I'd Die For You

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “Maryland, my Maryland”/“Maryland-My-Maryland”: James Ryder Randall (1839–1908) wrote “Maryland, My Maryland” in 1861 and his poem was quickly set to music. It became the state song of Maryland in 1939, despite its pro-Southern theme and lyrics like “the despot’s heel is on thy shore” and “Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!”

  “one of the real Napoleons”/“a real Bonaparte”: Fitzgerald may have had in mind a prominent Baltimore family, that of Jerome-Napoleon Bonaparte (1805–1870), as he created this character. The cousin of Emperor Napoleon III, “Bo” was a plantation owner and local celebrity, and his son Charles Joseph Bonaparte (1851–1921) was President Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of the navy and attorney general. Scribner published a biography of him by Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Charles Joseph Bonaparte: His Life and Public Services, in 1922.

  wide white Cordoba: A sombrero cordobés, or sombrero.

  “that Libby Prison”: Occupying an old warehouse space on the banks of the James River in Richmond, Virginia—the Confederacy’s capital—Libby was one of the two principal prisons for Union prisoners of war. It was a horrible, overcrowded, and notorious place by 1864, with a high mortality rate for those incarcerated there.

  “ ‘Lynchburg, thy guardsmen’ ”: Since its founding in 1757, Lynchburg, which is in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, has been known alternately as “the Hill City” or—invoking classical Rome—“the City of Seven Hills.”

  Mason-Dixon line: Charles Mason (1728–1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733–1779), two English-born astronomers and surveyors, agreed in 1763 to assist in a border dispute between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland. The line they surveyed between 1763 and 1767 runs along the bottom of Pennsylvania and the top of Maryland, making a right angle and turning south to mark the boundary line between the counties of Maryland’s Eastern Shore and the state of Delaware. The Mason-Dixon Line was an informal boundary during the Civil War indicating the divide between North and South.

  “Seventh Virginia Cavalry”: “Ashby’s Cavalry,” a large regiment of cavalry, and infantry, commanded by Turner Ashby until his death in battle in 1862. After Ashby’s death, Captain, later Colonel, Richard Henry Dulany of Loudon County, Virginia, took command of the Seventh. Fitzgerald gives his surname to Tib.

  “hang them up by their thumbs”: This was indeed done during the Civil War by both sides, and even inflicted by some officers upon their own men as punishment for stealing or attempted desertion.

  “follow the feather”: Confederate cavalry commanders favored a Cavalier-style plume in the hat as well. Mosby could find an ostrich feather for a fancy occasion, like one of his officers’ weddings in December 1864, but he customarily wore either a white or a black feather. The song Tib is singing, “Riding a Raid,” to the tune of “Bonnie Dundee,” initially extolled J. E. B. Stuart. Tib changes the lyrics for his own commander, Mosby.

  NOTES SPECIFIC TO “THUMBS UP”

  hoop slipped from its seam: By 1867, hoopskirts, or crinolines, were generally made of rings of cloth-covered steel joined by cloth tapes. Here, one of the lower rings has freed itself of its mooring and tripped Josie.

  “Paquebot Rochambeau”: A packet-boat, originally a ship running a regular route and carrying mail, was by this time a passenger ship. Jean-Baptiste, Comte de Rochambeau (1725–1807), was a French nobleman and military commander who fought with George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette against the British army during America’s Revolutionary War.

  “the great Doctor Evans”: Thomas Evans (1823–1897) was born in Philadelphia, and was one of the first dentists to use gold leaf in filling teeth. In 1848, he moved to Paris under the patronage of the emperor, became extremely wealthy, and was made a grand commander of the Légion d’Honneur, among many titles awarded him. During the Franco-Prussian War, as Paris fell in early September 1870, Evans helped Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, escape from Paris to Deauville and thence to England.

  “here you have For a United Ireland”: This slogan refers to the United Irishmen movement of the 1790s, which culminated in the French-supported Rising of 1798 and defeat by the British.

  “and The Friends of the Freedman”: Freedmen, which is to say freed slaves, were assisted after the Civil War by the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, established in 1865 and commonly called the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Bureau lasted only until 1872, when it lost its funding and was closed down in the backlash to Reconstruction. That this medal is not gold but “a bottle top” is a critical note on the lip service, too infrequently backed up with real help, given to freed slaves after the war.

