in what he’d later remember as the happiest period of his life. He was married to Hadley Richardson, his first wife, and had a small son he nicknamed Mr. Bumby. There’s a photograph of him taken around that time, in a thick sweater, shirt and tie, looking a little chubby. He has a new moustache, but it doesn’t quite disguise the boyish softness of his face. Three years back, in 1922, Hadley had accidentally lost a suitcase containing all his manuscripts, and so the book of stories he’d just published, In Our Time, represented entirely new material, or at the least new versions of lost originals.
The two men liked one another immediately. You can tell from even the most casual glance through their letters, which are stuffed with good-natured insults and statements as frankly loving as: ‘I can’t tell you how much your friendship has meant to me’ and ‘My god I’d like to see you’. As well as being good company, Fitzgerald was also of professional assistance to Hemingway that year. Before they’d even met, he recommended him to his own editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, suggesting Max sign up this promising young man. In a letter to Perkins written a few weeks after their first meeting in the Dingo, Hemingway noted that he was seeing a lot of Scott, adding enthusiastically: ‘We had a great trip together driving his car up from Lyon.’
The next summer Fitzgerald helped out again, this time by casting a critical eye over Hemingway’s new novel, The Sun Also Rises. In a characteristically insightful and badly spelled letter, he suggested that the first twenty-nine pages (full of ‘sneers, superiorities and nose-thumbings-at-nothing . . . elephantine facetiousness’) be cut, though in the end Hemingway could only bring himself to dispense with fifteen. ‘You were the first American I wanted to meet in Europe,’ he adds, to soften the blow, before confessing a few lines on: ‘I go crazy when people aren’t always at their best.’
At the time this letter was written, Hemingway had got himself into a fix. He’d fallen in love with a wealthy, boyishly attractive American, Pauline Pfeiffer. Over the course of the summer (in which he, Hadley and Pauline holidayed together in Fitzgerald’s old villa in Juan-les-Pins), it became increasingly clear that his marriage was finished. ‘Our life is all gone to hell,’ he wrote to Scott on 7 September. He spent a suicidal autumn alone in Paris, was divorced from Hadley on 27 January 1927 and by spring had resolved to marry Pauline.
During the course of the break-up he suffered punishing insomnia. In the same 7 September letter, he used the word hell a second time to describe his condition ever since meeting Pauline, adding:
. . . with plenty of insomnia to light the way around so I could study the terrain I get sort of used to it and fond of it and probably would take pleasure in showing people around it. As we make our hell we certainly should like it.
Insomnia as a light to view a hellish terrain. The idea evidently appealed to him, because it reoccurs as the foundation of a story he wrote soon after. A long time back, before he’d met even Hadley, Hemingway had served as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy in the First World War. While bringing chocolate to the soldiers on the front, he’d been blown up by mortar fire and had spent a long time in hospital with a badly damaged leg. In November 1926, he wrote a story inspired by this experience, though it ranged out much further than that.
‘Now I Lay Me’ begins with Nick Adams (not Hemingway exactly, but rather a kind of stand-in self or avatar, who shares various items of his childhood and wartime record) lying on the floor of a room at night, trying not to sleep. As he lies there, he listens to silkworms feeding on mulberry leaves. ‘I myself did not want to sleep,’ he explains, ‘because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body. I had been that way for a long time, ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come back.’
To ward off this terrifying eventuality, he carries out a nightly ritual. Lying in the dark, listening to the small noises of feeding from above, he fishes very carefully in his mind the rivers he knew as a boy: the trout rivers of Michigan, with their deep pools and swift, shallow stretches. Sometimes he finds grasshoppers in the open meadows, and uses them for bait, and at other times he collects wood ticks or beetles or white grubs with brown heads, and once a salamander, though that’s not an experiment he repeats. Sometimes, too, the rivers are imaginary, and these can be very exciting, and easily carry him through to dawn. These fishing adventures are so detailed it’s often hard to remember that they aren’t real; that they’re fictional even inside the fiction: a story a man is telling himself in secret, a manufactured substitute for the sort of wayward, nocturnal journeys he might otherwise be making.
On this particular night – the night of the silkworms in the mulberry leaves – there’s only one other person in the room, and he too is incapable of sleep. Both are soldiers, in Italy in the First World War. Nick is American, and the other man has lived in Chicago, though he’s Italian by birth. Lying there in the dark they get to talking, and John asks Nick why he never sleeps (though actually he can manage just fine when there’s a light on, or after the sun has risen). ‘I got in pretty bad shape along early last spring, and at night it bothers me,’ he says casually and that’s all the explanation he offers, except for the mention of being blown up at night at the very beginning of the story. Instead, the weight of his injury is carried by those dream rivers, its severity only really gaugeable by the enormous efforts he makes to circumvent it. He’s certainly not going to tell the reader directly how bad it feels to lie there, thinking you might die at any minute.
Fitzgerald’s own take on the hells of sleeplessness came seven years later, with an essay called ‘Sleeping and Waking’. It ran in Esquire in December 1934, when he was careering into the breakdown he’d confess to eighteen months later in ‘The Crack-up’, a much more famous trio of essays for the same magazine. At the time of writing, Fitzgerald was living in Baltimore with his daughter. His wife was in a mental institution, he was drinking heavily, and the days of being carefree in Paris and the Riviera had vanished as conclusively as they did for poor Dick Diver in Tender is the Night – though you could argue that they’d only been carefree in the sense that a man on a tightrope is carefree, soft-shoeing along without the slightest sign of strain or effort.
Writing in praise of Fitzgerald years later, John Cheever observed that his genius lies in the provision of details. Clothes, dialogue, drinks, hotels, incidental music: all are precisely rendered, plunging the reader into the lost world of the Riviera or West Egg or Hollywood or wherever it is we are. The same is true in this essay, though it’s by no means the most glamorous of his stage sets. Aside from one brief visit to a New York hotel room, the drama is confined to the bedroom of the author’s own house in Baltimore, with small forays out into the study and the porch.
In this room he suffers what might be described as a rupture in the fabric of sleep, a widening interval of wakefulness between the first easy plunge into unconsciousness and the deep rest that comes after the sky has begun to lighten. This is the moment, he declares in grand and untranslated Latin, that’s referred to in the Psalms as ‘Scuto circumdabit te veritas eius: non timebis a timore nocturno, a sagitta volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris’, which means: ‘His truth shall compass thee with a shield: thou shalt not be afraid of the terror of the night, of the arrow that flieth in the day, of the business that walketh about in the dark.’
Things that flieth are certainly part of the problem. If Nick Adams’s difficulties with sleep are, as we’re asked to assume, the result of shellshock – a manly, even heroic reason for developing such a childish ailment as fear of the dark – Fitzgerald by contrast emphasises the absurd smallness of his inciting incident. His insomnia, according at any rate to this deposition, began in a New York hotel room two years previously, when he was attacked by a mosquito. The ridiculousness of this assailant, its comic insignificance, is emphasised by a preceding anecdote, about a friend whose own chronic case of sleeplessness began after being bitten by a mouse. Perhaps both are simply true stories, but I can’t help feeling they represent an odd kind of minimisation
