Fitzgerald and Hemingway

Works and Days

Scott Donaldson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780231519786
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway might have been contemporaries, but our understanding of their work often rests on simple differences. Hemingway wrestled with war, fraternity, and the violence of nature. Fitzgerald satirized money and class and the never-ending pursuit of a material tomorrow. Through the provocative arguments of Scott Donaldson, however, the affinities between these two authors become brilliantly clear. The result is a reorientation of how we read twentieth-century American literature.

Known for his penetrating studies of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Donaldson traces the creative genius of these authors and the surprising overlaps among their works. Fitzgerald and Hemingway both wrote fiction out of their experiences rather than about them. Therefore Donaldson pursues both biography and criticism in these essays, with a deep commitment to close reading. He traces the influence of celebrity culture on the legacies of both writers, matches an analysis of Hemingway's Spanish Civil War writings to a treatment of Fitzgerald's left-leaning tendencies, and contrasts the averted gaze in Hemingway's fiction with the role of possessions in The Great Gatsby. He devotes several essays to four novels, Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms, and others to lesser-known short stories. Based on years of research in the Fitzgerald and Hemingway archives and brimming with Donaldson's trademark wit and insight, this irresistible anthology moves the study of American literature in bold new directions.

PART I

THE SEARCH FOR HOME

1

ST. PAUL BOY

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It needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion.

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—HENRY JAMES, HAWTHORNE

I

A good deal has been made of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s hometown by commentators on his work, but the fact is that he spent precious little time there. He was born in St. Paul in September 1896 and left eighteen months later. The next decade was spent in Buffalo and in Syracuse. The Fitzgeralds did not return to St. Paul until the summer of 1908, shortly before Scott’s twelfth birthday. From 1908 to 1911 the family lived in St. Paul, and Scott attended St. Paul Academy. Then he was sent east, first to the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey, and afterward to Princeton. During this period (1911 through 1917) Fitzgerald ordinarily spent his summers and Christmas vacations in St. Paul. This was followed by a two-year absence during his service in the U.S. Army and his brief career in the advertising business in New York. Fitzgerald did not come back to St. Paul until the summer of 1919, when he rewrote This Side of Paradise (1920) in a burst of activity and so won the hand of Zelda Sayre. He and Zelda stayed in the East after they were married in New York in the spring of 1920, but when their child was to be born, they “played safe and went home to St. Paul.” Scott and Zelda arrived in August 1921. Scottie was born in October. A year later they left the city permanently.

After infancy, then, Scott Fitzgerald lived in St. Paul for three years during prep school, half a dozen summers thereafter, nine months in 1916 and 1917 when he was sent home from Princeton for academic reasons, nine months in 1919 and 1920, and fourteen months in 1921 and 1922: about ten years, altogether. In one sense, of course, the amount of time is immaterial. Scott Fitzgerald’s mother’s family was based in St. Paul; his father moved there to seek his fortune; he himself was born there. Stay away as he assuredly did for the last half of his life, St. Paul was always the place he came from. But there is more to it than that. The city itself, his family’s position within its particular social structure, and his interaction with others there played an essential role in shaping his life and career.

St. Paul had its unprepossessing start in 1837, when the Canadian Pierre (“Pigs Eye”) Parrant built the first birch-roofed cabin, uncorked his jug, and began to sell whiskey to the Indians. The town grew rapidly, in good part because of its location at the head of navigation on the Mississippi River. By the late nineteenth century St. Paul had become a thriving community that inspired the admiration of famous visitors.

In Life on the Mississippi (1883), Mark Twain declared it to be a “wonderful town” constructed in “solid blocks of honest brick and stone” and having “the air of intending to stay.” The Mississippi and the railroads made it an ideal site for commerce, and like most outsiders Twain was struck by the physical beauty of the place, its high bluffs offering a wide view of the river and the lowlands. Twain also celebrated the growth of the bustling twin city of Minneapolis on the western side of the Mississippi, which though developed later than St. Paul had already surpassed it in population. And he called special attention to White Bear Lake, which was to play an important role in Fitzgerald’s early life. White Bear had “a lovely sheet of water, and is being utilized as a summer resort by the wealth and fashion of the state,” Twain observed. There were several summer resorts around St. Paul and Minneapolis, he went on, but White Bear Lake was “the resort” (486–93).

