Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (27 page)

Two months after their visit to England, in January 1926, the Fitzgeralds left Paris again. Zelda had been suffering from colitis and persistent gynecological problems; and they decided to spend a cold and restful winter in the western Pyrenees between Bayonne and Pau. In January Fitzgerald wrote to Harold Ober: “We have come to a lost little village called Salies-de-Béarn in the Pyrenees where my wife is to take a special treatment of baths for eleven months for an illness that has run now for almost a year. Here they have the strongest salt springs in the world—and out of season nothing much else—we are two of the seven guests in the only open hotel.” After the excitement of Paris and London, however, the place was too boring to endure. Scott told a friend that the other inhabitants were two goats and a paralytic, and Zelda’s rest cure was reduced from eleven months to only one. In June 1926 Zelda, on a quick trip to Paris, had her appendix out at the American Hospital, but continued to feel unwell.

In March they returned to the Riviera for a nine-month stay in Juan-les-Pins, just next to Antibes. They spent the first two months in the Villa Paquita, which Fitzgerald found too damp and uncomfortable. When the Hemingways arrived for the summer, Fitzgerald generously gave them the villa and moved to the more suitable Villa St. Louis. The large house was wonderfully situated on the coast, with the beach and the Casino nearby, and they looked forward to a marvelous summer.

At a farewell party for the critic Alexander Woollcott and other friends, Zelda (chirpy again) did her by-now-familiar but always welcome striptease. After speeches had been made, she daringly declared: “I have been so touched by all these kind words. But what are words? Nobody has offered our departing heroes any gifts to take with them. I’ll start off”—and she stepped out of her black lace panties and threw them at the grateful men. Not content with her own performance, Zelda also dared Scott (as she had dared him to fight the bouncer in the Jungle Club) to make some dangerous high dives from the cliffs into the sea—and forced him to accept her challenge.

One evening when the Fitzgeralds were dining outdoors with the Murphys at the Colombe d’Or in Vence, a lovely village in the Maritime Alps above Juan-les-Pins, Zelda took an even more dramatic dive. “Isadora Duncan was giving one of her last parties at the next table,” Zelda wrote. “She had got too old and fat to care whether people accepted her theories of life and art, and she gallantly toasted the world’s obliviousness in lukewarm champagne. There were village dogs baying at a premature white exhausted August moon and there were long dark shadows folded accordion-like along the steps of the steep streets of Saint-Paul.”
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Zelda portrayed the dancer who provoked the scene as unattractive and described the fateful evening as if nothing extraordinary had occurred. But the steep stone steps and the long dark shadows suggest an ominous event. Isadora, reputed to be free with her favors, had summoned Fitzgerald to her table. He sat at her feet while she ran her jeweled fingers through his blond hair and called him “my centurion.” Zelda, who liked to be the center of attention and resented this seductive behavior, suddenly got up from the table and—in her second attempt at self-destruction—threw herself down a long flight of steps. Though cut and bleeding, she was not badly hurt and offered no explanation for her bizarre act. The Murphys knew something was seriously wrong with Zelda, but did not suspect that she was mentally ill.

Though Fitzgerald was nearly thirty, he continued his heavy drinking and ludicrous pranks. During the summer of 1926 Scott and his Riviera friends lured a hotel orchestra to his villa, locked them in a room with a bottle of whiskey and sat down outside the closed door for a private concert of their favorite music. They made an amateur silent film, with an incestuous Japanese hero, on the grounds of the Hôtel du Cap, and painted the obscene titles on the walls of a friend’s villa. Some of these high-spirited adventures found their way into
Tender Is the Night.
Abe North, for example, kidnaps a waiter from a café in Cannes in order to saw him in two and find out what is inside. “ ‘Old menus,’ suggested Nicole with a short laugh. ‘Pieces of broken china and tips and pencil stubs.’ ‘Exactly [said Abe]—but the thing was to prove it scientifically. And of course doing it with that musical saw would have eliminated any sordidness.’ ”

