Scott Fitzgerald had a tragic life in many ways — suffering because of how he was wired — he was a bundle of nerves — and when and where he was plunked down in this world, all of which he poured into his art.
He poured himself into everything he did. He cared deeply and was particularly focused on the promise of youth, and gave of himself— helping many rising young writers make their mark, most famously Ernest Hemingway.
Scott was the first Irish Catholic American novelist of prominence. So prominent that his novel The Great Gatsby is rated “the most important American novel of the 20th century,” said novelist Jay McInerney. “It’s the great American novel. That illusive notion of the American dream has never seemed quite so tangible ..."
Fitzgerald was a child prodigy. His first work of fiction, a detective story, was published 15 years earlier, in 1910, when he was just 13, in the school newspaper at St. Paul Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota.
His emotional IQ was in the stratosphere, as he distilled the deepest human yearnings through the prism of his great artistic conscience and great intuitiveness — and great regard for humanity.
He was all too human.
Endowed with that ability to sniff out the tempo and spirit of the times — what people were thinking, what motivated them — he artfully branded “The Jazz Age”; then in the 1930s evocatively depicted the fallout from the Roaring Twenties, ending with the Stock Market Crash of 1929. It was all the product of living — not sought out, Hemingway-like, but simply who he was and how he lived. He fell in love with the beautiful and brilliant but deeply troubled, mentally ill Zelda Sayre of Montgomery, Alabama, whose parents did not think much of Scott, and who snapped when the market crashed.
Early years of struggle
Scott was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. His father Edward, born in 1853 at Glenmary Farm, hailed from an old-line Maryland family and attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., before moving West, where he opened a wicker/rattan furniture store in the late 1880s in St. Paul and met Mollie McQuillan. They wed on February 12, 1890, in Washington, D.C., the reception held at the townhome Mollie’s wealthy mother, Louisa, kept in the nation’s capital.
But Edward, who was quite charming and had a gift for storytelling, failed at business. Forced to close shop in 1898 and take a Proctor and Gamble sales job, he bounced the family between Buffalo and Syracuse in Upstate New York, before finally losing that job in March 1908. That was the day, said Scott, that his father became an old man. That summer, the family moved back to St. Paul, where the McQuillan family fortune helped bridge Edward’s financial gap — Mollie’s late father, Philip Francis McQuillan, having established a flourishing wholesale grocery business and helping found the Convent of the Visitation School in Mendota Heights (near St. Paul), where Mollie was educated.
Scott’s two older sisters, Mary Ashton and Louise Scott, died on the eve of his birth, in 1895 and 1896, respectively, engendering in Mollie an overprotectiveness of both Scott and younger sister Annabelle, born July 21, 1901. While living on the fringes of elite society, he was given the finest of everything, including a prep school education at the prestigious Newman Academy in New Jersey. There, he met Father Sigourney Fay (also known as Monsignor Sigourney Webster Fay). The priest inspired the character of Monsignor Thayer Darcy in Scott’s debut novel This Side of Paradise, which he dedicated to Fr. Fay, weaving in entire letters and personal anecdotes the prelate shared. Scott actually considered becoming a priest, given the friendship and spiritual counsel of Fr. Fay, who so impressed him because he had such great class. Scott wrongly thought Catholics were dowdy and old-fashioned, imposing a strict moral code without reference to the elegant world it opened up, humanly and spiritually.
Talent and drinking
Well-prepped, Scott matriculated at nearby Princeton University in the fall of 1913, where his literary and theatrical talents blossomed. At the same time, he began drinking more heavily, especially gin, served at eating clubs and organizations like the Princetonian where he socialized. Drinking helped his creative output and salved his insecurities. But then, too, he was hypoglycemic and an alcoholic and his drinking was a problem. When sober, he was perfectly polite; when not, it was a different story.
After his courtship with Ginevra King of Lake Forest, Illinois, famously ended because her father deemed him too poor, he hit the sauce full time. Add to that his academic deficiencies — he was a poor student who preferred writing songs and scripts for Triangle Club shows and writing for The Nassau Literary Magazine and The Princeton Tiger — and he did not make the grade and was put on academic probation. He finally dropped out of Princeton in October 1917 to enlist in the U.S. Army after America entered World War I. Receiving his commission as a second lieutenant in the infantry on October 26, 1917, he reported for active duty the following month at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he trained under the command of then-Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower.
By June 1918, he was transferred to Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama, where he was to complete his training before being shipped to France.
While there, he dated a Catholic girl. But as Joan M. Allen wrote in Candles and Carnival Lights: The Catholic Sensibility of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one night they went too far sexually and he prevailed upon her to join him for confession. He confessed the whole tale to the priest, asking for forgiveness; but, his date, whose confession followed Scott’s, did not, and the priest suggested she had more to tell, thus breaking the seal of confession.
Away from the Faith, but not from faith
It was a signal moment for Scott. Shortly afterwards he met Zelda, at which point he definitively drifted from the faith. In many ways, it seems, he had the same kind of invincible ignorance as James Cagney after his father died of influenza and the priest failed to show up for his funeral service. Cagney never again darkened the door of a church outside of weddings, funerals, and baptisms. Cardinal O’Connor famously apologizing to Cagney’s widow at his funeral.
When Fr. Fay died of the Spanish flu on January 10, 1919, F. Scott’s most vital link to the Church was gone.
Scott fell away from the practice of his faith. For him, the most important thing in life was his literary work — that and loving Zelda.
