Careless People (54 page)

I have a cottage on the Pacific which I gaze at morning and night with a not too wild surmise—my capacity for wonder has greatly diminished. And anyway it automatically stops whenever I cross the Mississippi River. I have a grand novel up my sleeve and I'd love to go to France and write it this summer. It would be short like “Gatsby” but the same in that it will have the transcendental approach, an attempt to show a man's life through some passionately regarded segment of it. This letter was to have been about you but there is only
the old you that I knew—knew very well I think—yet I always enjoyed the thrill of surprise when you made some new romantic gesture.
Almost
you always made all your dreams plausible—so often they quivered on the edge of fulfillment, but there were ranges of mountains higher than the Rockies in the way.

The letter could be addressed to young Jimmy Gatz from North Dakota, so reverberant is it with the language and sensibility of
The Great Gatsby
. The working title for the new transcendental book was
The Last Tycoon
, which Fitzgerald told Zelda would be “
a novel
à la Flaubert
without ‘ideas' but only people moved singly and in mass through what I hope are authentic moods. The resemblance is rather to
Gatsby
than to anything else I've written.”

And to Scottie he wrote: “
I wish now I'd
never
relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of
The Great Gatsby
: ‘I've found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.'” To find his line again, he would return to the ground of his greatest work, the book that he knew was a masterpiece, even if no one else did, and wrest out of his “
expiring talent” another magnificent novel.

For a year or more, Fitzgerald had been hearing echoes, trying to recapture his once-perfect pitch. He was reading constantly, piling up recently published books: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's
The Yearling
(it “
fascinated me . . . just simply flows”),
Steinbeck's
Of Mice and Men
(“
praised all out of proportion to its merits”), John O'Hara's
Hope of Heaven
(“he didn't bite off anything to chew on. He just began chewing with nothing in his mouth”), and a new book, published in the United States for the first time the previous year, called
The Trial
,
which he described to his friend John Biggs as “
a fantastic novel by the Czech Franz Kafka which you may have to wait for but it is worth it.”

Fitzgerald had also read André Malraux's
Man's Hope
, an eyewitness account of the Spanish Civil War. He didn't much care for it, preferring Malraux's
Man's Fate
,
which he considered “
the best
individual
novel of the last five years.”
Man's Hope
was just “hasty journalism,” he said, “about as good as Ernest's Spanish stuff.” (His erstwhile friend Hemingway's
For Whom the Bell Tolls
was a novel Fitzgerald judged to have been written for the movies, “with all the profundity of
Rebecca
.”)

But one day between 1938 and 1940 it was
Man's Hope
that Fitzgerald picked up: perhaps he liked what its title suggested. Maybe, with memory and imagination, he could recapture the past and there find again his art, “
a delicate thing—mine is so scarred and buffeted that I am amazed that at times it still runs clear.” He opened the book at the back cover, and on the last flyleaf he printed a schedule, without a date. And underneath:

It is a schedule for self-improvement, a short autobiography, a love letter to the past. It is a programmatic attempt to recover the self-made man who had been unmade by fate, a to-do list for retrieving all he had lost by the man who loved lists. He did not write it on the last flyleaf of
Hopalong Cassidy
, but on the last flyleaf of
Man's Hope
. Sometimes life provides better images than imagination, and Fitzgerald's life had always been magically graced by symbols. “I come across this book by accident,” as Henry Gatz told Nick. “It just shows you, don't it?” We come across this book by accident, and it just shows us—without explaining to us what we should think about what it shows.

In 1939 Fitzgerald began work on
The Last Tycoon
in earnest. In late 1940 he would say that he had not had a drink in over a year, but his past was strewn with false claims and false starts. As late as February 1939 he had been hospitalized for what he still called going on a bat, but he was doing his best, fighting to resurrect his art. The past was all around him: “
We were the great believers,” he wrote in his 1939 essay, “My Generation.” Ginevra King came to Hollywood; predictably Fitzgerald got drunk in order to brave the reunion and it did not go well. In October he wrote to Zelda about a party he'd attended: “
A lot of the past came into that party. Fay Wray, whose husband John Monk Saunders committed suicide two months ago; Deems Taylor whom I haven't seen twice since the days of the Swopes . . .”

By the autumn of 1940 he was telling Zelda, “
I am deep in the novel, living in it, and it makes me happy.”
The Last Tycoon
would be a “
constructed
novel like
Gatsby
, with passages of poetic prose when it fits the action, but no ruminations or side-shows like
Tender
. Everything must contribute to the dramatic movement. It's odd that my old talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me—the happy ending.”

The happy ending had dissipated into the vanished past, but tragedy was well within Scott Fitzgerald's expertise, and now perhaps he could bring to his writing a hard-earned wisdom; if the glitter had worn off his bright cleverness, it was showing the steel of his intelligence beneath. “
Twenty years ago ‘This Side of Paradise' was a best seller,” he wrote Zelda in 1940. “Ten years ago Paris was having almost its last great American season but we had quit the gay parade and you were gone to Switzerland. Five years ago I had my first bad stroke of illness and went to Asheville. Cards began falling badly for us much too early,” he concluded, but “the world has certainly caught up in the last four weeks.” He hoped she was not too surrounded by the “war talk” that was engulfing America.

The novel was coming, slowly but surely. “
I am digging it out of myself like uranium—one ounce to the cubic ton of rejected ideas.” In late November he told Bunny Wilson: “
I think my novel is good. I've written it with
difficulty . . . I am trying a little harder than I ever have to be exact and honest emotionally.” In December 1940 he wrote to Zelda: “
Everything is my novel now—it has become of absorbing interest. I hope I'll be able to finish it by February.”