Twain’s contemporary Charles Dudley Warner—they were coauthors of The Gilded Age (1873)—also singled out St. Paul for praise. St. Paul and Minneapolis were both fast-growing cities inhabited by handsome, vigorous, and active people, he reported in a March 1887 article for Harper’s Magazine, but he preferred St. Paul because of its picturesque location on the bluffs. Warner was especially impressed by Summit Avenue, another setting that was to play a significant role in Scott Fitzgerald’s life. Located high above the city and offering splendid views of the winding river below, Summit was “almost literally a street of palaces” (qtd. in Castle, History of St. Paul, 126–28).

It may be that Edward Fitzgerald, who was born in Maryland and descended from some of its oldest colonial families, read these or other encomiums about St. Paul and so decided to move there. At any rate, he journeyed west to join the flood of newcomers that tripled the population between 1880 and 1895. He married St. Paul’s Mary (Mollie) McQuillan in 1890. Mollie was the eldest child of Philip Francis (P. F.) and Louisa McQuillan. An immigrant from Ireland, P. F. came upriver to St. Paul from Galena, Illinois, in 1857 and launched a successful wholesale grocery business. When he died twenty years later, at forty-three, he left behind a fortune of more than $250,000.

Mollie was twenty-nine and Edward thirty-seven at the time of their marriage. They had two little girls in the first few years, but both of them died in an 1896 epidemic even while Mollie was pregnant with her only son. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, named for a distant relative on his father’s side of the family, was born September 24, 1896, and assumed the burdens of the replacement child. Much was expected of him. He was, in effect, to make up for the loss of his dead older sisters (Martin, “Biography and Humanity,” 53–54). Scott’s mother overprotected her baby boy and became “half insane with pathological, nervous worry” at the least hint of illness. Even after Scott was joined by his sister Annabel in 1901, she continued to pamper and spoil her clever and handsome son.

Mollie “just missed being beautiful,” her husband once said, but that was Southern gallantry. In photographs she faces the camera with a forbiddingly dark gaze and looks somewhat dowdy. She seemed to one of Scott’s contemporaries to have “worn the same dress all her life.” Sometimes her shoes did not match. When she walked to daily mass, she invariably carried an umbrella and wore a gloomy countenance. Aside from church-related functions, she and her husband had little involvement in the social life of the community. In his first novel Fitzgerald invented a mother for his autobiographical hero who in her elegance and charm stood sharply in opposition to his own mother. But at least he usually provided his fictional characters with mothers. Often they are given no fathers at all.

Along with good looks and good manners, Edward Fitzgerald bequeathed to his son a taste for romantic poetry and lost causes. Born near Rockville, Maryland, in 1855, he glorified the Confederacy in stories he told about the Civil War. Scott, who delighted in these yarns, admired his father’s graceful ways. But Edward lacked the drive required to achieve success and, apparently, was an alcoholic. In St. Paul he started a business manufacturing wicker furniture, the American Rattan and Willow Works, a venture that failed in the wake of the panic of 1897. Edward then took a position with Procter and Gamble that moved the family to Buffalo and Syracuse. He lost his job in the spring of 1908, traumatizing young Scott.

“Please don’t let us go to the poor-house,” he prayed (Turnbull, Fitzgerald, 17), but there was no danger of that. Instead the Fitzgeralds limped back to St. Paul to live on the largesse of the McQuillans. His father was given a desk and a title in the family business but nothing much to do. At fifty-five, Edward Fitzgerald was a defeated man.

Scott Fitzgerald was thus burdened with a father who had twice failed in business and an eccentric mother who, despite her inheritance, did not move comfortably in the social circles she yearned for her children to occupy. In an often-quoted letter to John O’Hara in 1933, Fitzgerald summed up his situation: “I am half black Irish and half old American stock with the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions. The black Irish half of the family had the money and looked down upon the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had, that certain series of reticences and obligations that go under the poor old shattered word ‘breeding.’” As a result, he “developed a two-cylinder inferiority complex.” If he became king of Scotland tomorrow, Fitzgerald insisted, he “would still be a parvenu” (Letters, 503).

In F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction, Brian Way links Fitzgerald with Henry James and Edith Wharton as keenly observant “historians of manners” who wrote “social fiction” (vii–viii). That social class matters is a dirty little secret many Americans are inclined to deny. Motivated by democratic sentiments and the myth that in this nation more than anywhere else on earth it is not only possible but nearly obligatory to make one’s way from rags to riches—hence realizing the American dream—we tell one another that there are no significant barriers between the classes. Fitzgerald knew better, for unlike the wellborn Wharton and James and some of the English novelists who created the novel of manners, he had looked around him, seen the social barriers, and tried to surmount them.