But the pranks that had once been playful and innocent now became menacing and malicious. They raided a restaurant in Cannes, captured the owner and waiters, and threatened to push them off a cliff. One late night outside the Casino at Juan-les-Pins an old lady offered them a tray of daintily arranged nuts and candies. As they stopped to admire the display, Fitzgerald made an ugly scene by kicking the tray and sending all the sweetmeats into the street. He was repentant, Sara Murphy recalled, and immediately tried “to make amends by offering her his apologies and hundreds of francs. He
always
realized when he had gone too far, & was very sorry & mortified.” But the damage had been done—both to the old lady and to his reputation. Fitzgerald certainly helped create the image of the rich and vulgar American in France.

The Murphys could apparently take anything: practical jokes, figs down backs, broken stemware, flying ashtrays, thrown garbage, kicked trays, drunken brawls, passing out and tedious analytical questions as well as Zelda’s public disrobing and attempts at suicide. No matter what the Fitzgeralds did, they were always forgiven by their devoted friends. Gerald’s moving letter of farewell, for example, echoed the second chapter of the Song of Solomon to express the intensity of their affection for the Fitzgeralds and—though the hush and emptiness must have been a welcome relief—the genuine sorrow they felt when their friends had left the Riviera:

There
really
was a great sound of tearing heard in the land as your train pulled out that day. Sara and I rode back together saying things about you both to each other which only partly expressed what we felt separately. Ultimately, I suppose, one must judge the degree of one’s love for a person by the hush and the emptiness that descends upon the day,—after the departure. We heard the tearing because it was there,—and because we weren’t able to talk much about how much we do love you two. We agreed that it made us very sad, and sort of hurt a little—for a “summer holiday.”
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VIII

Fitzgerald’s third volume of stories,
All the Sad Young Men,
was published in February 1926, ten months after
The Great Gatsby.
There was a striking difference between the three best stories—“Absolution” (1924), “Winter Dreams” (1922) and “The Rich Boy” (1926)—and the six mediocre ones that filled out the collection. It is significant that none of his best works was published in the
Saturday Evening Post.

“Absolution,” Fitzgerald’s most Catholic story, was originally intended to explain Jay Gatz’s background, but was deleted from the novel because Fitzgerald wished to preserve a sense of mystery about his hero. This story—with its disillusioned, ironic tone; its pure, detached style; its oblique, suggestive technique; and its subtle, elusive themes—is deeply indebted to Joyce’s
Dubliners
(1914). The homosexual temptation and death of the priest, in fact, evolve directly from “An Encounter” and “The Sisters” in that volume, just as the prurient priest and the insincere confession of sexual offenses derive from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in the last chapter of
Ulysses.

The opening paragraph of “Absolution” is brilliantly evocative:

There was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears. He wept because the afternoons were warm and long, and he was unable to attain a complete mystical union with our Lord. Sometimes, near four o’clock, there was a rustle of Swede girls along the path by his window, and in their shrill laughter he found a terrible dissonance that made him pray aloud for the twilight to come. . . . He had found the scent of cheap toilet soap desperately sweet upon the air. He passed that way when he returned from hearing confessions on Saturday nights, and he grew careful to walk on the other side of the street so that the smell of the soap would float upward before it reached his nostrils as it drifted, rather like incense, toward the summer moon.

The cold eyes of the tormented Father Schwartz contrast with the warm night of the town and intensify the irony of his impossible desire to attain
complete
mystical union with Jesus. In a similar fashion, the scent of the cheap toilet soap undermines the ironic comparison to incense as the priest, aroused by the sexual secrets of the confessional, is torn between spiritual yearning and sensual desire. The summer moon, which symbolizes his temptation at the beginning of the story, concludes the tale by shining on the scented Swede girls, lying amidst the wheat with their young farmboys and achieving the physical gratification denied to the priest.

