Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  When I rang Sir William the following day to thank him for his help and ask whether he had a photo of Bijou, he promised to send me one and also suggested I see her first cousin, the elderly Edwardian gentleman Sir Brinsley Ford, a distinguished art historian and trustee of the National Gallery. Sir Brinsley told me family stories and personal memories of Bijou. At one point in our interview his attractive granddaughter made a dramatic appearance and kissed his bald dome in greeting. She was delighted to learn that her distant cousin had been Fitzgerald’s mistress and that her highly respectable family included an eccentric rebel.

  The conversations with Michael O’Conor, Sir Brinsley Ford and Sir William Young enabled me to reconstruct Bijou’s life before she met Fitzgerald as well as to follow her strange career after their affair had ended. Sir Francis Elliot, Napier Alington and Fitzgerald all died in 1940. Most of Bijou’s possessions—including her Picasso drawings and the letters Fitzgerald wrote to her in the early 1930s—had been stored in Druce’s furniture warehouse when her father returned from France in 1936 and were destroyed during the London Blitz in 1940. After transport routes had suddenly been changed during the Blitz, Bijou was knocked down one dark night by a bus. Her leg had to be amputated and she was fitted with a wooden one. When she sued London Transport for reckless driving, their lawyer enraged the judge (who later became Lord Denning) by claiming she had suffered “a trifling injury,” and she was awarded substantial damages, which supported her for many years. One of her louche friends once persuaded her to smuggle contraceptives into Ireland in the hollow of her artificial leg.

  During the war Bijou—a notoriously indiscreet but highly gifted linguist in French, Russian, Polish, Greek and Chinese—worked for the Russian Department of military intelligence at the War Office in Northumberland Street, off Trafalgar Square. She became a great friend of Major-General Sir Guy Glover and of Major-General Edward Spears (whose wife, the novelist Mary Borden, had been Wyndham Lewis’ mistress before her marriage).

  Bijou resumed her luxurious but parasitic life in Monaco in the late 1940s and early 1950s. At the end of that decade she spent several uneasy months with Michael, who had scarcely known his mother, at his home in Nottinghamshire. She planned but never wrote her autobiography, to be called Interlude in Attica. After living alone at 88 Eccleston Square near Victoria Station, she finally settled into a near-penniless existence with a circle of old-age pensioners in Hove, where she died, shortly after the taped interview was made, in the fall of 1975.

  Christopher Clairmonte, who painted two portraits of the elderly Bijou, recalled the squalid end of her adventurous life in the Sunday Times Magazine of July 3, 1983: “She was nearly blind, and had an artificial leg as a result of an accident, so there was not a lot she could do for herself. We turned back a rug, and found it was a heaving mass of insects, so we took it straight out and dumped it in a skip. The place was a mass of dog messes because her Peke—she always had Pekes and adored them—hadn’t been able to get out regularly.”

  Despite her brief appearance in Fitzgerald’s life, Bijou was more important to Scott than he was to her. Though he reacted against her arrogant attitude and reckless way of life, and satirized her in his fiction, he desperately needed her companionship and enjoyed her wit and charm. Fitzgerald was one of Bijou’s more interesting lovers. She recognized herself in his works, made him the subject of her own amusing stories and survived to have the last word about their affair.

  Bibliography

  I. Works on Fitzgerald

  Bruccoli, Matthew. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: A Life of Scott Fitzgerald. New York, 1981.

  Buttitta, Tony. The Lost Summer: A Personal Memoir of F. Scott Fitzgerald. 1974; New York, 1987.

  Donaldson, Scott. Fool for Love: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. 1983; New York, 1989.

  Donnelly, Honoria Murphy with Richard Billings. Sara & Gerald: Villa America and After. New York, 1982.

  Graham, Sheilah and Gerold Frank. Beloved Infidel. 1958; New York, 1959.

  Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York, 1964.

  . Selected Letters, 1917–1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York, 1981.

  LeVot, André. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. Trans. William Byron. 1979; London, 1984.

  Mayfield, Sara. Exiles from Paradise: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. 1971; New York, 1974.

  Mellow, James. Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Boston, 1984.

  Meyers, Jeffrey. Married to Genius. London, 1977.

  . “Poe and Fitzgerald,” London Magazine, 31 (August–September 1991), 67–73.

  . “Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson: A Troubled Friendship,” American Scholar, 61 (Summer 1992), 375–388.

  . “Scott Fitzgerald and the English,” London Magazine, 32 (October–November 1992), 31–44.

  . “Scott Fitzgerald and the Jews,” Forward, February 12, 1993, pp. 9–10; reprinted in Midstream, 39 (January 1993), 31–35.

