Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (11 page)

Bishop, Wilson, Fitzgerald himself, as well as students and faculty at Princeton, all commented on the provocative book. After reading the manuscript, Bishop called it “damn good, brilliant in places, and sins chiefly through exuberance and lack of development.” Later on, Bishop tried to account for its astonishing popularity by observing: “Sincerity for hypocrisy, spontaneity in the place of control, freedom from repression—who could resist such a program? The response was prodigious. Success, as we know, was only less immediate. The faults of the program were not so soon apparent.”
⁵

In the
Bookman
of March 1922 Wilson (who was supposed to be a friend) opened his review of the novel with his usual put-down. He repeated some of the points he had made in his letter about the as-yet-unpublished novel and authoritatively established the line of criticism about Fitzgerald’s work that would be repeated throughout his lifetime: “He has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.” Though Wilson clearly had the intellectual control, aesthetic ideals and abundant ideas, it was Fitzgerald who had somehow blundered into the creation of a phenomenally popular novel. Trying, like Bishop, to account for its surprising critical success, Wilson praised the book’s vitality: “I have said that
This Side of Paradise
commits almost every sin that a novel can possibly commit: but it does not commit the unpardonable sin: it does not fail to live. The whole preposterous farrago is animated with life.”

In 1920 Fitzgerald, riding high on his new-found wealth and fame as spokesman for the postwar generation, had fulfilled Wilson’s prediction that his shallowness would make him a popular success. Still toiling as an obscure journalist, Wilson found other ways to attack Fitzgerald and now became as critical of his personal faults as he was of his literary failings. Wilson and Bishop, whose thin volume of poems had also been eclipsed by Fitzgerald, drew up, after seeing the novel piled high in his publisher’s handsome shop window on Fifth Avenue, a satiric catalogue for a “Proposed exhibit of Fitzgeraldiana for Chas. Scribner’s Sons.” These items—which reflected Fitzgerald’s immaturity, vanity, narcissism, shallowness and undistinguished military career (Wilson and Bishop had both served in France)—consisted of three double malted milks, a bottle of hair tonic, a yellow silk shirt, a mirror, his entire seven-book library (including a notebook and two scrapbooks) and an “overseas cap never worn overseas.”
⁶
The yellow shirt anticipated Jay Gatsby’s exhibition of his wardrobe; the overseas cap would be cunningly adopted by Fitzgerald in “The Crack-Up.” Though emotionally vulnerable, Fitzgerald tolerated this sharp criticism with humility and good-natured resignation.

Fitzgerald had good reason to put up with Wilson’s spiteful attacks. He was being exceptionally well paid for his work and could understand Wilson’s manifest envy. He knew that he was not an intellectual novelist and, though his commercial stories were hastily composed, that his style and subject matter were his own. He instinctively perceived that his work evolved from his personal faults and emotional crises. His role as passive target was, moreover, fundamental to his relationship with Wilson. Had he become angry and broken with his friend, he would have lost the benefit of Wilson’s harsh but stimulating criticism.

In the 1930s Fitzgerald retrospectively agreed with Wilson’s criticism, but also defended his cheeky novel. Comparing it to a work by Oscar Wilde that had provided one of the epigraphs, he told Max Perkins: “I think it is now one of the funniest books since
Dorian Gray
in its utter spuriousness—and then, here and there, I find a page that is very real and living.” Referring to Wilson in “Early Success,” Fitzgerald remarked: “A lot of people thought it was a fake, and perhaps it was, and a lot of others thought it was a lie, which it was not.”
⁷
Its intellectual pretensions were fake, Fitzgerald conceded, since he had brashly discussed books and issues about which he knew very little. But his descriptions of experiences and feelings were real and sincere.

The Princeton bookstore was stampeded on the day of publication. Five days later, on March 31, 1920, Fitzgerald gave Cottage Club an inscribed copy of the novel (which is still there) to mark his visit to Princeton a few days before his wedding.
This Side of Paradise
—which portrayed the undergraduates as social climbers, arrogant snobs, energetic hedonists and political windbags—was a direct and deliberate assault on Woodrow Wilson’s staunch Presbyterian values. H. L. Mencken, delighted by its wild iconoclasm, remarked that if a new Fitzgerald escaped from Princeton, he would be “received with a cordiality (both spiritual and spiritous) that the president of his university might envy.”

