Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  This fictional scene made an emotional impact on Scott’s boyhood friend Stephan Parrott, who had attended the same Catholic prep school and had read an early draft of the novel in April 1919. “The farther I got into it the more interested I became,” Parrott said, “but when I came to the place where you saw the man with the disgusting feet, I had to stop reading. I know just what you felt. Your mood was exactly like some I have felt, of the worst kind; in fact it started a humour in me that was quite horrible.”14

  Fitzgerald’s childhood phobia evolved from his subconscious “Freudian” feelings. Though revolted by his own feet, he was sexually excited by the feet of women. His fearful associations with feet—which stuck out stiffly and were strongly associated with sex—both displaced and expressed his adolescent and adult fears about his masculinity. His deep-rooted insecurity later led him to seek embarrassing reassurance, not only from his mistresses of the 1930s but also from personal friends, about the size and potency of his sexual organ.

  VI

  Scott’s poor performance at St. Paul Academy prompted his parents to send him to a stricter, Eastern, Catholic boarding school. This would, they hoped, provide a more rigorous academic program, expose him to a more sophisticated way of life and increase his chances of gaining admission to a good college. The Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey (across the Hudson River and about ten miles northwest of midtown Manhattan), had been founded in 1890 by Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore to attract the sons of “Catholic gentlemen” and taught sixty boys from well-off Catholic families throughout the country. Scott, brought up with the traditional values of his paternal ancestors in Maryland, had always yearned for an Eastern education. Like Basil Duke Lee in “The Freshest Boy,” he “had lived with such intensity on so many stories of boarding-school life that, far from being homesick, he had a glad feeling of recognition and familiarity.”

  Scott’s gladness, however, was short lived. As he entered Newman in September 1911, he naively overrated his appearance and athletic ability, social graces and intellectual power, which he felt would lead to success in school, and retrospectively made the honest admission that he lacked the fundamental elements of good character:

  First: Physically—I marked myself handsome; of great athletic possibilities, and an extremely good dancer. . . . Second: Socially . . . I was convinced that I had personality, charm, magnetism, poise, and the ability to dominate others. Also I was sure that I exercised a subtle fascination over women. Third: Mentally . . . I was vain of having so much, of being so talented, ingenious and quick to learn. . . . Generally—I knew that at bottom I lacked the essentials. At the last crisis, I knew I had no real courage, perseverance or self-respect.

  Scott attempted to cultivate friendships with several classmates by composing their weekly English essays and enhanced his reputation as an athlete by writing an anonymous account in the Newman News of his “fine running with the ball” during a football game. But these ingenious ploys did not work. One student recalled that he was “eager to be liked by his companions and almost vain in seeking praise.” His roommate remembered him as having “the most impenetrable egotism I’ve ever seen.”15

  “Sap” Donahoe, a popular and well-respected boy from Seattle, and a fine scholar and athlete, traveled with Scott during the long trips home on the holidays and remained his friend at Princeton. Though Sap liked Scott, he explained that “he was unpopular starting out at Newman partly because his good looks prompted classification as a sissy, which was reinforced by what appeared to be a lack of physical courage.” He described Scott as “imaginative in temperament, keen in observation, rather critical in taste and sceptical in mind”—traits which made him something of a misfit in the orthodox school and led to a crisis of faith after he left.

  Fitzgerald wrote about two wasted school years of “utter and profitless unhappiness” in both This Side of Paradise (in which he called the school St. Regis) and in “The Freshest Boy.” In the novel he records that he was resentful of authority and indifferent to his work, that he was considered both conceited and arrogant, and that he was universally detested. In the story he goes into greater detail about the numerous reasons for his extraordinary unpopularity. He mentions that he had received a hostile note that objected to his brash conceit and rudely asserted: “If someone will please poison young Basil, or find some other means to stop his mouth, the school at large and myself will be much obliged.” As one of the poorest boys in a rich boys’ school, he overcompensated by boasting, pointing out other people’s mistakes and showing off his fund of general knowledge. When, in addition to all this, he revealed his cowardice during a football game by avoiding a dangerous tackle, he became “the scapegoat, the immediate villain, the sponge which absorbed all malice and irritability abroad.” The lonely outcast was irreparably condemned to the ranks of “the bitter, the selfish, the neurasthenic and the unhappy.” Scott’s academic work inevitably suffered and he failed four courses during his two years at the school.