  , ed. The Great Gatsby. London: Dent-Everyman, 1993.

  , ed. Tender Is the Night. London: Dent-Everyman, 1993.

  Milford, Nancy. Zelda. 1970; New York, 1971.

  Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1951). Revised edition. Boston, 1965.

  Piper, Henry Dan. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait. New York, 1965.

  Ring, Frances Kroll. Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. Berkeley, 1985.

  Turnbull, Andrew. Scott Fitzgerald. 1962; London, 1970.

  Wilson, Edmund. Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–1972. Ed. Elena Wilson. New York, 1977.

  II. Edmund Wilson on Fitzgerald

  “The Literary Spotlight: F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Bookman (New York), 55 (March 1922), 21–22; reprinted in The Shores of Light. New York, 1952. Pp. 27–35.

  “Two Young Men and an Old One,” Vanity Fair, 19 (November 1922), 24.

  “A Selection of Bric-à-Brac,” Vanity Fair, 20 (June 1923), 18.

  “Imaginary Conversations, II. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks and Mr. Scott Fitzgerald,” New Republic, 38 (April 30, 1924), 249–254; reprinted in Discordant Encounters. New York, 1926. Pp. 37–60, and as “The Delegate from Great Neck.” The Shores of Light. New York, 1952. Pp. 141–155.

  “Mürger and Wilde on Screen,” New Republic, 46 (March 24, 1926), 144–145 (positive review of the stage version of The Great Gatsby).

  “The All-Star Literary Vaudeville” (1926). The Shores of Light. New York, 1952. Pp. 232–233.

  Foreword to The Last Tycoon. [Ed. Edmund Wilson.] New York, 1941. Pp. ix–xi.

  The Boys in the Back Room. San Francisco, 1941. Pp. 71–72; reprinted in Classics and Commercials. New York, 1950. Pp. 51–52, 56.

  “On Editing Scott Fitzgerald’s Papers” [poem], New Yorker, 18 (May 16, 1942), 17; reprinted as “Dedication” to The Crack-Up. New York, 1945. Pp. 7–9, and in Night Thoughts. 1953; New York, 1961. Pp. 119–122.

  “Thoughts on Being Bibliographed,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, 5 (February 1944), 51–54; reprinted in Classics and Commercials. New York, 1950. Pp. 105–120.

  Introduction to John Peale Bishop’s Collected Essays. New York, 1948. Pp. vii–xiii; reprinted in The Bit Between My Teeth. New York, 1965. Pp. 6–15.

  “A Weekend at Ellerslie.” The Shores of Light. New York, 1952. Pp. 373–383.

  “Christian Gauss as a Teacher of Literature.” The Shores of Light. New York, 1952. Pp. 3–26.

  “Sheilah Graham and Scott Fitzgerald,” New Yorker, 34 (January 24, 1959), 115–124; reprinted in The Bit Between My Teeth. New York, 1965. Pp. 16–27.

  “That Summer in Paris,” New Yorker, 39 (February 23, 1963), 139–142, 145–148; reprinted in The Bit Between My Teeth. New York, 1965. Pp. 515–525.

  A Prelude. New York, 1967. Pp. 47, 68–69, 93, 106, 116–117, 148, 180.

  The Twenties. Ed. Leon Edel. New York, 1975.

  Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–1972. Ed. Elena Wilson. New York, 1977.

&nbs
p; The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971. Ed. Simon Karlinsky. New York, 1979. Pp. 17, 114–115, 157n, 200n.

  The Thirties. Ed. Leon Edel. New York, 1980.

  The Forties. Ed. Leon Edel. New York, 1983.

  The Fifties. Ed. Leon Edel. New York, 1986.

  III. Scottie Fitzgerald on Her Father

  Fitzgerald, Frances Scott. “A Short Retort,” Mademoiselle, July 1939, p. 41.

  . “Princeton and F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Nassau Literary Magazine, 100 (1942), 45; reprinted as: “Princeton & My Father,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, 56 (March 9, 1956), 8–9.

  Lanahan, Frances Scott. “Fitzgerald as He Really Was,” Washington Post & Times-Herald, April 27, 1958, p. E7.

  Lanahan, Frances Fitzgerald. Introduction to Scott Fitzgerald’s Six Tales of the Jazz Age. New York, 1960. Pp. 5–11.

  . “My Father’s Letters: Advice Without Consent,” Esquire, 64 (October 1965), 95–97; reprinted as: Introduction to Scott Fitzgerald’s Letters to His Daughter. New York, 1965. Pp. ix–xvi.

