Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (5 page)

Perhaps the most interesting criticism came from Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, who wrote a review of the novel for the
New York Tribune.
Zelda criticized the book for its “literary references and the attempt to convey a profound air of erudition,” and asserted that the author had perhaps lifted a few of the passages: “It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar” (quoted in
Some Sort of Epic Grandeur,
p. 161). Zelda was right. For a writer everything is fair game, and from the beginning Fitzgerald used Zelda as a valuable source, often incorporating her sayings, mannerisms, and in this instance even adapting pieces of her writing into his work. Fitzgerald insisted, however, that there was only a surface resemblance between his wife and Gloria, later telling his daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, known as Scottie, “Gloria was a much more trivial and vulgar person than your mother” (quoted in
A Life in Letters,
p. 453). Indeed while Gloria and Zelda do share many characteristics—they are both beautiful, willful, domestic failures—Zeida was a much more complex and inherently lyrical person than the rather one-dimensional Gloria.

Never one to waste material, Fitzgerald also wove many of the circumstantial facts of his married life with Zelda into the novel: They had a Japanese butler named Tana; they rented a house out in Connecticut; Fitzgerald had served in the army but was discharged before he could be shipped to the war, etc. But more than the superficial elements, Fitzgerald invested Anthony and Gloria with his and Zelda’s central weakness: their inability to alter or stop their self-destructive behavior. As Fitzgerald himself wrote, “I wish the Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves—I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other”
(A Life in Letters,
p. 189).

Just before
The Beautiful and Damned
was published, Zelda had given birth to Scottie, their only child. One might think that a child would have forced Zelda and Scott to alter their lifestyle, but instead their outlandish behavior intensified. At parties, if he was bored Fitzgerald would flip over ashtrays or hack off his tie with a knife. One evening he even threatened to kill Zelda and her friend, chasing them around the kitchen with a knife until someone held him down. Always a flirt, Zelda began to court men in front of her husband to irritate him. They both went on two- or three-day drinking sprees, and their neighbors sometimes found Fitzgerald passed out on his front lawn. Like Gloria and Anthony, Scott and Zelda made attempts to reform; they moved to Great Neck to contain their costs and vowed to live the quiet life. When they continued to party, they took other measures to try to contain the damage. They posted notes around their house that stated, “Visitors are requested to not break down doors in search of liquor, even when authorized to do so by host or hostess” (Turnbull, p. 136). They continued to live well beyond their means, despite the fact that Fitzgerald was earning $30,000 or more a year. He coped with their negative cash flow by periodically taking advances from his short-story agent, Harold Ober, and then sequestering himself in a room with pots of coffee for several weeks until he emerged with several short stories. Although Fitzgerald wrote some first-rate short stories, in general he felt that this commercial work was an artistic compromise that degraded his talent and distracted him from writing novels.

Even more upsetting to Fitzgerald than the commercial compromises was his financial situation. He was continually in debt. Like Anthony and Gloria, he quickly gave up on the idea of controlling his spending; he wrote to Maxwell Perkins, “I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity” (quoted in Turnbull, p. 151). Instead he wrote a play called The
Vegetable
and hoped that he would earn a killing from it and never have to worry about money again. Unfortunately, the play was a huge failure and closed on the first night. Out in Great Neck, Fitzgerald began to make plans for his next novel, something more ambitious than he had ever written before. He bought some time by writing several short stories—he was now earning as much as $3,000 apiece for them—and then went with his family to Europe to lower costs. The Fitzgeralds settled in the south of France, and once again the couple began to act out, only this time in more dangerous ways. Fitzgerald’s drinking increased, and he went further with his antics, chewing up and spitting out hundred-franc notes at dinner and getting into a fight with a taxi driver that landed him in jail. For her part, Zelda threw herself down a flight of stairs when she thought her husband was flirting with another woman, threatened one night to drive a car off a cliff, and had an affair with a French aviator.

