This Day in Literary History (Fitzgerald Meets Joyce)

June 27, 1928—Sylvia Beach, co-owner of Parisian library-bookstore Shakespeare & Co., held a dinner party whose guests included two of the most influential novelists of the 20th century: James Joyce, whose Ulysses she had published in the teeth of censorship, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the voice of the “Jazz Age” who was dying to meet Joyce but was afraid to approach him.

Ordinarily, this particular dinner, with such illustrative guests, might have been like a literary-focused version of the old Steve Allen show “Meeting of the Minds.” Wouldn’t you have wanted to have been a fly on the wall as Joyce disclosed to Fitzgerald his ideas on stream of consciousness, or when Fitzgerald explained to Joyce what exactly happened in those missing years to his hero Jay Gatsby when he was apart from his Daisy?

Only it didn’t work out quite that way. It was more like the kind of incident you’d find in the marvelous book First Encounters, a series of ironic chapters accompanied by equally droll color drawings, created by the husband-and-wife team of Edward and Nancy Caldwell Sorel. The pairs chosen for that book include Marilyn Monroe and Isak Dinesen, Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst, Richard Nixon and Madame Mao.

Another odd couple in this beautiful volume was Fitzgerald and novelist Edith Wharton, in an episode that foreshadowed what happened at Beach’s. Impressed by The Great Gatsby, the aging grande dame of American letters had invited Fitzgerald over to her estate for tea. Fitzgerald and a friend worked themselves up into a state of liquefied but incoherent courage by the time they staggered over to her home. The encounter did not alter in the slightest Wharton’s hardening belief that the younger generation had lost the moral fiber that hers, though afflicted with restrictive and often arbitrary social codes, had possessed: “To tea, Teddy Chanler and Scott Fitzgerald, the novelist – awful,” she wrote in her diary.

Maybe nervousness drove Fitzgerald to a similar state when it was time to meet Joyce. (Not that it took much to intoxicate him—he was famous for not being able to hold his liquor.) It’s not recorded whether Fitzgerald tried out the usual conversational opener that always managed to puzzle and/or annoy listeners: “How much money do you make?”

In any case, very early on he was acting…unusually, shall we say. Like falling to one knee, kissing Joyce’s hand and saying, “How does it feel to be a great genius, sir? I am so excited at seeing you, sir, that I could weep.” And this was only a preview of the kind of behavior that gets him on nearly everyone’s short list of the most idiotic drunks in history.

Next, according to Herman Gorman, a fellow guest that night and future Joyce biographer, Fitzgerald turned his attention to Joyce’s wife Nora, who normally did not go in for literary soirees very much. Ine, she advised her sister: "There's one thing I hate-- going out to dinner and sitting with artists till 1:00 in the morning. They'd bore you stiff, Kathleen.”

The former Miss Barnacle was used to men clinging to her, sometimes foolishly (like her Jim, especially early in their quarter-century relationship). Sure, and so what if the American was a bit daft—he was calling her beautiful, and what harm did it ever do a middle-aged lady and mother of two with a preoccupied husband to hear talk like that?

Matters took a more daring turn, however, when Fitzgerald saw a window opening, rushed through it onto the balcony, climbed out onto an 18-inch-wide parapet, and announced he would kill himself unless Nora said she loved him.

Eventually, the small group convinced Fitzgerald to act sensibly and get down from there, though the episode left Joyce a bit shaken afterward. “That young man must be mad," he later told Beach about his and Nora’s admirer. "I'm afraid he'll do himself an injury some day." (In a few days, perhaps because his ego was stroked, the Irishman displayed more bonhomie when he provided Fitzgerald an autographed copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Earlier, I wrote that dinner at Miss Beach’s did not turn out to be quite the “Meeting of the Minds” that one might expect. But, in his post-hangover period, Fitzgerald somehow recalled enough about the evening to mention to editor Maxwell Perkins that Joyce predicted his own writing project would take another three or four years to complete.

Floundering on his follow-up to The Great Gatsby after vowing he would create “something NEW in form, idea, structure—the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find,” the American took comfort in the fact that even a genius such as Joyce could not unleash a masterpiece upon command.

The expectations of both novelists turned out to be overly optimistic. Already at work on his book for four years before meeting Fitzgerald, Joyce would take another 11 to complete Finnegans Wake. It wasn’t writer’s block that sidelined him, though, but life’s vicissitudes.

Glaucoma meant that Joyce required surgery 11 times to stave off blindness, and daughter Lucia ended up confined in a series of clinics and asylums. Fitzgerald’s disease was alcoholism, but the financial drain on him was wife Zelda’s medical care for what was diagnosed as the same medical condition as Lucia Joyce: schizophrenia.

For a long time, Nora Joyce did not share the literary community’s high opinion of her husband. She was given to despair wondering why he ever gave up singing for writing, and on at least one occasion, referring to Finnegans Wake, she asked Joyce: “Why don't you write sensible books that people can understand?"

After her finance-strapped husband died in 1941, however, Nora came to look differently on the man who had taken up so much of her adult life. "Sure if you've been married to the greatest writer in the world you don't remember all the little fellows." At long last, she had come to share the opinion of her late visually impaired husband’s work expressed by his pie-eyed American fan.