Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  The family tragedy also strengthened the bond between Scott and his father, who tried to protect the boy from his mother’s grief-stricken hysteria. In an autobiographical passage from Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald wrote that his hero, Dick Diver, “was born several months after the death of two young sisters and his father, guessing what would be the effect on Dick’s mother, had saved him from a spoiling by becoming his moral guide.” Fitzgerald later connected his sisters’ deaths to his vocation as an author: “Three months before I was born my mother lost her other two children and I think that came first of all though I don’t know how it worked exactly. I think I started then to be a writer.” Though Fitzgerald did not explain this cryptic statement, he probably meant that he had been born out of suffering, had been singled out for a survivor’s special fate and had been made to feel that his life was particularly precious. His existence somehow had to compensate for their absence.

  III

  Though Scott was a robust infant, weighing ten pounds six ounces at birth, he became a sickly and much-coddled child. When he was two years old, his mother, fearing that his persistent cough might lead to consumption, took him to a health resort. The following year his parents sent him to an infants’ school, but he wept and wailed so much that they took him out again after one morning. The family physician, M. R. Ramsey, recalled that the stubborn and spoiled young Scott “was a patient of mine when he was a small boy and until he went off to prep school. He was a very difficult and temperamental patient and refused to accept any regime which was not to his liking. This attitude he preserved throughout life.”4

  In April 1898, after Edward’s furniture business had collapsed, he moved his family to Buffalo, New York, and became a soap salesman for Procter & Gamble. They remained in Buffalo for the next decade, except for two and a half years in Syracuse from January 1901 to September 1903. But upstate New York, unlike St. Paul, left a negative impression on Scott’s character. At the end of Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver starts an unsuccessful medical practice in Buffalo, where his father had died, and then drifts about to Batavia, Lockport, Geneva and Hornell. Fitzgerald always associated upstate New York with isolation and failure.

  Scott’s only surviving sister, Annabel, was born in Syracuse in July 1901, and his first childhood memory was the sight of her howling on a bed. The self-absorbed boy was not close to her as a child, though he offered the teenage girl substantial advice about how to attract men, and rarely saw his attractive but conventional sister in adult life. Annabel later married and had two daughters. Her husband, Clifton Sprague, became an admiral and won the Navy Cross at the battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944.

  Two years after Annabel’s birth, while the family was still in Syracuse, the six-year-old Scott had some frightening experiences and acquired his first badge of courage: “He begins to remember many things, a filthy vacant lot, the haunt of dead cats, a hair-raising buckboard, the little girl whose father was in prison for telling lies, a Rabelaisian incident with Jack Butler, a blow with a baseball bat from the same boy—son of an army officer—which left a scar that will shine always in the middle of his forehead.” Despite his heroic scar, another boyhood friend recalled that the handsome Scott was considered a sissy because he was afraid of a dead cat in the alley. On September 24, 1903, just after he returned to Buffalo and was desperately trying to reestablish his childhood friendships, Scott sent out invitations to his seventh birthday party—to which no one came. Heavy rain kept the indifferent children at home, and the humiliated Scott, consoled and spoiled by his mother, was allowed to eat the entire birthday cake, including some candles, by himself. He was a great eater of tallow until well past the age of fourteen.

  In the summer of 1907 Scott went to Camp Chatham in Orillia, Ontario, north of Toronto on Lake Simcoe, where he swam, rowed, fished, played baseball and was extremely unpopular. When he played catcher without a mask, a ball cut his forehead. He became a hero despite his lack of athletic ability, but was so insufferably pleased with himself that he lost his short-lived prestige. One of his earliest letters, posted from camp to his mother, set the pattern of his future correspondence with agents and editors: “I wish you would send me five dollars as all my money is used up.” The ten-year-old also tactfully discouraged his mother from visiting him at camp and embarrassing him in front of the other boys: “Though I would like very much to have you up here, I don’t think you would like it as you know no one here except Mrs. Upton and she is busy most of the time. I don’t think you would like the accommodations as it is only a small town and no good hotels.”5

