Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  The letters of this physically repulsive but personally enchanting priest express his sublimated homoeroticism and strongly suggest that he was in love with his handsome protégé. Fay drew him into his ambience by mentioning his own connections with great figures in the world of religion and politics, by equating Fitzgerald with himself and by filling his seductive correspondence with outrageous flattery: “We are many other things—we’re extraordinary, we’re clever, we could be said I suppose to be brilliant. We can attract people, we can make atmosphere, we can almost always have our own way. . . . I never deny that I need you boys—your companionship and all that—but I am also coming to the conclusion that you both need a little touch of me, and I do hope if you get leave in August you will fly to my paternal arms.” Fitzgerald, always eager for admiration, was not fully aware of the intensity of Fay’s feelings.

  In August 1917, while Fitzgerald was waiting to come of age and obtain his commission, Fay included him in a tremendously exciting scheme. In March 1917 the first revolution had broken out in Russia; and in July the democratic socialist Alexander Kerensky had become prime minister and vigorously pursued the war against Germany. Fay’s ambitious plan was to journey via Japan to Russia (where he had traveled in 1915 on an ecclesiastical visit), ostensibly as head of a Red Cross mission but actually, during these turbulent times, to lead the Russian masses back to the Catholic church. Fitzgerald, in the guise of a Red Cross lieutenant, would be Fay’s traveling companion and confidential assistant.

  On August 22 Fay wrote Fitzgerald, with dramatic exaggeration: “The conversion of Russia has already begun. Several millions of the Russians have already come over to the Catholic Church from the schism in the last month. Whether you look at it from the spiritual or the temporal point of view it is an immense opportunity and will be a help to you all the rest of your life.” Fay wisely mentioned the kind of uniform Fitzgerald would wear as well as the expenses that would be paid by the church, and said they would have to work hard on his French—though the idea of Fitzgerald conducting diplomatic negotiations in a foreign tongue seems absurd.

  Most importantly, Fay heightened the significance of their expedition by insisting on cloak-and-dagger secrecy: “Do be discreet about what you say to anybody. If anybody asks you, say you are going as secretary to a Red Cross Commission. Do not say anything more than that, and if you show this letter to anybody, show it only in the strictest confidence.”6 But as Fitzgerald was applying for his Japanese and Russian visas, the Bolshevik coup d’état on November 7 (in the Western calendar) extinguished all future hope of a Catholic church in godless Russia.

  When the Russian mission failed, Fay immediately came up with another plan, which unfortunately did not include Fitzgerald. Fay joined the Red Cross and was sent to Rome by Cardinal Gibbons to acquaint the pope with the attitude of American Catholics toward the war and to stress their loyal determination to help the Allies (which included Italy) until the very end. In his patriotic essay, “The Genesis of the Super-German,” published in the Dublin Review in April 1918, Fay also urged the Irish people, for religious and philosophical reasons, to support the Allied cause.

  While in Italy Fay also became involved in negotiations to remove a clause from a secret treaty that had excluded the Holy See from participation in the peace conference after the war. Fay’s diplomatic visit to Rome was considered valuable and in 1918 he was created a monsignor by Pope Benedict XV. Delighted as a child and camping it up with a vivid simile that Fitzgerald adopted in his first novel, Fay immediately announced: “the Holy Father has made me a Prelate, so that I am the Right Reverend Monsignor now, and my clothes are too gorgeous for words. I look like a Turner sunset when I am in full regalia.”

  Fay also used this occasion to emphasize the spiritual quality that bound him to Stephan Parrott and to Fitzgerald. Though Fitzgerald’s religious beliefs were fading fast (he recorded that 1917 was his last year as a Catholic), Fay exclaimed: “I discovered that if I did not have a good hold on the mystical side of religion the romance [of my success] would have died down considerably. Sometimes I think that in all three of us, the secret of our success is the mystical element in us. Something flows into us that enlarges our personalities.”