But John Grier Hibben, Wilson’s successor as president of the university, was angered and upset by the portrayal of Princeton as “the pleasantest country club in America.” Rejecting Fitzgerald’s emphasis on frivolity, Hibben frankly told him “that your characterization of Princeton has grieved me. I cannot bear to think that our young men are merely living for four years in a country club and spending their lives wholly in a spirit of calculation and snobbishness.” Humbly deferring to authority, Fitzgerald admitted that the novel “does overaccentuate the gayety and country club atmosphere of Princeton.”
⁸
He did not mention, however, that his notorious phrase had been lifted from Wilson’s predecessor, President Patton, who had reigned at Princeton until 1902 and “was heard to boast that he was head of the finest country club in America.” Though the book offended Hibben’s ideal vision of Princeton, it conveyed a romantic aura to succeeding generations. The young George Kennan, later a diplomat and Soviet specialist, was drawn to Princeton by the novel; and Adlai Stevenson called it “a great human document.”
⁹

II

Fitzgerald was fortunate, at the beginning of his literary career, to win the loyal friendship and generous support of two remarkably similar men: his editor, Maxwell Perkins, and his agent, Harold Ober. Both gentlemen were reserved, respectable, reliable New Englanders, who had graduated from Harvard and led a conventional family life in the New York suburbs. Perkins came from a distinguished background. One of his ancestors had signed the Declaration of Independence; his grandfather had been attorney general under Andrew Johnson and secretary of state under Rutherford Hayes. Born in New York in 1884, the son of a lawyer, Perkins grew up in Windsor, Vermont, and attended St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. After college he worked in a Boston welfare house and became a reporter on the
New York Times.
He married an extremely proper wife just after becoming an editor at Scribner’s in 1910, had five proper daughters and lived properly in New Canaan, Connecticut. He also maintained a platonic friendship with another woman for twenty-five years. In the summer of 1916 Perkins unexpectedly joined the U.S. Cavalry, was sent to the Mexican border and chased but never found the revolutionary, Pancho Villa.

Rather stuffy and correct, but uncommonly generous, Perkins had, according to the Canadian author Morley Callaghan, “a talent for diplomacy in difficult human situations, and a kind of nobility of spirit and a fine sense of fairness.” Hemingway liked the strange way Perkins moved his lips and his reporter’s habit of keeping his hat on in the office. He admired Perkins’ kindness, modesty and tact, but criticized his deep-rooted puritanism, which made him abandon any pursuit that gave him pleasure.

Perkins gave excellent literary advice to authors who needed it. He helped Thomas Wolfe—who portrayed him unsympathetically as Foxhall Edwards in
The Web and the Rock
(1939)—to assemble his unwieldy tomes from a mass of disordered fragments. But he did not edit Hemingway, a careful author, beyond excising passages that were libelous and obscene. He merely accepted Hemingway’s typescripts, praised them and published them as expeditiously as possible.

Perkins was more intimate with Fitzgerald than with Hemingway and did much more for Scott. As Fitzgerald’s editor Perkins had to be as encouraging as possible. In contrast to Father Fay’s flattery and Edmund Wilson’s mockery, Perkins provided a constructive response that enabled Fitzgerald to improve his work. But Perkins could not spell and was absolutely useless at correcting, copy-editing and proofreading a text. As a result of both the author’s and the editor’s carelessness, Fitzgerald’s novels—from the first editions to the present time—are filled with hundreds of ludicrous orthographical, grammatical and factual errors. Though both Fitzgerald and Scribner’s looked foolish when Franklin P. Adams’ newspaper column listed scores of errors in
This Side of Paradise,
Perkins continued to be grossly negligent. In October 1921 he offered some typically bad advice when preparing the proofs of Fitzgerald’s second novel,
The Beautiful and Damned:
“I shall send them on to you but you will not need to read them very carefully unless you wish to. Just look them over.”
¹⁰

As Fitzgerald’s career progressed, Perkins assumed the additional roles of substitute parent, father confessor, secret sharer, social worker, medical mentor, psychiatric adviser, intermediary to Hemingway and rather reckless banker. He was one of the few people who maintained his friendship with Fitzgerald until the very end. Fitzgerald—like Ford and Pound—was generous with fellow authors. He repaid Perkins by recommending to Scribner’s many little-known and extremely promising writers, whom he had met or heard about in Princeton, St. Paul, New York and Paris: John Biggs, John Peale Bishop, Thomas Boyd, Ring Lardner, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Morley Callaghan, André Chamson, Raymond Radiguet, Erskine Caldwell and Franz Kafka. Through Fitzgerald’s good offices, Hemingway and Caldwell became two of Scribner’s most profitable authors.

