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| The cover of The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edited by Patricia Hampl and Dave Page, 2004. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor) |
F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on
September 24, 1896. His family moved to Buffalo, New York in 1898, but they
returned to Saint Paul in 1908, and the city would be Scott’s home, off and on,
until 1922.
Fitzgerald led a peripatetic life, spending considerable
amounts of time in Minnesota, New York, Montana, Louisiana, Connecticut,
Delaware, Alabama, Maryland, North Carolina, and California. And that’s not
even counting the numerous places where he and Zelda lived in France. Scott and
Zelda never owned a home of their own. It’s difficult to say that any one place
has a special claim on him. However, Saint Paul was where he first entertained
the idea of becoming a writer, where he published his first writings, and where
he finished his first two novels. Fitzgerald always saw places through the lens
of an outsider, and I suspect that he secretly wondered if he truly belonged
anywhere.
The 2004 collection The
St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Patricia Hampl and Dave
Page, does a superb job of advocating for the importance of Saint Paul in
Fitzgerald’s writings. Fitzgerald’s family was socially well-connected in Saint
Paul, as his mother, Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald, was born into a prominent and
wealthy family. Mollie’s father, P.F. McQuillan, had come to Saint Paul from
Ireland when he was just a boy. He eventually established a very successful
wholesale grocery business, and built a mansion in the section of downtown
Saint Paul known as Lowertown. (The mansion was torn down, as were all the
mansions of Lowertown.) The McQuillans rubbed shoulders with people like the
shipping and railroad tycoon James J. Hill, who had a nearby mansion of his own
in Lowertown. Unfortunately, P.F. McQuillan died at the age of 43 in 1877 of
Bright’s Disease, a kidney disorder. He left behind a fortune of about
$250,000, a significant sum of money. However, after grandfather McQuillan’s
death, no new money was being earned by the family, so by the time Scott was a
young man, the family was still very well off, but they weren’t in the
financial stratosphere like the Hills. In 1891 James J. Hill finished building
his gigantic mansion on Summit Avenue, which totaled 36,000 square feet and included
an art gallery. In contrast, Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in a spacious rented
apartment, one of six units in a building on Laurel Avenue, four blocks off of
the prestigious Summit Avenue. It was still a very nice residence in the best
part of town, but it was most definitely not a mansion.
Fitzgerald’s father, Edward, was from Maryland, and was the
epitome of the Southern gentleman. Handsome, courtly, and well-dressed, he was
unfortunately not successful at business. Nevertheless, young Scott Fitzgerald
grew up rubbing shoulders with the elite of Saint Paul. He attended Saint Paul
Academy, the most prestigious private school in the city, and also attended
dancing school, which was a must in those days for anyone in the upper classes.
He went to parties at the University Club, and Town & Country Club.
Fitzgerald’s unique social position gave him access to the world of the very
wealthy, but he knew that he would have to make his own way in the world. There
was not enough family money for him to coast idly through life.
If Fitzgerald had been either higher or lower in the social
strata, he might not have developed into the brilliant observer of class and
status that he became. Had he been a member of the idle rich, he might not have
fully understood how his life was different from other people’s, and he might
not have been interested in chronicling it. If Fitzgerald had been lower class,
he wouldn’t have had access to the rich to see how they lived. But Fitzgerald
had enough access to the rich to absorb their social milieu, and he knew how
unique it was. There’s a brilliant quote from the critic Malcolm Lowry about
Fitzgerald: “It was as if all his novels described a big dance to which he had
taken the prettiest girl, and as if at the same time he stood outside the
ballroom, a little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass, wondering how
much the tickets cost and who paid for the music.” Lowry called this
Fitzgerald’s “double vision” and I think it sums up Fitzgerald perfectly. He is
at once both involved participant and detached observer, and that’s one reason
why he was such a great writer.
The St. Paul Stories
of F. Scott Fitzgerald includes some of his greatest short stories, like
“Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” “The Ice Palace,” and “Winter Dreams.” It also
features the very funny “The Camel’s Back,” which Fitzgerald said he pounded
out in a sleepless twenty-two hour stretch.