  On August 17, two days before Scribner’s rejected “The Romantic Egoist,” Fay wrote another conspiratorial letter that ecstatically praised the unpublished work. Shane Leslie and Max Perkins had offered constructive criticism that would enable Fitzgerald to revise his book and get it published; Fay merely flattered his disciple in order to win his gratitude: “I have ten thousand things to say that I cannot write. There are intimacies that cannot be put upon paper. . . . Really the whole thing is most startling; I am keen beyond words to read the rest of that book. I may be frightfully prejudiced but I have never read anything more interesting than that book. . . . The more I see of it the more amazingly good I think it is.”7

  Fay died suddenly of influenza on January 10, 1919 (just before Fitzgerald was demobilized), on the eve of his departure for another diplomatic mission to London. He would have been even more fascinated by This Side of Paradise had he known that Fitzgerald’s description of Monsignor Darcy’s funeral would be taken nearly verbatim from Shane Leslie’s letter describing the funeral of Monsignor Fay. Shattered by the loss of his friend, Fitzgerald responded to Leslie’s account of the ceremony with heartfelt insincerity: “I can’t tell you how I feel about Monsignor Fay’s death.—He was the best friend I had in the world and last night he seemed so close and so good that I was almost glad—because I think he wanted to die. . . . Your letter seemed to start a new flow of sorrows in me. I’ve never wanted so much to die in my life. Father Fay always thought that if one of us died the other would, and now how I’ve hoped so. . . . This has made me nearly sure that I will become a priest. I feel as if in a way his mantle had descended upon me.”8 But the momentarily pious Fitzgerald had no more intention of becoming a priest than he did of becoming a professional soldier. Fay’s death meant that he would now have to find his own way to wealth and fame. In any case, he had already come under the powerful secular influence of Zelda Sayre.

  III

  Except for a brief time at Camp Mills on Long Island, Fitzgerald was stationed from June 1918 until February 1919 in Montgomery, Alabama. In that hot, static little town of forty thousand souls, nothing much had happened since the Civil War. In “The Ice Palace” (1920) Fitzgerald described Montgomery as a “languid paradise of dreamy skies and firefly evenings and noisy, niggery street fairs—and especially of gracious, soft-voiced girls, who [unlike Ginevra King] were brought up on memories instead of money.”

  At a country club dance on one of those “firefly evenings” in July 1918 Fitzgerald met a gracious, soft-voiced girl named Zelda Sayre. She let her long hair hang down loose and wore a frilly dress that made her look younger than eighteen. She came from a prominent though not wealthy family and had just graduated from Sidney Lanier High School.

  The solid respectability of the Sayres disguised the dangerous currents swirling beneath the calm surface of their lives. Zelda’s father, Anthony Sayre, son of the editor of the Montgomery Post, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1858, graduated from Roanoke College in Virginia and was admitted to the bar in 1881. He married three years later, and was elected and reelected associate justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama from 1909 until 1931. A man of fanatically regular habits, Judge Sayre always took the streetcar to and from work at exactly the same time every day and always retired for the night at exactly eight o’clock. Cold, humorless and hypercritical, the judge became increasingly unsociable and remote from his family. Zelda considered him inhumanly perfect and desperately tried to penetrate his stony reserve. The first time Fitzgerald was invited to dinner at the Sayres’ house at 6 Pleasant Avenue, Zelda goaded her father into such a rage that he picked up a carving knife and, while the rest of the family ignored them, chased her around the dining room table. Fitzgerald, nervous and infatuated, failed to p
erceive that this was a familiar occurrence, that the judge was not as self-controlled as he appeared to be and that all was not well in the Sayre family.

  Zelda’s mother, Minnie Machen, the daughter of a Kentucky senator, was born in 1860 and had in her youth cherished hopes of an operatic career. The Sayres had three older daughters—Marjorie, Rosalind and Clothilde—whose ages ranged from nine to eighteen when Zelda was born, and a son, Anthony, who was then six. Minnie nursed Zelda, her youngest and favorite child, till the age of four.

  Minnie’s mother and sister had both committed suicide. Marjorie had had a mental breakdown and suffered from nervous illness throughout her life. Young Anthony became notorious for his dissolute behavior and left Auburn University without earning his degree. In 1933, after recurrent nightmares about killing his mother, he would also commit suicide by leaping from the window of his hospital room in Mobile. No one ever told Fitzgerald, when he was courting Zelda, about the terrifying history of insanity and suicide in her family.

