sears, AT&T, and General Motors, among others) issued cheery reports about swelling sales and stability in an attempt to bolster public confidence.
There is no way to divorce Fitzgerald’s fate from the Wall Street crash and ensuing Depression. As the veritable poster boy for the glamour of the Roaring Twenties, the inevitable end of those glory days meant that Fitzgerald would suffer, just as countless millions of Americans were forced to do more with less just to survive. What we can see now, looking back on his life and era, is that Fitzgerald could not have anticipated how the ground beneath his family’s feet would shift as a result of the economic collapse.
At first, the chilling retribution would not come professionally, since Fitzgerald continued to make an inordinate amount of money via short fiction sales (some $31,500 in 1931 from stories, out of a total of $37,599).[7] However, Zelda experienced her first breakdown in April 1930 while the family resided in Paris. For almost a year and a half she remained in treatment facilities in Switzerland. She recovered enough to sail to America in September 1931, but the cost of getting her first-rate help put an indelible strain on their financial status.
Punctuating the impact of the Depression, Fitzgerald’s main outlet, the Saturday Evening Post, dropped his payment in 1932, with its editors complaining that his work was not his best. In retrospect, it seems clear that the preoccupation with Zelda’s mental health and becoming a single parent to Scottie weighed on him, which reflected in his writing. His earnings that year dropped to $15,832 and precipitated additional rough financial times ahead.[8]
Fitzgerald continued to struggle with the relentless bills and costs associated with his new lifestyle alone and supporting Zelda from afar. He would not recover until Hollywood threw him a lifeline in mid-1937. Yet, in this strange way of life, Fitzgerald faced the kinds of twists and unyielding challenges that gripped families across the nation. The economic crisis caused the idea of what a family could or should be to change. Ironically, it took World War II to get the nation back on track financially and the postwar period to get people interested in recreating the notion of family life, though that era faced unprecedented changes as well.
Family roles were muddled when the traditional male role of breadwinner disappeared. Merely keeping families together during economic duress became difficult as people lost their jobs and homes. Some couples delayed weddings due to the uncertainty, while others put off divorce because they could not afford to separate. For many children, the Depression altered their role in maintaining family order. Children had to grow up faster during the crisis; many were forced to forgo formal schooling and get a job at an early age while also often taking on parental roles to provide solace to those within their own families.
Domestic violence and child abuse increased during the Depression. Family disputes over finances, food, and other basic necessities caused tensions to increase. Men and boys often simply fled the home out of embarrassment, frustration, or the inability to cope with the new economic reality. Thousands of people, young and old, became traveling hobos, riding the rails in search of work or some form of relief.
The economic pressure on male breadwinners intensified. Men’s self-image, which had been strengthened by the nation’s victory in World War I and the subsequent prosperity of the 1920s, took a beating during the Great Depression. In many cases, men arrived at work to find the doors locked, with little or no explanation. Some families were able to make ends meet by having the wife and children work, a situation that could be humiliating for the husband and father. Studies, such those undertaken by sociologist Mirra Komarovsky for her book The Unemployed Man and His Family (1940), revealed that many unemployed or underemployed men suffered from impotence. The birthrate also slipped as unemployment grew.
During the 1920s, many Americans had begun to equate self-worth with material possessions. Therefore, when times turned bad, people felt worthless. The nation’s traditional optimistic outlook was replaced by the reality of economic chaos and confusion. Even among those fortunate or wealthy enough to avoid economic disruption, the Great Depression took a psychological toll. Psychiatrists’ offices were packed in the early 1930s with those from the upper classes attempting to cope with the economic mayhem. The confidence the average American held up as tenet of the nation’s greatness in the Roaring 1920s fell to a general malaise and inertia as unemployment grew and depression set in. People waited for something to happen, spinning in circles as they fought to survive.
Suicide became a part of everyday conversation, particularly as the stories of bankrupt Wall Street traders jumping from tall office buildings entered the public mind-set. Urban legend regarding mass suicides during the Great Depression far outstripped reality. However, the national suicide rate did increase in late 1929 and continued to increase until 1933—from 13.9 per 100,000 to an all-time high of 17.4 per 100,000.
In one widely publicized example, James J. Riordan, president of the New York County Trust Company, killed himself in November 1929 because of the deep shame he felt over losing other people’s money, as well as his own loss of funds. Fearing that news of his suicide would cause a run on the bank’s deposits, the board of directors did not release a public statement until after the bank closed on Saturday afternoon.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal began to reverse some of the psychological damage inflicted by the Great Depression. The New Deal relief programs helped people to realize that the collapse was societal, and not the result of individual failure. The New Deal enabled many Americans to deflect some of the guilt they felt for their personal economic failure.
