A Brief Biography of F Scott Fitzgerald.doc

A Brief Biography of F. Scott FitzgeraldF. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) was a writer very much of his own time. As Malcolm Cowley once put it, he lived in a room full of clocks and calendars. The years ticked away while he noted the songs, the shows, the books, the quarterbacks. His own career followed the pattern of the nation, booming in the early 1920s and skidding into near oblivion during the depths of the Depression. Yet his fiction did more than merely report on his times, or on himself as a prototypical representative, for Fitzgerald had the gift of double vision. Like Walt Whitman or his own Nick Carraway, he was simultaneously within and without, at once immersed in his times and able to view them-and himself-with striking objectivity. This rare ability, along with his rhetorical brilliance, has established Fitzgerald as one of the major novelists and story writers of the twentieth century.The source of Fitzgerald s talent remains a mystery. Edward Fitzgerald, his father, came from tired, old stock with roots in Maryland. His job with Proctor and Gamble took the family to Buffalo and Syracuse for most of his sons first decade. Then the company let Edward Fitzgerald go, and he returned to Saint Paul blaming no one but himself and going daily to an office where there was not much for him to do. He drank more than he should have but had beautiful manners that he taught to his only son. Edward Fitzgeralds great-great-grandfather was the brother of Francis Scott Keys grandfather, and if Scott Fitzgerald claimed a closer relationship, it was hardly his fault. He had after all been christened Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, and his mother Mollie was inordinately proud of the Key connection she had married into. Her own family could offer no pretensions to aristocracy, certainly. Philip Francis McQuillan, her father, had emigrated from Ireland in 1843 and built a substantial wholesale grocery business in Saint Paul. From him may have stemmed the energy that fueled Scott Fitzgerald s production of 160 stories and four and a half novels. Equally important, probably, was Fitzgerald s sense of having come from two widely different Celtic strains. He had early developed an inferiority complex in a family where the black Irish half . had the money and looked down on the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had . breeding. As a boy Scott used to imagine that he was born of royal blood but had turned up on the Fitzgeralds doorstep. He loved his father, but could hardly respect him. His feelings about his mother were even more complicated.Mollie Fitzgerald had lost two children to epidemics before her bright, handsome Scott came along. No beauty herself, she spoiled her son and loved to show him off. When company called, he was trotted out in his Little Lord Fauntleroy suit to recite or sing and accept the applause. Until he was fifteen, he later remarked, he did not know anyone else was alive. Mollie was also extremely ambitious for her son socially. Though Catholic, Irish, and the son of an unsuccessful businessman, Scott went to dancing school with children of Saint Pauls elite. At an unusually early age he became interested in girls, and still more interested in the game of adolescent courtship. In his Thoughtbook at the age of fourteen, he put down the names of his favorite girls of the moment. Marie Hersey was the prettiest, Margaret Armstrong the best talker. He wanted to be first in the affections of both, and saw no need to draw the line at two. Last year in dancing school I got 11 valentines and this year 15, he wrote. It was a game that he enjoyed playing and that he played better than most. A few years later he wrote for the benefit of his younger sister, Annabel, a closely detailed set of instructions about how to attract boys. Later, in Bernice Bobs Her Hair (1920), he presented some of the same advice in fictional form.As a youth Fitzgerald revealed a flair for dramatics, first in Saint Paul where he wrote original plays for amateur production, and later at the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey, and at Princeton, where he composed lyrics for the universitys famous Triangle Club productions. He also carried on an extensive correspondence with debutantes and subdebutantes. For Fitzgerald , boy-girl relationships amounted to a kind of contest in which there could be only one winner. There is ample evidence that he regarded man-woman relationships in much the same way, except that as he grew older the game turned into an increasingly bitter and sometimes violent conflict. During the hectic party season in Saint Paul, Christmas of his sophomore year at Princeton, Fitzgerald more than met his match in the charming Ginevra King of Chicago, Lake Forest, and the great world of wealth and family background. They dated a few times and conducted a long and heated correspondence, but in the end, almost inevitably, Fitzgerald lost her. There is a legend that Ginevras father told Scott that poor boys shouldnt think of marrying rich girls. Whether he said it or not, Fitzgerald intuited such a message and tried to work off some of his disappointment in a number of his most powerful stories, beginning with The Debutante, published in the Nassau Lit in January 1917 and later included in This Side of Paradise (1920). By the time that famous first novel appeared in 1920, Fitzgerald was engaged to marry yet another enchanting girl, Zelda Sayre of Montgomery, Alabama, the daughter of a judge and by all accounts a belle of shockingly unconventional behavior. But Rosalind Connage in This Side of Paradise derives from Ginevra King, and it is she who rejects Amory Blaine because he is poor and hasnt much by way of prospects. I cant be shut away from the trees and the flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you, she tells Amory. And: I dont 