  Though Scott loved to go on school holidays to the theater in New York, his happiest recollections concerned the exciting train journeys that allowed him to escape from the hateful school for longer periods and return to his adoring parents in the familiar Midwest. In The Great Gatsby, one of Nick Carraway’s

  most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. . . .

  That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.16

  VII

  Scott’s desperate unhappiness and isolation at Newman made him eagerly receptive to the attention, encouragement and flattery of an unusual Catholic priest and trustee of the school, whom he met during his second year in November 1912. Father Cyril Sigourney Webster Fay was born in Philadelphia in 1875, the only son of a wealthy Irish-American lieutenant-colonel in the United States Army. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1897 and the Episcopal Divinity School in Philadelphia five years later, he taught dogmatic and moral theology at Nashotah House, the Anglican seminary in Fond du Lac, northwest of Milwaukee. Though Fay had once started writing a book to prove the invalidity of Roman orders, he later joined a group of Anglo-Catholic Episcopal clergymen who seceded to the Roman Catholic Church in 1908. A hostile Protestant contemporary explained that “Fay’s unstable temperament called for a new thrill. . . . He was tired of socialism and the mild forms of modernism he had adopted. He was looking Romeward and the papal condemnation of modernism led him to declare publicly: ‘We must obey the Holy Father.’ ” Fay was ordained by his patron, Cardinal Gibbons, in 1910, and taught Sacred Liturgy and Ecclesiastical Greek from 1910 to 1914 at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. After Scott had left Newman, Fay became headmaster of the school.

  Father Fay, a brilliant intellectual and fascinating talker, was a strange-looking man. The huge, eunuch-like priest, almost a pure albino, had a shrill, high-pitched, giggling voice. He was extremely nearsighted and enormously fat. His thin, pale yellow hair, rising above a broad forehead, was parted in the middle. A thick pince-nez distorted his pink, watery eyes. His pudgy nose, round face, triple chins and thick neck emphasized his porcine appearance and made him look twenty years older than his actual age.

  The absolute antithesis of the dreary German Midwestern priest in Fitzgerald’s story “Absolution,” the heavily perfumed and wittily epigrammatic Father Fay was a fin-de-siècle aesthete and dandy, who adored Decadent authors like Huysmans, Swinburne and Oscar Wilde. Fay’s close friend Margaret Chanler emphasized the charming, worldly aspect of his personality and described him as a rather jolly monk: “He was a l
earned man with much of the delightful child about him. He combined spiritual with temporal gifts, for he preached admirably, and could bring fire from heaven to kindle the hearts of his hearers, but he was no ascetic and clearly loved good company, good food and drink.”

  He also took childish pleasure in ecclesiastical vestments and elaborate liturgy. Fitzgerald’s biographers, from Turnbull to Bruccoli, have stated that Father Fay recited the Mass in Gaelic. But a Gaelic version of the Mass did not exist in Fay’s lifetime and the Mass could not be said in any language but Latin until the Vatican II reforms of 1965. Henry Dan Piper was more accurate when he explained that Fay “obtained special dispensation to celebrate the Roman Mass according to the more exotic rites of the Greek Church, which he found more aesthetically satisfying.”17

