A Short Autobiography
[Scribner]
Paste rating: 8
On Booze
[New Directions]
Paste rating: 7.5
In vino veritas, sad to say
Ask any tweedy undergraduate of a certain generation—this one included—to reel off two or three favorite books, and you will inevitably get an answer that finds The Great Gatsby, and The Sun Also Rises jockeying for the top spot.
So we’ll start with the stipulation that Fitzgerald is a legend. Still, he damned sure didn’t die one. Nor did his last years have anything resembling the tint of legend about them.
It took decades—and the inevitable critical rehabilitation—to award Fitzgerald (1896-1940) his proper and rarefied place among The Dead White Men of the canon. That was a long way from the Hollywood apartment of gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, where an alcohol-soaked Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack at the age of 44.
Even then, the broad parameters of the way we now regard Fitzgerald—the squandered early promise, the alcoholism, the shambolic end—were already well in place. In no small part, Fitzgerald himself bears responsibility for some of this. His eye-opening 1936 essay, “The Crack-Up,” for the then-fledgling Esquire magazine, chronicled his decline and fall in cringe-inducing detail.
“Of course, all life is a process of breaking down,” he wrote, “but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from the outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments, of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once.”
Hemingway—his former friend—hammered the final nails into Fitzgerald’s coffin. That came with his loathsome portrayal in A Moveable Feast, a posthumously published memoir of the Lost Generation’s flowering in 1920s Paris. Hemingway, who could write so vividly and movingly about the color of the hills in Spain, savaged Fitzgerald with what amounted to a series of dick jokes.
So it’s a pleasant surprise to open A Short Autobiography, and find an entirely new side of the author, one in full command of faculties, who is capable of not only laughing at himself, but also capable of frank appraisals of himself and his literary contemporaries.
This short collection of nonfiction works starts with a 1920 piece from Saturday Evening Post and ends with a posthumously published piece in Esquire from 1968. Viewed as a whole, the work shows Fitzgerald, even from his earliest days, already developing a body of thought and gathering the narrative threads that would bind together his life and writing.
“The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it,” the 24-year-old Fitzgerald writes in the book’s opening piece “Who’s Who – and Why,” published, like so many of his stories, in Saturday Evening Post.
The balance of the book runs down all those factors that conspired to keep Fitzgerald away from his work: the endless parties (some in the United States, some abroad); adventures with his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald (1900-1948); the distractions of everyday life.
There’s evidence here too that even with all the distractions, Fitzgerald knew what he was supposed to be doing. Still, if most of us faced the choice between revising the third or fourth typescript of Tender Is the Night or lingering over cocktails on the Cap d’Antibes, some inevitable gray areas in the writerly mission might emerge.
Even so:
“Once, when my work was hampered by so many false starts that I thought the game was up at last, and when my personal life was even more thoroughly obfuscated I asked an old Alabama negro:
‘Uncle Bob, when things get so bad that there isn’t any way out, what do you do then?’
The heat from the kitchen stove stirred his white sideburns as he warmed himself. If I cynically expected a platitudinous answer, a reflection of something remembered from Uncle Remus, I was disappointed.
‘Mr. Fitzgerald,’ he said,‘when things get thataway, I wuks.’”
Putting aside the jarring Stepin Fetchit language that Fitzgerald employs in the piece, “One Hundred False Starts” (Saturday Evening Post, 1933) offers good advice for any writer: When everything’s just horrible, the path out lies in the work. It’s just a shame that Fitzgerald didn’t follow his own counsel more ably.
For every gem in this book—the1926 Bookman essay “How to Waste Material: A Note on My Generation” should be required reading, so efficiently does it dissect the gifts and foibles of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries—we also get some absolute clunkers that back up Hemingway’s criticism that his friend Scott squandered talent for cash.
Chief among those? A Short Autobiography, which catalogs the booze that Fitzgerald tossed back between 1913 (“four, defiant Canadian Club whiskeys) and 1929 (“a feeling that all liquor has been drunk and all it can do for one has been experienced.”). Fitzgerald wrote this one for the audience of The New Yorker.
Also, the less said the better about “How to Live on $36,000 a Year,” in which Fitzgerald manages to make an inflation-adjusted $456,095 and still end up broke. The author seems to seek a good-humored sympathy. A reader in the second Great Recession finds it hard to muster very much.
There’s more sympathy in “How to Waste Time.” This essay shows Fitzgerald possessed of the same sharp critical eye as his Princeton classmate Edmund Wilson. In Fitzgerald’s evaluation of post-World War I literature, E.E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room is “scarcely a novel … but it lives on because those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality.” Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers, despite its “fine last chapters … doesn’t stand up as well as Les Croix de Bois, and The Red Badge of Courage.”
Sound judgments, considering the way Dos Passos, considered such an innovator in his time, has fallen into neglect on reading lists.
It falls to In Our Time, Hemingway’s first and still best collection of short stories, to carry the post-WWI mantle. Fitzgerald writes, “For the many of us who have grown weary of admonitions to ‘watch this man or that’ have felt a sort of renewal of excitement at these stories wherein [Hemingway] turns a corner into the street.”
That’s not the work of someone whom a bitter, aged Hemingway patronizingly described in A Moveable Feast, saying he knew that “no matter what Scott did or how preposterously he behaved I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help that I could to him.”
Hemingway already suffered from the same disease, and would eventually succumb to it just like his friend, one of the many small ironies of the Paris travelogue.
There’s always been a warm romanticism between writers and alcohol. I still remember the 23-year-old version of myself who tried ardently to cultivate a passion for Scotch because I was hoping that some of Hemingway’s genius might be found at the bottom of a tumbler. (That didn’t work—maybe because I couldn’t afford to drink anything good.)
In his 1989 book The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, Tom Dardis lays out in devastating detail the utterly debilitating effect that alcohol had on Hemingway, Fitzgerald and William Faulkner.
In his final decade, Dardis writes, Fitzgerald started to suffer “increasing pain from the severe medical consequences of his disease.” Until he was about 35, Fitzgerald “had always been able to end his two- or three-day drinking episodes with no need for extended sedation or hospitalization.”
Glamorous, right? By 1936—with just four years remaining to him—Fitzgerald discovered that “alcoholics, as they grow older, require even larger amounts of alcohol to make them feel ‘normal.’”
It may be why On Booze, which runs just 86 pages, is such a slender volume. It may also be that alcohol is a topic rapidly exhausted, of interest mostly to the drunk.
On Booze offers selections from The Crack-Up, which New Directions first printed (and Wilson edited), in 1945. We also get selections from Fitzgerald’s notebooks and sketches and bits of correspondence (a 1929 letter to John Peale Bishop, among them).
This book, like this review, may chiefly be of interest to the train-spotters. But if you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably already spent your life collecting—as I have—Lost Generation ephemera.
The swim through Fitzgerald’s notebooks is enlightening. The stuff he didn’t use often reads as well—and occasionally better—than the stuff that made it into books. And buried among the one-liners and possible book titles is a two-line scribble that sends chills up the spine. You can’t help but wonder if Fitzgerald was taking notes or preparing an epitaph:
“Drunk at 20, wrecked at 30, dead at 40.
Drunk at 21, human at 31, mellow at 41, dead at 51.”
Turns out he was right the first time.
John L. Micek covers Pennsylvania government and politics for The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa. He’s re-read The Great Gatsby every summer since 1988.