Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald and St. Paul: "Still Home to Me," by Lloyd C. Hackl (1996)

 

Cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald and St. Paul: "Still Home to Me," by Lloyd C. Hackl, 1996. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1896. Fitzgerald spent his early childhood in Buffalo and Syracuse, New York, but in 1908 the Fitzgeralds returned to Saint Paul, and the city became his home, off and on, until 1922. Saint Paul is a place that played an important role in shaping Fitzgerald’s life and career. Okay, I might be a little bit biased since I give Fitzgerald walking tours in Saint Paul. Several books have examined Fitzgerald’s relationship with the city of his birth. One of those is F. Scott Fitzgerald and St. Paul: “Still Home to Me,” by Lloyd C. Hackl. Published in 1996, the centennial of Fitzgerald’s birth, the book analyzes Saint Paul’s influence on Fitzgerald.

Hackl writes of Fitzgerald’s Saint Paul neighborhood, “To know the Summit Hill area of Fitzgerald’s early years is to have a key to understanding his writing.” (p.60) As someone who has lived in the Summit Hill area, I agree with this statement. If you start to understand the Summit Hill neighborhood, you get a sense of Fitzgerald’s obsessions and interests, which crop up again and again in his writings. Why was Fitzgerald so finely attuned to class, status, and money? Well, look no further than the neighborhood he grew up in, and compare the mansions of Summit Avenue to the houses the Fitzgerald family rented—which are still very nice, but are not mansions.

Fitzgerald was the grandson of a very successful wholesale grocer—I read somewhere that Scott was always quick to emphasize the wholesale part, to underscore the fact that his grandfather didn’t simply have a little corner grocery store. Grandfather McQuillan’s business was run from a large warehouse/office building in downtown Saint Paul known as the McQuillan Block. By the time Scott was born, Grandfather McQuillan had long since passed away, and the family was still doing well, but no new money was coming in. There was no trust fund waiting for Scott when he turned 21. Although Scott was part of the glittering world of the Saint Paul elite, he knew his family was not as well-off as the Hills, Weyerhaeusers, and Ordways, whose businesses were still thriving.

Hackl does an excellent good job of describing the Saint Paul of Fitzgerald’s era, and identifying people and places that were central to Fitzgerald’s life in Saint Paul. One of the most interesting anecdotes in the book was the story that Fitzgerald was on a date with a young woman, and he somehow convinced her to go to confession with him. (Fitzgerald was raised Catholic, his date was a Protestant.) Fitzgerald went into the confessional first, and when he was done, his date entered. When she was seemingly finished, the priest asked her, “Have you told me everything? Remember, your boyfriend was in here before you.” (p.64) Who knows if the story is true or not—it doesn’t appear in any of Fitzgerald’s writings—but it has the ring of truth of something Fitzgerald might have done. He enjoyed behaving outrageously, had a wicked sense of humor, and had an ambivalent relationship with Catholicism. The anecdote also fits with Scott’s feelings of guilt and pleasure. Fitzgerald wasn’t a mindless hedonist. He thought the Victorian moral code was outdated and brittle, but he questioned what it would be replaced with. Fitzgerald’s own behavior may have been selfish at times, but he was invariably full of regret afterwards. Fitzgerald had a strong moral code and impeccable manners, both of which show the influence of his father.

One of the most interesting tidbits in the book was that in July 1913 “Fitzgerald received notice that he had been elected to the White Bear Yacht Club.” (p.42) The source for this is Fitzgerald’s scrapbook, which resides in the collection of his papers at Princeton University. Unfortunately, this part of his scrapbook is not reprinted in The Romantic Egoists, the 1974 “pictorial autobiography” that reprinted many of Scott and Zelda’s scrapbooks chronicling their lives. I realize that the general reader probably doesn’t care a fig whether or not F. Scott Fitzgerald was a member of the White Bear Yacht Club. As a scholar of Fitzgerald’s life in Minnesota, I do, so you’ll have to suffer through this digression. (Or you could just skip this paragraph.) Hackl’s book is the first time I’ve read that Fitzgerald was a member of the White Bear Yacht Club. The White Bear Yacht Club was a place that Fitzgerald frequented—one of the plays he wrote as a teenager was performed there, and during the summer of 1922, Scott, Zelda, and their daughter Scottie lived at the White Bear Yacht Club. White Bear Lake was the place to go in the summer if you lived in Saint Paul, and many of Fitzgerald’s friends had summer homes on White Bear Lake. The Fitzgeralds did not, which meant they weren’t summering in White Bear Lake or Dellwood, so it would seem unlikely to me that Scott’s parents were members of the Yacht Club. And while Scott’s family was certainly very well-off, joining the Yacht Club seems like an unnecessary expense if you’re not spending the whole summer on White Bear Lake. But why then was 16-year-old Scott elected to the Yacht Club if his parents weren’t members? I can’t explain that. If Scott’s parents were members of any country club, the one that would make the most sense for them to join would be the Town & Country Club, located in Saint Paul just a few miles from the neighborhood where Scott grew up. Anyway, Scott’s membership at the White Bear Yacht Club is yet another Fitzgerald mystery to unravel. I guess I’ll just have to go to Princeton and dig through Scott’s scrapbook myself.

If you want to know why Saint Paul was such an important place to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lloyd Hackl’s book is a great place to start.