The Beautiful and Damned

The Beautiful and Damned  - F. Scott Fitzgerald


F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, to Edward and Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald. His father was an unsuccessful businessman who came from an old family with roots in Maryland. His mother was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who built a successful wholesale grocery business in St. Paul. Scott was named after his father’s distant cousin, the author of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and his mother was proud of the family connection to the Keys. Before Scott reached school age his father’s wicker furniture factory had failed, and the family moved to upstate New York to follow Edward’s sales job with Proctor and Gamble. In 1908 Edward lost his position, and the family moved back to St. Paul; from that point on McQuillan money supported them.
At a young age, Scott showed a talent for writing: At thirteen he published his first story in his school journal. In 1911 he transferred to an elite Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he published three stories in the school’s literary magazine and wrote several plays. Fitzgerald enrolled in Princeton University in 1913, where he contributed to campus magazines and wrote scripts and lyrics for campus musicals. His devotion to extracurricular activities forced him to leave Princeton because of poor grades, although the reason recorded in official records was poor health. After the United States entered World War I, he enlisted in the army; while stationed at a military camp in Kansas, he began writing The Romantic Egotist, his first novel.
After the war, Fitzgerald was discharged from the army, never having seen active service. He revised his novel and renamed it This Side of Paradise; Charles Scribner’s Sons published it in 1920. That same year Scott married the willful, unpredictable Zelda Sayre, whom he had met several years earlier while stationed at an army base in Alabama. Fitzgerald’s first novel—immensely popular with the war generation—brought him instant fame, although many critics of the day debated its literary merits. He quickly developed notoriety as a carouser and a playboy—impressions he did little to diminish—but his reputation for heavy drinking and continual partying belied his writerly discipline, as evidenced by meticulous revisions of his novels and the numerous short stories he wrote throughout his life. In 1922 he followed his successful debut as a novelist with The Beautiful and Damned, a tale about a couple whose lives end in dissipation while they sue for a large inheritance. In his early works Fitzgerald explored a theme he would return to repeatedly: the effects of wealth and power on the people who possess them.
After the birth of their daughter, Scottie, the Fitzgeralds lived a peripatetic life for many years, settling in Europe for periods and then residing in America. In Paris Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingway and other American expatriate writers, whom Gertrude Stein was to dub the “lost generation.”
In 1925 Fitzgerald published his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Written while the author was living in the French Riviera, the story of the parvenu Jay Gatsby was more a critical success than a financial one, and Fitzgerald continued to support his extravagant lifestyle through frequent, and well-paid, magazine contributions. But his literary fortunes changed following publication of The Great Gatsby. Although he published a collection of short stories in 1926, he did not produce another book until 1934, when Tender Is the Night, on which he had labored for years, was published. Meanwhile, his domestic life deteriorated as he sank deeper into alcoholism and Zelda became increasingly unstable. Zelda’s emotional collapse in 1930 was precipitated by maniacally intense ballet studies; the remaining years of her life were spent in and out of hospitals.
Tender Is the Night was a commercial failure and received mixed reviews from the critics. Fitzgerald spent the years following its publication drunk and dissolute; he chronicled this period in the “Crack-Up” essays. As his literary fame diminished, he worked as a Hollywood scriptwriter and wrote short stories; in 1939 he began work on his final novel, The Last Tycoon, which detailed Hollywood life. By then he was living with Sheilah Graham, a Hollywood gossip columnist, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. On December 21, 1940, before The Last Tycoon was completed, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four. The Last Tycoon was published in 1941; its writing style is considered as fine as the best of Fitzgerald’s other work.



THE WORLD OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD AND THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED
1896 Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, the only son of Edward, a genteel, unsuccessful factory owner, and Mary (“Mollie”) McQuillan, the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became a successful wholesale grocer in St. Paul. He is named after his father’s distant cousin, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
1898 Commercial failures force Edward to move his family to Buffalo, New York, where he takes a sales job with Proctor and Gamble.
1899 Sigmund Freud publishes Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams); the first edition carries the publication date 1900.
1901 Edward Fitzgerald is relocated with his family to Syracuse, New York.
1905 Albert Einstein publishes significant physics papers, including one on the special theory of relativity.
1907 Artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque begin to develop cubism, an important new visual arts style.
1908 Edward Fitzgerald loses his job at Procter and Gamble, and the family returns to St. Paul, where they are supported by Mollie’s inheritance. F. Scott Fitzgerald enters St. Paul’s Academy.
1909 Scott’s first published story, “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage,” appears in his school journal.
1911 Scott enters the Newman School, an elite Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey. During his three years at Newman, he publishes three stories in the school literary magazine and writes and produces several plays.
1912 Scott meets Father Sigourney Fay and the Anglo-Irish
writer Shane Leslie, who both recognize and encourage his talents. C.G. Jung publishes Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (The Psychology of the Unconscious).
1913 Fitzgerald graduates from the Newman School and is accepted at Princeton University, despite an unexceptional academic record. In August, a production of his play Coward sells out at the St. Paul Y.W.C.A. Auditorium. At Princeton, he befriends Edmund Wilson, who will become a critic and author, and John Peale Bishop, who will become a poet and novelist. Fitzgerald spends much of his time in extracurricularlishes activities, including writing scripts and lyrics for the Triangle Club, Princeton’s drama club. D. H. Lawrence pub- Sons and Lovers.
1914 World War I begins.
1915 Fitzgerald meets and falls in love with Ginevra King, a young girl from a wealthy Chicago family. His affair with Ginevra, who is possibly a model for some of his fictional characters, amounts to several dates and a ream of passionate letters. His extracurricular activities take a toll on his grades, and he leaves Princeton, ostensibly because of illness. Europe is engulfed by war.
1916 Fitzgerald returns to Princeton.
1917 His relationship with Ginevra dies down. In January, Fitzgerald publishes The Debutante, a play inspired by his affair with her, in the Nassau Literary Magazine. America declares war against Germany, and Fitzgerald enlists in the army as a second lieutenant. He is stationed in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and begins writing a novel, The Romantic Egotist. T. S. Eliot publishes Prufrock and Other Observations.
1918 On leave from the army, Fitzgerald returns to Princeton and completes his novel. His mentor, author Shane Leslie, recommends it to Scribner’s. Fitzgerald is stationed first in Kentucky, then Georgia, and then near Montgomery, Alabama, where he meets Zelda Sayre, the wayward daughter of an Alabama state Supreme Court judge. Although editor Maxwell Perkins rejects Fitzgerald’s novel, his letter contains praise for the work. World War I ends; Fitzgerald never sees active service.
