Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (47 page)

Fitzgerald’s injury and weakness made him long, more than ever, to absorb into himself some of the qualities that made Hemingway so attractive, to lean on him in times of physical and psychological distress. But Hemingway despised Fitzgerald’s weakness and self-pity, and tended to bully him. In one of his own megalomaniacal moments, Fitzgerald told Laura Guthrie: “I never knew any person but one . . . who is as strong as I am. That is Ernest Hemingway.” And, writing of their friendship in his
Notebooks,
he said: “Ernest—until we began trying to walk over each other with cleats.” But these statements were absurd. He still hero-worshiped Hemingway and was destined to be trampled upon in their unequal combat.

Hemingway (as we have seen) took pot-shots at Fitzgerald in “Homage to Switzerland” (1933) and
Green Hills of Africa
(1935). In 1935 he sent Fitzgerald a poem with the grandiose and demeaning title: “Lines to Be Read at the Casting of Scott Fitzgerald’s Balls into the Sea from Eden Roc (Antibes, Alpes Maritimes).” And his disturbing letter about the falsity of
Tender Is the Night
repeated Sara Murphy’s serious charge about Scott’s naive approach to understanding others: “You think if you just ask enough questions you’ll get to know what people are like, but you won’t. You don’t really know anything at all about people.” Hemingway also attacked Fitzgerald with some well-meant but painful truths about his personal limitations which, Ernest felt, explained the defects of his work: “A long time ago you stopped listening except to the answers to your own questions. . . . That is where it all comes from. Seeing, listening. You see well enough. But you stop listening.”
²¹
Fitzgerald implicitly accepted this criticism when he told Laura Guthrie, an aspiring writer: “In the first place, listen. Just listen to how people talk,” and when in 1937 he told Hemingway: “I wish we could meet more often. I don’t feel I know you at all.”

In “The Crack-Up” Fitzgerald had called Hemingway his “artistic conscience”; and Hemingway chose to exercise that prerogative when he wrote Fitzgerald “a furious letter” and told him that he “was stupid to write that gloomy personal stuff.” Like Sara Murphy, Hemingway also disapproved of Fitzgerald’s fatuous former belief that “Life was something you dominated if you were any good.” A key passage in
A Farewell to Arms,
which Fitzgerald greatly admired, exalted, by contrast, the stoic acceptance of tragic defeat: “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. . . . It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.” Hemingway’s “furious letter” to Fitzgerald seems to be lost; but he expressed his strong views about “The Crack-Up” in a letter to Max Perkins that condemned Scott’s self-exposure and accused him of self-pity: “He seems to almost take a pride in his shamelessness of defeat. The
Esquire
pieces seem to me to be so miserable. There is another one coming too. I always knew he couldn’t think—he never could—but he had a marvellous talent and the thing is to use it—not whine in public. Good God, people go through that emptiness many times in life and come out and do work.”

Hemingway’s angry advice to Fitzgerald—“you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don’t cheat with it”
²²
—helps to explain the personal attack on him in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” For Hemingway, Fitzgerald was a frightening example of a good writer who had—like the hero of his story—betrayed his talent and been destroyed by literary fame. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” appeared with Fitzgerald’s “Afternoon of an Author” in the August 1936 issue of
Esquire,
four months after the publication in that magazine of his third “Crack-Up” essay and one month after his diving accident. This story, though written at the height of Hemingway’s worldly success, reveals his anxiety about his incipient moral corruption (symbolized by the hero’s gangrene) and predicts his failure as a writer and his spiritual death. One of Hemingway’s greatest works, it is in fact a more subtle, covert and artistically sophisticated version of “The Crack-Up”: an incisive confrontation of failure and analysis of what had caused it. Fitzgerald’s essays hit Hemingway at a vulnerable point and provoked him to violate fictional norms by cruelly attacking Fitzgerald in the
Esquire
version of the story.

