Happy Birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald

So you see that old libel that we were cynics and skeptics was nonsense from the beginning. On the contrary we were the great believers.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Generation”

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on this day in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota!

Fitzgerald was one of those writers I liked right away, even though I read most of his stuff when I was 15, and was forced to for school. I clicked with his books, for some reason. I credit a lot of that to my 10th grade teacher, Mr. Crothers. His love of The Great Gatsby permeated his lectures, and his enthusiasm inspired the class. (Excerpt from book here). I really “got” it. I remember the book as being much much longer. When I recently re-read it, I was shocked by how short it actually is.

I already had a fascination with flappers (Obviously.) I think it might have had something to do with seeing Bugsy Malone on TV when I was about 12. Jodie Foster and Scott Baio as little kid gangsters and gun molls, driving cars with their feet like the Flintstones. I loved that movie, and I loved Jodie Foster’s spit curls, and her costumes. I remember, too, in junior high I did a whole paper on the 1920s for history class. I remember including photographs of flappers, and photographs of the cars they had. I would insert stuff like this through the text:

I knew all about prohibition, I knew the music. I wrote stories about flappers and show girls and bootleggers. It was a highly evocative era for me, perhaps indicative of my fantasy of being grown-up, and on my own, and rebelling a little bit, doing what I wanted to do.

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.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Pierian Springs and the Last Straw” – a story written when he was an undergraduate

F. Scott Fitzgerald (or Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald) was born in St. Paul Minnesota in 1896. He went to Princeton, and afterwards joined the army. Somewhere in those early years, he sold his first story and when he was only 23 years old he wrote and published his first novel: This Side of Paradise. It was a smash hit – and was one of those zeitgeist books: it described the moment in time that everyone was experiencing (or, a certain set of people, let’s say that) … It was one of those books that is eloquent about cultural and social changes AS they are happening. Fitzgerald was immediately seen as the voice of that era, and that generation. The jazz age kicking in. Fitzgerald was the poster child. It remains as one of the greatest books about American undergraduate life ever written. It didn’t hurt that he was so handsome.

People projected their own desires onto him, their ideals for who they wanted to be. He was glamorous, urbane, free of societal conventions … He lived the life others wanted to live.

And yet, he wrote: “What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”

That is courage. That kind of honesty. So inspiring to me.

In 1922, he wrote in a letter to Maxwell Perkins at Scribners: “I want to write something new — something extraordinary and simple & intricately patterned.”

Such a young man. Such a broad and deep vision.

Around this time, he married Zelda Sayre who hailed from Montgomery, Alabama.

Girls, for instance, have found the accent shifted from chemical purity to breadth of viewpoint, intellectual charm and piquant cleverness … we find the young woman of 1920 flirting, kissing, viewing life lightly, saying damn without a blush, playing along the danger line in an immature way – a sort of mental baby vamp … Personally, I prefer this sort of girl. Indeed, I married the heroine of my stories. I would not be interested in any other sort of woman.

— Interview with F. Scott Fitzgerald, in January, 1921

She was the yin to his yang, she was the perfect partner in crime for that particular decade … she did not give a damn. She was the Clara Bow for the literary set. She was who they were talking about when they talked about “jazz babies”. The original flapper.

Look at their wedding portrait.

They had their wedding reception at Chumley’s, a former speakeasy and literary hangout at 86 Bedford Street, which is still there. It’s the same now as it was then: no signage, nothing to say it’s there. You have to know where it is. 86 Bedford, baby! The cops are coming, 86 those plates, and let’s get the hell out of here.

Fitzgerald and Zelda married. They lived their relationship in public. They created personae, they acted parts, they showed up at places looking amazing, they relished in their own publicity. They kept massive scrapbooks of their clippings from the gossip pages. They were partners in all of this. Partners in self-promotion and self-absorption.

Here is an excerpt from a letter Zelda wrote to Scott (who was clearly anxious about her flirting and her devotion to him alone):

Scott – there’s nothing in all the world I want but you – and your precious love – All the material things are nothing. I’d just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence – because you’d soon love me less – and less – and I’d do anything – anything – to keep your heart for my own – I don’t want to live – I want to love first, and live incidentally – Why don’t you feel that I’m waiting – I’ll come to you, Lover, when you’re ready – Don’t – don’t ever think of the things you can’t give me – You’ve trusted me wiht the dearest heart of all – and it’s so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had –

How can you think deliberately of life without me – If you should die – O Darling – darling Scot – It’d be like going blind. I know I would, too – I’d have no purpose in life – just a pretty – decoration. Don’t you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered – and I was delivered to you – to be worn – I want you to wear me, like a watch-charm or a button hole bouquet – to the world. And then, when we’re alone, I want to help – to know that you can’t do anything without me.