Amazingly, despite these distractions Fitzgerald managed to finish his third novel, The Great
Gatsby.
He knew that he had written better than he ever had before, achieving a new mastery of both story and style, and he was hopeful that the book would sell well and end his financial anxieties. Unfortunately, although
Gatsby
was an enormous critical success—deemed by none other than T. S. Eliot as “the first real step in American literature since Henry James” (quoted in Kazin, p. 94)—it was a commercial failure.

Zelda was becoming restless. Tired of being just Fitzgerald’s wife, she wanted something of her own. In the past she had tried to write, publishing a few short pieces, and painted, but she needed something more all-consuming. They had moved to Paris, and at twenty-nine, Zelda obsessively took up ballet lessons with the dream of joining the Ballets Russes. Drinking regularly and passing out occasionally, Fitzgerald by now had become a full-fledged alcoholic. He and Zelda fought over her ballet mania while he struggled with his fourth novel. The only bright spot was Fitzgerald’s growing friendship with a young writer he had helped get started, Ernest Hemingway. When Fitzgerald and Hemingway first met, Fitzgerald was the established and successful writer and Hemingway was the struggling unknown. Yet from the beginning Hemingway assumed the upper hand in the relationship while Fitzgerald played the role of a devoted groupie. He genuinely admired Hemingway’s writing—recommending Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s —but Fitzgerald also seemed to worship Hemingway’s machismo and male exploits in much the same way he had once worshiped football heroes. While Fitzgerald loved spending time with Hemingway, Zelda was not a fan. She thought he was a bully and a phony, and Hemingway in return thought that Zelda was crazy and told Fitzgerald she was trying to sabotage his writing.

As it turned out, Zelda
was
mentally ill. She had become more and more obsessive about her ballet studies, and one day in 1930, on the way to practice, she snapped and had a nervous breakdown. She entered a sanatorium in Switzerland while Fitzgerald lived nearby. He tried halfheartedly to work on his writing, hoping that his wife would recover from what had been diagnosed as schizophrenia. Fitzgerald suffered enormously during this time, terrified that he might lose Zelda and afraid that he perhaps had done something to contribute to her illness. While the doctor reassured him that he was in no way responsible for Zelda’s schizophrenia, he encouraged Fitzgerald to deal with his drinking. Like many artists, however, Fitzgerald was in denial about his addiction and fearful of tampering with his mental equipment.

Over the next four years the Fitzgerald family moved around Europe and America searching for a cure for Zelda. Fitzgerald struggled to keep up with his mounting debts, to play father and mother to his young daughter, Scottie, and to write a fourth novel. In 1934 he finally finished this novel,
Tender Is the Night,
but at great emotional cost. A much more mature work than
The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night
also chronicles the deterioration of a couple, Dick and Nicole Diver, except in the book the wife is saved. Fitzgerald put more of his soul into this novel than anything else he wrote, so when it was a commercial and even somewhat of a critical failure—nobody during the Depression appeared to want to read about the deterioration of a wealthy couple—Fitzgerald was devastated.

He now knew that Zelda would most likely never recover from her illness, a fact that caused him enormous, debilitating pain and robbed him of both his fundamental optimism and his sense of self. He realized that Zelda could no longer function as his muse, fueling his thirst for life and his drive to create art; without her to anchor him he was adrift, lost and despondent. At the time he wrote in one of his notebooks, “I left my capacity for hope on the roads to Zelda’s sanitarium” (quoted in Bruccoli, ed.,
The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald,
p. 204).

Other factors contributed to Scott’s depressed state. He was having a difficult time paying Zelda’s exorbitant hospital bills and supporting himself and Scottie; as a result of his frequent advances against future work, he now owed more than $20,000 to Scribner’s and his short-story agent Harold Ober; he was completely blocked as a writer; magazines were no longer interested in his short stories; and he was drinking constantly, both to dull the pain and simply to function.

