Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (45 page)

III

In September 1935 Fitzgerald fled his emotional entanglements in Asheville, returned to Baltimore and moved into the Cambridge Arms Apartments, a red-brick building across from the Johns Hopkins campus, at the corner of Charles and 34th Street. He felt guilty not only about his betrayal of Zelda (whom he visited), but also about the pain Beatrice had suffered. In early September he gloomily wrote Ober: “If only I would die at least [Scottie] and Zelda would have the life insurance and it would be a general good riddance, but it seems as if life has been playing some long joke with me for the past eight months and can’t decide when to leave off.”

After two lonely and despairing months in Baltimore, Fitzgerald impulsively packed his bag and traveled south to Hendersonville, a drab little town eighteen miles south of Asheville. He took a penitential dollar-a-day room in the Skylands Hotel at the corner of 6th and Main Street in the center of town. A
Notebook
entry for November 1935 described his ascetic existence—a great contrast to the luxury of the Grove Park Inn. It recorded that he could no longer eat much food, and mentioned that he was deeply in debt (to Scribner’s and Ober as well as to Perkins and his mother) and very close to destitution:

I am living very cheaply. Today I am in comparative affluence, but Monday and Tuesday I had two tins of potted meat, three oranges and a box of Uneedas [biscuits] and two cans of beer. The food totaled 18 cents a day—and I think of the thousand meals I’ve sent back untasted in the last two years. It was fun to be poor—especially [if] you haven’t enough liver power for an appetite. But the air is fine here and I liked what I had—and there was nothing to do about it anyhow because I was afraid to cash any checks and I had to save enough postage for the story. But it was funny coming into the hotel and the very deferential clerk not knowing I was not only thousands, nay tens of thousands in debt, but had less than 40 cents cash in the world and probably a $13 deficit at my bank.

In mid-November he explained that he had become severely depressed and had suffered a mild nervous breakdown. He also said he was living as cheaply as possible while trying to recover: “Suffice to say I cracked entirely after the strain of doing too many things at once and simply fled down here which I had no economic right to do. But since it was that or break up again and that would be an even more expensive business to dependents and creditors, here I am.”

Nora Flynn, who had an expensive and elegant house, painted a grim picture of Fitzgerald absorbed in his misery at Skylands: “He went off to that frightful hotel in Hendersonville, drunk and ill. And he lay there thinking about himself, as usual. He never was interested in any one or anything but himself. It was such a horrid place. I can still see it—with collar buttons on the bureau, and neckties hanging from the light chair, and dirty pajamas strewn all over.” After a month in Hendersonville Fitzgerald still claimed to enjoy, after long years of dissipation, washing his own clothes and eating two cheap meals a day. But, back in Baltimore for Christmas, he realized that he needed decent surroundings to produce his stories and firmly declared: “Have tried life on subsistence level and it doesn’t work.”
⁹

Fitzgerald was, as Nora observed, drinking more than ever. His wife was crazy, his health was poor, he could not write and he was deeply in debt. He felt he could not survive without liquor, which put him into a stupor and made him forget his overwhelming problems. He had once asked a friend: “Can you name a single American artist except James and Whistler (who lived in England) who didn’t die of drink?” and now saw himself in the destructive yet romantic tradition that began with his much-admired Poe.

In Asheville during the previous summer he had tried to drink sufficient quantities of beer to give him as much alcohol as he used to get from gin. One visitor, stumbling over the hidden bottles in his rooms, was astonished at how he was nearly buried beneath them: “I have never, before or since, seen such quantities of beer displayed in such a place in such a fashion. Rows of unopened bottles lined the tops of bureaus and chests of drawers in each room. As many cases as possible were jammed under each of the four beds. Each trash basket was full of empties. So was the tub in one of the baths. Stacks of cases served as tables for manuscripts, books, supplies of paper.”

