Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (10 page)

The money earned from his copious flow of stories enabled Fitzgerald, who had exhausted himself and was afraid of developing tuberculosis, to leave the harsh New York winter for the gentler climate of New Orleans. He rented a room in a boarding house at 2900 Prytania Street, but disliked the city and remained for only a month. While living in New Orleans he visited Zelda twice, finally persuaded her to marry him and became engaged for the second time. She knew she had inspired his novel and told him: “It’s so nice to know you really
can
do things—
anything
—and I love to feel that maybe I can help just a little.”

In February 1920 Zelda mistakenly thought she was pregnant, and Fitzgerald sent her some pills to induce an abortion. But she refused to take them, emphasizing that she did not regret their lovemaking and wanted above all to preserve her integrity:

I wanted to for your sake, because I know what a mess I’m making and how inconvenient it’s all going to be—but I simply
can’t
and
won’t
take those awful pills—so I’ve thrown them away. I’d rather take carbolic acid. You see, as long as I feel that I had the right, I don’t much mind what happens—and besides, I’d rather have a
whole family
than sacrifice my self-respect. They just seem to place everything on the wrong basis—and I’d feel like a damn whore if I took even one.

A few days later, Fitzgerald repeated the key phrase from Zelda’s brave letter and, acknowledging her delicious faults to a friend’s sister, explained why he wanted to marry her: “Any girl who gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has ‘kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more,’ cannot be considered beyond reproach. . . . [But] I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self-respect.”
²⁰
Zelda’s courage to oppose conventional behavior, her sincere defiance of hypocrisy and the self-respect that made her want to have the baby impressed Fitzgerald tremendously. That same month, when he sold the movie rights of “Head and Shoulders” for the vast sum of $2,500, he expressed his generosity and love, and tried to assuage her wounded feelings, by spending the money on gifts for Zelda.

Just before their Catholic wedding Mrs. Sayre, who had always been fond of Fitzgerald, gave a lighthearted warning that deliberately obscured the darker side of Zelda’s character: “It will take more than the Pope to make Zelda good: you will have to call on God Almighty direct. . . . She is not amiable and she is given to
yelping
” when she does not get her own way. In the late 1930s, during bitter recriminations about the failure of their marriage, Scott, with retrospective insight, reminded Zelda that he had been deceived by Mrs. Sayre and by Zelda herself. Despite his admiration of her defiant courage, they had had serious sexual problems from the very beginning of their marriage:

[Your mother] chose me—and she did—and you submitted at the moment of our marriage when your passion for me was at as low ebb as mine for you—because she thought romantically that her projection of herself in you could best be shown through me. I never wanted the Zelda I married. I didn’t love you again till after you became pregnant [in 1921]. . . . You were the drunk—at
seventeen,
before I knew you—already notorious. . . . The assumption [was] that you were a great prize package—by your own admission many years after (and for which I have never reproached you) you had been seduced and provincially outcast. I sensed this the night we slept together first, for you’re a poor bluffer.

He also told his daughter that he had soon regretted his foolish decision: “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.”
²¹
Despite his misgivings, their wedding was scheduled to take place a week after his novel came out. His book and his wife were bound in a common destiny.

Chapter Four

This Side of Paradise
and Marriage, 1920–1922

I

This Side of Paradise
was published on March 26, 1920, received considerable acclaim and made Fitzgerald instantly famous. It is (to use Orwell’s term) a “good-bad book”—superficial and immature, but still lively and readable, and valuable both as autobiography and as social history. The novel’s defiant tone had the same powerful impact on rebellious postwar youth as Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye
did in 1951, and it became a bible and guidebook as the Twenties began to roar. Like Eliot’s
Poems,
Owen’s
Poems,
Huxley’s
Limbo
and Lawrence’s
Women in Love
(all of which appeared in 1920), Fitzgerald’s novel captures the spirit of disillusionment that followed the Great War. The overt and somewhat naive theme echoes Woodrow Wilson’s “war to end wars” and portrays the hero of the new generation “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.”

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