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.
The victor belongs to the spoils.
--Anthony Patch
TO
SHANE LESLIE, GEORGE JEAN NATHAN
AND MAXWELL PERKINS
IN APPRECIATION OF MUCH LITERARY HELP
AND ENCOURAGEMENT
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER I
ANTHONY PATCH
IN 1913, WHEN ANTHONY Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual "There!"--yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch--not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward--a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.
A Worthy Man and His Gifted Son
Anthony drew as much consciousness of social security from being the grandson of Adam J. Patch as he would have had from tracing his line over the sea to the crusaders. This is inevitable; Virginians and Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular.
Now Adam J. Patch, more familiarly known as "Cross Patch," left his father's farm in Tarrytown early in sixty-one to join a New York cavalry regiment.1 He came home from the war a major, charged into Wall Street, and amid much fuss, fume, applause, and ill will he gathered to himself some seventy-five million dollars.
This occupied his energies until he was fifty-seven years old. It was then that he determined, after a severe attack of sclerosis, to consecrate the remainder of his life to the moral regeneration of the world. He became a reformer among reformers. Emulating the magnificent efforts of Anthony Comstock, after whom his grandson was named, he levelled a varied assortment of uppercuts and body-blows at liquor, literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres. His mind, under the influence of that insidious mildew which eventually forms on all but the few, gave itself up furiously to every indignation of the a
ge. From an armchair in the office of his Tarrytown estate he directed against the enormous hypothetical enemy, unrighteousness, a campaign which went on through fifteen years, during which he displayed himself a rabid monomaniac, an unqualified nuisance, and an intolerable bore. The year in which this story opens found him wearying; his campaign had grown desultory; 1861 was creeping up slowly on 1895; his thoughts ran a great deal on the Civil War, somewhat on his dead wife and son, almost infinitesimally on his grandson Anthony.