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Overview
Fool for Love is Scott Donaldson’s masterful biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald—written from a fresh and highly intimate perspective. Fool for Love follows Fitzgerald from his birthplace in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Princeton and upward into the highest reaches of literary and public success—and ultimately to Fitzgerald’s untimely death in Hollywood at the age of forty-four, broke and nearly forgotten. This engrossing, definitive study explores two classic Fitzgerald themes throughout—love and class—and the result is a striking portrayal of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, whose legacy and influence only continue to grow.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781452933412 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Minnesota Press |
| Publication date: | 08/22/2012 |
| Series: | A Fesler-Lampert Minnesota Heritage Book |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Scott Donaldson is one of the nation’s leading literary biographers. Among his many books are By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway; Archibald MacLeish: An American Life, winner of the Ambassador Book Award for Biography; and Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Man with No People
As a boy Scott Fitzgerald tried to persuade himself that he wasn't the son of his parents at all but the son of "a king who ruled the whole world." When his parents refused to be conjured out of existence, he repudiated their plans for him. Father thought his only son should go into business, Mother thought the army, neither thought writing. Fitzgerald resented their lack of faith as he resented their financial control. Many children have felt such resentments. He felt them with unusual vehemence. Publicly, he announced his independence in his fiction and in interviews where, posing as spokesman for the Younger Generation, he attacked the incompetence and ignorance of the Older. Privately, he proclaimed the shortcomings of Edward and Mollie Fitzgerald.
"Why shouldn't I go crazy?" he wrote Max Perkins, his editor. "My father is a moron and my mother is a neurotic, half insane with pathological nervous worry. Between them they haven't and never have had the brains of Calvin Coolidge."
Fitzgerald condemned Mother and Father alike for their lack of intelligence and for its deleterious effect on him. "If I knew anything rd be the best writer in America," he once remarked. More often, though, he stressed the difference between them, particularly the social difference.
His father bequeathed to him a heritage he might have been prouder of, had not the man himself turned out so poorly. Edward Fitzgerald was descended on his mother's side from prominent Maryland families who had settled in the colony in the seventeenth century. Francis Scott Key was the second cousin, twice removed, of the boy born in St. Paul on September 24, 1896, and christened Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. Scott's mother took special pride in the connection and liked to talk about it. So did her son. Both of them got the facts wrong, and claimed a closer relationship to the famous Key than was actually the case. "My great grandmother visited Dolly Madison," Scott observed in his notebooks. It mattered to him. He betrayed a measure of pride even in the mock genealogical chart he sent Edmund Wilson, wherein he traced the family tree of "F. Scott Fitzgerald (drunkard)" back to "Duns Scotus (philos.)," "Mary, Queen of Scotts (Queen)," "Edward Fitzgerald (The Rubiat)," "Sir Walter Scott (Ivanhoe)," and "Duke Fitzgerald (Earl of Lienster)" in addition to "Francis Scott Key (hymnalist)."
On his mother's side there was money but no social distinction. Philip Francis McQuillan, Scott's maternal grandfather, had started from scratch and built a small fortune in the wholesale grocery business. The McQuillans also became pillars of the Catholic church. When Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald went to Europe in 1921, Archbishop Dowling of St. Paul tried to arrange an audience for Scott with the Pope. The archbishop confessed that he had not met young Mr. Fitzgerald himself, but pointed out that "none have merited more of the Church in this city" than his family "through several generations — staunch, devout, generous." Scott Fitzgerald was unimpressed. To him his mother's family remained "straight 1850 potato famine Irish." (Actually, Philip Francis McQuillan emigrated in 1843.) In a letter to John O'Hara, another American writer with Irish roots, Fitzgerald vividly drew the contrast:
I am half black Irish and half old American stock with the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions. The black Irish half of the family had the money and looked down upon the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had, that certain series of reticences and obligations that go under the poor old shattered word "breeding" (modern form "inhibitions"). So being born in that atmosphere of crack, wisecrack and countercrack I developed a two-cylinder inferiority complex. So if I were elected King of Scotland tomorrow after graduating from Eton, Magdalene to Guards, with an embryonic history which tied me to the Plantaganets, I would still be a parvenu. I spent my youth in alternately crawling in front of the kitchen maids and insulting the great.
