Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was Irish, a Roman Catholic, and a Midwesterner. He was born in September, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. When he was two his family moved to Buffalo, where they remained (except for a brief stint in Syracuse) for his boyhood. In 1908 his father, Edward Fitzgerald, was fired from his job with Procter & Gamble and the family returned to St. Paul. It was a frightened young son who, upon learning of his father’s dismissal, prayed that they would not all go to the poorhouse. His father’s career continued to founder, and he apparently never fully regained his self-respect. In St. Paul he fell back upon the cushion of his wife’s wealthy relatives and began to drink just a little too much.
Scott once wrote, “Almost everything worth while I may have in the way of brains or energy comes from mother’s side, where I am Irish.” Yet it was neither his mother nor his prosperous Irish relatives (who had made their money in the wholesale grocery business) whom Scott Fitzgerald admired. His mother had spoiled him badly and he resented her and the coddling. On his father’s side he was descended from old and aristocratic Maryland families, the Scotts and the Keys. “He… came from another America,” Scott wrote at his father’s death. “I loved my father—always deep in my subconscious I have referred judgements back to him, what he would have thought, or done.… I was born several months after the sudden death of my two elder sisters & he felt what the effect of this would be on my mother, that he would be my only moral guide.” Edward Fitzgerald instilled in his son not only beautiful manners, but a sense of honor, an almost eighteenth-century code of decorum that Scott Fitzgerald prized. He also inadvertently gave him a model of masculine failure. “When I was a little older I did not understand at all why men that I knew were vulgar and not gentlemen made him stand up or give the better chair on our verandah. But I know now. There was new young peasant stock coming up every ten years & he was of the generation of the colonies and the revolution.” And it was from his father that he “acquired an extended and showy, if very superficial, knowledge of the Civil War (with an intense southern bias ….).” It is not surprising, then, to discover that his son saw in that conflict the “broken link in the continuity of American life.”
The Fitzgeralds lived always on the edge of the best neighborhood in St. Paul, but never at its center. They settled finally and firmly at the end of the finest street in the area, Summit Avenue. As Scott’s biographer Arthur Mizener has said, “The symbolism is almost too neat, and Fitzgerald was acutely aware of it.” Scott also exaggerated it. For however uncertain Scott Fitzgerald felt socially, the wealth of his mother’s family assured him entrée into St. Paul society; if anything held him back for a time, it was his own self-consciousness and conceit. He once wrote his daughter, with the disarming honesty that was an essential part of his make-up, “I didn’t know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty.”
When he was fourteen he began keeping a diary which he called his “Thoughtbook.” It is a curiously candid little book for a boy his age to have kept, for it records in great detail his ups and downs in the scale of popularity, and those of his friends. It was also an early manifestation of Fitzgerald’s lifelong habit of keeping a record of his experiences. He not only cared deeply about what others thought of him—“Jack Mitchell said that Violets opinean of my character was that I was polite and had a nice disposition and that I thought I was the whole push”—he also analyzed what he thought of others: “For a long time I was Pauls ardent admirer Cecil and I went with him all the time and we thought him a hero. Physically he is the strongest boy I have ever seen …. He was awfully funny, strong as an ox, cool in the face of danger polite and at times very interesting. Now I dont dislike him. I have simply out grown him.”*
He began at the same time to write stories for his school’s magazine, and at the end of the summer of 1911 he wrote a play which he directed and in which he starred. But he was not a good student, and his family decided to send him to Newman, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey, in the hope that some learning might he drilled into him. His first year was a miserable one; he was considered fresh, yellow at football, and his grades were poor. His only really happy times were when he escaped to New York to go to the theater; it provided the balm for his wounded self-esteem. “I saw a musical comedy called The Quaker Girl, and from that day forth my desk bulged with Gilbert & Sullivan librettos and dozens of notebooks containing the germs of dozens of musical comedies.” In the spring of his second year he found a musical score lying on top of a piano. It was for a show called His Honor the Sultan, put on by the Triangle Club of Princeton University. That settled it; he decided to go to Princeton, the Southerner’s Northern university.
During the summer he wrote and produced a Civil War melodrama called The Coward, and began to drink something stiffer than the sherry of his boyhood. Mizener observes that “twice during the year Fitzgerald was drunk enough to remember the occasions as special ones. He began to be known around St. Paul as ‘a man who drank,’ a reputation which gave him a certain romantic interest which he undoubtedly enjoyed.” In September, 1914, barely managing to pass his entrance exams, he enrolled at Princeton.
He decided to become one of the “gods of the class,” but the quickest path to that position was closed to him when he wrenched his knee at football practice, badly enough to keep him from playing for the rest of the season. If he was to make his mark, time was short and the pressure great, for the eating clubs which lined Prospect Avenue elected new members during their sophomore year. Where you fell as a sophomore was where you stayed at Princeton; there were no reprieves in this tight system. Scott was a Catholic boy from a little-known Catholic prep school, competing with boys from St. Paul’s, Groton, Hill, and Lawrenceville. With football out of the question, the Triangle Club was his next best route to achieving distinction.