  Four years younger than Scott, Zelda was born on July 24, 1900, and named for the romantic gypsy heroine in Robert Edward Francillon’s Zelda’s Fortune (1874). In this popular novel, Zelda—who “could have been placed in no imaginable situation without drawing upon herself a hundred stares”—foresees that she will find a fortune of gold treasure and fall in love with the handsome Dr. Vaughan. Zelda Sayre had no close friends in girlhood or in later life, but was always close to her mother. Protected by the respectability and prestige of her family, Zelda was known for her striking beauty, her unconventional behavior and her sexual promiscuity. As she wrote in the opening sentence of her novel Save Me the Waltz (1932): “ ‘Those girls,’ people said, ‘think they can do anything and get away with it.’ That was because of the sense of security they felt in their father. He was a living fortress.”9

  Zelda had a perfect peaches-and-cream complexion and honey-golden hair. In This Side of Paradise Fitzgerald portrayed her as Rosalind Connage and gave a delightful account of her physical attributes: “There was the eternally kissable mouth, small, slightly sensual, and utterly disturbing. There were gray eyes and an unimpeachable skin with two spots of vanishing color. She was slender and athletic, without underdevelopment, and it was a delight to watch her move about a room. . . . Her vivid, instant personality escaped that conscious, theatrical quality that Amory had found in Isabelle [Ginevra].”

  Fitzgerald was also keenly aware of the flaws in Zelda’s character—her rudeness, selfishness and lack of restraint—but found them quite provocative and exciting: “She treats men terribly. She abuses them and cuts them and breaks dates with them and yawns in their faces—and they [like Scott himself] come back for more. . . . [She] smokes sometimes, drinks [alcoholic] punch, frequently kissed. . . . She is prone to make every one around her pretty miserable when she doesn’t get [her way. . . . She believed] the only excuse for women was the necessity for a disturbing element among men.” She was, to Scott’s delight, an inspiring example of the postwar modern girl.

  Zelda’s notorious reputation in Montgomery began in childhood. When she was only ten she called the fire department (a recurrent ploy), climbed onto the roof and waited to be rescued. Unlike her self-effacing father, she scorned convention, liked to attract attention to herself and exploited the dramatic possibilities of the scene. She always gave a good public performance. Virginia Foster Durr, who went to dances with Zelda and later became a leader in the civil rights movement, confirmed Zelda’s powerful impact on her contemporaries: “Zelda always did things to shock people. . . . She used to come up to the dances in Birmingham and she was just gorgeous. She had a glow around her. When she came into a ballroom, all the other girls would want to go home because they knew the boys were going to be concentrating on Zelda. The boys would line up the whole length of the ballroom to dance with her for one minute. She was pre-eminent and we recognized it.”

  Mrs. Durr later elaborated her view of Zelda’s character and explained how her glorious youth left her especially vulnerable:

  Zelda was like a vision of beauty dancing by. She was funny, amusing, the most popular girl; envied by all others, worshipped and adored, besieged by all the boys. She did try to shock. At a dance she pinned mistletoe on the back of her skirt, as if to challenge the young men to kiss her bottom.

  In the South women were not supposed to do anything. It was sufficient to be beautiful and charming. Zelda, a spoiled baby just out of high school, never even learned to read or sew. She was always treated like a visiting film star: radiant, glowing, desired by all. Since she had absolutely nothing to do and no personal resources to draw on, she later bothered Scott when he was trying to write. She had no ability to suffer adversity, and was unprepared for it when it came.

  Fitzgerald would have agreed with this analysis. He later told his daughter that Zelda had burnt herself out by refusing to accept ordinary norms of behavior: “She had no education—not from lack of opportunity because she could have learned with me—but from some inner stubbornness. She was a great original in her way, with perhaps a more intense flame at its highest than I ever had, but she tried and is still trying to solve all ethical and moral problems on her own.”10