  “Here you’ve got United Veterans of the Mexican War”: The Mexican War (1846–1848) was fought after the American annexation of the Republic of Texas in 1845.

  “This says, The Legion of Honor, Private George Aiken”: Fitzgerald is perhaps conflating here George Aiken, the nineteenth-century dramatist who wrote the stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Wyatt Aiken, a Confederate officer who commanded the Seventh South Carolina Infantry and whose unit suffered heavy losses at Gettysburg. “For Valor Extraordinary” is Fitzgerald’s own language, and echoes the words inscribed on the medal Jay Gatsby says he was awarded by Montenegro.

  “the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Danville News and the Lynchburg Courier”: Three Virginia newspapers.

  “Prussian government”: The Franco-Prussian War began in July 1870. Here we see a preview.

  the Empress: Empress Eugénie of France and wife of Emperor Napoleon III (1826–1920). The daughter of a Spanish count and his half-Scottish wife, she was educated in Paris and married Louis-Napoléon in 1853. After the overthrow of government outlined in this story, during which she did indeed flee Paris from Deauville in the company of Dr. Evans, Eugénie, her husband, and their only child settled in England. Their son, Napoléon, was killed at age twenty-three, in 1879, while serving with British troops in the Anglo-Zulu War in South Africa.

  new Marie Antoinette: Tib has wondered if, as he watched the crowd passing the Tuileries, the empress would be tried by revolutionaries and guillotined, as Marie Antoinette was in 1793. It is not an idle wonder; the fall of the Deuxième Empire after the emperor’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War culminated, in Paris, in street sieges and a second Paris Commune. The Communards set fire to the Tuileries in May 1871 and burned it, and the library of the adjacent Louvre, to the bare walls.

  “taking to Trouville”: A resort town on the sea in Normandy.

  Porte Maillot: One of Paris’s ancient city gates, and the route for exiting the city to the northwest, heading for the English Channel.

  Ile-de-France: One of France’s eighteen regions, which includes the city of Paris.

  belonged to Sir John Burgoyne: Sir John Fox Burgoyne (1782–1871) was a British army officer. His father was the playwright, bon vivant, and army general “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, who lost the Battles of Saratoga to American troops under Benedict Arnold during the Revolutionary War.

  louis d’or: Gold coins, minted before the French Revolution, though the term was loosely applied to those circulating in France and struck during the Empires.

  NOTES SPECIFIC TO “DENTIST APPOINTMENT”

  autumn of 1866: Many people came to Minnesota in 1866, in a boom of settlement that followed a treaty with the Bois Forte Band of the Chippewa tribe. Gold was thought to have been discovered on Native American lands and the treaty was designed to let miners in; the gold proved to be pyrite, but settlers stayed. The capital of the Minnesota Territory since 1849, Saint Paul remained the capital when Minnesota was granted statehood in 1858. After the Civil War, the city’s location on the Mississippi River as a northern terminal point for steamships earned it the nickname “The Last City of the East.” Minneapolis, the new boom town across the river, began its swift growth in 1867. Minnesota’s air is “unpolluted,” in Dr. Pilgrim’s eyes, because, unlike many northern states in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it never had sl
avery.

  two red-headed twins: This recalls directly Margaret Mitchell’s Tarleton twins in Gone With the Wind (1936), one of Scottie Fitzgerald’s—and countless other American girls’—favorite books at the time.

  “tear our fences down”: The ongoing “Dakota conflict” and “Sioux uprising” went on between settlers and these two Native American tribes during and after the Civil War. Cattlemen and farmers fencing land that had been open range for the Indians, who had lived on the plains, was a major point of conflict. In 1862, white settlers were massacred, and Indian warriors hanged in reprisals. In 1863, Congress ordered the removal of all Sioux in Minnesota to reservations downriver. The conflict would not be settled until 1890, if then, at the horrific slaughter of Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota.

  “OFFSIDE PLAY”

  Yale Bowl: The Yale College football stadium opened November 21, 1914, with a game against Harvard. It is literally a bowl, with its top tiers spilling out into a green bank dotted with trees. In October 1915, Fitzgerald took Ginevra King, a wealthy Chicago debutante who was at the Westover School and who was the inspiration for many female characters in his fiction, to the Princeton-Yale game at the Bowl. The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King, His First Love, by James L. W. West III, includes entries from Ginevra’s diary about their romance—and attending the football game. By 1916, Ginevra was over him; she and a fellow prep-school girl came down to Princeton for the Princeton-Yale game, but then ditched Fitzgerald and another Princeton student, who had escorted them back to New York, for two Yalies in Grand Central Terminal.