On December 15 Fitzgerald sent a letter to Scottie explaining that he had recently had heart trouble, thanks to twenty-five years of cigarettes. “
You have got two beautiful bad examples of parents. Just do everything we didn't do and you will be perfectly safe.” He had, in fact, had a minor heart attack and was in bed recuperating. He urged her to be “sweet” to Zelda over Christmas, “despite her early Chaldean rune-worship which she will undoubtedly inflict on you. Her letters are tragically brilliant on all matters except those of central importance,” he added. “How strange to have failed as a social creature—even criminals do not fail that way—they are the law's ‘Loyal Opposition,' so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.”

It was the last letter he would write to his daughter. On December 21, 1940, Scott Fitzgerald died suddenly of occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis in California, while sitting in an armchair at Sheilah Graham's apartment, reading about the Princeton football team and
commenting on the reporter's prose in the margins. He was forty-four years old. In August Fitzgerald had received what would be
his last royalty statement, reporting the sale of nine copies of
Tender Is the Night
and seven copies of
The Great Gatsby
.
The Great Gatsby
had earned a total of $2.10 in royalties that year; Fitzgerald had not sold a single book outside the United States in the last twelve months of his life, and all of his books combined had earned him an unlucky total of $13.13. Life continued to shower him with symbols, right up to the bitter end.

Fitzgerald's body was put on view at a mortuary in a seedy Los Angeles neighborhood, in the William Wordsworth Room. “
Except for one bouquet of flowers and a few empty chairs, there was nothing to keep him company,” wrote one of the few reporters who went. “I never saw a sadder [scene] than
the end of the father of all the sad young men.” John O'Hara declared, “
Scott should have been killed in a Bugatti in the south of France, and not to have died of neglect in Hollywood, a prematurely old little man haunting bookstores unrecognized.” Gerald Murphy wrote of his shock: “
I thought of him as imperishable, somehow.” The
New York Times
regarded Fitzgerald as such a minor writer that they didn't bother getting the facts right, describing
The Beautiful and Damned
as a short story. “
With the skill of a reporter and ability of an artist he captured the essence of a period when flappers and gin and ‘the beautiful and damned' were the symbols of the carefree madness of an age,” the
Times
's obituary said, before concluding that “the promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” The next day a brief editorial agreed:
The Great Gatsby
“
was not a book for the ages, but it caught superbly the spirit of a decade . . . here was real talent which never fully bloomed.”

Notified of Scott's sudden death, Zelda gave confused instructions and collapsed. Nineteen-year-old Scottie, “tragic and bewildered,” said she had “
thought for so long that
every
day he would die for some reason.” Fitzgerald's original will, written during the days of grand extravagance, had left the seigneurial instructions that he be buried “in accordance with my station.” Later, he'd amended the request to “
the cheapest funeral . . . without undue ostentation or unnecessary expense.”

Fitzgerald's body was sent east, to be buried with his father in Rockville, Maryland, but St. Mary's Church refused him burial.
Scottie believed it was because his books were on a proscribed list at the time of his death, but in fact it was because he hadn't received last rites. One of the mourners was Andrew Turnbull, a Maryland friend who would later write Fitzgerald's biography and edit the first collection of his letters. Turnbull described the funeral as “
a meaningless occasion, having no apparent connection with the man, save as one of life's grim jokes . . . It was the sort of
envoi
a great dramatist might attach to the end of a play.” “Afterward,” he finished, “we drove to the cemetery in the rain.”

The whole day, in fact, uncannily echoed the funeral Fitzgerald had invented in 1924: “About five o'clock our procession of three cars reached the cemetery and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate—first a motor
hearse, horribly black and wet, then Mr. Gatz and the minister and I in the limousine, and, a little later, four or five servants and the postman from West Egg in Gatsby's station wagon, all wet to the skin. As we started through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop and then the sound of someone splashing after us over the soggy ground,” coming to offer an elegy.

Fitzgerald's old friend and drinking companion Dorothy Parker had been one of the few people to view his body in Los Angeles; she supposedly echoed the epitaph he bestowed upon his most famous character: “
The poor son of a bitch.” If she had gone east for the funeral, Parker might well also have repeated Owl-Eyes's other exclamation, “Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds.” Fitzgerald's burial service was attended by about twenty people; Zelda was not permitted by her doctors to go, and only a few of the old crowd of friends made it. Gerald and Sara Murphy, Max Perkins and his wife, the Obers, Ludlow Fowler, Fitzgerald's cousin Cecilia Taylor, John Biggs, and a few other friends were the only mourners. Fitzgerald was buried at Rockville Union Cemetery on December 27, 1940, eulogized by an Episcopalian rector who made the extraordinary (and rarely reported) decision to make public his disgust for the man he was burying: “
The only reason I agreed to give the service, was to get the body in the ground. He was a no-good, drunken bum, and the world was well rid of him.”

Zelda wrote to Max Perkins of her grief at realizing they wouldn't “
share again the happy possibility aspirational promise that he always seemed buoyed with,” their mutual loss of Fitzgerald's courage and faith and devotion. A year earlier, she had unwittingly offered her own elegy to Scott, only slightly premature. “
Dearest: I am always grateful to all the loyalties you gave me, and I am always loyal to the concepts that held us together so long: the belief that life is tragic, that man's spiritual reward is the keeping of his faith: that we shouldn't hurt each other. And I love, always your fine writing talent, your tolerance and generosity; and all your happy endowments. Nothing could have survived our life.”