The entertainment industry helped divert people’s attention during the Great Depression. Hollywood actually entered a boom period, with about eighty million people going to the movies each week. Popular radio entertainers, including Bing Crosby, George Burns, and Gracie Allen, also helped distract Americans from their difficulties. Fitzgerald, who always loved the movies, would eventually end his personal financial challenges by going west to Hollywood on a $1,250-a-week contract with MGM. As scholar Scott Donaldson notes, “In 1938 MGM paid him a total of $58,750. Fitzgerald made a fortune from writing. He also spent it all.”[9] Yet one must consider that a significant amount of money went for Zelda’s care. Her sanitarium expenses were not cheap, and Fitzgerald attempted to find her good care, not run-of-the-mill facilities.
In the long nine-year span between Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald’s life bobbed and bounded around the globe and across the United States, while he and Zelda experienced the travails of stars whose celebrity sputtered. During the long lull he struggled with a number of physical and professional ills, from intensifications of his alcoholism and other acute ailments to his freelance rate dropping and markets going out of business as the Depression churned.
Even though Tender is now considered either Fitzgerald’s best or second-best work, its publication did not spark huge sales or even provide the author with enough money to support himself or his family. Records obtained from Scribner’s by Elaine P. Maimon reveal that in 1936, just two years after Tender, the publisher only sold 210 books from the Fitzgerald catalog.[10] The forces conspiring against Fitzgerald included the deepening economic depression that made buying books a frivolous endeavor for many Americans. In addition, Fitzgerald’s poster-boy standing as a symbol of the Roaring Twenties worked against him and made Tender seem antiquated.
Tender is a novel quite unlike Gatsby, and is an even darker examination of the lead character’s (Dr. Dick Diver) deterioration based on his own shortcomings and the forces around him that are beyond his control, including the manipulations of the wealthy Warren family he marries into. For the purposes of this book, perhaps the most critical aspect of Tender in relation to Gatsby is that in his post-Gatsby state, Fitzgerald became in many respects more autobiographical, which provides readers a way to think about and consider his spiraling state in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
There are two overt assumptions related to Tender’s autobiographical impulses, first that Diver is basically a stand-in for Fitzgerald, but drawing on himself even more than in earlier work. Second, a common scholarly belief is that Fitzgerald’s portrayal of the Diver marriage is wholly autobiographical. On the former, Scott Donaldson claims, “This close identification of author and character accounts for a critical shortcoming in this brilliant novel . . . reviewers thought Diver’s decline and his rapid acceptance of it unconvincing.”[11] In other words, Fitzgerald played with his self-image on the page but could not accept that Diver could be disliked, just as he could not stand when people did not like him. The gap is reflected in the novel. In terms of the marriage, scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli claims, “Zelda Fitzgerald’s illness supplied more than factual background for Tender: it provided the emotional focus of the novel. Diver’s response to Nicole’s illness derives from Fitzgerald’s feelings about his wife’s collapse and relapses.”[12]
Like Gatsby, money plays a central role in Tender and is at the core of the Diver marriage. The Warren riches are an international calling card, giving Nicole Diver’s sister Baby Warren tremendous power for a woman in the 1920s. The Warren name alone “caused a psychological metamorphosis in people.”[13] However, Nicole’s illness inhibits Baby, so she tells Dick about her plan to marry her younger sister off to a doctor in Chicago, essentially buying him as a husband and caretaker. The arrangement will enable Baby to play out her role as a proper aristocrat without constantly worrying about Nicole’s whereabouts or state of mind.
Dick is disgusted by the notion of a husband “purchased in the intellectual stockyards of the South Side of Chicago.”[14] Since Baby outlines the idea to him, Dick incorrectly believes she is targeting him and using the Chicago example to goad him into action. Later, Baby’s request for Dick to escort Nicole back to the clinic is seen as another attempt to “throw us together.”[15] Interestingly, one of the major tenets of the book is the Warren family’s “ownership” of Dick and how that manifests itself throughout their marriage. However, that entire notion is built on deception and misinterpretation. The all-knowing narrator fills the reader in, saying, “He was wrong; Baby Warren had no such intentions. . . . Doctor Diver was not the sort of medical man she could envisage in the family. She only wanted to use him innocently as a convenience.”[16]
Fitzgerald is virtually setting up the characters (and the reader) for a fall. The entire marriage is predicated on this notion of ownership, but Fitzgerald reveals that it was the wrong assumption for Dick to make. The misdirection also enables Baby to maintain a powerful role within the Diver marriage by controlling the money flow. Whenever Dick or Nicole wants cash, they must ask Baby, all based on his perception that he is the husband/caretaker Baby implied she would find for Nicole. For her part, Nicole remains passive when it comes to money. She knows that the Warrens are wealthy, but she grants Baby control in this area.
