Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (6 page)

Ginevra came from Lake Forest, north of Chicago on Lake Michigan, a suburb which epitomized the zenith of upper-class Midwestern society. She grew up among the country mansions of the Swifts, the Armours and the McCormicks, and impressed the middle-class, socially insecure Fitzgerald with her sense of privilege and innate superiority. Ginevra’s sensual, seductive manner (which promised much and gave nothing) had a powerful impact on the older college boy. In a letter to his young sister, Annabel, he recommended Ginevra’s languid artifice as an ideal mode of behavior: “Never try to give a boy the [impression] that you’re popular—Ginevra always starts by saying that she’s a poor unpopular woman without any beaux. . . . A pathetic, appealing look is one every girl ought to have. Sandra and Ginevra are specialists at this. . . . It’s best done by opening the eyes wide and drooping the mouth a little, looking upward (hanging the head a little) directly into the eyes of the man you’re talking to.”
⁸

Though Scott was smitten by Ginevra, she considered him an amusing but by no means exclusive suitor. The narcissistic girl was more interested in attracting a series of boyfriends than in restricting herself to only one. She rather callously considered courtship a kind of stock market in which the wise investor bent the rules and bought shares in several promising prospects: “I can’t remember even kissing Scott. I imagine I did. But it wasn’t exactly a big thing in my life! . . . I guess I was too busy adding to my string to analyze my reaction to one suitor. . . . He was mighty young when we knew each other. I just never singled him out as anything special. . . . I was [later] engaged to two other people. That was very easy during the war because you’d never get caught. It was just covering yourself in case of a loss.”
⁹

The one-sided romance continued for the next two years during dances, dinners and plays in Lake Forest and New York, at Westover and Princeton. Though doomed in August 1916, when Fitzgerald overheard someone say that poor boys should not think of marrying rich girls, it was kept alive by hundreds of letters from Fitzgerald (some of them, thirty pages long, had to be stuffed into a series of envelopes). Fitzgerald kept Ginevra’s letters typed and bound into a 275-page book; she considered his clever but unimportant and destroyed them in 1917.

The following year she sent Fitzgerald an announcement of her marriage to a naval ensign. She had no regrets about rejecting Fitzgerald, and later showed some insight into his youthful character: “As I remember him, he was like a great many truly shy people, who give a feeling of conceit and self-importance as a cover up and an escape. . . . I truly feel that my part in Scott’s college life was a detriment to him—I certainly kept him from his work. . . . My attitude didn’t help an already supersensitive and sentimental person. . . . Scott’s and my temperaments would have clashed dreadfully & I would have undoubtedly driven him to drink a great many years earlier.” Ginevra’s younger sister, Marjorie Beldon of Santa Barbara, never understood how any girl could have been interested in a nobody like Scott Fitzgerald.
¹⁰

After divorcing her first husband in 1936, Ginevra married the heir to the Carson, Pirie, Scott department store in Chicago. In 1937, just before his apprehensive meeting with Ginevra, who was then between marriages and whom he had not seen for twenty years, Fitzgerald told his daughter, with a mixture of nostalgia and regret: “She was the first girl I ever loved and I have faithfully avoided seeing her up to this moment to keep that illusion perfect, because she ended up by throwing me over with the most supreme boredom and indifference.” Though heartbroken at the time, Fitzgerald answered Yeats’ crucial question—“Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman lost or a woman won?”
¹¹
—by using his lost love as imaginative inspiration. He re-created Ginevra as Isabelle in
This Side of Paradise
(1920), as Judy Jones in “Winter Dreams” (1922), as Daisy Buchanan in
The Great Gatsby
(1925) and as Josephine in the Basil and Josephine stories (1930–31).

