Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (7 page)

He was sent for three months of training, from November 1917 to February 1918, to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on the Missouri River northwest of Kansas City. The captain in charge of training provisional lieutenants in exercises, calisthenics and bayonet drills was Dwight Eisenhower. One of his trainees wrote home enthusiastically about the young captain: “He has given us wonderful bayonet drills. He gets the fellows’ imaginations worked up and hollers and yells and makes us shout and stomp until we go tearing into the air as if we meant business.”
¹

Fitzgerald, however, was not so keen. He did as badly as an army officer as he had as a college student. Just as classes seemed to interfere with his theatrical career at Princeton, so drills and marches became an irritating interruption of the novel he wanted to write. Though he intended to lead an infantry platoon into battle, he never took his responsibility seriously, never realized that it was vitally important to acquire basic military skills. Like T. E. Lawrence, who would translate Homer’s
Odyssey
, with a pad on his knees, in the RAF barracks in India in 1930, Fitzgerald, concealing his pad behind
Small Problems for Infantry
, continued to compose while in the army and “wrote paragraph after paragraph on a somewhat edited history of me and my imagination. The outline of twenty-two chapters, four of them in verse, was made, two chapters were completed; and then I was detected and the game was up. I could write no more during [evening] study period.” Undeterred by this interruption, he continued to compose his book amidst noise and distractions: “Every Saturday at one o’clock when the week’s work was over, I hurried to the Officers’ Club, and there, in a corner of a room full of smoke, conversation and rattling newspapers, I wrote a one hundred and twenty thousand word novel on the consecutive weekends of three months.”
²

Fitzgerald had known Charles Scribner at Princeton; and Christian Gauss suggested that Scott send “The Romantic Egoist” to the venerable firm that published his own works as well as those of such eminent authors as Meredith, James, Stevenson, Barrie, Wharton and Galsworthy. Shane Leslie, another Scribner’s author, wrote an encouraging letter to accompany the manuscript. He noted its weaknesses but felt it was worth publishing, and compared Fitzgerald to the handsome and romantic Rupert Brooke, who had died of a fever on a Greek island while on active service in 1915. Fitzgerald used Brooke’s poem “Tiare Tahiti” for the title, epigraph and theme (age has nothing to tell the young in this world) of “The Romantic Egoist,” which was published as
This Side of Paradise.

“In spite of its disguises,” Leslie wrote, “it has given me a vivid picture of the American generation that is hastening to war. I marvel at its crudity and its cleverness. . . . About a third of the book could be omitted without losing the impression that it is written by an American Rupert Brooke.” Since the mortality rate of infantry lieutenants was extremely high, Leslie thought that Fitzgerald, like Brooke, would die in the war. He urged Scribner’s to accept the book in order to make Fitzgerald happy during the last few months of his life.

On August 19, 1918—about five months after submitting the novel—Fitzgerald received a constructive response from a young editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins. Perkins saw considerable merit in the book, but felt its innovations were outweighed by its glaring defects: “We have been reading ‘The Romantic Egoist’ with a very unusual degree of interest;—in fact no ms. novel has come to us for a long time that seemed to display so much originality, and it is therefore hard for us to conclude that we cannot offer to publish it as it stands at present. . . . It seems to us in short that the story does not culminate in anything as it must to justify the reader’s interest as he follows it; and that it might be made to do so quite consistently with the characters and with its earlier stages.”
³
Perkins asked Fitzgerald to revise the book, changing the narrator from the first to the third person, and then submit it for reconsideration.

Fitzgerald, meanwhile, had become distracted by his military duties and by his frequent shifts around the country prior to embarkation for Europe. In March 1918 he joined the 45th Infantry Regiment in Camp Zachary Taylor, near Louisville, Kentucky—where Jay Gatsby would meet Daisy Fay in Fitzgerald’s novel. In April he was sent to Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia; in June his unit combined with another regiment and became part of the Ninth Division at Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama.

Despite Fitzgerald’s three years in the sophisticated male milieu of Princeton, most of his military colleagues considered him weak, spoiled and immature. Devereux Josephs, an older officer and graduate of Harvard, criticized him for concentrating on writing instead of on training. He also felt that Fitzgerald, though incompetent and rebellious in the army, wanted to be admired: “He was eager to be liked by his companions and almost vain in seeking praise. At the same time he was unwilling to conform to the various patterns of dullness and majority opinion which would insure popularity.” Major Dana Palmer, an army friend, was more tolerant of his faults, which were balanced by his charm, and anticipated the opinion of many men who met Fitzgerald later on: “Scott abused the kindness and friendship of nearly everyone, but at that time, one could not help liking him very much.”