1919 Fitzgerald is discharged from the army and becomes engaged to Zelda. Although he finds work at a New York advertising agency, Zelda breaks off their engagement, worried about his financial prospects. Fitzgerald returns to his parents’ house, where he rewrites his novel; now titled This Side of Paradise, it is accepted for publication by Scribner’s. Fitzgerald also sells his first story: “Babes in the Woods” is accepted for publication in The Smart Set. Prohibition begins.
1920 Fitzgerald and Zelda renew their engagement. He publishes stories in the Saturday Evening Post and The Smart Set. This Side of Paradise is published and goes through nine printings in its first year. Scott and Zelda are married in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. The newlyweds move to Westport, Connecticut, where Fitzgerald works on The Beautiful and Damned, and then to New York. Flappers and Philosophers, Fitzgerald’s first collection of short stories, is published. Following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, women gain the right to vote.
1921 Scott and Zelda spend months traveling in England, France, and Italy. They return in August to Minnesota, where Zelda gives birth to a daughter, Frances Scott (“Scottie”).
1922 The Beautiful and Damned, about the dissipated life of an artist and his wife, is published. Another collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age, is published in September. The family moves to Great Neck, Long Island (New York). Fitzgerald’s drinking habit grows. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses are published.
1923 The Vegetable, a play the Fitzgeralds thought would make them wealthy, is published but fails at an Atlantic City tryout. Jazz musician Duke Ellington first plays in New York.
1924 The family moves to the French Riviera, where Zelda has an affair with Edouard Jozan, a French pilot. Fitzgerald drafts his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. The Fitzgeralds befriend wealthy American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy. The Fitzgeralds spend several months in Rome.
1925 The Great Gatsby is published. Fitzgerald moves his family to Paris, where he meets Ernest Hemingway. Gangster Al Capone rises to the top of organized crime in Chicago.
1926 Fitzgerald publishes All the Sad Young Men, a collection of stories that includes one of his best, “The Rich Boy,” which examines how wealth influences character. The family spends most of the year in the Riviera, returning to America in December. Ernest Hemingway publishes The Sun Also Rises.
1927 Fitzgerald moves with Zelda to Hollywood, California, to write a screenplay. They move again, to Delaware, where Zelda begins ballet lessons. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is published. Charles Lindbergh completes the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic.
1928 The Saturday Evening Post publishes “The Scandal Detectives,” the first of a series of stories based on Fitzgerald’s youth. The family moves again to Paris, where Zelda’s ballet training damages her health and leads to marital problems. The family returns to Delaware in the fall.
1929 Once again the family goes back to Europe. Zelda publishes “The Original Follies Girl” in College Humor. The American stock market crashes, and the Great Depression begins.
1930 In April, Zelda suffers the first of a series of nervous breakdowns and is admitted to a Paris clinic. In May, she goes to a sanatorium in Switzerland where she is diagnosed as schizophrenic.
1931 Fitzgerald travels alone to America to attend his father’s funeral. He accepts an offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) to work on a screenplay in Hollywood. He returns to Europe and travels between Paris and Switzerland. In July the Swiss sanatorium releases Zelda. The Fitzgerald family returns to America in September. In December, Fitzgerald goes alone to Hollywood to work for Metro-GoldwynMayer.
1932 Zelda suffers another collapse and is hospitalized in Baltimore. She will be an inpatient or an outpatient at a sanatorium for the rest of her life. Fitzgerald moves to Baltimore to join his wife. Zelda publishes an autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz, completed in the clinic.
1933 Prohibition ends. Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany.
Gertrude Stein publishes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
1934 Zelda suffers a third breakdown and returns to the Baltimore clinic. Fitzgerald publishes Tender Is the Night, a novel about a psychiatrist in Europe who marries one of his patients and eventually unravels. Henry Miller publishes Tropic of Cancer in France.
1935 Taps at Reveille, Fitzgerald’s fourth short-story collection, is published. He moves back and forth between Baltimore, New York, and North Carolina.
1936 Fitzgerald’s confessional “Crack-Up” essays, which describe his sense of emotional depletion, appear in Esquire.
1937 Financially strained, Fitzgerald accepts a lucrative scriptwriting contract with MGM. In December, the six-month contract is renewed for one year. He starts writing the screenplay for Three Comrades, his only script to make it to film. He begins an affair with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham that will last until his death.
1939 Fitzgerald, whose MGM contract was not renewed at the end of 1938, starts work on a screenplay for United Artists but is fired after a drinking binge. Later that year he works as a freelance screenwriter in Hollywood. He starts The Last Tycoon, a novel about life in Hollywood. He is hospitalized twice following drinking bouts. World War II begins.
1940 With The Last Tycoon only half finished, F. Scott Fitzgerald dies of a heart attack on December 21, in Graham’s Hollywood apartment. He is buried in the Rockville Union Cemetery in Maryland.
1941 The Last Tycoon is published.
1945 The Crack-Up is published.
1948 Zelda Fitzgerald dies in a fire at a hospital in North Carolina.




INTRODUCTION
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Beautiful and Damned, his second book, when he was only twenty-five. It was published in 1922, just as the Jazz Age was beginning to hit its stride. The war was over, the economy was booming, the skyscrapers were rising, the flappers were vamping, the alcohol was flowing (despite Prohibition), the music was swinging, and the party appeared to be never-ending. America was, as Fitzgerald later said, “going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it” (The Crack-Up, with Other Pieces and Stories, p. 59; see “For Further Reading”). Who better to chronicle the splendor of this new age than Fitzgerald, the man who since the rip-roaring success of his first novel had been called its most notorious voice?
Although he was the poster boy for this extravagant age, with his second book Fitzgerald chose to focus not on the splendor of the era, but instead on its spoils, the ugly aftermath of the party. The Beautiful and Damned is a cautionary tale of a young, insouciant, and irresponsible couple, Anthony and Gloria Patch, and their inevitable downward spiral. In the beginning, they are carefree and happy, buoyed by their love for each other and the hope that Anthony will one day inherit his grandfather’s vast fortune. By the end, they have deteriorated to such an extent that both appear to be bitter, empty shells of their former selves. Gloria has lost her beauty and with it her confidence, and Anthony has metamorphosed into a dissolute drunk who behaves like a child. Theirs is a bleak story without any real promise of redemption.