Here’s a page from their scrapbook:

Dorothy Parker has a vivid (and oft-quoted) memory of seeing the two of them after their marriage:

Robert Sherwood brought Scott and Zelda to me right after their marriage. I had met Scott before. He told me he was going to marry the most beautiful girl in Alabama and Georgia! … But they did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun; their youth was striking.

Zelda and Scott were like the Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie of their day. Exhibitionists, putting their own craziness on display, loving and living to shock others, having massive crockery-throwing fights in public, also having clutching make-out sessions in public … It all was about being famous. But underneath all of that, there was a kindred spirit thing happening. You can’t be in love with someone who NEEDS to be famous and not have the same need yourself. Or, you can, but it’ll go bust. The two of them were in sync in those first years – it was like they were the same person. They wrote essays together (at least the essays carried two bylines) detailing their peripatetic life, wonderful stuff some of it. (Here’s a post I wrote about one of those essays. I was in the beginning stages of my breakdown last year when I wrote that essay, which I think is apparent. Once the brain-storm passed in around October of last year, I considered deleting everything on my blog in between June and September 2009, but I decided against it. I can’t re-read any of that stuff, but it’s okay to let it stand. I was reading Fitzgerald’s collection of essays The Crack-Up in the spring of last year, before I stopped being able to read altogether in July, so I wrote a lot about it at that time. Anyway, just a word of explanation for the tone of that piece. Nothing wrong with the tone, I am not apologizing for it, it’s just I found the link this morning and that time of mental chaos came rushing back.) Scott and Zelda had fun with the public perception of who they must be, it is evident in that fragmentary piece I excerpt in that link.

Zelda wrote a review of Scott’s book The Beautiful and the Damned in which she blithely references their relationship in an amusing way:

It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters, which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald – I believe that is how he spells his name – seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

Fitzgerald wrote in a letter to a friend:

I’ve always known that, 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 even if above it … I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and its these things I’d believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all that she should be … I love her and that’s the beginning and the end of everything. You’re still a catholic but Zelda’s the only God I have left now.

They would have drinks at the Plaza Hotel, and she would dance on the table. She would leap into fountains, fully dressed. She bucked convention. She was the life of the party (while it lasted). She was wild. Just wild. F. Scott Fitzgerald was inspired by her, she was a muse of some kind. She was right, he would read her diaries, he hoarded the letters she wrote to him, he was completely wrapped up in her glow. Zelda is a fascinating (and ultimately tragic) character: A girl completely unprepared to do anything useful in her life, pampered and indulged by her family who thought she was nuts (and it is probable that much of her “mania” that was so captivating early on was actually an ominous sign of things to come). She had the misfortune of marrying a man seen as the bright literary light of his generation, a misfortune because she had literary aspirations as well. Here is a small sketch she wrote about Montgomery Alabama, where she grew up. It is obvious she can write. Not like her husband, but she can definitely write.

There exists in Montgomery a time and quality that appertains to nowhere else. It began about half past six on an early summer night, with the flicker and sputter of the corner street lights going on, and it lasted until the great incandescent globes were black inside with moths and beetles and the children were called into bed from the dusty streets … The drug stores are bright at night with the organdie balloons of girls’ dresses under the big electric fans. Automobiles stand along the curbs in front of open frame houses at dusk, and sounds of supper being prepared drift through the soft splotches of darkness to the young world that moves every evening out of doors. Telephones ring, and the lacy blackness under the trees disgorges young girls in white and pink, leaping over the squares of warm light toward the tinkling sound with an expectancy that people have only in places where any event is a pleasant one. Nothing seems ever to happen.

There’s a nice descriptive romantic quality there. She wrote an essay called “Eulogy On the Flapper”:

How can a girl say again, “I do not want to be respectable because respectable girls are not attractive,” and how can she again so wisely arrive at the knowledge that “boys do dance most with the girls they kiss most,” and that “men will marry the girls they could kiss before they had asked papa?” Perceiving these things, the Flapper awoke from her lethargy of sub-deb-ism, bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity and rouge and went into the battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure, she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do. Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim and most of all to heart. She had mostly masculine friends, but youth does not need friends – it needs only crowds …

She had talent. Only she had no discipline. F. Scott Fitzgerald, while a frenzied party-man and a heavy drinker, had great discipline. He worked at his craft. He worked hard at writing. Maybe he was hungover, but his writing was his JOB. Zelda had none of that. She couldn’t focus her energies. She was threatened by his success. She wanted a piece of that pie for herself. She also ended up resenting how he used her and her thoughts and sometimes even her words to become a success.

