F.Scott Fitzgerald: The Golden Boy of the Jazz Age

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD The Golden Boy of the Jazz Age

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FOREWORD

by Jay McInerney

Jay B. McInernary (1995) is an American writer. His novels include Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, Story of My Life, Brigh Falls, and The last of the Savages. His series of short stories, How It Ended, was named one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times.

Michel Mok’s interview with Scott Fitzgerald is one of the most famous hatchet jobs of all time. Or at least, that’s how I remembered it, and that’s how Fitzgerald’s biographers usually characterise it - I just went back and looked at some of them. I can’t think of another interview of a literary figure that has featured so prominently in his own legend. And yet on rereading, it comes across as a more nuanced and sensitive portrait than I remember; if indeed I ever actually read it, as opposed to reading about it. I don’t know, maybe the full-frontal tabloid journalism of our era has blunted my own sensibility ...

Mok is remembered as one of the villains of the Fitzgerald story, one of history’s cloddish butterfly crushers. And while it’s true this interview did tremendous damage to Fitzgerald’s reputation (and there is a rumour that Fitzgerald tried to commit suicide having seen the piece), it can also be read as the mass-market version of his own “Crack-Up” essays — a vivid filling-in of the portrait of mental and emotional collapse that he limned in a series of autobiographical essays in Esquire that same year.

In September 1936, when the interview was published, America was still recovering from the Great Depression, and the 1920s seemed to many like the gaudy binge that had produced the terrible morning after.

Fitzgerald was the spokesman for the flamboyant generation that emerged after the first world war, a representative figure who not only chronicled the era but who seemed to embody it. “For just a moment, before it was demonstrated that I was unable to play the role,” he wrote in a collection of essays, My Lost City, “I was pushed into the position not only of spokesman for the time but of the typical product of that same moment.”

He and his beautiful wife Zelda provided at least one of the indelible images of the era when they jumped into the fountain of New York’s Plaza Hotel in evening dress after a night on the town. The Fitzgeralds were “flaming youth” personified, and for a few years they relished the role, during the years that Fitzgerald produced a significant body of work including one of the greatest artefacts of the jazz age, The Great Gatsby.

“Either you think, or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your own natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

In retrospect, Gatsby reads like an epitaph for that era; it is, among many other things, a prescient forecast of the end of the party, a subtle critique of the glossy materialism of the era - although Gatsby sold far fewer copies at the time than This Side of Paradise, the novel that gave birth to the flapper era and made its author a star.

If being a spokesman for a generation is a fleeting occupation, being a symbol of an era is downright dangerous for anyone who has the bad luck to outlive it. In the next few years the expatriate Fitzgerald continued to publish stories about flappers and giddy undergraduates in the Saturday Evening Post even as he struggled with alcohol and Zelda’s increasingly unstable mental state. Traveling with Zelda in North Africa in 1930, he wrote about hearing “a dull distant crash which echoed to the farthest wastes of the desert”.

I think it is a honest book, that is to say, that one used none of one’s virtuosity to get an effect, and, to boast again, one soft-pedalled the emotional side to avoid the tears leaking from the socket of the left eye, or the large false face peering around the corner of a character’s head. What makes this document even more poignant, almost unbearably so, is that Fitzgerald seems to have undervalued the literary achievement that would one day resurrect his reputation.

“...Fitzgerald seems to have undervalued the great literary achievement that would one day resurrect his reputation.”

When he returned to the States in 1931 he found a very different country from the one he had written about. By the time he published Tender is the Night in 1934, the privileged characters who populated his work were thoroughly out of fashion. The critic Philip Rahv, in his negative review in the Daily Worker, scolded: “You can’t hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella.” The hurricane being the Depression, and the will of the proletariat.

For those who didn’t read the Daily Worker, or the New York Times Book Review, Mok’s interview provided a morally satisfying answer to the question, what happened to that guy who wrote about flappers and bathtub gin? His portrait of the artist as a broken-down failure was almost as indelible as the earlier stereotype of the gin-swilling golden boy. Mok’s portrait is unseemly, but it’s not unfair, and one of the things that makes it so poignant is Fitzgerald’s collaboration in his own depantsing. What possessed him, you can’t help wondering, to expose himself this way? It’s as if he has determined to be a representative figure once again, even at the expense of humiliating himself, to reaffirm his significance as a generational totem by portraying himself as an exemplary victim of its faults.

I think it is a honest book, that is to say, that one used none of one’s virtuosity to get an effect, and, to boast again, one soft-pedalled the emotional side to avoid the tears leaking from the socket of the left eye, or the large false face peering around the corner of a character’s head. If there is a clear conscience, a book can survive—at least in one’s feelings about it. On the contrary, if one has a guilty conscience, one reads what one wants to hear out of reviews. In addition, if one is young and willing to learn, almost all reviews have a value, even the ones that seem unfair.

