Speaker I think Scott Fitzgerald was always pretty sure who he was, and that was part of the problem because I think Fitzgerald never felt he was quite enough. He was somebody who was born into a family that had some some names, some background, some money. The money was lost. There was, you know, the rich relative or too. And in a way, I think Fitzgerald always felt he had been somewhat robbed of his birthright. And I think he had a clear sense of exactly what his social position was, but that it could always be better and that it should be better and that he could improve upon that. All that being said, I think the one through line from a very early age was not just a very romantic sense of himself, but I think a very literary sense as well. He was someone who read a lot early and who began writing a lot, and he was someone who was writing plays when he was a teenager and having them performed in amateur productions.
Speaker Did Princeton represent for him?
Speaker Just the idea was that a glittering prize in and of itself for someone who was he seemed to be viscerally attracted to the lights, the east, the action. But Prince. But this idea of aristocracy as well seemed to be arrived. Aristocracy, Princeton maybe combined all of those in his mind’s eye.
Speaker I think in many ways, Princeton was a kind of glittering prize for Scott Fitzgerald as a teenager. He obviously had heard about this place and also when when Fitzgerald was applying to college, something kind of magical happened on the Princeton campus, which was the recent president of the university. Woodrow Wilson had just become president of the United States. And this was this was very exciting for this campus. It was very exciting for the country and the world. In fact, for Fitzgerald, though, it just added another layer to the great allure of this place, which represented the east, the establishment. It was really a kind of social pinnacle. And again, I think Fitzgerald very much wanted to belong to that. And I think he desperately wanted to to get into this place from the minute he heard about Princeton. There are two conflicting stories, how he first got interested in the university. One was his interest in football. And these were the days again when college football, especially Ivy League football, was really followed all over the country. The football heroes at Princeton, Harvard and Yale were football heroes around the nation. The other thing, though, was he came across a score from one of the triangle shows sitting on a piano out in Minnesota one day where he was performing his amateur one of his amateur productions. And the I think the two of those things that that football heroes and musical theater were being performed at Princeton among this young aristocracy. I think this this pulled him.
Speaker Where did this idea come from this this is sort of a double barreled idea of one, was that he was his admiration of what he his conception of a kind of an American aristocracy, the old money east, but also that he was really part of it, but robbed of it. Where did that where did that I.
Speaker I think one has to imagine what it was like for a young, very perceptive boy growing up in the Midwest, not even in Chicago, a big city in the Midwest, but in St. Paul with a father who really lost a business, ended up in a rather mundane job, really a salesman for years. The family moved from city to city, from house to house. The best they did was move into a house on Summit Avenue, which is one of the one of the beautiful streets in America, in fact. But the Fitzgerald house was really at the end of the row, the last of the houses where some it really is considered an important avenue. So I think with all this at work, Fitzgerald was always aware of the fact that there was something a little better just next door. I think you also have to factor in the fact that Roman Catholics in this country, as the Fitzgeralds were, they were outsiders in American society, especially the society that was blossoming in the east. In New York City. You go through the literature of the teens in the 20s and you begin to see the great lure of of the East and New York especially. And I think all this was very thrilling to young Fitzgerald now becoming a teenager. And I think this was all connected to part of the draw of Princeton as well, because so many of those bright young lights, those aristocratic scions, were going to schools like Princeton.
Speaker I had a slight impression that Scott, and this is really my impression, wasn’t so embarrassed by his Catholicism, St. Paul very heavily Catholic at that time, but he was embarrassed by his black Irishness. In other words, the pedigree was wrong. But I don’t know that that I’ve heard that. Read that a bit. What do you think about that?
Speaker I don’t think Fitzgerald was ever embarrassed by his Catholicism. I think he was aware of it. And he certainly wasn’t especially devout in his religion, if at all. But I think he was aware of the fact that there were great social divides in this country and that the great social leaders were the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. And I think this was something that he wanted somehow to be a part of and yet to be apart from as well. And I think this began to translate into his writing even from a very early age, in fact. And others have pointed out and it’s accurate, I think, that he had this rare gift to become part of the scene. And yet almost as though he’s got his nose pressed against the glass, watching the scene itself. He was the boy at the dance, but at the same time, the boy looking at the dance. And I think this really runs this is a theme that runs throughout his life and his writing.
Speaker Scott comes to Prinstein.
Speaker And kind of what’s his M.O., he needs something right away that this group has sort of been a freshman in a large place or a prep school or high school or whatever. But Scott had a special he needed to.
Speaker Might find an identity, it seems to me. I’d love to hear that from when he arrived, what was what was the priority, the priorities?
Speaker Well, I think very much unlike today, Princeton in 1913 was really a hotbed of snobbery. And it really mattered what your last name was, what your family wealth was, and what prep school you went to before you got here. You needed a pedigree before you arrived. Now, there were many students who didn’t have them, but they struggled. Fitz-Gerald, I think, was among that latter group. The quickest way to make a name for yourself was on the athletic field here to become a football hero. And indeed, when Scott Fitzgerald was here, there was a great star who was who called my God. He just shown above this university named Hobey Baker, who is again, a national football star and became a great hockey player. Hoby Baker’s middle name, not coincidentally, was Amerie, a name I think Scott Fitzgerald later borrowed for his hero of his first Princeton novel, The Side of Paradise. But Fitzgerald was small. He was slight. He was he was pretty coordinated, but he was never going to make the Princeton football team. So that was out. The second place you could really make a name for yourself here was in the Triangle Club, which was a club started by Booth Tarkington in the 90s, again, with some literary background to it. And the try and club to this day writes and produces an original musical comedy which they take on the road during Christmas vacation. And this was a place where you could instantly make a name for yourself and Fitzgerald, with his talent for writing plays already already proven. And he really adored the theater, especially the musical theater. He was a great fan of Gilbert and Sullivan. He seemed a natural for this and he went out for Triangle right away.
