A drunk with a conscience
Raymond Carr
SCOTT FITZGERALD by Jeffrey Meyers Macmillan, L77.99, pp. 288 Jeffrey Meyers would reverse Professor Stone's striking aphorism, 'Never trust a man who does not drink' (The Spectator, 14 May). Scott Fitzgerald could not be trusted by his family, his friends or his mistresses because he was an alcoholic. Like Edgar Allan Poe, with whom he identified, he suffered from hypoglycemia which makes it difficult for the system to metabolise alcohol. A few drinks and he was out. Drunk, he became an aggressive boor, insulting waiters — the last resort of the inebriated — and given to tiresome pranks such as boiling an assortment of watches and jewellery in tomato soup. He once said he would 'do anything to be liked': but tipsy acts of self-abasement were counter- productive. After such a performance Edith Wharton remarked, 'there must be something peculiar with that young man'.
The peculiarity was drink and Mr Meyers, whose perceptive and scholarly book — alas lacking Fitzgerald's gift, the vitality that drives one on to read the next sentence — is quite right to chronicle its ravages in some detail. Why do gifted People drink? In Fitzgerald's case, perhaps to cover up the social insecurity of an Irish Catholic from a middle-class Middle West- ern home who, plunged into Princeton, longed to be accepted — he never was into the world of the self-assured rich of the Eastern establishment. Philip Toynbee once told me — we had just seen The Lost Weekend together — 'you start to get going and then go over the top'. The rot sets in when, by cutting one off from the real world, it becomes the refuge from a sense of failure by excusing it 'I drink because I can't write; I can't write because I drink' is the vicious circle of the alcoholic.
Fitzgerald's friendship with Ernest Hemingway did not help. Hemingway despised Fitzgerald's incapacity to hold his liquor while Fitzgerald admired Heming- way as the athlete and war hero he himself had so lamentably failed to become. As Fitzgerald's 'artistic conscience', Heming- way accused him of 'whoring' by sacrificing art to money. Fitzgerald churned out short stories at $4,000 a time — he could write 7,000 words in a day — to finance his and
his wife's extravagant life style. He pro- fessed that this 'junk' was to give him the leisure to write his novels. But Hemingway would never let him off the hook. When in the 1930s his fortunes as a writer declined as Hemingway's rose, the vicious circle set in. He turned ruin into a vocation.
His marriage to Zelda was a disaster. Zelda was a spoilt southern belle, deflowered at the age of 15. Hopelessly extravagant, she was devoid of any domes- tic virtues. The Fitzgeralds never had a home; perpetual migrants, whether in Europe or America, they lived up to D. H. Lawrence's advice, 'when in doubt, move'. Their marriage was a sexual failure Zelda taunted Scott with his lack of virility and embarked on an affair which humiliat- ed him and was turned into literature in Tender is the Night. No writer has so consis- tently turned his private life into copy. The Fitzgeralds' home life was a succession of parties, of public drunken brawls and pri- vate reconciliations: yet they were bound to each other for life, as quarreling couples frequently are.
The trouble was that Zelda's infantile self-absorption could not bear Scott becoming the centre of attraction. A writer of some talent — her stories were pub- lished in her husband's name and he used her letters and diary in his own work — she craved recognition in her own right. Hence her pathetic attempts to become a ballet dancer at the age of 26. Her final descent into insanity revealed not merely a tie that could not be broken but, as Meyer reveals in his chronology of Zelda's illness, an essential nobility in her husband: he cared for her in expensive clinics at the cost of driving himself to write what he knew to be worthless stuff. By now, he was almost des- titute. In an attempt to give up gin, he was drinking 30 pints of beer a day, his cheap rooms littered with empty bottles. It was in these conditions that he was deceived into granting an interview with a journalist whose name should go down in infamy; Fitzgerald was described as a has-been, sunk in the self-created hell of desponden- cy, fetching his drinks with trembling hands, his 'twitching face with its pitiful expression of a cruelly beaten child'. All
this was especially painful because, trapped in the legacy of his life with Zelda, he was haunted by remorse and guilt. All those who knew him well remarked on the puritanism that was a relic of his early Catholicism. There is no more awful burden for an alcoholic or his friends than that of a drunk with a conscience.
The final disaster was his failure as a script-writer in Hollywood. Fitzgerald blamed failure on the 'system' which allowed philistine producers to maul his scripts out of recognition. The truth is, as Meyers points out, that he was no good at the job. Writing novels for the head is a different art from writing scripts for the screen. His dialogues were hopeless. 'I couldn't make the grade as a hack — that, as everything else, demands a certain practised experience.'
In 1932 he had written, 'I can't decide exactly who I am, if anyone'. In his final years he recovered enough to write The Last Tycoon. It corresponded with his attachment to Sheila Graham, a fantasist who invented a glamorous aristocratic past to hide a poverty-stricken Jewish back- ground: Mankiewicz described her as a `chorus girl who missed the bus'. Their vituperative quarrels were a repeat of life with Zelda; but she did give Fitzgerald the semblance of a home.
Fitzgerald confessed that he could only write about himself. 'You haven't the faintest idea what anyone else is like', a close friend told him. Yet self-obsessed as he was, he was a kind man and, when sober, lovable, if boring. His relationship with his daughter is a chronicle of good intentions gone awry. His losing struggle against adversity has a certain nobility; his endeavours to improve himself, a certain pathos — he ended up ploughing through Marx's Das Kapital. The 'poet-prophet' of the neurotic jazz age became the chronicler of the collapse of the American dream, as empty and cruel. The author of The Great Gatsby, of Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon, of some of the best short stories ever written, was not the failure he thought himself to be when, by the time of his death in 1940, he had become the forgotten man of American literature.
'Tell him we don't do bondage.'
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