Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (80 page)

Despised by the literary in Britain and unread in America, Lemmy Caution attracted a cultish following among French intellectuals – confirming, one imagines, Anglo-Saxon suspicions about that strange crew. The American émigré actor, Eddie Constantine, first appeared as Caution in
La Môme Vert-de-gris (The Gun Moll
) in 1953. With his pocked, Bogartian mannerisms, the former lover of Edith Piaf brought an authentic tough-guy chic to the image. The Parisian
culte Cheyney
reached its apogee in 1965 with Jean-Luc Godard’s film
Alphaville
, starring Constantine and subtitled –without exaggeration – ‘a strange adventure of Lemmy Caution’. It is sad that Cheyney never lived to chortle at its strangeness.

He made a third marriage in 1948 and died, prematurely, three years later, vastly corpulent and wholly exhausted. Drink, as with his father, may have been a cause. Overwriting was certainly another. He left the huge sum of £52,000, a
Times
obituary of amazing mendacity, and a bizarre place in the Parisian literary pantheon.

I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written.
Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins about
The Great Gatsby

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota, the first surviving child of a wicker-furniture manufacturer. He was named in honour of a distant relative, Francis Scott Key, who wrote the American national anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. If he did not write the Great American Novel, Fitzgerald had a lifelong connection with the Great American Song. Both Scott’s parents were Catholics. His father was from Maryland, old enough to remember the Civil War. Edward Fitzgerald imbued his son with the genteel values, and exquisite manners, of the ‘Old South’. His mother Mollie was second-generation Irish, with ‘new money’ (from the grocery wholesale business) in her family background. In 1898, when Edward’s business failed, the family moved to New York State where he took up work as a salesman for the pharmaceutical firm, Procter and Gamble. When Edward was dismissed from that job, in 1908, the family moved back to St Paul, where Mollie Fitzgerald’s inherited money saw them through. The sense of having been once wealthy and now ‘poor’ scarred young Scott indelibly: the glamour of money was the great theme of his life. None the less the Fitzgeralds were well enough off for him to attend a Catholic ‘prep’ school in New Jersey. He was already writing furiously and intending to make it his career.

In 1913 Fitzgerald entered Princeton University. Here he continued to concentrate on writing and football and neglected his studies. He left Princeton, without graduating, in 1917, when America entered the First World War, to take a commission in the infantry. Expecting to die on the field of battle, Fitzgerald dashed off a novel (‘The Romantic Egotist’ – a self-revealing title) as his epitaph. He sent it off to the prestigious publisher, Scribner’s, who rejected it while expressing interest in this gifted but still unfledged author. In 1918 Lieutenant Fitzgerald was posted to Montgomery, Alabama. Here he fell in love with an eighteen-year-old, golden-haired
belle, Zelda Sayre, and she with him. The daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge, the Sayres had no high opinion of Zelda’s beau. As her biographer, Nancy Milford, puts it: ‘Fitzgerald was a charming and attractive but uncertain young man; he had not graduated from Princeton, he was Irish, he had no career to speak of, he drank too much, and he was a Catholic.’ Despite this catalogue of faults the couple became engaged, with the understanding that they would marry when he had the means to support her in the (expensive) style to which Miss Sayre was accustomed.

The war ended in November 1918, denying Fitzgerald the opportunity to win his spurs. On demobilisation, he went off to New York, intending to make his fortune with his pen and marry Zelda. She, however, was unwilling to wait for his fame and broke off the engagement. It was altogether a bad time for Fitzgerald. Scribner’s again rejected ‘The Romantic Egotist’ but remained perversely encouraging. Fitzgerald had better luck with short stories for the glossy magazines (‘slicks’) which boomed in the post-war period. He would, over the course of his career, dash off 160 of them, and they were always a sure source of income.
The Great Gatsby
, which hovers, ambiguously, between novel and novella in length, draws on the author’s early mastery of the short fiction form. Finally, with the aid of Scribner’s brilliant chief editor, Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald came through with something publishable.
This Side of Paradise
, which drew heavily on the author’s Princeton experience, was published in March 1920. It was an instant bestseller and Fitzgerald was, at twenty-four, a literary celebrity. A week after the novel’s publication he and Zelda married.

