The Beauty Of Personal Disaster

IT’S THE GREAT GATSBY’S 100TH BIRTHDAY, the perfect pretext to spur discussion about how Fitzgerald’s iconic Jazz Age novel resonates, a century later. Why are we still obsessed with Jay Gatsby? He lies about his past, conducts shady business on the side, and indulges in the showiest, most outrageous entertainment as a party host. A loner, we also learn that it’s all because he’s stubbornly hanging onto his romantic dreams about reconquering his lost love Daisy. What would she be like today? Should we view her as a bored, beautiful but vapid material girl or the victim of a vile cheating husband?

For those who never read Fitzgerald’s book, the lavish cinematic adaptation of Gatsby by director Baz Lurhmann popularized the characters and paints a faithful portrait of madness of the era. Who could forget the scene when a nervous Di Caprio/Gatsby is showing Daisy (Carey Mulligan) around his mansion? Arriving in the bedroom, he flings open his closet and yanks out his innumerable designer shirts, one by one, as the swirling camera follows them flying all over the room. It’s a sublime and heart-breaking moment, but we already sense that Gatsby’s joyous flaunting of his hard-earned wealth will be short-lived. A downward plunge with tragic repercussions.

American novelist, Richard Ford, who won this year’s 14th prestigious Fitzgerald Prize on June 15 at Hotel Belles Rives (Scott and Zelda’s former digs in the summer of 1926) may not seem to have much in common. His characters are not of the same social strata as Fitzgerald’s and there’s nothing terribly extravagant in his novels and stories. This is Ford’s first trip to the French Riviera (he dislikes warm climates) and he is more comfortable hunting in the woods of Montana than showing up at fancy dress literary event. “The rich and famous are actually of little interest to me,” Ford adds with a smile. “I grew up around Nelson Rockefeller because he was a friend of my grandfather’s, but I just couldn’t think about rich - I have a lot of rich friends now. I can’t deal with them through the gauze of their wealth, I just kind of bring everything down to ground level.”

At 81, Ford’s rugged Clint Eastwood vibe, arresting green eyes, and disarming friendly charm exudes salt-of-the earth wisdom. Dubbed everything from a “dirty realist” to a “minimalist,” his most recently published book, Be Mine, is the fifth novel chronicling the life of his aging everyman protagonist, Frank Bascombe, who is dealing with his estranged chronically ill son. The breakdown of family relationships is a prevalent theme: the author won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Independence Day which took place over the Fourth of July weekend when the fortysomething Bascombe was navigating the challenges of middle age.

So why, in Ford’s opinion, does Fitzgerald continue to fascinate? The term Ford uses is “cautionary brilliance.” He explains:

“Fitzgerald had a very intimate relationship with - and often great clear-sightedness about - human ruin and folly,” Ford says. “He was an immensely precocious writer about such things - even in his early twenties, with an unstinting and uncanny instinct and willingness to sum up the world in words.”

To be more precise, Ford is suggesting that Fitzgerald shows us the glorious side of ruin - when “things are going to hell both fast and slow,” the writer is at his best at describing “how beautiful he makes personal disaster and folly seem to us. How seductive it can be.”

In the summer of 1925, months after The Great Gatsby was fi rst published, the exchange rate was at its strongest - almost 25 francs per dollar. The word was out: The French Riviera was “like going to Palm Beach in July,” Scott Fitzgerald noted wryly, convinced that he and his wife Zelda, self-avowed spendthrifts, could live well and spend “practically nothing.”

Fleeing their home and the chaotic party scene in New York, the Fitzgeralds returned to the Riviera for the second time, visiting their friends, Sara and Gerald Murphy at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc. It turns out that Picasso was hanging out there as well, along with his mother and his Russian ballerina wife, Olga. The hotel was nearly empty; the Murphys (the Riviera’s fi rst trend-setting lifestyle infl uencers) had convinced the owner to keep it open during the summer for their friends and family, with a minimal staff. Hard to imagine, perhaps—exactly one hundred years ago, the sleepy Cap d’Antibes and deserted turquoise shallows of La Garoupe Beach were a secret paradise that the beau monde had yet to discover.

And frivolity was at its height: “The summer of 1,000 parties - no work,” Fitzgerald recorded in his ledger.