What he cut out of it both physically and emotionally would make another novel!

—Jay McInerney

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F. SCOTT FITZGERALD The Sensible Thing: A Life in Letters F. Scott Fitzgerald An American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age, He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

The dominant influences on Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol.

18 96 Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896, the namesake and second cousin three times removed of the author of the National Anthem.

Fitzgerald’s mother, Mary (Molalie) McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul.Edward Fitzgerald failed as a manufacturer of wicker furniture in St. Paul, and he became a salesman in upstate New York. After he was dismissed in 1908, when his son was twelve, the family returned to St. Paul and lived comfortably on Mollie Fitzgerald’s inheritance.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life is a tragic example of both sides of the American Dream—the joys of young love, wealth and success, and the tragedies associated with excess and failure.

19 11 During 1911-1913 he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey, where he met Father Sigourney Fay, who encouraged his ambitions for personal distinction and achievement. As a member of the Princeton Class of 1917, Fitzgerald neglected his studies for his literary apprenticeship. He wrote the scripts and lyrics for the Princeton Triangle Club musicals and was a contributor to the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and the Nassau Literary Magazine. Fitzgerald joined the army in 1917 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry. Convinced that he would die in the war, he rapidly wrote a novel, “The Romantic Egotist”; the letter of rejection from Charles Scribner’s Sons praised the novel’s originality and asked that it be resubmitted when revised.

There he fell in love with a celebrated belle, eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre, the youngest daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge.

The romance intensified Fitzgerald’s hopes for the success of his novel, but after revision it was rejected by Scribners for a second time.

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Fitzgerald quit his job in July 1919 and reurned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel as This Side of Paradise. It was accepted by editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribners in September. Set mainly at Princeton and described by its author as “a quest novel,” This Side of Paradise traces the career aspirations and love disappointments of Amory Blaine. In the fall-winter of 1919 Fitzgerald commenced his career as a writer of stories for the mass-circulation magazines.

Working through agent Harold Ober, Fitzgerald interrupted work on his novels to write moneymaking popular fiction for the rest of his life.

The Saturday Evening Post became Fitzgerald’s best story market, and he was regarded as a “Post writer.” His early commercial stories about young love introduced a fresh character.

19 20 The publication of This Side of Paradise on March 26, 1920, made the twenty-four-year-old Fitzgerald famous almost overnight, and a week later he married Zelda Sayre in New York. They embarked on an extravagant life as young celebrities. Fitzgerald endeavored to earn a solid literary reputation, but his playboy image impeded the proper assessment of his work.

There he wrote his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, a naturalistic chronicle of the dissipation of Anthony and Gloria Patch. When Zelda Fitzgerald became pregnant they took their first trip to Europe in 1921 and then settled in St. Paul for the birth of their only child.

F. Scott Fitzgerald and the love of his life, Zelda Sayre on an afternoon drive. 1992

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“ALL GOOD WRITING IS SWIMMING UNDER WATER AND HOLDING YOUR BREATH.” F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald expected to become affluent from his play, The Vegetable. In the fall of 1922 they moved to Great Neck, Long Island, in order to be near Broadway. There were frequent rows, usually triggered by drinking. Literary opinion makers were reluctant to accord Fitzgerald full marks as a serious craftsman. The Fitzgeralds spent the winter of 1924-1925 in Rome, where he revised The Great Gatsby. It was published in April.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life is a tragic example of both sides of the American Dream, the joys of young love, wealth and success, and the tragedies associated with excess and failure.

Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. The obituaries were condescending, and he seemed destined for literary obscurity. By 1960 he had achieved a secure place among America’s enduring writers. The Great Gatsby, a work that seriously examines the theme of aspiration in an American setting, defines the classic American novel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Books Publication New York: Scribners

1920

This Side of Paradise

1922

The Beautiful and Damned

1925

The Great Gatsby

1934

Tender is the Night

1941

The Love of the Last Tycoon

Short Stories Publication

New York: Scribners 1920

Flappers and Philosphers

1922

Tales of the Jazz Age

1926

All the Sad Young Men

1935

Taps of Reveille

1951

The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

1960

Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

1962

The Patt Hobby Stories

1973

The Basil and Josephine Stories

1979

The Price was High: 50 uncollected Stories

1989

The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Other Books Publication

New York: Scribners Afternoon of an Author The Vegetable or From President to Postman The Crack-Up Bits of Paradise New York: New Directions Poems (19110-1940) New Jersey: Rutgers University The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald New York: Library of American Novels and Stories (1920-1922) Tender is the Night

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the golden boy of the jazz age

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