Paradise Lost

A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald

David S. Brown

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780674504820
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674978263
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Literature

Pigeonholed in popular memory as a Jazz Age epicurean, a playboy, and an emblem of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation's shifting mood and manners after World War I. In Paradise Lost, David Brown contends that Fitzgerald's deepest allegiances were to a fading antebellum world he associated with his father's Chesapeake Bay roots. Yet as a midwesterner, an Irish Catholic, and a perpetually in-debt author, he felt like an outsider in the haute bourgeoisie haunts of Lake Forest, Princeton, and Hollywood—places that left an indelible mark on his worldview.

In this comprehensive biography, Brown reexamines Fitzgerald's childhood, first loves, and difficult marriage to Zelda Sayre. He looks at Fitzgerald's friendship with Hemingway, the golden years that culminated with Gatsby, and his increasing alcohol abuse and declining fortunes which coincided with Zelda's institutionalization and the nation's economic collapse.

Placing Fitzgerald in the company of Progressive intellectuals such as Charles Beard, Randolph Bourne, and Thorstein Veblen, Brown reveals Fitzgerald as a writer with an encompassing historical imagination not suggested by his reputation as "the chronicler of the Jazz Age." His best novels, stories, and essays take the measure of both the immediate moment and the more distant rhythms of capital accumulation, immigration, and sexual politics that were moving America further away from its Protestant agrarian moorings. Fitzgerald wrote powerfully about change in America, Brown shows, because he saw it as the dominant theme in his own family history and life.

PART I

Beginnings, 1896–1920

When I was your age I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned how to speak of it and make people listen.

F. Scott Fitzgerald to Scottie Fitzgerald (age sixteen), 1938

{ ONE }

Prince and Pauper

I’ve been thinking about my father again + it makes me sad like the past always does.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1931

In the spring of 1934, John Jamieson, a Pittsburgher, wrote to Scott Fitzgerald, asking him about the origins of his most iconic character—the “great” Jay Gatsby. In a lettered reply, Fitzgerald explained, “He was perhaps created on the image of some forgotten farm type of Minnesota that I have known and forgotten, and associated at the same moment with some sense of romance.” Gatsby’s origins have long occasioned debate among literary detectives. In company with Fitzgerald’s “forgotten farm type,” some have recognized in Gatsby the echoes of John Keats’s disillusioned lovers, Henry Adams’s mythical medieval “Virgin,” or Oswald Spengler’s anachronistic Apollonian man—bearer of reason and harmony in an increasingly inharmonious world. In common did these writers confront the modern West’s transition from a civilization based on hierarchy, tradition, and cultural “unity” to one increasingly fragmented in the push-pull of the emergent urban-industrial process.¹ They memorialized, in other words, a dying spirit of romantic expression.

Among these “types,” one might too include the industrious Philip Francis McQuillan, a romantic in his own right. Fitzgerald’s maternal grandfather and resident model of the self-made man rising in America, McQuillan emigrated at the age of eight from County Fermanagh, Ireland, in 1842, settling with his parents and six siblings in Galena, a small upper-Illinois town near the Mississippi River. The hamlet became for Fitzgerald an idealized place of possibilities, the embodiment of, as he put it in Gatsby, “a fresh, green breast of the new world” that once drew Dutch sailors over Atlantic squalls and now called their ancestral sons across a continent. In his 1934 novel Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald described a young and then-obscure Ulysses S. Grant, “lolling in his general store in Galena … ready to be called to an intricate destiny.”² And when fate came knocking in 1861, Grant grew into himself. Rising in rank from colonel of the Twenty-First Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment to commander of all Union armies, he led the military charge against the slaveholders’ rebellion, claiming key victories at Shiloh and Vicksburg in the war’s western theater before bleeding Robert E. Lee’s celebrated Army of Northern Virginia and overseeing its surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in the early spring of 1865. From there, his star kept ascending, and Grant served two terms as president (1869–1877). After his death in 1885 at the age of sixty-three, he was interred at the General Grant National Memorial (colloquially known as “Grant’s Tomb”), which to this day remains the largest mausoleum in North America. For Scott, Grant’s success was a quintessentially American story, literally the stuff that dreams were made of.

Like Grant (and Gatsby), McQuillan discovered in the erratic mobility of America an inexhaustible arena for reinvention. In 1857, he moved to St. Paul, capital city of the Minnesota Territory, and found work as a bookkeeper for Beaupre & Temple, a major wholesale grocery establishment; at thirty-eight, he took over the business and soon amassed a fortune. Along the way, McQuillan married Louisa Allen of Galena, and they had eight children, five of whom lived beyond infancy. Like Fitzgerald’s, McQuillan’s life was marked by a brilliant early success followed by an early exit. Suffering from chronic nephritis compounded by tuberculosis, he died in April 1877, just one week after turning forty-three; he left behind a considerable legacy of some $270,000, a relative value today of about $6 million.

