They spoke of Fitz-
gerald’s green eyes. They “glittered,” Edmund Wilson said, and were “hard and
emerald.” Eyes that could spook the likes of Dorothy Parker and Ernest
Hemingway. I see those eyes as dragonfly green, the kind of coloration that
never quite stays put. Black-and-white photos register them sometimes as dark,
sometimes very light — never distinctive on film. Now it is 100 years this
September 24 since he was born, and we only know that no one who saw F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s eyes ever forgot them.
The photographs don’t convey Zelda either. Before her breakdown in 1930
everyone described her as one of the most beautiful women of her era, vividly
present, graceful, with red-gold hair. But she stiffened in front of cameras.
Even in the early photographs her features seem harsh, her expression austere.
And her coloring is lost. As early as the spring of 1919, shortly before her
19th birthday and several years before their fame, she sensed that she would be
inaccurately remembered. “In an hundred years,” Zelda wrote to Scott, “I think
I shall like having young people speculate on whether my eyes are brown or blue
— of course, they are neither.”
To sense their reality, we can depend only on words.
They would have liked that. Beyond everything else, they cherished words.
They discovered early that the happiness they’d dreamed of was impossible, so
what was left was to use words unflinchingly and beautifully.
Scott, from The Great Gatsby, in what could be a kind of epitaph:
“Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded
of something — an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard
somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my
mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling
upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had
almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”
Zelda, from Save Me the Waltz: “Looking for love is like asking for a
new point of departure.” And: “Anything incomprehensible has a sexual
significance to many people under thirty-five.” And: “We are certainly
accountable for all the things manifest in others that we secretly share.”
It’s easy, when considering literary folk, for people who are not writers to
make this mistake: to think, “They had their art and that gave them meaning,
but I’m not an artist so that doesn’t work for me.” It’s the other way around:
they had their meaning and that gave them art.
Not a meaning that could be summed up in pithy aphorisms. Nor a meaning to be
analyzed in the multi-syllabic treatise of an academic (whose typical sentence,
if diagrammed, would look like a train wreck as seen from the air). Scott and
Zelda’s meaning, like the meaning of any worthy artists, was a stance toward
life, unspecific and fierce. It has to do with those words I used before:
unflinching and beautiful. If happiness and philosophy were both,
by turns, impossible and unreasonable, there was still the ability to look at
any particular moment unflinchingly and search for its beauty.
They believed that an unflinching eye and a search for beauty are things
possible to anyone, and that art exists not so much to teach that stance as to
share it.
Scott wanted and tried to be a traditionalist, but it wasn’t in him. In the
great story “Absolution,” he wrote: “There was something ineffably gorgeous
somewhere that had nothing to do with God.” Two thousand years of Christianity
burned alive in that sentence. He was uttering what amounted to the battle cry
of the 20th century, but he hadn’t especially wanted to utter it. It was just
that, as he said in that story, “the honesty of his imagination had betrayed
him” — it had left him beyond the pall with nothing but his unflinching hard
green eyes and his passion for beauty.
Most critics were dismissing Fitzgerald a decade before he died (at which
time, none of his books would be in print). But when Tender Is the
Night, my favorite of his works, was being condescended to in the press,
Zelda wrote him from her mental hospital: “Don’t worry about the critics —
what sorrows have they to measure by or what lilting happiness with which to
compare those ecstatic passages?”
Scott defined love as “a wild submergence of soul.” It is too exacting a
definition for most people to live with, but that wasn’t his problem, nor
Zelda’s, and they knew it. Were they excessive? Of course. Drunk on booze and
fame and each other… in a haze of cigarette smoke and a rush of extravagant
words… hungry for the impossible… full of rages and despairs whose sources
they never discovered… they reeled from day to day and crack-up to crack-up
without any skill at conserving their energies, unable to spare themselves or
each other or anyone else. But they never pretended to be models of behavior.
They took their risks and then their risks took them.
“Don’t look for comfort,” Zelda wrote to Scott, “because there isn’t any; and
if there were, life would be a baby affair.”
In fact, it was Scott who popularized the phrase “crack up,” in his 1936 essay
of that title. Others idealized him, but as soon as the bloom of youth wore off
he never idealized himself. He had been the symbol of his generation, he’d
cracked up, and he was letting his generation know: “In a real dark night of
the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” He was
describing it; he wasn’t inviting anyone to join him.
He cracked up, but never lost his mind. In that essay, he offered a definition
for the highest practical function of the mind: “The test of a first-rate
intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same
time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be
able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them
otherwise.”
That is the best description of intellectual courage that I know.
He was a writer heart and soul, but unlike most of us he didn’t glorify
writing. From The Last Tycoon: “While I like writers — because if you
ask a writer anything, you usually get an answer — still it belittled him in
my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a
whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” And in his
notebook Scott added: “There never was a good biography of a good novelist.
There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
Fitzgerald knew how dangerous it was to be “too many people,” and he didn’t
encourage it in the young. At the same time, he wanted to be heard: “Draw your
chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.” This is
always what the best writers demand of us; that we listen to them not from the
safety of our assumptions but from the edge of the precipice.
Often I’ve walked past his last address, an apartment on Laurel Avenue in West
Hollywood. The building is still there, in good condition — a vintage example
of the Los Angeles that Raymond Chandler (borrowing many of Fitzgerald’s
methods) described so poignantly. It’s fronted by cedars, and then there are
several steps to a walkway, and you stand looking at another era. He lived on
the third floor. In the end, his heart was so bad he couldn’t make it up the
stairs. His last few days, he moved one street over to Sheila Graham’s because
she lived on the first floor. In those small apartments, he fought to finish
The Last Tycoon. He didn’t make it. He was only 44, but as he’d said, “I
am willing to die with my boots on — I just want to be sure that they are my
own boots and that they’re all on.”
For years, Zelda had been in mental hospitals on the East Coast. Not long
before Scott died she wrote him: “I love you anyway — even if there isn’t any
me or any love or even any life.” Another letter: “And maybe everything is
going to be all right, after all. There are so many houses I’d like to live in
with you. Oh won’t you be mine — again and again — and yet again — “
She died in 1948, age 48. When she was a girl in Alabama, she became notorious
for standing on the roof of her home yelling, “Fire! Fire!” When the firemen
came, she laughed and did a little jig. Some would call it irony; some,
prophecy; some, destiny. She died in a fire in the mental hospital. They were
able to identify her body because she’d fallen on her beautiful dancing
slippers. The slippers, protected by her fall, were intact.
By the time Zelda died she knew what Scott could not have known: that he’d
won. She lived to see all his books in print again, his influence recognized,
his image (and hers) glorified. But she couldn’t know that she’d win too — win
all that was left to win, since happiness and fulfillment were long gone. Her
remarkable novel, dismissed in her own time, would come into print again and
stay in print.
In the last year of his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter: “I
never blame failure — there are too many complicated situations in life — but
I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort.” Lack of effort was the one
sin he never committed. He always wrote, no matter what. Let the final
words be his, from one of his last stories, about a writer: “The words fell
wild and unreal on [his] burdened soul. But even though he now knew at first
hand what came next, he did not think that he could go on from there.”
n
This article appears in September 27 • 1996 and September 27 • 1996 (Cover).