Fitzgerald checked into a two-dollar-a-day hotel in North Carolina and took an inventory of his life. As he wrote in an essay about the experience, “The Crack-Up”: “I began to realize that for two years my life had been drawing on resources that I did not possess, I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually to the hilt”
(The Crack-Up,
p. 42). He could no longer come up with the commercial stories about young love that had earned him so much money. He could not even, it seemed, provide for his family. He felt he had nothing left to give as a writer or as a man. And he could not seem to control his drinking. He was morally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally bankrupt: “It was strange to have no self”
(The Crack-Up,
p. 50). Like Anthony Patch, Fitzgerald had in many ways seen this fall coming, but ultimately he had been powerless to stop it.

Fitzgerald’s essay “The Crack-Up” was published in
Esquire,
and it quickly drew a negative response from his friends, including his editor, Maxwell Perkins, who warned Fitzgerald against airing such dirty laundry in public. But Fitzgerald didn’t realize just how low he had sunk until the
New York Post
sent down a reporter to do a story on his fortieth birthday and then ran a scathing article describing Fitzgerald as a washed-up has-been and an alcoholic. Shocked and outraged, he attempted suicide by swallowing a vial of morphine. Luckily, he realized he did not want to die, and he coughed up the medicine. Fitzgerald was not ready to give up on life or on himself

For Gloria in
The Beautiful and Damned,
the movie business was a bitter disappointment, but for Fitzgerald in 1938 it represented salvation. His old friend Eddie Knopf had landed Fitzgerald a contract at MGM paying more than $1,000 a week, and suddenly Fitzgerald was a writer again. Several of his stories had been sold to Hollywood during the 1920s, and he had already visited there twice before—first in 1927 to write a silent film, then in 1930 to work on a Jean Harlow picture. Both times Fitzgerald hadn’t taken the work or the town very seriously; instead he had partied hard, grabbed the easy money, then dashed out of town to get back to his real writing. This time was different. Instead of treating film like the bastard son of novels, Fitzgerald approached it as its own art form. He studied movies in the same way he had first studied stories in the
Saturday Evening Post,
and he carefully noted their rules and rhythms. He vowed to give up alcohol and showed up every day at MGM with a briefcase of Coca-Cola bottles to placate his sweet tooth and help him resist the urge to drink. He also attempted to temper his cocky attitude with a new humility and deference.

Hollywood has never known what to do with literary talent, and the way studio executives handled Fitzgerald was no exception. In fact, his assignments while at MGM were downright comical. Because, years before, he had written a novel about college, they assigned him to several college pictures, including
A Yank Goes to Oxford.
He also did short stints on
Gone with the Wind, The Women,
and
Infidelity,
a Joan Crawford movie. Crawford’s advice when she heard Fitzgerald was working on her picture was, “Write hard, Mr. Fitzgerald, write hard” (quoted in Latham,
Crazy Sundays,
p. 158).

Fitzgerald tried to stay optimistic, to soldier through the rounds and rounds of script meetings, to ignore the teams of writers who were often working on the same script, but he began to lose heart. It was incredibly difficult for someone who crafted his work so carefully, polishing every phrase, to exist in a world where writing was so disposable. The final straw came when Fitzgerald was paired up with a young Budd Schulberg to write a silly script about the Dartmouth winter festival called
Winter Carnival.
The producer insisted that Fitzgerald and Schulberg travel out to Dartmouth to do research. At the airport, Schulberg’s father gave Budd two bottles of champagne as a going-away gift, and Fitzgerald went on a serious bender. Schulberg tried to cover up for Fitzgerald, but the producer found him wandering around the Dartmouth campus in an alcoholic haze and promptly fired him. Fitzgerald now realized that he would not conquer Hollywood, but he hoped he could at least get enough freelance work to survive.

Fortunately, he had other reasons to rejoice. He was still loyal at heart to Zelda, who was now living permanently in a sanatorium in North Carolina, but he had met a young gossip columnist named Sheilah Graham and quietly started a relationship with her. Sheilah was a lower-class British woman who had, as the saying goes, raised herself up by her own bootstraps. Like Dot in
The Beautiful and Damned,
Sheilah was a calm, acquiescent woman who seemed to be dedicated to nurturing and supporting Fitzgerald. Undoubtedly, she was not as exciting or challenging as Zelda, but at this stage in his life, Fitzgerald no longer craved those qualities.