From immigrant poverty to industrial-age prosperity, McQuillan corporealized for many Minnesotans the material side of the American Dream. One obituary called his life “a living romance, for in the brief period of twenty years he passed, by his own unaided exertions, from the humblest beginnings to a place among the merchant princes of the country.”³ Another St. Paul paper evoked the “rising people” theme, celebrated in both Benjamin Franklin’s iconic Autobiography and Horatio Alger’s formulaic Luck and Pluck tales, when reviewing McQuillan’s splendid ascent: “He came here a poor boy with but a few dollars in his pocket, depending solely on a clear head, sound judgment, good habits, strict honesty and willing hands, with strict integrity his guiding motive. How these qualities have aided him is shown in the immense business he has built up, the acquisition of large property outside, and the universal respect felt for him by the businessmen of the county, among whom probably no man was better known or stood higher.”⁴ But if McQuillan’s commercial kingdom symbolized local capitalist success, it further, and less agreeably, suggested the inevitable eclipse of an older pastoral ideal. One broadsheet described Philip Francis as a “pioneer of wholesale grocery,” a tribute that blurred the lines between backwoodsman and businessman and thus traded on the public’s affection for a fading frontier archetype.⁵ Amid a booming urban-industrial backdrop, Americans looked nostalgically on the last open lands as their final link to the old democracy, mobility, and independence. It was this sentiment that informed Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous Frontier Thesis and later coaxed Henry Ford to create, in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Greenfield Village, a shrine of sorts to the passing age of nineteenth-century American individualism. Filled with workshops, farmhouses, and mills, it embodies to this day the spirit of the old horse-and-buggy Middle West that Ford’s automobile empire had, ironically, done so much to obliterate.

McQuillan’s surviving children enjoyed all the material, cultural, and educational accoutrements that their affluent father could provide. The family occupied a multistory Victorian in the heart of St. Paul and generously patronized the city’s many Catholic appendages. In the words of one appreciative resident archbishop, “none have merited more of the church in this city.” Mary (Mollie) McQuillan, Philip Francis’s eldest daughter and Fitzgerald’s mother, was born in 1860 and bred to expectations of upper-middle-class respectability. She attended Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic boarding school for girls then located in New York City, and made several trips to Europe; the governor of Minnesota attended her wedding reception.⁶

A distracted, dowdy woman inclined to eccentricities, Mollie McQuillan gave the impression of wanting far more from life than life was willing to give her. Contemporaries, put off by her sometimes-mismatched shoes (a habit of breaking one in at a time), unkempt hair, and habitual umbrella, referred to her unkindly as a witch. One of Scott’s schoolteachers remembered her “dressed like the devil, always coming apart.” Her tendency to innocently unleash the oddly inappropriate comment—“I’m trying to decide how you’ll look in mourning,” she once let slip to the wife of a dying man—fueled the casual hostility of the people around her. As one St. Paulian put it, Mollie was “a pathetic, wispy little woman. People were cruel to her and Scott was ashamed of her.” This embarrassment can be read in the opening line of Fitzgerald’s 1936 story “An Author’s Mother”: “She was a halting old lady in a black silk dress and a rather preposterously high-crowned hat that some milliner had foisted upon her declining sight.” Nearing a then-spinsterish thirty in 1890, Mollie married Edward Fitzgerald, a man whom she had known for several years and who was several years her senior. Scottie Fitzgerald later recounted for a biographer the family gossip regarding their supposedly one-sided courtship: “Daddy said that his father had told him that he was sitting in the parlor one night with Molly … and talking about this and that when she called her parents in … and announced how wonderful it was that she was engaged to marry Ed; and that he had been too much a gentleman to know how to get out of it.” Scottie knew in relating this story that Mollie’s father had died several years before his daughter’s marriage, but she passed it on nevertheless as she believed, even with the particulars in question, that “it must have had more than a germ of truth.” In any case, the Fitzgerald-McQuillan marriage did not produce a meeting of minds, hearts, or bank accounts. Decamping on a European honeymoon, the little-traveled Edward eagerly awaited the Champs-Elysees and requested Mollie’s company for a first-day stroll. Her tactless rejoinder—“But I’ve already seen Paris!”—anticipated decades of marital disconnects.⁷