In Hendersonville he had abandoned the pretense of controlling his alcoholism by drinking only beer and gone back to his habitual gin. His doctors had warned him to confine himself to only one shot a day, so he carefully measured out one shot at a time until he had emptied the whole bottle. This heavy drinking inevitably took its toll. His damaged liver no longer allowed him to eat solid food, his skin was raw and ashen, and he had a rasping tubercular cough. Constant dizziness and blurred vision forced him to hold on to the furniture when he crossed the room. He also suffered episodes of
delirium tremens
and once told Sheilah Graham—“in full skin-crawling detail—how in 1935 he saw beetles and pink mice scurrying all over him and elephants dancing on the ceiling.”
¹⁰

Thomas Mann, who emigrated to the United States in 1938, observed that “America is a cruel land, whether in success or in failure.” But Fitzgerald—both a failure as a success and a failure as a failure—suffered much more than he deserved. Reflecting on his crack-up years, he wrote of the difficulty of recovery and regeneration: “When you once get to the point where you don’t care whether you live or die—as I did—it’s hard to come back to life. . . . It’s hard to believe in yourself again—you have slain a part of yourself.” But he also felt pathological satisfaction in hitting the bottom and knowing he had reached the extreme level of degradation. Having reached this depth Fitzgerald, as Eliot said of Coleridge, transformed his ruin into a vocation.

While subsisting in the Skylands Hotel in November 1935 Fitzgerald began to write his three “Crack-Up” essays—one of the seminal documents in modern American literature. In “Sleeping and Waking,” another essay about insomnia, he described his compulsive ritual before going to bed and mentioned the hope that his semi-conscious mind would throw off a creative spark: “All is prepared, the books, the glass of water, the extra pajamas lest I awake in rivulets of sweat, the luminal [sedative] pills in the little round tube, the note book and pencil in case of a night thought worth recording.”
¹¹
But most of the time his hopes were futile, and he finally decided to write about his creative sterility. In “The Crack-Up,” a distraction from and substitute for his fictional efforts, he could write about not writing instead of actually writing about what he wanted to write.

George Orwell once remarked that “autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.” “The Crack-Up”—a fascinating mixture of public therapy, confession, apologia and self-punishment—substantiates this observation and explores Fitzgerald’s worst characteristics. As in
Tender Is the Night,
he achieves an astonishing objectivity about his own suffering and expresses an intensity of feeling reminiscent of Dostoyevsky and Strindberg.

“The Crack-Up” begins with two rather abstract premises, one previously held and now rejected by Fitzgerald, the other retained. During the early 1920s, his years of success and fame, he had believed that “life was something you dominated if you were any good.” Sara Murphy, then going through a tragic period in her own life, strongly objected to the naive belief that one could conquer malign fate and angrily asked Scott: “Do you
really
mean to say you honestly thought [this]? . . . Even if you meant your
own
life it is arrogant enough—but life!”

The second premise, which he still believed, was that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Though this crucial statement has been quoted scores of times, no one has ever mentioned where it comes from and how it applies to the theme of “The Crack-Up.” The source is Keats’ letter to his brothers, of December 22, 1817, which defines his concept of “
Negative Capability,
that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
¹²
Fact and reason, the bases of logical thought, deny the Mysteries at the same time that the “first-rate intelligence” tries to grasp them. Fitzgerald implies that the two simultaneous but antithetical ideas in his own mind are that Zelda is permanently insane but will recover, and that he is a hopeless failure but will eventually succeed.

After mentioning several crucial events of his early life, Fitzgerald reveals that for the past two years “my life had been drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually,” and that “my vitality had been steadily and prematurely trickling away.” In short, he has been overcome by emotional exhaustion. The symptoms of his condition are a desire to be alone, a rejection of people, listlessness, apathy and lack of feeling as well as a purely mechanical response to experience, hypersensitivity to both noise and silence, irritation, irrational prejudice and a sense of being emotionally undernourished. “In a real dark night of the soul,” writes the insomniac Fitzgerald, alluding to the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross, “it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”

As Fitzgerald holds out “the tin cup of self-pity” and becomes the unwilling witness of the disintegration of his own personality, he tries to explain what has brought him to this desperate state. He had, it seems, weakly surrendered vital aspects of his moral being to his closest friends. Edmund Wilson had warned him, as early as 1919, to “brace up your artistic conscience, which was always the weakest part of your talent!” Fitzgerald claimed, in his Introduction to the Modern Library reprint of
The Great Gatsby
(1934), that he had kept his artistic conscience pure while writing his most flawless book. But in “The Crack-Up” he admits that having foolishly depended on Wilson to be his intellectual conscience, on his Princeton friend Sap Donahoe to be his moral conscience, on Hemingway to be his artistic conscience and on Gerald Murphy to be his social conscience, there was, not surprisingly, “not an ‘I’ any more—not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect.”

