Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography (3 page)

Edward was preoccupied with money because of his manifest inability to earn it. The most traumatic incident in Scott’s childhood took place in Buffalo in March 1908, and suddenly transformed his father from an elegant gentleman into a hopeless wreck:

One afternoon—I was ten or eleven—the phone rang and my mother answered it. I didn’t understand what she said but I felt that disaster had come to us. My mother, a little while before, had given me a quarter to go swimming. I gave the money back to her. I knew something terrible had happened and I thought she could not spare the money now.

Then I began to pray, “Dear God,” I prayed, “please don’t let us go to the poorhouse.” A little while later my father came home. I had been right. He had lost his job.

That morning he had gone out a comparatively young man, a man full of strength, full of confidence. He came home that evening, an old man, a completely broken man. He had lost his essential drive, his immaculateness of purpose. He was a failure the rest of his days.

Unlike the compassionate Linda Loman in
Death of a Salesman,
who responds to her husband’s failure in business by telling her sons—“he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog”
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—Mollie remained locked in her own hysterical world. She looked down on her husband, who began to drink too much, and frequently asked young Scott: “If it weren’t for your Grandfather McQuillan, where would we be now?” The fathers of most of Fitzgerald’s fictional heroes are dead before the novels begin.

IV

In July 1908 the defeated Fitzgeralds returned to St. Paul. The children moved in with Grandmother McQuillan on Laurel Avenue, the parents lived with a friend on Summit Avenue, and they were not reunited until the following April. Edward listlessly sold wholesale groceries from his brother-in-law’s real estate office, and the Fitzgeralds changed their rented residences, in the neighborhood of Summit Avenue, almost every year. Despite the loss of income, the family made a brave attempt to maintain their social status by providing lessons, arranging dances and sending their children to the right schools.

Scott’s swaggering adolescent roles as “actor, athlete, scholar, philatelist and collector of cigar bands” were undermined by his mother’s insistence that he demonstrate his “accomplishments” by singing for company. The attractive, egoistic, socially insecure boy now revealed a crucial, lifelong flaw in his character, which would hurt him as a writer. He had a weakness for showing off instead of listening and observing, and was unaware of the effect he had on others. “I didn’t know till 15,” Fitzgerald said, “that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me
plenty
.” Two of his closest friends later criticized the narcissistic self-absorption that limited Fitzgerald’s understanding of other men and women. Sara Murphy wrote, with some exaggeration: “I have always told you you haven’t the faintest idea what anybody else but yourself is like.” And Hemingway, who agreed with her, told their editor Max Perkins: “Scott can’t invent true characters because he doesn’t know anything about people.”
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Scott did develop a new awareness, however, when he perceived that he was popular with girls (if not with boys) and that they created strangely mixed feelings within him: “For the first time in his life he realized a girl is something opposite and complementary to him, and he was subject to a warm chill of mingled pleasure and pain.” His chaste adolescent heroine, Josephine, likes the daring experience of kissing boys, but has no real sexual feeling. And in a potentially lyrical moment in
This Side of Paradise,
when the thirteen-year-old Amory Blaine kisses a girl for the first time, she responds with conventional romantic modesty while he is overwhelmed by nauseous repulsion: “Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind. ‘We’re awful,’ rejoiced Myra gently. She slipped her hand into his, her head drooped against his shoulder. Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss any one.”
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Scott’s sexual revulsion was undoubtedly connected to what his Anglo-Irish friend, Shane Leslie, called the “middle-class, dull, unpoetical and fettering” Catholicism of the Middle West. His mother was fanatical about religion, went to Mass every day and, as he told Sheilah Graham, “believed that Christian boys were killed at Easter and the Jews drank the blood. She was a bigot.” He had attended two Catholic schools in Buffalo, and had shocked himself by lying in the confessional and telling the priest that he never told a lie.