  “that little guard Van Kamp”: The name owes a debt to Walter Chauncey Camp (1859–1925), one of the founding fathers of football. He played—as a 156-pound halfback—and coached at Yale, where the Yale Bulldogs had a record of sixty-seven wins and two losses with him at the helm. Hubert Van Kamp is a character in Samuel R. Crockett’s novel Hal O’ the Ironsides (1914), which was popular in Fitzgerald’s youth.

  the Grand Central: The Grand Central Terminal station at Forty-Second Street and Park Avenue in New York, the principal terminus for commuter trains arriving in New York from the north and east, opened in 1903. In 1943, Scottie Fitzgerald would become engaged to Princeton graduate and U.S. Navy officer Samuel Jackson “Jack” Lanahan (1918–1998) under the “Biltmore clock” in the Hotel Biltmore, adjoining the station. Zelda painted one of her brightest New York scenes, Scottie and Jack Grand Central Time, to commemorate their engagement.

  “Gone” or “Lost”: Both popular songs of 1936. “Gone” was composed by Franz Waxman, with lyrics by Gus Kahn; “Lost” was composed by Phil Ohman, with lyrics by Macy O. Teetor and Johnny Mercer. “Gone” was in part a hit because it was used in the soundtrack of Love on the Run, starring Clark Gable and Joan Crawford. In Chapter 1 of The Love of the Last Tycoon, a drunken passenger waiting at the Nashville airport “put two nickels in the electric phonograph and lay alcoholically on a bench fighting off sleep. The first song he had chosen, ‘Lost,’ thundered through the room, followed, after a slight interval, by his other choice, ‘Gone,’ which was equally dogmatic and final.” He is not allowed on the plane, and Cecilia Brady pities him: “The drunk sat up, awful looking, yet discernibly attractive, and I was sorry for him in spite of his passionately ill-chosen music.” In Chapter 5, Cecilia and Wylie drive up Laurel Canyon with “either ‘Gone’ or ‘Lost’ ” on the radio. However, “ ‘Lost’ and ‘Gone’ were the wrong mood, so I turned again and got ‘Lovely to Look At,’ which was my kind of poetry.”

  “Goody-Goody”: See note to “The Pearl and the Fur” on page 342.

  “list of names”: Fitzgerald was making a list of the names of football players, past and present, in the margins of a Princeton Alumni Weekly story by Gilbert Lea (1912–2008), a football All-American at Princeton, when he died on December 21, 1940. The very last words he ever wrote are scribbled next to a paragraph of the story he had circled: “good prose.”

  “the Taft”: The Hotel Taft opened on New Year’s Day, 1912. Former president William Howard Taft was among the notables living, and staying, at the hotel. From 1920 to 1933 (the years of Prohibition), the Taft boasted one of New Haven’s most popular speakeasies in its basement. Since the early 1980s, it has been an apartment building.

  Little Lord Fauntleroy: Cedric Errol, the child of an English nobleman and an American woman, is the title character of this children’s novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924) serialized from 1885 to 1886 in St. Nicholas Magazine. Reginald Birch (1856–1943) created the illustrations that started a fin-de-siècle fad for mothers—clearly including Mr. Gittings’, who has given her son Little Lord Fauntleroy’s name—curling their sons’ hair and dressing them in Renaissance-styled velvet suits with wide lace collars.

  expedition in Crete: Through the 1920s and 1930s the discoveries made at Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941) about Mycenaean civilization made headlines around the world.

  the Dartmouth game: In November 1935, Princeton beat Dartmouth 26–6 in a blizzard at home, in the “Snow Game,” on the Tigers’ way to an undefeated national championship. That same year, Yale beat Harvard in Cambridge—though the 47,000 fans present sat through only “intermittent snow flurries.” When he was on the East Coast during football season, Fitzgerald regularly attended Princeton football games; however, in the fall of 1935 he was in North Carolina.

