A Brief Life of F.Scott Fitzgerald
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The dominant
influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol.
Francis Scott Key
Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul,
Minnesota, on September 24, 1896,
the namesake and second cousin three times removed of the author of the
National Anthem. Fitzgerald’s given names indicate his parents’ pride in his
father’s ancestry. His father, Edward, was from Maryland, with an allegiance to the Old
South and its values. Fitzgerald’s mother, Mary (Mollie) McQuillan, was the
daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul. Both were
Catholics.
Edward Fitzgerald
failed as a manufacturer of wicker furniture in St. Paul,
and he became a salesman for Procter & Gamble in upstate New York. After he was dismissed in 1908,
when his son was twelve, the family returned to St. Paul and lived comfortably on Mollie
Fitzgerald’s inheritance. Fitzgerald attended the St. Paul Academy;
his first writing to appear in print was a detective story in the school
newspaper when he was thirteen.
During 1911-1913
he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he met Father Sigourney
Fay, who encouraged his ambitions for personal distinction and achievement. As
a member of the Princeton Class of 1917, Fitzgerald neglected his studies for
his literary apprenticeship. He wrote the scripts and lyrics for the Princeton
Triangle Club musicals and was a contributor to the Princeton Tiger humor
magazine and the Nassau Literary Magazine. His college friends included Edmund
Wilson and John Peale Bishop. On academic probation and unlikely to graduate,
Fitzgerald joined the army in 1917 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in
the infantry. Convinced that he would die in the war, he rapidly wrote a novel,
“The Romantic Egotist”; the letter of rejection from Charles Scribner’s Sons
praised the novel’s originality and asked that it be resubmitted when revised.
In June 1918
Fitzgerald was assigned to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery,
Alabama. There he fell in love
with a celebrated belle, eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre, the youngest daughter
of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. The romance intensified Fitzgerald’s hopes
for the success of his novel, but after revision it was rejected by Scribners
for a second time. The war ended just before he was to be sent overseas; after
his discharge in 1919 he went to New
York City to seek his fortune in order to marry.
Unwilling to wait while Fitzgerald succeeded in the advertisement business and
unwilling to live on his small salary, Zelda Sayre broke their engagement.
Fitzgerald quit
his job in July 1919 and returned to St.
Paul to rewrite his novel as This Side of Paradise. It
was accepted by editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribners in September. Set mainly at
Princeton and described by its author as “a
quest novel,” This Side of Paradise traces the career aspirations and love
disappointments of Amory Blaine.
In the fall-winter
of 1919 Fitzgerald commenced his career as a writer of stories for the
mass-circulation magazines. Working through agent Harold Ober, Fitzgerald
interrupted work on his novels to write moneymaking popular fiction for the
rest of his life. The Saturday Evening Post became Fitzgerald’s best story
market, and he was regarded as a “Post writer.” His early commercial stories
about young love introduced a fresh character: the independent, determined
young American woman who appeared in “The Offshore Pirate” and “Bernice Bobs
Her Hair.” Fitzgerald’s more ambitious stories, such as “May Day” and “The
Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” were published in The Smart Set, which had a small
circulation.
The publication of
This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, made the twenty-four-year-old
Fitzgerald famous almost overnight, and a week later he married Zelda Sayre in New York. They embarked
on an extravagant life as young celebrities. Fitzgerald endeavored to earn a
solid literary reputation, but his playboy image impeded the proper assessment
of his work.
After a riotous
summer in Westport, Connecticut,
the Fitzgeralds took an apartment in New
York City; there he wrote his second novel, The
Beautiful and Damned, a naturalistic chronicle of the dissipation of Anthony
and Gloria Patch. When Zelda Fitzgerald became pregnant they took their first
trip to Europe in 1921 and then settled in St. Paul for the birth of their only child,
Frances Scott (Scottie) Fitzgerald, who was born in October 1921.
The Fitzgeralds
expected to become affluent from his play, The Vegetable. In the fall of 1922 they moved to Great Neck,
Long Island, in order to be near Broadway. The
political satireòsubtitled “From President to Postman”òfailed at its tryout in
November 1923, and Fitzgerald wrote his way out of debt with short stories. The
distractions of Great Neck and New
York prevented Fitzgerald from making progress on his
third novel. During this time his drinking increased. He was an alcoholic, but
he wrote sober. Zelda Fitzgerald regularly got “tight,” but she was not an
alcoholic. There were frequent domestic rows, usually triggered by drinking
bouts.
Literary opinion
makers were reluctant to accord Fitzgerald full marks as a serious craftsman.
His reputation as a drinker inspired the myth that he was an irresponsible
writer; yet he was a painstaking reviser whose fiction went through layers of
drafts. Fitzgerald’s clear, lyrical, colorful, witty style evoked the emotions
associated with time and place. When critics objected to Fitzgerald’s concern
with love and success, his response was: “But, my God! it was my material, and
it was all I had to deal with.” The chief theme of Fitzgerald’s work is
aspirationòthe idealism he regarded as defining American character. Another
major theme was mutability or loss. As a social historian Fitzgerald became
identified with the Jazz Age: “It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art,
it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire,” he wrote in “Echoes of
the Jazz Age.”
Seeking
tranquility for his work the Fitzgeralds went to France in the spring of 1924 . He
wrote The Great Gatsby during the summer and fall in Valescure near St.
Raphael, but the marriage was damaged by Zelda’s involvement with a French
naval aviator. The extent of the affairòif it was in fact consummatedòis not
known. On the Riviera
the Fitzgeralds formed a close friendship with
affluent and cultured American expatriates Gerald and Sara Murphy.
