Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (535 page)

The tempo of the city had changed sharply. The uncertainties of 1920 were drowned in a steady golden roar and many of our friends had grown wealthy. But the restlessness of New York in 1927 approached hysteria. The parties were bigger - those of Conde Nast, for example, rivalled in their way the fabled balls of the nineties; the pace was faster - the catering to dissipation set an example to Paris; the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper; but all these benefits did not really minister to much delight. Young people wore out early - they were hard and languid at twenty-one, and save for Peter Arno none of them contributed anything new; perhaps Peter Arno and his collaborators said everything there was to say about the boom days in New York that couldn’t be said by a jazz band. Many people who were not alcoholics were lit up four days out of seven, and frayed nerves were strewn everywhere; groups were held together by a generic nervousness and the hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta. Most of my friends drank too much — the more they were in tune to the times the more they drank. And so effort per se had no dignity against the mere bounty of those days in New York, a depreciatory word was found for it: a successful programme became a racket — I was in the literary racket.

We settled a few hours from New York and I found that every time I came to the city I was caught into a complication of events that deposited me a few days later in a somewhat exhausted state on the train for Delaware. Whole sections of the city had grown rather poisonous, but invariably I found a moment of utter peace in riding south through Central Park at dark towards where the facade of 59th Street thrusts its lights through the trees. There again was my lost city, wrapped cool in its mystery and promise. But that detachment never lasted long - as the toiler must live in the city’s belly, so I was compelled to live in its disordered mind.

Instead there were the speak-easies — the moving from luxurious bars, which advertised in the campus publications of Yale and Princeton, to the beer gardens where the snarl-ing face of the underworld peered through the German good nature of the entertainment, then on to strange and even more sinister localities where one was eyed by granite-faced boys and there was nothing left of joviality but only a brutishness that corrupted the new day into which one presently went out. Back in 1920 I shocked a rising young business man by suggesting a cocktail before lunch. In 1929 there was liquor in half the downtown offices, and a speakeasy in half the large buildings.

One was increasingly conscious of the speak-easy and of Park Avenue. In the past decade Greenwich Village, Washington Square, Murray Hill, the chateaux of Fifth Avenue had somehow disappeared, or become unexpressive of anything. The city was bloated, gutted, stupid with cake and circuses, and a new expression ‘Oh yeah?’ summed up all the enthusiasm evoked by the announcement of the last super-skyscrapers. My barber retired on a half million bet in the market and I was conscious that the head waiters who bowed me, or failed to bow me, to my table were far, far wealthier than I. This was no fun — once again I had enough of New York and it was good to be safe on shipboard where the ceaseless revelry remained in the bar in transport to the fleecing rooms of France.

‘What news from New York?’

‘Stocks go up. A baby murdered a gangster.’

‘Nothing more?’

‘Nothing. Radios blare in the street.’

I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days. We were somewhere in North Africa when we heard a dull distant crash which echoed to the farthest wastes of the desert.

‘What was that?’

‘Did you hear it?’

‘It was nothing.’

‘Do you think we ought to go home and see?’

‘No - it was nothing.’

In the dark autumn of two years later we saw New York again. We passed through curiously polite customs agents, and then with bowed head and hat in hand I walked reverently through the echoing tomb. Among the ruins a few childish wraiths still played to keep up the pretence that they were alive, betraying by their feverish voices and hectic cheeks the thinness of the masquerade. Cocktail parties, a last hollow survival from the days of carnival, echoed to the plaints of the wounded: ‘Shoot me, for the love of God, someone shoot me!’, and the groans and wails of the dying: ‘Did you see that United States Steel is down three more points?’ My barber was back at work in his shop; again the head waiters bowed people to their tables, if there were people to be bowed. From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood — everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora’s box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits - from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground. That was the rash gift of Alfred W. Smith to the citizens of New York.

Thus I take leave of my lost city. Seen from the ferry boat in the early morning, it no longer whispers of fantastic success and eternal youth. The whoopee mamas who prance before its empty parquets do not suggest to me the ineffable beauty of my dream girls of 1914. And Bunny, swinging along confidently with his cane towards his cloister in a carnival, has gone over to Communism and frets about the wrongs of southern mill workers and western farmers whose voices, fifteen years ago, would not have penetrated his study walls.

All is lost save memory, yet sometimes I imagine myself reading, with curious interest, a Daily News of the issue of 1945:

MAN OF FIFTY RUNS AMUCK IN NEW YORK

Fitzgerald Feathered Many Love Nests Cutie Avers Bumped Off By Outraged Gunman

So perhaps I am destined to return some day and find in the city new experiences that so far I have only read about. For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!

ONE HUNDRED FALSE STARTS

This essay was printed in the
Saturday Evening Post
in 1933.

“Crack!” goes the pistol and off starts this entry. Sometimes he has caught it just right; more often he has jumped the gun. On these occasions, if he is lucky, he runs only a dozen yards, looks around and jogs sheepishly back to the starting place. But too frequently he makes the entire circuit of the track under the impression that he is leading the field, and reaches the finish to find he has no following. The race must be run all over again.

A little more training, take a long walk, cut out that nightcap, no meat at dinner, and stop worrying about politics —

So runs an interview with one of the champion false starters of the writing profession — myself. Opening a leather-bound waiste-basket which I fatuously refer to as my “notebook, “ I pick out at random a small, triangular piece of wrapping paper with a canceled stamp on one side. On the other side is written:

Boopsie Dee was cute.

