Читать книгу The Trip to Echo Spring - Olivia Laing - Страница 11
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FISHING IN THE DARK
WHEN I TOLD AN AMERICAN friend I was travelling by train from New York to New Orleans she looked at me incredulously. ‘It’s not like Some Like It Hot any more,’ she said, but I didn’t listen. I love trains. I love gazing out of the window as the cities slide by, and I couldn’t think of anything more pleasurable than taking a sleeper, crossing in darkness through the Blue Ridge Mountains and waking with the dawn in Atlanta or Tuscaloosa.
In the interests of thriftiness I’d decided that since the journey only took thirty hours I’d do without a cabin, sleeping instead in what was promisingly described as a ‘wide, comfortable reserved coach seat’. Before I left the Elysée for Penn Station I looked again at the route map. New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana: twelve states. Still, I guessed it would be less arduous than Tennessee Williams’s first trip to New Orleans. In December 1938 he travelled by bus from Chicago, stopping off to see his family in St. Louis and arriving in the south just in time to ring in the New Year. It was the Depression and he had no job and hardly any money, but all the same he felt at home immediately, writing in his journal three hours after arrival: ‘Here surely is the place that I was made for if any place in this funny old world.’
At the station there were people charging in every possible direction, and yet as soon as I worked out which check-in desk I needed, it all proceeded with beautiful efficiency. A uniformed porter took my bags down to the train and advised me against the seats above the wheels. It seemed like a return to a more civilised age and I felt for a moment, if not like Sugar Cane, then at least equal to Jack Lemmon’s Daphne, sashaying along the platform in his ill-fitting heels.
The first stop was Philadelphia. I took a window seat, stowed my bags and arranged all my little bits and bobs in easy reach: that strange homemaking impulse that overcomes travellers on overnight trips. iPod, notebook, water, a bag of sticky grapes I’d bought after hearing yet another horror story about Amtrak food. I spread my plaid blanket over my knees and as I did a great wave of claustrophobia overtook me. I was at the time at the tail end of a period of chronic insomnia. I could barely sleep in my own bed, with earplugs and an eye mask. My flat had been broken into ages back, and ever since my reticular activation system had locked on red alert.
Only those who are persistently deprived of sleep can understand the panic that wells up when the conditions it requires are likely to go unmet. Sleeplessness, as Keats put it, breeds many woes. That maggoty word breeds is exactly right, for who lying awake at three or four or five in the morning hasn’t felt their thoughts take on an insectile life, or experienced a minute crawling of the skin? Sleep is magically efficacious at smoothing out the tangles of the day, and a shortage makes one agitated to the point of lunacy.
As anyone who’s ever drunk too much will also know, alcohol has a complicated relationship to sleep. Its initial effect is sedative: the slumpy somnolence most of us are familiar with. But alcohol also disrupts sleep patterns and reduces sleep quality, limiting and postponing the amount of time spent in the restorative waters of REM, where the body both physically and psychologically replenishes itself. This explains why sleep after a wild night is so often shallow and broken into pieces.
Chronic drinking causes more permanent disturbances in what’s known prettily as the sleep circuitry: damage that can persist long after sobriety has been attained. According to a paper by Kirk Brower entitled ‘Alcohol’s Effects on Sleep in Alcoholics’, sleep problems are more common among alcoholics than the population at large. What’s more, ‘sleep problems may predispose some people to developing alcohol problems’, and are in addition often implicated in relapse.
Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway suffered from insomnia, and their writing on the subject is full of submerged clues about their drinking. The two men first met in May 1925 in the Dingo American Bar on the Rue Delambre in Paris, when Fitzgerald was twenty-eight and Hemingway was twenty-five. At the time, Fitzgerald was one of America’s best known and best paid short story writers. He was the author of three novels, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and the Damned and The Great Gatsby, which had been published a few weeks before. A pretty man, with neat little teeth and unmistakably Irish features, he’d been careering around Europe with his wife Zelda and their small daughter Scottie. ‘Zelda painting, me drinking,’ he recorded in his Ledger for the month of April, adding in June: ‘1000 parties and no work.’
In a way, the bingeing shouldn’t have mattered. He’d just finished Gatsby, after all; that perfectly weighted novel. Its great strength is its indelibility: the way it enters into you, leaving a trail of images like things seen from a moving car. Jordan’s hand, lightly powdered over her tan. Gatsby flinging out armfuls of shirts for Daisy to look at: a mounting pile of apple green and coral and pale orange, monogrammed in blue. People drifting in and out of parties, or riding away on horseback, leaving behind some lingering suggestion of a snub. A little dog sneezing in a smoky room and a woman bleeding fluently on to a tapestried couch. The owl-eyed man in the library, and Gatsby’s list of self-improvements, and Daisy being too hot and saying in her lovely throaty voice that she hopes her daughter will be a beautiful little fool. The green light winking, and Gatsby calling Nick old sport, and Nick thinking of catching the train back to St. Paul and seeing the shadows of holly wreaths cast on to the snow.
A different man could have survived a blowout after building something as lovely and as durable as that. But Fitzgerald was too unanchored to be able to tolerate his chosen pace of life. For years, he and Zelda had been reeling hectically around the globe, ricocheting from New York to St. Paul, to Great Neck, to Antibes and Juan-les-Pins, trailing wreckage in their wake. Just before he’d arrived in Paris there’d been a particularly troublesome spell. Zelda had an affair with a French aviator and was becoming very strange, while Fitzgerald was drinking heavily and getting into fights, at one point ending up in a Roman jail, a scene he’d later use to mark Dick Diver’s definitive loss of control in Tender is the Night, the novel he’d just begun.
As for Hemingway, he was knee-deep 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 that Fitzgerald seems compelled to repeat.
If 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 her like that.
Nor said this to him.
Nor broken myself trying to break what was unbreakable.
The 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’).