Some interpreters of Fitzgerald’s life and work maintain that “the McQuillan family and their grandson [Scott] Fitzgerald were very much insiders, a part of St. Paul society.” By way of evidence they cite the McQuillans’ generous contributions to the Catholic Church and the fact that Mollie’s younger sister was maid of honor at the wedding of the daughter of railroad tycoon James J. Hill. P. F McQuillan was indeed a substantial benefactor of the Catholic Church. He participated in the group that brought the Sisters of the Visitation from St. Louis to St. Paul. Mollie and her sisters attended the school these nuns founded, and so did Scott’s sister Annabel. Later Mollie showed off her son at the Convent of the Visitation, bringing him along to recite poetry and sing songs for the nuns. So extensive was the family’s support that when Scott and Zelda went to Europe in the spring of 1921, Archbishop Dowling of St. Paul tried to arrange an audience with the pope. “None have merited more of the Church in this city” than the McQuillans, he wrote (Hackl, “Still Home to Me,” 14–15, 62–63).

This evidence seems impressive but depends entirely on the prominence of the McQuillans among the city’s lace-curtain Irish families. Scott himself was hardly impressed. He described his mother’s family as “straight 1850 potato famine Irish” (qtd. in Mizener, Far Side of Paradise, 4) and therefore at a significant remove from the top of St. Paul’s social hierarchy. Few Irish Catholics were among Scott’s boyhood companions. Some of his friends believed that Catholics were plotting to overthrow the government. Scott and other boys who lived atop the bluffs fought mock battles with the “micks” from Lower Town, descendants of the Irish immigrants.

In The Far Side of Paradise (1951), the first biography of Fitzgerald, Arthur Mizener discoursed upon the makeup of St. Paul in the early years of the twentieth century. The city at that time, he wrote, had both “a great deal of the simple and quite unselfconscious democracy of the old middle-western cities” and “its wealth and its inherited New England sense of order. The best people in St. Paul are admirable and attractive people, but they are, in their quiet way, clearly the best people. They do not forget their Maine or Connecticut ‘connection’: they send their children to Hotchkiss or Hill or Westover, to Yale or Princeton, to be educated; they are, without ostentation or affectation, cosmopolitan” (16). Mizener’s comments may grate against democratic sensibilities; the remark about “the best people,” in particular, sounds offensively snobbish. But that does not mean that he was wrong about St. Paul.

In several observations of his own, Fitzgerald described in detail that “sense of order” Mizener observed. St. Paul felt “a little superior” to such other Midwestern cities as Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Milwaukee, Fitzgerald wrote in reviewing Grace Flandrau’s novel Being Respectable (1923). The other cities were but two generations old, while St. Paul was a “three generation” town: more settled, more conservative, more “complacent” (Flandrau’s word) than the brash and bustling younger cities. It also was significantly more eastern in its outlook. In the 1850s, Fitzgerald points out, the climate of St. Paul was reputed to be exceptionally healthy, and consequently “there arrived an element from the East who had both money and fashionable education. These Easterners mingled with the rising German and Irish stock, whose second generation left the cobbler’s last, forgot the steerage, and became passionately ‘swell’ on its own account. But the pace was set by the tubercular Easterners” (qtd. in Miscellany, 141).

Five years later Fitzgerald elaborated on the social structure established by these settlers:

There were the two or three nationally known families—outside of them rather than below them the hierarchy began. At the top came those whose grandparents had brought something with them from the East, a vestige of money and culture; then came the families of the big self-made merchants, the “old settlers” of the sixties and seventies, American-English-Scotch, or German or Irish, looking down upon each other somewhat in the order named…. After this came certain well-to-do “new people”—mysterious, out of a cloudy past, possibly unsound.

Like so many structures, Fitzgerald concludes, “this one did not survive the cataract of money that came tumbling down upon it with the war.” But it was he hierarchy in place during his prep school and college years when he sought to climb his way up the ladder. Fitzgerald understood precisely where he belonged: on his mother’s side among the respectable Irish “old settlers” who were generally looked down upon both by the cultured Easterners and by the Scotch-English and the Germans, and, on his father’s side, at best among the “possibly unsound” newcomers (qtd. in Donaldson, Fool for Love, 10–11).

