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.
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’).
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