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F. Scott Fitzgerald

1896–1940

 

The name of Scott Fitzgerald is forever associated with the Jazz Age, but this has perhaps done him a disservice.  He represents a particular kind of Irish-American experience, one in total contrast to that of James T. Farrell and John O'Hara.  He reminds us, if we needed reminding, of the huge variation in the experiences of Irish Americans.  Some of them had not only lace curtains on the windows, they had polished silver on the sideboard.

      After his death, his daughter Scottie investigated the complicated family background of her father and the families with whom he was connected.  Fitzgerald had cherished the thought that he had rich Southern relatives, but far more important were his Irish ones.  His grandfather, Philip McQuillan, had been born in Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, though little is known of his paternal grandfather, Michael Fitzgerald.  Fitzgerald, however, married a Cecilia Scott, who had Southern connections to Francis Scott Key, the author of the American national anthem.

      Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota, on 24th September 1896.  He was baptized a Catholic and reared in a Catholic household - formative experiences (as we know from JAMES  JOYCE [25] and other writers) involving guilt and rebellion, which can never be forgotten, even when the religious basis of one's childhood is rejected in later life.  His early years were spent in St Paul, but then the family moved to Buffalo, New York.

      The last two years of his pre-school education were passed in the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey.  In the fall of 1913 he entered Princeton University, but with the advent of the First World War he left college without a degree, having obtained an army commission as a second lieutenant.  But during the war, which for Americans only began in 1917, he saw no military action.

      In March 1920 his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published, and the following month, on 3rd April, he married Zelda Sayre in the rectory of St Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.  Such a private ceremony, in the parochial house rather than in the church, was the usual thing for a Catholic marrying a Protestant, but this seems to have been his last formal contact with the Catholic church of his youth and ancestors.  However, he never really escaped from the moral atmosphere of his early years and its strict rules.  His later life never seemed quite to live up to the standards he set himself, and it was this tension that forms much of his writing.

      It was as a short-story writer, especially of a popular literary yet commercial story, that made Fitzgerald's name.  In the days of the prosperous magazines, a living could be made from writing from them.  His first novel captured something of the hectic college life he had left behind, but always hankered after.  This was followed by The Beautiful and the Damned in 1922, but it was The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, which established him as a major literary figure, and it is generally agreed to be not only his masterpiece, but a novel of special significance to the American experience.

      After this, Fitzgerald began to suffer literary and personal difficulties.  He and his wife moved to Paris, met Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and other writers of the period.  He and Zelda lived in the south of France and began a life of travelling.  Then in the spring of 1930, Zelda's mental health collapsed, and she was placed in a sanatorium.  'I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanitarium,' Fitzgerald recorded in one of his notebooks.  Nothing in his later life assuaged his loss.

      His next book, Tender is the Night, did not appear until 1934, and from then on his career disintegrated.  The critics were, on the whole, kind to the book, which sold moderately well, but it was no great seller, and it left the author with unpaid debts and a feeling that there was some fault in the novel which could still be put right.

      His next novel The Last Tycoon was left unfinished at his death and had to be arranged for publication by his friend, the critic Edmund Wilson.  This book, which had cost him so much turmoil, was moving in a new direction.  However, Fitzgerald was unable to follow it - his talent was dying.

      He went out to that graveyard of talents, Hollywood, in 1937 to work on moves for money.  Here he met Sheilah Graham, a young journalist whom he spent a measure of time introducing to the intellectual history he himself had so enjoyed.  But little else seemed to go right.  His difficulties and debts mounted.  In his notebook he says: 'Then I was drunk for many years, and then I died.'  And so he did, on 21st December 1940.  His was a career of promise which was never quite realized, but his works have influenced our ideas about the 1920s, and America as a whole, in an important way.