Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Book One of the novel, “The Romantic Egoist,” recounts the life of Amory Blaine from his wealthy and pampered childhood through prep school to Princeton. A weak “Interlude” alludes to but does not actually describe his wartime service. The book is loosely structured by Amory’s three unhappy romantic attachments with Isabelle Borgé, Rosalind Connage and Eleanor Savage. Isabelle rejects Amory because he is too egoistic, analytical and critical. Rosalind, who feels that marrying him would ruin both their lives, jilts him for a rich and reliable rival. Eleanor, who comes from a mentally unstable family, discourages him by attempting suicide. After breaking with Eleanor, Amory finds himself in Atlantic City. In a scene based on Fitzgerald’s wartime contretemps with the detective in the Hotel Astor, Amory gallantly takes the blame when hotel detectives discover Rosalind’s brother in bed with a prostitute.

  The title of Book Two of this Bildungsroman, “The Education of a Personage,” echoes The Education of Henry Adams (1907). This phrase also alludes to the pedantic distinction made by Amory’s mentor, Father Darcy. In his view, the inconsequential “personality” is merely a false sense of self while the significant “personage” is a man with intellectual purpose and a definite goal: “Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on—I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done. He’s a bar on which a thousand things have been hung—glittering things sometimes, as ours are, but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.”

  In the last chapter of the novel, in which “The Egotist Becomes a Personage,” Amory is picked up on the road to Princeton by the wealthy father of a college friend who has been killed in the war. Having cornered his host in his own car, Amory gives him a long and unwelcome lecture on the virtues of socialism. In the final sentence, following the Socratic dictum, Amory proclaims: “I know myself . . . but that is all”—though there is no evidence in the novel to suggest that he has moved beyond egotism to self-awareness or done anything at all significant.

  The novel, dedicated to the recently deceased Father Sigourney Fay (the model for Father Darcy), incorporated extracts from Fay’s letters to Fitzgerald, Shane Leslie’s description of Fay’s funeral and Zelda’s diary. After reading the striking scene in which the devil appears with horrible feet and warns Amory not to sleep with a girl he had picked up at a nightclub, Fay had observed: “What a tremendous role the actual and cold fear of Satan does play in our make-up.” But it is more likely that this scene (which had horrified Scott’s friend Stephan Parrott) was influenced by Ivan’s chilling encounter with the devil in The Brothers Karamazov (1880) than by Fay’s discussions with his young disciples about the nature of evil. As early as January 1918 Bishop, in a letter to Fitzgerald, cited examples from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment to show that novels should be written in scenes “with successive climaxes.” And Fitzgerald must have heard about the famous diabolic scene in Karamazov from Christian Gauss, who remarked that at Princeton, Fitzgerald reminded him of all the Karamazov brothers at once.

  In a letter of August 1920 Fitzgerald called Leslie “my first literary sponsor, godfather to this book.” He told Leslie that he had originally intended to dedicate the novel to him as well as to Fay, ingenuously explained that he had used Leslie’s account of the funeral because “I didn’t see it myself and had to describe it” and joyfully announced: “I married the Rosalind of the novel, the southern girl I was so attached to, after a grand reconciliation.”1

  In This Side of Paradise (as we have seen) Fitzgerald exploited the dramatic possibilities of Father Fay, Ginevra King, Zelda Sayre, Henry Strater and John Peale Bishop (whose fictional name, Thomas D’Invilliers, was probably suggested by that of the nineteenth-century French writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam). He also put other real-life models into the book. Thornton Hancock was based on the distinguished historian Henry Adams, whom Fitzgerald had met through Fay and Leslie; Mrs. Lawrence on Mrs. Margaret Chanler, whose memoirs included a vivid description of Fay; Allenby (the name of a triumphant British general in the Great War) on the Princeton football star Hobey Baker; Eleanor Savage on Bishop’s friend Elizabeth Beckwith, with whom Fitzgerald had gone horseback riding in Charlestown, West Virginia, while waiting to enter the army in the summer of 1917; and the idealized Clara Page on his attractive widowed cousin, Cecilia Taylor, who lived in Norfolk, Virginia.

