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spending; he wrote to Maxwell Perkins, “I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity” (quoted in Turnbull, p. 151). Instead he wrote a play called The Vegetable and hoped that he would earn a killing from it and never have to worry about money again. Unfortunately, the play was a huge failure and closed on the first night. Out in Great Neck, Fitzgerald began to make plans for his next novel, something more ambitious than he had ever written before. He bought some time by writing several short stories—he was now earning as much as $3,000 apiece for them—and then went with his family to Europe to lower costs. The Fitzgeralds settled in the south of France, and once again the couple began to act out, only this time in more dangerous ways. Fitzgerald’s drinking increased, and he went further with his antics, chewing up and spitting out hundred-franc notes at dinner and getting into a fight with a taxi driver that landed him in jail. For her part, Zelda threw herself down a flight of stairs when she thought her husband was flirting with another woman, threatened one night to drive a car off a cliff, and had an affair with a French aviator.
    Amazingly, despite these distractions Fitzgerald managed to finish his third novel, The Great Gatsby. He knew that he had written better than he ever had before, achieving a new mastery of both story and style, and he was hopeful that the book would sell well and end his financial anxieties. Unfortunately, although Gatsby was an enormous critical success—deemed by none other than T. S. Eliot as “the first real step in American literature since Henry James” (quoted in Kazin, p. 94)—it was a commercial failure.
    Zelda was becoming restless. Tired of being just Fitzgerald’s wife, she wanted something of her own. In the past she had tried to write, publishing a few short pieces, and painted, but she needed something more all-consuming. They had moved to Paris, and at twenty-nine, Zelda obsessively took up ballet lessons with the dream of joining the Ballets Russes. Drinking regularly and passing out occasionally, Fitzgerald by now had become a full-fledged alcoholic. He and Zelda fought over her ballet mania while he struggled with his fourth novel. The only bright spot was Fitzgerald’s growing friendship with a young writer he had helped get started, Ernest Hemingway. When Fitzgerald and Hemingway first met, Fitzgerald was the established and successful writer and Hemingway was the struggling unknown. Yet from the beginning Hemingway assumed the upper hand in the relationship while Fitzgerald played the role of a devoted groupie. He genuinely admired Hemingway’s writing—recommending Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s —but Fitzgerald also seemed to worship Hemingway’s machismo and male exploits in much the same way he had once worshiped football heroes. While Fitzgerald loved spending time with Hemingway, Zelda was not a fan. She thought he was a bully and a phony, and Hemingway in return thought that Zelda was crazy and told Fitzgerald she was trying to sabotage his writing.
    As it turned out, Zelda was mentally ill. She had become more and more obsessive about her ballet studies, and one day in 1930, on the way to practice, she snapped and had a nervous breakdown. She entered a sanatorium in Switzerland while Fitzgerald lived nearby. He tried halfheartedly to work on his writing, hoping that his wife would recover from what had been diagnosed as schizophrenia. Fitzgerald suffered enormously during this time, terrified that he might lose Zelda and afraid that he perhaps had done something to contribute to her illness. While the doctor reassured him that he was in no way responsible for Zelda’s schizophrenia, he encouraged Fitzgerald to deal with his drinking. Like many artists, however, Fitzgerald was in denial about his addiction and fearful of tampering with his mental equipment.
    Over the next four years the