Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (17 page)

We combed Fifth Avenue this last month

A hundred times if we combed it onth,

In search of something we thought would do

To give a person as nice as you.

We had no trouble selecting gifts

For the Ogden Armours and Louie Swifts,

The Otto Kahns and the George F. Bakers,

The Munns and the Rodman Wanamakers.

It’s a simple matter to pick things out

For people one isn’t wild about,

But you, you wonderful pal and friend, you!

We couldn’t find anything fit to send you.

Parodying Ring’s parody, Scott revealed their similarity of style and taste. Shifting the venue to the distinctly less elegant Third Avenue, he varied Ring’s catalogue of millionaires (including the transportation executive Teddy Shonts) and imitated his “down-hoem” diction:

You combed Third Avenue last year

For some small gift that was not too dear

—Like a candy cane or a worn out truss—

To give to a loving friend like us

You’d found gold eggs for such wealthy hicks

As the Edsel Fords and the Pittsburgh Fricks

The Andy Mellons, the Teddy Shonts

The Coleman T. and Pierre du Ponts

But not one gift to brighten our hoem

—So I’m sending you back your Goddamn poem.

After the Fitzgeralds had settled on the Riviera in May 1924, Ring sent Zelda a mock-serious love poem in which he tried to steal her away from her unworthy husband and lure her back to Prohibition-damned America:

So, dearie, when your tender heart

Of all his coarseness tires,

Just cable me and I will start

Immediately for Hyères.

To hell with Scott Fitzgerald then!

To hell with Scott, his daughter!

It’s you and I back home again,

To Great Neck where the men are men

And booze is ¾ water.
¹¹

Scott, who kept a careful record of his publications and was eager for literary fame, was shocked by Ring’s indifference to—even scorn for—his own work. Ring Lardner, Jr., reporting a characteristic incident, wrote that “getting into a taxi with a friend, Ring dropped a manuscript and the pages scattered in the street. The friend gathered what he could, but there were two pages missing. ‘Makes no difference, it’s for
Cosmopolitan,
’ Ring said.” In 1923 Fitzgerald collected a dozen of Ring’s best stories by photographing old issues of magazines in the public library and persuaded Max Perkins to publish them under the catchy but misleading title,
How to Write Short Stories
(1924). Ring’s parodic introduction to his stories in this volume was influenced by Scott’s flippant introduction in
Tales of the Jazz Age
(1922). Scott’s patronage helped arouse interest in the book, which first attracted serious critical attention to Ring’s sardonic humor.

Ernest Hemingway had once admired and imitated Lardner. But he was unimpressed by this volume and jealous of Scott’s admiration for Ring’s work. In April 1926, just after Scott had dedicated
All the Sad Young Men
“To Ring and Ellis Lardner,” Hemingway rather harshly wrote: “Your friend Ring is hampered by lack of intelligence, lack of any aesthetic appreciation, terrible repressions and bitterness.” But Scott reaffirmed his admiration and tried to explain the reasons for this bitterness in one of his finest and most revealing essays—the obituary memoir of Ring Lardner in 1933.

Scott idealized his old friend as “Proud, shy, solemn, shrewd, polite, brave, kind, merciful, honorable,” and added that these qualities aroused people’s affection as well as their awe. He poignantly recalled his last visit to Ring, when alcohol had undermined his health and made him seem like a
memento mori:
“it was terribly sad to see that six feet three inches of kindness stretched out ineffectual in the hospital room. His fingers trembled with a match, the tight skin on his handsome skull was marked as a mask of misery and nervous pain,” and he seemed pursued by impenetrable despair. In a self-reflective passage, Scott wrote that Ring “had, long before his death, ceased to find amusement in dissipation.” Thinking of Ring’s minatory example and of his own sell-out to Hollywood and the
Post,
Scott declared: “whatever Ring’s achievement was, it fell short of the achievement he was capable of, and this because of a cynical attitude toward his work.”
¹²

Scott paid his final tribute to Ring by portraying him as the alcoholic composer Abe North in
Tender Is the Night
(1934). “His voice was slow and shy,” Scott wrote, “he had one of the saddest faces [she] had ever seen, the high cheekbones of an Indian, a long upper lip, and enormous deep-set dark golden eyes.” Though physically and intellectually impressive, Abe is also weak, self-indulgent and bitter. His friends are aware of his talent, but frightened by his urge to self-destruction: “All of them were conscious of the solemn dignity that flowed from him, of his achievement, fragmentary, suggestive and surpassed. But they were frightened at his survivant will, once a will to live, now become a will to die.”
¹³