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. As she tells another suitor, Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays. It was characteristic of Fitzgerald , who was one of the most autobiographical of writers, to transform his own experience into fiction. Later he was to appropriate Zeldas life in all its tragic dimensions for use in his stories and novels. But in this first novel, which sold more than 40,000 copies in 1920, the focus was on Fitzgerald himself, thinly disguised as the protagonist Amory Blaine, and on the people he had come to know and the events that had befallen him in his young life, particularly during that part of it spent at the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey, and at Princeton. At Newman Fitzgerald had encountered Father Cyril Sigourney Webster Fay, a worldly Catholic convert who delighted the boy by recognizing his potential and treating him like an adult. For a time Fitzgerald s Catholic roots threatened to emerge. At Princeton he had met John Peale Bishop, a young literary man who headed the Nassau Lit, Princetons literary magazine, and became, along with Edmund Wilson, a friend for the long haul. Fay and Bishop appear in This Side of Paradise as Monsignor Darcy and Thomas Parke dInvilliers, respectively, and it would be easy enough to list actual models for other characters in the novel. Always the emphasis stays on Amory, however. With people and events alike, as Andrew Turnbull observed, Fitzgerald adhered to the Renaissance and Romantic conception of the writer as a man of action who experiences his material at first hand-not from lack of imagination, but so he can write about it more intensely. This Side of Paradise became popular in large part because it portrayed the habits and customs of the young postwar generation. The youths do little more than kiss casually, take an occasional drink, and treat their parents rudely, but in 1920 that was enough to brand them as rebels, even if no one was sure what they were rebelling against. For his part, Amory Blaine is a remarkably tame and impeccably moral young man who flies from the arms of a seductive chorus girl as if she were an agent of the devil. He even utters some high-sounding phrases about democratic socialism. But his principal interest, and that of the novel, is in pursuing two not entirely unrelated goals. Amory seeks to win the golden girl and to achieve recognition as a leader at Princeton. His failure to win Rosalind is hardly Amorys fault, since he could not have prevented his familys loss of wealth. But his failure at Princeton is another matter. Like Fitzgerald , Amory Blaine throws himself into the work of the Triangle Club (and, in Amorys case, the Daily Princetonian ). He thus neglects his studies to the point where he is eventually ineligible to accept the rewards that would have been his if he had managed even a fair academic record. Like Fitzgerald , Amory spends too much time and energy analyzing the social system at Princeton as a kind of glamorous country club (this aspect of the book outraged some sons of Nassau and drew a letter of objection from Princetons president). At the end of This Side of Paradise , Amory Blaine has presumably matured. I know myself, . but that is all, he announces. It is doubtful. In form This Side of Paradise is less a novel than the collected works, to 1920, of its twenty-three-year-old author. Fitzgerald embeds poems, play fragments, and short stories within his sprawling book. As James Miller was to observe, the result reads like what H. G. Wells called the novel of saturation. Yet for all its shortcomings of structure, theme, and character, This Side of Paradise still possesses one unmistakable sign of genius. It has life, and though the times and the customs have changed, the vitality remains. Maxwell Perkins at Scribners recognized this at once, and encouraged Fitzgerald through two revisions of his book, much of which he completed while serving as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. From the beginning Perkins believed in Fitzgerald s talent and was not afraid to show it. He became Fitzgerald s lifelong friend and financial benefactor. He fought for his author within Scribners during times when it seemed foolish to do so, like the long dry spell between The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934). Fitzgerald wryly imagined how it must have been for Perkins in a late self-deprecatory story called Financing Finnegan (1938). Perkinss efforts were worth the trouble. The house of Scribners brought out all of Fitzgerald s books during his life, and continues to publish them, in hundreds of thousands of copies, to this day. With Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Scribners established a policy of following up each Fitzgerald novel with a book of his stories. In book form the stories sold less well than the novels, but they brought princely sums from the magazines. At one stage the Saturday Evening Post was paying Fitzgerald $4,000 per story, but the Fitzgeralds spent money so lavishly that they were almost always in debt. Their extravagance forced Fitzgerald to write more and more stories, which drained him of time and energy that might otherwise have gone into novels. Some of the stories are brilliant, some very moving. Many of the best are included in The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1951), edited by Malcolm Cowley. Others are much less successful, but even in the least effective Fitzgerald almost always struck a grace note that stamped the story as indisputably his own. Thus in Flappers and Philosophers , most of the stories are undistinguished, but two- Bernice Bobs Her Hair and The Ice Palace, a well-crafted story contrasting North and South-belong with the best of his tales. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were married in New York in the spring of 1920, and spent much of the next few years in and around New York, living variously in the city, Westport, Connecticut, and Great Neck, Long Island, with sojourns in Europe for a first look at that continent and in Saint Paul for the birth of their daughter, Scottie. They were never to alight anywhere long enough for it to seem like home, for Fitzgerald seems to have inherited an abiding restlessness from his parents. But during the New York years the two Fitzgeralds made themselves famous (some might say notorious) for their unconventional style of life and incessant partying. Fitzgerald earned a reputation as a symbol of the Jazz Age that he was never to rid himself of during his lifetime. But he also continued his frantic story production and widened his circle of literary acquaintances to include, for example, Ring Lardner, George Jean Nathan, and H. L. Mencken. The influence of Mencken, especially, emerged in his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922). This is Fitzgerald s bleakest novel, infected by a tone of cynicism. Not even Fitzgerald seems to care particularly about Anthony and Gloria Patch, his handsome young couple who decline in dignity and promise as they sue for the inheritance that will make them independently wealthy and-they anticipate-blissfully happy. When the money finally comes their way, however, Anthony has virtually lost his mind and Glorias beauty has begun to fade and harden. Much of the book consists of talk, with Maury Noble (modeled on Nathan) delivering himself of a good many dark and clever speeches. The novel sold surprisingly well, but did not advance Fitzgerald s reputation. Nor did the satirical play about American politics, The Vegetable (1923), which he wrote the following year in hopes of a Broadway production and financial killing. The play got as far as an out-of-town tryout in Atlantic City, where it fizzled out because of a terrible second act. If they did nothing else, The Vegetable and The Beautiful and Damned provided convincing evidence that Fitzgerald was not cut out to be a satirist. His writing was most successful when it was most deeply felt, when some part of Fitzgerald identified with his characters. Both the novel and play touched on themes that were to dominate Fitzgerald s work for the next fifteen years: the effects of money and power on those who have too much of them and the excruciating dilemma of the young man-not necessarily poor but not rich either-who falls in love with a golden girl, wealthy, beautiful, and often cruel. These same themes emerged in several brilliant stories Fitzgerald wrote in the first half decade of the 1920s. May Day (1920), a novella-length tale, provides an episodic view of New York City on May Day 1919, cutting from scenes of a society dance to a socialist newspaper office to a mob of war veterans. The protagonist of the story, Gordon Sterrett, is a weakling who commits suicide rather than face marriage with the lower-class woman who has seduced him. As in The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald supplies no one for the reader to identify with, but in May Day-manifestly a slice-of-life story-it matters far less, since there are a number of sharply drawn characters to dislike. Least appealing of all, significantly, are a hypocritical (and rich) Yale classmate of Sterretts and a shallow (and rich) debutante who was attracted to Sterrett when he was in less straitened circumstances. Conversely, the debutantes brother-an economics professor and socialist-emerges as the only really admirable figure in May Day, thus providing early evidence of the leaning to the left that characterized Fitzgerald s political stance. Two stories of 1922, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Winter Dreams, concentrate on young men in contact with the world of wealth. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, a fantasy, portrays the genteel viciousness of the Braddock Washingtons, who live atop a huge diamond of a mountain, feel annoyed when they must murder houseguests to keep the secret of its location, and assume they can buy their way out of any difficulty. In the final scenes, Washington attempts to bribe God to avert an aerial attack on his mountain, and John Unger, the young man who had come to visit the Washingtons on holiday from school, escapes with the lovely, totally impractical, and exquisitely selfish Kismine Washington and her sister Jasmine as their father, his bribe having failed, blows up the mountain. Winter Dreams hits closer to home. In fact, it is one of the few Fitzgerald stories obviously set in and around White Bear Lake, the summer playground of Saint Pauls elite. Dexter Green first encounters Judy Jones when he is caddying at her club. He quits on the spot because he realizes that she sees him as a servant, and he quite consciously begins to make something of himself in order to earn her approval. The little girl who had done this was eleven, Fitzgerald reveals, beautifully ugly now but destined after a few years to be inexpressively lovely and bring no end of misery to a great number of men. In time Dexter does attract her attention, but she treats him cavalierly as only one in a parade of beaux. Eventually Dexter makes a success in business and then on Wall Street, where he hears that Judy has married a man from Detroit who rather mistreats her and that her beauty has faded. Most of the women like her, he is told. Dexter can hardly believe his ears, and the news devastates him, destroying his dream of Judy: Something had been taken from him and the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished. Like Dexter, most of Fitzgerald s male characters celebrate the ideal at the expense of the real. Only the world of illusion can sustain their emotional intensity; only in dreams can they shut out the sometimes terrifying everyday world. So the twelve-year-old Rudolph Miller in Absolution (1924), which is the discarded beginning for The Great Gatsby, retreats into his imaginary self, Blatchford Sarnemi