Speaker When Scott, in terms of and this is a broader idea, we’ll come right back to that.
Speaker But it occurred to me, because Scott may be temperamentally and maybe this is jumping the gun because maybe this realization didn’t happen till later in life. But the idea that Jim was called the golden moment, but that, you know, it’s not so much the achieving of the dream that’s important. It’s the having of the dream. It’s the process of the dreaming not to diminish the achievement, but.
Speaker It’s not going to last anyway, that he had this sort of fatalistic view, quietly, fatalistic, perhaps I’m what I was thinking when Scott actually came to Princeton.
Speaker Is it possible that he thought this thing would slip away from him before it’s before his time was even up? Or is that just projecting now?
Speaker Now which thing with the Princeton itself, the idea of succeeding at Princeton and the idea of maybe graduating from Princeton? Or is that is that jumping is.
Speaker Yeah, I think that’s a bit of a reach. I’m trying to think where to go with that question now because that brought up a couple. Give me some of that again.
Speaker Well, Scott, in his later work, at least. Yes. And perhaps then we can already see in this side of paradise. The reaching for the dream, the American dream, with this wonderful sense of the American goal that he had, it was very elusive. It never quite worked, if you got it. It was a dangerous signal that it was going to slip away. I don’t think he quite had it yet that idea. But I don’t know. I don’t know if that was in him and if he if he trusted himself at Princeton, I guess is what I’m really getting at. Did he or maybe the emotion of going through was enough going through his getting his identity?
Speaker Yeah.
Speaker Because there’s so many things packed into that, I don’t figure where to pick this up.
Speaker There’s there’s no question that the the concept of aspiring, of dreaming runs throughout Fitzgerald’s life and his work, and I think part of that is that once you actually get it or it’s within grasp, you realize the dream is not exactly what you thought it was, that the reality is not the same as the dream. I think that’s why his books are so full of disappointment as as well as aspiration. The Golden Girl never quite turns out to be solid gold the way he envisioned for him. Princeton represented some of that, but I don’t think Princeton ever let him down in that way. Princeton really, I think, was as magical as he thought with one problem. He got so involved in extracurricular activities, it stopped occurring to him that he had to go to class at some point. And I think that was one part of the Princeton dream he really didn’t factor in, which was most people are the people came here to study. In fact, Fitzgerald had an interesting career here because he he not only was very heavily engaged in extracurricular activities, all literary in some form or another writing for for the Triangle Club or for some of the other campus literary magazines. But the flipside is he also became a great reader here. I mean, he had always been a reader, but he began to read rather deeply and widely while he was here, and he began to fall in with a very literary crowd. And I think this is one of the great dichotomies of of Princeton then. Well, Princeton now, too, for that matter. But there’s this wonderful, rich extracurricular life going on. In Fitzgerald’s day. It was very much a country club. But at the same time, when Fitzgerald was here in 1913, 14 and 15, there were some amazing young men all writing, Edmund Wilson, John Peel. Bishop Fitzgerald fell in with a great fellow named John Biggs, who went on to have a distinguished law career. It was a judge. But at the same time, this was a man who published a novel when he was in his early 20s. The place was just ripe with literary potential and Fitzgerald really savored all that.
Speaker It’s going away. Peter, it wasn’t that bad. Who was Christine Gauss and how did that?
Speaker I want to ask a different question and then go again. OK. Do you think, Scott, I know that I’m about to use a word this wildly subjective, but that’s fine. And in your view, do you think Scott Fitzgerald was an intellectual?
Speaker I wouldn’t go so far as to say Scott Fitzgerald was an intellectual, but I think he certainly had intellectual tendencies. I think if he didn’t have so much of this other social stuff to work out, if he didn’t feel he had to be popular, become the big man on campus, if he if he could have let go of some of that, I think he had the potential to become an intellectual. He certainly loved books. He admired intellectuals. The fact that that really his closest pal on campus and really for much of the rest of his life was Edmund Wilson, one of the towering intellectuals of the 20th century, I think says a lot about Fitzgerald. And I think the fact that Edmund Wilson remained interested in Scott Fitzgerald says a lot about Fitzgerald’s mind as well. He was a man who loved to read, loved to write, loved to write about what he had read. The interesting thing for me when I was going through Fitzgerald’s papers is from the very beginning to the very end of his life, the endless notes, the drafts, the outlines, comments on everything from anecdotes to histories he had read. He took it all seriously. He recorded it, he banked it, and he constantly drew on that account. He was a man who he was a thinker. There’s no question about it. The intellectual label, I’m not sure I would pin on him, but he certainly had the tendencies.
Speaker Scott’s process of writing.
Speaker I’m going to ask just a very simple question, and then we can if we can get into the process versus the natural aptitude with Scott, a natural writer, did this come easy?
