Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  When not working Fitzgerald got drunk with his college friends and self-consciously indulged in the kind of sophomoric pranks that would become tediously familiar to friends throughout his life. He threatened to jump out of the window of the Yale Club and was disappointed when nobody tried to stop him. He celebrated May Day in the Child’s restaurant on Fifty-Ninth Street by carefully mixing hash, eggs and ketchup in a friend’s hat.

  His attempts to write were as depressing as his work and his drinking bouts. He wrote film scenarios, sketches, jokes and nineteen stories, and decorated his room with a frieze of 122 rejection slips. Near the end of June Wilson helped him get started by introducing him to George Jean Nathan, who paid thirty dollars for a trivial story, “Babes in the Woods” (which he had written at Princeton for the Nassau Lit.), and published it in the sophisticated Smart Set.

  In the spring of 1919, while struggling to make his way in New York, Fitzgerald made three trips to Montgomery. In April he became engaged to Zelda and slept with her for the first time. One of her provocative and reassuring letters, written that spring, alludes to their sexual intimacy: “Sweetheart, I love you most of all the earth—and I want to be married soon—soon—Lover—Don’t say I’m not enthusiastic—You ought to know.”

  Though Fitzgerald was undoubtedly thrilled that Zelda was willing to sleep with him, he was also shocked by her behavior. At Princeton he had discovered that half his classmates admitted they had never even kissed a girl. Girls of his class were not expected to grant sexual favors or express enthusiasm for sexual pleasure. Zelda had in fact lost her virginity at fifteen and openly flaunted her defiance of these conventions. He was also surprised and hurt to realize, despite her sexual responsiveness, that she would not marry him before he had achieved financial success.

  His portrait of Rosalind in This Side of Paradise captures this impulsive yet calculating side of Zelda. It reveals that he was well aware of her desire to remain young and irresponsible forever, and have wealth to comfort and protect her. As his heroine ingenuously exclaims: “I’m just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness—and I dread responsibility. I don’t want to think about pots and kitchens and brooms. I want to worry whether my legs will get slick and brown when I swim in the summer.”

  Fitzgerald also resented her family’s opposition to the marriage. They felt (with good reason) that she needed a strong, reliable husband who could control rather than encourage her wild behavior. In their view, he was an unstable Irish Catholic who had not graduated from college, had no career and drank too much. Zelda claimed that Scott was the sweetest person in the world when sober, to which Judge Sayre sternly replied: “He’s never sober.” In 1927, long after his marriage but still eager for acceptance, Fitzgerald would rather pathetically kneel beside the judge’s sick bed and plead: “Tell me you believe in me.” “Scott,” the judge grudgingly conceded, “I think you will always pay your bills.”14 This prediction proved accurate. Though often in debt, Scott did pay his bills.

  Fitzgerald tried to persuade Zelda to marry him immediately by threatening, pleading and overwhelming her with kisses. But in June, impatient with his failures, she broke off their engagement and ended their sexual relations. In his plan for the “Count of Darkness” stories, Fitzgerald noted that his heroine, “after yielding, holds Philippe at bay like Zelda and me in [early] Summer 1919.”

  Fitzgerald felt he had foolishly allowed himself to be dominated by mentally inferior “authorities,” first at St. Paul’s Academy, Newman and Princeton, then in his regiment and in advertising. Clearly unsuited to a regular office job, he loathed business as much as he had hated academic and army life. He was fearful of losing Zelda to a prosperous local rival and determined to win her by writing a successful novel. He would express his love by including her diaries and portraying her character. Haunted by his drab room and by the crowded subway, obsessed by his shabby clothes, his poverty and his hopeless love, he quit his job: “I was a failure—mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home.”15

  V

  While estranged from Zelda and working hard on his novel in the top-floor room of the family house at 599 Summit Avenue in St. Paul, Fitzgerald met a kindred spirit: the lively and witty Donald Ogden Stewart. The tall, balding, bespectacled Stewart was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1894, the son of an improvident lawyer. After attending Exeter and Yale, he spent a few years working for the telephone company in St. Paul. He started his literary career as a popular writer of humorous and satiric fiction—Parody Outline of History (1921) and Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad (1925)—and then became a successful novelist, dramatist and screenwriter.