  Fay took a paternal interest in Scott, strengthening his religious beliefs, recognizing his talent and praising his first novel. He frequently invited Scott to his comfortable home in Washington, brought him into elite circles and introduced him to important men like Shane Leslie and Henry Adams. Fay’s influence became even stronger when the older, more appreciative Scott was at Princeton and in the army. After Fay’s death in the influenza epidemic of 1919, Fitzgerald idealized him as Monsignor Darcy in This Side of Paradise and compared him to an exiled Stuart king, waiting to be called back to rule his country: “Monsignor was forty-four then, and bustling—a trifle too stout for symmetry, with hair the color of spun gold, and a brilliant, enveloping personality. When he came into a room clad in his full purple regalia from thatch to toe, he resembled a Turner sunset, and attracted both admiration and attention.”18

  Scott’s other mentor was the dashing, wealthy and well-connected Shane Leslie. The son of an Anglo-Irish baronet and one of the beautiful American Jerome sisters, he was a first cousin of Winston Churchill. Tall, blunt-featured and rugged-looking, he went to Eton, studied at the Sorbonne, where he met Henry Adams, and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he rowed for the college and came to know Rupert Brooke. He visited Tolstoy in Russia, studied philosophy at Louvain and converted to Catholicism. He did social work in Wapping, in the East End of London, worked for the Home Rule movement in Ireland and changed his name from John to Shane to emphasize his Celtic origins. He married an American wife in 1912, became acquainted with Yeats and D. H. Lawrence, lived among diplomats in Spain and served with the American Ambulance Corps in France during World War I. Leslie—the friend of two powerful American priests, Archbishop Ireland of St. Paul and Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore—moved in exalted circles and, as chamberlain to the Pope, became an influential Catholic layman.

  Leslie called Fitzgerald “an American Rupert Brooke,” recommended his first novel to Scribner’s and wrote a favorable review of the book. He encouraged Fitzgerald’s courtship and marriage to Zelda Sayre, commenting that “literary men need wives to edit their letters (in two volumes).” He also saw his disciple as the American equivalent of the novelist, priest and son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had converted to Catholicism, and told Fitzgerald: “I think you would be happier if you were anchored like Hugh Benson to the priesthood.” Fitzgerald admired Leslie, and was grateful for his friendship and generous help. In his review of Leslie’s Etonian novel, The Oppidan (1922), he called him “the most romantic figure I had ever known” and described the liberating effect of his friendship: “He was a convert to the church of my youth, and he and another, since dead [Father Fay], made of that church a dazzling, golden thing, dispelling its oppressive mugginess and giving the succession of days upon gray days, passing under its plaintive ritual, the romantic glamour of an adolescent dream.”19 Scott’s friendships with Fay and Leslie compensated for his disappointment and unhappiness at Newman, and fortified his self-confidence and his Catholic faith as he entered Princeton in the fall of 1913.

  Chapter Two

  Princeton, 1913–1917

  I

  Fitzgerald’s grandmother Louise McQuillan died in the summer of 1913 and left her daughter Mollie $125,000. This legacy rescued Fitzgerald from the lumpenproletariat at the University of Minnesota or a parochial education at Georgetown University (where his father had been a student). It allowed him, instead, to become a gentleman scholar at Princeton.

  Fitzgerald chose the image as much as the reality of Princeton. It was in the same state as his prep school and—to a young man who identified with his Maryland ancestors—was more social and “Southern” than Harvard or Yale. Harvard, which he associated with New England puritans and brainy Jews, seemed too “indoors” and intellectual. Yale men, like Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, were too brawny and brutal. Even the Yale Daily News conceded, in the spring of 1913, that the Yale type dressed correctly and had fine manners but lacked intellectual ability: “Sometimes it has tremendous dumb energy. And it has nearly the mental power of the original Yale Bull Dog.” Fitzgerald imagined the Princeton man, by contrast, as lazy, good-looking and aristocratic: “Princeton drew him most, with its atmosphere of bright colors and its alluring reputation as the pleasantest country club in America.”

