The Trip to Echo Spring (8 page)

Things that flieth are certainly part of the problem. If Nick Adams's difficulties with sleep are, as we're asked to assume, the result of shellshock – a manly, even heroic reason for developing such a childish ailment as fear of the dark – Fitzgerald by contrast emphasises the absurd smallness of his inciting incident. His insomnia, according at any rate to this deposition, began in a New York hotel room two years previously, when he was attacked by a mosquito. The ridiculousness of this assailant, its comic insignificance, is emphasised by a preceding anecdote, about a friend whose own chronic case of sleeplessness began after being bitten by a mouse. Perhaps both are simply true stories, but I can't help feeling they represent an odd kind of minimisation that Fitzgerald seems compelled to repeat.

If the mosquito incident took place in 1932, then it occurred during a profound downturn in the Fitzgeralds' fortunes. In February Zelda had her second breakdown (the first took place in 1930) and was hospitalised in Baltimore at the Henry Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins University. There she produced a novel,
Save Me the Waltz,
which used so much of the same material as
Tender is the Night,
the book Fitzgerald had been working on increasingly frantically for the past seven years, that he wrote to her psychiatrist in a fury, demanding extensive deletions and revisions.

Later that spring he rented La Paix, a big rambling house a little out of town, with a garden full of dogwoods and black gums. Zelda came home in the summer, at first on day release, but they argued increasingly bitterly and in June 1933 she accidentally set the house on fire while burning some clothes or papers in an unused fireplace (an incident, funnily enough, that Tennessee Williams didn't use in
Clothes for a Summer Hotel
, his portent-obsessed, fire-obsessed play about the Fitzgeralds). ‘THE FIRE,' Fitzgerald wrote in his
Ledger,
adding ‘1st borrowing from Mother. Other borrowings.'

They had to move, though Scott insisted they stay on in the smoke-stained house for another few months until he had at long last finished his novel. In the beginning, it was called
The Boy Who Killed His Mother
and was about a man called Francis who falls in with a glittering group of expats and ends up going to pieces and murdering his mother. For some reason Fitzgerald couldn't make this alluring idea fly, and his gruelling failures were at least partially responsible for the insufferable badness of his behaviour at the time.

Later, he realised the story he really wanted to tell was much less fantastical. He turned the novel inside out and made it instead about Dick and Nicole Diver, and how Dick saved his wife from madness and in so doing destroyed himself. It's structured like a see-saw, Nicole rising up with her white crook's eyes, and Dick sinking down into alcoholism and nervous exhaustion, though he once boasted that he was the only living American who possessed repose.

The worst of it comes in Rome, where he goes on a bender after burying his father. He falls in with Rosemary, the young film star he thought he loved, and somehow they get up too close and disappoint each other. Bitter and confused, he goes out to get drunk, whirling in an immaculate progression of scenes through dances and conversations into arguments, fist-fights and at last to prison.
Tender
isn't by any means as coherent or as streamlined as
Gatsby,
but I can think of very few books that choreograph a downward spiral with such elegant and terrifying precision.

When it was finished, Fitzgerald went with his thirteen-year-old daughter Scottie to a townhouse at 1307 Park Avenue, while Zelda was institutionalised again, this time in the Shepherd Pratt Hospital, where she tried to kill herself at least twice. Little wonder that he described the period in his
Ledger
as ‘a strange year of work and drink. Increasingly unhappy', adding in pencil on a separate draft sheet: ‘Last of real self-confidence.' The long-awaited publication of
Tender
in April 1934 didn't exactly help matters. It sold better than tends now to be thought, but tenth on the
Publisher's Weekly
bestseller list can hardly be described as the summation of long-cherished dreams.

By November 1934, at around the time ‘Sleeping and Waking' was written, he made the seemingly frank admission to his editor, the eternally loyal Max Perkins: ‘I have drunk too much and that is certainly slowing me up. On the other hand, without drink I do not know whether I could have survived this time.' This ambivalence, which could be interpreted as a refusal to see alcohol as a cause rather than a symptom of his troubles, is echoed several times in the essay itself. At first he announces his insomnia to be the result of ‘a time of utter exhaustion – too much work undertaken, interlocking circumstances that made the work twice as arduous, illness within and around – the old story of troubles never coming singly'. A paragraph or two later, drink is dropped casually into the equation with the throwaway phrase, ‘I was drinking, intermittently but generously.'

Intermittently
implies that one can stop;
generously
that there is pleasure, perhaps even largesse in the act. Neither was exactly true. For a start, Scott didn't at the time count beer as alcohol. Not drinking might mean avoiding gin, but consuming instead perhaps twenty bottles of beer a day. (‘I'm on the wagon,' he says in Tony Buttitta's not wholly reliable memoir of the summer of 1935. ‘No hard liquor. Only beer. When I swell up I switch to cokes.') As to liquor, the Baltimore novelist H.L. Mencken, a friend at the time, recalled it made Scott wild, capable of knocking over dinner tables or smashing his car into town buildings.

A few sentences on there's another, more deeply buried clue as to how problematic his drinking had become. He notes that alcohol has the capacity to stop his nightmarish insomnia (‘on the nights when I took no liquor the problem of whether or not sleep was specified began to haunt me long before bedtime'), which begs the question of why he doesn't just use it, since the lack of sleep is evidently agonising. The answer comes a couple of paragraphs down: because having a drink means feeling ‘bad' the next day.
Bad
is a strangely flat word to use in such a lavishly detailed setting. Just as in Hemingway's story one gauges the intensity of the suffering by the efforts made to avoid it, so this opaque little word must outweigh the considerable, meticulously described horror of insomnia, since if it didn't the equation would surely be reversed.