  Scott later admitted that he disliked his mother. He blamed her for spoiling him (which his father could not prevent) and emphasized the great difference in their characters and beliefs: “Mother and I never had anything in common except a relentless stubborn quality,” he told his sister, “but when I saw all this it turned me inside out realizing how unhappy her temperament made her.” In “An Author’s Mother,” he described Mollie’s absurd appearance and mentioned her disapproval of his career: “She was a halting old lady in a black silk dress and a rather preposterously high-crowned hat that some milliner had foisted upon her declining sight. . . . Her son was a successful author. She had by no means abetted him in the choice of that profession but had wanted him to be an army officer or else go into business. . . . An author was something distinctly peculiar—there had been only one in the middle western city where she was born and he had been regarded as a freak. . . . Her secret opinion was that such a profession was risky and eccentric.”

  Fitzgerald once recorded a disturbing dream about his mother in which he felt ashamed of her for not being young and elegant, and for offending his sense of propriety by her peculiar behavior. He called her “a neurotic, half insane with pathological nervous worry.” And in This Side of Paradise he created the antithesis of Mollie Fitzgerald in his ideal mother, Beatrice Blaine: charming, stylish, well-educated, beautiful, wealthy and well-connected. Though Fitzgerald never dedicated a book to his father, he did, as a joke, offer Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) “Quite inappropriately, to my mother.” To Fitzgerald, the real matriarch of the family was Mollie’s younger sister, Annabel McQuillan, a dessicated spinster who had all the character and culture so noticeably lacking in his mother.

  Edward adored his small, blond, blue-eyed boy, whose refined and delicate features resembled his own, and who was full of energy and imagination. In a poignant essay on his father, Fitzgerald described how Edward would dress his son in starched white trousers and walk into downtown Buffalo to buy the Sunday paper and smoke his cigar. Scott always used his well-bred father, who believed in the old-fashioned virtues of honor, courtesy and courage, as a moral standard. After Mollie had been emotionally devastated by the death of her three babies, Edward roused himself from his usual lethargy and made an exemplary effort to be a good parent:

  I loved my father—always deep in my subconscious I have referred judgments back to him, to what he would have thought or done. He loved me—and felt a deep responsibility for me. . . . He came from tired old stock with very little left of vitality and mental energy but he managed to raise a little for me. We walked downtown in the summer to have our shoes shined, me in my sailor suit and my father in his always beautifully cut clothes, and he told me the few things I ever learned about life until a few years later from a Catholic priest, Monsignor Fay.6

  Since Edward lived in Mollie’s shadow and eventually became financially dependent on her, he was (unlike his wife) proud of his son’s profession and took great vicarious pleasure in his early success.

  While Scott was on holiday in Frontenac, Minnesota, in July 1909, his father—who was always pressed for money and even had to charge his postage stamps at the local drugstore—sent him a sententious, paradoxical and possibly playful note, which expected quite a lot from a rather small sum: “I enclose $1.00. Spend it liberally, generously, carefully, judiciously, sensibly. Get from it pleasure, wisdom, health and experience.”
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  Edward was preoccupied with money because of his manifest inability to earn it. The most traumatic incident in Scott’s childhood took place in Buffalo in March 1908, and suddenly transformed his father from an elegant gentleman into a hopeless wreck:

  One afternoon—I was ten or eleven—the phone rang and my mother answered it. I didn’t understand what she said but I felt that disaster had come to us. My mother, a little while before, had given me a quarter to go swimming. I gave the money back to her. I knew something terrible had happened and I thought she could not spare the money now.

  Then I began to pray, “Dear God,” I prayed, “please don’t let us go to the poorhouse.” A little while later my father came home. I had been right. He had lost his job.

  That morning he had gone out a comparatively young man, a man full of strength, full of confidence. He came home that evening, an old man, a completely broken man. He had lost his essential drive, his immaculateness of purpose. He was a failure the rest of his days.