  Fitzgerald also imagined himself a great football player and strongly identified with the heroes of the Princeton team. In a draft of his first novel, Fitzgerald said that seeing the Princeton end Sam White block a Harvard field goal and run ninety-five yards for a winning touchdown decided him for Princeton in 1911. This glorious image was reinforced four years later, while Fitzgerald was an undergraduate, when he saw the romantic Buzz Law kicking from behind his goal line with a bloody bandage round his head. Fitzgerald, the mediocre prep school player, always reveled in college football as spectator, statistician and would-be participant.

  Most importantly, Fitzgerald—who had been publishing stories and poems in his school newspapers since 1909 and had had four plays produced by the Elizabethan Dramatic Club in St. Paul—was attracted by the Princeton Triangle Club. This undergraduate club wrote and produced a lively if slightly antiquated musical comedy each fall and, during the Christmas vacation, performed it—with chorus, orchestra and scenery—in a dozen large cities across the country. “That was enough for me,” Fitzgerald wrote. “From then on the university question was settled. I was bound for Princeton.”1

  Since Fitzgerald’s school grades were deficient, he had to take a college entrance examination. The student who staunchly defended the honor system and had never heard of a Princeton man cheating, gained admission by some judicious cribbing and by convincing the examiners that they could not possibly reject him on September 24, his seventeenth birthday. Conditionally admitted to the Class of 1917, he immediately wired his mother for football pads and shoes. Weighing only 138 pounds, he tried out for the freshman team and was cut from the squad on the first day.

  Princeton had been founded in 1746 as a Presbyterian college and Jonathan Edwards, the Yale-educated theologian, had been an early president. In the 1770s its students included Aaron Burr, who later killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel; James Madison, who became the fourth president of the United States; the novelist H. H. Brackenridge and the poet Philip Freneau. Booth Tarkington, an influence on Fitzgerald’s early work, had founded the Triangle Club in the early 1890s; and Eugene O’Neill had failed out, after a rebellious and dissipated year, in 1907.

  The spire-filled college, surrounded by luxurious estates, rose out of the flat midlands of New Jersey. “The loveliest riot of Gothic architecture in America” was modeled on the Oxford quads just as the system of preceptors, founded by Woodrow Wilson (who had been president of the university before becoming governor of New Jersey and then wartime president of the United States), was based on the Oxford tutors. Anglophilia prevailed at Princeton, whose fifteen hundred students cultivated a tradition of gentility, charm and honor that reaffirmed the values of Fitzgerald’s old-fashioned father.

  After meeting privileged beings like Richard Cleveland (son of former president Grover Cleveland) and David Bruce (son of a United States senator, who himself later became a distinguished
ambassador), Fitzgerald soon discovered that there was a vast difference between young men from St. Paul’s School and a young man from St. Paul, Minnesota. Surrounded by rich, Eastern, Anglo-Saxon Protestants from the most elite private schools, the poor, provincial Irish Catholic from obscure and undistinguished Newman felt socially and financially inferior. As Fitzgerald later told a friend, he never had the money to sustain the precarious position he had struggled to achieve: “That was always my experience—a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy’s school; a poor boy in a rich man’s club at Princeton.”2 He also became, after his fortunes failed in the 1930s, a poor man at a luxurious resort in North Carolina and a poor writer among the fabulously rich film stars in Hollywood.

  While Fitzgerald’s more polished and self-assured classmates glided through Princeton with apparently effortless ease, the ambitious Midwestern schoolboy threw himself into college life with unusual seriousness and made strenuous efforts to distinguish himself by social and literary—if not athletic and academic—achievements.

  Considered deficient in Latin, French, algebra and physics, Fitzgerald (like two-thirds of the 430 freshmen) had to pass examinations in these subjects in December as well as do his ordinary course work. During his freshman year he was required to take an unusually heavy schedule: Latin (Roman historians), survey of French literature, English composition and rhetoric, trigonometry, physics, and hygiene, in addition to physical education and an extra course in algebra to prepare for the make-up exam.