Free Careless People by Sarah Churchwell Page B

by one of the Plaza’s discreet waiters. They added the hotel’s trademark lobster croquettes to a sumptuous table set by the windows overlooking Central Park and awaited their guests.
    It was a crisp day, showing the signs of early autumn: a high friendly sky, brightened by the fresh air, hung over hungover New York as John Dos Passos walked up Fifth Avenue to meet the nation’s literary good-luck charms. Writing about his memory of the day forty years later, Dos, as he was known, thought the encounter must have occurred in October, because of the chilly air with a scent of the fall to come. Fitzgerald’sledger, a kind of capsule autobiography that he first began keeping as a running account in 1922, put the lunch in September. However, Fitz frequently mixed up the months in his ledger, which he often recorded retrospectively.
    Dos Passos’s often-quoted versions of this encounter (he told it twice in the 1960s, slightly differently) attribute to his younger self all the foresight made possible by almost half a century of hindsight. Born earlier in the same year as Fitzgerald, Dos Passos served in the ambulance corps during the First World War with his friend Edward Cummings (who would soon begin signing some poems “e. e. cummings”). In 1920, Dos Passos had published
Three Soldiers
to much acclaim; Fitzgerald admired the novel, although he was concerned to make clear that his own fine story “May Day,” also about demobbed soldiers, had been written before Dos Passos’s novel. Still, in 1922 Dos Passos was a promising talent and Fitzgerald was, until the end of his life, notably interested in supporting young writers and celebrating those he admired.
    Arriving at the Fitzgeralds’ suite, Dos suspected they had hired it for theday to impress their visitors. (They had not: he overestimated their cynicism and underestimated their extravagance.) Sherwood Anderson, author of the much-admired
Winesburg, Ohio
, was there in a “gaudy Liberty silk necktie”; Dos thought he had a “selfindulgent [
sic
] mouth” (he sounds like Hemingway “worrying” about Fitzgerald’s “delicate long-lipped Irish mouth” in
A Moveable Feast
;
watching each other’s mouths seems to have been something of a preoccupation). Dos objected to the lobster croquettes—“Scott always had the worst ideas about food”—and disapproved of what seemed to him the Fitzgeralds’ fame-chasing: they were “celebrities in the Sunday supplement sense of the word. They were celebrities, and they loved it.”
    The Fitzgeralds commenced playing one of their favorite games, amusing themselves by asking their guests discomfiting personal questions. Scott, in particular, had a reputation for awkward prying. Some put these interrogations down to drunkenness, others to gaucherie, still others to a clumsy attempt at research: he would demand whether a man still had sex with his wife, or whether a woman was a virgin when she was married, or what method of birth control a couple preferred. Edmund Wilson noted in his diaries Dos’s suggestion that “Scott was by no means always so drunk as he pretended to be, but merely put on disorderly drunken acts, which gave him an excuse for clowning and outrageous behavior.” Wilson thought Dos was probably right, although he acknowledged that Fitz “also had an act as Prince Charming, and I have been assured by a lady who had met him only once that in this role he was quite irresistible.” Too often, however, “the sloppy boor took over,” a role with which many of Fitz’s acquaintances were all too familiar. Zelda did it too: she would tell a dancing partner that he danced badly, or mock a writer for using a joke she declared outmoded.
    Dos Passos disapproved: “Their gambit was to put you in the wrong. You were backward in your ideas. You were inhibited about sex. These things might perfectly