In his first novel Fitzgerald revealed that Ginevra was less a reality than an imaginative construct and gave his own reasons for the end of the affair. There was “nothing at all to her except what I read into her. . . . I convinced her that she was smarter than I was—then she threw me over. [Truly] said I was critical and impractical.” But her rejection inspired him much more than if she had surrendered herself to him. As he wrote in “Basil and Cleopatra” (1929) of the character based on the intensely idealized and voraciously virginal Ginevra: “Radiant and glowing, more mysteriously desirable than ever, wearing her very sins like stars, she came down to him in her plain white uniform dress, and his heart turned out at the kindness of her eyes.” Acknowledging her colossal vanity and egoism, Ginevra later confessed: “I read with shame the very true portrait of myself in my youth in the Josephine stories.”

Fitzgerald’s greatest tribute to the elusive, unattainable Ginevra appeared in
The Great Gatsby
, in which he portrayed her as Daisy Fay Buchanan. He punned on Ginevra’s name (“High in a white palace [lived] the
king’s
daughter, the golden girl”) and throughout the novel described her as an almost disembodied voice which, Gatsby realizes at the end, was “full of money.” “Her face,” Fitzgerald wrote, “was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget.”
¹²
Gatsby’s ability, like Fitzgerald’s, “to keep that illusion perfect” sustains his self-deceptive and ultimately self-destructive quest, with the help of his own fabulous money, to win Daisy back from her husband.

IV

Fitzgerald’s emotional upheavals with Ginevra, his devotion to the Triangle Club, his social striving at Cottage Club, his disappointment with the English department and his complete lack of interest in other subjects led to academic disaster in the middle of his junior year. He once remarked that “Princeton is still the hardest institution to get in to and stay in (and leave!) in America.” But he got into it with only mediocre qualifications and left it all too easily.

While at Princeton Fitzgerald maintained the careless indifference to academic life that had characterized his years at Newman and would continue during his training in the army. He did not even attempt the minimum work required to pass many of his courses and took the maximum of forty-nine absences allowed during his freshman year. He failed three courses in both his freshman and sophomore years, failed his makeup exams in Latin and chemistry at the beginning of his junior year, which again made him ineligible for Triangle, and barely managed to survive without expulsion. He never even learned how to spell and, despite his training in Latin and French, was hopeless at foreign languages.

In November 1915 Fitzgerald entered the infirmary with a touch of malaria, then endemic in the marshlands around Princeton. Though his illness (which he preferred to call tuberculosis) was real, it also provided an excellent excuse to leave college honorably as an invalid instead of failing out after his midyear exams. “After the curriculum had tied me up,” he defensively explained to the president of Princeton in 1920, “taken away the honors I’d wanted, bent my nose over a chemistry book and said, ‘No fun, no activities, no offices, no Triangle trips—no, not even a diploma if you can’t do chemistry’—after that I retired.” He was extremely sensitive about his failure and persuaded the dean to give him a letter stating that he had voluntarily withdrawn “because of ill health and that he was fully at liberty, at that time, to go on with his class, if his health had permitted.” At the same time the exasperated dean rubbed salt in the wound by including a caustic note to Fitzgerald: “This is for your sensitive feelings. I hope you will find it soothing.”
¹³

After idling away the spring of 1916 in St. Paul, he returned to Princeton to repeat his junior year. But his spirit was crushed. He felt it was stupid to spend four hours a day in his tutor’s stuffy room enduring the infinite boredom of conic sections. He had been deprived of the recognition he craved and had lost all chance of winning honors during his final years. “After a few months of rest I went back to college,” he explained in
The Crack-Up.
“But I had lost certain offices, the chief one was the presidency of the Triangle Club, a musical comedy idea, and also I dropped back a class. To me college would never be the same. There were to be no badges of pride, no medals, after all.” If he could not achieve great success at Princeton, Fitzgerald did not see the point of struggling through his courses.

