36
PARTISAN REVIEW
printable titles to write on the walls of Grace Moore's villa so that
they could be photographed. "I complained and scrubbed once or
twice," she said, "but the new captions that then appeared were so
much worse than the old that it seemed better to do with the four–
letter words one knew than those one knew not of."
But
if
these elaborate practical jokes are
in
retrospect often en–
tertaining, they were in fact frequently brutal and sometimes ominous–
ly and meaninglessly destructive. On one occasion they raided a small
restaurant in Cannes, carried off all its silverware, and kidnapped the
proprietors and waiter. These victims they tied up and carried to the
edge of a cliff, full of dire threats of murder. They did not stop until
they had exhausted every device of terrorization they could imagine.
The impulse to destroy which is apparent in much of this practical
joking is equally clear
in
many of Fitzgerald's social outrages, as
when, at a formal dinner in the Murphys' garden, he suddenly rose
and threw a ripe fig at the bare back of one of the guests. He seems,
however, to have understood neither the extravagant inappropriateness
of such tricks nor his own destructive hatred of the ordered mobility
and grace of the Murphys, which was nearly as strong as his admira–
tion of them. All the guests, including the victim, managed to ignore
Fitzgerald's gesture completely; he was left standing alone and in–
visible, like a man in a nightmare. It must have been a positive relief
to him when Gerald Murphy remonstrated with him afterwards and
he could be crestfallen and repentant. Certainly a part of
his
intense
hatred of the British, which comes out very strongly
in
Tender Is the
Night,
was the result of their habit of suavely ignoring him when he
tried to apologize for his bad behavior; they simply refused to admit
that he existed on such occasions, and he could not bear that. Partly,
perhaps, he was compelled to these acts because he thought of them
as innocent fun which misfired because he did not belong, as Gatsby's
efforts to give "interesting" parties misfired and, inexplicably, of–
fended Daisy.
There was little of the practical joker and none of the repentant
in
Zelda. She was now even more striking in appearance than she had
been as a girl. Her hair had darkened; Fitzgerald compared its color to
a chow's. Her whole face had matured, until even her mouth-"the
cupid's bow of a magazine cover"--only intensified the almost hawk–
like upper part of her face with its firm brow and nose and its re-