“Bernice Bobs Her Hair” was one of Fitzgerald’s first short
stories to be published in The Saturday
Evening Post, and concerns the popular Marjorie and her seemingly hopeless
cousin Bernice, who is visiting her for the summer. A young man thinks about
Bernice: “He wondered idly whether she was a poor conversationalist because she
got no attention or got no attention because she was a poor conversationalist.”
(p.52) However, with Marjorie’s help, Bernice is able to achieve social
popularity. The story also features this beautiful line, which shows how
Fitzgerald was wise beyond his years: “At eighteen our convictions are hills
from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.” (p.56)
“Winter Dreams” is one of Fitzgerald’s finest short stories,
and he wrote that it was a “sort of 1st draft of the Gatsby idea.”
(p.107) It’s a beautiful, haunting story, as Dexter Green tries to win the
heart of the cold Judy Jones. Dexter Green isn’t exactly Jay Gatsby, but they
have similarities in their single-minded focus to achieve their fantasies.
As usual in
Fitzgerald’s writing, there are beautiful, poetic sentences in “Winter Dreams,”
such as: “When the scarlet corners of her lips curved down, it was less a smile
than an invitation to a kiss.” (p.119) And: “In the middle of May when the
weather balanced for a few days on the thin bridge that led to deep summer he
turned in one night at Irene’s house.” (p.125)
“Winter Dreams” was the last short story that Fitzgerald
wrote while he was living in Saint Paul, but his hometown continued to be a
setting and influence on his work. The 1927 short story “A Short Trip Home” is
an interesting one. It mixes the supernatural with more typical Fitzgerald
story material about young love. The story connects to Fitzgerald’s strong
morality. While he’s often seen as the epitome of Jazz Age excesses, Fitzgerald
had a strong moral sense of good and evil. As his friend Oscar Kalman said of
him: “Poor Scott, he never really enjoyed his dissipation because he
disapproved intensely of himself all the time it was going on.” (The Far Side of Paradise, by Arthur
Mizener, p.93) Fitzgerald himself
said, “Parties are a form of suicide. I love them, but the old Catholic in me
secretly disapproves.” (The Far Side of
Paradise, p.135) In Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, the main character Amory Blaine sees a
physical manifestation of the devil, just as the mysterious man in “A Short
Trip Home” functions as a physical manifestation of evil.
In 1928 and 1929, Fitzgerald was suffering from a severe
case of writer’s block as he attempted to write the novel that would become Tender is the Night. So he returned to
his adolescence in Saint Paul for a series of stories about Basil Duke Lee. The
stories are excellent, and I strongly suspect that the young Basil Duke Lee
shared many similarities with the young F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first Basil
story was “The Scandal Detectives,” the short story taking its name from an
actual club that the teenaged Fitzgerald started with his friends. The story
features this lovely sentence, as Basil stares at Imogene Bissel: “For the
first time in his life he realized a girl completely as something opposite and
complementary to him, and he was subject to a warm chill of mingled pleasure
and pain.” (p.167)
Fitzgerald describes Basil’s youthful idea of what his life
will be like: “This summer he and his mother and sister were going to the lakes
and next fall he was starting away to school. Then he would go to Yale and be a
great athlete, and after that—if his two dreams had fitted onto each
other chronologically instead of existing independently side by side—he
was due to become a gentleman burglar.” (p.168) Like Basil, Fitzgerald dreamed
of finding glory on the athletic fields, but it was not to be. He badly wanted
to make the football team at Princeton, but he was cut the first day of
tryouts.
Another Basil story, “A Night at the Fair,” describes the
wonders of the Minnesota State Fair. If you haven’t had the good fortune to
attend the Minnesota State Fair, let me assure you, it is a wonderful event,
and one that most Minnesotans feel quite passionately about. Fitzgerald
perfectly captures the mood of the Fair in this passage:
“The first lights of the evening were springing into pale
existence; the afternoon crowd had thinned a little, and the lanes, empty of
people, were heavy with the rich various smells of popcorn and peanuts,
molasses and dust, and cooking Wienerwurst and a not-unpleasant overtone of
animals and hay. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved
leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled
overhead. The heat had blown off and there was the crisp stimulating excitement
of Northern autumn in the air.” (p.190)
At the Fair, Basil meets a girl. In Fitzgerald’s stories,
there is always a girl, and she is always beautiful: “Her eyes, dark and
intimate, seemed to have wakened at the glowing brilliance of the illumination
overhead; there was the promise of excitement in them now, like the promise of
the cooling night.” (p.191)
As Basil waits for his first pair of long pants to arrive by
courier, Fitzgerald sums up Basil’s thoughts: “Like most of us, he was unable
to perceive that he would have any desires in the future equivalent to those
that possessed him now.” (p.198)
In another Basil story, “He Thinks He’s Wonderful,”
Fitzgerald comes close to describing what Malcolm Cowley called his “double
vision” as an author: “Passing from the gleaming store into the darkness, Basil
was submerged in an unreality in which he seemed to see himself from the
outside, and the pleasant events of the evening began to take on fresh
importance.” (p.212) I think Fitzgerald was able to be both participant and
observer in his own life, which was a trait that rankled some of his
acquaintances. Donald Ogden Stewart, a friend of Fitzgerald’s who met him in
Saint Paul in 1919, and encountered him again in Hollywood in the late 1930’s, wrote
in his memoirs that Fitzgerald’s “note-taking watchfulness…kept me from ever
feeling that he was really my friend.” Everything in Fitzgerald’s life was a
possible story idea or a line of dialogue.
“At Your Age” is an interesting story of a much older man
falling for a younger woman. The story was published in The Saturday Evening Post in August of 1929, and Fitzgerald was
paid $4,000 for it—which would be approximately $58,000 today. One
particularly lyrical passage was incorporated into Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender is the Night. Here is the passage
from “At Your Age”:
“They came near and Tom admired the faint dust of powder
over her freshness, the guarded sweetness of her smile, the fragility of her
body calculated by Nature to a millimeter to suggest a bud, yet guarantee a
flower.” (p.281)
In Tender is the Night
this very similar passage occurs as Dick Diver admires the much younger
Rosemary Hoyt: “It took him a moment to respond to the unguarded sweetness of
her smile, her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a
flower.” (Tender is the Night, p.104)
“At Your Age” also contains this beautiful description of
Minnesota winters: “It was a long winter, even in a land of long winters. March
was full of billowy drift, and when it seemed at last as though the cold must
be defeated, there was a series of blizzards, desperate as last stands.”
(p.291)
“A Freeze-Out,” from 1931, was the last short story by Fitzgerald
that mentioned Minnesota. It’s an interesting, if somewhat slight story. But it
features this nice line, once again about Minnesota weather: “On the day spring
broke through and summer broke through—it is much the same thing in Minnesota—Forrest
stopped his coupe in front of a music store and took his pleasant vanity
inside.” (p.296)
Fitzgerald never wrote about his home town again, but he did
mention it in letters that reveal his complicated relationship to Saint Paul.
He wrote to his childhood friend Marie Hersey in 1934, “Having rambled so much
I no longer regard Saint Paul as my home any more than the eastern seaboard or
the Riviera. This is said with no disloyalty but simply because after all my
father was an easterner and I went east to college and I never did quite adjust
myself to those damn Minnesota winters. I was always freezing my cheeks, being
a rotten skater, etc.—though many events there will always fill me with a
tremendous nostalgia.” (The Letters of F.
Scott Fitzgerald, p.536-7)
Fitzgerald contradicted himself in a 1936 letter to Hersey:
“St. Paul contacts have been so infrequent that I am practically determined to
go out there next summer for a while and bring the daughter. In spite of a
fifteen-year absence, it still is home to me.” (The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.568)
One wonders what Fitzgerald’s true feelings about Saint Paul
were, but surely they were feelings that ran deep, given how often his hometown
was referenced in his fiction.
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