  Though Fitzgerald and Stewart interested each other, especially at the beginning of their careers, and later traveled in the same social circles, they never became intimate companions. Stewart felt that Fitzgerald’s “note-taking watchfulness . . . kept me from ever feeling that he was really a friend.” Fitzgerald called him “an intellectual simpleton” and criticized his ingratiating manner: “He pleases you not by direct design but because his desire to please is so intense that it is disarming. He pleases you most perhaps when his very words are irritants.”

  In early September Fitzgerald completed the second version of his novel, sent the manuscript back to Perkins and—eager to work outdoors—took a job repairing train roofs for James J. Hill’s Northern Pacific Railroad. Instructed to wear old clothes, Fitzgerald turned up in elegant white flannels, irritated the foreman by sitting down when he tried to hammer in nails and—despite his experience in dealing with ordinary soldiers—complained that he was unable to talk to the working men.

  Fitzgerald lasted no longer as a rude mechanical than he did as a writer of slogans. On September 16, 1919, Perkins freed him from his job with an enthusiastic letter: “I am very glad, personally, to be able to write to you that we are all for publishing your book, This Side of Paradise. . . . I think you have improved it enormously. As the first manuscript did, it abounds in energy and life and it seems to me to be in much better proportion. . . . The book is so different that it is hard to prophesy how it will sell but we are all for taking a chance and supporting it with vigor.”16 Fitzgerald rushed up and down the streets of St. Paul, stopping friends and strangers on foot and in cars to announce his good fortune. He then returned to New York to await success.

  VI

  Fitzgerald’s period of concentrated work, when he revised and improved his novel in the summer of 1919, transformed him from an unemployed amateur into a professional writer. During that time he discovered his subject, his voice and his style. When he returned to New York, he began to turn out amusing, cleverly plotted and sometimes absurd tales about the innocent adventures of bright upper-class teenagers and young people. Instead of the massive series of rejections he had suffered in the spring, he now found that his stories were accepted as fast as he could produce them. Slight pieces like “The Debutante,” “Porcelain and Pink,” “Dalrymple Goes Wrong” and “Benediction” (one of his few overtly Catholic works) were gobbled up by the Smart Set in the fall of 1919. And Scribner’s Magazine paid $150 each for more didactic pieces—“The Cut-Glass Bowl” and “The Four Fists”—from their firm’s new author.

  Fitzgerald also sold “Head and Shoulders”—in which a prodigy marries a chorus girl and they exchange roles: he becomes a trapeze artist and she a successful author—to the Saturday Evening Post for $400 and made his first appearance in a mass circulation magazine when it was published in February 1920. He energetically poured out five other stories between November 1919 and February 1920—including the more substantial “Ice Palace,” which effectively portrays a Southern girl’s horrified response to a frozen Northern city—and sold every one of them to the Post. Proud of his rapid composition, he boasted to Perkins that he had written and revised twelve thousand words of “The Camel’s Back”—in which a suitor with a marriage li
cense goes to a costume ball dressed as a camel and is accidentally married by a Negro waiter-minister to his irate and then pacified girl—in twenty-one straight hours of work.

  VII

  When Fitzgerald returned to New York he resumed his uneasy friendship with Edmund Wilson. Soon after they left college Fitzgerald had presumptuously declared: “I want to be one of the greatest writers who ever lived, don’t you?” Looking back on this period twenty-five years later and assuming his familiar Johnsonian persona with the Boswellian Fitzgerald, Wilson contrasted (as he had done in his satiric undergraduate poem) his own high intellectual standards with those of his bumbling disciple, who would take a long time to mature: “I had not myself quite entertained this fantasy because I had been reading Plato and Dante. Scott had been reading Booth Tarkington, Compton Mackenzie, H. G. Wells [all of whom influenced his early novels] and [the intoxicating rhythms of] Swinburne; but when he later got to better writers, his standards and his achievement went sharply up, and he would always have pitted himself against the very best in his own line that he knew.” Wilson failed to acknowledge that Fitzgerald, despite his naïveté, had actually achieved his fantasy by learning from his older contemporaries instead of pitting himself (as Wilson had done) against impossible standards.

