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From F. Scott Fitzgerald Remembered, which will be published this month by Camden House.

I did protest against traipsing across Carolina to see Scott. I felt a sense of ignominy from the start, I felt unwanted and forced on him. It seemed to me that he was the sort of man with whom I had never had success. I dreaded going through the old school torment over again, when I had put it behind me and felt a new power with men. Scott would be the West Pointer who did not ask me to dance, the football hero who did not remember having been introduced to me, he would bring back the long line of desirable young men I could not have and the eccentrics that had flocked to me. Not that I wanted to make a conquest now, but I did want to feel certain of our understanding each other a little.

Max Perkins insisted. He had the strange idea that I am normal and healthy and “a good influence.” He did a dreadful thing to his wife because of it. We had only finished murmuring “How nice to know you at last,” when he said, “Marjorie, will you invite Louise to the Creek and teach her values?” So he wrote, “Scott is in terrible shape. I think you could do him good.” I forget what arrangements were made. I think I wrote Scott that I should be passing through Asheville and would say hello if he felt up to it, and I believe he wrote back, coolly, as I expected, very well, but please phone first as he was having bad times. His neuroticism was more ominous than his glamour.

I had hoped to reach Asheville on my way to the Pisgah Forest Potteries by evening, but I met storms through the mountains and the car crept through blinding rain and thunder and lightning. I came to the outskirts of the city about eight o’clock at night and I phoned him. His nurse conferred with him and reported that he was feeling very ill and a call was out of the question. But if I would call the next morning, he might be improved. I could imagine him, cursing, fretted, not wanting after all to be rude to any protégé of the adored Max. I went on to my hotel, depressed, humiliated, a little angry. I decide not to disturb him further. I could report to Max that I had made my effort and it had failed.

I came back from the potteries to the hotel a little after noon, and again Max’s urgency, something in Max that is so gentle and yet compelling, sent me to the phone to call Scott for courtesy’s sake. He talked with me this time, and I said that I was leaving for the mountain cabin where I was working, and hoped that he would be soon recovered, and good luck. Perhaps he could not endure not making a conquest, either, perhaps he too couldn’t let Max down, perhaps the timbre of my voice did not sound like that of a drab female author. To my surprise, he insisted that I must come at once and have lunch with him. He was feverishly persistent, and I felt that it would be much worse for him if I refused than if I accepted, and Max’s screwed-up anxious face was probably before both of us.

I went to the Grove Park Inn, Victorian, pretentious, stuffy, overpoweringly moneyed—it had been part of Max’s feeling that a writer who was working in a cabin had something to give a writer who was working in the Grove Park Inn—and when the protective manager had called up to make sure I was expected, I was taken to Scott’s room. His nurse opened the door and welcomed me with icicles dripping from her starched white cap. Scott took both my hands and introduced her with a proprietary air, and her annoyance as he dismissed her for the rest of the day indicated either that she sensed I would be a bad influence for a sick patient, or that she was for the moment his mistress and resented any possible rival. I think she was probably a good nurse and not an inamorata, or he would have told Max about it. He had less reticence than anyone I have ever known. It was stupid of me to have any complex about him, when he had a complex about almost everything. The neurotic is always the most self-informative.

We talked at once, of course, about Max, and Scott professed to be annoyed by Max’s maternalism, though I do not think he guessed why I was there. He was overwhelmingly attractive, but I was relieved to find that in spite of it, I should never have yearned for him, even in my most troubled days. He phoned down for a bottle of sherry, of a certain vintage, and he was like a little boy stealing cookies, for it seemed that liquor of any sort was forbidden. He was proud of keeping to the letter of his contract with nurse and doctor by not ordering something stronger. He could as well have asked for the luncheon menu at the same time, but he phoned for that only a little later. Service delighted him.

The menu was lavish, and he ordered lavishly, scarcely consulting me. He talked like a machine gun, mostly about himself, and I was glad to listen. With luncheon, we had a dry white wine, and after, he phoned for a bottle of port, and as the afternoon wore on, another and another. We might as well have had martinis to begin with and been done with it, for we both became looping, and I for one prefer to do this on anything except wine. He had broken his shoulder, he said, doing a high dive, and the break occurred before he hit the water. This came out in Edmund Wilson’s version of The Crack-Up. What did not appear in that book was the fact, according to Scott, that the accident had happened because he was trying to show off in front of some very young girls. One of his most engaging characteristics, in the face of his complexes, was his frankness, though that too was neurotic and egoistic.

We had a grand afternoon. His previous nurse had been his mistress, but she had been “afraid of getting pregnant.” This rather reasonable anxiety had annoyed him, and he had dismissed her. His arm was in a sling, or cast, and there was a contraption over his bed—close beside the nurse’s bed, like domestic twins—for traction and elevation of the shoulder. I asked him how he had managed “love” under those circumstances, and he said that anything was possible. Then I remarked that it had always puzzled me how the hero in Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms had managed intercourse with his beloved, with a broken leg. He lifted his blond eyebrows and said again that anything could be arranged when the desire was strong. He went on from there with a discussion of Hemingway.

Hemingway, he said, had had his testicles shot off in the First World War, in Italy, and an Italian surgeon had grafted on a new set. “It must have worked,” Scott said, “because he had children after that. But I think it made him feel he had to prove his manhood. Later, in Paris, he boasted about sleeping with a prostitute six days a week, and with his wife the seventh. I think it has influenced all his writings. In The Sun Also Rises, the hero had exactly the same accident, but didn’t come out of it, as Hem did. A writer always takes revenge on his characters.”

Dark came, and we were both very high, and I said I must go, as I had the mountain to cross again. I asked him if he would sign a copy of The Great Gatsby for me if I sent it to him, as my original copy had been borrowed and not returned.

“I’ll do it now,” he said, and from a large box of copies of The Great Gatsby, he drew one. “Let’s use our menu for an autograph,” he said. “I’ll paste it in, and mark the things we had for lunch.” “That’s not necessary,” I said. “I’ll always remember.” But of course I have forgotten, and the other day, looking at the menu that implied a meeting, perhaps a meeting of two egotists, perhaps only the meeting of two people who had not had what they wanted, or thought they wanted, in their youth, I could not even remember the main course. I drove back to my mountain cabin, where I was beginning a book, The Yearling, and being inebriated with Scott’s evasions, sherry, white wine, and port, I lost my way and found myself halfway up North Carolina’s highest mountain before I realized where I was, backed down past the precipices, and reached my cabin. Before going to bed I read The Great Gatsby again and was torn with the nobility and the frustration of it and, still drunk, wrote a letter to Scott telling him how magnificent I considered it. I never heard from him again. A year or two later, I was in New York, talking with Max. I said, “You know, it’s odd. Scott and I got along famously, but I’ve never heard from him since my visit.” Max smiled his wry smile. “Scott, you know,” he said, “thinks every woman is in love with him.”


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