Fitzgerald and the Doctors

If you don’t know F. Scott Fitzgerald was an alcoholic, there’s a good chance you won’t know he was also a novelist.

The double claim to fame (or notoriety - it’s dirty business being a novelist) has been there from as near to the beginning as matters. For a while, and despite an early masterpiece, Fitzgerald’s celebrity as a drunk probably exceeded that as a writer. He was barely in print, after all, at the time of his death, an abuse-inspired event, and the biographies – of the train wreck rather than the talent – outsold any of the novels by a good measure. As the Miziners and Turnbulls and Mitfords faded in the firmament, the longer term restored the balance. But the alcoholic – thanks to Edmund Wilson, Cyril Connolly, and Fitzgerald himself, among others, and their combined efforts in creating the Fitzgerald Cautionary Tale - continues to keep pace with the writer, even the writer of a work as unqualifiedly good as The Great Gatsby.

Fitzgerald had objected, in 1922, when Wilson referenced his drinking in a Bookman review. A few years later, he had overcome his objections and was introducing himself to journalists with the motto: “Don’t you know I am one of the most notorious drinkers of the younger generation?” Not too long after that, when not in full-blown denial before the psychiatrists attending his sick wife, Fitzgerald tried to rein in the reputation somewhat. “All goes serenely down here,” he wrote to Maxwell Perkins early in 1933: “Am going on the water wagon from the first of February to the first of April but don’t tell Ernest because he has long convinced himself that I am an incurable alcoholic, due to the fact that we almost always meet on parties. I am his alcoholic just like Ring is mine and do not want to disillusion him ….”

As for Ernest, he would write,

The first time I ever met Scott Fitzgerald a very strange thing happened. Many strange things happened with Scott but this one I was never able to forget ... As he sat there at the bar holding the glass of champagne the skin seemed to tighten over his face until all the puffiness was gone and then it drew tighter until the face was like a death’s head. The eyes sank and began to look dead and the lips were drawn tight and the color left the face so that it was the color of used candle wax. This was not my imagination. His face had become a true death’s head, or death mask, in front of my eyes.

“Scott,” I said. “Are you all right?”

He did not answer and his face looked more drawn than ever.

“We’d better get him to a first aid station,” I said to Dune Chaplin.

“No. He’s all right.”

“He looks like he’s dying.”

“No. That’s the way it takes him.”

All of the contemporary accounts - except Fitzgerald’s - agree with Hemingway. Fitzgerald’s standing as “one of the most notorious drinkers of the younger generation” was arrived at by not being able to drink much – a lot. He consumed a great deal by accumulation; on the specific occasion, he couldn’t hold that much liquor. Tolerance did not come naturally, and never arrived at an impressive capacity. Louis Bromfield is a typical witness: “One cocktail and he was off … Immediately he was out of control and there was only one end … that he became thoroughly drunk, and like many Irishmen, when he became drunk he usually became very disagreeable and rude and quarrelsome, as if all his resentments were released at once.”

A more recent explanation, specific to the Hemingway observation, is proposed by Tom Dardis: “Current knowledge of alcoholism would suggest that Fitzgerald had been in the midst of a drinking cycle, perhaps stretching over several days, in which he had absorbed so much alcohol into his system that it required just two or three drinks to make him unconscious and suffer a blackout.” This would fit with the Fitzgerald who would later frequently leave his guests in one room to visit the kitchen where he would swig at the gin and then get drunk on a few drinks in their company. He was convinced to the end, it is said, that no one could smell the gin on his breath.

Robert Gale’s An F. Scott Fitzgerald Encyclopedia has an entry which begins as follows:

"ALCOHOLISM IN FITZERALD: Throughout adulthood, Fitzgerald had a problem with alcohol. He drank at Princeton. He and Zelda (see Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre) drank and misbehaved in the United States and abroad."