  Clara “was alone in the world, with two small children, little money, and, worst of all, a host of friends,” Fitzgerald wrote. “What a twist Clara had to her mind! She could make fascinating and almost brilliant conversation out of the thinnest air that ever floated through a drawing-room.” Cecilia’s daughter Sally Abeles “remembered Scott from his Princeton days as being very good-looking and, to his young female cousins, very glamorous.” She explained that “my mother was quite beautiful and the relationship with Scott was based on the family connection and the fact that she was sixteen years older than he and (as he matured) more his kind of person than his parents were.”2

  This Side of Paradise was written with facile cleverness in a series of short episodic scenes and in an unusual mixture of prose, poetry, drama, letters, book lists and quotations. Though flippant, it contains flashes of insight on a number of serious subjects: wealth, class, sex, mores, fame, romance, glamour, success, vanity, egoism, politics and religion. The potentially sensational chapter on “Petting” is in fact about kissing: “None of the Victorian mothers . . . had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed.” And none of the passionless kissing scenes—“HE: Rosalind, I really want to kiss you. SHE: So do I. (They kiss—definitely and thoroughly)”—stimulates Amory to engage in more daring sexual acts. The originality of the novel lies in its attitude toward sex rather than in its descriptions of sexual behavior. At a time when twelve percent of Fitzgerald’s Princeton class regarded casual kissing as morally wrong, and when a serious kiss meant that a proposal was expected, This Side of Paradise seemed daring in recognizing the sexual impulses of young men and women and in celebrating—just after Prohibition had been enacted—the freedom of drinking and sex.

  “I’m sick of the sexless animals writers have been giving us,” Fitzgerald told an interviewer in January 1921. “Personally, I prefer this sort of [modern] girl. Indeed, I married the heroine of my stories. I would not be interested in any other sort of woman.”3 Fitzgerald persuaded Scribner’s to advertise the book as “A Novel About Flappers Written for Philosophers.” And with Zelda in mind, he popularized the term “flapper” (originally derived from a “wild duck”). The word had evolved from meaning a young harlot in the early nineteenth century, and then an immoral girl in her early teens at the turn of the twentieth century, to a young girl with her hair not yet put up in 1905, and finally to an unconventional young woman with short hair in the 1920s. The novel had an immense social as well as literary impact. Amory and his girlfriends—freed by wealth, alcohol and automobiles—became models for unconstrained behavior. Fitzgerald’s book expressed the current revolt against prewar respectability and alarmed protective parents. It both baptized the Jazz Age and glorified its fashionable hedonism.

  Most reviewers were surprisingly enthusiastic and generous about the flawed but vibrant novel, which seemed to fit Fitzgerald’s own description of similar works by his young rivals Floyd Dell and Stephen Vincent Benét: “This writing of a young man’s novel consists chiefly in dumping all your youthful adventures into the reader’s lap with a profound air of importance, keeping carefully within the formulas of Wells and James Joyce.” Fitzgerald himself was influenced by the social context of Wells’ The History of Mr. Polly and closely paraphrased (“He was . . . preserved to help in building up the living consciousness of the race”) the famous words about the rebellious hero in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist.

  Franklin P. Adams criticized This
Side of Paradise as “sloppy and cocky; impudent instead of confident; and verbose,” but most critics were favorably impressed by its originality, its vitality and its style. The anonymous reviewer in the New York Times Book Review admired “the glorious spirit of abounding youth [that] glows throughout this fascinating tale.” Burton Rascoe of the Chicago Tribune exclaimed: “It is sincere, it is honest, it is intelligent, it is handled in an individual manner, it bears the impress, it seems to me, of genius.” And the influential, frequently harsh H. L. Mencken, who had with George Jean Nathan published Fitzgerald’s first stories in the Smart Set and would soon become his friend, pronounced it “a truly amazing first novel—original in structure, extremely sophisticated in manner, and adorned with a brilliancy that is as rare in American writing as honesty is in American statecraft.”4

  Bishop, Wilson, Fitzgerald himself, as well as students and faculty at Princeton, all commented on the provocative book. After reading the manuscript, Bishop called it “damn good, brilliant in places, and sins chiefly through exuberance and lack of development.” Later on, Bishop tried to account for its astonishing popularity by observing: “Sincerity for hypocrisy, spontaneity in the place of control, freedom from repression—who could resist such a program? The response was prodigious. Success, as we know, was only less immediate. The faults of the program were not so soon apparent.”5