  Unlike the compassionate Linda Loman in Death of a Salesman, who responds to her husband’s failure in business by telling her sons—“he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog”7—Mollie remained locked in her own hysterical world. She looked down on her husband, who began to drink too much, and frequently asked young Scott: “If it weren’t for your Grandfather McQuillan, where would we be now?” The fathers of most of Fitzgerald’s fictional heroes are dead before the novels begin.

  IV

  In July 1908 the defeated Fitzgeralds returned to St. Paul. The children moved in with Grandmother McQuillan on Laurel Avenue, the parents lived with a friend on Summit Avenue, and they were not reunited until the following April. Edward listlessly sold wholesale groceries from his brother-in-law’s real estate office, and the Fitzgeralds changed their rented residences, in the neighborhood of Summit Avenue, almost every year. Despite the loss of income, the family made a brave attempt to maintain their social status by providing lessons, arranging dances and sending their children to the right schools.

  Scott’s swaggering adolescent roles as “actor, athlete, scholar, philatelist and collector of cigar bands” were undermined by his mother’s insistence that he demonstrate his “accomplishments” by singing for company. The attractive, egoistic, socially insecure boy now revealed a crucial, lifelong flaw in his character, which would hurt him as a writer. He had a weakness for showing off instead of listening and observing, and was unaware of the effect he had on others. “I didn’t know till 15,” Fitzgerald said, “that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty.” Two of his closest friends later criticized the narcissistic self-absorption that limited Fitzgerald’s understanding of other men and women. Sara Murphy wrote, with some exaggeration: “I have always told you you haven’t the faintest idea what anybody else but yourself is like.” And Hemingway, who agreed with her, told their editor Max Perkins: “Scott can’t invent true characters because he doesn’t know anything about people.”8

  Scott did develop a new awareness, however, when he perceived that he was popular with girls (if not with boys) and that they created strangely mixed feelings within him: “For the first time in his life he realized a girl is something opposite and complementary to him, and he was subject to a warm chill of mingled pleasure and pain.” His chaste adolescent heroine, Josephine, likes the daring experience of kissing boys, but has no real sexual feeling. And in a potentially lyrical moment in This Side of Paradise, when the thirteen-year-old Amory Blaine kisses a girl for the first time, she responds with conventional romantic modesty while he is overwhelmed by nauseous repulsion: “Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind. ‘We’re awful,’ rejoiced Myra gently. She slipped her hand into his, her head drooped against his shoulder. Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss any one.”9

  Scott’s sexual revulsion was undoubtedly connected to what his Anglo-Irish friend, Shane Leslie, called the “middle-class, dull, unpoetical and fettering” Catholicism of the Middle West. His mother was fanatical about religion, went to Mass every day and, as he told Sheilah Graham, “believed that Christian boys were killed at Easter and the Jews drank the blood. She was a bigot.” He had attended two Catholic schools in Buffalo, and had shocked himself by lying in the confessional and telling the priest that he never told a lie.

  When his family, still clinging precariously to the fringe of “good society,” returned to Minnesota, the twelve-year-old Scott entered a nonsectarian school, St. Paul Academy, which had forty boys between the ages of ten and eighteen. During his three years there, he energetically began his literary apprenticeship. He would memorize titles in bookstores and confidently discuss works he had not read (the same intellectual pretentiousness would permeate his first novel). He attempted to achieve popularity with his classmates, as he had in Buffalo and at summer camp, but failed abysmally because he observed and criticized their faults. As he would later do at Princeton and in the army, he ignored his studies and “wrote all through every class in school in the back of my geography book and first year Latin and on the margins of themes and declensions and mathematics problems.”10

  He wrote many juvenile adventure stories for the school newspaper and melodramatic plays for the Elizabethan Dramatic Club, which was named after the director, Elizabeth Magoffin. Scott’s first published story, “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage” (1909), echoed the title and imitated the characters and themes of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Though he neglected to bring the mortgage into the story, no one seemed to notice. “When it came to rewriting,” Magoffin recalled, “Fitzgerald was indefatigable, retiring to a corner and tossing off new lines with his ever-facile pen.” Scott was also capable of the kind of heroic action that fulfilled his childhood fantasies. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that in September 1914, during a performance of his fourth play, Assorted Spirits, a fuse suddenly exploded and the audience panicked. The young playwright saved the evening by leaping onto the stage and calming the frightened audience with an improvised monologue.

