The Risk of Writing from Experience

How Fitzgerald's Final Novel Ruined Him

Two years ago I told my cousin that I wanted to make it as a fiction writer. She must have spent months searching, but, finally, she succeeded in finding a book sanguine about the prospects. For Christmas she gifted me Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami; I devoured it like a lost man starving, grateful for a guide to the jungle’s wild and sometimes poisonous flora. Not only was I convinced completely of the practicality and applicability of its advice, but, for the first time ever, the numbers even made sense: In a world evermore disinterested in novels, the author mathematically proved, beyond doubt, that people could still make a living off writing them.

One year later, however, I found that I couldn’t remember a single seed of the book’s wisdom: None of the equations, none of the digits, not a thing! All of it had vanished until one afternoon when I was rereading Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final¹ novel, in the hills of California. Mysteriously, the most somber passage from the otherwise optimistic book rose up from the abyss of memory. Murakami writes:

Hemingway was the type of writer who took his strength from his material. This helps explain why he led the type of life he did, moving from one war to another (the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War), hunting big game in Africa, fishing for big fish, falling in love with bullfighting. He needed that external stimulus to write. The result was a legendary life; yet age gradually sapped him of the energy that his experiences had once provided. This is pure conjecture, but my guess is that it helps to explain why Hemingway, after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, sank into alcoholism and then took his own life in 1961, at the very height of his fame.

In an instant, I realized Fitzgerald had made the same mistake. His writing had ruined him too. Like Hemingway, Fitzgerald needed to live out the lives of his characters. But the embodiment of his final protagonist was deleterious; it contributed enormously to his decline. If he had been a different type of writer, he might have come apart more slowly, possibly never at all.

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Though he’s often remembered as the wealthy wunderkind of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald’s final years were much more bleak. Scorned by the critics, forgotten by the public, twenty years on he was little more than an alcoholic curled up inside a leaky dilapidated body, a man who staggered around Hollywood asking strangers if they’d read his books, if they’d once seen his name in the papers.

The first golden epoch was never given a name, but the author titled his last The Crack-Up. Although it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly where this period begins, 1929 seems like a reasonable estimation. That year, Fitzgerald commenced the most difficult part of composing Tender is the Night: Not the writing, but the molding of himself into Dick Diver, the book’s protagonist. A brilliant, charming psychologist, Diver sets out to be good, “maybe to be the greatest [] that ever lived,” but instead ends up the to-be-forgotten failure his inventor considered himself when he died.

Technically, Fitzgerald had started writing the novel four years earlier in 1925, the year The Great Gatsby was published, with a very different concept in mind than the one he realized when he finished it eight years later. After spending time with Gerald and Sara Murphy—the couple who the main characters are, in-part, based on—he came up with the concept of a young man traveling from Hollywood to the French Riviera. There, he was set to fall in with American expats and destabilize to the point where he kills his tyrannical mother. After writing five drafts of the novel in two years, however, Fitzgerald found that he could not get it to move. He was stuck.

In 1926 he put the book away and moved his family from Europe to Hollywood where he spent his time failing on film sets. He did, however, take something good from California: Lois Moran, who inspired Rosemary, one of the major characters of the book. But even with his new muse—the one who gave him back a confidence that Zelda, his unstable wife, siphoned—Fitzgerald was only able to complete two chapters in the new direction Moran inspired. With all that he lived, still, he could not progress. Short on cash, Fitzgerald returned to writing mediocre, lucrative short stories for magazines, a practice that Hemingway famously refers to in A Moveable Feast as “whoring”:

[Fitzgerald] had told me at the Closerie des Lilas how he wrote what he thought were good stories, and which really were good stories for the Post, and then changed them for submission, knowing exactly how he must make the twists that made them into salable magazine stories. I had been shocked at this and I said I thought it was whoring. He said it was whoring but that he had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money ahead to write decent books. I said that I did not believe anyone could write any way except the very best he could write without destroying his talent. Since he wrote the real story first, he said, the destruction and changing of it that he did at the end did him no harm.

In 1929, thankfully, finally, Fitzgerald’s luck turned. He moved back to Europe and his wife’s mind crumbled to the point where she tried to kill him, herself, and their nine year-old daughter by attempting to fly their car off of a cliff. Simultaneously, Fitzgerald’s bitter alcoholism flared up as his already-diminutive reputation as a writer burnt out.

With his career, alcoholism, and marriage spiraling out of control, Fitzgerald finally had the material he needed to complete what he considered his masterwork. The forlorn family returned once again to the United States; this time he borrowed money from his agent and editor so that he could dedicate himself to writing seriously. From 1932 to 1933, he locked himself up in a rented estate in Baltimore, near where his wife was hospitalized, and wrote the tragedy of a man dissipating instead of realizing his potential.

One of the finest novels ever written, Tender is the Night was, of course, a total failure. Its poor reception deepened his conviction that posterity would never hear of him. The failure strengthened his connection with Dick Diver by proving the story true—a bizarre and sardonic vindication. Six years later, after three heart attacks, at forty-four years-old, Fitzgerald died. While his corpse was still warm, the few critics who bothered to write his obituary declared him an alcoholic who had squandered his talent.

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As Murakami alludes to in the earlier passage, authors tend to be the sort who either plunder their stories from real episodes or make most of it up. At first glance, the choice of which writer to become seems inconsequential, but there are many perils to the path of the former: If you choose to be like Hunter S. Thompson, then you will live much of your life like a method actor. Likely you’ll have the beginning of a story in mind, then you’ll start making yourself into that character while gathering the real experiences you need to adequately tell it.

The writing itself strengthens the identification with the character as it serves as a sort of affirmation: Day after day, authors with the most powerful imaginations and the greatest command of language write themselves into the characters of their stories. Jack London, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway—too many to count—lived certain lives for the sake of material, and, in turn, the novels they wrote significantly shaped them.

It is no coincidence that Fitzgerald could not progress on Tender is the Night until his sky started falling: even a perfunctory examination of his bibliography proves he was this sort of writer. This Side of Paradise is based closely on his experiences at Princeton; The Beautiful & The Damned on his early relationship with Zelda; The Great Gatsby on his first failed romance as well as his roaring time in New York. More poignantly, perhaps, one sees his desire to draw directly from actual experiences through the anecdotes he never documented: Was he not in search of material when he was spinning perpetually around revolving doors, eating orchid petals one-by-one at the bar, having a taxi driver take him door-to-door from the Ritz in Paris to his home in New York?

Fitzgerald was intent on living a life he could record. He was able to survive his first three books all right, but his last—not quite. At some point, he started seeing himself as Dick Diver, and he started acting as the character would. In The Crack-Up—a brooding, desperate, lucid, pitiable series of essays—the author admits that he “had become identified with the objects of [his] horror or compassion”; after Hemingway read his novel, he felt the need to remind him: “Bo, you’re not a tragic character.”

Recklessly, the author over-cultivated the soil of his life for professional benefit. In the end, it became arid, cracked, and brittle; no longer could it nutrition or beauty to him personally. It’s easy to wish that he’d written another story, one in which he was the hero, but the better prayer is altogether different: that Fitzgerald had developed as a writer who pulled from imagination rather than one who transcribed personal experience. Because, by the time he got to his last book, it was too late: His genius fed off that which he’d touched; the only story he could have written was the tragedy that he lived through, the one that broke him along with his characters.

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1. He began another book later, The Last Tycoon, but died before finishing it.