  In August 1919 Fitzgerald had sharply defined the difference in their talents and future careers by presciently warning Wilson, who would become an accomplished anthologist: “For God’s sake, Bunny, write a novel and don’t waste your time editing collections [of war stories]. It’ll get to be a habit.”17 Wilson longed to be an imaginative writer, but his knowledge and appreciation of the literature of the past inhibited his creative urge. He was making a living as a journalist and in time would become the most influential literary critic of his day. But now, like Fitzgerald, he aspired to be a novelist, and assumed that fiction was an altogether higher and more valuable kind of writing than literary criticism.

  In college Wilson had been the older, wiser and more sophisticated student, and, with Bishop, a scornful critic who punctured Fitzgerald’s illusions. Now he became Fitzgerald’s literary mentor, discussing the art of the novel with him, urging him to pay more attention to form. Fitzgerald eagerly sought his comments on the manuscript of This Side of Paradise. On November 21, 1919, Wilson responded with his usual mixture of friendly derision, backhanded compliments and faint praise. He compared Fitzgerald’s novel to the trivial current bestseller by the preadolescent Daisy Ashford, spotted the influence of the hero of Mackenzie’s Sinister Street, mocked Fitzgerald’s intellectual pretensions and warned him about preferring popularity to serious art—a question Fitzgerald had raised with Alfred Noyes: “I have just read your novel with more delight than I can well tell you. It ought to be a classic in a class with The Young Visiters. . . . Your hero is an unreal imitation of Michael Fane, who was himself unreal. . . . As an intellectual [Amory] is a fake of the first water and I read his views on art, politics, religion and society with more riotous mirth than I should care to have you know.” At the same time he offered sound criticism, and warned him against adopting the cheap effects of commercial stories instead of doing the serious work needed to achieve high art: “It would all be better if you would tighten up your artistic conscience and pay a little more attention to form. . . . I feel called upon to give you this advice because I believe you might become a very popular trashy novelist without much difficulty.”18

  In the years to come Wilson often read Fitzgerald’s work before publication and also wrote reviews for public consumption. Wilson’s private and public comments helped Fitzgerald define and develop his art. Fitzgerald constantly deferred to Wilson’s literary judgment, appeared to surrender his intellectual conscience to him and retained him as mentor long after establishing himself as a serious novelist. (He later called Hemingway his “artistic conscience.”) Wilson, however, clearly resented Fitzgerald’s creative talent, and envied his enormous, apparently arbitrary financial success. In his view, Fitzgerald wasted his talent and sacrificed his integrity by publishing trashy stories in popular magazines.

  In November, the month he received Wilson’s letter, between the acceptance of the novel and his marriage to Zelda, Fitzgerald had a brief love affair with the English actress Rosalinde Fuller. Her picture had appeared in Vanity Fair, and she had also had an affair with her brother-in-law, the author Max Eastman. Fitzgerald may have wanted to retaliate for Zelda’s promiscuous adventures or to have one final fling before committing himself to her. In her diary, Rosalinde provocatively described riding through the city—like Emma Bovary and Léon Dupuis—in a closed carriage that aroused their sexual appetites: “The clip-clop of the horse’s hoofs made a background to our discovery of each other’s bodies. Eager hands [were] feeling in warm secret places under the old rug, while the bouncing of the horse’s bottom was our only contact with the outside world. ‘You have Egyptian ears,’ whispered Scott” (who could resist his “Egyptian ears”?) “ ‘and the look of a naughty boy.’ ”19

  The money earned from his copious flow of stories enabled Fitzgerald, who had exhausted himself and was afraid of developing tuberculosis, to leave the harsh New York winter for the gentler climate of New Orleans. He rented a room in a boarding house at 2900 Prytania Street, but disliked the city and remained for only a month. While living in New Orleans he visited Zelda twice, finally persuaded her to marry him and became engaged for the second time. She knew she had inspired his novel and told him: “It’s so nice to know you really can do things—anything—and I love to feel that maybe I can help just a little.”