The roaring 1920s was a decade made for Scott and Zelda (and, in 1921, their only child, Scottie – cute as her name suggests). He was the laureate of the jazz age and in many ways its icon: the camera loved him. The most admired of all celebrities and buoyed up with his apparently inexhaustible literary earnings, Fitzgerald moved between fashionable resorts in Europe and America (including, significantly for
The Great Gatsby
, a spell in Great Neck in 1922). His second novel,
The Beautiful and Damned
(1922), enjoyed similar success, while confirming the cult of ‘beautiful losers’ to be found in all his mature work. Fitzgerald was even at this early stage displaying the symptoms of alcoholism and Zelda the early signs of her later dementia. Also evident was a growing artistic tension between the couple. As he went from success to success, Zelda failed – as a would-be ballet dancer and a novelist – to rival her husband’s triumphs: her only novel,
Save Me the Waltz
was published in 1936. It provoked behaviour that was increasingly irrational.

In April 1924 the Fitzgeralds departed the hectic world of Prohibition America and settled in the French Riviera, where Scott set to work on his third novel,
The Great Gatsby
. Its composition, and the Fitzgeralds’ marriage, were threatened by Zelda’s falling in love with the French aviator Edouard Jozan. Despite the distraction,
Fitzgerald, by now a consummate craftsman, laboured on this work in collaboration with his editor Perkins.
The Great Gatsby
was published in April 1925. A few weeks later, in Paris, Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingway – a novelist still to make his name. Their friendship would be close, complex and brutally competitive. For Fitzgerald it would also be destructive.

The Great Gatsby
did not enjoy the unequivocal success of its predecessors. Moreover, even with the large sums he was earning from his short stories and film rights, they were always broke. Money problems would afflict Fitzgerald for the remainder of his career. The couple spent the next few years mostly in France (the main setting for his fourth novel,
Tender is the Night
). Like other expatriate Americans, they were hit hard by the 1929 crash; and the long Depression which followed made Fitzgerald seem, along with the jazz age he personified, historically irrelevant. When it was published, belatedly, in 1933,
Tender is the Night
registered a distinct slump in his appeal.

In 1930 Zelda suffered the first of a series of breakdowns. Despite psychiatric treatment (which was cripplingly expensive), her condition worsened until she was permanently under professional care in the mid-1930s. Their daughter, Scottie, was largely looked after by friends, although Fitzgerald remained a solicitous father. But his drinking was now out of control: this was the period which he called ‘The Crack Up’. Friends like Hemingway believed he would never write a good novel again unless he ditched his ‘nutty’ wife, which Fitzgerald – true to his cradle Catholicism – resolutely declined to do. In the last three years of his life, Fitzgerald (a ‘forgotten man’, as he now thought himself) worked as a well-paid, but undistinguished, scriptwriter in Hollywood. He has no major screen credits and his drinking led to his being regarded as unreliable by the studios. A vivid depiction of Fitzgerald in these last, wretched, years is given in Budd Schulberg’s novel
The Disenchanted
(1950). A rueful self-portrait is given in Fitzgerald’s ‘Pat Hobby’ stories, and their Hollywood-hack, drink-sodden, comic hero.

Yet his genius was not quite extinguished. Fitzgerald’s hugely promising Hollywood novel,
The Last Tycoon
, was only half finished at the time of his death, in December 1940. He died of a heart attack in the apartment of his mistress, the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. Zelda survived until 1948, when she died in a fire at the hospital in which she had been confined.