The Fitzgeralds’ position in this hierarchy was nicely symbolized by their places of residence. Scott was born in an apartment at the San Mateo Flats, 481 Laurel Avenue, a short walk from Summit Avenue. The next year, his grandmother Louisa McQuillan built a substantial (if not particularly imposing) home on Summit, but she sold it two years later. When the Fitzgeralds returned to the city from Buffalo in 1908, Scott and his sister Annabel moved in with their grandmother at 294 Laurel. During the succeeding decade, the family occupied at least five different domiciles, the first three of them on Holly Avenue, like Laurel close to “the Summit Avenue area,” or “the Summit Avenue section,” or “the Summit Avenue neighborhood,” as biographers have termed it. But not on Summit itself.

As the St. Paul historian John J. Koblas observes, these various homes—all of them within a twelve-square-block area near Summit—offered young Scott “the relative stability of residing within a single definable community and having a secure circle of friends.” But at the same time the boy could not help being conscious of his family’s precarious position as renters rather than owners of homes, living on the fringes of St. Paul’s best street. His multiple residences differentiated him from that circle of friends who grew up, like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, in a community “where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name” (Fitzgerald in Minnesota, 184).

According to one architectural historian, “St. Paul’s Summit Avenue stands as the best-preserved American example of the Victorian monumental residential boulevard.” Blight and economic downturns have diminished its luster, but Summit remains the city’s “high street”: characteristically a street rising above the rest of the community, both in physical location and in social stature (Donaldson, Fool for Love, 12–13). Electric trolleys and a tunnel made the elevated setting available for building in the 1880s, when the empire builder James J. Hill (greatly admired by Jay Gatsby’s father and by Rudolph Miller’s father in the story “Absolution”) built his mansion near the eastern end of the avenue. Other leading families followed suit (Hackl, “Still Home to Me,” 50–51). By the time Fitzgerald was born, Summit Avenue ruled.

A character in Being Respectable takes a Sunday-afternoon walk along the most fashionable stretch of Summit, strolling unhurriedly up one side “past the opulent houses he knew so well” and down the other side “past more opulent houses he knew equally well.” Between the houses on the south side, “sudden dreamy prospects” of the gray, winding river came into his view, “composed” by the walls of the houses and the trees. In the little park at Summit and Western, he sat and looked for a long time at the river and the green pastures and groves of trees beyond. Then it grew dark and the lights came out: “sparkling yellow stars in the gray,” moving lights on the river, and the bridges like “necklaces, glittering tenderly.” Thus did the novelist Grace Flandrau, Fitzgerald’s friend and also a native of St. Paul, celebrate her city’s most elegant street (18–19). There is no closely comparable passage in Fitzgerald’s writing, although in “Winter Dreams” his character Dexter Green waxes rhapsodic about Judy Jones’s home one summer night (the street, given no name, is undoubtedly Summit Avenue): “The dark street lightened, the dwellings of the rich loomed up around them, he stopped his coupe in front of the great white bulk of the Mortimer Joneses house, somnolent, gorgeous, drenched with the splendor of the damp moonlight. Its solidity startled him” (Short Stories, 232).

The mansion’s solidity, Dexter explains, presented a striking contrast to Judy’s young beauty, its sturdiness accentuating her slightness and, perhaps, the fragility of the dream he has invested in her. The Jones house, like Nick Carraway’s, was a dwelling as assuredly permanent as the Fitzgeralds’ serial domiciles were shakily temporary. Edward and Mollie Fitzgerald finally did achieve an address on Summit Avenue, first moving into a brownstone-front row house at 593 Summit in 1915, and then to 599 Summit in 1918, the house where Scott rewrote This Side of Paradise. The house at 599 Summit has been officially designated a National Historical Landmark, though as landmarks go, this one has singularly little to do with the famous figure associated with it. He lived there less than a year. Moreover, it was a rented house—neither Scott nor his father ever owned a home of his own—and a row house rather than one of the sprawling free-standing houses that dominated the avenue. When he wrote Alida Bigelow the news that Scribner’s had accepted his novel for publication, he headed the letter

(599 Summit Avenue)

In a house below the average

Of a street above the average

In a room below the roof.

(QTD. IN DONALDSON, FOOL FOR LOVE, 13)

That there was never to be a “Fitzgerald house” in St. Paul set Scott and Annabel apart from their companions. So did his family’s lack of a ...