  In February 1920 Zelda mistakenly thought she was pregnant, and Fitzgerald sent her some pills to induce an abortion. But she refused to take them, emphasizing that she did not regret their lovemaking and wanted above all to preserve her integrity:

  I wanted to for your sake, because I know what a mess I’m making and how inconvenient it’s all going to be—but I simply can’t and won’t take those awful pills—so I’ve thrown them away. I’d rather take carbolic acid. You see, as long as I feel that I had the right, I don’t much mind what happens—and besides, I’d rather have a whole family than sacrifice my self-respect. They just seem to place everything on the wrong basis—and I’d feel like a damn whore if I took even one.

  A few days later, Fitzgerald repeated the key phrase from Zelda’s brave letter and, acknowledging her delicious faults to a friend’s sister, explained why he wanted to marry her: “Any girl who gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has ‘kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more,’ cannot be considered beyond reproach. . . . [But] I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self-respect.”20 Zelda’s courage to oppose conventional behavior, her sincere defiance of hypocrisy and the self-respect that made her want to have the baby impressed Fitzgerald tremendously. That same month, when he sold the movie rights of “Head and Shoulders” for the vast sum of $2,500, he expressed his generosity and love, and tried to assuage her wounded feelings, by spending the money on gifts for Zelda.

  Just before their Catholic wedding Mrs. Sayre, who had always been fond of Fitzgerald, gave a lighthearted warning that deliberately obscured the darker side of Zelda’s character: “It will take more than the Pope to make Zelda good: you will have to call on God Almighty direct. . . . She is not amiable and she is given to yelping” when she does not get her own way. In the late 1930s, during bitter recriminations about the failure of their marriage, Scott, with retrospective insight, reminded Zelda that he had been deceived by Mrs. Sayre and by Zelda herself. Despite his admiration of her defiant courage, they had had serious sexual problems from the very beginning of their marriage:

  [Your mother] chose me—and she did—and you submitted at the moment of our marriage when your passion for me was at as low ebb as mine for you—because she thought romantically that her projection of herself in you could best be shown thr
ough me. I never wanted the Zelda I married. I didn’t love you again till after you became pregnant [in 1921]. . . . You were the drunk—at seventeen, before I knew you—already notorious. . . . The assumption [was] that you were a great prize package—by your own admission many years after (and for which I have never reproached you) you had been seduced and provincially outcast. I sensed this the night we slept together first, for you’re a poor bluffer.

  He also told his daughter that he had soon regretted his foolish decision: “I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her.”21 Despite his misgivings, their wedding was scheduled to take place a week after his novel came out. His book and his wife were bound in a common destiny.

  Chapter Four

  This Side of Paradise and Marriage, 1920–1922

  I

  This Side of Paradise was published on March 26, 1920, received considerable acclaim and made Fitzgerald instantly famous. It is (to use Orwell’s term) a “good-bad book”—superficial and immature, but still lively and readable, and valuable both as autobiography and as social history. The novel’s defiant tone had the same powerful impact on rebellious postwar youth as Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye did in 1951, and it became a bible and guidebook as the Twenties began to roar. Like Eliot’s Poems, Owen’s Poems, Huxley’s Limbo and Lawrence’s Women in Love (all of which appeared in 1920), Fitzgerald’s novel captures the spirit of disillusionment that followed the Great War. The overt and somewhat naive theme echoes Woodrow Wilson’s “war to end wars” and portrays the hero of the new generation “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”