Fitzgerald on the Riviera

HE PULLED HIS HANDS from the icebox, cradling a solid brick of vanilla ice cream. It resembled the thick stucco walls of the house and took its time to slither off the dull knife, curling into a bowl on the kitchen table.

Fitzgerald winced as the knife’s tip clinked against porcelain. He was still hungover from last night’s party. The cook had been up hours earlier, serving breakfast to Zelda and their daughter, Scottie. Now alone, in a clean kitchen, Fitzgerald remembered the aftermath of the night before, a circle of empty gin bottles tipped towards dirty plates of stubbed out cigarettes. Using his talent for “trashy imaginings,” he staged the scene of polo players, war heroes, and Broadway stars who had finally left 6 Gateway Drive only a few hours before sunrise.

The cream melted, leaving behind a sticky, slightly foamy trail. Fitzgerald attempted to cross the room, turning to face the light through the arched windows to better converse with the conjured ghosts around him. His unsteadiness shattered his illusions. The floor disappeared under his feet as he lunged for the bowl and gobbled down the sweet vanilla sludge, his slender shoulders shivering with each guilty swallow.

It was all gone. Even the pleasant way alcohol led to mixing memories with the present circumstance—the writer’s cocktail.

Outside, the morning mist rose off the nearby bay. The sun, which had first arrived around six as a pink sliver across the water, had since widened to a garish orange button—louder than all the birds that called from the willow branches, louder than the clank of halyards from the moored boats at the dock.

In these solitary moments, when Zelda was off to the shops, and Scottie was with her Nanny, the itching regret crept up in him again. He would never be a football star. There were no combat medals to thumb in his bedroom drawer. Instead, he had trained to become a writer of serious, enduring novels; somewhere during his fitful training, he had become something else, someone who pays bills by writing fiction. Zelda enjoyed seeing his stories published in the Post, and they counted on the money his writing brought in. But it sickened him—the seclusion for days in the room over the garage, sweating over the pages as his words danced in the flicker of an oil lamp. Commercial success was just another type of failure for someone desiring to be thought of as a serious artist.

Three chapters were all he had produced in a winter and spring. And most of that would need to be rewritten or scrapped entirely. An 18,000-word false start. Maybe he could at least spin it into a publishable story—buy some more time.

Fitzgerald held two opposed ideas in his mind at the same time: one, his talent was deteriorating with each social call he didn’t say no to. And, two, he was on the brink of something great, perhaps the greatest novel ever written by an American. He put the coffeepot on.

For the next few months, writing would be his sanctuary and his prison. “Scott’s retired into his strict seclusion again,” Zelda told the yachtsmen and their wives who called on the couple. The extravagant cadre of Great Neck society would have to wait.

By March of 1924, Fitzgerald emerged…sleepless, dry and irritable, yet, with 10 new stories that, despite some delayed payments, would be enough to fund a summer of uninterrupted focus. He knew where they had to go.

II

Gentleman bootleggers, gamblers, and city friends gathered on the dock, waving and cheering as the SS Minnewaska carried the Fitzgeralds, along with their 17 steamer trunks and a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannicas, into the harbor, bound for France. As soon as he was off New York soil, Fitzgerald felt his internal rhythm change.

A week later, the comical sound of a French car horn woke Fitzgerald up in his Paris hotel room. They had stopped in Paris to find Scottie a Nanny. After a few French nannies failed the interview, they settled on an older English woman. Fitzgerald was relieved, as he was eager to check out of the hotel that had been swelling with familiar faces since they had arrived. Everyone in the lobby looked like Douglas Fairbanks and received the "tourist fee" the second the Parisian staff heard their American accent.

The gloom crept up in him again, so Fitzgerald called the porters to wrangle the tower of luggage; he, Zelda, Scottie, and her new nanny boarded the hot, sweaty train to the coast.

“When your eyes first fall upon the Mediterranean, you know at once why it was here that man first stood erect and stretched out his arms toward the sun,” Fitzgerald would write in an article, “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year,” published in The Saturday Evening Post a few months later.

The sea was so blue that it was difficult to comprehend its reality. It was the blue of oil paintings and vivid fever dreams. The Riviera the Fitzgeralds encountered was not the one of princes lunching on caviar and Russian millionaires crouched over roulette tables. This was the off-season, when the luxury stores were boarded up, and the resort towns became local fishing spots again.

The family reached Hyeres at high noon. Scottie demanded that her coat be removed, which the valet took as a direct order. Sweat dripped from Fitzgerald’s brow as the hotel clerk approached with a tentative grin.