The Beautiful and Damned is Fitzgerald’s least-known novel, yet it provides fascinating insight into his development as a writer and his evolution as a person. Stylistically, it functions as the intermediate step between the unfocused but exuberant vitality of his debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and the superb craftsmanship of his third and in many ways greatest book, The Great Gatsby. While This Side of Paradise is a discursive story with digressions aplenty and The Great Gatsby is a seamless, nearly flawless narrative, The Beautiful and Damned is somewhere in between: a fully fashioned and controlled story that nevertheless often belabors its points and exhausts its themes. Despite its defects, the book is a compelling story that allowed Fitzgerald to explore fundamental questions and themes he developed throughout his fiction: What is the purpose and the cost of maintaining dreams? What motivates failure? What causes people to fall in and out of love? And what makes a character tragic? Tragedy, of course, was a running theme in Fitzgerald’s psyche and his life.
When Fitzgerald began to write The Beautiful and Damned, his life was anything but tragic. His first novel had just been published to wide critical and popular acclaim, selling more than 75,000 copies. He was universally hailed as a literary wunderkind and had become one of the highest-paid short story writers in the business. He had finally won the hand of his sweetheart, Zelda, and together they were living the high life in New York, feted everywhere as the glamour couple. At the age of twenty-four, Fitzgerald had achieved all his dreams, and the future looked infinitely bright and promising. Yet within fourteen years he would hit rock bottom and become an alcoholic living in a cheap motel, eating twenty-five-cent meals and washing his own clothes in the sink while his wife was treated for schizophrenia in a nearby sanatorium. By then, unable to write and owing tens of thousands of dollars, overwhelmed by his dire situation, Fitzgerald would crack, suffer a nervous breakdown, and, like his character Anthony Patch, become a broken man.
While there is no simple explanation of how Fitzgerald’s downfall came about, there is no question that by writing The Beautiful and Damned he was expressing his fears of dissipation and, to a certain extent, prophetically anticipating and foreshadowing his own decline. Although he created several memorable heroes, in many ways Fitzgerald was his own greatest tragic figure. In keeping with the credo of his Romantic idols, like John Keats, he lived life at full speed, flinging himself into every experience with frightening energy to enlarge his powers as an artist. He married a woman who zealously asserted her own will and her thirst for life without fear, inhibition, or, at times, regard for him. Fitzgerald always had the capacity to recognize the risks inherent in his own behavior, to acknowledge that he was self-destructive, but he lacked the desire, strength, or ability to change. His resistance to change was perhaps a result of his artistic commitment. Fitzgerald’s first and foremost priority was to experience life, then to write about it. Everything else, even self-preservation, came second. While his lack of caution may in retrospect appear irresponsible, even indeed tragic, he did produce magnificent writing.
From the beginning, Fitzgerald felt that he was destined to be a writer. He was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Edward Fitzgerald and his wife, Mollie, a middle-class Irish-American Catholic couple. Just three months before he was born, Scott’s parents had lost their two young daughters; although Mollie never talked about the dead children, the loss endowed her son with a heightened sensitivity to the past and to the fragile nature of life.
In an effort to quell her grief, Mollie spoiled and indulged her young son, and Scott quickly developed into a precocious and perceptive child. While his mother was an outspoken and ambitious woman, his father was a shy, retiring man. A southern gentleman and a distant relative of Francis Scott Key—the author of “The Star Spangled Banner” and Scott’s namesake—Edward told tales of the old South and the Civil War that fascinated Scott and invested him with romantic ideals at a young age.
When Scott was still a boy, Edward moved the family to Buffalo, New York, where he started a new business. The business failed, and then Edward was fired from a position as a salesman at Procter and Gamble. Fitzgerald later remembered that his father was never the same. While he had left in the morning a confident, capable person, “He came home that evening, an old man, a completely broken man. He had lost his essential drive.... He was a failure the rest of his days” (quoted in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 20). The family returned to St. Paul, moved in with Mollie’s wealthy mother, and lived off a substantial inheritance from Mollie’s father, who had been a well-to-do grocer and businessman.
Although her husband had failed, Mollie was determined that her son would succeed. She dressed Scott in the finest clothes, enrolled him in dance school and the St. Paul Academy, and made sure that he was introduced to the best families in town. Scott was an articulate, attractive, and sophisticated young man who knew very well how to sweet-talk the girls and please the parents. He fit right into St. Paul, where he joined in the rounds of sleigh rides, picnics, and dances. But like Basil Lee—his fictional alter ego in the “Basil and Josephine” short stories—Scott often had a hard time reining in his intelligence and his “fresh” know-it-all manner. He once corrected his teacher, admonishing her that Mexico City wasn’t the capital of Central America, and often endeavored to tell other children how they could improve themselves to become more popular. When he was twelve, the school magazine asked if someone would find a way to shut up Scott or poison him please! (Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 21). A naturally dramatic child and somewhat of an exhibitionist, Scott was interested in the theater and would often, along with his friends, act out plays he had seen. He also displayed an early gift for writing, and had his literary debut at thirteen when his first piece was published in the school’s magazine, St. Paul Academy Now and Then. Scott could hardly contain himself and hung around after classes, excitedly asking students if they had read it.
When he was fifteen, Scott’s mother sent him to the Newman School, a Catholic boarding school in Hackensack, New Jersey, in order to improve his chances to attend a top university. Scott showed off his vast knowledge in class, bossed people around on the football field, boasted a few too many times, and quickly became persona non grata at the school. He encapsulated his position there wonderfully in the short story “The Freshest Boy”: “He had, indeed, become the scapegoat, the immediate villain, the sponge which absorbed all malice and irritability abroad” (The Basil and Josephine Stories, p. 61). While it may have been painful at the time, his pariah status helped foster Scott’s development as an artist, in that it allowed him to channel most of his energy into writing short stories and plays. By his second year he had achieved a belated kind of popularity, helped along by his status as a “writer,” his humbled manner, and his improvements on the football field.
At seventeen, Fitzgerald entered Princeton University, a long-held dream. At the time, he believed that “life was something you dominated if you were any good” (The Crack-Up, p. 70), and he planned to be not just good but great. He set highly ambitious goals for his tenure at Princeton: He wanted to be a football hero, and president of the Triangle Club, a theater group that put on a musical every year. The first goal was quickly squashed, since he didn’t even make the freshman team, but the second he pursued with dogged determination. Always a lackluster student, he quickly decided that classes were a waste and spent most of his time in his room writing musicals to submit to the Triangle or pieces for the Princeton Tiger, a humor magazine. He would often stay up all night, then wait outside of class for the editor of the Tiger, to waylay him with more submissions. His classmates would later remember Fitzgerald as an exuberant, gregarious young man who, as John Peale Bishop said, “looked like a jonquil” (quoted in Kazin, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, p. 46), and was bursting with enthusiasm and emanating a magical, incandescent aura around him.