The hostile reference to Fitzgerald originated in a sharp exchange between Hemingway and the quick-witted Irish writer Mary Colum when they were dining in New York in 1936. After Hemingway declared: “I am getting to know the rich,” Mary Colum replied: “The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.” Hemingway avenged himself by appropriating the remark and victimizing Fitzgerald when he was particularly vulnerable: “He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of [the rich] and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.” (Scott’s name was changed to “Julian” when “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” appeared in
The Fifth Column and The First Forty-Nine Stories
in 1938.)

Hemingway’s luxurious house, boat and African safari had been paid for by his wife’s wealthy uncle, Gus Pfeiffer, and he had also befriended the rich while hunting big game in Kenya and fishing for marlin in Key West. But he felt he could define himself in opposition to the rich, who lived on unearned income, because he wrote for a living and made enough money to support himself. He justified the passage in the story by stating that Fitzgerald’s revelation of his personal failure in “The Crack-Up” left him open to the kind of public castigation that Hemingway had previously given—with Fitzgerald’s encouragement—to the declining Sherwood Anderson. Though Hemingway had made his own personal confession in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” he convinced himself that the brutal truth in the story would give Fitzgerald a salutary jolt and shake him out of his self-pity.

A passage mercifully deleted from
To Have and Have Not
(1937), which also deals with the corruption of the rich, summarizes Hemingway’s view of Fitzgerald’s weaknesses and anticipates the more extensive critique of Scott’s character in
A Moveable Feast.
Hemingway said that Scott wrote too much when he was very young, lacked good sense and had a great deal of bad luck that was not his fault. He had charm and talent, but no brains, was romantic about money and youth, and went directly from youth to senility without passing through manhood. He thought old age came right after youth—and for him it did. If he gave up self-pity, he still might pull himself together.

Fitzgerald, deeply humiliated by Hemingway’s criticism, admired the art of his story but expressed anger about the personal attack. He justified his own work by alluding to Oscar Wilde’s apologia and told Hemingway: “If I choose to write
de profundis
sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. . . . It’s a fine story—one of your best—even though the ‘Poor Scott Fitzgerald, etc.’ rather spoiled it for me. . . . Riches have
never
fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.” Fitzgerald told Max Perkins (who later persuaded Hemingway to delete the reference to Fitzgerald) that he still loved Ernest, no matter what he said or did, but admitted that he had been wounded by Hemingway’s statement that he was “wrecked”: “It was a damned rotten thing to do, and with anybody but Ernest my tendency would be to crack back. Why did he think it would add to the strength of his story if I had become such a negligible figure? This is quite indefensible on any grounds.”
²³
If Fitzgerald had answered his own question, he might have realized that Hemingway had attacked him so that Scott would share his own guilt about selling out to the rich.

Hemingway’s charge continued to rankle, especially when another old friend, John Peale Bishop, repeated it in a critical essay, “The Missing All” (1938). When responding to the essay, Fitzgerald ignored his own past friendships with the millionaires in Gatsby-like Great Neck and with the heiress Emily Vanderbilt (whom he had met in Paris in 1928), as well as his lifelong fascination with the luxurious life of Hollywood film stars. Instead, he expressed his sense of betrayal by another rich friend whom he had also helped at the beginning of his literary career. And he defended himself, when down and out in Hollywood, in a letter to Edmund Wilson:

[Bishop] reproached me with being a suck around the rich. I always thought my progress was in the other direction.—Tommy Hitchcock and the two Murphys are not a long list of rich friends for one who, unlike John, grew up among nothing else but. I don’t even
know
any of the people in “café society.” It seems strange from John. I did more than anyone in Paris to help him finish his Civil War book [
Many Thousands Gone,
1931] and get it published. It can’t be jealousy for there isn’t much to be jealous of any more.