“Monsieur, souhaitez-vous une chambre donnant sur la mer?”

Fitzgerald’s French was not proficient, but he requested a room in the back of the hotel, away from the almond-eyed men on the street who stared at Zelda in her thin cotton dress.

That night, at dinner, Fitzgerald’s spirits were lifted by the wine and the low cost of the bill. He was entranced by the green belt of this ancient land, its rose gardens obscured by the shadows of the mountains. At times like this, the French coast could be idyllic—until it got overrun again by pleasure-seeking tourists, romance followed by decadence. Fitzgerald had plenty more to write about.

III

It was the only car for sale in town, an older Renault with six horsepower, no locks, and a broken speedometer, but the price of 750 dollars was right. As long as it could make the short trip to Cannes…which it did without overheating; Fitzgerald was pleased. He had no way of knowing the drama that would ensue in this little blue vehicle over the next few months.

He and Zelda had been hunting for the right villa to rent. Theirs was a meager ask: a bath, enough rooms for all of them to be comfortable, and a garden.

They found all of that and more in Saint-Raphaël. A seaside town where Napoleon had once landed after fleeing Egypt to escape the British navy. Fitzgerald would write that it now had the “air of repressed carnival about it.” He loved it.

The white villa sat on a small hill. Its impressive tower had a belvedere overlooking the red roofs of the houses below. The expansive grounds included a large garden with nightingales framed by tall pines.

Finally, Fitzgerald had a place to settle into his monastic writing schedule. In this villa, he would achieve some of the finest writing of his life. He’d emerge around seven in the evening to take a drive with Zelda into town, where he’d order two fingers of straight gin at the bar, and Zelda would have a Stinger. They got along well with the locals, the old English retirees and young French men in the bar were captivated by Zelda. She did little to rebuff their flirtations. Fitzgerald often played the good sport in public, but if he got drunk, his anger streak would spark a terrible argument.

Occasionally, the couple drove up to Antibes where their good friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy were staying. The Murphys rented a place they called “Villa America” and relished their position as early pioneers of the Riviera summer retreat. Picasso, Cole Porter, and Stravinsky had all been there. When the Fitzgeralds arrived, and the drinks started flowing, anything could and usually did happen—diving off large rocks sans clothes notwithstanding.

Most days, however, Zelda was left alone while her husband wrote and rewrote parts of Gatsby, struggling to give it form and depth. He was having an especially rough time with two chapters in the middle, but still believed it would surpass his earlier novels.

To maximize his creative capacity, he informed his wife that celibacy would be required so he could put all his energy into the book. She grabbed some spicy French fiction, put on her espadrilles, and trotted off to the beach.

Looking back, it’s easy to see this arrangement was a recipe for trouble, but Fitzgerald was too distracted by plot and characters to be concerned with how Zelda spent her days.

In a beach cafe, she encountered a group of young French pilots. Her tanned skin and natural beauty got their attention, but it was her steady, brooding gaze that made them fall over themselves to please her. She always wore a fresh peony in her hair, fashioned in the latest style.

As the midsummer heat baked the beach, Zelda sipped a cool drink in the cafe that smelled of salted fish and West African incense. She glanced into a mirror on the wall and caught the eyes of a young aviator named Edouard Jozan. It was the start of what Fitzgerald would eventually categorize in his ledger as “the great crisis.”

IV

In June, Fitzgerald sent a letter to his editor, Max Perkins. He informed Perkins that he was working on something more ambitious than This Side of Paradise or The Beautiful and Damned, a “consciously artistic achievement…something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.”

Meanwhile, Zelda had found something simple and beautiful to consume her, lounging on a beach towel by the sea with Jozan. They spent so much time together, even the Murphys took notice. Jozan was handsome, fit, and gave Zelda something Fitzgerald had taken away: attention.

The French pilots, including Jozan, received an invitation to visit Villa Marie. Maybe it was Fitzgerald’s way of keeping tabs on his wife, but he also probably felt a kinship with the young military men who, like him, had worn a uniform without seeing combat.

The pilots lounged on the Villa’s front lawn, drinking champagne and discussing Rimbaud. Jozan leaned against a pine tree, one hand in his pocket, listening to a drunk Fitzgerald who slipped into the bombastic speech patterns of Gatsby’s Tom Buchanan. Jozan was not impressed. He glanced at Zelda with a mix of tenderness and pity. She adjusted her hat to shade her eyes and went off in search of another bottle of Verveine Du Velay.