Although he didn’t pay much attention to his English professors, Fitzgerald did form a literary brotherhood of sorts with his classmate John Peale Bishop. According to Fitzgerald, Bishop taught him what was and wasn’t poetry and awakened him to the magic of the Romantic poets. Fitzgerald also met Edmund Wilson, an upperclassman who, despite his highbrow tastes, wrote for the Triangle and would become a lifelong friend. By his junior year Fitzgerald had written two Triangle musicals and was well placed to become president. Unfortunately, he had also severely neglected his studies. After he failed his make-up exams he was placed out of the running to be president of the Triangle Club. The dream was dead, and both college and life appeared meaningless: “It seemed on one March afternoon that I had lost every single thing I wanted” (Turnbull, p. 70).
Fitzgerald quickly replaced the Princeton dream with another—that of being a war hero. He received his commission as a second lieutenant in the fall of 1917, his senior year, and left school. As it turned out, he was a lousy soldier who fell off horses, improperly saluted his superiors, and poorly managed his regiment. He didn’t really believe in the war, and felt that all of the drills and practice skirmishes were nuisances that interrupted him from his real work: finishing his novel.
Convinced he might die in battle, Fitzgerald had hastily begun to write a coming-of-age story and every week spent half of Saturday and all of Sunday maniacally working on it in the officer’s club. Fitzgerald quickly finished the novel and in 1918 sent it to his friend and mentor Shane Leslie, who forwarded it to the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons. Free to socialize, Scott finally allowed himself to have a little fun. He was now posted in Montgomery, Alabama, and while attending a dance he met one of its most celebrated belles, Zelda Sayre. Zelda was the youngest of the five children of Judge Anthony Sayre and already at nineteen an infamous beauty. Uninhibited, fearless, and effervescent, her exploits were legendary: She rode on motorcycles, smoked at a time when it was taboo for women, turned cartwheels at dances when things got boring, and entertained beaus round the clock. In Fitzgerald’s eyes, Zelda was an original, both the embodiment of his ideal woman and a fierce, bold individual whose flame burned bright, and he pursued her relentlessly.
The end of World War I interrupted Fitzgerald’s courtship of Zelda. He and his troop were sent back East and then dismissed. Eager to earn some money, Fitzgerald quickly moved to New York and got a job in advertising, then wrote Zelda asking her to marry him. He continued to toil as a writer, composing short stories at night, but had little success. His stories, like his novel, were almost all turned down, and he papered the walls of his apartment with more than 120 rejection slips. Then Zelda, fearing he would never make enough money, threw him over. Suddenly life in New York seemed pointless. Fitzgerald moved back to St. Paul to rewrite his novel.
One of Fitzgerald’s abiding characteristics was his ability to bounce back. Time and again he would suffer a terrible blow, then recoup, and achieve an astounding success. He moved back into his parents’ house determined to write a novel that would sell. He holed himself away in his bedroom, taped a careful outline to his curtains, and subsisted only on the sandwiches and milk his mother supplied. After two months he had rewritten a book he had originally called “The Romantic Egotist”—a semi-autobiographical novel about his youth and time at Princeton—and transformed it into what he felt was a more accomplished piece of writing, now titled This Side of Paradise. He sent it off to Scribner’s, certain that it would be accepted. He confidently wrote his friend Edmund Wilson, “I really believe that no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation” (quoted in A Life in Letters, p. 17).
Fitzgerald had always believed he was destined for greatness. Two weeks after he had mailed off his manuscript to Scribner’s, Fitzgerald received a letter from Maxwell Perkins, one of the editors, accepting the novel. Fitzgerald was jubilant. He ran down the streets of St. Paul stopping cars to tell them that he was now an author. As it turned out, his estimation of his book was correct. Although flawed and at times clumsy, it was a unique piece of writing that spoke to and for this new generation of flappers and former soldiers. It was published in March 1920, became a runaway best-seller, and transformed Fitzgerald’s life. The Saturday Evening Post, which had repeatedly rejected his work before, began paying him $1,000 a story. Zelda had accepted his offer of marriage and by April was settled with him in New York. And instead of being an impoverished unknown, Fitzgerald was now a renowned, wealthy author.
Fame, money, beauty, and early success: This was the American dream. Zelda and Scott embarked on a series of madcap escapades to celebrate: They rode to parties on the roofs and hoods of taxies; they went to a play and laughed during the serious parts, then remained silent during the funny parts; they jumped into the fountain at the Plaza Hotel. Everything they did was chronicled in the papers, and the couple began to symbolize the freewheeling era of flappers and flaming youth. But achieving all of your dreams at such a young age can be a mixed blessing. Later, Fitzgerald remembered “riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again” (quoted in Turnbull, p. 115).
After several months of the high life, Fitzgerald realized it was time to begin work on a second novel. However, the high life was expensive, and he was out of money. He composed several short stories to drum up some cash, then began to concentrate on his new work. His first priority was to take a leap forward as a writer. He was well aware of the weaknesses of his first novel: It was undisciplined, pretentious, and uneven—a pastiche of different styles and tones. Edmund Wilson had even warned Fitzgerald that if he weren’t careful he could easily become a trashy popular novelist. Although Fitzgerald wrote and would continue to write for mass-market magazines in order to sustain himself financially, he had decided he wanted to be a serious artist. Toward that end he resolved with his second novel to compose a more united, structured narrative. At the time he was reading Joseph Conrad, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser; under the influence of their work, he gravitated toward social realism and began to shape a story of one couple’s deterioration. Fitzgerald wrote quickly, finishing the book in less than nine months. He was extremely happy with his work, telling his publisher Charles Scribner that “it’s really a most sensational book” (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 41).
One of the most notable things about the novel and indeed all of Fitzgerald’s work is the luminous, sparkling prose. People have said about Fitzgerald again and again, my how he could write. He was not yet at the peak of his abilities; he still struggled to fuse style and meaning, but he was already an astonishing wordsmith with a dazzling ability to not only tell a story, but also evoke a whole world. This description of Times Square, written in 1921, is brilliant and eerily current today:
The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughter hoarse as a crow’s, incessant and loud, with the rumble of subways underneath—and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light—light dividing like pearls—forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky (p. 25).
