The Last Tycoon

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  September 1914 and the beginning of Fitzgerald’s sophomore year would mark the great calamity of his Princeton education, causing a trauma that Fitzgerald would approach variously in his writing (notably in This Side of Paradise and Gatsby’s abortive “Oxford” career in The Great Gatsby). Poor academic performance meant that Fitzgerald was barred from extra-curricular activities; he was therefore unable to perform in Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi!, and took to the road with the production in an attendant capacity. Fitzgerald’s progress at the Triangle and Cottage clubs stagnated (he made Secretary at Triangle nonetheless, but did not reach the heights he had imagined for himself), and his hopes of social dominance on campus were dashed.

  The second half of the 1914–15 academic year saw a brief improvement and subsequent slipping of Fitzgerald’s performance in classes, perhaps in response to a budding romance with Ginevra King, a sixteen-year-old socialite from Lake Forest, Illinois. Their courtship would continue until January 1917. King would become the model for a series of Fitzgerald’s characters, including Judy Jones in the 1922 short story ‘Winter Dreams’, Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise and, most famously, Daisy Miller in The Great Gatsby. In November 1915 Fitzgerald’s academic career was once again held up when he was diagnosed with malaria (though it is likely that this was in fact the first appearance of the tuberculosis that would sporadically disrupt his health for the rest of his life) and left Princeton for the rest of the semester to recuperate. At the same time as all of this disruption, however, Fitzgerald was building a head of steam in terms of his literary production. Publications during this period included stories, reviews and poems for Princeton’s Nassau Literary Magazine.

  The USA entered the Great War in May 1917 and a week later Fitzgerald joined up, at least partly motivated by the fact that his uncompleted courses at Princeton would automatically receive credits as he signed up. Three weeks of intensive training and the infantry commission exam soon followed, though a commission itself did not immediately materialize. Through the summer he stayed in St Paul, undertaking important readings in William James, Henri Bergson and others, and in the autumn he returned to Princeton (though not to study) and took lodgings with John Biggs Jr, the editor of the Tiger. More contributions appeared in both the Nassau Literary Magazine and the Tiger, but the commission finally came and in November Fitzgerald was off to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was to report as a second lieutenant in the infantry. Convinced that he would die in the war, Fitzgerald began intense work on his first novel, The Romantic Egoist, the first draft of which would be finished while on leave from Kansas in February 1918. The publishing house Charles Scribner’s Sons, despite offering an encouraging appreciation of the novel, rejected successive drafts in August and October 1918.

  As his military training progressed and the army readied Fitzgerald and his men for the fighting in Europe, he was relocated, first to Camp Gordon in Georgia, and then on to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama. There, at a dance at the Montgomery Country Club in July, he met Zelda Sayre, a beautiful eighteen-year-old socialite and daughter of a justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. An intense courtship began and Fitzgerald soon proposed marriage, though Zelda was nervous about marrying a man with so few apparent prospects.

  As the armistice that ended the Great War was signed on 11th November 1918, Fitzgerald was waiting to embark for Europe, and had already been issued with his overseas uniform. The closeness by which he avoided action in the Great War stayed with Fitzgerald, and gave him another trope for his fiction, with many of his characters, Amory Blaine from This Side of Paradise and Jay Gatsby among them, attributed with abortive or ambiguous military careers. Father Fay, who had been involved, and had tried to involve Fitzgerald, in a series of mysterious intelligence operations during the war, died in January 1919, leaving Fitzgerald without a moral guide just as he entered the world free from the restrictions of Princeton and the army. Fay would be the dedicatee of This Side of Paradise.