“Misbehaved” is priceless. It was Fitzgerald’s habit, as Clive James has noted, to “arrive late and leave early, or arrive late and leave never, or leave in an ambulance,” but he was a first-rate alcoholic, at home and everywhere else, and Zelda was his match until the obsession with “dancers and their cheap satellites” (Fitzgerald), the suicidal tendencies, and, eventually, the schizophrenia got the upper hand. “Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were coming home from a New Year’s party,” runs the joke: “It was April.” Yes, but what year was it? If it was 1930, Fitzgerald had long been off to the races, and Zelda went mad.

Once “Zelda got a sort of breakdown from overwork,” as Fitzgerald put it at first, the letters between the two read like they are comparing notes on a mutual blackout - Scott to Zelda: “In Rome we were dismal … Then we came to Prague … Finally you got well in Juan-les-Pins …;” Zelda to Scott: “There was … the strangeness and excitement of New York … We moved to 59th Street … We went to St. Raphael … and we went sometimes to Nice or Monte Carlo …” And the recriminations fly – “We ruined each other,” writes Zelda, to which Fitzgerald replies, “We ruined ourselves – I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.” Either way, ruined was right, and support for that conclusion would not have been hard to find. As Fitzgerald wrote to Doctor Mildred Squires in 1932:

"Perhaps fifty percent of our friends and relatives would tell you in all honest conviction that my drinking drove Zelda insane – the other half would assure you that her insanity drove me to drink … These two classes would be equally unanimous in saying that each of us would be well rid of the other ..."

Such unanimity, however, even in 1932, would be “in full face of the irony that we have never been so desperately in love with each other in our lives.” The desperation is apparent enough, but otherwise this is a stretch. What follows might be delusional: “Liquor on my mouth is sweet to her; I cherish her most extravagant hallucination.”

And yet, Zelda’s most extravagant hallucinations might well have been a godsend for Fitzgerald. He was deeply vexed, of course, by discussions between Zelda and her therapists about, for example, sexuality, especially his (“Does Dr. Meyer suspect, or did Dr. Squires lead him to suspect that there were elements in the case that were being deliberately concealed? I ask this because for a month Zelda had Dr. Forel convinced that I was a notorious Parisien homo-sexual”), but hers as well (Zelda is “probably a polygamous type; and possibly she has, when not herself, a touch of mental lesbianism”). And, of course, his alcoholic habits were directly challenged, which led to some interesting flourishes - to Doctor Adolf Meyer, Spring 1933: “When you qualify or disqualify my judgment on the case, or put it on a level very little above hers on the grounds that I have frequently abused liquor I can only think of Lincoln’s remark about a greater man and heavier drinker than I have ever been – that he wished he knew what sort of liquor Grant drank so he could send a barrel to all his other generals.”

But this was a challenge he could deflect. If that half of the jury of his peers who sat in judgment against Fitzgerald on the cause of Zelda’s illness was wrong, he would be discharged of any responsibility to stop. More important, by focusing on the “dual case” analysis, even if just to give his attentions to disentangling it, he was effectively released from the much harder task of self-examination. He could not only resist any temptation to review his last-line defenses of denial, projection, rationalization, and self-delusion; he could put these defenses into overdrive.

Doctor Oscar Forel was the first psychiatrist at the scene of Zelda, and with him Fitzgerald was able to quickly establish the story he was to stick to. In the first place, it was all Zelda’s fault:

"During my young manhood for seven years I worked extremely hard, in six years bringing myself by tireless literary self-discipline to a position of unquestioned preeminence among younger American writers … My work is done on coffee, coffee and more coffee, never on alcohol. Doubtless a certain irritability developed in those years, an inability to be gay which my wife – who had never tried to use her talents and intelligence – was not inclined to condone. It was on our coming to Europe in 1924 and upon her urging that I began to look forward to wine at dinner … We went on hard drinking parties together sometimes but the regular use of wine and apperatives [sic] was something that I dreaded but she encouraged because she found I was more cheerful then and allowed her to drink more. The ballet idea was something I inaugurated in 1927 to stopper her idle drinking after she had already so lost herself in it as to make suicidal attempts. Since then I have drunk more, from unhappiness, and she less, because of her physical work – that is another story."