Speaker Well, I think it’s hard for anyone to say writing comes easily to any writer, but having gone through some of Fitzgerald’s first drafts, it is amazing to me. It’s just stunning to me. Some of the sentences that came out of the first sharpened pencil onto the page, I’m thinking especially of The Great Gatsby. I mean, some of those most glorious sentences came out just that way the first time. So he certainly had this incredible natural gift for my money and my taste. There’s no American writer who had such eloquence and elegance in his writing. It’s just amazing. And the amount he could pack into a sentence, into a paragraph, all this with great humor and great insight at the same time. What constantly surprised me, again, going through his papers was what a craftsman he was. And this was not a guy who tossed it off and never looked at it again. This was a man who really sculpted his writing, who sculpted his chapters, his paragraphs and his sentences. And so many of the really great bits of all his writing were rewritten time and time again. He was not only one of the great writers, he was one of the great writers. And he had a wonderful editorial sense of his own. I remember another time just going through, I guess, when he was working on Tender’s the Night, which was really extended over almost a decade. It took nine years really before it got into print. So there were endless versions and drafts of this manuscript. And when he was doing the final reading of it before it was really going to be published, he encountered all sorts of not just not passages, but sometimes a word that he would repeat. And he quickly got in touch with his editor, Max Perkins, and said, we’ve got to change this, that we’ve got to reset the type. I mean, I don’t want readers to think that my imagination is starving and I can’t come up with another word. I mean, it meant that much to him. Every word counted for this man and every word was just right.
Speaker The musicality of this is speaking purely for myself, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a writer in any language. Not that I read anything but English.
Speaker There’s a musicality to Scott’s language. Which is not to demean content, it can be there or not be there with the content, and we all know he’s written lesser, much lesser work, but he’s got just in your own view, is the musicality, the evocative power and the lyric quality of the writing. Kind of uniquely Fitzgerald, is that something you responded to when you first read it?
Speaker I think there’s great musicality to F. Scott Fitzgerald writing, and I think it was probably that’s probably what drew me to his writing in the first place when I was 15 years old and read my first Fitzgerald book, which was The Great Gatsby. And by musicality, I don’t mean just the sounds of the words beautifully selected words, but the rhythms of the sentences and the paragraphs. And I don’t know. I mean, I was I heard the Pied Piper song, and I think that’s the great effect he has on his readers. He he tootles a song that that we all respond to and we follow him. And and I think you see it in Fitzgerald, perhaps more than any other, because it’s a it’s a kind of writing that isn’t necessarily about plot and character. You see, although I think he comes up with interesting plots and really interesting characters for me, that the magic, the music of Fitzgerald is found in between the plot points and in between the character nuances. It’s those passages of ether that just kind of carry you from one place to another. They’re just they’re just about ambience or it’s just something in the air. So we beat on boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past. Where does that come from? That that final passage of The Great Gatsby? It’s just magic.
Speaker When you. Encounter Fitz-Gerald.
Speaker Well, let me ask, how did Scott Fitzgerald first come into your life and I don’t know whether we know your Scott or Scott Berg biography, but it would be, I guess, helpful to know that you were a student here.
Speaker We’ll know probably just how did this happen?
Speaker When I was 15 years old at Palisades High School in Pacific Palisades, California, with 10th graders, had to write the obligatory report on an American author. And I, at my mother’s urging, selected F. Scott Fitzgerald. She because she had a great passion for Fitzgerald herself and had saved clippings and books about Fitzgerald. And I began to read well, I read Gatsby first and then I read everything else he wrote. And by the time I had graduated from high school, I had read every word, at least in English, written by an about F. Scott Fitzgerald. And so the only place I seriously considered going for college was Princeton University, where F. Scott Fitzgerald had gone. And I remember writing my application to this place and it basically said, you know, I know you’re a wonderful university and I know things have changed since 1917, but frankly, I have this Fitzgerald problem and I’ve got to deal with it somehow and I’m coming. I remember telling my interviewer I’m coming anyway, whether you accept me or not, I just have to make a pilgrimage to Princeton. They made it easy on themselves. They accepted me.
Speaker So I got to come in through the front door.
Speaker The irony is, which you didn’t know your strategy might have backfired because the wasn’t that fond of Scott Fitzgerald. Is that I mean, I’m thinking that he was he was not a prodigal son here.
Speaker When I when I arrived on this campus in 1967, people who were of mixed minds about F. Scott Fitzgerald on one hand on this campus, they still resented the whole country club atmosphere that had been portrayed certainly in his first novel, The Side of Paradise. At the same time, he was just coming into fashion. He was becoming, as he now is, the most popular American writer. And Princeton was just beginning to take great pride in its most famous dropout. I think they were taking great pride in the fact that he had written these incredible books. They were starting to teach The Great Gatsby in English courses here. Part of the guided tour around the campus was was F. Scott Fitzgerald dorm room. I didn’t need any of that, that I knew where it all was. I was I was on this campus not two days before I made my way to Firestone Library. And I went to the rare books and manuscripts room and I asked one of the librarians, you know, I introduced myself and said, I’m a recent arrival in a Fitzgerald fanatic. What have you got here? And I remember the library librarian said, how much time have you got? And I said, I’ve got four years. Let’s let’s get started. What have you got? And I remember she was a wonderful woman and she brought up a carload of of Audur. Basically, she brought up I remember the first she brought up a scrapbook that the Fitzgeralds had kept. She brought up a ledger that Fitzgerald had kept of all his earnings. And best of all, what a great thing she brought the first time she brought the very first draft of The Great Gatsby written in his hand. And I was just hooked. I spent the next year or two going through all of his papers, and the deeper I got in, the more intrigued I got with a fascinating correspondence between Fitzgerald and his editor, a man who discovered him, a man who worked at Charles Scribner’s sons named Maxwell Evarts Perkins. And by my junior year, I became not only interested, but even a little obsessed with this guy, Max Perkins, whom I learned not only discovered and developed F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner, James Jones, Allen Payton, an endless list of two or three dozen of the most important writers in the English language between the two World Wars.
Speaker Was it how did Scott know about Max Perkins again telling us to Max Perkins’s, and was it kind of presumptuous that he would deny that he or was a part of Scott’s belief in himself that he would go to such a leading light or was Max wasn’t such a leading light at that time, 19, 17, 18?
Speaker He wasn’t.