Over the years, many people have asserted that Fitzgerald’s talent with language was a gift, the implication being that he was a natural who could effortlessly toss off his writing. This was hardly true. While Fitzgerald may have had inborn talent, he labored over his writing. He had tirelessly studied the Romantic poets—in particular Keats—for their command of language and incomparable imagery, and he aspired to achieve a style as sumptuous, seamless, and lyrical as theirs. He wrote and rewrote all of his work with uncommon zeal. But what makes his style so effective is the sensitivity and feeling that underscore it. As Lionel Trilling noted, “Even in Fitzgerald’s early, cruder books ... there is a tone and pitch to the sentences which suggests his warmth and tenderness, and ... his gentleness without softness” (Kazin, p. 195). When Fitzgerald describes the hero’s first kiss with the heroine in The Beautiful and Damned, the tender yet powerful feelings fairly leap off the page:
There were pauses that seemed about to shatter and were only to be snatched back to oblivion by the tightening of his arms about her and the sense that she was resting there as a caught, gossamer feather, drifted in out of the dark. Anthony laughed, noiselessly and exultantly, turning his face up and away from her, half in an overpowering rush of triumph (p. 85).
At the center of this magnificent prose is the hero, one Anthony Patch. Anthony’s parents died when he was young, and his grandfather raised him, but his family seemed to have little effect on his upbringing or his values. He attended Yale, traveled in Europe, and as a young man had a vague sense that “he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy” (p. 7). Despite his notions of grandeur, Anthony is for the most part an opaque character with no real passion or ambition; as Fitzgerald himself said, he is a man “with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative inspiration” (quoted in A Life in Letters, p. 41). The only thing that sets Anthony apart is his relationship to desire. Early on in the narrative he sees a woman across the way through his apartment window:
He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful—then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards.... Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known (p. 19).
What has attracted Anthony is not the woman herself but the act of desiring her, the dream of her. This motif of desire that is more fulfilling than the object itself plays off the romantic themes of Fitzgerald’s idol, Keats. In the Romantic tradition one could never obtain beauty, which is an ideal, yet one must continually strive for it. Fitzgerald developed this theme of desire and the unobtainable dream that sustains us throughout all of his fiction, first articulating it with his hero Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise:
Always, after he was in bed, there were voices—indefinite, fading, enchanting—just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorite waking dreams, the one about becoming a great half back.... It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being (p. 19).
Of course, the unobtainable dream would reach its most mature expression in Jay Gatsby’s ill-fated, irrevocable, and inextinguishable desire to capture Daisy. Comically for Anthony, his initial dream falls apart as he looks again out the window and realizes that this female apparition is in actuality a fat middle-aged woman, not his ideal at all. Once again, life is empty and meaningless—that is, until Anthony finally does meet his ideal, Gloria Gilbert.
Gloria is introduced in the narrative not as a person, but as a beauty, sent down to Earth by a voice. This trope is in keeping with Fitzgerald’s Keatsian concept of beauty as an ideal and his rather sexless view of women. For Fitzgerald, beauty is never carnal, base, or attended by sexual desire. Instead it is a supernatural quality, connected to something much greater than an arrangement of features or body parts. Once Gloria has been sent down to Earth she becomes a real woman, yet to Anthony she is no mere mortal: “Out of the deep sophistication of Anthony an understanding formed ... that as she talked and caught his eyes and turned her lovely head, she moved him as he had never been moved before. The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance—that was all” (p. 62).
Anthony is besotted with Gloria, overwhelmed by the force of her person and her power. In describing Gloria’s effect on Anthony, Fitzgerald’s prose takes off: “Such a kiss—it was a flower held against the face, never to be described, scarcely to be remembered; as though her beauty were giving off emanations of itself which settled transiently and already dissolving upon his heart” (p. 86). Gloria is the totality of womanhood for Anthony; indeed “he was convinced that no woman he had ever met compared in any way with Gloria” (p. 87). Anthony’s worship of Gloria strongly resembles Fitzgerald’s initial response to Zelda. In a letter to a friend written while he was engaged, Scott stated, “Zelda is the only God I have left now” (quoted in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 111).
And so Gloria and Anthony marry. Both dilettantes without any real desire to do or accomplish anything, they settle into a pattern of partying and spending while waiting for Anthony’s grandfather to die and leave them his money. Anthony quickly learns that while Gloria may be his ideal, she is not easy to live with. Indeed she is spoiled, willful, egotistical, and a terrible housekeeper, one who neglects both laundry and dishes. But despite some disagreements and Anthony’s struggle to manage a personality stronger than his own, they love each other: “Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost uncanny pull at each other’s hearts” (p. 138).
Although entertaining and well written, the story of Anthony and Gloria’s courtship and early marriage is the weakest section of the novel, in part because initially Anthony and Gloria lack substance as characters. Unlike Fitzgerald, who was driven by a deep and abiding passion both to live life and create art, Anthony wants nothing, while nominally pretending to be an aesthete and a gentleman. As Arthur Mizener stated, “Anthony is not real as the sensitive and intelligent man; what is real is the Anthony who is weak, drifting, and full of self-pity” (Kazin, p. 32).
The novel doesn’t really take off until the characters start to fall apart. Anthony’s grandfather comes by during one of their alcoholic binges and proceeds to disinherit Anthony. Then panic sets in as both Anthony and Gloria realize that, because they may never get the inheritance, they need to change their way of life. Unfortunately, as they ultimately discover, they lack the strength to do so. They try to rein in their improvident habits but continually fail. They cannot quit drinking. They criticize each other and start to grow resentful and distant: “Things had been slipping perceptibly. There was the money question, increasingly annoying, increasingly ominous; there was the realization that liquor had become a practical necessity to their amusement.... Moreover, both of them seemed vaguely weaker in fibre” (p. 225). They may be weaker in fiber, but through their dissipation Anthony and Gloria emerge as more believable characters—flawed human beings who are stuck in a downward spiral from which they cannot extricate themselves.
