Read Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) for Free Online Page B

Fitzgerald family moved around Europe and America searching for a cure for Zelda. Fitzgerald struggled to keep up with his mounting debts, to play father and mother to his young daughter, Scottie, and to write a fourth novel. In 1934 he finally finished this novel, Tender Is the Night, but at great emotional cost. A much more mature work than The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night also chronicles the deterioration of a couple, Dick and Nicole Diver, except in the book the wife is saved. Fitzgerald put more of his soul into this novel than anything else he wrote, so when it was a commercial and even somewhat of a critical failure—nobody during the Depression appeared to want to read about the deterioration of a wealthy couple—Fitzgerald was devastated.
    He now knew that Zelda would most likely never recover from her illness, a fact that caused him enormous, debilitating pain and robbed him of both his fundamental optimism and his sense of self. He realized that Zelda could no longer function as his muse, fueling his thirst for life and his drive to create art; without her to anchor him he was adrift, lost and despondent. At the time he wrote in one of his notebooks, “I left my capacity for hope on the roads to Zelda’s sanitarium” (quoted in Bruccoli, ed., The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 204).
    Other factors contributed to Scott’s depressed state. He was having a difficult time paying Zelda’s exorbitant hospital bills and supporting himself and Scottie; as a result of his frequent advances against future work, he now owed more than $20,000 to Scribner’s and his short-story agent Harold Ober; he was completely blocked as a writer; magazines were no longer interested in his short stories; and he was drinking constantly, both to dull the pain and simply to function.
    Fitzgerald checked into a two-dollar-a-day hotel in North Carolina and took an inventory of his life. As he wrote in an essay about the experience, “The Crack-Up”: “I began to realize that for two years my life had been drawing on resources that I did not possess, I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually to the hilt” (The Crack-Up, p. 42). He could no longer come up with the commercial stories about young love that had earned him so much money. He could not even, it seemed, provide for his family. He felt he had nothing left to give as a writer or as a man. And he could not seem to control his drinking. He was morally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally bankrupt: “It was strange to have no self” (The Crack-Up, p. 50). Like Anthony Patch, Fitzgerald had in many ways seen this fall coming, but ultimately he had been powerless to stop it.
    Fitzgerald’s essay “The Crack-Up” was published in Esquire, and it quickly drew a negative response from his friends, including his editor, Maxwell Perkins, who warned Fitzgerald against airing such dirty laundry in public. But Fitzgerald didn’t realize just how low he had sunk until the New York Post sent down a reporter to do a story on his fortieth birthday and then ran a scathing article describing Fitzgerald as a washed-up has-been and an alcoholic. Shocked and outraged, he attempted suicide by swallowing a vial of morphine. Luckily, he realized he did not want to die, and he coughed up the medicine. Fitzgerald was not ready to give up on life or on himself
    For Gloria in The Beautiful and Damned, the movie business was a bitter disappointment, but for Fitzgerald in 1938 it represented salvation. His old friend Eddie Knopf had landed Fitzgerald a contract at MGM paying more than $1,000 a week, and suddenly Fitzgerald was a writer again. Several of his stories had been sold to Hollywood during the 1920s, and he had already visited there twice before—first in 1927 to write a silent film, then in 1930 to work on a Jean Harlow picture. Both times Fitzgerald hadn’t taken the work or the town very seriously; instead he had partied hard, grabbed the easy money,