FITZGERALD, F. Scott (1896-1940)
Before Francis
Scott Fitzgerald died at age 44, he thought he was a failure. His
obituaries described him as an obscure writer who never fulfilled his
early promise. The second printing of The Great Gatsby sat unsold
fifteen years after the book's publication.
Twenty-odd years
later, Fitzgerald was universally recognized as one of the great literary
figures of the century and The was widely acclaimed one of the greatest novels of the
modern era.
Even more surprising
to Fitzgerald might be how his own life has come to represent in the
public imagination the romantic rise and fall of American idealism—a
favourite subject of his writing—in the first half of the twentieth
century.
Fitzgerald was born
in St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of a failed furniture manufacturer
although the family lived well on an inheritance. He attended Princeton
University, quitting in 1917 to join the army after the United States
entered the First World War. During the war, he wrote a novel taking
place at Princeton, The Romantic Egotist, which publishers
Scribners rejected but suggested could be revised. After a rewrite it was
rejected again and was rewritten again as This Side of Paradise.
Finally published in 1920 by Scribners it became an immediate popular and
commercial success. He married the unstable Zelda Sayre and the two became
high-living celebrities during the wild years of the 1920s.
He also started to
produce short stories about the young, rich, post-war generation for
magazines—including such ephemeral fare as "Bernice Bobs Her
Hair" and the more serious stories like "The Ice Palace",
"May Day" and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" that
have become modern classics. He coined the term the term "The Jazz
Age" for the wild 1920s of which he became known as the chronicler,
as well as the embodiment.
His second novel The
Beautiful and Damned (1922) and his short-story compendiums Flappers
and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz (1922) told the happy and sad stories of the beautiful
people of that age.
His novel The Great Gatsby
(1925) though introduced a mature tragic element, taking the story of the
self-made but deluded millionaire Jay Gatsby beyond the immediate era and
into the mainstream of the American dream—its myth and reality. The
novel's controlled but romantic detachment however was not what the public
wanted in the middle of the goodtime Roaring Twenties and, despite
positive reviews, the novel was not widely appreciated. It was followed by
another story collection, All (1926).
The Fitzgeralds were living in Europe among other
American expatriates when he met Ernest
Hemingway and, as a famous author, Fitzgerald became a promoter of the
as-yet-little-known writer. The two also became close friends but as
Hemingway's star rose, Fitzgerald struggled with his own work.
His next novel
was to be a study of Americans in France called The Boy Who Killed His
Mother, or Our Type, or The World's Fair, but it never
came together.
Fitzgerald
continued to turn out magazine fiction—he wrote 160 short stories in
total—to make enough money to support his lifestyle and, after Zelda's
mental breakdown in 1930, to pay for her psychiatric treatment.
Despite a
recovery, Zelda's mental health continued to waver over the next few years
and Fitzgerald's novel, called Tender is the Night Taps at
Reveille (1935), coming in the midst of the Depression, was similarly
dismissed as outdated.
After this
Fitzgerald's world fell apart. Alcoholism prevented him from writing commercial stories, he was
deeply in debt, Zelda was committed to a mental hospital and he gave up
their only child to be raised and educated by others. This period did
however yield the magazine articles he wrote under the title "The
Crack-Up" in 1936 in an attempt to cure himself. They were later
edited by the critic Edmund Wilson into a book published after
Fitzgerald's death.
A two-year stint
as a Hollywood screenwriter resulted in only one screen credit but did get
him out of debt. More importantly it gave him the material for a series of
brilliantly cynical tales about a screenwriter's life, later collected as The
Pat Hobby Stories (1962), as well as for a novel, The Last Tycoon (1941),
which unfortunately was unfinished when Fitzgerald died of a heart attack.
Hemingway has
been savaged as a jealous ingrate for his portrait of Fitzgerald in his
memoir of the Paris years, A Moveable Feast. However, despite the
picture that emerges of Fitzgerald as erratic and insecure, I believe the
love and respect Hemingway held for the slightly older writer comes
through. His description of Fitzgerald to a bar chief years after
Fitzgerald's death is a pretty objective summary of the man's
achievements, expressed in Hemingway's usual understated manner: "He
wrote two very good books and one which was not completed which those who
know his writing best say would have been very good. He also wrote some
good short stories."
In a more poetic
vein, Hemingway introduced the Fitzgerald section of his memoir with the
following:
His talent was
as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's
wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and
he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious
of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think
and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he
could only remember when it had been effortless.
Scott
Fitzgerald's resurrection as an artist since his death and the growing
recognition of The Great Gatsby as a modern masterpiece has led to
many more collections of his works to be published, often under confusing
titles. Babylon Revisited (1960) includes the story of the same
name that originally appeared in Taps at Reveille and one other
from that collection, along with classic tales from the 1920s volumes. It
may be the best collection of Fitzgerald's short fiction. Six Tales of
the Jazz Age and Other Stories (1960) combines six from Tales of
the Jazz Age with three from All the Sad Young Men —sort of
the second-best of Fitzgerald.
The Portable F.
Scott Fitzgerald (1945) was compiled by Dorothy Parker and introduced
by John O'Hara. It includes The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night
and nine short stories. This would be the best introduction to his works
as a whole, if you could find it. It's out of print but you may sight it
in a used book store. The Fitzgerald Reader (1963), edited by
Arthur Mizener, includes Gatsby , excerpts from Tender
and Tycoon , stories, and essays.
— Eric
©
Copyright 2002-2003 Eric McMillan. All rights reserved.
FITZGERALD, F. Scott 