Alonzo Myers, who served with Fitzgerald for most of his military career, concluded that “as an Army officer, Fitzgerald was unusually dispensable.” Myers felt he was a ludicrous figure: immature, irresponsible and unfit for command. Fitzgerald was therefore treated by his military companions in much the same way as he had been treated at Newman School: “Nobody took Fitzgerald seriously. His fellow officers generally conceded that he lacked sound judgment. Much of the time he even appeared to lack any independent judgment at all. The result was that we tended to take advantage of him and to perpetrate pranks on him that sometimes could have had quite serious consequences.”
⁴
On one occasion the officers encouraged Fitzgerald to contravene military regulations and force a conscientious objector to pick up a rifle and drill. On another, according to Myers, they persuaded their naive comrade to sleep through reveille instead of turning out for inspection by the commanding general. When Fitzgerald did report for parade he fell off his horse.

After his superiors had reluctantly entrusted him with a command, Fitzgerald got involved in dangerous and absurd misadventures. When directing a mortar company, he mistakenly ordered his men to fire on another unit. And his soldiers, nearly blown up when a shell jammed in a Stokes mortar, were saved at the last moment when Dana Palmer bravely tipped the barrel and spilled out the shell.

Responsible as a supply officer for unloading equipment on the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, when his unit was on its way to France, Fitzgerald left the train to visit Princeton and allowed thousands of dollars of matériel to be stolen. He falsely claimed to have commandeered a special locomotive to take him to Washington with an urgent message for President Woodrow Wilson. While stationed at Camp Mills on Long Island, Fitzgerald went into New York for a party, borrowed a friend’s room at the Hotel Astor and was caught there by the house detective—naked and in bed with a girl. He tried to bribe the detective with a dollar bill folded to look like a hundred, but was caught again and saved from jail only by being put under military arrest in his army camp.

His one redeeming act occurred when a ferry used to get troops across the Tallapoosa River near Montgomery was swamped during maneuvers. Fitzgerald helped save a number of men who had fallen into the water. He described this incident in his story “I Didn’t Get Over” (1936)—whose title alludes both to crossing the river and crossing the ocean to fight in Europe—and gives the guilty hero, Hibbing, a name that recalls the president of Princeton in Fitzgerald’s time, John Grier Hibben.

Despite his manifest incompetence, Fitzgerald’s good looks, well-cut uniform, Princeton charm and Irish-Catholic background (for once, an advantage) attracted the attention of Brigadier General James Augustine Ryan, who in December 1918 appointed him aide-de-camp. Born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1867, Ryan had graduated from West Point, become a cavalry officer and been put in charge of relations with the civil authorities. He apparently thought Fitzgerald would be useful—or at least harmlessly decorative—in this quasi-diplomatic role.

Fitzgerald’s regiment was about to leave for France when the Armistice ended the war on November 11, 1918. He never even got close to making the fatal sacrifice of the twenty-one Princeton boys (five percent of his class) who were killed in the war. He wanted to prove his courage, gain glory and win the acceptance of his comrades, and always considered his lack of combat experience one of the deepest disappointments in his life. He equated athletic with military failure, called himself “the army’s worst aide-de-camp,” and in
The Crack-Up
said the two greatest regrets of his youth were “not being big enough (or good enough) to play football in college, and not getting overseas during the war.” He later suggested that the army was merely a social extension of Princeton and declared: “I can’t tell you how I wanted to get over. I wanted to belong to what every other bastard belonged to: the greatest club in history”
⁵
—a sort of Cottage Club of the trenches. His ludicrous career in the army explains why Hemingway believed that if Scott
had
gone to war he would have been shot for cowardice.

II

While his military life alternated between escapades and disasters, Fitzgerald turned for achievement and recognition to secret diplomacy, love affairs and literature. He had kept in close touch with his kindly benefactor Father Fay and while in the army had corresponded with this “brilliant enveloping personality.” Since Stephan Parrott, Fay’s other favorite at Newman, seemed ruined by having too much money and had failed to live up to Fay’s expectations, the priest—who was the first to perceive Scott’s unusual talents—pinned all his hopes on Fitzgerald.

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.”