Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (30 page)

Zelda’s obsession with dancing led to a reversal of roles in her marriage as she became ascetic and Scott plunged deeper into dissipation. In
Save Me the Waltz
—which recalls the Fitzgeralds on the Riviera in 1925 and in Paris a few years later—David Knight works on his frescoes while his wife Alabama is left alone. When she asks: “What’ll we
do,
David . . . with ourselves?” (Just as the bored Daisy does in
The Great Gatsby
), David replies that “she couldn’t always be a child and have things provided for her to do.” But when Alabama vigorously takes up dancing and is absolutely exhausted at night, David, as eager for distraction as Alabama had once been, complains when she will not go out with him.

In her novel Zelda, with considerable insight, equated dancing with exorcism and tried to control her wild emotions by disciplining her body: “It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her—that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self—that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions.”
⁸
Zelda had hoped to join the Diaghilev troupe; Egorova said she was capable of secondary roles in the Massine Ballet in New York; and she was asked—and refused—to join the San Carlo Opera Ballet in Naples. But most of the emissaries who came to Egorova’s studio, on the top floor above the Olympia Music Hall on the rue Caumartin, were from the Folies-Bergère. They all wanted to make Zelda into an American shimmy dancer.

Like Zelda, the wife in Fitzgerald’s story “Two Wrongs” (1930) is bravely but hopelessly struggling to succeed against younger competitors and impossible obstacles: “she plunged into her work like a girl of sixteen—four hours a day at barre exercises, attitudes,
sauts,
arabesques and pirouettes. It became the realest part of her life, and her only worry was whether or not she was too old. At twenty-six she had ten years to make up, but she was a natural dancer with a fine body—and that lovely face.” Watching Zelda dance in 1929, the Murphys—who sympathized with her ambitions but were embarrassed by her efforts—felt she would never achieve her goal: “Zelda was awkward, her legs were too muscular, there was something about her intensity when she danced that made her look grotesque.” The distorted legs and tortured feet in Zelda’s painting
Ballerinas
(1938), which evoke the suffering of a crucifixion, suggest that she was pushing her mind and body far beyond what they could bear. Looking back on the sad history of their marriage, Fitzgerald later told Sheilah Graham that Zelda, temperamentally unsuited to be his wife, was jealous of his success and destroyed herself by trying to compete with him:

Zelda and I never should have married. We were wrong for each other. She would have been happier married to almost anyone else. She was beautiful and talented. It was her tragedy that she could not bear to be overshadowed by the attention I received from my early books. For instance, she hated it when Gertrude Stein talked only to me, while her companion Alice B. Toklas talked to her. She had a compulsion to compete with me. She could not as a writer, so she decided to be a famous ballerina and studied with the Russian ballet in Paris. But it was too late for her. And when she realized this, instead of accepting the fact and bending with it, she broke.
⁹

IV

In September 1928, after five months in Paris, the Fitzgeralds returned to Ellerslie to complete their two-year lease. In a grand gesture, Fitzgerald brought back to America a former boxer and taxi driver, Philippe, as his butler, chauffeur, sparring partner and drinking companion. Scott would summon Philippe from the distant kitchen with a blast from a brass automobile horn. But Zelda disliked Philippe, and found him disrespectful and intimidating. Their French nanny added to the chaos by falling in love with and becoming hysterical about Philippe, whose name Fitzgerald borrowed for the hero of his “Count of Darkness” stories. The second stay at Ellerslie was a reprise of the first. Zelda set up a bar in front of a “whorehouse” mirror, played “The March of the Toy Soldiers” over and over and over again, and practiced dancing all day long. Scott did very little work, took long solitary walks and, according to his neighbors, looked lonely and miserable.

In mid-November 1928 Francis Godolphin, Hemingway’s Oak Park friend, saw Ernest with Scott in New York before the Princeton-Yale football game. Godolphin described their comradely contentment in much the same way as Booth Tarkington had portrayed them in Paris in 1925: “On that particular morning when they landed in our apartment together they were both a bit tight and very cheerful, very pleasant and very happy. They both seemed very harmonious, enjoying each other and having a hell of a fine time. They were at the apartment for a time, then they went off to the Cottage Club and to the game.”