But in 1926, only a year later, the mood had already shifted. The Fitzgeralds rented the seaside Villa Saint-Louis in Juan-les-Pins (transformed into the family-run Hotel Belles-Rives in 1929) for a few months. In between heavy drinking and socializing, Scott didn’t write much but started taking notes on an idea that would blossom into the Riviera-set Tender is the Night, which took seven years to complete.

Perhaps Scott was disappointed that the world was still not ready for Jay Gatsby. Though the critical reviews of The Great Gatsby were generally positive, sales were sluggish compared to his fi rst novel, This Side of Paradise, which sold 32,786 copies in 1920, catapulting him into Jazz Age stardom. Things soured even more when Scott’s new friend, Ernest Hemingway, a then-budding young writer, came to Juan-les-Pins for a few weeks that summer. When he and his wife, Hadley, briefl y rented a villa down the street from the Fitzgeralds’ Villa Saint-Louis, the tension mounted. One night, in honor of Hemingway’s success, the Murphys held a Champagne & Caviar party at a local nightclub. Jealous of the attention that his friends were lavishing on Hemingway, Scott misbehaved badly, lobbing ashtrays at clients and spoiling the evening.

Those amusing Riviera summers came along with living dangerously and playing for high stakes. On sudden impulse, Scott and Zelda would jump into their blue Renault and wind around the Grande Corniche to the Casino Monte-Carlo. On one occasion in Monaco, Fitzgerald’s alcohol-fueled stunts backfi red. Having forgotten his passport and been barred entrance into the gambling room, Fitzgerald insulted the guard and then pretended to faint, collapsing at the man’s feet in a heap. This repeatedly clowning sometimes strained the relationships of his closest friends. As Gerald Murphy put it, at times Fitzgerald had “sophomoric, almost trashy” humor.

Although the Murphys were initially the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender is the Night—which Richard Ford recognizes as “a ponderous, overwritten book and structurally broken”—that changed gradually over the years. At a certain point, Fitzgerald's characters evolved into a portrait of his own drunken binges and Zelda's nervous breakdown.

After the prize-winning ceremony speeches, Richard Ford is back in Belle Rives’ retro-stylish Fitzgerald Bar, where the barman is mixing scarlet “Gin Rickey” cocktails (lavender-spiked red vermouth, fi g, and verbena bitters) and a row of the new signature “Great Gatsby” concoctions, an eff ervescent mix of champagne, rose water, and citrus.

Does Ford see the fl amboyant glamorous appeal of the Jazz Age as pure nostalgia or does it represent something more?

“I think people think of the Twenties as a halcyon period,” Ford says, leaning back in his chair. “A period of abandon - and the things that were abandoned—just before the Depression. There was a kind of typical fi ctional aura of the time, particularly on the East Coast, in New York. People were having a good time.” A concept that people can hardly imagine today, he adds ruefully.

In Tender is the Night, Ford explains, “Fitzgerald almost can’t get out of his own way, telling you things about what people think, do, and feel. And then, he’ll spend only four sentences on something but it tells me something straight on. He’s so smart! And I think long ago I realized that’s what I like—when writers will tell me something smart that I recognize as human.”

And you can’t help wishing that Scott (who died of a heart attack at age 44, spent and broke in Hollywood in 1940) were here with us at the bar. What would Ford feel inclined to talk about?

“Minnesota, of course,” Ford says without missing a beat (where Fitzgerald was born and raised until he left for Princeton). “I love Minnesota. I go hunting there all the time and I’m constantly driving through there, when I’m traveling from Montana to Maine. I’d ask him what he remembers and where he lived in Saint Paul.”

And with Saint Paul, we’ve inadvertently come full circle back to Gatsby, echoing Fitzgerald’s own formative years in a small Midwestern town when the writer became aware of social class, status anxiety, and the tension between old money and new money.

But ultimately, for Richard Ford, Fitzgerald’s observational insights rise above thematic concerns. It’s all about Scott’s uncanny talent to elevate hijinks desperation, turning the spiral downward into something human and beautiful. To make us feel, in a sudden moment of clarity, that we must pay close attention because, as Ford eloquently puts it, “life is all we have.”

By Lanie Goodman

Contributor