He confessed that when his morale was at its lowest point he had even sought solace from a prostitute. “It seemed on one March afternoon [in 1917] that I had lost every single thing I wanted—and that night was the first time that I hunted down the spectre of womanhood that, for a little while, makes everything else seem unimportant.” But this kind of behavior was out of character. On one occasion, when Bishop and another Princeton friend, Alexander McKaig, had gone off to pick up two girls, Scott priggishly told Edmund Wilson: “That’s one thing that Fitzgerald’s never done.”
¹⁴

In 1916 Wilson and Bishop, his fellow highbrow, published a cruel satiric poem that put the popular but cheeky Fitzgerald in his proper place. They contrasted his shallowness to their learning, and deflated his flashy cleverness, superficial reading, derivative cynicism and unworthy ambition by having Fitzgerald exclaim:

I was always clever enough

To make the clever upperclassmen notice me;

I could make one poem by Browning,

One play by Shaw,

And part of a novel by Meredith

Go further than most people

Could do with the reading of years;

And I could always be cynically amusing at the expense

Of those who were cleverer than I

And from whom I borrowed freely,

But whose cleverness

Was not the kind that is effective

In the February of sophomore year. . . .

No doubt by senior year

I would have been on every committee in college,

But I made one slip:

I flunked out in the middle of junior year.

In his
Ledger
Fitzgerald honestly characterized 1916 as “a year of terrible disappointments & the end of all college dreams. Everything bad in it was my own fault.” But he never completely accepted his share of the blame. In 1937, when Bishop truthfully stated that Fitzgerald had failed out of Princeton and used illness as an excuse for his departure, Fitzgerald became furious and melodramatically claimed that he had been carried out on a stretcher.

Glenway Wescott once observed that “Fitzgerald must have been the worst educated man in the world.”
¹⁵
It was ironic, Fitzgerald later told his daughter, that he had failed “Buzzer” Hall’s course in modern European history, but now owned more than three hundred books on the subject. Aware of his own intellectual limitations, he struggled to improve his mind until the very end of his life.

Fitzgerald dedicated the summer of 1917 to drinking gin and reading Schopenhauer, Bergson and William James. But the gin had a more powerful effect than the philosophy, and he returned to Princeton to await his commission in the army rather than to get his degree. The most famous alumnus of the college never graduated. Though bitter about his failures, he always remained intensely idealistic about and deeply devoted to Princeton.

Chapter Three

The Army and Zelda, 1917–1919

I

Fitzgerald, who was extremely self-absorbed, had no serious interest in or understanding of the greatest historical event of his lifetime: World War I. “Beyond a sporting interest in the German dash for Paris,” he wrote with studied indifference in
This Side of Paradise
, “the whole affair failed either to thrill or interest him. . . . He hoped it would be long and bloody.” When the war bogged down in the trenches after the German invasion of France, he “felt like an irate ticket holder at a prizefight where the principals refused to mix it up.” Fitzgerald joined the army for the same reasons that he went to Princeton. It was the fashionable thing to do. He imagined himself as a war hero as he had once pictured himself as a football star and wanted to prove his courage in combat. The army was also a convenient way, as malaria had been in 1916, to escape his recurrent failures in college.

Writing to his cousin Cecilia Taylor and to his mother (who had wanted him to become an army officer) after America had entered the war in April 1917, Fitzgerald emphatically rejected the patriotic motives that had inspired thousands of young men and had been immortalized in Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier”: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.” Instead, when explaining his voluntary enlistment to these good ladies, he alluded to Ireland’s neutrality and stressed his own individuality and deliberate detachment: “Updike of Oxford or Harvard says ‘I die for England’ or ‘I die for America’—not me. I’m too Irish for that—I may get killed for America—but I’m going to die for myself. . . . About the army, please let’s not have either tragedy or Heroics because they are equally distasteful to me. I went into this perfectly cold-bloodedly and don’t sympathize with the ‘Give my son to country’ . . . stuff because
I just went
and purely for
social reasons
.”

In July 1917, after his brief bout with Schopenhauer and Bergson, Fitzgerald went to Fort Snelling, near St. Paul, and took the exams required for an appointment as second lieutenant in the regular army. He could not become an officer until he reached the age of twenty-one in September. When he received his commission in the infantry on October 26, he immediately ordered his smart uniforms at Brooks Brothers—just as he had sent for his football equipment as soon as he was admitted to Princeton.