Speaker Now, want me to back up a little and do him writing this side of paradise in the Army or.
Speaker Well, actually, I think this actually went to him with romantic ego even before, but I’m not sure of that. But it could.
Speaker Yeah, but but he had a but he had a draft written, I mean.
Speaker Well, what you need so much for the chronology is here is Scott completely unknown and you have the. Going to go to a publishing house, we’ve all heard of little Max Perkins.
Speaker Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker Almost from the moment Fitzgerald dropped out or flunked out of Princeton or it depends who’s telling the story, he like to say he he dropped out because of poor health. But Fitzgerald began writing a novel and it went through several drafts and he turned it over to a friend of his who gave it to another friend, a writer who was teaching in this country named Sean, Leslie and Sean. Leslie loved it. He thought it needed a lot of work. He thought it was young in many ways, as Fitzgerald was. He was barely 21, 22. But Sean Leslie said, I think we should send this to Charles Scribner’s Sons, which was then one of the leading publishing houses in the United States. Scribner’s was also perhaps the most conservative publishing house in the United States, certainly among them. This was a publishing house that that that published Galsworthy and Henry James. I mean, they are racy novelist was Edith Wharton. And in comes this rather cheeky, brash I call a novel. It’s almost a pastiche of a novel written by this college dropout then serving in the U.S. Army. It somehow sifted down to Max Perkins’s. Hans Maxwell Perkins was one of, oh, almost a dozen editors working at the House of Scribner, a junior editor. And in fact, Perkins really did not have that much clout at the firm of Charles Scribner’s Sons. Then he was even still considering whether he should remain in the publishing business. And finally, when this book came in and he stood up for it three times at editorial board meetings and his boss, old Charles Scribner, then in his late 60s, he wasn’t sure whether they should publish this at all. I mean, he was trying to respect his family’s name, this imprimatur, and he really didn’t think it should. It belonged on this book, This Side of Paradise.
Speaker And Perkins literally laid his job on the line and he said to Mr. Scribner, if we don’t publish this book, if we don’t publish the likes of this book, I’m not sure I’m in the right business. And Mr. Scrivner took a weekend to decide whether Perkins had found the right profession or not. And on a Monday morning, he said no. You did tell Mr. Fitzgerald we will publish his novel, The Side of Paradise, when it was published in March of 1920, became an instant success. And not only in sales, but it was talked about. It was the book everyone was talking about that year because it was a young new voice. So in many ways, you see Max Perkins really put F. Scott Fitzgerald on the map. Equally true. And I think equally important is that Scott Fitzgerald put Max Perkins on the map because no longer was he just a junior vote at the conference table in the Scribner boardroom. Now, when Max Perkins went before the board to introduce some new writers, whether it be Ring Lardner or Ernest Hemingway or Thomas Wolfe or Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, they sat back and listened and they said, well, we’ll trust your instincts, Max. Look what you did with Scott Fitzgerald. So I think it went along. What what the hell do I think?
Speaker Do you think? Do you think do you think, Scott, how close this was and how zealous his champion Perkins was an extremely modest man, never one to take credit at all.
Speaker I think to some degree, Fitzgerald knew how hard Perkins had fought for him because Perkins did something absolutely extraordinary. First of all, four months he engaged in a dialogue through mail writing letters with Fitzgerald, giving him suggestions how to improve his novel. Even though there was no book contract yet. Perkins, his attitude was this publishing house isn’t ready to print your book, but I think it’s wonderful. And I think if you just change this and this and this, I could take it before the board again and get it published. But then he did something outrageous. Perkins loved this book so much, he took it to two rival publishing houses, hoping they would publish it just because he wanted to see it in print. He knew Fitzgerald was a new voice. He knew he was the real thing as as as Perkins always said about writers he loved. And he did everything he could to see that that career got launched.
Speaker Meanwhile, back at the Army training camp, Scott and Zelda in Montgomery, Alabama, have started, they’ve fallen in love with each other, or at least Scott has fallen in love with her.
Speaker And my impression was that Zelda and to some degree the sailors wanted some evidence that this guy was going to either produce an income for the daughter or from Zilda standpoint, be famous and take her to to her version of the glittering lights.
Speaker Could you possibly help me with the with the juxtaposition of the completion of the this side of paradise? I think Scott was writing kind of for his love life as well.
Speaker I think the Scott and Zelda love story are beginning with the courtship and going up to and through the marriage really illustrates these themes of the dream, bumping into the reality when they met. I mean, Fitzgerald fell madly in love with Zelda Fitzgerald. She she was the belle of the ball. She was the belle of Montgomery, Alabama. He was the handsome young lieutenant stationed down there at Camp Sheridan. And they got engaged. They got unengaged the more time they began to spend with each other. I think Fitzgerald realized that this beautiful girl, this Zelda Sayre, was a little more than met the eye. And both she and her parents were extremely concerned with the future. Can this man make a living? What does he do? Well, he claims I’m writing a novel. I’m a novelist. I’m a writer. Well, that’s fine. But can you make a living doing that? All their their marriage, their future hinged on Fitzgerald proving that he was a writer. And really the only way he could do that was by having his first book published and earn some money. It is no coincidence that within a few weeks of the publication of his first book, he is married to Zelda Sayre in New York City. So this book was more than just launching a literary career. It was launching a marriage. It was launching the Fitzgeralds as we know them, the Fitzgeralds of legend.
Speaker Social norms, meaning social question, why do you think, if you have any thought on it at all, that Judge Seyah and Mrs. Sayer did not come to the wedding?
Speaker In New York City.