  . “Scott, Ernest, Arnold and Whoever,” Esquire, 67 (March 1967), 159 (letter).

  Lanahan, Frances Scott Fitzgerald. When I Was 16. Ed. Mary Brannum. New York, 1967. Pp. 200–216; reprinted as: “When I Was Sixteen,” Good Housekeeping, 167 (October 1968), 100–101.

  Smith, Scottie Fitzgerald. Foreword to As Ever, Scott Fitz. Philadelphia, 1972. Pp. xi–xvi.

  Smith, Frances Fitzgerald. “Où sont Les Soleils d’Antan? Françoise ‘Fijeralde’?” F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest M. Hemingway in Paris. Ed. Matthew Bruccoli and C. E. Frazer Clark. Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, 1972. N.p.

  Smith, Scottie Fitzgerald. “Christmas as Big as the Ritz,” Washington Post, December 23, 1973, Potomac Magazine, pp. 7–8.

  . Introduction to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s The Romantic Egoists. New York, 1974. Pp. ix–x.

  Smith, Frances Scott Fitzgerald. “Mia is the Daisy Father Had in Mind,” People, 1 (March 4, 1974), 34.

  Smith, Scottie Fitzgerald. Foreword to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s Bits of Paradise. 1974; New York, 1976. Pp. xi–xvii.

  Smith, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, “Notes About My Now-Famous Father,” Family Circle, 84 (May 1974), 118, 120.

  Smith, Scottie Fitzgerald. [Foreword to] Zelda, exhibition catalogue. Montgomery: Museum of Fine Arts, 1974, N.p; reprinted as [Foreword] to The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald. New York, 1991. Pp. ix–x.

  . “The Colonial Ancestors of Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.” In Matthew Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. New York, 1981. Pp. 496–509.

  See also In Memoriam: Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith, 1921–1986. Privately printed, n.p., n.d.

  Notes

  Chapter One: St. Paul and the Newman School

  1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Notebooks, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (New York, 1978), pp. 267–268; Grace Flandrau, “The Untamable Twin,” The Taming of the Frontier, ed. Duncan Aikman (New York, 1925), p. 149; Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901 (New York, 1934), p. 236.

  2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920; New York, 1948), pp. 219, 273; F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Absolution,” Short Stories, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (New York, 1989), p. 264; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; New York, 1953), p. 169. For works on Hill, see William Cunningham, “Hill, James Jerome,” Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Dumas Malone (New York, 1932), 9:36–41, and Albro Martin, James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest (Oxford, 1976).

  3. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Letters, ed. Andrew Turnbull (1963; London, 1968), p. 522; Sheilah Graham, The Real Scott Fitzgerald (New York, 1976), p. 34; Andrew Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald (1962; London, 1970), p. 34.

  4. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (1934; New York, 1962), p. 203; F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Author’s House,” Afternoon of an Author, Introduction and notes by Arthur Mizener (New York, 1957), p. 184; Letter from Dr. M. R. Ramsey to James Hill of Boston, February 11, 1964, Firestone Library, Princeton University.

  5. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ledger: A Facsimile, Introduction by Matthew Bruccoli (Washington, D.C., 1972), p. 157; F. Scott Fitzgerald, Correspondence, ed. Matthew Bruccoli and Margaret Duggan (New York, 1980), p. 4; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 469.

  6. Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 554; F. Scott Fitzgerald, “An Author’s Mother” (1936), The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories, ed. Matthew Bruccoli (London, 1979), pp. 736–737; Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, ed. John Kuehl and Jackson Bryer (London, 1971), p. 135; F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Death of My Father,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, 12 (Summer 1951), 187–188. An earlier draft of this important essay was published in The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. John Kuehl (New York, 1965), pp. 177–182, and a later version was fictionalized in Tender Is the Night, pp. 203–204.

  7. Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 5; F. Scott Fitzgerald, In His Own Time, ed. Matthew Bruccoli and Jackson Bryer (1971; New York, 1974), p. 296; Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York, 1949), p. 56.

  Robert Lowell’s father, who was fired from Lever Brothers as Edward had been sacked from Procter & Gamble, was also plagued by failure but managed to live well on his navy pension and wife’s money. See Robert Lowell, “Commander Lowell,” Life Studies (New York, 1959), p. 71:

  With seamanlike celerity

  Father left the Navy,

  and deeded Mother his property.

  He was soon fired. Year after year,

  he still hummed “Anchors aweigh” in the tub—

  whenever he left a job,

  he bought a smarter car.

  Father’s last employer

  was Scudder, Stevens & Clark, Investment Advisors,

  himself his only client.