IV

Fitzgerald’s move from St. Paul to New York placed him in the center of literary life, enabling him to keep in touch with old friends and meet a number of new writers: John Dos Passos, P. G. Wodehouse, Van Wyck Brooks, Carl Van Vechten, Theodore Dreiser and Rebecca West. The nearsighted and introspective Dos Passos was the grandson of an immigrant cobbler from Portuguese Madeira and the illegitimate son of a successful New York lawyer. Born in Chicago in 1896, he had been educated in Europe and at the Choate School. After graduating from Harvard, he drove ambulances during the war in France and Italy. He had traveled widely in Spain and the Middle East; and his war novel,
Three Soldiers
(1921), had been favorably reviewed by Fitzgerald in the
St. Paul Daily News.

Dos Passos first met Scott and Zelda at the Plaza Hotel in October 1922. They introduced him to Sherwood Anderson, gave him cocktails and champagne, and then asked the shy writer embarrassing questions about his sex life. Anderson left after a lunch of lobster croquettes, and Dos Passos drove out to Great Neck in their chauffeured red touring car to help them search for a house. They had plenty of time to talk that day and Dos Passos found Fitzgerald interesting, despite his intellectual limitations: “When he talked about writing his mind, which seemed to me full of preposterous notions about most things, became clear and hard as a diamond. He didn’t look at landscape, he had no taste for food or wine or painting, little ear for music except for the most rudimentary popular songs, but about writing he was a born professional.”

After searching in vain for a suitable house, they visited Ring Lardner, who was completely drunk. On the way back to the city, they stopped at an amusement park. Dos Passos and Zelda rode together on a Ferris wheel, and an alarming gulf opened between them when he realized that she was emotionally disturbed: “I had come up against that basic fissure in her mental processes that was to have such tragic consequences. Though she was so very lovely, I had come upon something that frightened and repelled me, even physically.” Zelda sulked and Scott drank during the rest of the trip, and Dos Passos was glad to part with them in front of the Plaza.

Though most writers emphasized Fitzgerald’s drunkenness and bizarre behavior, the English humorist P. G. Wodehouse found Scott sober and charming, though rather seedy, when he ran into him at the village train station. As Wodehouse wrote to a friend: “I have also met Scott Fitzgerald. In fact I met him again this morning. He was off to New York with Truex, who is doing his play
The Vegetable.
I believe these stories you hear about his drinking are exaggerated. He seems quite normal, and a very nice chap indeed. You would like him. The thing is he goes to New York with a scrubby chin, looking foul. I suppose he gets a shave when he arrives, but it doesn’t show him at his best in Great Neck. I would like to see more of him.”
¹⁴

In contrast to Wodehouse, the wealthy, Harvard-educated critic and biographer Van Wyck Brooks remarked on Fitzgerald’s unconventional behavior and conspicuous extravagance. After arriving late for a Manhattan dinner party in 1923, the Fitzgeralds promptly fell asleep at the table. Scott went to lie down more comfortably in the living room, but woke up suddenly to take command of the festivities and “telephone an order for two cases of champagne, together with a fleet of taxis to take us to a night club.”

The following year, Edmund Wilson used Brooks in his dialogue, “Imaginary Conversations: Mr. Van Wyck Brooks and Mr. Scott Fitzgerald,” to contrast the two men. Continuing his critical debate with Fitzgerald, Wilson attributed his
own
ideas to the thorough, learned and scholarly Brooks, who “knows far more about American literature than anybody else in the world,” and gave Brooks all the best lines. In this conversation, Brooks, the mouthpiece for Wilson, freely censured Fitzgerald for haste, superficiality and commercialism; for writing too much and too fast; and for allowing himself to be corrupted by high-paying magazines like the
Post.
This influential and frequently reprinted essay contained some useful admonitions, and portrayed Fitzgerald as foolish, shallow and outclassed by the heavyweight critic.