  In the Bookman of March 1922 Wilson (who was supposed to be a friend) opened his review of the novel with his usual put-down. He repeated some of the points he had made in his letter about the as-yet-unpublished novel and authoritatively established the line of criticism about Fitzgerald’s work that would be repeated throughout his lifetime: “He has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.” Though Wilson clearly had the intellectual control, aesthetic ideals and abundant ideas, it was Fitzgerald who had somehow blundered into the creation of a phenomenally popular novel. Trying, like Bishop, to account for its surprising critical success, Wilson praised the book’s vitality: “I have said that This Side of Paradise commits almost every sin that a novel can possibly commit: but it does not commit the unpardonable sin: it does not fail to live. The whole preposterous farrago is animated with life.”

  In 1920 Fitzgerald, riding high on his new-found wealth and fame as spokesman for the postwar generation, had fulfilled Wilson’s prediction that his shallowness would make him a popular success. Still toiling as an obscure journalist, Wilson found other ways to attack Fitzgerald and now became as critical of his personal faults as he was of his literary failings. Wilson and Bishop, whose thin volume of poems had also been eclipsed by Fitzgerald, drew up, after seeing the novel piled high in his publisher’s handsome shop window on Fifth Avenue, a satiric catalogue for a “Proposed exhibit of Fitzgeraldiana for Chas. Scribner’s Sons.” These items—which reflected Fitzgerald’s immaturity, vanity, narcissism, shallowness and undistinguished military career (Wilson and Bishop had both served in France)—consisted of three double malted milks, a bottle of hair tonic, a yellow silk shirt, a mirror, his entire seven-book library (including a notebook and two scrapbooks) and an “overseas cap never worn overseas.”6 The yellow shirt anticipated Jay Gatsby’s exhibition of his wardrobe; the overseas cap would be cunningly adopted by Fitzgerald in “The Crack-Up.” Though emotionally vulnerable, Fitzgerald tolerated this sharp criticism with humility and good-natured resignation.

  Fitzgerald had good reason to put up with Wilson’s spiteful attacks. He was being exceptionally well paid for his work and could understand Wilson’s manifest envy. He knew that he was not an intellectual novelist and, though his commercial stories were hastily composed, that his style and subject matter were his own. He instinctively perceived that his work evolved from his personal faults and emotional crises. His role as passive target was, moreover, fundamental to his relationship with Wilson. Had he become angry and broken with his friend, he would have lost the benefit of Wilson’s harsh but stimulating criticism.

  In the 1930s Fitzgerald retrospectively agreed with Wilson’s criticism, but also defended his cheeky novel. Comparing it to a work by Oscar Wilde that had provided one of the epigraphs, he told Max Perkins: “I think it is now one of the funniest books since Dorian Gray in its utter spuriousness—and then, here and there, I find a page that is very real and living.” Referring to Wilson in “Early Success,” Fitzgerald remarked: “A lot of people thought it was a fake, and perhaps it was, and a lot of others thought it was a lie, which it was not.”7 Its intellectual pretensions were fake, Fitzgerald conceded, since he had brashly discussed books and issues about which he knew very little. But his descriptions of experiences and feelings were real and sincere.

  The Princeton bookstore was stampeded on the day of publication. Five days later, on March 31, 1920, Fitzgerald gave Cottage Club an inscribed copy of the novel (which is still there) to mark his visit to Princeton a few days before his wedding. This Side of Paradise—which portrayed the undergraduates as social climbers, arrogant snobs, energetic hedonists and political windbags—was a direct and deliberate assault on Woodrow Wilson’s staunch Presbyterian values. H. L. Mencken, delighted by its wild iconoclasm, remarked that if a new Fitzgerald escaped from Princeton, he would be “received with a cordiality (both spiritual and spiritous) that the president of his university might envy.”

