F Scott Fitzgerald

Richard Shephard

• Publisher: Pocket Essentials
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781904048404
• eBook ISBN: 9781843442264
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

F Scott Fitzgerald is widely praised as the finest and most celebrated novelist of twentieth century America. His reputation is infinitely more lustrous since his untimely death than it was for much of his twenty-year literary career and is largely based on his 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, as well as on the colourful and tragic incidents of his personal life. His alcoholism; his fairy tale marriage to the beautiful Zelda Sayre, and her gradual descent into schizophrenia; the incandescent blossoming and dissipation of his literary gifts have all added to his legend.

Fitzgerald was an individual who seemed to be composed of opposites and who, fittingly, could have been one of his own characters. He was charming, witty and in love with the magic and splendour of life, but also felt compelled to embrace the darkness. As a writer, his perception of the world around him was so finely tuned and acute that his life and career were a mirror of the 1920s and 30s, so that just as the Jazz Age gave way to the Depression, Fitzgerald's dazzling and youthful success yielded to drunkenness, despair and what he termed 'emotional bankruptcy'.

This Pocket Essentials examines both Fitzgerald's life and writing and probes the infinitely complex and symbiotic relationship between the two, revealing the man behind the myth and behind some of the finest prose of all time.

Part One: The Early Years: 1896-1919

 

Chapter One: Childhood and School

 

Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota, on 24 September 1896, the same year that movies and ragtime first appeared in New York, and a little over three years before the beginning of the twentieth century, arguably the century of America, and a period he would write about, and in some small way, create, with such resonance, wit and charm. Drawn to European literature and its sensitivities, he was nevertheless a consummate American writer, and was named after his ancestor, Francis Scott Key, the composer of The Star Spangled Banner, about as American a forebear as one could get. He was the only son of Edward Fitzgerald, a pleasant and kind, if rather unlucky, man, and Mary McQuillan Fitzgerald, an energetic, eccentric woman whose Irish family had a substantial sum of money and who looked down on the more genteel, but humble, Fitzgeralds. Edward Fitzgerald owned an unsuccessful wicker furniture business but he was a poor businessman and an ineffectual provider for his family. His meagre efforts to support them, often derided by his wife, had to backed up by her money.

 

Fitzgerald was the third child of the marriage, born a few months after the deaths of his two elder sisters in an epidemic, and the elder brother to Annabel, born five years later. He was spoiled by his indulgent, but erratic mother, while his father, whose side he took, struggled to be a salesman. After his furniture business went under, Edward Fitzgerald worked for Procter and Gamble, but he was sacked suddenly, aged fifty-five, and returned home, as his son described in an interview after his father’s death, ‘an old man, a completely broken man’, who was ‘a failure the rest of his days'. His father was humiliatingly obliged to rely on McQuillan money, and to make things worse, when his eleven-year-old son heard this distressing news, he was horrified, and cried, ‘Dear God, please don’t let us go to the poorhouse; please don’t let us go to the poorhouse’.

 

Following this, the Fitzgeralds were obliged to move around until they settled in a rather dreary house on Summit Avenue, where, in the attic, Fitzgerald would complete his first novel, This Side of Paradise, in 1919, an event that he would record in a brief bit of verse in a letter.

 

‘In a house below the average

Of a street above the average

In a room above the roof’.

 

This background of class and historical lineage on his father’s side, money and Irish eccentricity on his mother’s was already fermenting in the young Fitzgerald, so that the rather chaotic and humbling travails of his home life, and his need to dissimulate and create a better, if not perfect, world for himself, were starting to simmer away in the crucible of his imagination. Of the many themes that resonate in his fiction, two dominate: love and money. He received the former from his father and the latter had its origin with his mother and her family. She spoiled and pampered him, trying to make him a success, no doubt to overcome the disappointment she felt in her husband, but she didn’t bother to discipline him or teach him the modesty and self-restraint he might have found assets in later life. Clearly, his parents failed to live up to his, no doubt, exacting standards, being less glamorous, less prosperous, less effective and, in the case of his mother, less normal than he wanted them to be.

 

At a camp, when he was ten years old and separated from them for the first time, he was bullied and miserable, and wrote and told them. His father sent him a dollar and some paternal advice on how to spend it, while his mother threatened to visit him. Shrewdly, he dissuaded her from coming, but succeeded in getting another dollar out of her, by making good use of his father’s advice and promising her he would ‘spend it cautiously’. Pointedly, he added that, ‘All the other boys have pocket money besides their regular allowance’. Along with other letters written during his childhood, all asking his beleaguered parents for cash, because ‘all my money is used up’ (the impersonal tone is a nice touch, suggesting it’s the money’s fault and not his), this letter points straight to the adult Fitzgerald a few years down the line, when he was an author regularly imploring both his publisher and his agent to advance him money for stories and novels he hadn’t yet written. A year or two prior to this, when he was struggling to be a copywriter at the Barron Collier advertising agency and failing to get his stories published, he felt understandably bitter, because he was broke and his fiancé, Zelda Sayre, had broken off their engagement. His prospects were poor, and she had reluctantly ceased, or postponed, trusting in his ability to make something of his life. Since he had no money to back him up, or, crucially, to support them should she ever decide to join him in New York, Zelda, a well-to-do Southern girl with one eye on a string of even more well-to-do potential suitors, had lost faith in him and his ability to support them both. This painful, even brutal, experience would be reworked again and again in his fiction, ironically generating thousands of dollars for Fitzgerald.