The sophisticated aesthete and novelist Carl Van Vechten first met Fitzgerald at a New York party in 1923, saw him socially in Hollywood and Delaware, and photographed him in 1937. Like Dos Passos and Brooks, Van Vechten usually saw Scott when he was getting drunk and quarreling with Zelda. He closely observed the Fitzgeralds, who were trying to live up to their dashing reputation, and portrayed them as David and Rilda Westlake in his novel
Parties
(1930). In this work Rilda influences most of David’s behavior. He does everything either to please or to annoy her, and they torture each other because they love each other. But, Rilda complains, with considerable insight: “Our damned faithfulness, as you call it, our clean ‘fidelity,’ doesn’t get us very far. We follow each other around in circles, loving and hating and wounding. We’re both so sadistic. It’s really too bad one of us isn’t a masochist.”
¹⁵

Van Vechten was present—along with Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, Burton Rascoe and the novelist Llewelyn Powys—at a deadly party given by Theodore Dreiser. The dour novelist had no idea how to entertain his guests, lined them up in straight-backed chairs, did not introduce them to one another and failed to provide any drink. At this point Fitzgerald staggered in drunk, clutching a bottle of excellent champagne. In an attempt to enliven the proceedings, he generously declared: “Mr. Dreiser, I get a great kick out of your books,” and handed over the precious bottle. Instead of offering it to his thirsty guests, Dreiser carefully placed it in the icebox, and the party sank back into its torpor.

Another social mishap occurred just after Fitzgerald told Thomas Boyd, early in 1924, that the young English novelist “Rebecca West and a rather (not
too
) literary crowd are coming out Sunday for a rather formal party and Zelda’s scared.” Fitzgerald told Rebecca West, the guest of honor, that someone would pick her up and drive her from Manhattan out to Great Neck. Due to a typical misunderstanding, she was not picked up. Since she did not know Fitzgerald’s address, she spent the entire evening waiting for his call in her hotel room. Insulted by her failure to appear, Fitzgerald made fun of her at dinner. When they were finally reconciled on the French Riviera in the summer of 1925 Zelda, always uncomfortable with intellectuals, cattily said that West looked “like an advertisement for cauliflower ears and [was] entirely surrounded by fairies—male.”
¹⁶

Apart from Lardner, Fitzgerald’s most important friend during the Great Neck years was the patrician war hero and polo star, Tommy Hitchcock, whom he often saw playing in championship matches at the Meadow Brook Club on Long Island. Born into a wealthy, upper-class family in 1900, Tommy attended the Fay School and St. Paul’s. During the war, while still in his teens, he joined the legendary Lafayette Corps of flyers. Shot down and wounded in German territory, he escaped to Switzerland by jumping off a moving train. His bravery earned him the Croix de Guerre with three palms.

After the war Tommy attended Harvard and (like Jay Gatsby) spent a term or two at Oxford. He married a steel heiress, became a successful investment banker with Lehman Brothers and dominated the international polo scene as a ten-goal player from 1919 to 1939. Tommy’s biographer writes that “he was deficient in the graces, as ‘country’ aristocrats often are, sloppy in dress and awkward in manner; but he possessed in full measure the virtues valued by his class: modesty, loyalty, and magnanimity. . . . [Scott’s Princeton friend] David Bruce, who shared an apartment with Hitchcock during World War II, went so far as to call him the only ‘perfect’ man he’d ever met.”
¹⁷

Fitzgerald idolized Tommy, who had many of the qualities he himself desired. Tommy had the great wealth, social class and fine breeding of Gerald Murphy (whom Scott would meet in 1925) combined with the good looks, athletic ability and heroic war record of Ernest Hemingway. In April 1929 Scott told Perkins that a French book was about to appear that would describe Tommy’s daring escape from the German train. In his
Notebooks,
Scott contrasted two of his personal heroes and suggested how they would become models for the fictional characters in
Tender Is the Night:
“Difference in conversation between Gerald Murphy and Tommy Hitchcock. Tommy doesn’t answer foolish questions or trivial questions [from Fitzgerald]. . . . Trace a character who once was like Gerald and who now tends toward Tommy Hitchcock’s impatience with fools.” Toward the end of his life, Scott used Tommy’s career to inspire his daughter to take her college studies more seriously: “Tommy Hitchcock, who came back from England in 1919 already a newspaper hero in his escapes from Germany and the greatest polo player in the world—went up to Harvard in the same year to become
a freshman
—because he had the humility to ask himself ‘Do I know anything?’ That combination is what forever will put him in my pantheon of heroes.”