While Scott Fitzgerald schemed to excel socially, there were men at Princeton whom Fitzgerald would come to know and know well who were of an entirely different bent. They were perhaps mavericks, but not obviously so. As a classmate of Scott’s said, with perfect Princetonian aplomb, “they dressed as everyone else did. [It was] just that they were literary, which was not something to be at Princeton.” Among these men were John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson, Alexander McKaig, Townsend Martin, and John Biggs, Jr. It was from the first two that Scott Fitzgerald acquired his first taste of the literary life. Bishop, older than the other undergraduates, austere and somewhat affected in his dress, was already something more than a fledgling poet. Edmund Wilson, whose extraordinary intelligence and taste had already begun to emerge at Hill, would serve as Fitzgerald’s “intellectual conscience” for the rest of his life. Wilson was rather scornful of Scott’s social ambitiousness, preferring to remain aloof from the undergraduate scene. However, both Bishop and Wilson were members of Triangle.
It was in this overlapping of the intellectual and social worlds at Princeton that Scott’s own talents began to take shape. Eagerly he plunged into the arena. He wrote the lyrics for Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi!, the Triangle show which, as he said later, “blooms in a dozen cities every Christmastide,” and only his academic in-eligibility prevented him from appearing in it. He returned to St. Paul for the holidays and basked in the celebrity that Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi! brought him. At home he was beginning to be known as a man who had made it at Princeton. He met and fell in love with Ginevra King, a rich and wildly popular visitor from Chicago, who at sixteen had the social ease of a young duchess. A beauty with dark curling hair and large brown romantic eyes, she had an air of daring and innocent allure. To Fitzgerald, Ginevra King was the embodiment of a dream, and he was immediately and completely captivated. He later wrote that he would never forget “one night when she made luminous the Ritz Roof” at the Frolic in New York. For her part, Ginevra for a time considered Scott to be the “top man” among her many beaus.
At Princeton he made Cottage Club, the pinnacle of social success (and at the section party passed out from
drinking for the first time in his life). In short order he was elected secretary of Triangle and to the editorial board of The Tiger; his stories and poems began to appear in the Nassau Lit.
Then at the beginning of his junior year his world fell in. The young man who would write of the hero of his autobiographical first novel, “It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being,” flunked examinations in Latin and chemistry and was again made ineligible for the prizes he had won through such single-minded pursuit. In November, 1916, he left Princeton because he was ill. He wrote later: “But I had lost certain offices, the chief one was the presidency of the Triangle Club …. To me college would never be the same. There were to be no badges of pride, no medals, after all.… I had lost every single thing I wanted—and that night was the first time that I hunted down the spectre of womanhood that, for a little while, makes everything else seem unimportant.”
Although he returned to Princeton the following fall grimly determined to make a fresh start, he had been badly hurt. As he wrote later, “A man does not recover from such jolts—he becomes a different person and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about.” In January, in a final coup de grâce, he lost Ginevra King, and that too he took hard. As he tried to recover from his losses he did find something new to care about; he read more widely than ever before: Shaw, Tarkington, Wells, Swinburne, Compton Mackenzie. And he decided to become a writer. By the end of that academic year he had written and published nine poems, five reviews, and eight stories in the Nassau Lit.
There is no doubt that his reverses, including the loss of Ginevra King, marked his new fiction. But even before he met Miss King, Fitzgerald had begun to form the kind of heroine he would make famous, the romantic teen-age fatal woman. In “A Luckless Santa Claus,” written while Scott was at the Newman School, Christmas, 1912, Fitzgerald wrote: “Miss Harmon was responsible for the whole thing. If it had not been for her foolish whim, Talbot would not have made a fool of himself ….” Her challenge to Talbot that he could not even give away $25 on Christmas Eve brings about his humiliation, for he tries and cannot and is beaten for his attempt. Five years later in a one-act play called The Debutante, his heroine has come into fuller bloom. Her name is Helen, she smokes, carries a silver flask, and as the scene opens she stands practicing expressions before a pier glass. She says of herself, “I like to run things, but it gets monotonous to always know that I am the key to the situation.” Selfish, exceedingly pretty, she belongs to herself, “or rather to the crowd,” rather than to any single suitor. In a reversal of the accepted sexual roles, it is not the female who is the prey. Helen says: “I like the feeling of going after them, I like the thrill when you meet them and notice that they’ve got black hair that’s wavey. … Then I like the way they begin to follow you with their eyes …. Then I begin to place him. Try to get his type… right then the romance begins to lessen for me and increase for him.” As the music begins downstairs for her party, she kisses the reflection of herself in the mirror and runs from her room.
In “Babes in the Woods,” also written in 1917, Fitzgerald has his young models perfectly paired. Of Isabelle and Kenneth he says: “They had both started with good looks and excitable temperaments and the rest was the result of certain accesable popular novels, and dressing room conversation culled from a slightly older set …. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it.” It is this final sentence that will reverberate in Fitzgerald’s adult fiction, as well as in his life. He grants his girls, for all their potential ability to promote ruin among their men, their right to do it. And, more than that, he admires their destructive high-handedness, for it is that female quality which attracts him.