In Dick’s mind, Nicole used the money against him, not only using it to “own him,” but also to draw him away from his work.[17] Dick sees it as a plot wearing him down to the point where he feels that he can do nothing but sit and watch time pass. He would not accept the notion of being owned, but his thin mental defense could not overcome the onslaught of Warren wealth and the tag team of Nicole and Baby always tacitly insisting as much.
If one believes Ernest Hemingway’s recollection of Fitzgerald’s real-life marriage in A Moveable Feast, then it would be difficult to argue that the way Nicole tried to keep Dick from working was not inspired by Zelda’s attempts to keep Scott from writing. Hemingway says, “He would start to work 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.”[18] Later, Hemingway accused Zelda of using the jealousy of suitors against Scott to sabotage his work. Rather than alcoholic binges, Nicole used her money as a way to make Dick soft.
Dick and Nicole carry out opposing trajectories in Tender. Surprisingly, however, she is not willing to rescue him in the end, like he did for her. The marriage saves her but destroys him. Nicole carries on as a full-fledged Warren, traipsing around the globe with Tommy Barban, the Barbarian he-man lover she takes on as her protector. Dick, though, grows increasingly obscure in small-town America, not even recovering enough to assume the mantle of “big fish in a small pond.” The cycle is complete.
Nicole’s gradual loosening of Dick and her budding independence certainly make it difficult to pin too much of the autobiographical label on the Diver marriage based on the Fitzgerald union. Instead, the Diver marriage (and Nicole’s character, in particular) may better be viewed as a composite of many individuals the author encountered, not least of whom are Gerald and Sara Murphy, who are acknowledged by Fitzgerald as the models. In writing Tender over a seven-year span with several complete overhauls of the plot, it is reasonable to consider that Fitzgerald simply worked pieces of Zelda and her illness into the story, just like he did with the Murphys and other friends and acquaintances from his days in Europe and on the Riviera.
Clearly, the novel’s intricate plot, philosophical and historical themes, and flashback chronology influenced several decades of reviewers, who were quick to judge the book as subpar or average. However, Tender has enjoyed more favorable critical and scholarly attention over the last several decades. Some old myths about the book still remain, such as the notion about its level of autobiographical detail. A close reading of Dick and Nicole’s marriage reveals that there is more to the union than a replica of the Fitzgeralds, yet it is also unmistakably a model of sorts.
Fitzgerald spent the last eighteen months of his life in chaos, near collapse psychologically, physically, and financially. The most pressing day-to-day concern was money. Once his scriptwriting assignment for MGM ended in late 1938, he had no reliable income. With little advance knowledge from MGM that they were dropping his contract, Fitzgerald’s income plummeted from $1,250 a week to virtually nothing. The situation forced him to scramble for bit studio writing gigs that were far below his former salary. He also resorted to begging friends and acquaintances for money, an old tactic that humbled him and would later feed rumors of his hand-to-mouth existence and carelessness with money. Given his deteriorating health conditions, which prevented him from holding any kind of traditional job, Fitzgerald had little choice but to attempt to write his way out of the turmoil.
Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood in July 1937 to break out of debt on the back of the studio system. When he arrived, the MGM contract made him one of the highest-paid writers on the lot. Working and reworking the figures, Fitzgerald made progress in whittling down his obligations. However, his creditors, including the Internal Revenue Service and Zelda’s North Carolina sanitarium, continued to demand payment. The bleak situation necessitated that he take extreme measures, including haranguing editors over the phone while drunk, which simply perpetuated the common notion that he was on a never-ending bender.
At one point in September 1939, Fitzgerald pleaded with Zelda’s doctor because he could not pay her bills. Describing his dire situation, including a recent recovery from tuberculosis, he claimed, “It is simply impossible to pay anything . . . when one drives in a mortgaged Ford and tries to get over the habit of looking into a handkerchief for blood when talking to a producer.”[19] Showing his deep concern for his wife but realistically examining the situation, Fitzgerald hoped “that this does not mean Zelda will be deprived of the ordinary necessities . . . [but] if things go as bad as they have for another month, the hospital can reimburse itself out of life insurance. This is a promise.”[20] Foreshadowing actual events, fifteen months later, the author died of a heart attack in December 1940.