His rejection by wealthy women was, he said, the lodestar of his first three novels, including This Side of Paradise. Published on March 26, 1920, it was an immediate hit, enabling him to marry Zelda in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral that April 3, by which time, a mere days later, the novel had already entered its second printing.
Scott and Zelda were just kids — their dramatic stunts eye-popping — who became overnight sensations as one of the most photographed couples of the era. Their glamorous images were retained in photograph albums and scrapbooks they kept bulging with snapshots, professional photo shoots (such as their 1923 feature for Hearst’s International Magazine), and press clippings, personifying the excess of the Roaring Twenties and “a new generation grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken,” as Scott described the “lost generation” in This Side of Paradise.
But what goes up must come down. And these kids would grow up fast.
His parents, sensing Scott was getting more lost as he rose to prominence, moved to Washington, even as Scott and Zelda moved to Great Neck, New York, on Long Island, where the party never ended. After Scott’s play The Vegetable bombed in November 1923, he set to work inking 10 short stories for The Saturday Evening Post, earning $16,450 (roughly $250,000 in today’s dollars), thereby regaining the financial freedom to resume work on The Great Gatsby. But all the partying was corrosive. In early 1924, he and Zelda decamped to the French Riviera, where Scott toiled away on his novel, as Zelda, whose sensuous impulses were unfettered and professional desires unfulfilled, dove headlong into an adulterous affair with a dashing French aviator, Edouard Jozan, who served as a prototype for Jay Gatsby.
Scott, Victorian in his views on intimacy and a romantic at heart, who believed in love, put a halt to the affair. Yet, needless to say, it changed their relationship inexorably, though Scott never stopped loving her. His Catholic heart was compassionate and forgiving, though Zelda tested it to the limits.
Scott and Hem
Two weeks after The Great Gatsby was published, Scott met Hemingway at the Dingo Bar in Paris. It was April 24, 1925. He was scouting Hem for Scribner’s, but also scouting a friend in the wake of Zelda’s wounding infidelity. Their friendship blossomed, but then bogged down, given Hem’s pique over how Zelda, jealous of Scott, kept him from producing great literary works, for instance, getting him drunk so he could not work. Hem pegged Zelda as crazy from their first meeting. Indeed, mental illness was in her family DNA, her brother having died by suicide in 1933. Hemingway felt Scott needed to show more strength.
Then, too, Hem was not without his flaws, which Scott analyzed to a tee, noting that while Hemingway tended to megalomania, he was drawn to melancholia. But, in the end, they reconciled. Scott, who had a princely soul, showed restraint while recognizing his own flaws. He could fall quite low, but would dust himself off and get up off the mat and back on track, which Hem said was the mark of greatness.
As Hemingway was breaking out of the pack with publication of his debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, on October 22, 1926 -- made possible through Scott’s introduction and sage literary advice -- Scott had just turned 30 and was drinking himself to death.
Scott said he drank because he was insecure about his writing, fearing the next masterpiece would elude him.
But, as with Hemingway, writing was his healing. As he was in his final years, melting down, unable to write, Scott said that a writer who did not write had a maniac inside his head. Also, like Hem, he believed work was the greatest dignity.
Hemingway also recognized that the Church could help Scott, as he wrote to Max Perkins after Scott bared his soul in “The Crack-up,” a series of confessional essays he wrote while staying at the Skyland Hotel in Hendersonville, North Carolina, in late 1935. The series, initially published in Esquire in February 1936, revealed his spiritual bankruptcy. It was around this time that he wrote the line about a hero and tragedy in his notebooks.
"Hide and seek with the angels"
As Andrew Turnbull wrote of this time in his excellent Fitzgerald biography published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, which partly informed this piece, “the Church had a stronger hold on Scott than he perhaps realized or would have admitted. He had broken with it intellectually but not emotionally. If on the one hand he railed against the ‘mumbo-jumbo’ of Catholicism ... on the other hand he would talk nostalgically of going to Mass and admiringly of the great saints like Augustine and Ignatius.” (p. 270)
As Scott’s friend Nora Flynn of Tryon, North Carolina, said, “Scott played hide and seek with the angels. He was fundamentally a moralist and a very religious person. He kept his soul.”
And, yes, he considered writing his salvation. As Malcolm Cowley wrote in The Literary Solution, Fitzgerald likely felt Catholicism would keep him from scaling the heights of literary success, Finley Peter Dunne being the only famous Irish Catholic American writer — a journalist, humorist and satirist — before him. (p. 153)
It did not help that in June 1937, instead of writing more masterpieces, Scott headed to Hollywood for the third and longest time to make money. He lived there until his death two and half years later. Billy Wilder said that Scott working in Hollywood “was like a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job.” Yet Scott also analyzed Hollywood to a tee, calling it a “dump... such a slack, soft place — even its pleasures lacking the fierceness and excitement of Provence — that withdrawal is practically a condition of safety.”
And so it was that in 1939 Scott cut back on scriptwriting and used the great material he got from this “dump” for his final novel, The Last Tycoon, a roman a clef about Irving Thalberg, the “boy wonder” who became head of production at Universal at age 21.
In the end, Scott — emptied by the divine artisan of that elusive quest for happiness he artfully deconstructed in his novels — was filled by that truest of Loves, when God called him home on December 21, 1940, felled by a heart attack. As Zelda wrote of her great-hearted husband after he died, in one of her lucid moments over 10 years of intermittent mental breakdowns: “He was as spiritually generous as a soul ever was ... the best friend a person could have.” And, noting his desire for rest, she closed with Jesus’ famous words: “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”