Speaker It’s true that Zelda’s parents, her father was a judge, didn’t show up for the wedding, part of it could be interpreted as theirs, their less than approval of the marriage. At the same time, I think it must be, said Fitzgerald, through this wedding together so hastily, I think he wanted nothing to get in the way of anything breaking this up. And he just Zelda unpublished, let’s get married. And she was in that moment as wild as he was and she went for it.
Speaker So off they went.
Speaker I’m backing up here a little bit back into our sacred ground of Princeton, within the glittering prize of Princeton is the college. But now we don’t know what the college is and we don’t know. But we’re sitting in a club. But it’s fair to say that. What did it represent to Scott? I mean, you’re sitting here with his Bible in my hand where he’s listing all the clubs in their various categories. And how did he do here?
Speaker Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker Like most colleges, Princeton really didn’t have an active fraternity life, but Princeton had an alternative called eating clubs. And in fact, I’m sitting here right now in the University Cottage Club, which was one of a handful of the important clubs back in Fitzgerald’s day. Again, this was a very socially conscious period. And the clubs on this campus had a real pecking order. They ranked and there were three or four at the top of the heap. And again, Fitzgerald wasn’t going to make the football team and was making a name for himself writing for the Triangle Club. I think perhaps the most important oh feather of respectability that he could put in his cap would be to be admitted to the cottage club and he desperately wanted to belong here. The president of the Triangle Club belong to Cottage Club, and so it meant a great deal to him when he was admitted at the end of his sophomore year, which meant he would spend his junior and senior years taking his meals here. Unfortunately, real life, not the dream life, not the imagined life, began to interfere. This is when ill health stepped in the way. This is when he stopped going to class because he was so active writing and and rehearsing for the Triangle Club. And it was also a period when something else began to surface in Fitzgerald’s life. And that was something that made itself known back in St.. Paul, but began to reappear more and more often. And that was alcoholism. And in fact, at the big party, after he was accepted into the cottage club along with his classmates, Fitzgerald got extremely drunk, famously drunk, such that it was talked about many years later, 50 years later, when I was at the school.
Speaker And when Scott Halbrook, what happened, Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald became a wild man.
Speaker He he he drank to celebrate. And in fact, even after Fitzgerald left the school, he never quite got over being a Princeton undergraduate. And I think that’s because he never really got past being a Princeton undergraduate. And I think the way he felt robbed of his birthright in a way back in St. Paul, he felt robbed of his Princeton diploma when he was kicked out of the school, when he had to drop out because of his health as well. When he came back to to resume school, he had lost a lot of his social position. He wasn’t the big man on campus. He had expected to be by junior and senior year. He had lost his position in the Triangle Club. His behavior got a little more and more drunk on campus. So he wasn’t so popular here at the cottage club, and yet he never got over it. So even when he was no longer a student here, he would come back. He would come back and wrote portions of this side of paradise in this very room, in this library at Cottage Club. After he became a published writer, he still came back here. It was very important to him in 1920 when this side of paradise, he told his editor, Max Perkins, that the day the book was published, he wanted to be in Princeton, not New York City, where you’d think any writer would want to be right, where it’s being published, where all the great bookstores in the country were. He wanted to be in Princeton. He wanted to be the big man on campus or again or for the first time. And I think, again, it was the dream eluding him. And he was he was spreading, sprinting to try to try to grasp it. And over the years, at least over that year, Fitzgerald came back to Cottage Club several times. Amazingly, they asked him to come chaperone a party here that was that was hopeless because he was in a celebratory mood. So he came back and he got extremely drunk and basically was was kicked out of the club. Not a not long after that, there was another meeting on campus of some of the literary lights who had written for the Princeton magazines in the past few years. Fitzgerald came back with some of his friends, with Edmund Wilson, with John Peel Bishop to other wonderful writers. But Fitzgerald got extremely drunk. He came back dressed. He was wearing a golden wreath and he was carrying a pan pipe and wearing a toga. Came to the cottage club here, extremely drunk. Now, when I joined this club fifty years later, I was told the story that he was so drunk that they hung him out this second story window and threatened to drop him out. Not the case. I think that’s just suburban legend about Fitzgerald. But the fact of the matter is, they did push him out a window on the ground floor and said, you are no longer welcome in this club. And that was the case. He was no longer welcome at Cottage Club. And yet and yet he still never let go of Princeton and he still attended Princeton events, Princeton football games. He would attend the triangle shows if it played in the city where he was then living. And interesting to me that when F. Scott Fitzgerald died and he was living out in Hollywood in 1940, he was reading the Princeton Alumni Weekly when he had what proved to be a fatal heart attack. Literally, he was making notes on the Princeton football team. It’s a place he just never got over.
Speaker You’ve answered this, covered this in what we’re about to say, but just when I was wondering about the glorious pool of funding at my fancy leather director’s chair there, I noticed there was in 1936 the fiftieth dinner at the Savoy Plaza, the Cottage Club, fiftieth dinner in 1936.
Speaker And it occurred to me, just ask you, if Scott had wanted to go to that dinner, would he have been allowed? And then I remembered also 36 was the year he was hitting the absolute rock and roll the crack houses.
Speaker But I guess so I’m really asking, could he have gotten in? What do you like to have gone to that dinner? What do you been welcomed at that dinner? And there happens to be the coincidence of that. But I’m really asking the former and give me that.
Speaker And the former is if there was there was a fiftieth dinner of the founding of Canada right there at the Savoy Plaza.
Speaker And all the names and numbers are there. And I even see someone I was very fond of in the front row of that photograph. But it occurred to me, would Scott have been allowed to go to the damn thing?
Speaker You know, in 1936, there was a banquet in New York City at the Savoy Plaza. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the Cottage Club.
