seems fair that I should have just a little fun with our good friends here in Paris,' she said
to Scott.
Scott was being the perfect host and we ate a very bad lunch that the wine cheered a
little but not much. The little girl was blonde, chubby-faced, well built, and very healthylooking
and spoke English with a strong cockney accent. Scott explained that she had an
English nanny because he wanted her to speak like Lady Diana Manners when she grew
up.
Zelda had hawk's eyes and a thin mouth and deep-south manners and accent.
Watching her face you could see her mind leave the table and go to the night's party and
return with her eyes blank as a cat's and then pleased, and the pleasure would show along
the thin line of her lips and then be gone. Scott was being the good cheerful host and
Zelda looked at him and she smiled happily with her eyes and her mouth too as he drank
the wine. I learned to know that smile very well. It meant she knew Scott would not be
able to write.
Zelda was jealous of Scott's work and as we got to know them, this fell into a regular
pattern. Scott would resolve not to go on all-night drinking parties and to get some
exercise each day and work regularly. He would start to work and as soon as he was
working well Zelda would begin complaining about how bored she was and get him off
on another drunken party. They would quarrel and then make up and he would sweat out
the alcohol on long walks with me, and make up his mind that this time he would really
work, and would start off well. Then it would start all over again.
Scott was very much in love with Zelda. and he was very jealous of her. He told me
many times on our walks of how she had fallen in love with the French navy pilot. But
she had never made him really jealous with another man since. This spring she was
making him jealous with other women and on the Montmartre parties he was afraid to
pass out and he was afraid to have her pass out. Becoming unconscious when they drank
had always been their great defence. They went to sleep on drinking an amount of liquor
or champagne that would have little effect on a person accustomed to drinking, and they
would go to sleep like children. I have seen them become unconscious not as though they
were drunk but as though they had been anaesthetized, and their friends, or sometimes a
taxi-driver, would get them to bed, and when they woke they would be fresh and happy,
not having taken enough alcohol to damage their bodies before it made them unconscious.
Now they had lost this natural defence. At this time Zelda. could drink more than
Scott could and Scott was afraid for her to pass out in the company they kept that spring
and the places they went to. Scott did not like the places nor the people and he had to
drink more than he could drink and be in any control of himself, to stand the people and
the places, and then he began to have to drink to keep awake after he would usually have
passed out. Finally he had few intervals of work at all.
He was always trying to work. Each day he would try and fail. He laid the failure to
Paris, the town best organized for a. writer to write in that there is. and he thought always
that there would be some place where he and Zelda could have a good life together again.
He thought of the Riviera, as it was then before it had all been built up, with the lovely
stretches of blue sea and the sand beaches and the stretches of pine woods and the
mountains of the Esterel going out into the sea. He remembered it as it was when he and
Zelda had first found it before people went there for the summer.
Scott told me about the Riviera and how my wife and I must come there' the next
summer and how we would go there and how he would find a place for us that was not
expensive and we would both work hard every day and swim and lie on the beach and be
brown and only have a single aperitif before lunch and one before dinner. Zelda. would
be happy there, he said. She loved to swim and was a beautiful diver and she was happy
with that life and would want him to work and everything would be disciplined. He and
Zelda. and their daughter were going to go there that summer. I was trying to get him to
write his stories as well as he could and not trick them to conform to any formula, as he
had explained that he did.
'You've written a fine novel now,' I told him. 'And you mustn't write slop.'
'The novel isn't selling,' he said. 'I must write stories and they have to be stories that
will sell.'
'Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can,'
'I'm going to,' he said.
But the way things were going, he was lucky to get any work done at all. Zelda did
not encourage the people who were chasing her and she had nothing to do with them, she
said. But it amused her and it made Scott jealous and he had to go with her to the places.
It destroyed his work, and she was more jealous of his work than anything.
All that late spring and early summer Scott fought to work but he could only work in
snatches. When I saw him he was always cheerful, sometimes desperately cheerful, and
he made good jokes and was a good companion. When he had very bad times, I listened
to him about them and tried to make him know that if he could hold onto himself he
would write as he was made to write, and that only death was irrevocable. He would
make fun of himself then, and as long as he could do that I thought that he was safe.
Through all of this he wrote one good story, The Rich Boy, and I was sure that he could
write better than that, as he did later.
During the summer we were in Spain and I started the first draft of a novel and
finished it back in Paris in September. Scott and Zelda had been at Cap d'Antibes, and
that fall when I saw him in Paris he was very changed. He had not done any sobering up
on the Riviera and he was drunk now in the daytime as well as nights. It did not make any
difference any more to him that anyone was working and he would come to 113 rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs any time he was drunk either in the daytime or at night. He had
begun to be very rude to his inferiors or anyone he considered his inferior.
One time he came in through the sawmill gate with his small daughter - it was the
English nurse's day off and Scott was caring for the child - and at the foot of the stairs she
told him she needed to go to the bathroom. Scott started to undress her and the proprietor,
who lived on the floor below us, came in and said, 'Monsieur, there is a cabinet de toilette
just ahead of you to the left of the stairs.'
'Yes, and I'll put your head in it too, if you're not careful,' Scott told him.
He was very difficult all the fall, but he had begun to work on a novel when he was
sober. I saw him rarely when he was sober, but when he was sober he was always
pleasant and he still made jokes and sometimes he would still make jokes about himself.