Instead, when Fitzgerald wakes in the grim midsection of the night he takes a minute pill of Luminal from the tube on his bedside table. While he waits for it to work he walks around the house, or reads, or looks out over Baltimore, which is for the moment hidden by greyish mist. After a time, when the pill has begun to take effect, he
climbs back into bed, props the pillow against his neck and tries, like Hemingway, to build himself a counterfeit dream, a runway into sleep.

In the first – God how this made me cringe in sympathy – he imagines something he has been imagining since he was an unpopular boy at boarding school, too small to be much good at sports and too imaginative not to cook up a countervailing fantasy. The team is down a quarterback. He's tossing passes on the sidelines when the coach spots him. It's the Yale game. He only weighs 135 pounds, but in the third quarter, when the score is –

It's no good. The dream's been overused and no longer possesses its consolatory magic. Instead he turns to a war fantasy, but this too sours, ending with the extraordinary line ‘in the dead of the night I am only one of the dark millions riding forward in black buses toward the unknown'. What does this even mean? Is he still talking about soldiers, or is it a vision of death itself, as sinister and democratic as those fleets of black buses? It's one of the most nihilistic images he ever set down, though he was always a writer with a real eye for horror.

Both fantasies had their roots in the actual failures of Fitzgerald's youth, when he didn't play quarterback or distinguish himself in the army, or fight in France, or grow tall and dark like the boys he admired, or finish his degree, or even play the lead in the musical comedy he wrote for the Triangle Club, which was his main reason for going to Princeton in the first place. Now, in this never-ending night, the failure of wish-fulfilment topples inexorably into a contemplation of failure itself.

A sense of accumulating terror begins to pour unstoppably on to the page. Walking madly about the house, he hears the cruel and stupid
things he has said in the past repeated, magnified in the echo chamber of the night.

I see the real horror develop over the roof-tops, and in the strident horns of night-owl taxis and the shrill monody of revelers' arrival over the way. Horror and waste –

– Waste and horror – what I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable. I could have acted thus, refrained from this, been bold where I was timid, cautious where I was rash.

I need not have hurt her like that.

Nor said this to him.

Nor broken myself trying to break what was unbreakable.

The horror has come now like a storm – what if this night prefigured the night after death – what if all thereafter was an eternal quivering on the edge of an abyss, with everything base and vicious in oneself urging one forward and the baseness and viciousness of the world just ahead. No choice, no road, no hope – only the endless repetition of the sordid and the semi-tragic. Or to stand forever, perhaps, on the threshold of life unable to pass it and return to it. I am a ghost now as the clock strikes four.

And on this horrifying, annihilating thought – the thought of a lapsed Catholic who never quite lost his acute sense that bad deeds were being totted up for punishment – he falls abruptly asleep. He falls asleep and dreams of girls like dolls: sexless, pretty girls with real yellow hair and wide brown eyes. He hears a song, a song that might have
drifted in from the dances of his early twenties, when he was newly rich and newly married and all of a sudden golden, riding on the hood of a taxicab along Fifth Avenue at dawn like a man who, in the words of Dorothy Parker, had just stepped out of the sun. He's asleep, deeply asleep, and when he wakes it is to one of those stray lines of dialogue that Chekhov also loved: an interpolation from the inconsequential outer world that Fitzgerald always knew was more powerful than any individual, however rich or charming.

‘. . . Yes, Essie, yes. – Oh, My God, all right, I'll take the call myself.'

We were coming into Philly. A goods train passed in the opposite direction, the trucks deep brown and rusty brown and iron red, each printed with the legend herzog. The woman next to me was eating a hot dog. ‘I don't know what'll you'll call him,' she said into her phone. I was listening to Patti Smith singing ‘Break It Up', a song I'd last heard while shooting beer bottles in the snow outside a friend's cottage in New Hampshire.

Next time I looked up we were travelling through a wood in which a single species of tree was flowering. Redbud, I figured. The blossom was pink and pinkish red, an absurdly frothy foretaste of spring. We passed a lake with wooden jetties and white wooden houses far out around it. There were three people in a green boat, fishing. Someone was barbecuing on a farm. ‘It was cold, I was like oh my goodness,' the woman said. Another wood, set back behind a verge of tawny grass and sedge, the same pink and red tipped trees lit gold by the setting sun. A hawk drifted in circles. Red-tail? I
couldn't see it properly against the light, just a silhouette of long-tipped wings.

By the time we reached Baltimore the sun was very low in the sky. There were mountains of shale and aggregate and corrugated iron warehouses with burned and smoke-stained panels. We shuddered by a line of derelict row houses, the bricks caved in like teeth. The shops were boarded up. I saw torn curtains in the windows and between the buildings cherry trees just coming into bloom.

The house where Fitzgerald had written ‘Sleeping and Waking', 1307 Park Avenue, was only two blocks from the station, while his last address in the city, a seventh-floor apartment at what's now a hall of residence at Johns Hopkins university, was maybe a mile further north. In December 1935, Hemingway wrote Fitzgerald two letters at this latter address. In the decade since their first meeting, their relationship had undergone a profound transformation. While Fitzgerald had been putting out fires and trying to finish
Tender
, Hemingway had published a bestselling novel,
A Farewell to Arms,
two collections of short stories,
Men Without Women
and
Winner Takes Nothing
, and two non-fiction books,
Death in the Afternoon
and
Green Hills of Africa.
He'd also divorced his first wife, married his second, moved to Key West and had two more sons.