Speaker Fitzgerald was not there. I think part of them would have loved to have been there. He was not there because it was the absolute nature of his life.
Speaker I mentioned that Fitzgerald drank when he was feeling celebratory, when he was feeling good. Pretty soon he began to drink when he felt bad and more and more in his life, as the dreams bumped into reality, he was feeling bad. He never felt so bad as he did in 1936 and wrote the Crack-Up, which is a deeply revealing study of himself. It’s it is so raw and so moving. And I think he was feeling so bad about himself, it wouldn’t have crossed his mind sober anyway to attend.
Speaker I could imagine him hitting the bottle hard and perhaps getting so drunk he would show up had he I think they would have barred the doors. I think Fitzgerald was definitely persona non grata in this club and on this campus in that period. But but more interesting is the fact that he was almost persona non grata among himself, just with himself. He was uncomfortable in his own skin then. And he was struggling. He was scrambling.
Speaker Is there a paradox in ensconce?
Speaker Feeling in his writing and in his soul that inherited money is a hollow heart, that it is the American enterprise that is not productive, and yet his his simultaneous longing for sort of the aristocracy, the old money, the glittering prizes.
Speaker I think I think there’s a great paradox in almost anything F. Scott Fitzgerald viewed, including money. I mean, money was especially inherited wealth. This was something that dazzled him. It was something that impressed him. At the same time. I think the closer he got to it, witnessing people or even earning some money himself, I think the more he realized the reality of it. Again, the dream bumps into the reality and realizes in some ways how pointless or how hollow the dream was. And I think this is a theme that runs throughout all his writing as it ran throughout his life. And I think this gets back to being the two different people. It’s the someone who is at the dance and it’s someone who is outside watching the dance. And so on one hand, he is he is caught up in in the music. And at the same time he’s just outside and he can’t quite hear it. But what he hears doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t sound right. And I think that fracturing runs throughout Fitzgerald’s writing that the reality is never what the dream is. The golden girl is never quite so golden. There is a hollowness all the time for Fitzgerald himself.
Speaker The interesting thing to me is the more he went on in life, the more he struggled in his career, the more he gave up of the dream, I think, and the more of a person he became. And it’s very interesting to me that in his final years, his final moments in Hollywood, in fact, which many people write off as a kind of bad period for him having to settle doing hackwork in Hollywood, I see quite the other way around. I see it’s a man who was making some good money in the movies, enough that he could take time off to write what would have been a promise to be, if not his best, one of his best novels, The Last Tycoon. He is someone whose wife was then in an insane asylum and he fell in love again. He met Sheila Graham, a gossip columnist in Hollywood who was a beautiful blonde. He was working hard. He always took his writing so seriously. And I think this is the thing that it so touches me about Fitzgerald all the time that good times or bad times. This man always took his work extremely seriously. He certainly squandered a lot of good months and years. But even during that period when he was incredibly drunk and depressed, he was still knocking out scores of short stories, some of them quite wonderful. But when he was at his best, he was still working hard, taking it seriously, making outline after outline character studies of everybody in the book. This was a craftsman. This was a guy who took being a writer very seriously.
Speaker And my impression is that, first of all, Scott believed the talent was a finite resource that could could be mined to the point of sort of expropriation but or exhaustion, I meant to say.
Speaker But my own impression is that this the last tycoon his writing was, I thought, improving. It’s a different type of writing, but it’s leaner. It’s more confident. Any any. Truth to those things, here he is in what turned out to be the last years, few years of his life and and believing that maybe there was an exhaustion.
Speaker I think Fitzgerald was growing up in the end. He was putting aside a lot of the childhood toys. I think he was no longer quite so bedazzled with the rich. I think he had gotten over a lot of that. He went out to Hollywood, dazzling again, rich, famous, beautiful, glamorous, famous people. And all that was very attractive to him for a while. But again, the dream bumped into the reality. And I think he began to see, you know, these are just people struggling like I am people with with Made-Up names making up, inventing characters for themselves, trying to hold on to their money, trying to get their next jobs. And I think partly as a result of that, Fitzgerald really began to settle down and he did settle down with Sheila Graham. I think it’s also interesting that in his final year, he basically took in all but adopted a young secretary whose name was Francis Ring, Francis Croal. She was then before she married. It was interesting to me that Fitzgerald himself had a daughter the same age as Francis, and they went by the name of Scottie, but her real name was Francis Scott Fitzgerald. And it so intrigues me that in the final years of his life, where Fitzgerald’s life went so wrong in so many ways, ways beyond his control, I’m thinking mostly of Zelda and her insanity. Here was Scott Fitzgerald duplicating a rather homely version of his original family, Sheila Graham, a daughter named Frances and working hard. He’s just doing his work every day, doing perhaps the best writing of his life. And I think with all that, his writing kind of simmer down and became something more mature as he did. It became more serious in a way. I think his observations were sharper and I think the commentary he was making was deeper.
Speaker One of the few specific girlfriends of old, I guess the only one to make it into my latest draft is Ginevra King and her. I guess it’s more than the golden girl.
Speaker It’s because she happened to coincide her turning her back on Scott, who happened to coincide with his demise princess.
Speaker I think yeah, and and I’m I’m just wondering if you could help me with who is Ginevra King and how does she fit into the canal?
Speaker How did their relationship fit into the scheme of things dream wise?
Speaker Actually, now, if you’ve got the facts, how when he met Ginevra King, was he had he come to Princeton yet?
Speaker I don’t know that.
Speaker I can’t remember. I know she was still in high school. I’m just trying to remember because she was a little younger.
Speaker But I know they will find that out they dated they dated when they were when he was here in the next room, in my primmer, I think.
