Free The Trip to Echo Spring by Olivia Laing Page B

Gatsby calling Nick old sport, and Nick thinking of catching the train back to St. Paul and seeing the shadows of holly wreaths cast on to the snow.
    A different man could have survived a blowout after building something as lovely and as durable as that. But Fitzgerald was too unanchored to be able to tolerate his chosen pace of life. For years, he and Zelda had been reeling hectically around the globe, ricocheting from New York to St. Paul, to Great Neck, to Antibes and Juan-les-Pins, trailing wreckage in their wake. Just before he’d arrived in Paris there’d been a particularly troublesome spell. Zelda had an affair with a French aviator and was becoming very strange, while Fitzgerald was drinking heavily and getting into fights, at one point ending up in a Roman jail, a scene he’d later use to mark Dick Diver’s definitive loss of control in Tender is the Night, the novel he’d just begun.
    As for Hemingway, he was knee-deep in what he’d later remember as the happiest period of his life. He was married to Hadley Richardson,his first wife, and had a small son he nicknamed Mr. Bumby. There’s a photograph of him taken around that time, in a thick sweater, shirt and tie, looking a little chubby. He has a new moustache, but it doesn’t quite disguise the boyish softness of his face. Three years back, in 1922, Hadley had accidentally lost a suitcase containing all his manuscripts, and so the book of stories he’d just published, In Our Time, represented entirely new material, or at the least new versions of lost originals.
    The two men liked one another immediately. You can tell from even the most casual glance through their letters, which are stuffed with good-natured insults and statements as frankly loving as: ‘I can’t tell you how much your friendship has meant to me’ and ‘My god I’d like to see you’. As well as being good company, Fitzgerald was also of professional assistance to Hemingway that year. Before they’d even met, he recommended him to his own editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, suggesting Max sign up this promising young man. In a letter to Perkins written a few weeks after their first meeting in the Dingo, Hemingway noted that he was seeing a lot of Scott, adding enthusiastically: ‘We had a great trip together driving his car up from Lyon.’
    The next summer Fitzgerald helped out again, this time by casting a critical eye over Hemingway’s new novel, The Sun Also Rises. In a characteristically insightful and badly spelled letter, he suggested that the first twenty-nine pages (full of ‘sneers, superiorities and nose-thumbings-at-nothing . . . elephantine facetiousness’) be cut, though in the end Hemingway could only bring himself to dispense with fifteen. ‘You were the first American I wanted to meet in Europe,’ he adds, to soften the blow, before confessing a few lines on: ‘I go crazy when people aren’t always at their best.’
    At the time this letter was written, Hemingway had got himself into a fix. He’d fallen in love with a wealthy, boyishly attractive American, Pauline Pfeiffer. Over the course of the summer (in which he, Hadley and Pauline holidayed together in Fitzgerald’s old villa in Juan-les-Pins), it became increasingly clear that his marriage was finished. ‘Our life is all gone to hell,’ he wrote to Scott on 7 September. He spent a suicidal autumn alone in Paris, was divorced from Hadley on 27 January 1927 and by spring had resolved to marry Pauline.
    During the course of the break-up he suffered punishing insomnia. In the same 7 September letter, he used the word hell a second time to describe his condition ever since meeting Pauline, adding:
    . . . with plenty of insomnia to light the way around so I could study the terrain I get sort of used to it and fond of it and probably would take pleasure in showing people around it. As we make our hell we certainly should