Harold Ober was born near Lake Winnipesaukee in 1881 and grew up in New Ipswich, New Hampshire, on the Massachusetts border. He worked his way through Harvard as a tutor, rowed for the varsity crew and graduated in 1905. Eager to become an author, he spent the next two years in Europe; and he returned to France with the Red Cross in 1917. Ober joined the Paul Reynolds literary agency in 1907, became a partner in 1919 and opened his own agency, just before the Wall Street Crash, in 1929. “He was tall and lean,” wrote Catherine Drinker Bowen, one of his satisfied clients, “with deep-set, serious blue eyes, a big nose, a high color, and . . . a head of handsome grey hair which he wore parted on one side and carefully brushed down.” But he also had overgrown eyebrows, a pendulous lower lip and a weak chin.

Ober had two sons, and was interested in dogs, gardening, music and skiing. Like Perkins, he was generous with advice and money, and always behaved with old-fashioned courtesy and extreme reserve. After some difficult negotiations, one editor remarked: “That New Hampshireman can say nothing for longer periods than the great Buddha.” Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie, who became part of the Ober family during her years in high school and college, called him “a man of TOTAL integrity.”
¹¹

Fitzgerald dealt directly with Perkins at Scribner’s. Ober handled only his magazine stories, but was instrumental in his financial success. “In 1919,” Fitzgerald wrote, “I had made $800 by writing, in 1920 I had made $18,000, stories, picture rights and book. My story price had gone from $30 to $1,000”—and would continue to rise until it reached $4,000 from the
Saturday Evening Post
in 1929. No longer a poor boy in a rich boy’s world, Fitzgerald now revealed a vulgar streak and seemed to illustrate Thorstein Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption. Intoxicated by the excitement of money and eager to advertise his success, he would prepare for parties by prominently displaying hundred dollar bills in his vest pockets.

This Side of Paradise,
which had sold out in twenty-four hours, required twelve more printings by the end of 1921 and by then had sold more than 49,000 copies. Fitzgerald, who naively expected all his books to achieve a similar success, lived up to what he imagined his future income would be. He spent his money and his talent as if they would last forever. “All big men have spent money freely,” he told his mother. “I hate avarice or even caution.”
¹²
He did make one attempt to provide for the future by buying two bonds, but they lost value and he was unable to sell them. When he tried to abandon them in the subway, they were always returned to him.

Fitzgerald’s lavish expenditure of money indelibly marked him as nouveau riche. Once he developed luxurious tastes, he preferred to sacrifice his independence and go deeper into debt rather than reduce his standard of living to match his diminished income. Like Joseph Conrad, he felt he had to live like a gentleman and (even when pressed for money) provide his family with maids, governesses, nannies, nurses, expensive hotels, luxurious cars, private schools and the finest hospitals. Forced to borrow from his publisher and agent to get what he needed, he became as financially dependent on Ober as Conrad had been on his agent, J. B. Pinker.

Fitzgerald’s sudden wealth and fame created emotional and intellectual problems. He felt guilty because he did not deserve these blessings. Having reached the peak of financial and critical success, he found it extremely difficult to surpass his first achievement. He could do this only by writing a more serious and ambitious novel, which would inevitably earn less money than a popular one. This would force him once again to turn out commercial stories in order to pay for his lavish way of life.

At the same time that he began his friendship with Perkins and Ober, Fitzgerald met the editors of the
Smart Set,
H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. The
Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness
was satiric and avant-garde, snobbish and stylish, witty and iconoclastic. It published Somerset Maugham’s “Rain,” fiction by Willa Cather, James Branch Cabell and Sinclair Lewis as well as more experimental works by Lawrence, Joyce and Pound. It also took stories by Fitzgerald that were too serious or too highbrow for the
Saturday Evening Post.