When they returned to Ellerslie, which Hemingway found surprisingly impressive, Fitzgerald uncorked
six
bottles of expensive Burgundy just for his friend. Ernest was flattered by his generosity but found the gesture wasteful. Content to be in Hemingway’s company, Fitzgerald had behaved well all day. But he got drunk that evening and made Hemingway uncomfortable by insulting the attractive black maid who served dinner. According to A. E. Hotchner, who heard the story from Hemingway, Fitzgerald, imitating what he took to be Ernest’s manly swagger, exclaimed: “ ‘Aren’t you the best piece of tail I ever had? Tell Mr. Hemingway.’ The girl never answered him and kept her composure. He must have said it to her ten times. ‘Tell him what a grand piece of pussy you are.’ Like that, over and over.” Hemingway felt bull-fights were sedatives compared to weekends with Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald redeemed himself the following month when Hemingway, traveling south on a train from New York to Florida, received a telegram announcing his father’s death (by suicide) and asking him to go west to Oak Park. Hemingway asked Fitzgerald for a hundred-dollar loan, which he delivered in person to the North Philadelphia station. And Hemingway praised him for his prompt response: “You were damned good and also bloody effective to get me that money.”
¹⁰

When the two-year lease on Ellerslie ended in March 1929 the Fitzgeralds—still restless and undecided about where to live—took their fourth and final trip to Europe. They sailed to Genoa, traveled along the Riviera to Paris, and spent April and May in an apartment on the rue Palatine, on the Left Bank, near Saint-Sulpice and their old flat on the rue Vaugirard. They had spent the previous summer in Paris, but from June to October 1929 they rented the Villa Fleur des Bois in Cannes. They returned to Paris in October, when the weather began to turn cold, and rented their last apartment at 10 rue Pergolèse, off the avenue de la Grande Armée, near their first flat on the rue de Tilsitt.

In the spring of 1929, following Max Perkins’ suggestion, Fitzgerald looked up the young Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan, who shared his Irish Catholic background and had published his first novel with Scribner’s the previous year. Callaghan liked Fitzgerald’s “shrewd opinions, quick fine intelligence, extraordinary perception and tireless interest.” But he thought Scott was reckless and prodigal when straining to live up to his legend. Fitzgerald loved the vicarious excitement of glamorously recounting Hemingway’s exploits, prowess and courage (which were so unlike his own): Ernest’s war, his wound and the time Ernest thought he was dead. But Fitzgerald, as Edmund Wilson noted, had also carefully studied Hemingway’s weaknesses. In 1929 he made one of the most perceptive and accurate predictions about his friend, who in 1927 had divorced Hadley and married Pauline Pfeiffer: “I have a theory that Ernest needs a new woman for each big book. There was one for the stories and
The Sun Also Rises.
Now there’s Pauline.
A Farewell to Arms
is a big book. If there’s another big book I think we’ll find Ernest has another wife.” Following the pattern Fitzgerald had predicted, Hemingway acquired a third wife, Martha Gellhorn, for his next big book,
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, as well as a fourth, Mary Welsh, for
Across the River and into the Trees
, which he hoped would be his big book about World War II.

Fitzgerald’s occasional sparring with his chauffeur, Philippe, revived his interest in boxing. There was no question of the delicate Fitzgerald actually getting into the ring with Hemingway, who disdainfully declared: “There’s no distinction in punching Scott on his [‘almost beautiful, unmarked’] nose. Every taxi driver in Paris has done it.” In June 1929 Hemingway used to box at the gym of the American Club with Callaghan, whom he had first met at the
Toronto Star
in 1923. After a lunch together at Prunier’s, Scott decided to participate vicariously in their combat by assuming the grave responsibility of timekeeper.