The priest’s vague but powerful desire immediately focuses on the beautiful, blue-eyed, eleven-year-old Rudolph Miller. In a flashback at the end of section I, to three days earlier, Rudolph dutifully confesses seven sins. But he then lies in the confessional by stating that he never tells lies. Like the young Fitzgerald, Rudolph considers himself too good to be his parents’ son and invents a suave alter ego, with the absurd name of Blatchford Sarnemington, which allows him to escape from sin and from the need to deceive God. Rudolph plans to evade communion, while in a state of sin, by drinking a glass of water before church. But when his father catches him in the act, he tells the truth (when he could easily have lied, as he had lied to the priest) by admitting that he has not yet tasted the water.

After being beaten by his father (like the innocent child in Joyce’s “Counterparts”), Rudolph goes to a second confession. But he does not admit that he lied in the first one, and takes communion in a state of sin. When the story returns to the present in the final section, Father Schwartz, instead of providing discipline and giving penance, tells Rudolph about “the glimmering places,” which the priest associates with amusement parks (like the one in Joyce’s “Araby”). But the priest also brings himself back to reality by warning the boy: “don’t get up close . . . because if you do you’ll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life.” This lesson conveyed, Father Schwartz collapses into death. Unable to live up to his religious ideals, the priest cannot provide the necessary comfort during the spiritual crisis of a confused, guilt-ridden boy. Both fathers, natural and spiritual, have failed Rudolph, who never receives the long-sought absolution.

The plots and themes of “Winter Dreams” and “The Rich Boy” are similar. In the former, a poor boy, Dexter Green, falls in love with a rich girl, Judy Jones. He loses her, becomes engaged to and then abandons a poor substitute for his true love. At the end of the story, he discovers that Judy is unhappily married and that her looks have faded. Dexter is shattered by this news because he too has lost his illusions of beauty and perfection: “He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at last—but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes. The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. . . . Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.”

In the latter story, a rich boy, Anson Hunter, loves a rich girl, Paula Legendre, but loses her and becomes involved with an inferior girl, Dolly Karger. Hunter retaliates for his own emotional vacuity by abandoning Dolly and by driving his aunt’s lover to suicide. Later on, he encounters Paula, who has had an unhappy first marriage but is now contentedly pregnant by her second husband. At the end of the story, Hunter learns that Paula has died in childbirth.

In one story differences in money and class are the obstacles to love; in the other, the obstacles are great egoism and great wealth. Both works describe the hero’s life from boyhood to his early thirties. Both stories portray the destructive power of beautiful women, ephemeral happiness, the reluctance to abandon illusory dreams, the sense of loss and the impossibility of achieving true love. But Anson Hunter is a more fully developed character than Dexter Green and is portrayed in a more substantial social context. Like the Patches in
The Beautiful and Damned,
the Buchanans in
The Great Gatsby
and the Warrens in
Tender Is the Night,
Hunter expresses Fitzgerald’s fascination with the superiority, the selfishness and the emptiness of the rich. “They are different from you and me,” he writes at the beginning of the story. “They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”
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Hunter also shows that money can fatally weaken the will and lead to a meaningless life.

Dexter Green is cruelly manipulated by Judy Jones (based on Ginevra King) who “treated him with interest, with encouragement, with malice, with indifference, with contempt.” Though Anson Hunter dominates his women, he is incapable of emotional commitment and deprives himself of a married life and a settled—rather than a dissipated—existence. Fitzgerald based “The Rich Boy” on the confidential revelations of his hard-drinking Princeton friend, Ludlow Fowler. Though Hunter is portrayed negatively, Fitzgerald somehow thought Fowler would be pleased by the tale. “It is in a large measure the story of your life,” he wrote Fowler in 1925, “toned down here and there and simplified. Also many gaps had to come out of my imagination. It is frank, unsparing but sympathetic and I think you will like it—it is one of the best things I have ever done.” When Hemingway read the story, Fitzgerald told Fowler, he said the real Anson
would
have raped Dolly instead of abandoning the seduction. And, Fitzgerald added, “I hadn’t the privilege of telling him that, in life, he
did!”
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