the last book I ever read (Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins, excerpt six)

from Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins:

The Fitzgeralds and the Murphys had seen a great deal of one another in Paris in the winter of 1925-26, during which time Sara and Gerald had assumed, more or less unwittingly, the role of friendly guardians. A decade older than the Fitzgeralds, they looked upon Scott and Zelda’s baroque exploits with a mixture of tolerant amusement and genuine concern, and the Fitzgeralds, for their part, often went out of their way to try to shock the Murphys. Scott could not bear to be ignored. If he felt that Sara was not paying enough attention to him, he would do something to upset her. One afternoon in Paris, while riding in a taxi with Sara and Zelda, he pulled out some filthy hundred-franc notes and began putting them in his mouth and chewing them. Sara, whose fear of germs was so intense that she always draped the railway compartments her family traveled in with her own clean sheets, was predictably horrified.

Even in the early days it was an unusual friendship. The two couples had almost nothing in common except their great affection for each other. Neither Scott nor Zelda seemed to have the slightest interest in the art, the music, the ballet, or even the literature of the period; Scott knew the American writers in Paris, and spent a large part of his time that winter getting Hemingway recognized, but he met few Europeans, and he never learned to speak more than a few words of French, which he made not the slightest effort to pronounce correctly. The simpler aspects of the Murphys’ life at Antibes—their cultivation of the life of the senses—never appealed to Fitzgerald at all. He scarcely noticed what he was eating or drinking. He stayed out of the sun as much as possible, and his skin never lost its dead-white pallor. When the others on the beach went in swimming, Scott would get up, take a flat running dive into the shallow water, and come right out again. He never showed any curiosity about Murphy’s painting, which he appeared to consider a mere diversion. Gerald, for his part, was not particularly impressed with Fitzgerald as a writer. He had not cared much for The Great Gatsby (Sara had), and neither of them read the Fitzgerald stories that were appearing—infrequently, just then—in the Saturday Evening Post. “The one we took seriously was Ernest, not Scott,” Murphy said. “I suppose it was because Ernest’s work seemed contemporary and new, and Scott’s didn’t.”