THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 12, 1994 TAG: 9406090438
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON
DATELINE: 940612 LENGTH: Medium
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD'S story is so tantalizing, perhaps, because it seems to be the paradigmatic one for American writers.
{REST} It is a story of obtuse critics and an indifferent reading public. Like Melville, Fitzgerald could have cried out, ``Dollars damn me!'' Like Faulkner's most important novels, his best work was mainly misunderstood during his lifetime. During the last year of his life, he sold only 40 copies of his books, giving him a royalty of a little over $13. This may have been the nadir, but the simple fact is that, except for the great success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, he never made significant sums from his true writing. Most of his income came from hack stories and Hollywood screenwriting.
But Fitzgerald's story is truly fascinating because, like Jay Gatsby, he seems to have been destroyed by his own dream. Barely 24 years old, in 1920, he became instantly wealthy and successful with the publication of his first novel. Money and fame allowed him to marry the selfish and beautiful Zelda Sayre of Montgomery, Ala. With only a few brief respites during the next 20 years of his life, as Meyers says, she played the mad Ophelia to his tortured Hamlet.
Between her insanity and his alcoholism, it is a marvel, as Raymond Chandler once noted, that Fitzgerald was able to accomplish what he did. At one point he was consuming as many as 37 beers a day. In the course of the last 10 years of their married life, Zelda was hospitalized for mental breakdowns eight times, adding up to about eight years in institutions. In a moment of lucidity about a year before Fitzgerald's death, Zelda thanked him for his tolerance and generosity. ``Nothing could have survived our lives,'' she said.
From the pain of his life, though, Fitzgerald made art. Maybe, as Eliot said of Coleridge, Fitzgerald transformed his ruin into a vocation. He wrote a half-dozen remarkable stories and two masterful novels (The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night). He also left behind many unremarkable stories that earned him huge sums from The Saturday Evening Post and a number of failed attempts at scriptwriting.
In addition, he left behind an American legend, a life that seemed to have the plot of both a fairy tale and a morality play at the same time. The rise and fall of his fortunes ran a parallel course to the boom of the Jazz Age and the bust of the Depression. But both Zelda and Scott knew, ``We ruined ourselves.'' Like many American writers (Hemingway, Faulkner, Twain, Frost, Melville, Hawthorne, the list could go on) who were sons of weak or absent fathers and strong mothers. Fitzgerald used art to confront loss. But somewhere along the way there was more loss in his life than even his magical ability as a writer could transform.
His life with Zelda indicated a constant need for drama, or farce. As Meyers says, their public performances were like ``the Marx brothers at a debutantes' cotillion.'' But the slapstick comedy was finally pathetic and, in terms of Scott's wasted talent, tragic. The drunken brawls, the rude behavior at parties, the sophomoric jokes, the habitual self-humiliations were a desperate attempt to live up to the glamorous legend they had created for themselves. Hemingway said that bullfights were sedatives compared to a weekend with the Fitzgeralds.
Fitzgerald once commented that there were no second acts in American literature. He lived a life that made that statement a self-fulfilling prophecy. To Meyers' credit, he makes it clear that Fitzgerald was a loyal friend, a responsible provider for his family, an artist who was not threatened by the talent of others. Basically he was a moralist (despite a number of affairs), and he had a capacity for guilt and understanding that matched Hemingway's talent for jealousy and revenge.
Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography is compelling reading, lucid and carefully researched, but the book does not tell us much that Arthur Mizener didn't in his revised biography in 1965. And when Meyers does tell us more - suggestions about Fitzgerald's foot obsession or Zelda's repressed lesbianism or instances of sodomy - I'm not certain it adds much to the picture of the man.
A biography should get at the heart of its subject, and the heart is not necessarily found in guessing about what is in the shadows. The heart is found in the words and actions. Most of the time Meyers stays out of the shadows and remains in the sad, cruel light of the facts of Fitzgerald's life. In that blazing reality there is a twice-told tale that is tragic but certainly worth hearing.
by CNB