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
Ernest Hemingway
The victor belongs to the spoils.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

According to Scott Donaldson, the idea for an interfused Fitzgerald/Hemingway biography came to him in a dream of the two novelists going at each other hammer and tongs in a boxing ring. It was, even as fantasy-pugilism, a mismatch: ‘Ernest simply used Scott as a punchbag.’ But Fitzgerald would not fall. The dream gave Donaldson his biographer’s key: ‘Hemingway needed to strike out at his former friend at least as much as Fitzgerald wanted or needed to be hurt.’ Their ‘failed friendship’ was founded on a reciprocal and destructive neediness – Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald. Donaldson’s approach is gimmicky – but points to an observable fact about writing novels. It is, among all else, a competitive, sometimes a gladiatorial, activity. There are winners and losers: and combat – insofar as literature permits it – as much as luck, patronage or merit often determines who wins and who loses. According to Donaldson, the pattern of the Fitzgerald–Hemingway fisticuffs falls into three phases. Fitzgerald, the older man by three years, became famous early with
The Beautiful and Damned
(1922). When the writers first met in the Dingo Bar in Paris in April 1925, Hemingway still had his name to make. They bonded instantly and took off on a boozy trip to Lyons, swilling five bottles of Macon in the car. Fitzgerald was ‘as excited as a girl’, Hemingway later recalled.

As in love, so in literary friendships, there is always one who admires and one who lets himself be admired. Fitzgerald was the smaller man physically, had never seen war, and had any number of neuroses. ‘Sissy’ was one of the unfriendly words Hemingway would apply to his admirer; ‘pretty’, ‘coward’ and ‘butterfly’ were others. Fitzgerald introduced his friend to Maxwell Perkins, editor to the great. ‘He’s the real thing,’ he wrote, lapsing as everyone who met Ernest did into Hemingwayese. Fitzgerald loaned Hemingway money and gave crucial advice on changes to
The Sun Also Rises
(1926) – assistance that in later life Hemingway was at pains to deny. For his part, Fitzgerald succumbed somewhat to the ‘awful pull’ of the Hemingway style. Over the next five years, Hemingway’s star rose high; meanwhile Fitzgerald toiled unavailingly to produce a worthy successor to
Gatsby
. He sold his literary soul churning out ‘crap’ short stories for the ‘slicks’ – glossy magazines. He and his wife Zelda turned self-destruction into a ruinous lifestyle. Fitzgerald drank himself paralytic; she went crazy.

Unlike Hemingway (who had four wives, all abused), Fitzgerald could never
Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway discard his women. Hemingway saw this as a failure: ‘Poor old Scott,’ he sighed, ‘he should have swapped Zelda when she was still saleable five or six years before she was diagnosed as nutty.’ As the years rolled on, ‘poor Scott’ was the invariable epithet. Why was he to be pitied? Because he was too easily intoxicated by cheap glamour. He was too easily intoxicated by expensive liquor. He couldn’t ‘hold it’. Hemingway, of course, approved of excessive drinking. ‘A man does not exist until he is drunk,’ he believed. But you had to drink like a man, not a girl on her first date. Above all, Hemingway thought that ‘poor Scott’ lacked discipline as an artist. He ‘cheated too damned much’; there was ‘too much bloody flashy writing’ in his fiction; his was a ‘lovely, golden, wasted talent’. With friends like Hemingway, who needs critics?

In the last phase of their relationship, before Fitzgerald’s premature death at the age of forty-four, their relationship was conducted almost entirely through Maxwell Perkins. The pendulum had, in fifteen years, swung all the way. ‘Hemingway is the best writer in the USA today,’ Fitzgerald wrote at the end of his short life. ‘I used to want to be the best damn writer in the USA. I still do.’ His last royalty cheque was for an ominous $13.13. ‘My God,’ he wrote, ‘I am a forgotten man.’ He, unlike Ernest, would never win the Nobel.

Everyone knows two things about the writers’ friendship. One is Hemingway’s wisecrack when Fitzgerald observed, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ ‘Yes,’ Hemingway shot back, ‘they have more money.’ Donaldson establishes that the putdown is a total Hemingway invention. It still circulates, viciously scathing Fitzgerald’s memory – as it was intended to. The other universally known truth is that Fitzgerald consulted Hemingway after Zelda complained that his penis was ‘too small’. Was it, Fitzgerald timidly inquired over lunch in Michaud’s restaurant? Hemingway summoned him into the ‘consulting room’ (i.e. the men’s lavatory) where he examined the organ. It wasn’t all
that
small, he concluded. Hemingway then took Fitzgerald off to the Louvre, where the two greatest American novelists of their time spent an afternoon solemnly measuring the appendages on Greek statues. It is not recorded whether Papa flashed his.