But … well, we all know what ended up happening to Zelda. This was not a case of clinical depression. It was psychosis. While they lived in Paris, she got it into her head that she needed to be a ballerina. She began to study. She became obsessed. Soon, she was dancing for 6, 7, 8 hours a day. She was in her early 30s by that point, way too old to be a prima ballerina. But Zelda didn’t care. Apparently, too, she was a terrible dancer. Friends who visited the couple in Paris told stories (in letters, and later, to biographers) of arriving for their visit, and Zelda would greet them at the door in a tutu and ballet shoes. She would dance for them. Awfully. These stories are excruciatingly painful to read. Look at her wedding portrait. Her young wild face, those tiger eyes. It’s just sad to think of her end. It really is. It must have been unbearable.

Who knows where the madness came from, or if the wildness of her behavior in her youth (jumping in fountains, etc.) were early warning signs – things people ignored and forgave her for, because she was young and free. Who knows. I read a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald and it was so heart-wrenching I actually had a hard time finishing it. She had a deadly fear of fire, always, and she died in a fire that broke out in the mental institution in North Carolina. She was on a locked ward, couldn’t get out, and the institution burned to the ground. Unspeakable.

But for about 5 or 6 years, the two of them were on top of the world. They had youth in their favor.

The Great Gatsby was published in 1925. Fitzgerald worked his ass off on this book – and was tormented throughout the process. He wrote, and re-wrote, and re-wrote – holding off his editor, Maxwell Perkins, as long as possible. It was a precious book to him, a deeply personal book, and he feared he had not succeeded.

Perkins’ long letter back to Fitzgerald, after he finally received the manuscript, gives me chills. I won’t print it in its entirety – it’s too long – but it’s an amazing insight into the book, and also … into Fitzgerald the Writer. The guy had an innate gift, yes, but he also was this major craftsman.

Here are some excerpts from Perkins’ initial letter:

I think you have every kind of right to be proud of this book. It is an extraordinary book, suggestive of all sorts of thoughts and moods. You adopted exactly the right method of telling it, that of employing a narrator who is more of a spectator than an actor: this puts the reader upon a point of observation on a higher level than that on which the characters stand and at a distance that gives perspective. In no other way could your irony have been so immensely effective, nor the reader have been enabled so strongly to feel at times the strangeness of human circumstance in a vast heedless universe. In the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg various readers will see different significances; but their presence gives a superb touch to the whole thing: great unblinking eyes, expressionless, looking down upon the human scene. It’s magnificent!

I could go on praising the book and speculating on its various elements, and meanings, but points of criticism are more important now. I think you are right in feeling a certain slight sagging in chapters six and seven, and I don’t know how to suggest a remedy. I hardly doubt that you will find one and I am only writing to say that I think it does need something to hold up here to the pace set, and ensuing.

He then goes on to list a couple of pages of specific criticisms. Beautiful to read. It’s really just amazing literary analysis is what it is.

One of the criticisms is this:

The other point is also about Gatsby: his career must remain mysterious, of course. But in the end you make it pretty clear that his wealth came through his connection with Wolfstein. You also suggest this much earlier. Now almost all readers numerically are going to be puzzled by his having all this wealth and are going to feel entitled to an explanation. To give a distinct and definite one would be, of course, utterly absurd. It did occur to me though, that you might here and there interpolate some phrases, and possibly incidents, little touches of various kinds, that would suggest that he was in some active way mysteriously engaged. You do have him called on the telephone, but couldn’t he be seen once or twice consulting at his parties with people of some sort of mysterious significance, from the political, the gambling, the sporting world, or whatever it mayb be. I know I am floundering, but that fact may help you to see what I mean … I wish you were here so I could talk about it to you for then I know I could at least make you understand what I mean. What Gatsby did ought never to be definitely imparted, even if it could be. Whether he was an innocent tool in the hands of somebody else, or to what degree he was this, ought not to be explained. But if some sort of business activity of his were simply adumbrated, it would lend further probability to that part of the story.

