The Trip to Echo Spring. Olivia Laing

Both are soldiers, in Italy in the First World War. Nick is American, and the other man has lived in Chicago, though he’s Italian by birth. Lying there in the dark they get to talking, and John asks Nick why he never sleeps (though actually he can manage just fine when there’s a light on, or after the sun has risen). ‘I got in pretty bad shape along early last spring, and at night it bothers me,’ he says casually and that’s all the explanation he offers, except for the mention of being blown up at night at the very beginning of the story. Instead, the weight of his injury is carried by those dream rivers, its severity only really gaugeable by the enormous efforts he makes to circumvent it. He’s certainly not going to tell the reader directly how bad it feels to lie there, thinking you might die at any minute.

      Fitzgerald’s own take on the hells of sleeplessness came seven years later, with an essay called ‘Sleeping and Waking’. It ran in Esquire in December 1934, when he was careering into the breakdown he’d confess to eighteen months later in ‘The Crack-up’, a much more famous trio of essays for the same magazine. At the time of writing, Fitzgerald was living in Baltimore with his daughter. His wife was in a mental institution, he was drinking heavily, and the days of being carefree in Paris and the Riviera had vanished as conclusively as they did for poor Dick Diver in Tender is the Night – though you could argue that they’d only been carefree in the sense that a man on a tightrope is carefree, soft-shoeing along without the slightest sign of strain or effort.

      Writing in praise of Fitzgerald years later, John Cheever observed that his genius lies in the provision of details. Clothes, dialogue, drinks, hotels, incidental music: all are precisely rendered, plunging the reader into the lost world of the Riviera or West Egg or Hollywood or wherever it is we are. The same is true in this essay, though it’s by no means the most glamorous of his stage sets. Aside from one brief visit to a New York hotel room, the drama is confined to the bedroom of the author’s own house in Baltimore, with small forays out into the study and the porch.

      In this room he suffers what might be described as a rupture in the fabric of sleep, a widening interval of wakefulness between the first easy plunge into unconsciousness and the deep rest that comes after the sky has begun to lighten. This is the moment, he declares in grand and untranslated Latin, that’s referred to in the Psalms as ‘Scuto circumdabit te veritas eius: non timebis a timore nocturno, a sagitta volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris’, which means: ‘His truth shall compass thee with a shield: thou shalt not be afraid of the terror of the night, of the arrow that flieth in the day, of the business that walketh about in the dark.’

      Things that flieth are certainly part of the problem. If Nick Adams’s difficulties with sleep are, as we’re asked to assume, the result of shellshock – a manly, even heroic reason for developing such a childish ailment as fear of the dark – Fitzgerald by contrast emphasises the absurd smallness of his inciting incident. His insomnia, according at any rate to this deposition, began in a New York hotel room two years previously, when he was attacked by a mosquito. The ridiculousness of this assailant, its comic insignificance, is emphasised by a preceding anecdote, about a friend whose own chronic case of sleeplessness began after being bitten by a mouse. Perhaps both are simply true stories, but I can’t help feeling they represent an odd kind of minimisation that Fitzgerald seems compelled to repeat.

      If the mosquito incident took place in 1932, then it occurred during a profound downturn in the Fitzgeralds’ fortunes. In February Zelda had her second breakdown (the first took place in 1930) and was hospitalised in Baltimore at the Henry Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins University. There she produced a novel, Save Me the Waltz, which used so much of the same material as Tender is the Night, the book Fitzgerald had been working on increasingly frantically for the past seven years, that he wrote to her psychiatrist in a fury, demanding extensive deletions and revisions.

      Later that spring he rented La Paix, a big rambling house a little out of town, with a garden full of dogwoods and black gums. Zelda came home in the summer, at first on day release, but they argued increasingly bitterly and in June 1933 she accidentally set the house on fire while burning some clothes or papers in an unused fireplace (an incident, funnily enough, that Tennessee Williams didn’t use in Clothes for a Summer Hotel, his portent-obsessed, fire-obsessed play about the Fitzgeralds). ‘THE FIRE,’ Fitzgerald wrote in his Ledger, adding ‘1st borrowing from Mother. Other borrowings.’

      They had to move, though Scott insisted they stay on in the smoke-stained house for another few months until he had at long last finished his novel. In the beginning, it was called The Boy Who Killed His Mother and was about a man called Francis who falls in with a glittering group of expats and ends up going to pieces and murdering his mother. For some reason Fitzgerald couldn’t make this alluring idea fly, and his gruelling failures were at least partially responsible for the insufferable badness of his behaviour at the time.

      Later, he realised the story he really wanted to tell was much less fantastical. He turned the novel inside out and made it instead about Dick and Nicole Diver, and how Dick saved his wife from madness and in so doing destroyed himself. It’s structured like a see-saw, Nicole rising up with her white crook’s eyes, and Dick sinking down into alcoholism and nervous exhaustion, though he once boasted that he was the only living American who possessed repose.

      The worst of it comes in Rome, where he goes on a bender after burying his father. He falls in with Rosemary, the young film star he thought he loved, and somehow they get up too close and disappoint each other. Bitter and confused, he goes out to get drunk, whirling in an immaculate progression of scenes through dances and conversations into arguments, fist-fights and at last to prison. Tender isn’t by any means as coherent or as streamlined as Gatsby, but I can think of very few books that choreograph a downward spiral with such elegant and terrifying precision.

      When it was finished, Fitzgerald went with his thirteen-year-old daughter Scottie to a townhouse at 1307 Park Avenue, while Zelda was institutionalised again, this time in the Shepherd Pratt Hospital, where she tried to kill herself at least twice. Little wonder that he described the period in his Ledger as ‘a strange year of work and drink. Increasingly unhappy’, adding in pencil on a separate draft sheet: ‘Last of real self-confidence.’ The long-awaited publication of Tender in April 1934 didn’t exactly help matters. It sold better than tends now to be thought, but tenth on the Publisher’s Weekly bestseller list can hardly be described as the summation of long-cherished dreams.

      By November 1934, at around the time ‘Sleeping and Waking’ was written, he made the seemingly frank admission to his editor, the eternally loyal Max Perkins: ‘I have drunk too much and that is certainly slowing me up. On the other hand, without drink I do not know whether I could have survived this time.’ This ambivalence, which could be interpreted as a refusal to see alcohol as a cause rather than a symptom of his troubles, is echoed several times in the essay itself. At first he announces his insomnia to be the result of ‘a time of utter exhaustion – too much work undertaken, interlocking circumstances that made the work twice as arduous, illness within and around – the old story of troubles never coming singly’. A paragraph or two later, drink is dropped casually into the equation with the throwaway phrase, ‘I was drinking, intermittently but generously.’

      Intermittently implies that one can stop; generously that there is pleasure, perhaps even largesse in the act. Neither was exactly true. For a start, Scott didn’t at the time count beer as alcohol. Not drinking might mean avoiding gin, but consuming instead perhaps twenty bottles of beer a day. (‘I’m on the wagon,’ he says in Tony Buttitta’s not wholly reliable memoir of the summer of 1935. ‘No hard liquor. Only beer. When I swell up I switch to cokes.’) As to liquor, the Baltimore novelist H.L. Mencken, a friend at the time, recalled it made Scott wild, capable of knocking over dinner tables or smashing his car into town buildings.

      A few sentences on there’s another, more deeply buried clue as to how problematic his drinking had become. He notes that alcohol has the capacity to stop his nightmarish insomnia (‘on the nights when I took no liquor the problem of whether or not sleep was specified began to haunt me long before bedtime’),