Like
Tender Is the Night,
“The Crack-Up” is an attempt to account for his personal decay. But in the essays Fitzgerald circles around the events of his life and announces that he has cracked up without actually explaining why he did so. Like Rudolph Miller in “Absolution,” Fitzgerald confessed, but could not confess everything. There are many flashes of revelation and insight, but no honest reference to his drinking, the breakdown of his marriage or his guilt about the insanity of his wife. In 1922 he had asked Wilson to delete all references to Fitzgerald’s drinking in his review of
The Beautiful and Damned.
In 1936 he again conceals his alcoholism and vaguely states that at the time of his crack-up he had “not tasted so much as a glass of beer for six months—it was [my] nervous reflexes that were giving way—too much anger and too many tears.” Though “The Crack-Up” was praised by reviewers for its honesty and candor, it was more a complex work of art than a frank revelation. Just as Fitzgerald had once carefully created the image of the golden boy of the 1920s, so he now offered a cunningly constructed negative image to complement the earlier one. He later told Scottie he was “too much a moralist at heart and really want[ed] to preach at people in some acceptable form.”
¹³
In “The Crack-Up” he preached at himself.

Critics have been intrigued by what Glenway Wescott called Fitzgerald’s “self-autopsy and funeral sermon.” Scottie, who picked up this clinical metaphor, compared her father to “a surgeon performing an operation upon himself, hurting terribly but watching the process with a fascinated detachment.” In 1945 Joseph Wood Krutch praised the work’s intelligence, sophistication and artistic sincerity. And Mark Schorer, one of Fitzgerald’s most perceptive readers, called it “a beautiful and moving confession; without a hint of self-pity, it is one of the most extraordinary self-revelations in literature.”
¹⁴

Fitzgerald acknowledged in “The Crack-Up” that “there are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible.” And he explained to Beatrice Dance that many friends—from Hemingway and Dos Passos to Perkins and Ober—thought he had done himself great harm, when the articles were published in
Esquire
in the spring of 1936, by announcing to the world that he was morally and artistically bankrupt. Amid all this criticism of Fitzgerald, Arnold Gingrich, the editor of
Esquire,
was a persuasive dissenting voice. He felt that Fitzgerald had indeed hit rock bottom, but that
any
publicity—good or bad—was helpful and that “The Crack-Up” actually had a beneficial effect on Scott’s career:

Can’t feel that it did any damage. So it got him a brutal letter from Ernest Hemingway and a rather hoity-toity one from Dos Passos. And an interviewer from the New York
Post,
stimulated by it to look him up, did a nasty piece about him that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings deplored. But don’t forget, at this point, sixteen years after his first fame, a lot of people thought he was dead. So the publicity occasioned by the publication of the “Crack-Up” series undoubtedly reminded Hollywood that he was still around, and led either directly or indirectly to his getting his second chance out there, with his contract that took him out there in July of ’37. At the “Crack-Up” stage nothing could harm his career—it could only help.

The personal revelations in “The Crack-Up” blasted open the reticence that had characterized American literature before World War II and had a liberating influence on the writers who followed Fitzgerald’s innovative path. Like Fitzgerald, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer deliberately provoked bad publicity in order to gain attention and revealed their pathetic or violent alcoholism. More significantly, “The Crack-Up” had a powerful impact on confessional poets like W. D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, who wrote openly about their personal anguish and mental breakdowns, as well as on literary accounts of alcoholism, drugs and depression in works like William Styron’s
Darkness Visible
(1990).