  But John Grier Hibben, Wilson’s successor as president of the university, was angered and upset by the portrayal of Princeton as “the pleasantest country club in America.” Rejecting Fitzgerald’s emphasis on frivolity, Hibben frankly told him “that your characterization of Princeton has grieved me. I cannot bear to think that our young men are merely living for four years in a country club and spending their lives wholly in a spirit of calculation and snobbishness.” Humbly deferring to authority, Fitzgerald admitted that the novel “does overaccentuate the gayety and country club atmosphere of Princeton.”8 He did not mention, however, that his notorious phrase had been lifted from Wilson’s predecessor, President Patton, who had reigned at Princeton until 1902 and “was heard to boast that he was head of the finest country club in America.” Though the book offended Hibben’s ideal vision of Princeton, it conveyed a romantic aura to succeeding generations. The young George Kennan, later a diplomat and Soviet specialist, was drawn to Princeton by the novel; and Adlai Stevenson called it “a great human document.”9

  II

  Fitzgerald was fortunate, at the beginning of his literary career, to win the loyal friendship and generous support of two remarkably similar men: his editor, Maxwell Perkins, and his agent, Harold Ober. Both gentlemen were reserved, respectable, reliable New Englanders, who had graduated from Harvard and led a conventional family life in the New York suburbs. Perkins came from a distinguished background. One of his ancestors had signed the Declaration of Independence; his grandfather had been attorney general under Andrew Johnson and secretary of state under Rutherford Hayes. Born in New York in 1884, the son of a lawyer, Perkins grew up in Windsor, Vermont, and attended St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. After college he worked in a Boston welfare house and became a reporter on the New York Times. He married an extremely proper wife just after becoming an editor at Scribner’s in 1910, had five proper daughters and lived properly in New Canaan, Connecticut. He also maintained a platonic friendship with another woman for twenty-five years. In the summer of 1916 Perkins unexpectedly joined the U.S. Cavalry, was sent to the Mexican border and chased but never found the revolutionary, Pancho Villa.

  Rather stuffy and correct, but uncommonly generous, Perkins had, according to the Canadian author Morley Callaghan, “a talent for diplomacy in difficult human situations, and a kind of nobility of spirit and a fine sense of fairness.” Hemingway liked the strange way Perkins moved his lips and his reporter’s habit of keeping his hat on in the office. He admired Perkins’ kindness, modesty and tact,
but criticized his deep-rooted puritanism, which made him abandon any pursuit that gave him pleasure.

  Perkins gave excellent literary advice to authors who needed it. He helped Thomas Wolfe—who portrayed him unsympathetically as Foxhall Edwards in The Web and the Rock (1939)—to assemble his unwieldy tomes from a mass of disordered fragments. But he did not edit Hemingway, a careful author, beyond excising passages that were libelous and obscene. He merely accepted Hemingway’s typescripts, praised them and published them as expeditiously as possible.

  Perkins was more intimate with Fitzgerald than with Hemingway and did much more for Scott. As Fitzgerald’s editor Perkins had to be as encouraging as possible. In contrast to Father Fay’s flattery and Edmund Wilson’s mockery, Perkins provided a constructive response that enabled Fitzgerald to improve his work. But Perkins could not spell and was absolutely useless at correcting, copy-editing and proofreading a text. As a result of both the author’s and the editor’s carelessness, Fitzgerald’s novels—from the first editions to the present time—are filled with hundreds of ludicrous orthographical, grammatical and factual errors. Though both Fitzgerald and Scribner’s looked foolish when Franklin P. Adams’ newspaper column listed scores of errors in This Side of Paradise, Perkins continued to be grossly negligent. In October 1921 he offered some typically bad advice when preparing the proofs of Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned: “I shall send them on to you but you will not need to read them very carefully unless you wish to. Just look them over.”10

  As Fitzgerald’s career progressed, Perkins assumed the additional roles of substitute parent, father confessor, secret sharer, social worker, medical mentor, psychiatric adviser, intermediary to Hemingway and rather reckless banker. He was one of the few people who maintained his friendship with Fitzgerald until the very end. Fitzgerald—like Ford and Pound—was generous with fellow authors. He repaid Perkins by recommending to Scribner’s many little-known and extremely promising writers, whom he had met or heard about in Princeton, St. Paul, New York and Paris: John Biggs, John Peale Bishop, Thomas Boyd, Ring Lardner, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Morley Callaghan, André Chamson, Raymond Radiguet, Erskine Caldwell and Franz Kafka. Through Fitzgerald’s good offices, Hemingway and Caldwell became two of Scribner’s most profitable authors.