Читать книгу Breaking Down Fitzgerald - Helen M. Turner - Страница 10

Fitzgerald had turned his attention to a new novel in the summer of 1925, mere weeks after the publication of Gatsby. More than five years later, the work remained unfinished. There were multiple drafts with multiple titles, a variety of plots that were amended and discarded, changes in focus and narrative voice during this period. Fitzgerald's inability to finish the novel was multifaceted. Financial anxiety weighed heavily upon him, which often led to him putting aside his novel to work on short stories that could pay the bills. Zelda's treatments and Scottie's education required a steady flow of income. Fitzgerald's alcoholism was also creating havoc in his personal and creative life as well as damaging his health and general well‐being. He was also unable to get a handle on his material. This, in part, was because of constant interruptions, but there were possibly other factors too such as subject matter that was not best suited to his style and a dread of failure after the disappointment of the reception of The Great Gatsby.

However, early in 1932, he turned his attention once again to the novel and began to draft what would eventually become Tender Is the Night (1934). As a writer who drew heavily on his own life for inspiration in his fiction, Fitzgerald reflected upon recent events and funneled aspects of them into the novel. His growing familiarity with psychiatry because of Zelda's illness was a rich source of material and his protagonist, Dick Diver, is a psychiatrist who ends up marrying one of his patients. The novel is—in many respects—a reflection on the importance of work and vocation. It also reflects on the distractions that destroy the dedication required to succeed. Once again, it is possible to see Fitzgerald's themes reflecting concerns in his own life.

In February 1932, Zelda's mental health declined once again. It was serious enough to warrant admittance to Johns Hopkins Hospital's Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore. By the following month she had written a novel of her own titled, Save Me the Waltz (1932) and sent it to Max Perkins without any consultation with or mention of the work to Fitzgerald, who was mortified. Zelda had completed a full‐length piece of fiction in six weeks compared to his six years of labor for no return. Even more unnerving was that the material crossed over significantly with his own novel with which he was starting to make progress. A bitter marital rift ensued with accusations of sabotage and demands to cease writing on Scott's part and claims of jealousy and stealing of her own experiences for his benefit on Zelda's. The relationship was becoming increasingly strained because of Zelda's ill health, Scott's alcoholism, and the relentless pressures the pair were under in their daily lives. Despite Fitzgerald's reservations, the novel was published by Scribner's on October 7, 1932.

By this time, Zelda had been discharged from the hospital and the couple were living at “La Paix.” The house was on the estate of the Turnbull family and situated on the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland. The Turnbull family's young son, Andrew, would be an early biographer of Fitzgerald's, publishing F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography in 1962. He also edited the first collection of the author's letters in 1963. During this time, Fitzgerald carried on working on his novel while Zelda turned her attention to writing a play called Scandalabra. It was produced by the Junior Vagabonds, a Baltimore‐based theater group and had a one‐week run in June 1933.

The final months of that year saw the beginning of Fitzgerald periodically checking himself into the hospital for a number of complaints. There were, of course, complications from alcohol but he also suffered from tuberculosis, the lung condition that had killed his beloved Keats.

By October, Fitzgerald was finally able to send Perkins the manuscript of his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night; the title came from Keats's poem “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819). The novel was serialized between January and April of 1934 in Scribner's Magazine and the book was finally published on April 12 of that year. It was an astonishing nine years since Fitzgerald had published a novel. Unfortunately, reviews were once again mixed. One of the perceived problems was that the novel's focus on a wealthy and leisurely class whiling away the days on the French Riviera seemed out of kilter with an America that remained in the throes of the Great Depression. To put this in context, Tender Is the Night was published less than three years before John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (1937) and only five before The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Both books detail the depths of the despair brought about by the economic collapse on great swaths of the American population. Other concerns were structural; Fitzgerald had used an extended flashback in the middle section of the book, but some critics felt a chronological approach would have worked better. For others, there was also a sense of disjointedness because of the novel's lengthy composition and a feeling that Diver's demise was not fully explained. It is also worth noting that the anticipation after close to a decade of waiting almost guaranteed disappointment. Fitzgerald had his own reflections on the novel's perceived weaknesses when he wrote to Maxwell Perkins on March 11, 1935, almost a year after its publication:

A short story can be written on a bottle, but for a novel you need the mental speed that enables you to keep the whole pattern in your head and ruthlessly sacrifice the sideshows as Ernest did in A Farewell to Arms. If a mind is slowed up ever so little it lives in the individual part of a book rather than in a book as a whole; memory is dulled. I would give anything if I hadn't had to write Part III of Tender Is the Night entirely on stimulant. If I had one more crack at it cold sober I believe it might have made a great difference. (Fitzgerald 1994, pp. 277–278)

Just before the release of Tender Is the Night, Zelda's mental health declined once more, and she was readmitted to the Phipps Clinic. She would be moved to a number of institutions over the next few years while her husband's circumstances became increasingly dire in terms of finances, productivity, and addiction. Between 1934 and 1936, he was moving between Baltimore and North Carolina, often in an attempt to be near where Zelda was hospitalized. In 1935, crippled by debt and worry and unable to work as quickly and effectively as in years past, Fitzgerald turned to his own inner turmoil as the source of a series of essays for Esquire magazine. After his death, they were published as a collection under the title of one of them: “The Crack‐Up” (1945). The essays are powerful pieces of confessional writing in which the author reflects on the causes of his current plight and distress. However, Fitzgerald does play down the significance of alcohol as a root cause of his difficulties.

The series of essays were published in Esquire in 1936. It was a particularly painful year that saw his author friends berate him for exposing his emotional distress in a magazine. In addition, sometime friend and sometime nemesis, Ernest Hemingway openly mocked him by name in a story that was published in the same edition of Esquire that one of his own essays had appeared in. His mother died. He turned forty. On the day after his birthday that year, an interview was published in the New York Post that Fitzgerald had undertaken with journalist, Michael Mok. He was presented as a washed up, self‐pitying drunk. Mortified and humiliated—according to a letter received by his long‐suffering literary agent, Harold Ober, on October 5—Fitzgerald attempted suicide by overdose. Whether it was a genuine attempt or not, it clearly illustrated that the man was at the end of his tether.