The Fitzgeralds
spent the winter of 1924-1925 in Rome, where he
revised The Great Gatsby; they were en route to Paris when the novel was published in April.
The Great Gatsby marked a striking advance in Fitzgerald’s technique, utilizing
a complex structure and a controlled narrative point of view. Fitzgerald’s
achievement received critical praise, but sales of Gatsby were disappointing,
though the stage and movie rights brought additional income.
In Paris
Fitzgerald met Ernest Hemingwayòthen unknown outside the expatriate literary
circleòwith whom he formed a friendship based largely on his admiration for
Hemingway’s personality and genius. The Fitzgeralds remained in France until the end of 1926, alternating
between Paris and the Riviera. Fitzgerald made little progress on
his fourth novel, a study of American expatriates in France provisionally titled “The
Boy Who Killed His Mother,” “Our Type,” and “The World’s Fair.” During these
years Zelda Fitzgerald’s unconventional behavior became increasingly eccentric.
The Fitzgeralds
returned to America to
escape the distractions of France.
After a short, unsuccessful stint of screen writing in Hollywood,
Fitzgerald rented “Ellerslie,” a mansion near Wilmington, Delaware,
in the spring of 1927. The family remained at “Ellerslie” for two years
interrupted by a visit to Paris
in the summer of 1928, but Fitzgerald was still unable to make significant
progress on his novel. At this time Zelda Fitzgerald commenced ballet training,
intending to become a professional dancer. The Fitzgeralds returned to France in the
spring of 1929, where Zelda’s intense ballet work damaged her health and
contributed to the couple’s estrangement. In April 1930 she suffered her first
breakdown. She was treated at Prangins clinic in Switzerland until September 1931,
while Fitzgerald lived in Swiss hotels. Work on the novel was again suspended
as he wrote short stories to pay for psychiatric treatment.
Fitzgerald’s peak
story fee of $4,000 from The Saturday Evening Post may have had in 1929 the
purchasing power of $40,000 in present-day dollars. Nonetheless, the general
view of his affluence is distorted. Fitzgerald was not among the highest-paid
writers of his time; his novels earned comparatively little, and most of his income
came from 160 magazine stories. During the 1920s his income from all sources
averaged under $25,000 a year- good money at a time when a schoolteacher’s
average annual salary was $1,299, but not a fortune. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
did spend money faster than he earned it; the author who wrote so eloquently
about the effects of money on character was unable to manage his own finances.
The Fitzgeralds
returned to America in the
fall of 1931 and rented a house in Montgomery.
Fitzgerald made a second unsuccessful trip to Hollywood in 1931. Zelda Fitzgerald suffered
a relapse in February 1932 and entered Johns
Hopkins Hospital
in Baltimore.
She spent the rest of her life as a resident or outpatient of sanitariums.
In 1932, while a
patient at Johns Hopkins, Zelda Fitzgerald rapidly wrote Save Me the Waltz. Her
autobiographical novel generated considerable bitterness between the
Fitzgeralds, for he regarded it as pre-empting the material that he was using
in his novel-in-progress. Fitzgerald rented “La Paix,” a house outside Baltimore, where he
completed his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night. Published in 1934, his most
ambitious novel was a commercial failure, and its merits were matters of
critical dispute. Set in France
during the 1920s, Tender Is the Night examines the deterioration of Dick Diver,
a brilliant American psychiatrist, during the course of his marriage to a
wealthy mental patient.
The 1936-1937
period is known as “the crack-up” from the title of an essay Fitzgerald wrote
in 1936. Ill, drunk, in debt, and unable to write commercial stories, he lived
in hotels in the region near Asheville, North Carolina, where in 1936 Zelda Fitzgerald entered Highland Hospital. After Baltimore Fitzgerald did
not maintain a home for Scottie. When she was fourteen she went to boarding
school, and the Obers became her surrogate family. Nonetheless, Fitzgerald
functioned as a concerned father by mail, attempting to supervise Scottie’s
education and to shape her social values.
Fitzgerald went to
Hollywood alone
in the summer of 1937 with a six-month Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer screenwriting
contract at $1,000 a week. He received his only screen credit for adapting
Three Comrades (1938), and his contract was renewed for a year at $1,250 a
week. The $91,000 he earned from MGM was a great deal of money during the late
Depression years when a new Chevrolet coupe cost $619; but although Fitzgerald
paid off most of his debts, he was unable to save. His trips East to visit his
wife were disastrous. In California
Fitzgerald fell in love with movie columnist Sheilah Graham. Their relationship
endured despite his benders. After MGM dropped his option at the end of 1938,
Fitzgerald worked as a freelance script writer and wrote short-short stories
for Esquire. He began his Hollywood novel, The
Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939 and had written more than half of a working
draft when he died of a heart attack in Graham’s apartment on December 21,
1940. Zelda Fitzgerald perished at a fire in Highland Hospital
in 1948.
F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a
failure. The obituaries were condescending, and he seemed destined for literary
obscurity. The first phase of the Fitzgerald “revival” does not
properly describe the process that occurred between 1945 and 1950. By 1960 he had
achieved a secure place among America’s
enduring writers. The Great Gatsby, a work that seriously examines the theme of
aspiration in an American setting, defines the classic American novel.
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Matthew J. Bruccoli’s “A Brief Life of Fitzgerald”
originally appeared in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Bruccoli
with the assistance of Judith S. Baughman (New York: Scribners, 1994.); essay reprinted
courtesy of Simon & Schuster.
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