PARTISAN REVIEW
very moment of the novel's conception at Antibes;
((Our Type,"
he
wrote Perkins at that time, "is about several things, one of which is an
intellectual murder on the Leopold-Loeb idea. Incidentally it is about
Zelda and me and the hysteria of last May and June in Paris." Some
of this incidental element remains in the manuscript which has been
preserved, though it is obvious that there was once much more of it
and that, as he worked on the novel through the next two years and
studied the Murphys and Antibes, he began to shift the background
from Paris to the Riviera; the change can be seen taking place be–
tween the various versions of a given passage which sometimes re–
main in the manuscript (there are sometimes as many as three versions
of the story preserved). Altogether Fitzgerald completed four long
chapters, about twenty thousand words, before he gave up this story
of matricide in 1929. It originally began with a chapter describing
Francis' getting in a fight with the Italian police and being beaten
up, as Fitzgerald had been, but this chapter was presently numbered
VII
and the second chapter made the beginning. This chapter was
a description of the arrival of Francis and
his
mother on the Riviera
and--except for the relation of Francis and his mother and a fine
scene with Mary and Abe Grant (North)-is similar to the opening
chapter of
Tender Is the Night.
There follow then the Pipers' (Div–
ers') dinner party and the duel and, finally, a long chapter in which
Francis accompanies the Pipers to Paris to see Abe Grant off to
America.
It
is this chapter which uses "the hysteria of last May and
June in Paris," most of which was eliminated in
Tender Is the Night
and replaced by the love affair between Dick and Rosemary.*
But though Fitzgerald sent Perkins an optimistic report of pro–
gress in September and was still trying to put a good face on things
in October (" ... progresses slow and carefully with much destroy–
ing and revision"), the fact was that he was doing almost no work at
all. Instead there were parties, in Paris and-in November-in Lon–
don. "[We] went," wrote Fitzgerald with his customary ambivalence
about such things, "on some very high toned parties with Mountbat–
tens and all that sort of thing. Very impressed, but not very, as I
furnished most of the amusement myself."
It
was not a happy winter;
they were tired of parties without seeming able to stop going to them
• This chapter was published, under the title "The World's Fair," in
The
Kenyon Review,
Autumn, 1948.
