Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (2 page)

In “Absolution” Rudolph’s dreary father, Carl Miller, works as a freight agent in one of Hill’s transport camps and adores his omnipotent boss: “His two bonds with the colorful life were his faith in the Roman Catholic Church and his mystical worship of the Empire Builder, James J. Hill. Hill was the apotheosis of that quality in which Miller himself was deficient. . . . [He grew] old in Hill’s gigantic shadow. For twenty years he had lived alone with Hill’s name and God.” Hill was also one of the models for Gatsby’s wealthy patron, Dan Cody. After Gatsby’s death, his old father, ignoring the criminal basis of Gatsby’s fortune, tells Nick Carraway: “If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country.”
²
If the Hollywood executive Irving Thalberg was Fitzgerald’s last tycoon, Hill was certainly his first. Hill’s astonishing success not only fulfilled the American dream and revealed the power of boundless wealth, but also showed Fitzgerald that a man from St. Paul could become a significant figure in the great world.

II

Fitzgerald’s family had some claim to Eastern culture. His great-great-grandfather was the brother of Fitzgerald’s namesake, Francis Scott Key, a Maryland lawyer who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the British naval bombardment of Baltimore in 1814. Despite its limp opening (“O say can you see”), its livid rockets and martial rhetoric soon made the song famous, and it was eventually adopted as the American national anthem. Fitzgerald was acutely aware of the embarrassing contrast between the genteel but impoverished and the crude but wealthy elements in his background, which always made him feel like a parvenu. As he told the socially ambitious writer John O’Hara: “I am half black Irish and half old American stock with the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions. The black Irish half of the family had the money and looked down upon the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had, that certain series of reticences and obligations that go under the poor old shattered word ‘breeding.’ . . . [So] I developed a two-cylinder inferiority complex.” Though his parents were listed in the
St. Paul Social Register,
they lived on the money that had been made by Grandfather McQuillan, an Irish immigrant and wholesale grocer, who had left a fortune of several hundred thousand dollars when he died at the age of forty-three in 1877.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, the product of these warring strains, was born on September 24, 1896, in a rented apartment at 481 Laurel Avenue, near (but not on) Summit Avenue in St. Paul. Like many American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, he was the son of a weak father and strong mother. His father, Edward, born near Rockville, Maryland, in 1853, had attended Georgetown University but did not graduate. He married Mollie McQuillan in February 1890 and took her on a honeymoon to Europe, where she had traveled on four previous trips. On their first day in Paris, as he urged her to hurry so he could tour the fascinating city, she innocently replied: “But I’ve already seen Paris!”

Edward was a small, ineffectual man with well-cut clothes and fine Southern manners. He loved to tell stories of his boyhood adventures during the Civil War, and was fond of reading the Romantic poetry of Byron and Poe and drowsing over the miscellaneous knowledge in the
Encyclopædia Britannica.
The absolute antithesis of James J. Hill, Edward was quite obviously a gentleman—and a failure. When Scott was born, Edward was the middle-aged proprietor of a small but grandly named wicker furniture business, the American Rattan and Willow Works, which was doomed to be eclipsed by his more energetic competitors.

As a boy, Scott was not only troubled by his father’s failure in trade, but also ashamed of his mother’s eccentric dress and peculiar behavior. Born in St. Paul in 1860, Mollie McQuillan was educated at that city’s Visitation Convent and at Manhattanville College in New York. A voracious but indiscriminate reader of sentimental poetry and popular fiction, she was often seen carrying piles of books from the local library. She toted an umbrella even in fine weather and wore mismatched shoes of different colors. Mollie was also accustomed to blurting out embarrassingly frank remarks without realizing their effect on her acquaintances. She once stared at a woman whose husband was dying and said: “I’m trying to decide how you’ll look in mourning.”

Edward tactfully remarked that she just missed being beautiful. But one relative, who thought she had missed by quite a lot, described the pathetic, wispy little wife as “the most awkward and the homeliest woman I ever saw.” Andrew Turnbull, Fitzgerald’s biographer, observed that “her sallow skin had grown surprisingly wrinkled, there were dark discolorations beneath her pale eyes, and her fringing, cascading hair was a byword. . . . Somewhat broad for her height, she walked with a slight lurch, and she spoke in a droll manner, dragging and drawling her words.”
³
Fitzgerald inherited his elegance and propensity to failure from his father, his social insecurity and absurd behavior from his mother.

The most influential event of his childhood took place before he was born. His two older sisters, Mary and Louise, suddenly died during an epidemic, at the ages of one and three, while their mother was pregnant with Scott. Another infant, born four years later in 1900, lived only an hour. The Fitzgeralds—like the family of Franz Kafka, whose two young brothers died soon after he was born—were devastated by these losses. (Mollie kept Louise’s dolls in tissue paper until the end of her life.) The death of his sisters may have made Scott feel guilty about surviving. It certainly led to an unnaturally close connection between the overprotective, middle-aged mother and the spoiled, delicate child.

The family tragedy also strengthened the bond between Scott and his father, who tried to protect the boy from his mother’s grief-stricken hysteria. In an autobiographical passage from
Tender Is the Night,
Fitzgerald wrote that his hero, Dick Diver, “was born several months after the death of two young sisters and his father, guessing what would be the effect on Dick’s mother, had saved him from a spoiling by becoming his moral guide.” Fitzgerald later connected his sisters’ deaths to his vocation as an author: “Three months before I was born my mother lost her other two children and I think that came first of all though I don’t know how it worked exactly. I think I started then to be a writer.” Though Fitzgerald did not explain this cryptic statement, he probably meant that he had been born out of suffering, had been singled out for a survivor’s special fate and had been made to feel that his life was particularly precious. His existence somehow had to compensate for their absence.

III

Though Scott was a robust infant, weighing ten pounds six ounces at birth, he became a sickly and much-coddled child. When he was two years old, his mother, fearing that his persistent cough might lead to consumption, took him to a health resort. The following year his parents sent him to an infants’ school, but he wept and wailed so much that they took him out again after one morning. The family physician, M. R. Ramsey, recalled that the stubborn and spoiled young Scott “was a patient of mine when he was a small boy and until he went off to prep school. He was a very difficult and temperamental patient and refused to accept any regime which was not to his liking. This attitude he preserved throughout life.”
⁴

In April 1898, after Edward’s furniture business had collapsed, he moved his family to Buffalo, New York, and became a soap salesman for Procter & Gamble. They remained in Buffalo for the next decade, except for two and a half years in Syracuse from January 1901 to September 1903. But upstate New York, unlike St. Paul, left a negative impression on Scott’s character. At the end of
Tender Is the Night,
Dick Diver starts an unsuccessful medical practice in Buffalo, where his father had died, and then drifts about to Batavia, Lockport, Geneva and Hornell. Fitzgerald always associated upstate New York with isolation and failure.

Scott’s only surviving sister, Annabel, was born in Syracuse in July 1901, and his first childhood memory was the sight of her howling on a bed. The self-absorbed boy was not close to her as a child, though he offered the teenage girl substantial advice about how to attract men, and rarely saw his attractive but conventional sister in adult life. Annabel later married and had two daughters. Her husband, Clifton Sprague, became an admiral and won the Navy Cross at the battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944.

Two years after Annabel’s birth, while the family was still in Syracuse, the six-year-old Scott had some frightening experiences and acquired his first badge of courage: “He begins to remember many things, a filthy vacant lot, the haunt of dead cats, a hair-raising buckboard, the little girl whose father was in prison for telling lies, a Rabelaisian incident with Jack Butler, a blow with a baseball bat from the same boy—son of an army officer—which left a scar that will shine always in the middle of his forehead.” Despite his heroic scar, another boyhood friend recalled that the handsome Scott was considered a sissy because he was afraid of a dead cat in the alley. On September 24, 1903, just after he returned to Buffalo and was desperately trying to reestablish his childhood friendships, Scott sent out invitations to his seventh birthday party—to which no one came. Heavy rain kept the indifferent children at home, and the humiliated Scott, consoled and spoiled by his mother, was allowed to eat the entire birthday cake, including some candles, by himself. He was a great eater of tallow until well past the age of fourteen.

In the summer of 1907 Scott went to Camp Chatham in Orillia, Ontario, north of Toronto on Lake Simcoe, where he swam, rowed, fished, played baseball and was extremely unpopular. When he played catcher without a mask, a ball cut his forehead. He became a hero despite his lack of athletic ability, but was so insufferably pleased with himself that he lost his short-lived prestige. One of his earliest letters, posted from camp to his mother, set the pattern of his future correspondence with agents and editors: “I wish you would send me five dollars as all my money is used up.” The ten-year-old also tactfully discouraged his mother from visiting him at camp and embarrassing him in front of the other boys: “Though I would like very much to have you up here, I don’t think you would like it as you know no one here except Mrs. Upton and she is busy most of the time. I don’t think you would like the accommodations as it is only a small town and no good hotels.”
⁵

Scott later admitted that he disliked his mother. He blamed her for spoiling him (which his father could not prevent) and emphasized the great difference in their characters and beliefs: “Mother and I never had anything in common except a relentless stubborn quality,” he told his sister, “but when I saw all this it turned me inside out realizing how unhappy her temperament made her.” In “An Author’s Mother,” he described Mollie’s absurd appearance and mentioned her disapproval of his career: “She was a halting old lady in a black silk dress and a rather preposterously high-crowned hat that some milliner had foisted upon her declining sight. . . . Her son was a successful author. She had by no means abetted him in the choice of that profession but had wanted him to be an army officer or else go into business. . . . An author was something distinctly peculiar—there had been only one in the middle western city where she was born and he had been regarded as a freak. . . . Her secret opinion was that such a profession was risky and eccentric.”

Fitzgerald once recorded a disturbing dream about his mother in which he felt ashamed of her for not being young and elegant, and for offending his sense of propriety by her peculiar behavior. He called her “a neurotic, half insane with pathological nervous worry.” And in
This Side of Paradise
he created the antithesis of Mollie Fitzgerald in his ideal mother, Beatrice Blaine: charming, stylish, well-educated, beautiful, wealthy and well-connected. Though Fitzgerald never dedicated a book to his father, he did, as a joke, offer
Tales of the Jazz Age
(1922) “Quite inappropriately, to my mother.” To Fitzgerald, the real matriarch of the family was Mollie’s younger sister, Annabel McQuillan, a dessicated spinster who had all the character and culture so noticeably lacking in his mother.

Edward adored his small, blond, blue-eyed boy, whose refined and delicate features resembled his own, and who was full of energy and imagination. In a poignant essay on his father, Fitzgerald described how Edward would dress his son in starched white trousers and walk into downtown Buffalo to buy the Sunday paper and smoke his cigar. Scott always used his well-bred father, who believed in the old-fashioned virtues of honor, courtesy and courage, as a moral standard. After Mollie had been emotionally devastated by the death of her three babies, Edward roused himself from his usual lethargy and made an exemplary effort to be a good parent:

I loved my father—always deep in my subconscious I have referred judgments back to him, to what he would have thought or done. He loved me—and felt a deep responsibility for me. . . . He came from tired old stock with very little left of vitality and mental energy but he managed to raise a little for me. We walked downtown in the summer to have our shoes shined, me in my sailor suit and my father in his always beautifully cut clothes, and he told me the few things I ever learned about life until a few years later from a Catholic priest, Monsignor Fay.
⁶

Since Edward lived in Mollie’s shadow and eventually became financially dependent on her, he was (unlike his wife) proud of his son’s profession and took great vicarious pleasure in his early success.

While Scott was on holiday in Frontenac, Minnesota, in July 1909, his father—who was always pressed for money and even had to charge his postage stamps at the local drugstore—sent him a sententious, paradoxical and possibly playful note, which expected quite a lot from a rather small sum: “I enclose $1.00. Spend it liberally, generously, carefully, judiciously, sensibly. Get from it pleasure, wisdom, health and experience.”