Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (26 page)

Hemingway felt that Fitzgerald was uneducated, unaware of the immutable laws of fiction and “did everything wrong,” but managed to succeed because of his great natural talent. When
Tender Is the Night
finally appeared in 1934, Hemingway thought it was too autobiographical, too full of self-pity about Zelda’s breakdown and madness, Scott’s alcoholism and deterioration. The following year, in
Green Hills of Africa,
Hemingway used the unnamed Fitzgerald to exemplify an author who had declined and dried up: “Our writers when they have made some money increase their standard of living and they are caught. They have to write to keep up their establishments, their wives, and so on, and they write slop. . . . Or else they read the critics. . . . At present we have two good writers [Fitzgerald and Anderson] who cannot write because they have lost confidence through reading critics.”
²⁶

VI

Fitzgerald also met two important women writers when he moved to Paris in the spring of 1925. Hemingway introduced him to Gertrude Stein, who had studied with William James while at Radcliffe and had been trained as a doctor at Johns Hopkins, though she did not complete her medical degree. Rich and domineering, she weighed two hundred pounds, was one of the leading lesbians of the Left Bank and was still struggling to establish her literary reputation. Hemingway’s description compared her Jewish features to those of an Italian and concentrated on her sensual hair: “Miss Stein was very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She had beautiful eyes and a strong German Jewish face that could also have been Friulano and reminded me of a northern Italian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobile face and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair.” Stein’s companion, Alice Toklas, an amiable gargoyle, resembled (according to Hadley Hemingway) “a little piece of electric wire, small and fine and very Spanish looking, very dark, with piercing dark eyes.” Emphasizing Fitzgerald’s rather appealing lack of self-confidence, Toklas remembered Stein’s “unfailing appreciation of his work and belief in his gift—which he would not believe. I mean he did neither believe in his gift nor believe she meant what she told him about his work.” The less tolerant Hemingway was actually annoyed about Fitzgerald’s perverse refusal to accept Stein’s sincere compliment and his attempt to distort her praise into a slighting remark.

At that time Stein, who had praised
The Great Gatsby
, admired Fitzgerald’s work as much as she did Hemingway’s. She was then preoccupied with generations, lost and new. In her third-person narrative
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
—written after she had quarreled with Hemingway, who refused to remain her disciple—she demoted Hemingway and placed Fitzgerald above him: “Gertrude Stein had been very much impressed by
This Side of Paradise
. . . . She said of it that it was this book that really created for the public the new generation. She has never changed her opinion about this. She thinks this equally true of
The Great Gatsby.
She thinks Fitzgerald will be read when many of his well-known contemporaries [i.e., Hemingway] are forgotten.”
²⁷
Toklas herself adored Fitzgerald, considered him her favorite young American writer and declared that “his intelligence, sensibility, distinction, wit and charm made his contemporaries [i.e., Hemingway] appear commonplace and lifeless.”

Zelda, however, disliked Stein as much as she disliked Hemingway, and thought her involuted conversation was “sententious gibberish.” Zelda irreverently told Edmund Wilson, who would write perceptively about the portentous mandarin in
Axel’s Castle
(1931): “We went to Gertrude Stein’s where a young poet vomited from sheer emotion and the atmosphere was hazy and oracular.” Though Zelda avoided Stein in Paris, she received her in Baltimore in December 1934. Andrew Turnbull, then living in Baltimore, gave a dramatic account of Scott’s attempt to dominate Zelda, her lively resistance to his demands and Stein’s tactful acquiescence to Zelda’s wishes:

During the visit, Zelda came in with some of her paintings, and Fitzgerald asked Miss Stein to take any ones she pleased. She chose two which Zelda had promised her doctor.

“But dear,” said Fitzgerald, “you don’t understand. Gertrude will hang them in her salon in Paris and you will be famous. She’s been kinder to me than almost anyone and I’d like to give her something.”

“If she has been as kind to you as my doctor has been to me,” said Zelda, “you should give her everything you own but she can’t have those paintings.” In the end Miss Stein chose two others.

