Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  IV

  Fitzgerald’s emotional upheavals with Ginevra, his devotion to the Triangle Club, his social striving at Cottage Club, his disappointment with the English department and his complete lack of interest in other subjects led to academic disaster in the middle of his junior year. He once remarked that “Princeton is still the hardest institution to get in to and stay in (and leave!) in America.” But he got into it with only mediocre qualifications and left it all too easily.

  While at Princeton Fitzgerald maintained the careless indifference to academic life that had characterized his years at Newman and would continue during his training in the army. He did not even attempt the minimum work required to pass many of his courses and took the maximum of forty-nine absences allowed during his freshman year. He failed three courses in both his freshman and sophomore years, failed his makeup exams in Latin and chemistry at the beginning of his junior year, which again made him ineligible for Triangle, and barely managed to survive without expulsion. He never even learned how to spell and, despite his training in Latin and French, was hopeless at foreign languages.

  In November 1915 Fitzgerald entered the infirmary with a touch of malaria, then endemic in the marshlands around Princeton. Though his illness (which he preferred to call tuberculosis) was real, it also provided an excellent excuse to leave college honorably as an invalid instead of failing out after his midyear exams. “After the curriculum had tied me up,” he defensively explained to the president of Princeton in 1920, “taken away the honors I’d wanted, bent my nose over a chemistry book and said, ‘No fun, no activities, no offices, no Triangle trips—no, not even a diploma if you can’t do chemistry’—after that I retired.” He was extremely sensitive about his failure and persuaded the dean to give him a letter stating that he had voluntarily withdrawn “because of ill health and that he was fully at liberty, at that time, to go on with his class, if his health had permitted.” At the same time the exasperated dean rubbed salt in the wound by including a caustic note to Fitzgerald: “This is for your sensitive feelings. I hope you will find it soothing.”13

  After idling away the spring of 1916 in St. Paul, he returned to Princeton to repeat his junior year. But his spirit was crushed. He felt it was stupid to spend four hours a day in his tutor’s stuffy room enduring the infinite boredom of conic sections. He had been deprived of the recognition he craved and had lost all chance of winning honors during his final years. “After a few months of rest I went back to college,” he explained in The Crack-Up. “But I had lost certain offices, the chief one was the presidency of the Triangle Club, a musical comedy idea, and also I dropped back a class. To me college would never be the same. There were to be no badges of pride, no medals, after all.” If he could not achieve great success at Princeton, Fitzgerald did not see the point of struggling through his courses.

  He confessed that when his morale was at its lowest point he had even sought solace from a prostitute. “It seemed on one March afternoon [in 1917] that 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.” But this kind of behavior was out of character. On one occasion, when Bishop and another Princeton friend, Alexander McKaig, had gone off to pick up two girls, Scott priggishly told Edmund Wilson: “That’s one thing that Fitzgerald’s never done.”14

  In 1916 Wilson and Bishop, his fellow highbrow, published a cruel satiric poem that put the popular but cheeky Fitzgerald in his proper place. They contrasted his shallowness to their learning, and deflated his flashy cleverness, superficial reading, derivative cynicism and unworthy ambition by having Fitzgerald exclaim:

  I was always clever enough

  To make the clever upperclassmen notice me;

  I could make one poem by Browning,

  One play by Shaw,

  And part of a novel by Meredith

  Go further than most people

  Could do with the reading of years;

  And I could always be cynically amusing at the expense

  Of those who were cleverer than I

  And from whom I borrowed freely,

  But whose cleverness

  Was not the kind that is effective

  In the February of sophomore year. . . .

  No doubt by senior year

  I would have been on every committee in college,

  But I made one slip:

  I flunked out in the middle of junior year.

  In his Ledger Fitzgerald honestly characterized 1916 as “a year of terrible disappointments & the end of all college dreams. Everything bad in it was my own fault.” But he never completely accepted his share of the blame. In 1937, when Bishop truthfully stated that Fitzgerald had failed out of Princeton and used illness as an excuse for his departure, Fitzgerald became furious and melodramatically claimed that he had been carried out on a stretcher.