In short, Fitzgerald did not know how to act socially. Lacking social confidence, he felt he had to justify himself wherever he went. Often he tried too hard to impress people. Occasionally he refused to try at all.
"Mollie just missed being beautiful," Edward Fitzgerald used to say of his wife, but then he was a Southern gallant. Mollie was not beautiful nor close to it. In photographs she looks forthrightly at the camera, but the dark circles under her eyes dominate the picture. Her hair appears frizzy and unkempt, and her clothing drab. She seemed, to one of Scott's contemporaries, to have "worn the same dress all her life," and she was given to extravagantly droopy hats. Sometimes her shoes did not quite match, for she used to break in a new pair one at a time. She went to the beauty parlor for a manicure of her right hand only; she could do the left herself. She looked rather like a peasant, her son used to say. Others thought her more witchlike in appearance. Betty Jackson recalls watching Mrs. Fitzgerald walk to daily Mass, frumpy and unsmiling, toting her invariable umbrella and "followed by a lot of little glooms. You didn't get a lift when she went by."
In conversation Mollie was eccentrically outspoken. Whatever came into her head came out of her mouth. "Why did you have your house painted that awful color?" she'd ask. "Lorena," she demanded of her sister-in-law, "why do you put your table over there? We keep ours here." Once she was riding a streetcar with a woman whose husband was ill. What are you thinking about, the woman asked. "I'm trying to decide," Mollie Fitzgerald replied, "how you'll look in mourning."
In St. Paul Mrs. Fitzgerald was regarded as rather literary, since she was often seen carrying an armload of books home from the library. In fact she read eclectically in popular books of the day, and especially admired the uplifting poems — so Scott wrote in "An Author's Mother" — of Alice and Phoebe Cary. She sent her son religious books to read. When he began to publish his own books, she did not know what to make of them. For his part Scott relentlessly pilloried her taste. "It's a masterpiece, Mother," he scrawled in her copy of The Great Gatsby. "Write me how you like it." He assured Alfred Dashiell, editor of Scribners magazine, that Tender Is the Night "must have some merit" since his mother "wasn't interested in it." Scott did dedicate Tales of the Jazz Age"Quite Inappropriately To My Mother"— inappropriately on at least two grounds. First, she hardly belonged to the Jazz Age herself. Second, she possessed little or no understanding of the stories in the collection, which included "The Camel's Back," "May Day," and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz." "I wish," he told Margaret Turnbull, the mother of his biographer Andrew Turnbull, "I had had the advantage when I was a child of parents and friends who knew more than I did."
Mollie McQuillan was in her thirtieth year when she married Edward Fitzgerald in February 1890. The fine-featured, small Fitzgerald, then 36, looked a better catch than he turned out to be. Dapper in his Vandyke beard and well-cut clothes, Fitzgerald had beautiful manners but not much drive. He had come west from Maryland to run a wicker-furniture manufacturing business of his own in St. Paul. When it went under in 1897, Fitzgerald took a salesman's job with Procter & Gamble, a post that moved the family to Buffalo and Syracuse, New York. When Scott's father was fired ten years later, the Fitzgeralds returned to St. Paul to be supported by the McQuillan money. As a businessman Edward Fitzgerald failed twice, and it was characteristic of his son to take the emotional impact of his father's failure personally, yet to admire the manner in which he confronted it.