Turnbull also mentioned Stein’s characteristically regal demeanor: “When Scottie appeared, Miss Stein drew from the pocket of her homespun skirt a handful of hazel nuts which she had gathered on her afternoon walk. She gave one to Scottie, who wanted it autographed. ‘That would be appropriate,’ said Miss Stein, inscribing it.”
²⁸

The bohemian Stein, though a formidable personality, was less intimidating than Edith Wharton, who was then a much grander figure in the world of letters. While the egoistic Stein felt Fitzgerald’s deferential reverence was entirely appropriate, the respectable and autocratic Wharton was embarrassed by his awkward and self-abasing homage. His behavior was intended to express his youthful admiration and respect for her art. But Fitzgerald could never quite bridge the gulf between himself and his artistic heroes. Instead of living up to the dramatic occasion, he nervously erupted in gaucherie with Galsworthy, Dreiser, Conrad and Wharton just as he later would with Isadora Duncan and James Joyce.

When Fitzgerald first met Wharton in Charles Scribner’s office, just after his first novel was published in the spring of 1920, he impulsively threw himself at her feet and exclaimed: “Could I let the author of
Ethan Frome
pass through New York without paying my respects?” In July 1925, after receiving
The Great Gatsby
and complimenting him on the novel, Wharton invited the Fitzgeralds to tea at her home outside Paris. Zelda, remembering the boredom at Stein’s salon and fearing she would be patronized by the grande dame, refused to go. So Scott took the young American composer Theodore Chanler. They had a few drinks on the way; and, as Zelda later wrote, “the nights, smelling of honeysuckle and army leather, staggered up the mountain side and settled upon Mrs. Edith Wharton’s garden.”

Their conversation was slow and awkward. Swaying against the mantelpiece, Fitzgerald proposed to enliven the dull tea party by telling a couple of “rather rough stories.” After Wharton, by no means as stuffy as Fitzgerald imagined, had encouraged him to proceed (writes Wharton’s biographer), he “got entangled in an anecdote about an American couple [perhaps himself and Zelda] who by mistake spent a night in a Paris bordello. His hostess, listening attentively, commented at last that the story ‘lacks data’—the kind of rounded realistic information and description that the flustered Fitzgerald was unable to provide.”
²⁹

Wharton made no effort to put her nervous guest at ease, deliberately led him into an awkward situation, which he was not quite drunk enough to ignore or to brazen out, and seemed to enjoy his discomfort. Though he certainly had the necessary “data,” he felt he could not, under the circumstances, provide it. So his performance fell completely flat. After he left, Wharton remarked: “there must be something peculiar about that young man.” But, according to Janet Flanner, Wharton maintained her admiration of his work and later spoke appreciatively of Fitzgerald.

VII

In August 1925 the Fitzgeralds rejoined the Murphys, who had completed the Villa America, and moved into the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes. Fitzgerald celebrated this idyllic place and its devout sun worshipers in the alluring, chromatic opening paragraphs of
Tender Is the Night:
“The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of the old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water.” He sent Bishop a characteristically sparkling list of celebrities who gathered in Antibes that summer and who seemed to re-create the Great Neck parties in a more exotic setting: Esther, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Dos Passos, MacLeish, Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, the screenwriter Charlie Brackett, the mystery writer E. Phillips Oppenheim, Rudolph Valentino, the French singer Mistinguett, the actress Alice Terry and her husband, the film director Rex Ingram, the violinist David Mannes, the soprano Marguerite Namara, ex-premier Vittorio Orlando of Italy and the art connoisseur Count Étienne de Beaumont. A real place to rough it, he added, and escape from the world. The Fitzgeralds almost made their escape complete one drunken evening when their car stalled and they fell asleep on some dangerous trolley tracks. Early the next morning, a peasant awakened them minutes before a trolley smashed their car to pieces. Fitzgerald described their life during this pleasant but wasteful period as “1,000 parties and no work.”

In November 1925 the Fitzgeralds returned to England, once again equipped with useful introductions to well-placed people. Through Tallulah Bankhead, a girlhood friend of Zelda, they went to some “high tone” parties with the Mountbattens and the Marchioness of Milford Haven. “Very impressed, but not very,” Fitzgerald told Perkins, with newly acquired English nonchalance, “as I furnished most of the amusement myself.” Fitzgerald’s visit to his new London publisher, Chatto & Windus, without first making an appointment, was more significant. The novelist Frank Swinnerton, who received him, recalled:

I went from my office to the waiting-room, where a young man sat, with his hat on, at a small table. He did not rise or remove his hat, and he did not answer my greeting, so I took another chair, expressing regret that no partner was available, and asking if there was anything I could do. Assuming, I suppose, that I was some base hireling, he continued brusque to the point of truculence; but we spoke of the purpose of his visit, and after a few moments he silently removed his hat. Two minutes later, looking rather puzzled, he rose. I did the same. I spoke warmly of
The Great Gatsby;
and his manner softened. He became an agreeable boy, quite ingenuous and inoffensive, and finally asked my name. I told him. If I had said “The Devil” he could not have been more horrified. Snatching up his hat in consternation, he cried: “Oh, my God!
Nocturne
’s one of my favorite books!” and dashed out of the premises.
³⁰

In this encounter between a poised Englishman and a bumbling American, Swinnerton, completely in control of the situation, brought Fitzgerald round from rudeness to adoration. Their meeting revealed the uncomfortably defensive and effusive aspects of Fitzgerald’s character, and suggested that far from being at ease in English society, he got on with Swinnerton no better than he had with Galsworthy, Mackenzie and Rebecca West. In the end, he had to rush out of the room in acute embarrassment.

Fitzgerald, to his intense irritation, had much less of a reputation in England than in America. He was virtually ignored by the critics from the early 1920s until after World War II and none of his books sold well there during his lifetime. Though Thomas Hardy, shortly before his death, said he “had read and been greatly impressed by
This Side of Paradise
” and that Fitzgerald “was one of the few younger American writers whose work he followed with any interest,” the
Times Literary Supplement
correctly stated that “when Fitzgerald died in 1940 his work, outside a small circle, was hardly known in this country.”

Fitzgerald had been in London when William Collins brought out
This Side of Paradise
in May 1921 and had told an editor friend that the book was “having a checkered career in England.” The
Manchester Guardian
dismissively concluded: “But what people! What a set! They are well lost.” And the
Times Literary Supplement
disagreed with the American critics who had found the novel original and exuberant. Setting the critical tone for the next twenty years, its anonymous reviewer rejected the novel as trivial, unconvincing and “rather tiresome; its values are less human than literary, and its characters . . . with hardly an exception, a set of exasperating
poseurs
, whose conversation, devoted largely to minute self-analysis, is artificial beyond belief.”
³¹
The novel, which had required twelve printings and sold 49,000 copies during its first year in America, bombed in England with a sale of only 700.

Flappers and Philosophers, The Beautiful and Damned
and
Tales of the Jazz Age,
also published by Collins, did not receive serious critical attention. When Scribner’s sent Fitzgerald’s masterpiece,
The Great Gatsby,
to Collins, he invented a rather absurd reason to reject an author whose books had been losing money for the firm. “We do not at all like to part with Scott Fitzgerald, but we feel very strongly that to publish
The Great Gatsby
would be to reduce the number of his readers rather than to increase them,” he explained to Perkins, who passed the bad news on to Fitzgerald in October 1925. “The point is, that the atmosphere of the book is extraordinarily foreign to the English reader, and he simply would not believe in it, and therefore I am regretfully returning it to you.” Fitzgerald justly complained that the publisher had rejected his serious and encouraged his frivolous work: “Collins never believed in me. (He always wanted me to write [another] ‘Offshore Pirate.’) I know my public in England is small—but I have had enough enthusiastic letters to know it exists.” Though Chatto & Windus published
The Great Gatsby
in 1926, his last two collections of stories,
All the Sad Young Men
and
Taps at Reveille
, have never appeared in England.

The Great Gatsby
received excellent notices from two American critics, Gilbert Seldes and Conrad Aiken, in T. S. Eliot’s magazine,
The Criterion.
Eliot himself, an editor at Faber, had been enthusiastic about the novel and hoped his firm would publish it. But the English reviewers were much less keen. The
Times Literary Supplement
acknowledged that it was “undoubtedly a work of art and of great promise”—though its promise had surely been fulfilled—but complained about the unpleasantness of the characters. And the novelist L. P. Hartley offered a condescending admonition: “Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view.
The Great Gatsby
is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.” Fitzgerald, perhaps unduly touchy, as he had been with Swinnerton, continued to feel that Chatto & Windus was snubbing him. In January 1930 he complained to Perkins about a commonplace business reply: “they answered a letter of mine on the publication of [
The Great Gatsby
] with the signature (Chatto & Windus, per Q), undoubtedly an English method of showing real interest in one’s work.”
³²
Though Fitzgerald admired Oxford, which had played a prominent role in
The Great Gatsby,
he lost interest in England after Collins dropped him. He never returned there after his second visit and was consistently hostile to the English in his work.