  Glenway Wescott once observed that “Fitzgerald must have been the worst educated man in the world.”15 It was ironic, Fitzgerald later told his daughter, that he had failed “Buzzer” Hall’s course in modern European history, but now owned more than three hundred books on the subject. Aware of his own intellectual limitations, he struggled to improve his mind until the very end of his life.

  Fitzgerald dedicated the summer of 1917 to drinking gin and reading Schopenhauer, Bergson and William James. But the gin had a more powerful effect than the philosophy, and he returned to Princeton to await his commission in the army rather than to get his degree. The most famous alumnus of the college never graduated. Though bitter about his failures, he always remained intensely idealistic about and deeply devoted to Princeton.

  Chapter Three

  The Army and Zelda, 1917–1919

  I

  Fitzgerald, who was extremely self-absorbed, had no serious interest in or understanding of the greatest historical event of his lifetime: World War I. “Beyond a sporting interest in the German dash for Paris,” he wrote with studied indifference in This Side of Paradise, “the whole affair failed either to thrill or interest him. . . . He hoped it would be long and bloody.” When the war bogged down in the trenches after the German invasion of France, he “felt like an irate ticket holder at a prizefight where the principals refused to mix it up.” Fitzgerald joined the army for the same reasons that he went to Princeton. It was the fashionable thing to do. He imagined himself as a war hero as he had once pictured himself as a football star and wanted to prove his courage in combat. The army was also a convenient way, as malaria had been in 1916, to escape his recurrent failures in college.

  Writing to his cousin Cecilia Taylor and to his mother (who had wanted him to become an army officer) after America had entered the war in April 1917, Fitzgerald emphatically rejected the patriotic motives that had inspired thousands of young men and had been immortalized in Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier”: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.” Instead, when explaining his voluntary enlistment to these good ladies, he alluded to Ireland’s neutrality and stressed his own individuality and deliberate detachment: “Updike of Oxford or Harvard says ‘I die for England’ or ‘I die for America’—not me. I’m too Irish for that—I may get killed for America—but I’m going to die for myself. . . . About the army, please let’s not have either tragedy or Heroics because they are equally distasteful to me. I went into this perfectly cold-bloodedly and don’t sympathize with the ‘Give my son to country’ . . . stuff because I just went and purely for social reasons.”

  In July 1917, after his brief bout with Schopenhauer and Bergson, Fitzgerald went to Fort Snelling, near St. Paul, and took the exams required for an appointment as second lieutenant in the regular army. He could not become an officer until he reached the age of twenty-one in September. When he received his commission in the infantry on October 26, he immediately ordered his smart uniforms at Brooks Brothers—just as he had sent for
his football equipment as soon as he was admitted to Princeton.

  He was sent for three months of training, from November 1917 to February 1918, to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on the Missouri River northwest of Kansas City. The captain in charge of training provisional lieutenants in exercises, calisthenics and bayonet drills was Dwight Eisenhower. One of his trainees wrote home enthusiastically about the young captain: “He has given us wonderful bayonet drills. He gets the fellows’ imaginations worked up and hollers and yells and makes us shout and stomp until we go tearing into the air as if we meant business.”1

