The Trip to Echo Spring (9 page)

Richer, more successful, more productive and more happily established in his domestic life, Hemingway was less inclined to play nursemaid than bully. In the first of the December letters, he harangued Scott for the way he seemed to be compelled to ‘get stinking drunk and do every possible thing to humiliate yourself and your friend' – though it was by no means clear any more that he could be so counted (‘I miss seeing you and haveing a chance to talk,' he adds, softening a little).

He was probably referring to a meal in New York two years previously with Edmund Wilson, when Fitzgerald had got so wretchedly drunk he lay on the floor of the restaurant, pretending to be asleep but occasionally emitting needling little remarks or struggling off to the bathroom to be sick. Later, Wilson escorted him back to his room at the Plaza, where he put himself to bed and lay in silence watching his old Princeton friend with ‘expressionless birdlike eyes'. The Plaza, which in the looking-glass world he'd created for it was where Gatsby and Daisy and Nick and Tom took a suite one broiling summer's afternoon, to drink mint juleps and edge up on the quarrel that would pull the whole rich tapestry of the novel apart.

In Hemingway's second letter, written a few days later, he takes up the subject of his own insomnia, presumably (Scott's letter is lost) in answer to some similar complaint or plea:

Non sleeping is a hell of a damned thing too. Have been haveing a big dose of it now lately too. No matter what time I go to sleep wake and hear the clock strike either one or two then lie wide awake and hear three, four, five. But since I have stopped giving a good goddamn about anything in the past it doesn't bother much and I just lie there and keep perfectly still and rest through it and you seem to get about as much repose as though you slept. This may be of no use to you but it works for me.

The stance is characteristic: first the gruff acknowledgement of pain
(hell
of a damned thing),
and then the stoic refusal to be touched by it
(it doesn't bother me much).
Of course Hemingway would know exactly
how to treat insomnia, just as he knew the correct technique for any number of physical activities, from boxing to fishing to shooting a gun. Of course he wouldn't whimper about it. What was he, some kind of yellow-bellied dog? Fitzgerald, on the contrary, was more than happy to abase himself. After all, he'd opened ‘Sleeping and Waking' with the craven line: ‘When some years ago I read a piece by Ernest Hemingway called Now I Lay Me, I thought there was nothing further to be said about insomnia,' which is pretty much as low to the floor as you can get without actually rolling under someone's boot. Mind you, it could also be read as an undercut, a quick little feint to the jaw, since what he's actually saying is Hemingway hasn't had the last word, not by any means at all.

I sat back in my seat, turning these different testimonies over in my mind as the train shuttled from day into night. Story, essay, letter: all of them covering the same rough ground. None of them were straightforward. None of them were reliable, at least not in the way that we commonly use that word. Later in the second letter Hemingway invites Scott to come out on his boat and get himself killed. He's kidding, of course. But jokes are resistant to outsiders' eyes. It's entirely possible that you could read it and think you were dealing with a psychopath (‘we can take your liver out and give it to the Princeton Museum, your heart to the Plaza Hotel').

Part of the problem was the common or garden issue of literary biography: that while a writer may draw very deeply on events they've experienced or felt, what they make of them is never straightforwardly factual and can't be treated as such. Even an essay – even Scott's confessional ‘Sleeping and Waking' – is produced for a fee, and subject to the usual shaping, the usual scissoring and moulding by which real
life is converted into art. As for letters, they're written for an even more specific audience, and only rarely give a neutral sense of the whole person. In his
Paris Review
interview, Tennessee Williams touched a little embarrassedly on this, explaining that his letters to Donald Windham, which had recently been published, ‘had a great deal of malicious humor in them. I knew he liked that. And since I was writing to a person who enjoyed that sort of thing I tried to amuse him with those things.'

When the writer is also an alcoholic, however, this migration of lived experience becomes entangled with another slippery process: the habit of denial. According to
DSM-IV,
the standard guide for all psychiatric disorders: ‘Denial is ubiquitous in alcoholism. Almost all alcoholics deny they have a problem with drinking or rationalize it one way or another. They are often quick to lay blame for their drinking on situations or other people . . . The main impediments to the diagnosis of alcoholism are the denial seen in alcoholics and the low index of suspicion held by most physicians.'

The desire to drink, and the repercussions it has on the drinker's physical, emotional and social selves, are buried beneath excuses, elisions and flat-out lies. An alcoholic might be understood in fact to live two lives, one concealed beneath the other as a subterranean river snakes beneath a road. There is the life of the surface – the cover story, so to speak – and then there is the life of the addict, in which the priority is always to secure another drink. It's not for nothing that the first step of the Twelve Step Programme is simply ‘to admit we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable'. This single step can take a lifetime to face up to, or never be achieved.

In the particular case of the writer who drinks, the ways in which
autobiographical material is used requires more than ordinary scrutiny, since what denial means in practice is an inconsistent mass of material that moves bewilderingly between honest accounting, self-mythologising and delusion.
Intermittently. It doesn't bother me much. Generously. Bad.
None of these words could be taken at face value. They were carrying out a secret function, sometimes directly at odds with what was apparently being said. Perhaps this is what made ‘Now I Lay Me' so compelling: the sense that one's hook is snagging on something far beneath the bright waters of the surface.

I once came across a statement that captured this tendency towards concealment so precisely it made me reel. I was reading
The Impossible Profession,
Janet Malcolm's short, incisive book on psychoanalysis. During a discussion of the profession's founding principles, she quoted Sigmund Freud on the apparently universal disinclination of humans to be transparent on the subject of sexuality.

Instead of willingly presenting us with information about their sexual life, they try to conceal it by every means in their power. People are in general not candid over sexual matters. They do not show their sexuality freely, but to conceal it they wear a heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies, as though the weather were bad in the world of sexuality.