But when he was drunk he would usually come to find me and, drunk, he took almost as
much pleasure interfering with my work as Zelda did interfering with his. This continued
for years but, for years too, I had no more loyal friend than Scott when he was sober.
That fall of 1925 was upset because I would not show him the manuscriptot the first
draft of The Sun Also Rises.* I explained to him that it would mean nothing until I had
gone over it and rewritten it and that I did not want to discuss it or show it to anyone first.
We were going down to Schruns in the Vorarlberg in Austria as soon as the first snowfall
there. [*Published in England as Fiesta.]
I rewrote the first half of the manuscript there, finished it in January, I think. I took
it to New York and showed it to Max Perkins of Scribner's and then went back to Schruns
and finished rewriting the book. Scott did not see it until after the completed rewritten
and cut manuscript had been sent to Scribner's at the end of April. I remembered joking
with him about it and him being worried and anxious to help as always once a thing was
done. But I did not want his help while I was rewriting.
While we were living in the Vorarlberg and I was finishing rewriting the novel, Scott
and his wife and child had left Paris for a watering place in the lower Pyrenees. Zelda had
been ill with that familiar intestinal complaint that too much champagne produces and
which was then diagnosed as colitis. Scott was not drinking, and starting to work, and he
wanted us to come to Juan-les-Pins in June. They would find an inexpensive villa for us
and this time he would not drink and it would be like the old good days and we would
swim and be healthy and brown and have one aperitif before lunch and one before dinner.
Zelda was well again and they were both fine and his novel was going wonderfully. He
had money coming in from a dramatization of The Great Gatsby which was running well
and it would sell to the movies and he had no worries. Zelda was really fine and
everything was going to be disciplined.
I had been down in Madrid in May working by myself and I came by train from
Bayonne to Juan-les-Pins third class and quite hungry because I had run out of money
stupidly and had eaten last in Hendaye at the French-Spanish frontier. It was a nice villa
and Scott had a very fine house not far away and I was very happy to see my wife who
had the villa running beautifully, and our friends, and the single aperitif before lunch was
very good and we had several more. That night there was a party to welcome us at the
Casino, just a small party, the MacLeishes, the Murphys, the Fitzgeralds and we who
were living at the villa. No one drank anything stronger than champagne and it was very
gay and obviously a splendid place to write. There was going to be everything that a man
needed to write except to be alone.
Zelda was very beautiful and was tanned a lovely gold colour and her hair was a
beautiful dark gold and she was very friendly. Her hawk's eyes were clear and calm. I
knew everything was all right and was going to turn out well in the end when she leaned
forward and said to me, telling me her great secret, 'Ernest, don't you think Al Jolson is
greater than Jesus?'
Nobody thought anything of it at the time. It was only Zelda's secret that she shared
with me, as a hawk might share something with a man. But hawks do not share. Scott did
not write anything any more that was good until after he knew that she was insane.
19 A Matter of Measurements
Much later, in the time after Zelda had what was then called her first nervous breakdown
and we happened to be in Paris at the same time, Scott asked me to have lunch with him
at Michaud's restaurant on the corner of the rue Jacob and the rue des Saints-Peres. He
said he had something very important to ask me that meant more than anything in the
world to him and that I must answer absolutely truly. I said that I would do the best that I
could. When he would ask me to tell him something absolutely truly, which is very
difficult to do, and I would try it, what I said would make him angry, often not when I
said it but afterwards, and sometimes long afterwards when he had brooded on it. My
words would become something that would have to be destroyed and sometimes, if
possible, me with them.
He drank wine at the lunch but it did not affect him and he had not prepared for the
lunch by drinking before it. We talked about our work and about people and he asked me
about people that we had not seen lately. I knew that he was having great trouble with it
for many reasons, but that was not what he wanted to talk about. I kept waiting for it to
come, the thing that I had to tell the absolute truth about; but he would not bring it up
until the end of the meal, as though we were having a business lunch.
Finally when we were eating the cherry tart and had a last carafe of wine he said,
'You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda.'
'No, I didn't.'
'I thought I had told you.'
'No. You told me a lot of things but not that.'
'That is what I have to ask you about.'
'Good. Go on.'
'Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that
was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt
the same since she said that and I have to know truly.'
'Come out to the office,' I said.
'Where is the office?'
'Le water,' I said.
We came back into the room and sat down at the table.
'You're perfectly fine,' I said. 'You are OK. There's nothing wrong with you. You
look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look
at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.'
'Those statues may not be accurate.'
'They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.'
'But why would she say it?'
'To put you out of business. That's the oldest way in the world of putting people out
of business. Scott, you asked me to tell you the truth and I can tell you a lot more but this
is the absolute truth and all you need. You could have gone to see a doctor.'
'I didn't want to. I wanted you to tell me truly.'
'Now do you believe me?'
'I don't know,' he said.
'Come on over to the Louvre,' I said, 'It's just down the street and across the river.'
We went over to the Louvre and he looked at the statues but still be was doubtful
about himself.
'It is not basically a question of the size in repose,' I said. 'It is the size that it
becomes. It is also a question of angle.' I explained to him about using a pillow and a few
other things that might be useful for him to know.
'There is one girl,' he said, 'who has been very nice to me. But after what Zelda
said—'
'Forget what Zelda said,' I told him. 'Zelda is crazy. There's nothing wrong with you.
Just have confidence and do what the girl wants. Zelda just wants to destroy you.'
