The American Century

Scott Fitzgerald’s reputation was low when he died of a heart attack in 1940. He was broke and in debt to his publisher and his agent. His books were mostly out of print. He was regarded as a failure in Hollywood where, idealistic about movies, he had hoped to recoup his fortune. His glamorous wife, Zelda, was confined to an asylum. Though he had spent long periods on the wagon, he remained a self-destructive binge drinker; his last published stories were about a beat-up, alcoholic scriptwriter called Pat Hobby. The novel he was working on, The Last Tycoon, was left unfinished.

At the same time, Ernest Hemingway was at the top of the tree, the most famous living American writer; he had just published For Whom The Bell Tolls, his novel about the Spanish Civil War. It was a critical and commercial success and many thought it a masterpiece. Fitzgerald generously told him it was better than anyone else could do. They had been friends from Paris days in the Twenties, when Fitzgerald, five years the senior, was rich and successful, while Hemingway, at the time they met, was poor and unknown. Fitzgerald was like an elder brother to him, introduced him to Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s and urged Perkins to grab him. Perkins took the advice, and the novel he published, Fiesta, made Hemingway’s reputation, which was enhanced by A Farewell to Arms. Though Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, was a critical success, its sales were disappointing. By 1930 and the end of the Jazz Age, elder and younger brother had changed places. Hemingway was on the up escalator, Fitzgerald on the down one. It stayed that way the rest of Fitzgerald’s life.

There was professional rivalry and jealousy, and other reasons for friction. One was Zelda. She and Hemingway disliked and distrusted each other. He thought she was already mad; according to him she once asked him if he didn’t think Al Jolson greater than Jesus. Hemingway told Fitzgerald she was jealous of his work and encouraged him to drink so that he couldn’t write. She said that the hair on Hemingway’s chest was a toupee.

The Thirties were bad years for Fitzgerald. Tender Is The Night, the novel he worked on for years – his masterpiece in my opinion – flopped. The magazines didn’t want his stories; he could no longer write about young love and beautiful people. He wrote The Crack-Up, a wretched analysis of his state of mind. Hemingway reproved him, told him he was “a rummy”. So what? Joyce was a rummy – but not a tragic character. Self-pity was demeaning. (This was rich: Hemingway scored high on self-pity himself.)

Fitzgerald died, and eventually his reputation began to climb. The fragment of The Last Tycoon was published, and found to be good. (It is; it might have been the great Hollywood novel that has never been written.) Meanwhile, by the end of the Forties, Hemingway was on the slide. The critic Wilfrid Sheed described him as “an artistically desperate man”. His Venice novel, Across The River and into the Trees, was panned. He claimed it was his best work, but few thought it even half-good. It has marvellous passages. I rather love it, but much of the book is embarrassing, and anyone who tried to match its hero’s consumption of liquor would pass out by lunchtime.