38
PARTISAN REVIEW
also by this clear realization that morally and physically he was stead–
ily deteriorating. "I wish I were twenty-two again," he said, "with all
my dramatic and feverishly enjoyed miseries. You remember I used to
say I wanted to die at thirty-well, I am twenty-nine and the pros–
pect is still welcome. My work is the only thing that makes me happy
-except to be a little tight-and for these two indulgences I pay a
big price in mental and physical hangovers." As
if
to demonstrate
how persistent this mood was, he wrote Perkins an obviously drunken
but revealing letter two months later:
"If
you see anyone I know tell
'em I hate 'em all, him especially. Never want to see 'em again. Why
shouldn't I be crazy? My father is a moron and my mother is a
neurotic, half insane with pathological nervous worry. Between them
they haven't and never have had the brains of Calvin Coolidge.
If
I knew anything I'd be the best writer in America"-"which isn't
saying a lot" he added when he recurred to this subject in another
letter.
But if coming home, as he said, revolted him as much as the
thought of remaining in France, they nonetheless made up their
minds to return to America. The money from the play and the movie
of
Gatsb
y
was running out, Zelda was
ill
again, and the situation
was, so far as their morale in general was concerned, completely out
of hand.
As
they so often did in these circumstances, they fled, sailing
for America from Genoa on the Conte Biancamano on December 10. It
was not a very happy return. They did not have the money they had
planned, three years earlier, to save before they came home; the man–
uscript of Fitzgerald's novel was not under his arm.
If
he still ap–
peared, at thirty, to be a "stocky, muscular, clear-skinned [young
man] with wide, fresh, green-blue eyes" and blond hair, who an–
nounced boldly to the press on his arrival in New York that "he
[had] nearly completed a novel ... which deal[t] with Americans
in Europe," he knew himself as a man who for over two years had
done no serious work and very little work of any kind, who was lead–
ing a more and more self-indulgent life, who felt, precisely as Dick
Diver did of himself, that "the change came a long way back-but
at first it didn't show. The manner remains intact for some time after
the morale cracks."
