Life on a Dare

...But it wasn't simply a matter of good tactics...

...At 24 Fitzgerald would marry the Alabama belle, Zelda Sayre...

...If there is ultimately something unsatisfying about his work, that may well be because Fitzgerald never ceased to think of life's wreckage in the most boyishly wondrous of terms...

...Fitzgerald was a zealous watchguard of his talent precisely because he sensed that its well-springs were not all that deep...

...As he wrote Beatrice Dance, "my capacity for wonder has greatly diminished...

...but unlike her I wanted to make it useful...

...He was pre-eminently the poet of withdrawn promise—the green light that winks ever less brightly at the end of Daisy's dock...

...I think you'll like a series of sketches I'm starting in Esquire next month," he wrote to Beatrice Dance, a married woman with whom he had a brief affair, "they can tell you more about myself than I ever could in a letter because unfortunately, in my profession correspondence has to be sacrificed to the commercial side of being a literary man and I am probably the worst letter writer in the world...

...are his examples of how a girl should open conversation with a boy...

...They were a lavishly misspent pair...

...What must be remembered is that for all his resentment (call it whining if you want to), Scott never seriously considered the idea of abandoning Zelda—certainly not financially, but even less so emotionally...

...It is interesting to see, for instance, how early and completely Fitzgerald developed his myth of desire—the gleaming girl whom everyone wants and who, in her infinite suggestiveness, stoked the fires of his dreamy imagination: "Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it," Nick Carraway says of his cousin, Daisy, in The Great Gatsby, "bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered 'Listen,' a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour...

...Although his style was inimitably lovely—indeed, there are sentences in The Great Catsby and Tender is the Night that leave one breathless—he was also one of those writers whose style exceeds their repertoire of perceptions...

...In a letter to Zelda of 1938 he described himself as "a pretty broken and prematurely old man who hasn't a penny except what he can bring out of a weary mind and a sick body...

...It is, in a way, incidental that Scott—and Zelda—were writers...

...It's the best place in the world . . . and we could keep a little house on the lake...

...Actually I'm in Lausanne + migrate to Paris once a fortnight to see Scotty who has a small apartment...

...This Side of Paradise was published March 26, 1920, eight days before the Fitzgeralds took their wedding vows in St...

...Scott Fitzgerald wrote novels that hinge on the conceptually softest of visions—less than visions really, glimpses...

...Instead she served as an erratically compliant Muse: "But don't fret —if it hadn't been you," Scott wrote in one of his last letters to Zelda, "perhaps I would have worked with more stable material...

...rather, he seems to have lost—and at an unfairly young age—the ebullience, the shiny-eyed habit of response that had once been his trademark...

...In your conversation," her worldly sibling goes on to advise, "always affect a complete frankness but really be only as frank as you wish to be...

...He might have painted or fought bulls, except that his occupation gave Scott a chance to document, over and over again, both the "romantic readiness" that Jay Gatsby personified and its gradual erosion...

...He gives her some pointers on proper carriage while dancing, then ominously concludes this paragraph, "And dancing counts as nothing else does...

...A letter from her, dated two months before their marriage in 1920, contains the following complaint about Frank Norris' McTeague, a novel she was reading at Scott's behest: "All authors who want to make things true to life make them smell bad—like McTeague's room—and that's my most sensitive sense...

...I loved you," he wrote to his wife in the fall of 1939, "romantically—like your mother, for your beauty + defiant intelligence...

...I see few traces of the habitual complainer in him...

...They created the kind of splash that only the reckless of the race create: Bonnie and Clyde, life on a dare, ending in the Fitzgeralds' case not in bloodshed but in subtle, lingering damage...

...So we're all split up...

...He continued to alert Zelda's doctors to her "very extraordinary mind" for as long as he lived...

...We might have a very happy summer in such circumstances—you like it there, and I am very clever at serving birdsong and summer clouds for breakfast...

...It is a disappointing collection, partly because many of the truly interesting letters have been published before and are not reprinted here, but mostly because Scott's was a slim, sterling gift and he knew enough not to tarnish it with overuse...

...Money wasn't coming in abundantly as it once had from the popular magazines where Fitzgerald's stories appeared, owing both to his declining literary reputation and to the declining fortunes of the country generally...