  Despite the contrast in their backgrounds—a lower-middle-class Irish Catholic from the Upper Midwest, who had lived in five different towns and had been to college, and an upper-middle-class Anglo-Protestant from the Deep South, who had spent her entire life in Montgomery and had just completed a patchy high school education—Scott and Zelda had a great deal in common. They were both spoiled children of older parents. They had the same blond hair, fair skin, straight nose and thin lips, and looked enough alike to be brother and sister. They even wore matching jackets and knickerbockers on their drive from Connecticut to Montgomery in the summer of 1920. Both liked to exchange sexual roles. Scott dressed up as a show girl for the Triangle Club. Zelda put on men’s clothing and went to the movies with a group of boys. Scott—who had a weak father, strong mother, younger sister and eventually a wife, daughter and several mistresses—was always surrounded by women. He believed: “I am half feminine—that is, my mind is.” Zelda told a friend: “I have always been inclined toward masculinity.”11 Both spent extravagantly, drank heavily, behaved irresponsibly and did not care what people thought of them.

  Zelda’s volatile mixture of beauty and daring was fatally attractive to men. Officers gathered on her sagging veranda, which resembled an army recruiting station, and gladly surrendered their military insignia to express their esteem. Flyers from Camp Sheridan performed aerial stunts over her house and two planes crashed during these daring exhibitions. Admirers at Auburn University, where she was tremendously popular, founded a fraternity based on her initials, Zeta Sigma. To be admitted, potential members had to pledge their devotion to Zelda and offer proof that they had had at least one date with her in Montgomery. Fitzgerald was excited—and sometimes tormented—by other men’s love for Zelda, which enhanced her value in his eyes. And having lost Ginevra, he was determined to win Zelda from her Southern halfbacks and golfing beaux.

  During their parabolic courtship Zelda used her power over men to make Scott unbearably jealous. She once grabbed a boy and started kissing him just as Fitzgerald approached; and later “regretted having flirted so much with other men and never telling Scott how far she’d gone with them, letting him guess the worst and neither denying nor correcting his suspicions.” But selfishness in women had an irresistible appeal to Fitzgerald, and their fights (like those of Frieda and D. H. Lawrence) were a form of sexual foreplay that made their reconciliations and lovemaking even sweeter. “I love your tenderness—when I’ve hurt you,” Zelda confessed. “That’s one of the reasons I could never be sorry for our quarrels.”12 The intensely romantic Fitzgerald had a Proustian impulse to construct an ideal image of the woman he loved—first Ginevra, then Zelda—to compensate for any defects in reality.

  Fitzgerald often pondered the differences between the woman los
t and the woman won. Ginevra’s family was wealthy and socially prominent, Zelda’s was more intellectual and artistic. Ginevra was cool and distant, Zelda spontaneous and sensual; Ginevra poised and self-assured, Zelda vivacious and impulsive. Though Ginevra was more worldly and sophisticated, Zelda was more beautiful and exciting. Zelda was much closer to Scott in temperament and, though pursued by legions of young men, soon fell in love with him. Ginevra was sexually unattainable, Zelda willing to sleep with him. He had nothing to give Ginevra that she did not already have, but could offer Zelda something she really wanted: an escape from constrictive provincial life into the glamorous world of New York.

  IV

  The “unusually dispensable” Fitzgerald, one of the first officers to be discharged from his unit in February 1919, returned that month to New York. While still an undergraduate in 1916, he had looked up Edmund Wilson, who shared an apartment on West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, worked for the Evening Sun and seemed to embody the ideal literary life. Fitzgerald discovered that “the shy little scholar of Holder Court” in Princeton had been transformed into a promising symbol of cosmopolitan sophistication. “That night, in Bunny’s apartment,” Fitzgerald recalled, “life was mellow and safe, a finer distillation of all that I had come to love at Princeton . . . and I began wondering about the rent of such apartments.”13

  Fitzgerald now assumed he could easily adopt Wilson’s attractive way of life and earn enough money to marry Zelda. But he lacked his friend’s discipline and found it difficult to break into commercial or literary life in New York. Instead of a congenial flat in the Village, shortage of money forced him into a remote and depressing room at 200 Claremont Avenue, near Columbia University in uptown Manhattan. After a fruitless search for work on a newspaper, he took an unappealing job with the Barron Collier advertising agency at thirty-five dollars a week. For several stupefying months he wrote ads for signs on street-cars. His best slogan, composed for a steam laundry in Iowa, was “We keep you clean in Muscatine.”