When his family, still clinging precariously to the fringe of “good society,” returned to Minnesota, the twelve-year-old Scott entered a nonsectarian school, St. Paul Academy, which had forty boys between the ages of ten and eighteen. During his three years there, he energetically began his literary apprenticeship. He would memorize titles in bookstores and confidently discuss works he had not read (the same intellectual pretentiousness would permeate his first novel). He attempted to achieve popularity with his classmates, as he had in Buffalo and at summer camp, but failed abysmally because he observed and criticized their faults. As he would later do at Princeton and in the army, he ignored his studies and “wrote all through every class in school in the back of my geography book and first year Latin and on the margins of themes and declensions and mathematics problems.”
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He wrote many juvenile adventure stories for the school newspaper and melodramatic plays for the Elizabethan Dramatic Club, which was named after the director, Elizabeth Magoffin. Scott’s first published story, “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage” (1909), echoed the title and imitated the characters and themes of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Though he neglected to bring the mortgage into the story, no one seemed to notice. “When it came to rewriting,” Magoffin recalled, “Fitzgerald was indefatigable, retiring to a corner and tossing off new lines with his ever-facile pen.” Scott was also capable of the kind of heroic action that fulfilled his childhood fantasies. The St. Paul
Pioneer Press
reported that in September 1914, during a performance of his fourth play,
Assorted Spirits,
a fuse suddenly exploded and the audience panicked. The young playwright saved the evening by leaping onto the stage and calming the frightened audience with an improvised monologue.

Another incident that made the newspapers took place during a Christmas service at St. John’s Episcopal Church the previous year. Scott made a dramatic gesture, drew attention to himself and expressed his defiance of convention and rejection of religion. Though he called it “the most disgraceful thing I ever did,” his cocky tone suggests that he welcomed the notorious publicity he had inspired: “I plodded toward the rector. At the very foot of the pulpit a kindly thought struck me—perhaps inspired by the faint odor of sanctity which exuded from the saintly man. I spoke. ‘Don’t mind me,’ I said, ‘go on with the sermon.’ Then, perhaps unsteadied a bit by my emotion, I passed down the other aisle, followed by a sort of amazed awe, and so out into the street. The papers had an extra out before midnight.”
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V

Three crucial entries in Scott’s autobiographical
Ledger
for his boyhood years from 1901 to 1904 expressed his acute anxiety and shame about his feet, which he associated with fear of exposure, with filth and with perversion. Scott’s bizarre obsession with and phobia about his feet were closely connected not only to his childhood guilt about sex and revulsion when kissing girls—the result of what he called “a New England conscience, developed in Minnesota”—but also to adult doubts about his masculinity and fears about his sexual inadequacy:

He went to Atlantic City—where some Freudian complex refused to let him display his
feet,
so he refused to swim, concealing the real reason. They thought he feared the water.

There was a boy named Arnold who went barefooted in his yard and peeled plums. Scott’s Freudian shame about his feet kept him from joining in.

He took off John Wylie’s shoes. He began to hear “dirty” words. He had this curious dream of perversion.