  8. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “That Kind of Party,” The Basil and Josephine Stories, ed. with an introduction by Jackson Bryer and John Kuehl (New York, 1973), p. 1; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 19; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 398; Quoted in Matthew Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York, 1981), p. 375.

  9. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Scandal Detectives,” Taps at Reveille (1935; New York, 1988), p. 7; Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, p. 14.

  10. Shane Leslie, “Some Memories of Scott Fitzgerald,” Times Literary Supplement, October 31, 1958, p. 632; Graham, Real Scott Fitzgerald, p. 36; Fitzgerald, “Who’s Who—and Why,” Afternoon of an Author, p. 83.

  11. Quoted in Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 50; Fitzgerald, In His Own Time, p. 234.

  12. Fitzgerald, “One Hundred False Starts,” Afternoon of an Author, p. 134; Fitzgerald, Ledger, pp. 155, 157, 158; B. F. Wilson, “Notes on Personalities IV—F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Smart Set, 73 (April 1924), 31.

  13. Interview with Frances Kroll Ring, Beverly Hills, California, December 21, 1991; Tony Buttitta, The Lost Summer: A Personal Memoir of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1972; New York, 1987), pp. 41, 112–113.

  14. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, pp. 113–114; Fitzgerald, Correspondence, p. 41. In “Crazy Sunday,” Fitzgerald describes Miles Calman as “artist from the top of his curiously shaped head to his niggerish feet” (Fitzgerald, Short Stories, p. 704).

  15. Fitzgerald, “The Freshest Boy,” Taps at Reveille, p. 25; Fitzgerald, The Romantic Egoist (an early version of This Side of Paradise), quoted in Turnbull, Scott Fitzgerald, p. 41; Quoted in Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, revised edition (Boston, 1965), pp. 23–24.

  16. Letter from Charles “Sap” Donahoe to Arthur Mizener, January 10, 1948, Princeton; Fitzgerald, “The Freshest Boy,” Taps at Reveille, pp. 26, 30, 46; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, pp. 176–177.

  17. Joseph G. H. Barry, Impressions and Opinions (New York, 1931), p. 245; Margaret Chanler, Autumn in the Valley (Boston, 1936), p. 80; Henry Dan Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (New York, 1965), p. 47.

  18. Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, p. 24. In The Great Gatsby, Jordan Baker’s aunt is named
Mrs. Sigourney Howard and Daisy’s maiden name is Fay.

  Three years after Fay’s death, five of his sermons and fifteen of his conventional religious poems, which explain his conversion to Catholicism, were published, with an anonymous biographical Foreword and an Introduction by Cardinal Gibbons, as The Bride of the Lamb and Other Essays (New York, 1922). For more on Fay, see Rev. R. C. Nevius, “A Note on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Monsignor Sigourney Fay and His Early Career as an Episcopalian,” Fitzgerald–Hemingway Annual, 3 (1971), 105–113.

  19. Letters from Shane Leslie to Fitzgerald, September 8, 1918 and January 23, 1919, Princeton; Fitzgerald, In Our Own Time, p. 134. For more on Leslie, see his lively autobiography, Long Shadows (London, 1966).

  Chapter Two: Princeton

  1. Quoted in Scott Donaldson, Archibald MacLeish: An American Life (Boston, 1992), p. 52; Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, p. 36; Fitzgerald, “Who’s Who—and Why,” Afternoon of an Author, p. 84.

  2. Fitzgerald, “Princeton,” Afternoon of an Author, p. 72; F. Scott Fitzgerald, As Ever, Scott Fitz: Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent, Harold Ober, 1919–1940, ed. Matthew Bruccoli and Jennifer Atkinson (Philadelphia, 1972), p. 357.

  3. Fitzgerald, “Princeton,” Afternoon of an Author, p. 75; Fitzgerald, Letters, p. 104. See also Alfred Noyes, “Princeton Days,” Two Worlds for Memory (Philadelphia, 1953), pp. 98–103.

  4. Quoted in Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, p. 68; Letter from an unidentified English professor to Arthur Mizener, January 28, 1951, Princeton; Christian Gauss, “Edmund Wilson: The Campus and the Nassau Lit.,” Princeton University Library Chronicle, 5 (February 1944), 49.

  5. Gauss, Princeton University Library Chronicle, p. 50; Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, p. 50; Quoted in Robert White, John Peale Bishop (New York, 1966), p. 25.

  6. Fitzgerald, In His Own Time, p. 269; Letter from Cornelius Van Ness to Henry Dan Piper, May 25, 1947, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale; Letter from Whitney Landon to Jeffrey Meyers, January 12, 1992.