Though Edward shared Mollie’s Irish Catholicism, he brought to their alliance a decidedly different range of references. A southerner born near Rockville, Maryland, in 1853, he was weaned on memories of the Confederate Lost Cause and seemed ill suited to the land of Yankee capitalism, to which—first in Chicago and subsequently in St. Paul—the postwar boom brought him. His maternal roots, the Scott side, ran deep into the American past and gave him a vicarious glory that no amount of McQuillan money could buy. Scott Fitzgerald picked up on these ancestral cues and sported with Philip Francis’s “grubby” merchant roots in his first novel, This Side of Paradise. In it, a hitherto-admired Princetonian’s stock drops after a classmate reveals an ugly secret: “if you want to know the shocking truth, his father was a grocery clerk.”⁸ The Fitzgeralds, by contrast, could point proudly to generations of civic service in colonial legislatures and governors’ assemblies. The most famous branch of the family tree led to Francis Scott Key, the author of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and brother to Edward’s great-great-grandfather. And, adding notoriety, the ill-fated Mary Surratt, convicted and hanged in the summer of 1865 for taking part in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, was mother-in-law to Edward’s first cousin.

Edward himself could claim a personal rendezvous with American history, which, if not on the inflated order of Grant, was still worth the making of several stirring bedtime stories. Though border-state Maryland remained in the Union, its loyalties were divided. The southern and eastern parts of the state were tied to a tobacco and slavery economy and favored joining the new Confederate government; the northern and western areas were typically pro-Union. In the 1860 presidential election, Maryland had given its eight electoral votes to Kentucky’s John C. Breckenridge, the candidate of the southern Democratic coalition that had formed that summer and split the Democratic Party in half. Lincoln, by contrast, carried less than 3 percent of the state’s popular vote. An alleged February 1861 plot to assassinate the president-elect in Baltimore forced Lincoln to take the precautionary measure of traveling through the city unannounced in the dead of night—critics called him a coward. Three months later, a thousand federal soldiers under General Benjamin F. Butler occupied Federal Hill overlooking Baltimore and arrested the city’s mayor and police commissioner. Martial law was declared, and by that summer, Union power was asserted throughout the state. Edward’s adolescent sympathies, along with much of the Rockville / Montgomery County area, were with the South. At the age of nine, in the first full year of the Civil War, he had rowed Confederate spies across the Potomac. He subsequently helped a member of Mosby’s Raiders—the famed Forty-Third Battalion, First Virginia Calvary, led by John Singleton Mosby—avoid arrest. And he cheered on Jubal Early’s army as it drove off Union forces at the Battle of Monocacy just outside of Frederick (July 1864) and proceeded to march on nearby Washington before meeting stiff resistance at Fort Stevens and retreating. In weighing this paternal impact, Scott Fitzgerald was later to write, “so many legends of my family went west with father.”⁹

Courtly, deferential, and distinguished by a neatly sculpted Vandyke beard, Edward fairly trailed clouds of faded southern glory. A cultural conservative indifferent to the businessman’s perspective, he had chivalric manners that were conspicuously dated in the dawning age of machines. Marriage to Mollie inspired no Philip Francis–like success on his part; if anything, Edward seemed silently, stubbornly proud of his inability to make money. Faintly indolent and temperamentally unsuited for St. Paul’s bustle and vigor, he tried his luck in upstate New York (1898–1908) before finally falling into a permanent occupational paralysis. Eventually given a sinecure by the McQuillans (an office with no duties), he came to resent his in-laws; humiliated, he chalked up his penury to a superior aristocratic sensibility.

In June 1896, the Fitzgeralds cruelly lost their two young daughters, Mary and Louise, to an epidemic. Heartbroken, Edward wrote his mother, “I wonder sometimes if I will ever have any interest in life again. Perhaps so but certainly the keen zest of enjoyment is gone forever.” Three months later, on 24 September, his son, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, was born. The deaths, though never brought up, seemed in some firm if incommunicable way to set in motion the new child’s “intricate destiny.” Certain suggestions, feelings, and intangibles were conveyed in Mollie’s pain. “[Shortly] before I was born,” Fitzgerald later recalled, “my mother lost her other two children and I think that came first of all though I don’t know how it worked exactly. I think I started then to be a writer.”¹⁰

As if to compensate for both the deaths of Mary and Louise and the embarrassment of Edward’s inertia, Mollie lavished a mother’s love on her son. Much to Fit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction: Clio and Scott
• Part I: Beginnings, 1896–1920
• Part II: Building Up, 1920–1925
• Part III: Breaking Down, 1925–1940
• Part IV: Ghosts and Legends, 1940 and After
• Illustrations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index