To a sensitive boy like Scott Fitzgerald, it must have seemed that everyone in St. Paul knew of his father's failure. Edward went regularly to an office in his brother-in-law's real estate firm, where he presumably functioned as a wholesale grocery salesman. But he barely earned enough to pay the rent, and his personal credit wasso shaky that he had to charge his postage stamps to Mrs. Fitzgerald's account at the drug store. Besides, he drank. "He couldn't get anywhere with that fault," as C. N. B. Wheeler, the headmaster of St. Paul Academy, put it. Scott was perfectly aware of his father's fondness for alcohol. "Father used to drink too much and then play baseball in the back yard," he recorded in his ledger for August 1905. But he refused to make the connection between drinking and business failure.
In a passage excised from "Early Success," an article written in 1937, Scott Fitzgerald simultaneously celebrated his father's unwillingness to make excuses for his lack of success and supplied him with excuses of his own. Never, the younger Fitzgerald wrote, did he hear his father "blame his failure on anything but his own incompetence, yet he might have since he was caught once in a panic ... and once in the first rush to weed older men out of business." Here he characterized his father as the victim of economic forces beyond his control. Elsewhere, he cited genetic forces. In his essay on "The Death of My Father" he described Edward Fitzgerald as the product of "tired old stock," unaccommodated to the bustling world of business. In effect, Scott was trying to convert his father's weakness into a virtue.
Such defensiveness testifies to a wound that refused to heal. Scott Fitzgerald grew up at the turn of the century reading the Alger books and believing in the gospel of success. Nothing he wrote or said could obliterate the fact of his father's failure. Scott liked his father enormously, and proudly remembered dressing up in long trousers and a short cane and walking downtown with his father on a Sunday morning to get his shoes shined. He absorbed from Edward Fitzgerald a taste for romantic poetry, especially Poe and Byron. "Tell Father," he wrote home from Lausanne in 1930, "that I visited the
'— seven pillars of Gothic mould in Chillon's dungeons deep and old'
and thought of the first poem I ever heard, or was [it] 'The Raven?'" He also acquired from him a sentimental attachment to the lost cause of the Confederacy, for though his father was brought up in Rockville, Maryland, technically Union territory, his sympathies lay with the South and he loved to tell his enthralled son tales of the Civil War, drawing on his own childhood recollections.
Like the fictional Dick Diver and his father, Scott attempted to emulate Edward Fitzgerald's good manners — manners that were more the product of temperament than of calculation. And to the best of his ability, Edward served as his son's "only moral guide." Only once did he strike Scott, when the boy called him a liar. Edward was inordinately proud of his handsome son: proud of his boyhood accomplishments, proud of his (undistinguished) Army service in World War I, proud of his becoming a famous writer. Scott's feelings toward his father remained forever ambiguous, however; for how could he respect a man who had failed so abjectly and was virtually emasculated through living off his wife's income?
Mrs. Fitzgerald dominated the household. When they traveled to Washington to visit relatives, she'd take the sleeper and Edward would follow on the day coach. The neighborhood kids were terrified of her. Once when Scott's friends Paul Ballion and Cecil Read came to lunch, Mr. Fitzgerald was having some difficulty cutting a pie that stuck to the tin. "Edward, let me cut the pie!" Mollie demanded, and snatched it away from him. "Where would we be," she'd say, "if it wasn't for Grandfather McQuillan?"
The ambivalence of Fitzgerald's feelings about his father emerges in a letter sent to his agent, Harold Ober, after Ober had escorted the elder Fitzgerald to the Broadway production of The Great Gatsby. "He misses me, I think," Fitzgerald wrote in acknowledging Ober's courtesy, and then went on to touch the nerve. "His own life after a rather brilliant start back in the seventies has been a 'failure' — he's always lived in mother's shadow and he takes an immense vicarious pleasure in any success of mine."