If there were a positive to be drawn from standing on the edge of financial ruin, Fitzgerald found it in the ready market of Esquire magazine under the editorship of Arnold Gingrich. Long a Fitzgerald admirer, Gingrich accepted almost everything Fitzgerald sent for a base fee of $250 per piece. Both out of necessity (for money) and to exercise his creative writing skills after almost two years of doing almost nothing but screenwriting, Fitzgerald created Pat Hobby, a character unlike any he had produced before.
Some seventeen Pat Hobby stories appeared in Esquire between January 1940 and May 1941, despite Fitzgerald’s death. Payment for the Hobby stories helped Fitzgerald remain solvent, but even still he fought with Gingrich over pay, often nearly to the point of destroying that relationship as well. In October 1939, Fitzgerald sent a telegram threatening to send the Hobby stories to magazines back east if Gingrich could not increase the per story price by $150. In a reply telegram—after a lengthy collect telephone call from Fitzgerald, which included profanity—the editor replied by telling Fitzgerald not to “jeopardize old reliable instant payment market like this by use of strong arm methods . . . next move is up to you but on bird in hand theory believe you would be better businessman to regard it as advance against another story.”[21] Fitzgerald’s desperation kept the Hobby stories coming, even if he could not convince Gingrich to increase his pay.
***
Two or more Fitzgeralds emerge in just about every instance, which makes assessing him problematic. One could claim that the last decade and a half of his life was a roller coaster of good and bad with the negative sucking up more of his time and energy. Yet, at the same time, I wonder how many people would trade just about any possession they own to author a great work of literature like Tender Is the Night? Was he really breaking at the same time he had the wherewithal to write that novel? These kinds of questions bedevil the researcher but also serve a level of intrigue and mystery to the narrative. I think these questions and others like them go a long way toward supplying a more complete picture of this complex individual, even though some of the ideas about him prove to be little more than speculation. Despite half a century of scholarly study about Fitzgerald and his work, mountains of published primary documentation, and the memoirs of those who knew him well, as well as his own writing, there is still much room for engaging with the author.
Eminent literary critic Alfred Kazin, writing just two years after Fitzgerald’s untimely death, attempted to place the writer within his times, explaining, “Fitzgerald was a boy, the most startlingly gifted and self-destructive of all the lost boys, to the end.”[22] But even granting Kazin’s understanding of the era, such a pithy rationalization comes up short. The notion of Fitzgerald being a “boy” genius persisted in the early days of his postdeath revival. Not enough time had passed for him to adequately separate the myth from the real-life writer crafting the work, nor had the pioneering scholarly work been undertaken by Matthew J. Bruccoli. As a Fitzgerald champion, Bruccoli researched the author from a textual analysis perspective, which revealed the detailed revision he did, and scoured the Fitzgerald papers and then published what he found, which profoundly transformed the way people assessed Fitzgerald.
Writing in the twenty-first century, critic Clive James takes a different position
on Fitzgerald, concluding, “It takes a great artist to have a great failure, and F.
Scott Fitzgerald was so great an artist that he could turn even his fatal personal
inadequacies into material for poetry.”[23] The difference between Kazin’s and James’s interpretations of Fitzgerald demonstrates
the way the academic study about the author has changed people’s observations. Now
that we have a more complete picture of Fitz-
gerald’s challenges late in life—both from the outside and the ones he created for
himself—we can still appreciate the tragedy of his early death, but also better place
his life within its cultural and socioeconomic times.
Quoted in Morris Dickstein, A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 80.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2nd revised ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 410–11.
Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 320.
Bruccoli, F. Scott Fitzgerald, 322.
Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 336.
Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (New York: Norton, 2007), 209.
Matthew Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr, eds., The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 185.
Bruccoli, Epic Grandeur, 327.
Scott Donaldson, Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Congdon & Weed, 1983), 114.
Elaine P. Maimon, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Book Sales: A Look at the Record,” Fitzgerald/Hemingway Annual 5 (1973): 166–67.
Donaldson, Fool for Love, 196.
Matthew J. Bruccoli with Judith S. Baughman, Reader’s Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 4.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (New York: Scribner, 1934, 1962), 179.
Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, 174.
Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, 177.
Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, 177–78.
Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night, 192.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 1964, 2003), 181.
Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan, eds., Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1980), 545.
Bruccoli and Duggan, Correspondence, 545.
Bruccoli and Duggan, Correspondence, 552.
Alfred Kazin and Ted Solotaroff, Alfred Kazin’s America: Critical and Personal Writings (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 124.
James, Cultural Amnesia, 210.