 

After his lowly experiences at camp, he began at St Paul Academy, where within a year, he had written his first stories and had begun to participate in the activities that were always to hold a fascination for him and for which he had an affinity. These included socially-inclined activities like dancing (classes that his mother made him take, since she knew he would meet children from the most prestigious - or rather, wealthy – families) and sports like basketball and football, at which he wanted desperately to shine, knowing instinctively how heroic this would be, but for which he was too slight. Sometimes the other children would arrive in large limousines and be driven by chauffeurs in liveried uniform, no doubt watched by a Fitzgerald just on the verge of adolescence, a boy who was already casting himself as the hero in the stories he was starting to write. (Around twenty years later, when he was in Europe, basking in the afterglow of critical acclaim for The Great Gatsby and its success as a Broadway play, and the royalties this generated, and during a period when he started receiving three and a half thousand dollars for each story published in The Saturday Evening Post, he would temporarily abandon the struggle he was having in writing his fourth novel and knock out a whole series of tales about Basil Duke Lee, a schoolboy alter ego, and his female counterpart, Josephine. These stories, about 120,000 words in all, covered the years from 1907, when their author was eleven, to 1913, when he was seventeen and about to enter Princeton University.)

 

He joined in amateur dramatics and quickly took over, as writer, director and, naturally, leading man. Every summer for four years, with increasing success, he would write and act in a play for the local company, Elizabethan Dramatic Club. In 1911, he was sent to the Newman School, a Catholic institution in New Jersey, where he would be a boarder, and, so his parents hoped, would both learn some discipline and improve his grades. Less than an hour from New York, the school must have seemed a real step forward to Fitzgerald, who was becoming frustrated by the comparatively provincial St Paul. Within a short time, he was thoroughly disliked, ostracized and utterly miserable, a gloomy experience that he worked neatly into his first novel, This Side of Paradise, whose hero, Amory Blaine shares many of the hardships from which Fitzgerald suffered. ‘He went all wrong at the start, was generally considered both conceited and arrogant, and was universally detested.' Amory, like his creator, was ‘unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy…confined to bounds, unpopular with both faculty and students’. Much of this misery is also evoked in The Freshest Boy, a story written for the Basil series in 1928, sixteen years later. Even as a youth, and at the height of his unhappiness, he was able to turn personal tragedy into an artistic triumph, by writing about the unkindnesses that life seemed to have in store for him. A poem, cannily entitled Football, about an incident when he was unfairly accused of cowardice in a game, was published in the school magazine, the Newman News. After this, things gradually improved for Fitzgerald, as he worked harder on his poor grades, made friends with a boy who was a school football hero, improved at sports, acted in a school play and had stories published in the magazine. In his second year, he met and was befriended by Father Sigourney Fay, a recently converted Catholic, who was a member of the school board and was soon to be appointed its director. He became the young Fitzgerald’s mentor, father figure and spiritual guide and was transposed into the pages of the writer’s first novel, This Side of Paradise as Monsignor Darcy. Fay’s friendship and influence helped Fitzgerald to become a more rounded individual, the ‘personage’ that his protagonist Amory Blaine becomes in This Side of Paradise, and thus prepared him for his entrance to Princeton, the first real turning point in his young and somewhat haphazard life.

 

That he ever went to Princeton was down to the death of his grandmother, who had bequeathed a substantial estate, worth $125,000, which provided the financially ailing Fitzgeralds with significant fiscal security. Rather than going to the less expensive, but fairly drab, University of Minnesota, Fitzgerald could now attend whichever college he preferred. He gave several reasons for his choice, but the main one was that, while near the end of his time at Newman, he had found the score for a musical comedy on a piano. Entitled His Honor the Sultan, it had been presented by the Triangle Club of Princeton University, and the young student, with a modicum of dramatic success himself, and with passionate memories of those evenings when sufficient cramming had allowed him to leave his studies and venture out to New York to see a Broadway musical, was won over. As he put it, years later: ‘That was enough for me. From then on, the university question was settled. I was bound for Princeton’.