The powerful Hemingway was not troubled by his friends’ fear that he would “hurt his brains” in boxing. Callaghan noted that Hemingway had thought a good deal about boxing while he himself had actually worked out with fast college fighters. Hemingway took the sport seriously, was extremely aggressive and hated to lose. When Callaghan punched Hemingway’s lip, he retaliated by spitting a mouthful of blood in his opponent’s face and solemnly exclaiming: “That’s what bullfighters do when they’re wounded. It’s a way of showing contempt.”
¹¹

There were several versions of the notorious incident involving Fitzgerald and Hemingway. According to Callaghan, Fitzgerald, supposed to be keeping time, became so absorbed in the action that he unintentionally allowed the round to go well past the prescribed one-minute period. After Callaghan knocked Hemingway down, Fitzgerald woke up and screamed: “ ‘Oh, my God! . . . I let the round go four minutes.’ . . . ‘All right Scott,’ Ernest said savagely. ‘If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don’t say you made a mistake.’ . . . ‘Don’t you see I got fascinated watching? [Fitzgerald said]. I forgot all about the watch. My God, he thinks I did it on purpose. Why would I do it on purpose?’ ” Hemingway believed Fitzgerald was using Callaghan as a surrogate to punish him for his superiority in athletics, drinking, war and art. But it is unlikely that Fitzgerald, who genuinely admired Hemingway, wanted to see him hurt. He probably was distracted from his duties by seeing his hero unexpectedly beaten by the smaller Callaghan.

In Hemingway’s version, which he related to Perkins (no doubt alarmed about the battering of his literary properties), he was drunk at the time, lost his wind, was beaten by Callaghan and prevented by pride from asking the time. He was convinced that Fitzgerald had been motivated by hidden animosity and had acted with deliberate malice:

I couldn’t see him hardly—had a couple of whiskeys en route. Scott was to keep time and we were to box 1 minute rounds with 2 minute rests on acct. of my condition. I knew I could go a minute at a time and went fast and used all my wind—then Morley commenced to pop me and cut my mouth, mushed up my face in general. I was pooped as could be and thought I had never known such a long round but couldn’t ask about it or Morley would think I was quitting. Finally Scott called time. Said he was very sorry and ashamed and would I forgive him. He had let the round go three minutes and 45 seconds—so interested to see if I was going to hit the floor!

The matter would have ended with Callaghan victorious, Hemingway embittered and Fitzgerald guilt-stricken. But a journalist—either Pierre Loving or Caroline Bancroft—heard about the incident from either Callaghan or Fitzgerald and belatedly sent a grossly distorted version of the story to the
Denver Post.
The “amusing encounter” was then reprinted by Isabel Paterson in the
New York Herald Tribune
of November 24, 1929:

One night at the [Café] Dôme Callaghan’s name was mentioned and Hemingway said: “Oh, you can easily see he hasn’t any practical background for his fight stories—shouldn’t think he knew anything about boxing.” Callaghan, hearing of it, challenged Hemingway. After arranging for rounds and a considerable audience, they entered the arena. Not many seconds afterward Callaghan knocked Hemingway out cold. The [unnamed] amateur timekeeper was so excited that he forgot to count and the deflated critic [Hemingway] had to stagger up and finish the round.

When Callaghan read this piece two days later, he sent a denial to Isabel Paterson. He then received an “arrogant” collect cable from Fitzgerald (under considerable pressure from Hemingway, who was sensitive about his reputation as a boxer and furious that one of his friends had spread this damaging story):
HAVE
SEEN
STORY
IN
HERALD
TRIBUNE
.
ERNEST
AND
I
AWAIT
YOUR
CORRECTION
.
SCOTT
FITZGERALD
. A correction duly appeared on December 8; and Hemingway, in a letter to Callaghan on January 4, 1930, blamed the story—though not the lapse in timekeeping that had inspired it—on the Paris-based Pierre Loving. But the real loser in this boxing match was Fitzgerald. Hemingway had compelled him to send the telegram and, as Callaghan wrote, Scott, “having been insulted by Ernest that day in the American Club, was now insulted by me because he had acted to please Ernest.”
¹²

V

The estrangement from Hemingway and Callaghan was compounded by drunken quarrels with many other friends, few of whom were as tolerant as the Murphys. The summary in Fitzgerald’s
Ledger
for 1929, when he and Zelda began their precipitous slide into alcoholism and madness, was extremely grim: “
Ominous.
No Real Progress in ANY way and
wrecked myself with dozens of people
.” Worst of all were the increasingly frequent and bitter arguments with Zelda. Robert Penn Warren, who met them in Paris that year, remembered “the frightful hissing quarrel, well laced with obscenities, which went on between them.”