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.

Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home, by Dave Page, Photographs by Jeff Krueger (2017)

Fitzgerald historian Dave Page, author of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home, 2017.

Photographer Jeff Krueger.

I’m a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I give Fitzgerald walking tours of the Saint Paul neighborhood he lived in. The more I read by and about Fitzgerald, the more intrigued I am by this man who wrote such fantastic prose. 

In 2017’s F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home, author Dave Page has produced the essential work about Fitzgerald’s life in Minnesota. Page has written about Fitzgerald before: in the 1996 book F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: Toward the Summit, co-written with John J. Koblas, in the notes he wrote for the 2004 collection The St. Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, which he co-edited, and in his perceptive Introduction and Afterword to the 2013 re-printing of The Thoughtbook of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a teenage diary that Fitzgerald kept. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home is beautifully illustrated with photographs by Jeff Krueger, who has done a fantastic job at capturing the essence of Fitzgerald’s neighborhood. There are also period photos of some of the houses and buildings, as well as newspaper clippings about Fitzgerald and his friends. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home was published by Fitzgerald in Saint Paul, a non-profit organization dedicated to “celebrating the life and literature of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” The organization was started by an endowment from Richard McDermott, who lived in Fitzgerald’s birthplace for almost forty years. 

Throughout the book, Page reminds us of Fitzgerald’s place in the Saint Paul society of his adolescence and young adulthood—he was not merely on the fringes of the Saint Paul elite, he was among the elite. Scott’s family was prominent enough in Saint Paul that when he visited Europe for the first time in 1921, the Archbishop of Saint Paul wrote him a letter of introduction to the Pope! (Despite the kind words from the Archbishop, Scott and Zelda did not meet the Pontiff.) Fitzgerald sometimes exaggerated his stories, as when he expressed his fear that his family would have to go to the poorhouse after his father lost his job in 1908. Page cuts through those misconceptions to give us a portrait of Fitzgerald as he truly was—someone born into a prominent family of some means, but who would also have to work for a living. 

Fitzgerald was an insider who could also project himself to be an outsider. There’s a beautiful passage in The Great Gatsby where Nick Carraway does exactly that. He’s at a party with Tom Buchanan and Myrtle Wilson:

“Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (p.40) 

I suspect that it must have been that way for Fitzgerald in his own life—at the same time he was experiencing something, there was part of his brain that was cataloguing it, storing it for later, gathering information and scenes that would later inform his fiction. 

Page has done his homework, and he uncovers tidbits that other Fitzgerald historians have not. For example, it’s sometimes stated that Scott’s two older sisters died in an epidemic, which makes it sound as though they died close together. As Page shows, they actually died seven months apart. Sure, that fact by itself probably doesn’t mean much to all but the most devoted Fitzgerald aficionados, but my point is that Page is dispelling myths, and the more myths we can dispel, the more accurate we can be about Fitzgerald’s life. Numerous biographies repeat the story that Scott’s sisters died in an epidemic, and once an error like that appears in print, it can multiply indefinitely, as the book then becomes the source for others. 

Sprinkled throughout the book are insights into Fitzgerald from his childhood friends and contemporaries. Bob Clark gives us a sense of Scott’s charm: “He absolutely charmed the older women. My mother thought he was great…he absolutely charmed you when he was talking to you, as if you were the most interesting person in the world.” (p.139) 

There’s a lovely quote from Scott’s aunt, thanking him for his letter after the sudden death of his uncle: “…nothing touched me so much as your beautiful telegram & letter. I read them over & over and will always keep them. Father Barron said, ‘No one but Scott could have written that.’” (p.152) 

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home will give great pleasure to passionate Fitzgerald fans who want to know more about his life in Minnesota, and how Saint Paul impacted his life and work. It will also no doubt give enjoyment to those not deeply immersed in Fitzgerald’s life and work as a beautiful visual record of the Saint Paul neighborhood that he called home.