The pilots became a fixture at Villa Marie dinners, popping bottles, swapping stories of Peking opium dens, eating dark meat and fish, followed by a variety of neon-colored deserts the cook brought out.

In the cool of night, Fitzgerald would see the tipsy soldiers out through the garden gate, lingering to watch the outline of their starched white shirts bouncing away under a silver moon.

One morning, following what came to be known as the family meal, Fitzgerald, Zelda, and Jozan decided to take the Renault for a drive up the coast. Despite the breeze whipping their hair in the open car, Fitzgerald could feel the heat passing between Jozan and Zelda. The dashing aviator, who was behind the wheel, sensed the tension too and attempted to cut it by revving the engine to full rpm, ramming the gears, and taking the narrow corners at speeds only a fighter pilot could be comfortable with. Fitzgerald hoped that the car wouldn’t start shedding parts.

Zelda’s affair with Jozan, whether it was ever fully consummated or not, provided the jealous fuel that Fitzgerald needed to find the heart of his novel.

His prose exploded off the page now; his characters came alive. The wasteland that his marriage had become helped him create his Valley of Ashes on the page. Each betrayal, desperate motive, longing look, or reckless impulse inspired a new scene or better revision. Fitzgerald was gambling his marriage for a chance at his greatest artistic achievement. But the stakes were about to get a lot higher.

X

Five weeks after meeting Jozan on the beach, Zelda walked into her husband’s room and demanded a divorce. Fitzgerald was shocked. Both of them had been guilty of flirtations before, but this crossed a line they had never breached.

Fitzgerald demanded that the pilot visit him and tell him to his face that he was running away with Zelda. Jozan was unwilling to have the confrontation. He wasn’t scared of the writer; he knew if the standoff escalated to a boxing match, he could pummel Fitzgerald. It appeared to Zelda that Jozan was more interested in a summer fling than a serious commitment. He fancied himself a career military man, not a homewrecker.

When Jozan failed to appear, Fitzgerald locked Zelda in the bedroom and pocketed the key. She took sedatives and collapsed on the bed, hearing the familiar buzzing sound of a single-engine plane flying low over the Villa and continuing to Frejus with the Roman aqueducts built from the stones Julius Caesar himself ordered cut. She would never see the pilot again.

Ironically, a few days later, a young married couple the Fitzgeralds knew stopped in for a visit while on their honeymoon. Fitzgerald ended Zelda’s exile, so they could play tour guides, taking the young couple up the coast in their car.

Zelda’s earlier summer glow had been replaced by a pale and fatalistic helplessness. The flowers were no longer in her hair. As they approached a hairpin turn on the edge of a steep drop, she asked her husband (who was driving) for a cigarette. Fitzgerald fumbled in his coat pocket for a Chesterfield, looking down, eyes off the road, until the young bride in the shotgun seat screamed at the approaching danger of plunging over a cliff to her death.

Fitzgerald yanked the wheel and turned the car away from disaster in the last possible second. Everyone let out a sigh of relief, except Zelda, who laughed maniacally until the honeymooners were on the verge of tears. Fitzgerald dropped the frazzled couple off at the front of their hotel, and he and Zelda continued home in peaceful silence.

XI

In late August, Fitzgerald told Perkins that the novel would be done the following week. “Zelda + I are contemplating careful revision after a week’s complete rest.”

Loose gravel crunched under the car’s tires as Fitzgerald drove along a high road at twilight. On one side of him, water reflected the glittering lights of the buildings like thousands of precious jewels. On the other side, row after row of verdant trees, an expanse of green as far as the light would let him see.

As he approached Monte Carlo, he let out an audible “Ah me!”

In “Early Success,” an essay published many years later, Fitzgerald writes of this drive, “It was not Monte Carlo I was looking at. It was back into the mind of the young man with cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York. I was him again—for an instant I had the good fortune to share his dreams, I who had no more dreams of my own.”

Postscript

When The Great Gatsby was published in April 1925, Fitzgerald was certain he had produced the novel that would solidify his reputation as a great American writer. It was tighter, more deliberate, and better than his earlier work. However, initial reviews were mixed, and sales were underwhelming. Fewer than twenty-five thousand copies moved in the first year, a bitter disappointment for a writer who had assumed the voice of the Jazz Age.

Fitzgerald would not live long enough to see Gatsby rediscovered. The Army put the book into soldiers’ hands overseas; literary scholars praised its restrained elegance. Today, about 64% of public schools make it a required reading, and it sells roughly half a million copies a year across numerous editions.

Fitzgerald believed that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Yet, Gatsby’s green light still flickers across the sound—a permanent symbol of human longing.