Though Hemingway was extremely critical of Fitzgerald, he owned most of Scott’s books, studied them carefully and learned a great deal from them. He had accepted many of Scott’s editorial suggestions about
The Sun Also Rises
and “Fifty Grand,” and (as we have seen) took the concluding sentence of
A Farewell to Arms
from chapter five of
The Great Gatsby.
Zelda may have contributed to the creation of Margot Macomber; and Albert McKisco’s reaction to his duel with Tommy Barban in
Tender Is the Night
influenced the character of the similarly named Francis Macomber. When McKisco is challenged by Barban after his wife gossips about Nicole Diver’s mental breakdown, Rosemary sensibly urges him not to fight. He replies that his wife would force him to take part in the duel:

Of course even now I can just leave, or sit back and laugh at the whole thing—but I don’t think Violet would ever respect me again. . . . She’s very hard when she gets an advantage over you. . . . She called me a coward out there tonight.

When the equally predatory Margot Macomber witnesses her husband’s flight from the charging lion, she loses respect for him, seizes the psychological advantage and sleeps with the white hunter Wilson to punish Francis for his cowardice. As Wilson observes of Margot:

They are, he thought, the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory and the most attractive and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened.

After McKisco, provoked by his wife, proves his courage, confronts Barban and fights the duel, he regains confidence, feels exultant and struts “toward the car through the now rosy morning.” Macomber is emotionally transformed in the same way. After he regains his courage and redeems his honor by killing the charging buffalo, he tells Wilson: “You know I don’t think I’d ever be afraid of anything again. . . . Something happened in me after we first saw the buff and started after him. Like a dam bursting. It was pure excitement.” The influence on Hemingway continued after Fitzgerald’s death, for the title of the last novel published in Ernest’s lifetime,
Across the River and into the Trees
(1950), came from Scott’s quotation of General Stonewall Jackson’s last words in “Afternoon of an Author”: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”
²⁴

VI

The summer of 1936 was the saddest period of Fitzgerald’s life. In addition to the chronic problems of Zelda’s insanity, his heavy drinking, poor health and crippling debts, he had broken his shoulder in July and been attacked by Hemingway in August. But worse was to come. On September 2 his mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and on September 25 he was publicly humiliated by a cruel interview in the New York
Post.

In mid-September, after his mother’s death, he told friends how deeply moved he was by the loss of a woman he had never liked or been close to, but who seemed to stand protectively between him and death. “A most surprising thing in the death of a parent,” he told Oscar Kalman, “is not how little it affects you, but how much. When your Father or Mother has been morbidly perched on the edge of life, when they are gone, even though you have long ceased to have any dependence on them, there is a sense of being deserted.” And in a letter to Beatrice Dance, he praised his mother’s character, mentioned his own lack of filial feeling and illogically concluded that she had died for his sake: “She was a defiant old woman, defiant in her love for me in spite of my neglect of her, and it would have been quite within her character to have died that I might live.”

Scott was more dependent on Mollie Fitzgerald than he admitted to Kalman, for he had borrowed five or six thousand dollars from her. He now felt her death would enable him to “live” by providing some desperately needed funds. In 1934 he had sold the Count of Darkness stories to
Redbook
for $1,250 to $1,500 each, sold three other stories to the
Post
and earned the substantial income of $20,000. In 1935 he could still earn $3,000 for a story, but his productivity fell and his income dropped to $17,000. In 1936—when Zelda’s annual fees at Highland were about $3,000 and Scottie’s fees at the Ethel Walker School in Connecticut (recommended by Gerald Murphy as one of the best in the country) were reduced from the normal rate of $2,200 a year—his income fell by nearly half to $10,000. Fitzgerald made matters more difficult by giving Harold Ober substandard work, by making foolish phone calls and sending damaging letters to magazine editors and movie executives instead of letting his agent conduct his affairs.

The settlement of his mother’s estate led to a quarrel with his sister Annabel, who was five years younger than Scott. Since he was away at prep school and college when she was growing up, they had not been close in childhood and rarely saw each other in adult life. The pious and conventional Annabel was dismayed by her brother’s scandalous, alcoholic life. And she was baffled by his marriage to an insane woman, with whom she had nothing in common and whom she could not possibly understand. As Annabel’s daughters explained in their privately published life of their father: