Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (5 page)

While Fitzgerald’s more polished and self-assured classmates glided through Princeton with apparently effortless ease, the ambitious Midwestern schoolboy threw himself into college life with unusual seriousness and made strenuous efforts to distinguish himself by social and literary—if not athletic and academic—achievements.

Considered deficient in Latin, French, algebra and physics, Fitzgerald (like two-thirds of the 430 freshmen) had to pass examinations in these subjects in December as well as do his ordinary course work. During his freshman year he was required to take an unusually heavy schedule: Latin (Roman historians), survey of French literature, English composition and rhetoric, trigonometry, physics, and hygiene, in addition to physical education and an extra course in algebra to prepare for the make-up exam.

Since math and physics were boring and obstructive, and foreign languages remained a mystery, he was most keenly interested in his courses in English literature. Alfred Noyes, a popular conventional poet and author of “The Highwayman,” was Murray Professor and gave two lectures a week for half the college year. Fitzgerald naively asked Noyes if he should write for fame or for money (a question that troubled him throughout his life). On another occasion he was permitted to carry the vintage port into the dining room during a formal dinner for John Galsworthy.

The other English teachers were deeply disappointing. His talented classmate John Peale Bishop thought most of them were old boys with a weakness for pedantry. Fitzgerald, even more critical, complained that none of his English teachers ever mentioned contemporary American writers. The surprisingly pallid English department was “top-heavy [and] undistinguished, with an uncanny knack for making literature distasteful to young men.” The dead academic hand touched passionate poetry and made it wither: “one of my first discoveries was that some of the professors who were teaching poetry really hated it and didn’t know what it was about. I got in a series of endless scrapes with them so that I finally dropped English altogether”
³
—and was left with little else in the classroom that interested him.

The lectures in each course were supplemented by weekly meetings with the preceptors, who were supposed to strengthen the course by teaching small groups of students. But Fitzgerald’s English tutor, far from inspiring him, merely offered pedantic analyses. Instead of dutifully paying attention and taking notes, Fitzgerald vented his anger in his copy of Sidney’s
Defence of Poesie:
“this man Griffin is terrible. I sit here bored to death and hear him pick English poetry to pieces. Small man, small mind. Snotty, disagreeable. Damn him. . . . They say Griffin has made more men leave the English department than any other praeceptor in College. The slovenly old fool!
I have the most terrible praeceptors.”
Though repeatedly warned about his lateness to class, Fitzgerald refused to change his habits to please his teacher and excused himself by declaring: “Sir—it’s absurd to expect me to be on time. I’m a genius!”

Though Fitzgerald’s grades were predictably terrible, he managed to survive his freshman year. But he established the disastrous pattern of trying to make up past deficiencies while failing his current courses. Christian Gauss, who taught French Romantic poetry and was one of the few teachers Fitzgerald admired, gave a perceptive analysis of the character, ambitions and defects of his bright but wayward student: “He was impatient of discipline . . . and was fascinated by the operatic pageantry of the pre-World War campus. . . . He yearned rather consistently to dominate the world, become president of the Triangle Club and be a Big Man on the Campus. He possessed a far less solid background of reading than his friends but was deeply interested in the problems of art and its techniques. . . . He pursued his studies only spasmodically.”
⁴

II

Fitzgerald’s Princeton friends, as Gauss suggested, were more intellectual than he was. Sap Donahoe, a serious student who had been a friend at Newman and remained close to Fitzgerald, invited him in the summer of 1915 to his family ranch in White Sulphur Springs, sixty-five miles north of Bozeman, in the highlands of central Montana. Togged in Western clothes, Fitzgerald had a good time drinking with the cowboys and winning fifty dollars in a poker game.

Henry Strater, a pacifist devotee of Tolstoy and Edward Carpenter, was the model for the “fair-haired, silent, and intent” Burne Holiday in
This Side of Paradise.
A popular man who liked to champion unpopular causes, Strater led an influential protest against the discriminatory club system at Princeton and also opposed America’s entry into World War I. He later became a mediocre painter, and a hunting and fishing companion of Hemingway.

John Biggs, whose grandfather had been governor of Delaware and whose father was attorney general, had a booming voice and an impressive head and build. Biggs roomed with Fitzgerald in 1917; wrote many issues of the college humor magazine, the Princeton
Tiger,
with him; and collaborated with him on the 1916 Triangle Club play,
Safety First!
Biggs published two novels with Scribner’s in the 1920s, and was the youngest judge named to the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He remained Fitzgerald’s faithful friend and eventually became his literary executor.

Fitzgerald’s most literary companions (who also remained lifelong friends) were John Peale Bishop and Edmund Wilson. Born in West Virginia in 1892, Bishop had been an invalid as a child and entered Princeton several years later than his contemporaries. Christian Gauss said that “even as a freshman John had a self-possession and self-mastery which gave him the poise and bearing of a young English lord.” Fitzgerald was intrigued by Bishop’s scholarly and aesthetic persona, so different from his own boyish enthusiasm, and found him exquisite, anachronistic and decadent. In
This Side of Paradise
he portrayed the cracked-voiced Bishop as Thomas Parke D’Invilliers, “an awful high-brow . . . who signed passionate love-poems in the [
Nassau
]
Lit.
He was perhaps nineteen, with stooped shoulders, pale blue eyes, and . . . without much conception of social competition.” Bishop—partly deceived and wholly delighted by Fitzgerald’s pretentious talk about books he had not read—directed Fitzgerald’s reading, guided his literary taste and, with Wilson, taught him more about poetry than all the teachers at Princeton.

Bishop, who won all the literary prizes as an undergraduate, cultivated his precious persona and later remarked: “As to my tastes, I like to eat and drink, and above all to talk; I am fond of looking at paintings, sculpture, architecture and formal gardens; in a very modest way, I paint and garden myself. In particular, I like the architecture of humanism and the music of the eighteenth century. I prefer the ballet—at its best—to the theatre. I no longer care very much for reading, except for information.”
⁵
Bishop published his first volume of poems in 1917, served overseas during the war, married a rich and rather stuffy wife, and lived mostly in France in the 1920s. Though he turned out novels and poems, he was weakened by wealth, became desiccated and depressed, and never fulfilled his literary promise. He died on Cape Cod of a heart attack in 1944. Though aware of Bishop’s limitations as a writer, Fitzgerald was always eager to earn his praise.

Edmund Wilson, like Bishop, was Fitzgerald’s antithesis. Born in New Jersey in 1895, the son of a brilliant Princetonian trial lawyer and sometime attorney general of the state, Wilson was a solid member of the Eastern gentry. Haughty and aloof, he attended the Hill School, graduated from Princeton with an outstanding record in 1916 and served overseas with the ambulance corps in World War I. Plain in appearance, the stocky, auburn-haired Wilson was intellectual and sternly rational, stiff and self-conscious. The dazzlingly handsome Fitzgerald, by contrast, had an imaginative and intuitive mind, a spontaneous and impetuous approach to experience.

At Princeton Wilson had all the advantages. A year ahead of Fitzgerald and editor of the
Nassau Lit.,
he corrected Fitzgerald’s one-act play “Shadow Laurels” and his story “The Ordeal,” and published them in the college magazine in 1915. They collaborated that year on a musical comedy for the Triangle Club, Wilson writing the book and Fitzgerald the lyrics for
The Evil Eye.
To Fitzgerald, Wilson seemed self-conscious and pedantic; a well-dressed, withdrawn grind, smug and superior about his intelligence and erudition. It was understood between them that Fitzgerald was the brash, superficial upstart, destined to make a risky splash in the world, while Wilson was the solid intellectual who would set him straight.

Despite their friendship, Wilson and Bishop maintained a rather condescending attitude toward Fitzgerald’s considerable literary achievement at Princeton: two dozen pieces for the
Nassau Lit.,
three dozen for the
Tiger
and the lyrics for three absurdly plotted musicals of the Triangle Club—the most powerful organization, outside of athletics, on campus. Some of these early stories were good enough to rewrite and publish in H. L. Mencken’s
Smart Set
at the beginning of Fitzgerald’s professional career.

Fitzgerald studied the “amazing lyrics” of Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Iolanthe
and
Patience
when writing his own songs and modeled his witty dialogue on the plays of Oscar Wilde. In 1924 Fitzgerald recalled: “I spent my entire freshman year writing an operetta for the Triangle Club. I failed in algebra, trigonometry, coordinate geometry and hygiene, but the Triangle Club accepted my show, and by tutoring all through a stuffy August I managed to come back a sophomore and act in it as a chorus girl.”

