Breaking Down Fitzgerald - Helen M. Turner

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newspapers and magazines as the spokesman of his generation. It was also at this time that the image—both still and moving—became ubiquitous. His good looks and those of his glamorous wife, Zelda, made them an early incarnation of the celebrity couple. The highs could not last, however, and the desperate predicaments that both of them would find themselves in through the course of the 1930s read like a tragedy. He would die in 1940 in Hollywood, aged only forty‐four, but his life began in the Midwest city of St. Paul, Minnesota.

      In the popular imagination, F. Scott Fitzgerald is associated with the glamour of New York and the French Riviera in the 1920s, but his roots were firmly planted in the turn of the century Midwest. He was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Edward and Mollie Fitzgerald. The couple represented two alternative traditions of American identity. His maternal line was immigrant Irish; his grandfather had arrived as a child in the United States in the 1840s. Through industry and identifying valuable opportunities, Philip McQuillan amassed a considerable fortune running a wholesale grocery business that would be the income source Fitzgerald's family relied upon through much of his childhood. This financial reliance was the result of Edward owning and then losing a furniture business in 1898 that led to a family move to Buffalo, New York, for employment. This work with Procter & Gamble ended in 1908 and a return to the Midwest and financial dependency followed.

      Edward's background contrasted with his wife's in a number of significant ways. He was born in Maryland into a well‐established Southern family whose influence had faded. At the end of the Civil War, Edward had headed north and west, eventually settling in industrial St. Paul, home of railroad magnate James J. Hill. The pull between the self‐made and reinvented idea of American identity and the allure of inherited wealth and social influence his parents represented reveals itself as a tension both in Fitzgerald's life and in his writing.

      Throughout his great success in the 1920s, Fitzgerald showed little appreciation for the role his parents had played in the formation of his talent. Remarks about them during this time are either disparaging or pitying. However, Edward was central in passing on a love of literature, particularly in the form of English Romanticism. Fitzgerald's lifelong love of Byron and John Keats specifically can be traced to the influence of his father. He applied a less flattering acknowledgement to his mother, claiming that weaknesses in his character were a direct result of her overindulgence of him in childhood. Her behavior was not entirely surprising when we reflect on the fact that the Fitzgeralds buried three of Scott's siblings in infancy.

      Although Fitzgerald was already showing signs of writerly talent by adding playwriting to his short story accomplishments, he did not particularly shine academically. However, university was an expected path for a man of his class to follow and he set his heart on the Ivy League and Princeton. His maternal grandmother's timely death meant that the tuition fees could be met and the threat of the University of Minnesota to save money was removed (Bruccoli 2002, p. 37).

      Fitzgerald's time at Princeton was no more academically successful than his school days. However, he made a number of important friends during his time as an undergraduate, including the poet John Peal Bishop, the writer and critic Edmund Wilson, and John Biggs, future judge and—on Fitzgerald's death—executor of his estate. Fitzgerald carried on writing and performing with the university's Triangle Club, as well as contributing to the university magazines Tiger and Nassau Literary Magazine that both Wilson and Bishop were heavily involved in. These creative outlets were the focus of his attention rather than his studies.

      The outcome of his haphazard approach to academia was that in 1916, he returned to Princeton to repeat his junior year. By the beginning of the following year, he was making little progress and had little chance of graduating. In April 1917, the United States entered the war, relieving Fitzgerald of having to admit his academic failure or make decisions about his immediate future. By October, he was a commissioned second lieutenant in the infantry stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The following March he was at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama, and had been promoted to first lieutenant. Fitzgerald would not take part in the action of the First World War, which he recognized as the defining experience of his generation, but he was about to experience a life‐changing moment of a different kind. For it was here in Montgomery that he would meet eighteen‐year‐old Zelda Sayre, his future wife.

      Before his arrival at Fort Sheridan, Fitzgerald had already begun work on the novel that would eventually become This Side of Paradise and an early draft was completed by February 1918. It was submitted to Charles Scribner's Sons publishing house in New York for consideration under the title The Romantic Egotist, but it was rejected in both August and October of that year.

      In July, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre at a country club dance in Montgomery. She was beautiful, vivacious, and popular; Fitzgerald was besotted. The path to marriage, however, was not without interruption as Zelda was unable to fully commit to Fitzgerald until she was certain that he could provide for her properly. A handsome soldier and would‐be writer may have had romantic appeal but Zelda, like all women of her class at this time (as well as Fitzgerald's female characters), needed to be practical too. With no means of generating an income for themselves because of the limited opportunities open to them, women needed to take the decision to marry with both the head and the heart. Her lack of faith at this point in the relationship cast a shadow over their marriage that Fitzgerald could never quite escape.

      In 1919, having never seen action overseas, Fitzgerald was dismissed from the army. Intent on marrying Zelda, he headed to New York and a role in advertising. He continued to write and submitted a number of short stories to magazines for publication but was unsuccessful. In June, Zelda—unconvinced that Fitzgerald would make a success of his chosen career and conscious that he had no independent wealth—broke their engagement. Fitzgerald was heartbroken but it triggered a series of events that would set him on the path to fame and fortune. He quit his job in advertising, packed his belongings, and once again returned to St. Paul where in the attic of his parents’ home he redrafted his novel in a flurry of activity over the summer months.

      In September, Fitzgerald's career as a commercial writer began when The Smart Set magazine accepted “Babes in the Woods” for publication. More good news would follow that month when Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins accepted the newly renamed This Side of Paradise for publication. The title came from a poem titled “Tiare Tahiti” (1915) by English poet Rupert Brooke, who had perished during the war. The relationship between Perkins and Fitzgerald would be a mainstay of the author's life. Perkins was not only an extraordinary editor; he was also a loyal and remarkable friend who supported Fitzgerald through some of the darkest periods of his life.

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