The weather, it seems, is also bad in the world of alcoholism, and those heavy overcoats are favoured by almost all its inhabitants. And yet, without falling too far into the honey-trap of romanticism, I was also aware of a corresponding desire in all these writers to expose and scrutinise themselves in ways that seemed almost abnormally
courageous. Imagine writing that quarterback fantasy down, let alone sending it out for publication. It must have been like undressing in public – though this, it must be admitted, is something else Fitzgerald was prone to do. Once, in the 1920s, he stripped to his underclothes in the audience of a play. Another time, according again to Mencken, he shocked a Baltimore dinner party ‘by arising at the dinner table and taking down his pantaloons, exposing his gospel pipe'. But even undressing is an act of concealment sometimes. You can yank down your pants and show off your gospel pipe and still be a man in mortal terror of revealing who you are.

We reached DC at 6 p.m. The tannoy sang out, ‘This is a smoking stop. This is a rest stop,' and people began to get up and shift their bags. I was starving. I waited till we pulled out again and then went to the dining car. So much for the urban myths. The food was wonderful: steak and jacket potato with sour cream and a chocolate peanut butter pie. After dinner I napped a while and was woken at half past ten by my phone. The woman beside me was still talking. ‘Freak it, am I on speakerphone? No, no, hell no. She asked about cutting it and I said no, hell no.' She was massive and dressed all in black, with a hooded leather jacket pulled up over her head. Despite her bulk her voice was very soft and girlish and even after I put my iPod on I could still hear her saying periodically
uh huh, uh huh, uh huh.

For a long time I stayed just beneath the surface of sleep, and then all of a sudden I dropped into a nightmare, as if I had fallen into one of those deep trout pools in Hemingway's imaginary rivers. An
ex-boyfriend – for what it's worth also an alcoholic – was about to hang himself. I woke abruptly, my heart thumping. It was very late. I looked out of the window. We were travelling through hill country. The Blue Ridge Mountains? I guessed from the time that we must be nearing Clemson, the home, according to the itinerary I'd practically memorised, of one of the two men who'd resigned the office of vice president. Christ, I was tired. My skin felt like it'd been put on wrong: back to front or inside out.

Eventually I got up to use the bathroom. The carriage was full of sleeping bodies curled up under coats and blankets. Couples huddled together, their faces almost touching, and I saw a woman feeding a tiny baby, the only other person awake in the whole coach. It's not often, in the privileged West at least, that one finds oneself in a room full of sleepers. Hospitals, boarding schools, homeless shelters: none of them places I much frequented. There was something almost eerie about it, like those Henry Moore drawings of people sheltering in the stations of the London Underground during the Blitz. They lie in rows and could be sleeping, though their boneless immobility makes one wonder if the platform hasn't been turned into an impromptu mortuary.

I went back to my seat and looked out into the dark again. The train was following the trajectory of Fitzgerald's fall through time. After Baltimore he went to Asheville, North Carolina in 1935 to recover from what he was told was an attack of tuberculosis. He stayed in the Grove Park Inn, a vast, rambling resort hotel. It must have been somewhere in that bulk of hills, in the clean thin air that was supposed to be good for damaged lungs. That summer he made friends with Laura Guthrie, a palmist at the hotel who he employed as something
between a companion and a secretary. She kept a diary of the season and much of it ended up, by way of an essay in
Esquire,
in
Scott Fitzgerald,
Andrew Turnbull's soft-hearted, thoughtful biography.

Turnbull was the son of Fitzgerald's landlord at La Paix. He was about Scottie's age, and had the advantage over other biographers in not only having known Fitzgerald, but also in having seen what a sweet man he could be, how compassionate and honourable, how exceptionally gifted and hard-working. People used to speak of someone being refined by suffering, and that's the sense one carries away from Turnbull's account. Unlike his subject, he also seems a notably reliable witness, acknowledging the failings without ever seeming to smack his lips.

He describes Fitzgerald in his room at the Grove Park Inn making endless lists ‘of cavalry officers, athletes, cities, popular tunes. Later, he realised that he had been witnessing the disintegration of his own personality and likened the sensation to that of a man standing at twilight on a deserted range with an empty rifle in his hands and the targets down.' The images are drawn from Fitzgerald's own account in ‘The Crack-up', but somehow have more impact here. At the same time he was trying to write stories to keep his family afloat, though the old easy facility had long since gone. Not cheap, having a wife in hospital, and a daughter in private school. He was also trying to stop drinking, for the sake of his lungs if nothing else, though what that meant in practice was the usual heroic consumption of beer.

After a while he lapsed, returning to hard liquor. One day Laura found him working in his room swaddled in a thick wool sweater over pyjamas, his eyes very red and his legs shaking. He was trying to sweat out the gin, he told her, though since he was still drinking it
at the time his method seemed doomed to failure. When he said he'd been spitting blood she called a doctor and he was taken to the local hospital to dry out, something that had already happened several times back home in Baltimore. He stayed five days, and – here's a classic Turnbull detail – finished off the story from the sanctuary of his bed.

At some point that summer he told Laura: ‘Drink heightens feeling. When I drink, it heightens my emotions and I put it in a story. But then it becomes hard to keep reason and emotion balanced. My stories written when sober are stupid – like the fortune-telling one. It was all reasoned out, not felt.' It's hard not to read this as justification, particularly since he was already bitterly regretting the necessity of writing so much of
Tender
drunk. Later, walking in the hills above Asheville together, on the way down from Chimney Rock, he changed his mind, saying instead: ‘Drink is an escape. That is why so many people do it now. There is Weltschmerz – the uncertainty of the world today. All sensitive minds feel it. There is a passing away of the old order and we wonder what there will be for us in the new – if anything.'