  Another incident that made the newspapers took place during a Christmas service at St. John’s Episcopal Church the previous year. Scott made a dramatic gesture, drew attention to himself and expressed his defiance of convention and rejection of religion. Though he called it “the most disgraceful thing I ever did,” his cocky tone suggests that he welcomed the notorious publicity he had inspired: “I plodded toward the rector. At the very foot of the pulpit a kindly thought struck me—perhaps inspired by the faint odor of sanctity which exuded from the saintly man. I spoke. ‘Don’t mind me,’ I said, ‘go on with the sermon.’ Then, perhaps unsteadied a bit by my emotion, I passed down the other aisle, followed by a sort of amazed awe, and so out into the street. The papers had an extra out before midnight.”11

  V

  Three crucial entries in Scott’s autobiographical Ledger for his boyhood years from 1901 to 1904 expressed his acute anxiety and shame about his feet, which he associated with fear of exposure, with filth and with perversion. Scott’s bizarre obsession with and phobia about his feet were closely connected not only to his childhood guilt about sex and revulsion when kissing girls—the result of what he called “a New England conscience, developed in Minnesota”—but also to adult doubts about his masculinity and fears about his sexual inadequacy:

  He went to Atlantic City—where some Freudian complex refused to let him display his feet, so he refused to swim, concealing the real reason. They thought he feared the water.

  There was a boy named Arnold who went barefooted in his yard and peeled plums. Scott’s Freudian shame about his feet kept him from joining in.

  He took off John Wylie’s shoes. He began to hear “dirty” words. He had this curious dream of perversion.

  In a Smart Set inte
rview of 1924, Fitzgerald commented on the childhood phobia that had made him so unhappy and falsely claimed that it had suddenly vanished when he reached adolescence: “The sight of his own feet filled him with embarrassment and horror. No amount of persuasion could entice him to permit others to see his naked feet, and up until he was twelve this fear caused him a great deal of misery. . . . This complex suddenly disappeared one day without any reason.”12

  Frances Kroll, Fitzgerald’s secretary in Hollywood, observed that he was slightly pigeon-toed, always wore slippers and never went about in bare feet. Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald’s companion during the last years of his life, wrote that he had mentioned his “mysterious shyness” about his feet, and during the years that she knew him always refused to take off his shoes and socks on the beach. When Tony Buttitta, who visited Fitzgerald’s hotel room in Asheville in 1935, noticed his “stubby and unattractive feet,” Fitzgerald “fumbled for his slippers and hid his feet in them.” Most significantly, Lottie, a prostitute who became Fitzgerald’s mistress that summer, described his foot fetishism and said that he “caressed her feet, the toes, instep, and heel, and got an odd pleasure out of it. . . . It seems that the sight of women’s feet has excited him since he first started thinking about sex.”13

  Early in his career Fitzgerald used his curious obsession to suggest the presence of evil. In This Side of Paradise, in a five-page scene called “The Devil,” Amory Blaine and a friend pick up two chorus girls in a nightclub, where he notices a pale, middle-aged man dressed in a brown suit. They then go up to the girls’ apartment to get drunk and have sex. Just as Amory is tempted by Phoebe, the minatory devil figure from the nightclub mysteriously appears in the apartment: “suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a rush of blood to the head [instead of the penis] he realized he was afraid. The feet were all wrong . . . with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather than knew. . . . It was like weakness in a good woman, or blood on satin; one of those terrible incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain.” Associating the horrific feet with sexual immorality and sexual violation, Amory rushes out of the sinful apartment and descends in the elevator. As he reaches the lower floor, “the feet came into view in the sickly electric light of the paved hall.”