In fact, the more Anthony bottoms out the more interesting he becomes. When he goes off to war hoping to reform and become a new person but then quickly slips into a meaningless affair with Dot, a lower-class woman living in the South, he is pathetic but also overwhelmingly real. He continually struggles to cut things off with Dot, but because of his neediness, he is unable to do so. He becomes more and more pitiful but also more and more recognizably a person. When he returns to New York and attempts to sell motivational pamphlets to bartenders to make money but instead ends up dead drunk, he is a ridiculous failure. However, he is also a wonderfully three-dimensional human being. As many critics have noted, Fitzgerald never wrote about success as well as he captured failure. Throughout his fiction he wrote movingly of the broken man who can no longer maintain his dream, whose spirit has been undone. Fitzgerald’s unique ability to convey broken spirits was perhaps fueled in part by his memory of watching his own father’s sudden transformation from a dignified gentleman into an unmitigated failure.
In sharp contrast to Anthony’s downward spiral is the successful career of his friend and Gloria’s cousin, Dick Caramel. Dick is a writer who has a nominal success with his first novel, The Demon Lover, then gives in to the drum of commercialism and begins to write trashy stories for the magazines and the movies. Unlike Fitzgerald, who also wrote for popular magazines but felt that the work was beneath him, Dick doesn’t realize that he is compromising his talent. He has deluded himself into thinking that all of his work is as good as his first book. He doesn’t even know how much his literary reputation has slipped: Ironically, just as Anthony’s alcoholic dissipation foretells Fitzgerald’s emotional descent, Dick’s declining literary reputation foreshadows Fitzgerald’s literary reversal. When he wrote The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald was one of the most highly esteemed young writers. Yet by the time of his death Fitzgerald, like Dick, was seen as passé and out of touch, a writer who had blossomed early and then bottomed out. Ultimately the timeless quality of Fitzgerald’s work would win out, but it is interesting that he chose to envision such a decline—even if only in a fictional writer—while still at his peak.
It had become the custom among young and clever reviewers to mention Richard Caramel with a smile of scorn. “Mr.” Richard Caramel, they called him. His corpse was dragged obscenely through every literary supplement. He was accused of making a great fortune by writing trash for the movies. As the fashion in books shifted he was becoming almost a byword of contempt (p. 340).
Like many desperate and weak people who are unable to change their behavior, Gloria and Anthony grasp onto the hope that a divine intervention of sorts will somehow transform their sorry state of affairs. Their version of the deus ex machina is the lawsuit they have launched contesting the terms of Anthony’s grandfather’s will. The lawsuit drags on for four years, and while it is being argued Anthony and Gloria develop separate coping devices to nurse their illusions and block the pain. Anthony retreats further and further into the bottle: “There was a kindliness about intoxication—there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings” (p. 336). Meanwhile Gloria consoles herself with the notion that she still has her beauty and could, if need be, go into the movies. Finally, one day when she is tired of lacking money, Gloria does audition for the pictures, only to discover that her beauty has faded. No longer a glimmering youth, she is now a woman of a certain age. Fitzgerald attempts to imply that Gloria’s loss of beauty shatters her sense of self, but he cannot fully pull it off. Gloria has always tended to exist more as an idea and a counterpart to Anthony than as a character, and once she loses her beauty she also loses her only defining characteristic. Fitzgerald would successfully articulate this type of female character much more adeptly in The Great Gatsby with Daisy Buchanan, a woman who instead of ruining herself ruins others.
Much more effective than Gloria’s final descent is Anthony’s last bender. Out of booze and nearly out of money, he leaves the house with what appears to be a clear plan: He will use the two dollars he has to buy a few drinks, then hock his watch, which will give him and Gloria enough money for the weekend. Of course, he is a drunk, so nothing goes according to plan. He stays too late at the bar, so he can’t hock the watch. Out on the street he is snubbed by his old college friend, then—in an effort to resurrect his manhood—he tries to confront Mr. Bloeckman, an old beau of Gloria’s. Instead Mr. Bloeckman decks Anthony. Finally, a Good Samaritan dumps Anthony into a cab and takes him home, but when he discovers that Anthony doesn’t have any money, the would-be savior punches him. At each step we can feel Anthony’s intention to do the right thing slowly become muddled as he sinks deeper into confusion and alcoholic despair. Fitzgerald manages to present Anthony’s alcoholism in an empathetic light, as a sickness that he is powerless against, not a moral weakness, which is the way many people viewed it at the time.
At the end of the novel Fitzgerald lets his characters off the hook and gives them the money they had so desperately been waiting for. Yet there is no sense that either Anthony or Gloria will ever be content again. Their years of suffering appear to have divested them of any ability to feel happiness. This ending is somewhat unfulfilling and a sign that although Fitzgerald had adopted a more naturalistic approach for this novel, he didn’t really know how to make naturalism his own.
When The Beautiful and Damned came out, George Nathan, one of the editors of The Smart Set, proclaimed it “a very substantial performance” (quoted in Turnbull, p. 130) and a vast improvement over Fitzgerald’s first novel. The critic H. L. Mencken said, “There is fine observation in it, and much penetrating detail, and the writing is solid and sound.... Fitzgerald ceases to be a Wunderkind, and begins to come into his maturity” (quoted in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p.160). Many critics noted that while the central characters were not entirely redeemable, they were nonetheless compelling. Fitzgerald’s friend Edmund Wilson asserted that
there is a profounder truth in The Beautiful and Damned than the author perhaps intended to convey: the hero and heroine ... give themselves up to wild debaucheries and do not, from beginning to end, perform a single serious act; but you somehow get the impression that ... they are the most rational people in the book (quoted in Kazin, p. 83).
Perhaps the most interesting criticism came from Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, who wrote a review of the novel for the New York Tribune. Zelda criticized the book for its “literary references and the attempt to convey a profound air of erudition,” and asserted that the author had perhaps lifted a few of the passages: “It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar” (quoted in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 161). Zelda was right. For a writer everything is fair game, and from the beginning Fitzgerald used Zelda as a valuable source, often incorporating her sayings, mannerisms, and in this instance even adapting pieces of her writing into his work. Fitzgerald insisted, however, that there was only a surface resemblance between his wife and Gloria, later telling his daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, known as Scottie, “Gloria was a much more trivial and vulgar person than your mother” (quoted in A Life in Letters, p. 453). Indeed while Gloria and Zelda do share many characteristics—they are both beautiful, willful, domestic failures—Zeida was a much more complex and inherently lyrical person than the rather one-dimensional Gloria.
Never one to waste material, Fitzgerald also wove many of the circumstantial facts of his married life with Zelda into the novel: They had a Japanese butler named Tana; they rented a house out in Connecticut; Fitzgerald had served in the army but was discharged before he could be shipped to the war, etc. But more than the superficial elements, Fitzgerald invested Anthony and Gloria with his and Zelda’s central weakness: their inability to alter or stop their self-destructive behavior. As Fitzgerald himself wrote, “I wish the Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves—I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other” (A Life in Letters, p. 189).