Speaker Yeah. So about this captain here. I know, OK, I happen to love Ernest Hemingway as a writer. I had no idea about the Fitzgerald Hemingway relationship until I started this project. And I was just a bit horrified that after helping her anyway, she really discovered despite sort of.
Speaker What we all know where there can be assumed competition between good writers, he had to beg for mercy at the end of him, could you help me in the context of that friendship and.
Speaker Maybe I’m wrong to be to interpret it as.
Speaker Winding up generosity, being repaid with no, you’re not, you know, for me, one of the most interesting things about F. Scott Fitzgerald and I’ve never, never encountered it with any writer living or dead was his extreme generosity. I have never known another writer who helped so many other writers get into print and hear. Fitzgerald is now working with Maxwell Perkins, who goes on to become the legendary editor of so many of the great writers of the 20th century. But every year, Fitzgerald is sending another suggestion for a writer. I honestly don’t think we would be reading Ring Lardner short stories today had Fitzgerald not recommended that Max Perkins publish him in Scribner editions. He sent a couple of writers he knew from St. Paul named Tom and Woodward Boyd, and he also made a recommendation now a famous recommendation about a writer he had met in Paris. And you better get it right away. He said to Max, he’s the real thing. And of course, I’m talking about Ernest Hemingway. What is so interesting to me is how very helpful Fitzgerald was getting Hemingway not into printers. He had been published, but getting him the Scrivner imprimatur that really got him published in a big way. Max Perkins became the most important kind of avuncular figure in Hemingway’s entire life. And writing career was there until the day Perkins died. And yet what happened to the relationship between Fitzgerald and Hemingway becomes a bit ugly, I think. And those of us who really love Fitzgerald can’t quite stand what Hemingway did to him because he really did turn his back on Fitzgerald once. The Sun Also Rises was published and Hemingway became a literary light on his own, he really began to belittle Fitzgerald. He did it in letters to Max Perkins. In time, he began to do it in public. And Fitzgerald himself became aware of what Hemingway was doing to him. And in fact, there’s a comment he once made that that Ernest was always willing to give a helping hand to a guy on a higher rung. And I think that really bespeaks what went on in their relationship in in the 30s.
Speaker Hemingway took a real swipe at Fitzgerald when he wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro, which is basically about a writer who sold out. And in the very first printed version of that story, which appeared in Esquire magazine, Hemingway made it very clear who he was writing about. And he says poor Scott Fitzgerald, you know, was always enamored of the very rich. And and Hemingway purportedly says, you know, the difference between the very rich and you and me is they have more money. It’s it’s an anecdote Hemingway dined out on for years. In fact, that isn’t the way it was originally done. The Real Story is Hemingway once commented to Max Perkins that he was getting to know the very rich and somebody else in the room said to Hemingway, The only difference is the rich have more money. What was kind of insidious was Hemingway took this story on himself and turned it against Fitzgerald. And Fitzgerald never really forgave Hemingway for doing what he did in the snows of Kilimanjaro. When the story was later published, Max Perkins saw to it that Scott Fitzgerald’s name was taken out and it was replaced by just the name Julian. But again, things were never the same between those two and to Fitzgerald’s dying day, Hemingway really felt he was he was the heavier weight and and he had good reason to. Fitzgerald was really fading from the public eye by the late 30s. By the time Fitzgerald died in 1940, his books were just starting to go out of print. He was very much a forgotten figure. He was as dead as the Charleston.
Speaker Why, and maybe the answer is who knows, but I’m just wondering why was earnest because he just so competitive that he had to be number one no matter what it cost the competition.
Speaker I think Hemingway took the swipe he did in the snows of Kilimanjaro out of a kind of professional jealousy, strangely enough, the fact of the matter is he was at that point top dog and and Fitzgerald was not. Fitzgerald was really, really hurting then. He was really quiet down and out in every way, financially, emotionally, literarily. Hemingway said he was doing it for Fitzgerald’s own good. Well, I’m always very wary of people who do things for other people’s own good. I think he was doing it for his own good, actually. And I think part of him, part of Hemingway was a bully. And I think I think it might have been a down moment for Hemingway. In fact, it was it was actually he wrote that story during a lull in his career. I should add. It was a period between great novels. I mean, Farewell to Arms was in 1929, and he didn’t write for whom the bell tolls until 1940. In between, he was doing a lot of relatively mediocre work. So maybe he was hurting himself and saw a lot of himself in the character and visited that upon Fitzgerald. So I’ve always felt that that he took that swipe because of his own unhappiness. Not not anything he really felt about Fitzgerald.
Speaker All right, Max Perkins, feel about the crack.
Speaker I mean, it was just not done. I’m not I’m not saying Max felt this way, but I think after writing something so searingly personal was just almost unheard of when Max Perkins read the crack up.
Speaker He was definitely of two minds. Now, this was this was a good Vermont Yankee. This was a man who really kept his emotions hidden. And he didn’t think it was quite proper to be so revealing of emotions in public. At the same time, this was a man who loved and revered literary talent and who really cared for Scott Fitzgerald. And when he read the Crack-Up, he was so moved and he thought maybe Fitzgerald has hit bottom with this and maybe this is just the thing he needs and maybe this is the sure sign that he’s going to be OK, because nobody who is that cracked up could possibly write such beautiful pieces as those crack up pieces were. So in a way, Perkins took some heart out of the crack up, and indeed he was correct because Fitzgerald did steadily, slowly but steadily rebound.
Speaker Last question, coming home in nine states knowing absolutely nothing came of the Centennial Fitzgerald conference, September ninety six right here at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. There was virtually no one from this university, and I rather only ran my eyes down the list of where all these hundreds of people were from or from anywhere. No one from any Ivy League institution.