  Fitzgerald, however, was not so keen. He did as badly as an army officer as he had as a college student. Just as classes seemed to interfere with his theatrical career at Princeton, so drills and marches became an irritating interruption of the novel he wanted to write. Though he intended to lead an infantry platoon into battle, he never took his responsibility seriously, never realized that it was vitally important to acquire basic military skills. Like T. E. Lawrence, who would translate Homer’s Odyssey, with a pad on his knees, in the RAF barracks in India in 1930, Fitzgerald, concealing his pad behind Small Problems for Infantry, continued to compose while in the army and “wrote paragraph after paragraph on a somewhat edited history of me and my imagination. The outline of twenty-two chapters, four of them in verse, was made, two chapters were completed; and then I was detected and the game was up. I could write no more during [evening] study period.” Undeterred by this interruption, he continued to compose his book amidst noise and distractions: “Every Saturday at one o’clock when the week’s work was over, I hurried to the Officers’ Club, and there, in a corner of a room full of smoke, conversation and rattling newspapers, I wrote a one hundred and twenty thousand word novel on the consecutive weekends of three months.”2

  Fitzgerald had known Charles Scribner at Princeton; and Christian Gauss suggested that Scott send “The Romantic Egoist” to the venerable firm that published his own works as well as those of such eminent authors as Meredith, James, Stevenson, Barrie, Wharton and Galsworthy. Shane Leslie, another Scribner’s author, wrote an encouraging letter to accompany the manuscript. He noted its weaknesses but felt it was worth publishing, and compared Fitzgerald to the handsome and romantic Rupert Brooke, who had died of a fever on a Greek island while on active service in 1915. Fitzgerald used Brooke’s poem “Tiare Tahiti” for the title, epigraph and theme (age has nothing to tell the young in this world) of “The Romantic Egoist,” which was published as This Side of Paradise.

  “In spite of its disguises,” Leslie wrote, “it has given me a vivid picture of the American generation that is hastening to war. I marvel at its crudity and its cleverness. . . . About a third of the book could be omitted without losing the impression that it is written by an American Rupert Brooke.” Since the mortality rate of infantry lieutenants was extremely high, Leslie thought that Fitzgerald, like Brooke, would die in the war. He urged Scribner’s to accept the book in order to make Fitzgerald happy during the last few months of his life.

  On August 19, 1918—about five months after submitting the novel—Fitzgerald received a constructive response from a young editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins. Perkins saw considerable merit in the book, but felt its innovations were outweighed by its glaring defects: “We have been reading ‘The Romantic Egoist’ with a very unusual degree of interest;—in fact no ms. novel has come to us for a long time that seemed to display so much originality, and it is therefore hard for us to conclude that we cannot offer to publish it as it stands at present. . . . It seems to us in short that the story does not culminate in anything as it must to justify the reader’s interest as he follows it; and that it might be made to do so quite consistently with the characters and with its earlier stages.”3 Perkins asked Fitzgerald to revise the book, changing the narrator from the first to the third person, and then submit it for reconsideration.

  Fitzgerald, meanwhile, had become distracted by his military duties and by his frequent shifts around the country prior to embarkation for Europe. In March 1918 he joined the 45th Infantry Regiment in Camp Zachary Taylor, near Louisville, Kentucky—where Jay Gatsby would meet Daisy Fay in Fitzgerald’s novel. In April he was sent to Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia; in June his unit combined with another regiment and became part of the Ninth Division at Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama.

  Despite Fitzgerald’s three years in the sophisticated male milieu of Princeton, most of his military colleagues considered him weak, spoiled and immature. Devereux Josephs, an older officer and graduate of Harvard, criticized him for concentrating on writing instead of on training. He also felt that Fitzgerald, though incompetent and rebellious in the army, wanted to be admired: “He was eager to be liked by his companions and almost vain in seeking praise. At the same time he was unwilling to conform to the various patterns of dullness and majority opinion which would insure popularity.” Major Dana Palmer, an army friend, was more tolerant of his faults, which were balanced by his charm, and anticipated the opinion of many men who met Fitzgerald later on: “Scott abused the kindness and friendship of nearly everyone, but at that time, one could not help liking him very much.”

