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
