alcohol and creative life

Alcohol is woven into the work and friendship of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as both a social habit and a threat to sustained writing. Fitzgerald’s drinking can make him animated and cheerful, but the book repeatedly shows it ending in incapacitation and lost working time; Hemingway, meanwhile, describes rules intended to keep drinking apart from his own writing. The contrast develops into a wider pattern involving Fitzgerald’s marriage to Zelda Fitzgerald, social life, and repeated efforts to work.

A night on the road

During a journey with Fitzgerald, Hemingway sees how quickly drinks can change the evening. Fitzgerald downs a whisky sour, requests another, and later has more. The drinks initially make him feel better and more talkative. He speaks about his relationship with Zelda, including a painful episode at Saint-Raphaël, and insists on contacting her because this is the first night they have slept apart since their marriage. Drinking accompanies his need to talk, but it does not resolve the tension behind it.

After the call, the two return to dinner. Fitzgerald eats very little and drinks only a little wine before passing out at the table. Hemingway and the waiter take him upstairs; Hemingway undresses him, covers him with the bedclothes, and opens the window. The scene is described as untheatrical: the evening’s collapse is not a performance but a practical crisis that Hemingway must manage. He recognizes that he has not taken good care of Fitzgerald and decides to reduce the drinking on the journey back.

Hemingway’s stated reason for limiting drinks is that he must train in order to write. He admits to himself that this explanation is not true: his actual discipline is not to drink after dinner, before writing, or while writing. That distinction matters. The rule is not presented as a cure for Fitzgerald, but as Hemingway’s own working boundary, one he tries to maintain while also managing his friend’s drinking. On the next day’s drive to Paris, Fitzgerald is cheerful and healthy, and talks at length about Michael Arlen’s books. The abrupt contrast with the previous night shows that the effects of drinking in this account are recurrent but not continuous.

Drinking, marriage, and interrupted work

As Hemingway gets to know the Fitzgeralds, he describes a repeating sequence. Fitzgerald resolves to stop staying out all night, exercise, and work regularly. When he begins working well, Zelda complains of boredom and draws him into another drinking party. The couple quarrels and makes up; Fitzgerald then takes long walks with Hemingway to sweat out the alcohol and recommits himself to work. The routine offers temporary resets, but it does not hold: the same disruption starts again.

The account connects that cycle to jealousy and their social surroundings. Fitzgerald is deeply in love with Zelda and jealous of her, while Hemingway says she is jealous of Fitzgerald’s writing. Zelda’s interest in the people who pursue her, though she says she has nothing to do with them, amuses her and makes Fitzgerald jealous; he feels obliged to accompany her, and his work suffers. At the Montmartre parties, he worries about either of them passing out. The couple had once tended to fall unconscious after drinking, which Hemingway presents as a kind of protection from the consequences of the social life around them. By this spring, that pattern has changed: Zelda can drink more than Fitzgerald, and he drinks beyond what he can manage in order to endure the people and places he dislikes, then drinks further to stay awake. The result is not simply one bad night but increasingly scarce stretches of work.

From brief recovery to decline

Even amid the interruptions, Fitzgerald continues trying to work. In late spring and early summer, Hemingway sees him as cheerful, sometimes desperately so, and still a good companion. Hemingway listens during his very bad periods and encourages him to hold on to the possibility of writing. Fitzgerald produces one good story, The Rich Boy, though Hemingway believes he can do better. The story stands as evidence that drinking has not erased his capacity, even as the surrounding pattern makes that capacity harder to use.

After the summer, when Hemingway has spent time in Spain and begun a novel, Fitzgerald returns from Cap d’Antibes changed. He is now drunk during the day as well as at night, and Hemingway says that work by others no longer seems to matter to him. He comes to Hemingway’s home whenever he is drunk, including while Hemingway is trying to work, and becomes rude to people he considers beneath him. The change extends the damage beyond Fitzgerald’s own writing: his drinking begins to intrude directly on his friend’s working life.

The account nevertheless distinguishes Fitzgerald’s drunken behavior from his sober conduct. He has begun work on a novel when sober, and Hemingway rarely sees him in that state; when he does, Fitzgerald is pleasant, jokes, and can make fun of himself. Drunk, he often seeks Hemingway out and interferes with his work. This continues for years, alongside Hemingway’s assertion that Fitzgerald remains one of his most loyal friends when sober. Alcohol therefore marks a recurring division in their relationship, not a complete replacement of affection or loyalty.

The meaning of discipline

The book treats drinking less as a single moral failing than as a force entangled with habits, marriage, company, and the conditions needed to write. Hemingway’s own rule—no drinking before or during writing, and none after dinner—gives a practical counterpoint to Fitzgerald’s repeated resolutions, which are undermined by parties and marital conflict. Yet the contrast is not absolute: Hemingway drinks with Fitzgerald and recognizes that he has failed to look after him. The friendship involves both an effort to limit harm and participation in the circumstances surrounding it.

Across the episodes, drinking repeatedly offers short-lived animation, sociability, or a way to endure company, then narrows the time available for work. Fitzgerald’s attempts to return to writing, and the story and novel he manages to work on, prevent the account from reducing him to his drinking. At the same time, the shift from nighttime excess and periodic unconsciousness to daytime drinking and intrusions into Hemingway’s work gives the pattern a clear worsening trajectory. Creative life appears here to depend not on inspiration alone but on the fragile routines that drinking can repeatedly break.