FITZGERALD IN THE TWENTIES
19
gerald how far her flirtations had gone, letting his suspicions tease
him, and to tell him that if he were away she could sleep with an–
other man without affecting her feelings for him at all. It was a re–
mark that haunted Fitzgerald all his life.
Gradually, indeed, the division in his nature was being re-enforced
by the life they were leading and by Zelda's delight in it and her
ability to appeal both to his weakness for it and the old feeling, left
over from his wooing, that her love required it. When Fitzgerald fell
in
love, his whole nature was involved. But he gradually discovered
that the only side of it that found a full response in Zelda, in the
first flush of enjoying all that her beauty and charm could win her,
was the prodigal side.
When I was your age [he wrote his daughter in 1938, speaking
out of the other side of his nature] I lived with a great dream. The
dream grew and I learned to speak of it and to make people listen. Then
the dream divided one day when I decided to marry your mother after
all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was
sorry immediately I had married her, but being patient in those days,
made the best of it and got to love her in another way. You came along
and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives.
But I was a man divided-she wanted me to work too much for her and
not enough for my dream.
"The idyl passed," as he said in
1921.
"But, knowing they had had
the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love lingered–
by way of long conversations at night ... by way of deep and in–
timate kindnesses they developed toward each other, by way of their
laughing at the same absurdities and thinking the same things noble
and the same things sad." But those who worried about Fitzgerald's
career worried about his working for Zelda. "Scott was extravagant,"
said Max Perkins, "but not like her; money went through her fingers
like water; she wanted everything; she kept him writing for the
magazines."
Thus, gradually, through the dazzle of New York and glamorous
names and alcohol, Fitzgerald's conscience began to assert itself; what
that conscience thought of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald was to come
out very clearly in his portrait of Anthony and Gloria Patch in his
next novel. "My new novel," he wrote Mr. Scribner, "called 'The
Flight of the Rocket' concerns the life of Anthony Patch between his