In his fiction, Scott Fitzgerald tended to depict fathers in hazy outlines. Often he disposed of the protagonist's father precipitously. "My father is very much alive at something over a hundred," he observed in his notebooks, "and always resents the fact that the fathers of most of the principal characters in my books are dead before the book begins. To please him I once had a father stagger in and out at the end of the book but he was far from flattered." That must have been Henry Gatz, who appears briefly near the close of The Great Gatsby. But Mr. Gatz was clearly ignorant and declassél, hardly a character modeled on Edward Fitzgerald. Moreover, his values were blatantly materialistic. It is the father of Nick Carraway who serves as a kind of moral touchstone in that novel, as it is the minister with roots in old Virginia, Dick Diver's father, who stands for honor and courage and courtesy in Tender Is the Night. Scott idealized the best of his father in the Reverend Diver; in that novel the parallels run closest. Like Dick Diver, Scott Fitzgerald sailed across the Atlantic to attend his father's funeral. And like Diver he felt that with his father's death an era had passed, and a sense of honor and duty, as well as a generation. "Good-by, my father — good-by, all my fathers": Dick said it for them both.
Shadowy though the fathers are in Fitzgerald's novels, the mothers are still more wraithlike. Only once did he portray a protagonist's mother with any vividness. Beatrice Blaine, Amory's mother in This Side of Paradise, was almost exactly the kind of mother Fitzgerald would have chosen for himself. But Beatrice Blaine and Mollie Fitzgerald have little in common. Beatrice possesses wit and charm derived from "a brilliant education." Her beauty is accentuated by "the exquisite delicacy of her features" and complemented by "the consummate art and simplicity of her clothes." She is not merely rich, like Fitzgerald's mother, but "a fabulously wealthy American girl" whose name is known to cardinals and queens. When Amory's ineffectual father dies, Beatrice and her only child become boon companions, traveling around Europe together while she gaily drinks rather more than she should. Amory inherits this weakness, as he inherits his charm and his snobbery, from Beatrice Blaine. On one occasion he feels "a sudden great pride" in her and fears he will not be able to measure up to the standards she has established.
Amory Blaine represents a glamorized version of Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald's first and most openly autobiographical novel. One way Amory is glamorized is by eliminating his parents, even the engaging Beatrice. By the time Amory and Rosalind Connage fall in love, fate has orphaned him.
"I want to belong to you," the rich and beautiful Rosalind tells him. "I want your people to be my people. I want to have your babies."
"But I haven't any people," Amory replies.
Fitzgerald's own parents lived out a normal life span, but metaphorically he had "no people" from the age of social awareness on: none he would have wanted to introduce to the immensely wealthy parents of Ginevra King, the real-life Chicago-Lake Forest belle he courted in 1915 and 1916, none he would have wanted to present to the parents of Zelda Sayre, the Montgomery, Alabama, girl with ties to the Southern aristocracy he married a week after the publication of This Side of Paradise in the spring of 1920. The groom's parents did not come to the wedding in New York. Neither did the bride's.
Fitzgerald launched a novel tentatively titled The Boy Who Killed His Mother after finishing The Great Gatsby in 1925. He also composed and performed on festive occasions a humorous ballad about matricide, with lyrics that ran
Just a boy that killed his mother I was always up to tricks When she taunted me I shot her Through her chronic appendix
While Mollie Fitzgerald could not be disposed of so easily, Scott kept her at a distance. By the time he was ten years old, he had apparently begun to be ashamed of his mother. During the summer of 1907, he went to Camp Chatham in Ontario and might have been expected to feel the pangs of homesickness. These were not strong enough to keep him from discouraging her visit. "I'd like very much" to have you come, the boy's letter began, but — he immediately added — "I don't think you would like it as you know no one here except Mrs. Upton and she is busy most of the time" and there were no good hotels and "about the only fare" in the boarding houses consisted of lamb and beef. Confronted by such elaborate signals, Mollie Fitzgerald stayed put. Neither then nor later did Scott want her around much.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Fool for Love F. Scott Fitzgerald"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Scott Donaldson.
Excerpted by permission of University of Minnesota Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
1. A Man with No People
2. Princeton ‘17
3. “I Love You, Miss X”
4. Darling Heart
5. Genius and Glass
6. The Glittering Things
7. War Between the Sexes
8. Running Amuck
9. Cracking Up
10. Demon Drink
11. The Worst Thing
12. “a writer only”
Notes
Index