Just before The Beautiful and Damned was published, Zelda had given birth to Scottie, their only child. One might think that a child would have forced Zelda and Scott to alter their lifestyle, but instead their outlandish behavior intensified. At parties, if he was bored Fitzgerald would flip over ashtrays or hack off his tie with a knife. One evening he even threatened to kill Zelda and her friend, chasing them around the kitchen with a knife until someone held him down. Always a flirt, Zelda began to court men in front of her husband to irritate him. They both went on two- or three-day drinking sprees, and their neighbors sometimes found Fitzgerald passed out on his front lawn. Like Gloria and Anthony, Scott and Zelda made attempts to reform; they moved to Great Neck to contain their costs and vowed to live the quiet life. When they continued to party, they took other measures to try to contain the damage. They posted notes around their house that stated, “Visitors are requested to not break down doors in search of liquor, even when authorized to do so by host or hostess” (Turnbull, p. 136). They continued to live well beyond their means, despite the fact that Fitzgerald was earning $30,000 or more a year. He coped with their negative cash flow by periodically taking advances from his short-story agent, Harold Ober, and then sequestering himself in a room with pots of coffee for several weeks until he emerged with several short stories. Although Fitzgerald wrote some first-rate short stories, in general he felt that this commercial work was an artistic compromise that degraded his talent and distracted him from writing novels.
Even more upsetting to Fitzgerald than the commercial compromises was his financial situation. He was continually in debt. Like Anthony and Gloria, he quickly gave up on the idea of controlling his spending; he wrote to Maxwell Perkins, “I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity” (quoted in Turnbull, p. 151). Instead he wrote a play called The Vegetable and hoped that he would earn a killing from it and never have to worry about money again. Unfortunately, the play was a huge failure and closed on the first night. Out in Great Neck, Fitzgerald began to make plans for his next novel, something more ambitious than he had ever written before. He bought some time by writing several short stories—he was now earning as much as $3,000 apiece for them—and then went with his family to Europe to lower costs. The Fitzgeralds settled in the south of France, and once again the couple began to act out, only this time in more dangerous ways. Fitzgerald’s drinking increased, and he went further with his antics, chewing up and spitting out hundred-franc notes at dinner and getting into a fight with a taxi driver that landed him in jail. For her part, Zelda threw herself down a flight of stairs when she thought her husband was flirting with another woman, threatened one night to drive a car off a cliff, and had an affair with a French aviator.
Amazingly, despite these distractions Fitzgerald managed to finish his third novel, The Great Gatsby. He knew that he had written better than he ever had before, achieving a new mastery of both story and style, and he was hopeful that the book would sell well and end his financial anxieties. Unfortunately, although Gatsby was an enormous critical success—deemed by none other than T. S. Eliot as “the first real step in American literature since Henry James” (quoted in Kazin, p. 94)—it was a commercial failure.
Zelda was becoming restless. Tired of being just Fitzgerald’s wife, she wanted something of her own. In the past she had tried to write, publishing a few short pieces, and painted, but she needed something more all-consuming. They had moved to Paris, and at twenty-nine, Zelda obsessively took up ballet lessons with the dream of joining the Ballets Russes. Drinking regularly and passing out occasionally, Fitzgerald by now had become a full-fledged alcoholic. He and Zelda fought over her ballet mania while he struggled with his fourth novel. The only bright spot was Fitzgerald’s growing friendship with a young writer he had helped get started, Ernest Hemingway. When Fitzgerald and Hemingway first met, Fitzgerald was the established and successful writer and Hemingway was the struggling unknown. Yet from the beginning Hemingway assumed the upper hand in the relationship while Fitzgerald played the role of a devoted groupie. He genuinely admired Hemingway’s writing—recommending Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s —but Fitzgerald also seemed to worship Hemingway’s machismo and male exploits in much the same way he had once worshiped football heroes. While Fitzgerald loved spending time with Hemingway, Zelda was not a fan. She thought he was a bully and a phony, and Hemingway in return thought that Zelda was crazy and told Fitzgerald she was trying to sabotage his writing.
As it turned out, Zelda was mentally ill. She had become more and more obsessive about her ballet studies, and one day in 1930, on the way to practice, she snapped and had a nervous breakdown. She entered a sanatorium in Switzerland while Fitzgerald lived nearby. He tried halfheartedly to work on his writing, hoping that his wife would recover from what had been diagnosed as schizophrenia. Fitzgerald suffered enormously during this time, terrified that he might lose Zelda and afraid that he perhaps had done something to contribute to her illness. While the doctor reassured him that he was in no way responsible for Zelda’s schizophrenia, he encouraged Fitzgerald to deal with his drinking. Like many artists, however, Fitzgerald was in denial about his addiction and fearful of tampering with his mental equipment.
Over the next four years the Fitzgerald family moved around Europe and America searching for a cure for Zelda. Fitzgerald struggled to keep up with his mounting debts, to play father and mother to his young daughter, Scottie, and to write a fourth novel. In 1934 he finally finished this novel, Tender Is the Night, but at great emotional cost. A much more mature work than The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night also chronicles the deterioration of a couple, Dick and Nicole Diver, except in the book the wife is saved. Fitzgerald put more of his soul into this novel than anything else he wrote, so when it was a commercial and even somewhat of a critical failure—nobody during the Depression appeared to want to read about the deterioration of a wealthy couple—Fitzgerald was devastated.
He now knew that Zelda would most likely never recover from her illness, a fact that caused him enormous, debilitating pain and robbed him of both his fundamental optimism and his sense of self. He realized that Zelda could no longer function as his muse, fueling his thirst for life and his drive to create art; without her to anchor him he was adrift, lost and despondent. At the time he wrote in one of his notebooks, “I left my capacity for hope on the roads to Zelda’s sanitarium” (quoted in Bruccoli, ed., The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 204).
Other factors contributed to Scott’s depressed state. He was having a difficult time paying Zelda’s exorbitant hospital bills and supporting himself and Scottie; as a result of his frequent advances against future work, he now owed more than $20,000 to Scribner’s and his short-story agent Harold Ober; he was completely blocked as a writer; magazines were no longer interested in his short stories; and he was drinking constantly, both to dull the pain and simply to function.