 

Needless to say, it wasn’t that simple. His love of football and the fact that he had watched a Princeton-Harvard game in 1911 (where Princeton’s full-back made a valiant eighty-five yard dash to score the winning touchdown, sending Fitzgerald into a frenzy of excitement) must have played their part. Now that his family had sufficient sums to enable him to enter Princeton, the balance of Fitzgerald’s academic account was less impressive. Though he failed the written exam, he made up for it in an oral test, and, won over by his eloquence and his Irish charm, the examiners decided to give him a chance. On his seventeenth birthday, he was accepted into Princeton.

 

Chapter Two: Princeton: 1913-1917

Just as Monsignor Fay had had a profound affect on Fitzgerald at Newman, so too, at Princeton, did Christian Gauss, the head of the modern languages department, and one of the very few professors there who was able to snare Fitzgerald’s admiration, or even attention. Some of his other teachers were dismissive of his wavering application and what they considered his lack of interest, and one of them, later the head of the department, continually refused to believe that this indifferent student was the same man who had written The Great Gatsby.

Other than Gauss, his real mentors were two friends, John Peale Bishop, who was his classmate and Edmund Wilson, who was in the year above them. Always a voracious reader, Fitzgerald had, for the first time, encountered friends and peers with whom he could discuss books and writers. Amory Blaine, in This Side of Paradise, meets and airily discusses ‘books he had read, read about, books he had never heard of’, with a young man called Thomas Parke D’Invilliers, who is ‘partly taken in and wholly delighted’ with his new acquaintance. (The verse epigraph, before the dedication to Zelda, at the start of The Great Gatsby is also attributed to D’Invilliers, although it was actually written by Fitzgerald himself.) In Andrew Turnbull’s Scott Fitzgerald: a Biography, Bishop’s version of his first meeting with his fellow bibliophile dryly concurs with the account in the novel. ‘We talked about books: Those I had read, which were not many, those Fitzgerald had read, which were even less; those he said he had read, which were many, many more.' Above all, Bishop inspired Fitzgerald both to appreciate and to understand poetry, and, his encouragement, as well as his criticism, helped to point out directions and generally paved the way on Fitzgerald’s journey towards becoming a serious writer. Four years older than his friend, his academic career interrupted by tuberculosis, Bishop was a young man with what seemed like an exotic background -his lineage included the Scottish aristocracy - and a passion for literature that the possibility of an early death from his romantic illness only served to intensify. It was a passion, moreover that Fitzgerald felt was lacking in most of Princeton’s teachers.

Fitzgerald’s other friend, Edmund ‘Bunny’ Wilson, was even harsher and unstinting than Bishop in his criticism of his young companion’s cultural pretensions, sarcastically deriding his lamentable lack of learning and taste in literature. At the same time, unlike Bishop, he found himself irresistibly intrigued by Fitzgerald’s undoubted talent, and fascinated that, despite his poor grammar and meager academic prowess, he could invest his prose with a vibrancy, a kind of intuitive magic that enthralled the reader. Never one to spare his friend’s feelings, Wilson once famously described Fitzgerald and his talent as being similar to the tale of ‘the old stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond; she is extremely proud of the diamond and shows it to everyone who comes by, and everyone is surprised that such an ignorant old woman should possess so valuable a jewel; for in nothing does she appear so inept as in the remarks she makes about the diamond’. He then added that Fitzgerald, though quick witted and bright, ‘has been given imagination without intellectu...

Table of contents

• Part One: The Early Years: 1896-1919
• Chapter Two: Princeton: 1913-1917
• Chapter Three: The War
• Chapter Seven: More Success and a Dramatic Failure
• Chapter Nine: Europe Again - and Gatsby
• Chapter Ten: America and Europe – Again and Again
• Chapter Eleven: Emotional Bankruptcy and a Breakdown
• Chapter Twelve: America –Hospitals and Hollywood
• Chapter Thirteen: The Depression - Drinking and Declining
• Chapter Fourteen: Debts and Despair
• The Great Gatsby has been filmed four times: in 1926, 1949, 1974 and in an HBO version in 2001. The first, and silent, version was directed by Herbert Brenon and starred Warner Baxter as Gatsby, Lois Wilson as Daisy, Neil Hamilton as Nick Carraway, Hale Harrington as Tom Buchanan and William Powell, somewhat improbably cast, as George Wilson. Following the novel’s successful stage adaptation and run on Broadway, Harold Ober had sold the rights to Paramount, with Fitzgerald pocketing $25,000 from the play and film sale. The film received mixed reviews, with one astute critic calling the novel ‘one of the very best stories in modern American fiction’, but dismissing the film as ‘half way dull, half way cold and uninteresting’. In 1938, only two years before Fitzgerald’s death, novelist John O’Hara, a friend and fellow carouser, tried to buy the rights to the book from Paramount, who owned them and refused to sell. Prompted by O’Hara’s interest, the studio snapped into action, releasing t