  Alonzo Myers, who served with Fitzgerald for most of his military career, concluded that “as an Army officer, Fitzgerald was unusually dispensable.” Myers felt he was a ludicrous figure: immature, irresponsible and unfit for command. Fitzgerald was therefore treated by his military companions in much the same way as he had been treated at Newman School: “Nobody took Fitzgerald seriously. His fellow officers generally conceded that he lacked sound judgment. Much of the time he even appeared to lack any independent judgment at all. The result was that we tended to take advantage of him and to perpetrate pranks on him that sometimes could have had quite serious consequences.”4 On one occasion the officers encouraged Fitzgerald to contravene military regulations and force a conscientious objector to pick up a rifle and drill. On another, according to Myers, they persuaded their naive comrade to sleep through reveille instead of turning out for inspection by the commanding general. When Fitzgerald did report for parade he fell off his horse.

  After his superiors had reluctantly entrusted him with a command, Fitzgerald got involved in dangerous and absurd misadventures. When directing a mortar company, he mistakenly ordered his men to fire on another unit. And his soldiers, nearly blown up when a shell jammed in a Stokes mortar, were saved at the last moment when Dana Palmer bravely tipped the barrel and spilled out the shell.

  Responsible as a supply officer for unloading equipment on the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, when his unit was on its way to France, Fitzgerald left the train to visit Princeton and allowed thousands of dollars of matériel to be stolen. He falsely claimed to have commandeered a special locomotive to take him to Washington with an urgent message for President Woodrow Wilson. While stationed at Camp Mills on Long Island, Fitzgerald went into New York for a party, borrowed a friend’s room at the Hotel Astor and was caught there by the house detective—naked and in bed with a girl. He tried to bribe the detective with a dollar bill folded to look like a hundred, but was caught again and saved from jail only by being put under military arrest in his army camp.

  His one redeeming act occurred when a ferry used to get troops across the Tallapoosa River near Montgomery was swamped during maneuvers. Fitzgerald helped save a number of men who had fallen into the water. He described this incident in his story “I Didn’t Get Over” (1936)—whose title alludes both to crossing the river and crossing the ocean to fight in Europe—and gives the guilty hero, Hibbing, a name that recalls the president of Princeton in Fitzgerald’s time, John Grier Hibben.

  Despite his manifest incompetence, Fitzgerald’s good looks, well-cut uniform, Princeton charm and Irish-Catholic background (for once, an advantage) attracted the attention of Brigadier General James Augustine Ryan, who in December 1918 appointed him aide-de-camp. Born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1867, Ryan had graduated from West Point, become a cava
lry officer and been put in charge of relations with the civil authorities. He apparently thought Fitzgerald would be useful—or at least harmlessly decorative—in this quasi-diplomatic role.

  Fitzgerald’s regiment was about to leave for France when the Armistice ended the war on November 11, 1918. He never even got close to making the fatal sacrifice of the twenty-one Princeton boys (five percent of his class) who were killed in the war. He wanted to prove his courage, gain glory and win the acceptance of his comrades, and always considered his lack of combat experience one of the deepest disappointments in his life. He equated athletic with military failure, called himself “the army’s worst aide-de-camp,” and in The Crack-Up said the two greatest regrets of his youth were “not being big enough (or good enough) to play football in college, and not getting overseas during the war.” He later suggested that the army was merely a social extension of Princeton and declared: “I can’t tell you how I wanted to get over. I wanted to belong to what every other bastard belonged to: the greatest club in history”5—a sort of Cottage Club of the trenches. His ludicrous career in the army explains why Hemingway believed that if Scott had gone to war he would have been shot for cowardice.

  II

  While his military life alternated between escapades and disasters, Fitzgerald turned for achievement and recognition to secret diplomacy, love affairs and literature. He had kept in close touch with his kindly benefactor Father Fay and while in the army had corresponded with this “brilliant enveloping personality.” Since Stephan Parrott, Fay’s other favorite at Newman, seemed ruined by having too much money and had failed to live up to Fay’s expectations, the priest—who was the first to perceive Scott’s unusual talents—pinned all his hopes on Fitzgerald.