Gatsby meets Macomber

Gatsby meets Macomber

 

 

 

by Jeffrey Meyers

 

 

 

June 2014, New Criterion

 

 

 

Decoding the parallels between Fitzgerald's Gatsby and Hemingway's “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

 

 

 

 

 

Throughout his writing life Hemingway constantly criticized and satirized Fitzgerald, whom he felt had been psychologically castrated by Zelda, couldn’t hold his liquor, had no personal dignity, and publicly humiliated himself. In the magazine version of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), the dying Harry “remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe” of the rich. Twenty years later, after Fitzgerald’s death, Hemingway continued to mock him. A Moveable Feast (1964) described Fitzgerald’s pretty, effeminate, and even decadent good looks, and portrayed him as reckless, hypochondriac, and foolish. In conversation and letters, Hemingway condemned him as a self-confessed cuckold, artistic whore, and destroyer of his own talent. Fitzgerald was even pilloried as a poor boxing timekeeper who let the clock run and subjected Hemingway to unnecessary punishment in the ring.

 

Like most of Fitzgerald’s friends, Hemingway was attracted to the sexy and uninhibited Zelda, and wrote that she “was very beautiful and was tanned a lovely gold color and her hair was a beautiful dark gold.” But he also resented her and told Fitzgerald that “Zelda is crazy. . . . Zelda just wants to destroy you.” Fitzgerald abjectly submitted to Zelda, yet was proud of the defects of her character, which he defined as a “complete, fine, and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness.”

 

Despite all his notorious defects, Fitzgerald surprised everyone—including himself—by producing a masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), which Hemingway respectfully called “an absolutely first-rate book.” Hemingway had taken the famous last sentence of A Farewell to Arms (1929) from the style and mood of a sentence in Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s narrator departs as Gatsby and Daisy seem to recapture, but in reality are about to lose, their dreams: “Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.” Hemingway followed closely with: “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain”—leaving the dead Catherine and their dead baby. (The emphasis is mine.) Two of the finest works in modern American literature are even more closely connected. Gatsby’s romantic pessimism and portrayal of adultery and murder among the very rich also had a powerful and hitherto unnoticed influence on the characters, plot, and themes of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936).

 

The ironic title of Hemingway’s story comes from Artabanus’ address to Xerxes before the battle of Salamis in Herodotus’ Histories: “Life gives no greater occasion for pity than this. Short as his life is, no man is so happy . . . that it shall not be his lot, not only once but many times, to wish himself dead rather than alive.” Gatsby’s short happy life took place between Daisy Buchanan’s long-awaited declaration of love and his being shot by George Wilson. Macomber’s happiness takes place, even more briefly, between shooting a charging buffalo and being shot by his wife, Margot. Macomber, like Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s words, “wanted to recover something, some idea of himself.” Both men reach an emotional peak and experience a euphoric moment. When Daisy weeps and expresses her love for Gatsby on her first visit to his mansion, “there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exaltation a new well-being radiated from him.” Similarly, after redeeming himself by shooting the buffalo, Macomber, “instead of fear had a feeling of definite elation. . . . Macomber felt a wild unreasonable happiness that he had never known before.” Describing his youthful euphoria tinged with sadness in The Crack-Up (1945), Fitzgerald wrote, “I had everything I wanted and knew that I would never be so happy again.”

 

Hemingway’s fictional names also connect his story to Fitzgerald’s novel. The garage man and husband of the ill-fated Myrtle in Gatsby and the white hunter in “Macomber” are both called Wilson—an ironic tribute in both these works to Edmund Wilson. Wilson had enthusiastically reviewed Hemingway’s small press pamphlet In Our Time in The Dial of October 1924. He told Fitzgerald about Hemingway before the two novelists met in Paris in April 1925, and Fitzgerald recommended Hemingway to his Scribner’s editor, Max Perkins. Fitzgerald’s narrator Carraway echoes Hemingway in the same way that Francis Macomber recalls Francis (Scott) Fitzgerald.

 

Daisy, age eighteen in 1917, was born in 1899—a year before Zelda and the same year as Hemingway. Zelda was a model for Daisy, and both the real woman and the fictional character influenced Hemingway’s portrayal of Margot. Fitzgerald and Macomber were both cuckolded. Zelda slept with the dashing French aviator Edouard Jozan; Margot sleeps with the adventurous, red-faced white hunter Robert Wilson. Daisy and Margot are cynical about marriage and threaten to leave their husbands, who finally rein in and recapture their adulterous wives. Margot asks Wilson a crucial question: “What importance is there to whether Francis is any good at killing lions?” Yet adopting John Dryden’s theme in “Alexander’s Feast” (1697)—“None but the brave deserves the fair”—she takes revenge by tormenting and betraying Macomber, and uses his cowardice to justify her seduction of Wilson. Macomber feebly protests her habitual infidelity—“There wasn’t going to be any of that. You promised there wouldn’t be”—but doesn’t restrain or punish her.