After a couple more paragraphs, Perkins writes:

The general brilliant quality of the book makes me ashamed to make even these criticisms. The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry, are most extraordinary. The manuscript is full of phrases which make a scene blaze with life. If one enjoyed a rapid railroad journey I would compare the number and vividness of pictures your living words suggest, to the living scenes disclosed in that way. It seems in reading a much shorter book than it is, but it carries the mind through a series of experiences that one would think woudl require a book of three times its length.

The presentation of Tom, his place, Daisy and Jordan, and the unfolding of their characters is unequalled so far as I know. The description of the valley of ashes adjacent to the lovely country, the conversation and the action in Myrtle’s apartment, the marvelous catalogue of those who come to Gatsby’s house — these are such things as make a man famous. And all these things, the whole pathetic episode, you have given a place in time and space, for with the help of T.J. Eckleburg and by an occasional glance at the sky, or the sea, or the city, you have imparted a sort of sense of eternity. You once told me you were not a natural writer — my God! You have plainly mastered the craft, of course; but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this.

Now that’s the kind of letter you want from your editor. Here is a wonderful post about the revisions made.

The Great Gatsby was not the phenom that This Side of Paradise was. Reviews were mixed. In 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a heartcracking letter to editor Maxwell Perkins:

Would the 25-cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye – or is the book unpopular? Has it had its chance? Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers – I can maybe pick one – make it a favorite with classrooms, profs, lovers of English prose – anybody? But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much!

Only posterity would put Gatsby in the canon.

Zelda had her first breakdown in 1930. Fitzgerald’s drinking problem went to another level. He was devastated by her illness, and he was devastated by what was obviously a slacking off in his success. It’s tough when you become a mega-star at 23. One of my favorite essays by Fitzgerald is about what it is like to achieve “early success”. Anything that follows is sure to be a letdown. Fitzgerald needed to support himself, so he started cranking out short stories for the big mags at the time … stuff that paid the bills but left him feeling empty.

F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at 44, leaving an unfinished novel The Last Tycoon behind him.

When I read Gatsby at age 15, I was completely on the side of Nick, the narrator: The relatively innocent and honest bystander, looking on at the decadence of Daisy and Jordan and Gatsby, trying not to judge (like he says on the first page of the book), and trying to come out of the situation unscathed. But by the end of the book, Nick is changed. And so are we, whether we like it or not.

But now, reading it as a grown woman, with a couple of failed love affairs in my rear view mirror, I found myself entering the story through the eyes of Gatsby. I understood Gatsby, suddenly. Carrying a torch for years, infusing everything with significance, poetry, choosing the dream-world over reality.

It is only NOW, after reading it from an adult perspective, that I can truly understand why the book is seen as such an epic human tragedy. An American tragedy.

Now I understand. Now I understand.

First edition, “The Great Gatsby”

The first pages of the book are so extraordinary, so exquisitely written, they cannot be improved upon.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that any intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament” — it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

And here, in his essay “Early Success”, written in 1937, Fitzgerald writes:

The uncertainties of 1919 were over – there seemed little doubt about what was going to happen – America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it. The whole golden boom was in the air – its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in prohibition. All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them – the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew up, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy’s peasants. In life these things hadn’t happened yet, but I was pretty sure living wasn’t the reckless, careless business these people thought – this generation just younger than me …

The dream had been early realized and the realization carried with it a certain bonus and a certain burden. Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power – at its worst the Napoleonic delusion. The man who arrives young believes that he exercises his will because his star is shining. The man who only asserts himself at thirty has a balanced idea of what will power and fat have each contributed, the one who gets there at forty is liable to put the emphasis on will alone. This comes out when the storms strike your craft.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young. When the primary objects of love and money could be taken for granted and a shaky eminence had lost its fascination, I had fairy years to waste, years that I can’t honestly regret, in seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea. Once in the middle twenties I was driving along the High Corniche Road through the twilight with the whole French Riviera twinkling on the sea below. As far ahead as I could see was Monte Carlo, and though it was out of season and there were no Grand Dukes left to gamble and E. Phillips Oppenheim was a fat industrious man in my hotel, who lived in a bathrobe – the very name was so incorrigibly enchanting that I could only stop the car and like the Chinese whisper: “Ah me! Ah me!” It was not Monte Carlo I was looking at. It was back into the mind of the young man with cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York. I was him again – for an instant I had the good fortune to share his dreams, I who had no more dreams of my own. And there are still times when I creep up on him, surprise him on an autumn morning in New York or a spring night in Carolina when it is so quiet that you can hear a dog barking in the next county. But never again during that all too short period when he and I were one person, when the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment – when life was literally a dream.