  Fitzgerald’s first move after the war was to secure gainful employment at Barron Collier, an advertising agency, producing copy for trolley-car advertisements. At night he continued to work hard at his fiction, collecting 112 rejection slips over this period. Relief was close at hand, however, with The Smart Set printing a revised version of ‘Babes in the Wood’ (a short story that had previous appeared in Nassau Literary Magazine and that would soon be cannibalized for This Side of Paradise) in their September 1919 issue. The Smart Set, edited by this time by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, who would both become firm supporters of Fitzgerald’s talent, was a respected literary magazine, but not a high payer; Fitzgerald received $30 for this first appearance. Buoyed by this, and frustrated by his job, Fitzgerald elected to leave work and New York and return to his parents’ house in St Paul, where he would make a concerted effort to finish his novel. As none of the early drafts of The Romantic Egoist survive, it is impossible to say with complete certainty how much of that project was preserved in the draft of This Side of Paradise that emerged at St Paul. It was, at any rate, more attractive to Scribner in its new form, and the editor Maxwell Perkins, who would come to act as both editor and personal banker for Fitzgerald, wrote on 16th September to say that the novel had been accepted. Soon after he would hire Harold Ober to act as his agent, an arrangement that would continue throughout the greatest years of Fitzgerald’s output and that would benefit the author greatly, despite sometimes causing Ober a great deal of difficulty and anxiety. Though Fitzgerald would consider his novels the artistically important part of his work, it would be his short stories, administered by Ober, which would provide the bulk of his income. Throughout his career a regular supply of short stories appeared between his novels, a supply that became more essential and more difficult to maintain as the author grew older.

  Newly confident after the acceptance of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald set about revising a series of his previous stories, securing another four publications in The Smart Set, one in Scribner’s Magazine and one in The Saturday Evening Post, an organ that would prove to be one of the author’s most dependable sources of income for many years to come. By the end of 1919 Fitzgerald had made $879 from writing: not yet a living, but a start. His receipts would quickly increase. Thanks to Ober’s skilful assistance The Saturday Evening Post had taken another six stories by February 1920, at $400 each. In March This Side of Paradise was published and proved to be a surprising success, selling 3,000 in its first three days and making instant celebrities of Fitzgerald and Zelda, who would marry the author on 3rd April, her earlier concerns about her suitor’s solvency apparently eased by his sudden literary success. During the whirl of 1920, the couple’s annus mirabilis, other miraculous portents of a future of plenty included the sale of a story, ‘Head and Shoulders’, to Metro Films for $2,500, the sale of four stories to Metropolitan Magazine for $900 each and the rapid appearance of Flappers and Philosophers, a volume of stories, published by Scribner in September. By the end of the year Fitzgerald, still in his mid-twenties, had moved into an apartment on New York’s West 59th Street and was hard at work on his second novel.

  Zelda discovered she was pregnant in February 1921, and in May the couple headed to Europe where they visited various heroes and attractions, including John Galsworthy. They returned in July to St Paul, where a daughter, Scottie, was born on 26th October. Fitzgerald was working consistently and well at this time, producing a prodigious amount of high-quality material. The Beautiful and Damned, his second novel, was soon ready and began to appear as a serialization in Metropolitan Magazine from September. Its publication in book form would have to wait until March 1922, at which point it received mixed reviews, though Scribner managed to sell 40,000 copies of it in its first year of publication. Once again it would be followed within a few months by a short-story collection, Tales of the Jazz Age, which contained such classics of twentieth-century American literature as ‘May Day’, ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ and ‘The Cu
rious Case of Benjamin Button’.

  1923 saw continued successes and a first failure. Receipts were growing rapidly: the Hearst organization bought first option in Fitzgerald’s stories for $1,500, he sold the film rights for This Side of Paradise for $10,000 and he began selling stories to The Saturday Evening Post for $1,250 each. The Vegetable, on the other hand, a play that he had been working on for some time, opened in Atlantic City and closed almost immediately following poor reviews, losing Fitzgerald money. By the end of the year his income had shot up to $28,759.78, but he had spent more than that on the play and fast living, and found himself in debt as a result.

  The Fitzgeralds’ high living was coming at an even higher price. In an attempt to finish his new project Fitzgerald set out for Europe with Zelda and landed up on the French Riviera, a situation that provided the author with the space and time to make some real progress on his novel. While there, however, Zelda met Édouard Jozan, a French pilot, and began a romantic entanglement that put a heavy strain on her marriage. This scenario has been read by some as influencing the final drafting of The Great Gatsby, notably Gatsby’s disillusionment with Daisy. It would also provide one of the central threads of Tender Is the Night, while Gerald and Sara Murphy, two friends they made on the Riviera, would be models for that novel’s central characters. Throughout 1924 their relations became more difficult, their volatility was expressed through increasingly erratic behaviour and by the end of the year Fitzgerald’s drinking was developing into alcoholism.