Nothing more. No cue as to what was intended to follow that preposterous statement. Boopsie Dee, indeed, confronting me with this single dogmatic fact about herself. Never will I know what happened to her, where and when she picked up her revolting name, and whether her cuteness got her into much trouble.

I pick out another scrap:

Article: Unattractive Things Girls Do, to pair with counter article by woman: Unattractive Things Men Do.

No. 1. Remove glass eye at dinner table.

That’s all there is on that scrap. Evidently, an idea that had dissolved into hilarity before it had fairly got under way. I try to revive it seriously. What unattractive things do girls do — I mean universally nowadays — or what unattractive things do a great majority of them do, or a strong minority? I have a few feeble ideas, but no, the notion is dead. I can only think of an article I read somewhere about a woman who divorced her husband because of the way he stalked a chop, and wondering at the time why she didn’t try him out on a chop before she married him. No, that all belongs to a gilded age when people could afford to have nervous breakdowns because of the squeak in daddy’s shoes.

Lines to an Old Favorite

There are hundreds of these hunches. Not all of them have to do with literature. Some are hunches about importing a troupe of Ouled Nail dancers from Africa, about bringing the Grand-Guignol from Paris to New York, about resuscitating football at Princeton — I have two scoring plays that will make a coach’s reputation in one season — and there is a faded note to “explain to D. W. Griffith why costume plays are sure to come back. “ Also my plan for a film version of H. G. Wells’ History of the World.

These little flurries caused me no travail — they were opium eater’s illusions, vanishing with the smoke of the pipe, or you know what I mean. The pleasure of thinking about them was the exact equivalent of having accomplished them. It is the six-page, ten-page, thirty-page globs of paper that grieve me professionally, like unsuccessful oil shafts; they represent my false starts.

There is, for example, one false start which I have made at least a dozen times. It is — or rather has tried to take shape as — a short story. At one time or another, I have written as many words on it as would make a presentable novel, yet the present version is only about twenty-five hundred words long and hasn’t been touched for two years. Its present name — it has gone under various aliases — is The Barnaby Family.

From childhood I have had a daydream — what a word for one whose entire life is spent noting them down — about starting at scratch on a desert island and building a comparatively high state of civilization out of the materials at hand. I always felt that Robinson Crusoe cheated when he rescued the tools from the wreck, and this applies equally to the Swiss Family Robinson, the Two Little Savages, and the balloon castaways of The Mysterious Island. In my story, not only would no convenient grain of wheat, repeating rifle, 4000 H. P. Diesel engine or technocratic butler be washed ashore but even my characters would he helpless city dwellers with no more wood lore than a cuckoo out of a clock.

The creation of such characters was easy, and it was easy washing them ashore:

For three long hours they were prostrated on the beach. Then Donald sat up.

“Well, here we are, “ he said with sleepy vagueness.

“Where?” his wife demanded eagerly.

“It couldn’t be America and it couldn’t be the Philippines, “ he said, “because we started from one and haven’t got to the other. “

“I’m thirsty, “ said the child.

Donald’s eyes went quickly to the shore.

“Where’s the raft?” He looked rather accusingly at Vivian. “Where’s the raft?”

“It was gone when I woke up. “

“It would be, “ he exclaimed bitterly. “Somebody might have thought of bringing the jug of water ashore. If I don’t do it, nothing is done in this house — I mean this family. “

All right, go on from there. Anybody — you back there in the tenth row — step up! Don’t be afraid. Just go on with the story. If you get stuck, you can look up tropical fauna and flora in the encyclopedia or call up a neighbor who has been shipwrecked.

Anyhow, that’s the exact point where my story — and I still think it’s a great plot — begins to creak and groan with unreality. I turn around after a while with a sense of uneasiness — how could anybody believe that rubbish about monkeys throwing coconuts? — trot back to the starting place, and I resume my crouch for days and days.

A Murder That Didn’t Jell

During such days I sometimes examine a clot of pages which is headed Ideas for Possible Stories. Among others, I find the following:

Bath water in Princeton or Florida.

Plot — suicide, indulgence, hate, liver and circumstance.

Snubbing or having somebody.

Dancer who found she could fly.

Oddly enough, all these are intelligible, if not enlightening, suggestions to me. But they are all old — old. I am as apt to be stimulated by them as by my signature or the beat of my feet pacing the floor. There is one that for years has puzzled me, that is as great a mystery as Boopsie Dee.

Story:

THE WINTER WAS COLD
CHARACTERS

Victoria Cuomo

Mark de Vinci

Jason Tenweather

Ambulance surgeon

Stark, a watchman

What was this about? Who were these people? I have no doubt that one of them was to be murdered or else be a murderer. But all else about the plot I have forgotten long ago.

I turn over a little. Here is something over which I linger longer; a false start that wasn’t bad, that might have been run out.

Words

When you consider the more expensive article and finally decide on the cheaper one, the salesman is usually thoughtful enough to make it alt right for you. “You’ll probably get the most wear out of this, “ he says consolingly, or even, “That’s the one I’d choose myself. “

The Trimbles were like that. They were specialists in the neat promotion of the next best into the best.

“It’ll do to wear around the house, “ they used to say; or, “We want to wait until we can get a really nice one. “

It was at this point that I decided I couldn’t write about the Trimbles. They were very nice and I would have enjoyed somebody else’s story of how they made out, but I couldn’t get under the surface of their lives — what kept them content to make the best of things instead of changing things. So I gave them up.