Fitzgerald checked into a two-dollar-a-day hotel in North Carolina and took an inventory of his life. As he wrote in an essay about the experience, “The Crack-Up”: “I began to realize that for two years my life had been drawing on resources that I did not possess, I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually to the hilt” (The Crack-Up, p. 42). He could no longer come up with the commercial stories about young love that had earned him so much money. He could not even, it seemed, provide for his family. He felt he had nothing left to give as a writer or as a man. And he could not seem to control his drinking. He was morally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally bankrupt: “It was strange to have no self” (The Crack-Up, p. 50). Like Anthony Patch, Fitzgerald had in many ways seen this fall coming, but ultimately he had been powerless to stop it.
Fitzgerald’s essay “The Crack-Up” was published in Esquire, and it quickly drew a negative response from his friends, including his editor, Maxwell Perkins, who warned Fitzgerald against airing such dirty laundry in public. But Fitzgerald didn’t realize just how low he had sunk until the New York Post sent down a reporter to do a story on his fortieth birthday and then ran a scathing article describing Fitzgerald as a washed-up has-been and an alcoholic. Shocked and outraged, he attempted suicide by swallowing a vial of morphine. Luckily, he realized he did not want to die, and he coughed up the medicine. Fitzgerald was not ready to give up on life or on himself
For Gloria in The Beautiful and Damned, the movie business was a bitter disappointment, but for Fitzgerald in 1938 it represented salvation. His old friend Eddie Knopf had landed Fitzgerald a contract at MGM paying more than $1,000 a week, and suddenly Fitzgerald was a writer again. Several of his stories had been sold to Hollywood during the 1920s, and he had already visited there twice before—first in 1927 to write a silent film, then in 1930 to work on a Jean Harlow picture. Both times Fitzgerald hadn’t taken the work or the town very seriously; instead he had partied hard, grabbed the easy money, then dashed out of town to get back to his real writing. This time was different. Instead of treating film like the bastard son of novels, Fitzgerald approached it as its own art form. He studied movies in the same way he had first studied stories in the Saturday Evening Post, and he carefully noted their rules and rhythms. He vowed to give up alcohol and showed up every day at MGM with a briefcase of Coca-Cola bottles to placate his sweet tooth and help him resist the urge to drink. He also attempted to temper his cocky attitude with a new humility and deference.
Hollywood has never known what to do with literary talent, and the way studio executives handled Fitzgerald was no exception. In fact, his assignments while at MGM were downright comical. Because, years before, he had written a novel about college, they assigned him to several college pictures, including A Yank Goes to Oxford. He also did short stints on Gone with the Wind, The Women, and Infidelity, a Joan Crawford movie. Crawford’s advice when she heard Fitzgerald was working on her picture was, “Write hard, Mr. Fitzgerald, write hard” (quoted in Latham, Crazy Sundays, p. 158).
Fitzgerald tried to stay optimistic, to soldier through the rounds and rounds of script meetings, to ignore the teams of writers who were often working on the same script, but he began to lose heart. It was incredibly difficult for someone who crafted his work so carefully, polishing every phrase, to exist in a world where writing was so disposable. The final straw came when Fitzgerald was paired up with a young Budd Schulberg to write a silly script about the Dartmouth winter festival called Winter Carnival. The producer insisted that Fitzgerald and Schulberg travel out to Dartmouth to do research. At the airport, Schulberg’s father gave Budd two bottles of champagne as a going-away gift, and Fitzgerald went on a serious bender. Schulberg tried to cover up for Fitzgerald, but the producer found him wandering around the Dartmouth campus in an alcoholic haze and promptly fired him. Fitzgerald now realized that he would not conquer Hollywood, but he hoped he could at least get enough freelance work to survive.
Fortunately, he had other reasons to rejoice. He was still loyal at heart to Zelda, who was now living permanently in a sanatorium in North Carolina, but he had met a young gossip columnist named Sheilah Graham and quietly started a relationship with her. Sheilah was a lower-class British woman who had, as the saying goes, raised herself up by her own bootstraps. Like Dot in The Beautiful and Damned, Sheilah was a calm, acquiescent woman who seemed to be dedicated to nurturing and supporting Fitzgerald. Undoubtedly, she was not as exciting or challenging as Zelda, but at this stage in his life, Fitzgerald no longer craved those qualities.
Even better than the relationship was the renaissance of his art. While working on scripts, Fitzgerald had begun to construct a novel about Hollywood. He quizzed people at the studios, made a detailed outline, and finally in 1940 began to write it. In a letter to his daughter, who was now attending Vassar, Fitzgerald said that he had enormous hope for his new book and that he finally felt alive again, working on a true labor of love. He sent a few chapters to Maxwell Perkins, who responded enthusiastically, forwarding Fitzgerald an advance out of his own pocket. In his new novel, The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald stated, “There are no second acts in American lives,” but he was, it would seem, about to embark on one himself.
In December 1940, Fitzgerald was halfway through the first draft of The Last Tycoon, certain that he could finish it by the spring. But while his life was on the upswing, his health was not. He had a heart attack on December 21 and died. His funeral was a small affair, sparsely attended, and the obituaries, while respectful, treated him as a failed writer who had never fully lived up to his promise. All of his books were out of print.
Fitzgerald had begun to resurrect himself shortly before his death, and his literary reputation was resurrected shortly after it. It began with the publication of The Last Tycoon, edited by his friend Edmund Wilson. While unfinished, it was widely acknowledged as a masterful work. Then his other novels were reissued, the critics began to reevaluate, and Fitzgerald joined his friend and sometimes nemesis Ernest Hemingway as one of the classic American writers of the twentieth century.
Fitzgerald wrote, “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. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise” (The Crack-Up, p. 39). For a short time Fitzgerald lost his ability to hope, to maintain a dream to sustain him. He became a man submerged in his own despair, with no sense of self or ability to change. But Fitzgerald found a way to emerge from his depression, to heal his heart and rediscover a dream. With this renewal he proved that while he may have ruined himself with his spiral into dissipation, he was not condemned to the doomed decline of his fictional character Anthony Patch. With his heartbreaking vulnerability, his capacity for love, and his commitment to hold fast to dreams, Fitzgerald at the end of his life brings to mind another of his characters, Jay Gatsby:
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift of hope, a romantic readiness (The Great Gatsby, p. 2).
Pagan Harleman studied literature at Columbia College, then traveled extensively in the Middle East and West Africa before receiving an MFA from New York University’s graduate film program. While at NYU she made several award-winning shorts and received the Dean’s Fellowship, the Steven Tisch Fellowship, and a Director’s Craft Award.