  Some progress was made on the novel, however, and a draft was sent to Scribner in October. A period of extensive and crucial revisions followed through January and February 1925, with the novel already at the galley-proof stage. After extensive negotiations with Max Perkins, the new novel also received its final title at about this time. Previous titles had included Trimalchio and Trimalchio in West Egg, both of which Scribner found too obscure for a mass readership, despite Fitzgerald’s preference for them, while Gold-Hatted Gatsby, On the Road to West Egg, The High-Bouncing Lover and Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires were also suggestions. Shortly before the novel was due to be published, Fitzgerald telegrammed Scribner with the possible title Under the Red, White and Blue, but it was too late, and the work was published as The Great Gatsby on 10th April. The reception for the new work was impressive, and it quickly garnered some of Fitzgerald’s most enthusiastic reviews, but its sales did not reach the best-seller levels the author and Scribner had hoped for.

  Fitzgerald was keen to get on with his work and, rather misguidedly, set off to Paris with Zelda to begin his next novel. Paris at the heart of the Roaring Twenties was not a locale conducive to careful concentration, and little progress was made on the new project. There was much socializing, however, and Fitzgerald invested quite a lot of his time in cementing his reputation as one of the more prominent drunks of American letters. The couple’s time was spent mostly with the American expatriate community, and among those he got to know there were Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Robert McAlmon and Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Company. Perhaps the most significant relationship with another writer from this period was with Ernest Hemingway, with whom Fitzgerald spent much time (sparking jealousy in Zelda), and for whom he would become an important early supporter, helping to encourage Scribner to publish The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises, for which he also gave extensive editorial advice. The summer of 1925 was again spent on the Riviera, but this time with a rowdier crowd (which included John Dos Passos, Archibald MacLeish and Rudolph Valentino) and little progress was made on the new book. February 1926 saw publication of the inevitable follow-up short-story collection, this time All the Sad Young Men, of which the most significant pieces were ‘The Rich Boy’, ‘Winter Dreams’ and ‘Absolution’. All three are closely associated with The Great Gatsby, and can be read as alternative routes into the Gatsby story.

  With the new novel still effectively stalled, Fitzgerald decamped to Hollywood at the beginning of 1927, where he was engaged by United Artists to write a flapper comedy that was never produced in the end. These false starts were not, however, adversely affecting Fitzgerald’s earnings, and 1927 would represent the highest annual earnings the author had achieved so far: $29,757.87, largely from short-story sales. While in California Fitzgerald began a dalliance with Lois Moran, a seventeen-year-old aspiring actress – putting further strain on his relationship with Zelda. After the couple moved back east (to Delaware) Zelda began taking ballet lessons in an attempt to carve a niche for herself that might offer her a role beyond that of the wife of a famous author. She would also make various attempts to become an author in her own right. The lessons would continue under the tutelage of Lubov Egorova when the Fitzgeralds moved to Paris in the summer of 1928, with Zelda’s obsessive commitment to dance practice worrying those around her and offering the signs of the mental illness that was soon to envelop her.

  Looking for a steady income stream (in spite of very high earnings expenditure was still outstripping them), Fitzgerald set to work on the “Basil” stories in 1928, earning $31,500 for nine that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, forcing novel-writing into the background. The next year his Post fee would rise to $4,000 a story. Throughout the next few years he would move between the USA and Europe, desperate to resuscitate that project, but make little inroads.

  By 1930 Zelda’s behaviour was becoming more and more erratic, and on 23rd April she was checked into the Malmaison clinic near Paris for rest and assistance with her mental problems. Deeply obsessed with her dancing lessons, and infatuated with Egorova, she discharged herself from the clinic on 11th May and attempted suicide a few days later. After this she was admitted to the care of Dr Oscar Forel in Switzerland, who diagnosed her as schizophrenic. Such care was expensive and placed a new financial strain on Fitzgerald, who responded by selling another series of stories to the Post and earning $32,000 for the year. The most significant story of this period was ‘Babylon Revisited’. Zelda improved and moved back to Montgomery, Alabama, and the care of the Sayre family in September 1931. That autumn Fitzgerald would make another abortive attempt to break into Hollywood screenwriting.

