F. Scott Fitzgerald

From Philosopedia

Zelda and Scott, 1921

Fitzgerald, F(rancis) Scott (Key) (24 September 1896 - 21 December 1940)

The literary spokesman of the “jazz age,” the decade of the 1920s, Fitzgerald was a colorful novelist who was the self-styled spokesman of the "Lost Generation," those Americans of the 1890s who came of age during World War I.

While at Camp Sheridan, he met Zelda Sayre (1900-1948) and called her the "top girl of Montgomery, Alabama's youth society." The two were engaged in 1919, he moved to 1395 Lexington Avenue in New York City, and he got employment in an advertising firm while he wrote short stories. When he lived at 200 Claremont Avenue at Tiemann Place in New York City, for an Iowa laundry he coined the slogan, “We keep you clean in Muscatine.” Zelda, however, broke off their engagement, thinking he would not be able to support her. He returned to St. Paul to his parents' house, writing This Side of Paradise, which became one of the year's biggest hits. She then agreed to their marriage in 1920, despite her family’s concern about their Episcopalian daughter’s marrying a non-Protestant, and the event took place at New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral.

He wrote The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) and also his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby (1925), a devastating portrait of the so-called American Dream, one that measures love and success in materialistic terms only. Fitzgerald originally had entitled the book The High-Bouncing Lover. In the work, Fitzgerald describes a sign in front of an oculist’s shop: “The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic–their retinas are one yard high.” Some have insisted that he was symbolizing God by using the eyes with the yard-high retinas. Others feel he was illustrating what can trigger a response from a person’s superego. Still others note that retinas cannot be seen, that Fitzgerald meant pupils or irises.

Tender Is the Night (1934) had as its theme the spiritual malaise of American life, which he had experienced even before writing his final novel, The Last Tycoon (published in 1941), was about a Hollywood studio mogul. The work was unfinished, for Fitzgerald died before finishing it while working as a scriptwriter in Hollywood.

Although raised a Midwestern, genteel, Roman Catholic youth in St. Paul, Minnesota, Scott as an adult became known as a spoiled rich boy who lived with reckless and stupid extravagance, one who was unable to hold his liquor. His and Zelda's zany life together has been documented by biographers Jeffrey Meyers, Andrew Turnbull, and Arthur Mizener, among others. Any number of documented drunken scenes revealed his dissipation and flamboyant lifestyle: He once tipsily told airline passengers that his Hollywood mistress, Sheilah Graham, was “a great lay”; while he was a houseguest of Sara and Gerald Murphy, he threw their gold-flecked Venetian wineglasses over the garden wall; when the Murphys objected, he threw a can of garbage onto their patio while they were dining; when he was in France and an old lady tendered a tray of candies and nuts, he kicked the tray from her hands; with lipstick he wrote on the expensive dress of his friend John Peale Bishop’s wife; he got into a number of fistfights, usually losing; etc.

Zelda, as a reminder of their friendship, once removed her black panties and tossed them to New York literary and drama critic Alexander Woollcott. The curious enjoyed dishing the dirt about Fitzgerald, and in 1924 when Zelda had an affair with a French aviator she reported that, in comparison, Fitzgerald was “inadequate.”

Ernest Hemingway, one of his many drinking buddies, included a passage in A Moveable Feast about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis, and gossips whispered that although Fitzgerald had a scorn for “fairies” he himself may have had homosexual experiences. To Zelda he once wrote, “The nearest I ever came to leaving you was when you told me you thought I was a fairy in the Rue Palatine,” for she had accused him of having a relationship with Hemingway.

Of Hemingway, Fitzgerald had once written, “I really loved him, but of course it wore out like a love affair. The fairies have spoiled all that,” implying that their friendship had stopped because of such gossip. Graham, according to Meyers, knew about the relative sizes of penises, however, and “she found the tubercular, drug-addicted and often alcoholic Fitzgerald a creditable performer – ‘very satisfactory . . . in terms of giving physical pleasure.’ After lovemaking, they would lie happily in each other’s arms for a long time.”

The homosexual gossip continued, however, despite his describing homosexuals unscientifically as “Nature’s attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them.”