His last undergraduate story, “The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw,” was his most ambitious and his best, for in it the reader comes to understand more about the nature of the woman who is able to reduce her men to pathetic figures. She demands that they be heroes while challenging them in such a way that they fail utterly. Then she rejects them. She has “beauty and the most direct, unprincipled personality I’ve ever come in contact with.” Fitzgerald then tells his reader something about the fatal flaw in his men that attracts them to their women:
All the time I was idealizing her to the last possibility, I was perfectly conscious that she was about the faultiest girl I’d ever met. She was selfish, conceited and uncontrolled and since these were my own faults I was doubly aware of them. Yet I never wanted to change her. Each fault was knit up with a sort of passionate energy that transcended it. Her selfishness made her play the game harder, her lack of control put me rather in awe of her and her conceit was punctuated by such delicious moments of remorse and self-denunciation that it was almost—almost dear to me …. She had the strongest effect on me. She made me want to do something for her, to get something to show her. Every honor in college took on the semblance of a presentable trophy.
If his men idealize, or romanticize, his women do not. Their allure is apparently in their total self-centeredness and overwhelming instinct for conquest; it is matched only by their extraordinary spirit. When inevitably the man in the story loses his girl, he describes his reaction:
I wandered around… like a wild man trying to get a word with her and when I did I finished the job. I begged, pled, almost wept. She had no use for me from that hour. At two o’clock I walked out of that school a beaten man.
Why the rest—it’s a long nightmare—letters with all the nerve gone out of them, wild imploring letters; long silences hoping she’d care; rumors of her other affairs.
But for all the young author’s talk of the enticing loveliness of his girls, only one is made love to (in “Sentiment—and the Use of Rouge”), and even then Fitzgerald presents the lovemaking ambiguously. “He knew what was wrong, but he knew also that he wanted this woman, this warm creature of silk and life who crept so close to him. There were reasons why he oughtn’t to have her, but he had suddenly seen how love was a big word like Life and Death …. Still they sat without moving for a long while and watched the fire.” Perhaps these girls were not meant to be possessed, but always lost, for the other girls are not even kissed, much less touched. The fault seems to lie in the puritanical restraint of Scott Fitzgerald’s boys rather than in his girls. Never evenly matched, the boys forfeit what might have been their upper hand to their girls’ imperious selfishness. By failing them again and again the boys, perhaps unwittingly, trap the girls into permanent performance of their game. Both sexes seem to survive on the nervous edge of the sexual maneuver while never achieving anything more than the retreat of the male and the end of the story. From the girls’ point of view it must have been a desperately unsatisfying sport they provoked; they are the creatures of a young man’s puritanical conscience, which is fascinated by the preliminary sexual game, the tease, but would prefer to lose it rather than enjoy the woman herself.
Fitzgerald spent the summer of 1917 in St. Paul and wrote to Edmund Wilson, who was already in the army, that he had taken his examinations for the regular army and had “given up the summer to drinking (gin) and philosophy (James and Schopenhauer and Bergson).” He returned to Princeton for his senior year really only waiting until his commission came through. In November he left for Officer’s Training Camp at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He had also begun a novel which he called The Romantic Egotist, about himself, Princeton, and his generation, “and really,” he wrote Wilson, “if Scribners takes it I know I’ll wake some morning and find that the debutantes have made me famous overnight. I really believe that no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation…”
Zelda Sayre was not like any of the girls Scott had known before. Zelda’s beauty and vivacity equaled Ginevra King’s, but her assurance stemmed entirely from confidence in her own good looks and drawing power. While Ginevra had moved in a larger world than Scott had known—a world of Eastern finishing schools, of wealth and soci
al position taken for granted—Zelda’s was even more restricted than his own. To Zelda, Scott was a dazzling visitor from a place where life was lived on a grand scale.
Scott was a romancer who, never overly popular with men, was on the other hand completely at ease with girls. He was talkative, merry, imaginative, and filled by his own dreams of success and wealth and fame. His novel, which he had completed at breakneck speed on weekends at Fort Leavenworth, was still in Scribner’s hands. Shane Leslie, an Irish novelist and critic whom Scott had known from his days at Newman, and to whom he had sent the manuscript of The Romantic Egotist, gave this summary of its possibilities when he forwarded it to Scribner’s, his own publisher: “I marvel at its crudity and its cleverness …. About a third of the book could be omitted …. Though Scott Fitzgerald is still alive it has a literary value. Of course when he is killed it will also have a commercial value.” For he was certain that Fitzgerald would die in action in France as had Rupert Brooke. So was Scott, and his novel had an even greater value for him than it would have had under normal circumstances. By comparison his military career seemed to him a waste of time. To a fellow officer in his division who had been with him since Fort Leavenworth, Scott seemed pleasant enough, but immature and irresponsible.
In August, 1918, his novel was rejected by Scribner’s, but praised by an editor there named Maxwell Perkins. Scott sent a chapter of it to Zelda with a note saying:
Here is the mentioned chapter ….. a document in youthful melancholy …..
However ….. the heroine does resemble you in more ways than four …..
Zelda Page 4