  At the beginning of 1932 Zelda suffered a relapse during a trip to Florida and was admitted to the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore. While there she would finish work on a novel, Save Me the Waltz, that covered some of the same material her husband was using in his novel about the Riviera. Upon completion she sent the manuscript to Perkins at Scribner, without passing it to her husband, which caused much distress. Fitzgerald helped her to edit the book nonetheless, removing much of the material he intended to use, and Scribner accepted it and published it on 7th October. It received poor reviews and did not sell. Finally accepting that she had missed her chance to become a professional dancer, Zelda now poured her energies into painting. Fitzgerald would organize a show of these in New York in 1934, and a play, Scandalabra, that would be performed by the Junior Vagabonds, an amateur Baltimore drama group, in the spring of 1933.

  His own health now beginning to fail, Fitzgerald returned to his own novel and rewrote extensively through 1933, finally submitting it in October. Tender Is the Night would appear in serialized form in Scribner’s Magazine from January to April 1934 and would then be published, in amended form, on 12th April. It was generally received positively and sold well, though again not to the blockbusting extent that Fitzgerald had hoped for. This would be Fitzgerald’s final completed novel. He was thirty-seven.

  With the receipts for Tender Is the Night lower than had been hoped for and Zelda still erratic and requiring expensive medical supervision, Fitzgerald’s finances were tight. From this point on he found it increasingly difficult to produce the kind of high-quality, extended pieces that could earn thousands of dollars in glossies like The Saturday Evening Post. From 1934 many of his stories were shorter and brought less money, while some of them were simply sub-standard. Of the outlets for this new kind of work,
Esquire proved the most reliable, though it only paid $250 a piece, a large drop from his salad days at the Post.

  March 1935 saw the publication of Taps at Reveille, another collection of short stories from Scribner. It was a patchy collection, but included the important ‘Babylon Revisited’, while ‘Crazy Sunday’ saw his first sustained attempt at writing about Hollywood, a prediction of the tendency of much of his work to come. His next significant writing came, however, with three articles that appeared in the February, March and April 1936 numbers of Esquire: ‘The Crack-up’, ‘Pasting It Together’ and ‘Handle with Care’. These essays were brutally confessional, and irritated many of those around Fitzgerald, who felt that he was airing his dirty laundry in public. His agent Harold Ober was concerned that by publicizing his own battles with depression and alcoholism he would give the high-paying glossies the impression that he was unreliable, making future magazine work harder to come by. The pieces have, however, come to be regarded as Fitzgerald’s greatest non-fiction work and are an essential document in both the construction of his own legend and in the mythologizing of the Jazz Age.

  Later in 1936, on the author’s fortieth birthday in September, he gave an interview in The New York Post to Michael Mok. The article was a sensationalist hatchet job entitled ‘Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair’ and showed him as a depressed dipsomaniac. The publication of the article wounded Fitzgerald further and he tried to take his own life through an overdose of morphine. After this his health continued to deteriorate and various spates in institutions followed, for influenza, for tuberculosis and, repeatedly, in attempts to treat his alcoholism.

  His inability to rely on his own physical and literary powers meant a significant drop in his earning capabilities; by 1937 his debts exceeded $40,000, much of which was owed to his agent Ober and his editor Perkins, while Fitzgerald still had to pay Zelda’s medical fees and support his daughter and himself. A solution to this desperate situation appeared in July: MGM would hire him as a screenwriter at $1,000 a week for six months. He went west, hired an apartment and set about his work. He contributed to various films, usually in collaboration with other writers, a system that irked him. Among these were A Yank at Oxford and various stillborn projects, including Infidelity, which was to have starred Joan Crawford, and an adaptation of ‘Babylon Revisited’. He only received one screen credit from this time, for an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Three Comrades, produced by Joseph Mankiewicz. His work on this picture led to a renewal of his contract, but no more credits followed.