...Throughout those years Scott worked hard, nudging his editor Max Perkins with publicity gimmicks and displaying, as book followed book, the "ungodly facility" that John Peale Bishop called his "worst enemy...

...Patrick's Cathedral...

...Whether or not he drove her crazy, as her family thought and her biographer seems to think, is not to my mind an answerable question...

...His drinking and her madness have become the stuff of legend, of Art colliding with Life, yet we watch wide-eyed as the reel unwinds once again: See the golden-haired couple frolic and then scorch themselves playing too close to the sun...

...In 1930 Zelda had a breakdown and was sent to the first of many psychiatric clinics...

...A 19-year-old Scott sent his younger sister, Annabel, a letter that is a short course in the art of seduction as the Jazz Age conceived of it: "You've got the longest eyelashes...

...He described Zelda to Scottie, their daughter, as "one of the eternal children of this world," yet the phrase applies just as easily to him...

...Still, there are curious and beguiling things to be found here if one is willin6 to wade through the picayune details that make up much of the correspondence...

...She was diagnosed as schizophrenic...

...it has been suggested more than once, most recently by Gore Vidal in the New York Review of Books, that Fitzgerald was a whine...

...In its place were only the specters of ruin: "The possibility of dissipation, " he wrote to one of Zelda's psychiatrists in 1940, a little less than a year before he died, "frightens me more than anything else—which I suppose is poetic justice...

...She can't cross the ocean for some time yet + it'll be a year before she can resume her normal life unless there's a change for the better...

...Adress me Paris, care of Guaranty...

...I'm still here waiting...

...This volume has been put together with a reverential scholar's eye: No cable is too insignificant, no postcard too slight, no book-dedication too flippant to reproduce in full...

...What he saw he saw, as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote him, with "that terrible, clear white light you possess...

...I do hope you'll never be a realist —one of those kind that thinks being ugly is being forceful...

...Small chance...

...Zelda is better but very slowly...

...Thereafter came the high times-browning on French beaches, celebrities, partying...

...her indulgent Southern upbringing and her temperament—even in its sanest form—militated against it...

...Dont be afraid of slang—use it," suggests this older brother who could not spell, "but be careful to use the most modern and sportiest like 'line,' camafluage etc...

...Zelda's letters, by the way—all of them printed here—justify the volume as few of Scott's do...

...Scott returned to America saddled with the care of "my invalid," as he called Zelda, and with overseeing the education of their daughter...

...The evidence isn't all in on their marriage, and it looks like certain questions—such as whose was, innately, the greater talent—will never be solved other than in a partisan spirit, but Scott and Zelda appear to have been more similar than not...

...In 1937 he began writing for Hollywood, and in 1938 Scottie was admitted to Vassar at reduced fees...

...She probably would not have...

...Would Zelda have utilized her considerable talents for writing and painting more completely if she hadn't married Scott...

...Zelda would get better and then worse...

...What the author noted most consistently in his characters-there was something gorgeous about him," he observed of The Great Gatsby, "some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life"—was what he had observed most truly in himself...

...As the sunlit world of their first 10 years together was cast abruptly into ever-lengthening shadow, Scott sent this terse letter to his mother from Switzerland: "No news...

...When Scott could no longer be a child, when debts piled up and Zelda's mind went off course, he became a drunk...

...They both believed, rather fatally, in what Scott called "the business of creating illusion": "Why don't you come to Tyron...

...More, in fact, than one had wished for...

...and "I hear you've got a 'line...

...Scott and Zelda intrigue because the scale of their lives was more grand, their triumphs were more dazzling, their failures were more replete than most of ours will ever be...

...Zelda wrote in April 1939, on her way back to a mental hospital in North Carolina...

...Normal life" was never resumed: The Depression was fast approaching...

...Even the firmest of admirers must notice, however, that there were startling blind-spots in Fitzgerald's gaze, whole realms that failed to interest him or escaped his attention altogether...

...The just-issued Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Random House, 640 pp., $25), edited by the indefatigable Matthew J. Bruccoli and by Margaret M. Duggan, with the assistance of Susan Walker, is as complete a compilation of previously unpublished letters to and from Fitzgerald as one could wish for...