Though Fitzgerald reserved for himself the role of the sexy and seductive show girl, his poor grades made him ineligible to act in the play. He had to be content with dressing up for the part in a blond wig, glamorous hat, tulle shawl and flowered gown, and having his theatrical photograph published in the newspapers of all the cities in the Christmas tour. Fitzgerald was five feet eight inches tall, with blond hair, green eyes, perfect features and a smooth, almost honeyed voice. He was “pretty” without being effeminate (his class poll gave him two votes for handsomest and five for the prettiest man), and had the same Irish beauty as Wilson’s future wife Mary McCarthy. In this photograph, with his head tilted fetchingly back, Fitzgerald looks for all the world like a charming drag queen. A St. Paul friend recalled: “He was strikingly good-looking and when his eyes sparkled and his face shone with that powerful interior animation it was truly an exciting experience.” And a Princeton contemporary, noting that all the female parts in the musicals were played by male students, agreed that “besides being one of the prettiest girls in the shows, he looked exactly like a beautiful lady and acted like one.”
⁶

In Minneapolis, Fitzgerald again put on his costume, falsies and make-up. Escorted by a St. Paul friend, he created a sensation by appearing at a fraternity party at the University of Minnesota. He brazenly smoked cigarettes on the dance floor, took a powder compact from the top of his blue stocking and was not unmasked until, after several drinks, he had to use the men’s room. His ambitions at the Triangle Club also ended badly, as he later warned his daughter while minimizing his own academic failures: “You are doing [at Vassar] exactly what I did at Princeton. I wore myself out on a musical comedy there for which I wrote the book and lyrics, organized and mostly directed while the president played football. Result: I slipped way back in my work, got T.B., lost a year in college—and, irony of ironies, because of the scholastic slip I wasn’t allowed to take the presidency of the Triangle.”

Though the football-playing club president took credit for Fitzgerald’s book and Scott failed to succeed him in office when forced to leave in the middle of his junior year, he did at least achieve the desired social success. Toward the end of each year the eighteen eating clubs on Prospect Street elected about three-quarters of the second-year students, while the rejected men continued to eat in the university dining halls. The Princeton eating clubs had no other function, Arthur Mizener noted, than “to provide a system of grading people according to social distinction at the middle of the sophomore year.”

Fitzgerald was elected to Cottage, which—with Ivy, Tiger, and Cap and Gown—was one of the “big four” clubs. It had been founded in 1887, was the most architecturally sumptuous of the clubs and had a large Southern following from St. Louis and Baltimore. Cottage was “an impressive mélange of brilliant adventurers and well-dressed philanderers,”
⁷
he wrote in
This Side of Paradise.
Its lavish weekend parties in impressive surroundings, which attracted girls from New York, Philadelphia and beyond, may well have provided the first grain of inspiration for Fitzgerald’s portrayal of Jay Gatsby’s fabulous parties on Long Island.

III

Apart from Father Fay, whom he continued to see at the priest’s family home on the New Jersey coast, Fitzgerald had no significant social connections in the East and no girlfriends at Princeton. But at a Christmas dance in St. Paul in 1914 (the middle of his sophomore year) he met Ginevra King, who was visiting her roommate from Westover School, and immediately fell in love with the sophisticated sixteen-year-old girl. “I didn’t have the top two things—great animal magnetism or money,” Fitzgerald later wrote in his
Notebooks.
“I had the two second things, tho’, good looks and intelligence. So I always got the top girl.” In
This Side of Paradise
Fitzgerald also observed that his autobiographical hero Amory Blaine lacked animal magnetism—the basis of physical attraction—and that Isabelle (based on Ginevra) had this admirable quality: “Flirt smiled from her large black-brown eyes and shone through her intense physical magnetism.” It is significant that in his
Notebooks
Fitzgerald valued money more than intelligence, and did not even mention artistic ability. And he did
not
get Ginevra, the top girl. She was too self-absorbed to notice his unusual talent and played an indifferent Fanny Brawne to Fitzgerald’s suffering Keats.