  Sachem Tea House: Sachem Street in New Haven was in the 1930s a street of little shops and residences, anchored by the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

  “Philo Vances”: Philo Vance is a dapper New York detective who solves murder mysteries in twelve novels by Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939), writing as S. S. Van Dine. He was created in 1926, and is much akin to his more famous English contemporary Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy Sayers’s amateur detective, who is also a passionate art historian, polo player, and classicist.

  “Hercule Poirots”: The celebrated Belgian policeman and detective created by Agatha Christie (1890–1976). Poirot has appeared in novels, short stories, a play, and television and film adaptations from 1920 until the present (despite his death in 1949, in Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case).

  parlor car . . . “day coach”: Parlor cars were popular, particularly on the business routes of the Northeast Corridor, among those who could afford seats there. Day coaches were unreserved, coach-class cars.

  “Harvard Club”: At 27 West Forty-Fourth Street in New York. The main clubhouse, designed by McKim, Mead & White, opened in 1894. A doorman would have had to take Considine a note, as women were not allowed in most rooms of the Club in the 1930s, and long thereafter.

  A truck marked Harvard Crimson: Begun as the Harvard Magenta in 1873, the Crimson is the oldest continuously published college daily paper in the United States.

  “Ted Coy”: Edward Harris Coy (1888–1935), who died at forty-seven in September 1935, was a three-time All-American fullback for Yale from 1906 to 1909, and a boyhood hero of Fitzgerald’s. In 1933, he filed for bankruptcy. After his death, his widow pawned a gold medallion, a gold football, a Yale Skull and Bones Society badge, and a wedding ring set with emeralds. Lottie Coy, who was working in a kitchen, was asked why she had pawned the items. “I haven’t any money, that’s the Simon Simple answer to this,” was her reply. Skull and Bones redeemed the items and had them sent to New Haven. Ted Fay, in Fitzgerald’s story “The Freshest Boy” (1928), is based in part on Coy.

  “THE WOMEN IN THE HOUSE” (“TEMPERATURE”)

  “No reference to any living character”: This qualifier, or, as Fitzgerald rightly terms it, dodge, came into being in Hollywood. In 1932, the studio for which Fitzgerald would principally work, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, released Rasputin and the Empress, a vehicle for the three Barrymore siblings, John, Lionel, and Ethel. In it Prince Paul (John Barrymore), based on Prince Felix Yusupov, murders Rasputin, who is intimated to have seduced or sexually assaulted Paul’s fiancée, Princess Natasha. Felix did
indeed murder Rasputin, and bragged about the fact, but there is no evidence that the movie subplot involving “Natasha” was true. Yusupov and his wife sued MGM for invasion of privacy and libel, and in 1934 were awarded £20,000 by an English court. MGM settled out of court in New York for a further $250,000, and movies—and many novels—have included the disclaimer ever since.

  the pictorials: Magazines and newspapers in which the pictures were of more importance and given more room than text. In the 1930s, major newspapers like the New York Times ran “Pictorials” that survive today as weekend magazine sections. The film and celebrity fan magazine Photoplay was one of the top pictorials in the world in 1939; Fitzgerald’s lover during his last Hollywood days, Sheilah Graham, occasionally wrote for it.

  Omigis: There is no such island chain. However, as Monsen is returning to Los Angeles on a ship with a made-up Japanese name, he may be coming from the Omi-jima (today Oumi or Omi) Island area on the southwestern coast of Japan’s Honshu Island.

  electro-cardiograph: Designed to record the heartbeat and cardiovascular disorders. Willem Einthoven (1860–1927) won a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1924 for his invention of the first practical electrocardiogram machine; by 1937, there were portable ones.

  the country estate of young Carlos Davis: In November 1938, Fitzgerald moved into a cottage on the four-acre Encino, California, estate of the actor Edward Everett Horton (1886–1970). The estate, Belleigh Acres or, locally, “Belly Acres,” contained a main house and two guesthouses. Fitzgerald lived in one of these until 1940. Horton was a Brooklyn-born vaudevillian and a character actor who had great success in Hollywood in the 1930s, most notably in a series of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, including The Gay Divorcee (1934) and Top Hat (1935)—movies that Scottie Fitzgerald loved. Horton’s partner of many years was the actor Gavin Gordon. Fitzgerald seems to be having fun here with Carlos Davis’s sexuality, from the “affectations ascribed to him” and his “extraordinary personal beauty” to his status as “the maiden’s prayer,” which may come from his observations of Horton and Gordon.