In a
Smart Set
interview of 1924, Fitzgerald commented on the childhood phobia that had made him so unhappy and falsely claimed that it had suddenly vanished when he reached adolescence: “The sight of his own feet filled him with embarrassment and horror. No amount of persuasion could entice him to permit others to see his naked feet, and up until he was twelve this fear caused him a great deal of misery. . . . This complex suddenly disappeared one day without any reason.”
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Frances Kroll, Fitzgerald’s secretary in Hollywood, observed that he was slightly pigeon-toed, always wore slippers and never went about in bare feet. Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald’s companion during the last years of his life, wrote that he had mentioned his “mysterious shyness” about his feet, and during the years that she knew him always refused to take off his shoes and socks on the beach. When Tony Buttitta, who visited Fitzgerald’s hotel room in Asheville in 1935, noticed his “stubby and unattractive feet,” Fitzgerald “fumbled for his slippers and hid his feet in them.” Most significantly, Lottie, a prostitute who became Fitzgerald’s mistress that summer, described his foot fetishism and said that he “caressed her feet, the toes, instep, and heel, and got an odd pleasure out of it. . . . It seems that the sight of women’s feet has excited him since he first started thinking about sex.”
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Early in his career Fitzgerald used his curious obsession to suggest the presence of evil. In
This Side of Paradise,
in a five-page scene called “The Devil,” Amory Blaine and a friend pick up two chorus girls in a nightclub, where he notices a pale, middle-aged man dressed in a brown suit. They then go up to the girls’ apartment to get drunk and have sex. Just as Amory is tempted by Phoebe, the minatory devil figure from the nightclub mysteriously appears in the apartment: “suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a rush of blood to the head [instead of the penis] he realized he was afraid. The feet were all wrong . . . with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather than knew. . . . It was like weakness in a good woman, or blood on satin; one of those terrible incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain.” Associating the horrific feet with sexual immorality and sexual violation, Amory rushes out of the sinful apartment and descends in the elevator. As he reaches the lower floor, “the feet came into view in the sickly electric light of the paved hall.”

This fictional scene made an emotional impact on Scott’s boyhood friend Stephan Parrott, who had attended the same Catholic prep school and had read an early draft of the novel in April 1919. “The farther I got into it the more interested I became,” Parrott said, “but when I came to the place where you saw the man with the disgusting feet, I had to stop reading. I know just what you felt. Your mood was exactly like some I have felt, of the worst kind; in fact it started a humour in me that was quite horrible.”
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Fitzgerald’s childhood phobia evolved from his subconscious “Freudian” feelings. Though revolted by his own feet, he was sexually excited by the feet of women. His fearful associations with feet—which stuck out stiffly and were strongly associated with sex—both displaced and expressed his adolescent and adult fears about his masculinity. His deep-rooted insecurity later led him to seek embarrassing reassurance, not only from his mistresses of the 1930s but also from personal friends, about the size and potency of his sexual organ.

VI

Scott’s poor performance at St. Paul Academy prompted his parents to send him to a stricter, Eastern, Catholic boarding school. This would, they hoped, provide a more rigorous academic program, expose him to a more sophisticated way of life and increase his chances of gaining admission to a good college. The Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey (across the Hudson River and about ten miles northwest of midtown Manhattan), had been founded in 1890 by Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore to attract the sons of “Catholic gentlemen” and taught sixty boys from well-off Catholic families throughout the country. Scott, brought up with the traditional values of his paternal ancestors in Maryland, had always yearned for an Eastern education. Like Basil Duke Lee in “The Freshest Boy,” he “had lived with such intensity on so many stories of boarding-school life that, far from being homesick, he had a glad feeling of recognition and familiarity.”

Scott’s gladness, however, was short lived. As he entered Newman in September 1911, he naively overrated his appearance and athletic ability, social graces and intellectual power, which he felt would lead to success in school, and retrospectively made the honest admission that he lacked the fundamental elements of good character:

First:
Physically—I marked myself handsome; of great athletic
possibilities,
and an extremely good dancer. . . .
Second:
Socially . . . I was convinced that I had personality, charm, magnetism, poise, and the ability to dominate others. Also I was sure that I exercised a subtle fascination over women.
Third:
Mentally . . . I was vain of having so much, of being so talented, ingenious and quick to learn. . . . Generally—I knew that at bottom I lacked the essentials. At the last crisis, I knew I had no real courage, perseverance or self-respect.

Scott attempted to cultivate friendships with several classmates by composing their weekly English essays and enhanced his reputation as an athlete by writing an anonymous account in the
Newman News
of his “fine running with the ball” during a football game. But these ingenious ploys did not work. One student recalled that he was “eager to be liked by his companions and almost vain in seeking praise.” His roommate remembered him as having “the most impenetrable egotism I’ve ever seen.”
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