 

Daisy and Tom gather “wherever people played polo and were rich together.” Francis and Margot come from the same social class and belong to “the international, fast, sporting set.” Buchanan and Macomber are both tall, handsome, athletic, and wealthy. Their wives, Daisy and Margot—spoiled, selfish, dissolute, and destructive—are beautiful, upper-class women who married for money. Fitzgerald warned his daughter that “Park Avenue girls are hard.” In “Macomber,” Hemingway calls such women “the hardest in the world; the hardest, the cruelest, the most predatory, and the most attractive and their men have softened or gone to pieces nervously as they have hardened.”

 

Gatsby covers up Daisy’s hit-and-run killing of Myrtle. George Wilson, who mistakenly thinks Gatsby is Myrtle’s lover and killer, then removes Buchanan’s rival by killing Gatsby. (The dead Gatsby floating face down in his pool inspired the dead Joe Gillis floating face down in the pool in Billy Wilder’s 1950 Sunset Boulevard.) Wilson also covers up Margot’s shooting of Macomber. In both works, the men save their lovers from a capital crime and the women get away with murder. As Fitzgerald observed in Gatsby, Tom and Daisy “were careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” The same is true of Margot, who smashes Macomber and lets Wilson clean up her mess.

 

Both Gatsby entering high society and Macomber hunting in the wilds of East Africa are out of their natural element and violate the prevailing, unwritten code. Gatsby, a liar and crook, interloper and usurper, wears ludicrous pink suits. He throws vulgar, ostentatious parties where he knows very few of his guests and remains an outsider at his own festivities. Buchanan easily exposes his fraudulent persona and calls him “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere.” Though the hunter’s code says “no white man ever bolts in Africa,” Macomber “bolted like a rabbit.” He also asks Wilson not to tell what happened, suggests Wilson send in the African beaters to deal with the wounded lion, refuses to go after it himself, and can’t tell Wilson to kill it for him. Unmanned by his weakness, he allows Wilson to sleep with his wife. With notable bad form and disregard for the law, Margot shoots him from the car, which—in both senses—is strictly forbidden.

 

Carraway represents the moral values and Wilson the hunting code in these works. Carraway is tempted by the dishonest Jordan Baker, Wilson by the treacherous Margot. But Carraway rejects Jordan and escapes from the rotten bond market before the Crash of 1929. Wilson’s more elastic code allows him to chase but not shoot the prey in a car and, while working for corrupt clients, to accept sexual windfalls in his convenient double bed. But he also respects Macomber when he recovers his courage.

 

The Conradian themes of a moral fall and recovery of self-esteem, and of lost illusions, appear in both works. Gatsby, who has recovered “some idea of himself,” naively believes he can repeat—and revive—the past. Not satisfied to win Daisy’s love, he unrealistically insists that she also deny her former love for Tom and return to the pristine virginity she possessed when Gatsby first met her. Francis and Margot are under the illusion that he’ll remain a coward for the rest of his life and that she’ll always dominate him by holding his moral weakness against him. Afraid of the sudden change in Macomber and shift in their struggle for power, she shoots him because he’s recovered his courage and Wilson’s respect, and has become strong enough to leave her. When he shatters her illusions, she shatters his skull. At the end, he has “left” her.

 

The tragic hero in Fitzgerald’s novel reaches for the stars and is defeated by forces less noble than himself. Hemingway’s story is a more compact study, focusing on a single episode that reveals (as in Gatsby) three contrasting characters. The power of the story derives in great part from his strong but ambivalent feelings about Fitzgerald and Zelda. Both works show how a rich, beautiful, and heartless woman brings a man down, but Margot is more venomous and deliberately destructive than Daisy. Though Hemingway appropriated Fitzgerald’s characters, he also transformed them.

 

T. S. Eliot, whose Waste Land influenced Gatsby, provided the finest tribute to the novel when he told Fitzgerald that “it has interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years. . . . It seems to me the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” Carefully studying Fitzgerald’s themes and using Gatsby to enhance his well-wrought urn, Hemingway followed Eliot’s advice in his essay on Jacobean playwright Philip Massinger (1920): “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better.”

 

Jeffrey Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is writing a biography of Samuel Johnson.