Speaker But really, the thing that really got me was No one from Princeton. What does that signify?
Speaker Not just Princeton, but he was this is this is the centennial. And this was one of the major, major conferences.
Speaker So I wouldn’t make too much out of the fact that the Princeton faculty didn’t rush off to a Fitz-Gerald conference. First of all, it could have been exam week. So who you know, who knows what was going on or something. Princeton has long had a love hate relationship with Scott Fitzgerald. This is a university that has really spent the better part of the 20th century getting over its country club reputation. It’s a university that is so much about diversity today that it bears so little resemblance to the Princeton of Scott Fitzgerald’s day, except in one sense. And that is the absolute beauty of this place. Well, in a second sense, it’s absolute dedication to to the intellectual life, to I mean, it’s still a wonderful institution of higher learning.
Speaker Why Fitzgerald was sort of out of fashion is not a place we should go to jail time that I’m interested in, I think I maybe I’m wrong, but Scott Fitzgerald was not I don’t think my experience is that he’s not really still accepted by the academy. And its a is more of a one biography. I mean The Great Gatsby 350 years ago. Yeah. My sense is that was that drove the second act is the man that had no second acts and there’s something to be said for that.
Speaker But, but I guess my I’m trying to, I’m trying not to go there at all. I’m trying to make a point.
Speaker I don’t know that there’s a real point to be made that I mean, I’m not resisting it. I just don’t quite see it. The fact is, he is taught here, for example. I mean, you take the American novel course here at the 20th century and Fitzgerald is definitely taught.
Speaker But do you think the academy has been slow to accept Scott Fitzgerald? God knows if and when he died? I don’t even know about it.
Speaker Or sort of I think the academy, such as it is, has been slow in accepting Scott Fitzgerald. And I think part of that has to do with with that early reputation that he was perhaps a less than serious writer because he lived a less than serious life and because so much of his life seemed to be attached to so much frivolity. A lot of that carried over to people’s reactions to his books. But I think in time, people have come to realize that he was one of the great writers of the 20th century, that The Great Gatsby is now on the lists of all these century and lists of the great books. And I think people realized that he was more than just a writer about flappers and chics and Sheba’s, as they were called in the 20s and and just people getting drunk and dancing the Charleston. I think people are realizing that Fitzgerald did write about the great themes and quite specifically the great American themes of self invention, of of the outsider always trying to get in to belong of love, love found, love lost. I don’t think anybody wrote about these things more eloquently, more persuasively than F. Scott Fitzgerald. And I and I think the academy has come around and I think it’s I think it’s sad and it’s ironic that Fitzgerald’s books sell more and more each year, that this was a man who died almost forgotten with his books just beginning to go out of print. And now they can hardly print them fast enough. I mean, now he is he is read by high school students.
Speaker I mean, he is he is part of part of the makeup of of the American reader today.
Speaker His themes are so woven into know that’s that’s sorry.
Speaker Couldn’t finish that good. The fact is that Scott is rich. I mean, the fact is that he had a second act and he has this is not slipping away. It seems to be growing in force.
Speaker Well, of course. Yeah. Sorry.
Speaker Of course, there is a further irony, this is the man who said there are no second acts in American lives and in his own instance, he was correct there. There is a huge second act, but it’s really a third act that came only in death. And it’s the kind of resurrection which I like to think well, know I’m part of.
Speaker Part of him always knew that. I think he he knew his writing was good. He he always had a sense of of modesty about it, but he always knew it was good. And I do think he believed the writing would live after his own death. He made comments to Max Perkins and others that he felt he had made at least some small contribution to literature. And he certainly did. He he knew he was doing something special, something different, and ultimately something enduring. I think one of the other great ironies about Fitzgerald is his obsession with youth, and it appears not only in his work, but in his life. When he was 21 years old, he commented, God, how I miss my youth. And I remember he wrote a letter to Max Perkins on his 30th birthday saying, today, I am 30 and it is tragic. Well, my God, the irony, of course, is here’s a man who was cut down in his youth who is dead at 44. And as a result of that, almost like like some movie stars, he is frozen in time. He is frozen as a youth. And I think we remember him only as this youthful figure. And I think it is this youth obsession that is so attached to this side of paradise, to The Great Gatsby, to the beautiful and damned, these early books, that that is perhaps part of the reason why the academy has been slow in coming around to accepting him, that in a way for so many years he was the kid. He was the juvenile writer. And and yet it’s so tragic because he he really was so much more than that and proved to be so much more that as his writing and as he is a man matured.
Speaker Is it possible? That is something that just occurred to me the other day, that part of Scott’s enduring appeal is the fact that young people actually pick up on this by this identity crisis to some degree is always under Churney.
Speaker I and I think this whole youth obsession is part of the massive and continuing appeal that Fitzgerald has. I think young people find in Fitzgerald their voice. It’s interesting. I was recently on a panel talking about The Great Gatsby and the other panelists were an African-American woman, an Indian American woman and a man who was half Mexican-American, half Native American. And they started the panel talking about The Great Gatsby. And they all said how they their lives had nothing to do with this book. This book meant absolutely nothing to them. The more they talked about it, the more they talked about how their lives were just like that in The Great Gatsby, they totally understood Fitzgerald’s themes, the themes of being the outsider, of trying to be accepted, of trying to find out who you are, of being able to invent who you are, if you like. And by the end of this panel, these three disparate authors who had nothing to do with Scott Fitzgerald were actually spouting the very same themes he articulates in all his novels. So I think the appeal grows. And it’s not just to young people and it’s not just to Americans. And he is not just a 20s writer. This is an appeal that I think is ultimately universal in time and place.