Critic Sally Eckhoff, reviewing two of Matthew J. Bruccoli’s books, Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship (1994) and F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (1994), notes, “From all the evidence now available, we can safely believe Hemingway’s assertion that Mrs. Fitzgerald had told her husband that his dick was too small. During a drunken lunch at Michaud’s, the distraught Scott spilled the beans to Ernest [Hemingway - both repaired to the hommes room to size up the problem. “ ‘Forget what Zelda said,’ I told him. ‘Zelda is crazy,’ ” Hemingway wrote in his chapter called “A Matter of Measurements.” (According to Edmund Wilson, Hemingway tried to dilute Scott’s anguish about his penis by claiming ‘it only seemed to him small because he looked at it from above. You have to look at in a mirror.’ Fitzgerald didn’t buy it.) Hemingway complained to Max Perkins that ‘almost every bloody fool thing I have ever seen or known him to do has been directly or indirectly Zelda inspired,’ but added, ‘I would not have Scott imagine I believed this for the world.’ ”

Hemingway knew that Zelda sneered about The Sun Also Rises, saying it was about “bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullshit.”

Quotations

"Perhaps I can guess the other one," she said; and reaching up on her tiptoes she kissed him softly in the illustration.

Here was a new generation, a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success, grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths to man shaken.

There seemed little doubt about what was going to happen. America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth, Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused all that trouble.

"There are all kinds of love in this world, but never the same love twice.

"Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy.

"Then I was drunk for many years, and then I died. (The Crack-Up, self-referential)

The following quotations are from The Great Gatsby:

Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

. . . as my father snobbishly suggested and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

"They are a rotten crowd," I shouted across the lawn. "You're worth the whole damn bunch put together."

"Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"

The poor son of a bitch.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . .

Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning . . . .So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The following quotation is from the short story Winter Dreams:

He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people - he wanted the glittering things themselves.

The following quotation is from Fitzgerald's fifth and final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon:

Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.

Ernest Hemingway once said of F. Scott Fitzgerald: "His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings" Hemingway is responsible for a famous misquotation of Fitzgerald's.

According to Hemingway, a conversation between him and Fitzgerald went:

Fitzgerald: The rich are different than you and me.

Hemingway: Yes, they have more money.

This never actually happened; it is a retelling of an actual encounter between Hemingway and Mary Colum, which went as follows:

Hemingway: I am getting to know the rich.

Colum: I think you’ll find the only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.

(The full quotation is found in Fitzgerald's words in his short story "The Rich Boy" (1926), paragraph 3: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand."

The Last Years

His last letter to their daughter, their only child, “Scottie” (Frances Scott), written the month he died, contained, “But be sweet to your mother at Xmas despite her early Chaldean rune-worship which she will undoubtedly inflict on you at Xmas,” a reference to her having become a fanatic Christian. Fitzgerald, however, expressed no interest in organized religion and, as was evident to his friends, was a non-believer and no longer a Catholic.

His handwritten will speaks of “the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death” [emphasis added]. The will is surprising in that it mentions Zelda’s insanity, giving her all of his household and kitchen furniture “in the event she shall regain her sanity.” In previous letters to Scottie he had written, “I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her.” Zelda outlived him eight years, dying in 1948 at the age of forty-seven, a hopeless schizophrenic, in a sanitarium fire. Her last years were spent clutching a Bible and writing about the apocalypse. Scott’s estate and literary-property interests passed to their only child, Frances Scott Fitzgerald.

In late 1940, Fitzgerald had two heart attacks. Ordered by his physician to avoid strenuous exertion, he obtained a first floor apartment and moved in with his lover, Sheilah Graham. When he had the second heart attack, he collapsed and died while clutching the mantelpiece in Graham's apartment.

Among the attendants at a visitation held at a funeral home in Hollywood was Dorothy Parker, who reportedly cried and murmured "the poor son of a bitch," a line from Jay Gatsby's funeral in The Great Gatsby. His remains were then shipped to Maryland, where his funeral was attended by very few people.

After Zelda's death in 1948, the two were originally buried in Rockville Union Cemetery, but with the permission and assistance of their only child, Frances "Scottie" Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, the Women's Club of Rockville had their bodies moved to the family plot in Saint Mary's Cemetery, in Rockville, Maryland.

{CE; FFRF}