Second, to give up drinking would be nothing less than suicide:

"Two years ago in America I noticed that when we stopped all drinking for three weeks or so, which happened many times, I immediately had dark circles under my eyes, was listless and disinclined to work … I gave up strong cigarettes and, in a panic that perhaps I was just giving out, applied for a large insurance policy … I found that a moderate amount of wine, a pint at each meal made all the difference in how I felt."

The sensitivity, anxiety, contempt, and idealization, as he battens down the hatches, betray traces, at least, of compensatory narcissistic tendencies, and at times it sounds like he is about to address the Virginia House of Burgesses on the small matter of war:

"Now when that old question comes up again as to which of two people is worth preserving, I, thinking of my ambitions once so nearly achieved of being part of English literature, of my child, even of Zelda in the matter of providing for her – must perforce consider myself first. [He will.] I say that without defiance but simply knowing the limits of what I can do. To stop drinking entirely for six months and see what happens, even to continue the experiment thereafter if successful – only a pig would refuse to do that. Give up strong drink permanently I will. [He won’t.] Bind myself to forswear wine forever I cannot. [He got that right.] My vision of the world at its brightest is such that life without the use of amenities is impossible. I have lived hard and ruined the essential innocence in myself that could make it that possible, and the fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps but not with renunciation … I cannot consider one pint of wine at the days end as anything but one of the rights of man."

Give me liberty, or give me ...! In any case, for the sake of his calling and for the sake of Zelda’s madness, there is no way Fitzgerald is backing down on this one:

"Is there not a certain disingenuousness in her wanting me to give up all alcohol? Would not that justify her conduct completely to herself and prove to her relatives, and out friends that it was my drinking that caused this calamity, and that I thereby admitted it? Wouldn’t she finally get to believe herself that she had consented to “take me back” only if I stopped drinking? I could only be silent. And any human value I might have would disappear if I condemned myself to a life long asceticism to which I am not adapted either by habit, temperament or the circumstances of my métier."

“Does this sound like a long polemic composed of childish stubbornness and ingratitude?” he asks. No, it sounds like a long polemic composed of sentiments perfectly commonplace among active alcoholics.

Dr. Richard Hoffman, one of the few psychiatrists who saw Scott rather than Zelda, the occasion being his surfacing from a bender in 1939, decided that Fitzgerald suffered from hypoglycemia or hyperinsulinism. This would cause a craving for sugar, and, alcohol being one way to replenish the body’s sugar, Fitzgerald might well have paid good money for the diagnosis, although it had the slight drawback of being pure nonsense. All alcoholism produces hypoglycemia, but a few days without a drink and Fitzgerald’s blood sugar levels were perfectly normal. Pathologist William Ober, having examined Fitzgerald’s medical records several decades later, writes, quite sensibly:

"There is no evidence for hypoglycemia whatsoever … [Fitzgerald] did not drink because his blood sugar level was low; he drank because he was a drunkard. ‘Drunkard’ is the old-fashioned term for alcoholic and, as we know today, it is an addiction, a form of escape for people with inadequate personalities, people with deep-seated insecurities, people with unresolved intra-psychic conflicts … as well as people … who use it to drown out the still small voice of self-reproach.”

And self-reproach is something the writer who “could write and didn’t” and “couldn’t drink but did” had in abundance.

“I heard you lost a lot in the crash,” Alix, the barman, says to Charlie Wales in “Babylon Revisited.”

“I did,” and he added grimly, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”

“Selling short.”

“Something like that.”

In Paris, again, hoping to get his daughter back, Charlie notes: “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.” Looking in on and upon old haunts in Montmartre as it goes about “catering to vice and waste” on “an utterly childish scale,” Charlie suddenly realizes “the meaning of the word ‘dissipate’ - to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something.”

The drinker will do that, make nothing out of something, to the writer – whose goal is not far removed from making something out of nothing. For a writer as ambitious, and an alcoholic as chronic as Fitzgerald, the superego is bound to be troubled. And the trouble with the superego (William Ober again) is that it can be “defined as that portion of the personality that is soluble in alcohol.”