Book Review: Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Frances Kroll Ring (1985)

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Encino, California, 1939.

Frances Kroll Ring, F. Scott Fitzgerald's last secretary. She died in 2015 at the age of 99.

My copy of Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Frances Kroll Ring, along with some of my other Fitzgerald books. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Frances Kroll was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s secretary from April of 1939 until his death on December 21, 1940. Kroll was 22 years old when she met Fitzgerald, and she collected her reminiscences of Fitzgerald in a 1985 memoir, Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. By then her name was Frances Kroll Ring, and she was approaching 70 years old. She still had 30 more years to live, as she passed away in 2015 at the age of 99, the last living link who had significant first-hand knowledge of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Kroll was born and raised in New York City until the end of 1938, when her father made the decision to move the family to Los Angeles. Kroll’s father was born in Russia and immigrated to the United States. The Krolls were a Jewish family, and Fitzgerald never tired of quizzing Frances about Judaism. According to Kroll, Fitzgerald was stung by criticism that his character of Meyer Wolfshiem in The Great Gatsby was an anti-Semitic caricature. Scott maintained that Wolfshiem’s background didn’t really have anything to do with the character. Kroll writes that Fitzgerald’s point of view was that “Wolfshiem was a character whose behavior fulfilled a function in the story and had nothing to do with race or religion. He was a gangster who happened to be Jewish.” (p.47) Wolfshiem was based, at least partially, on the real-life Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein, who was widely suspected of fixing the 1919 World Series, as Wolfshiem is alleged to have done in Gatsby. Meyer Wolfshiem is also the subject of one of my favorite footnotes by Matthew J. Bruccoli in the 1990’s edition of Gatsby that I read in high school. When Nick Carraway is attempting to contact Wolfshiem, he visits the offices of the “Swastika Holding Company.” Bruccoli’s footnote gives us the useful information: “Not an indication that Wolfshiem is a Nazi. Indeed, he is a Jew.” (p.214) Fitzgerald’s use of the word swastika pre-dated its adoption as a Nazi symbol, and that may have been the first time I learned that the swastika symbol had a whole history before the Nazis.

During the time that Kroll worked for Fitzgerald, he was working on a novel about Hollywood. Eventually published as The Last Tycoon, the novel’s hero was movie executive Monroe Stahr. Stahr was Jewish, as was Irving Thalberg, the producer that Stahr was modeled on. Because The Last Tycoon was unfinished at Fitzgerald’s death, we don’t know how large a role Stahr’s Judaism would have played in the novel. However, I can’t help but suspect that the fact that Frances Kroll was Jewish was an influence on Fitzgerald choosing to make Stahr Jewish. Fitzgerald always drew inspiration from any material that was close at hand, and he and Kroll were working together very closely during the time he was planning and writing the novel.(I reviewed The Last Tycoon here. I wrote an essay about Irving Thalberg as the model for Monroe Stahr here.)

Fortunately for posterity, Kroll quickly realized that Fitzgerald was a brilliant writer, and she tolerated his eccentricities. Although she didn’t keep a journal or a diary during their time together, she kept many of the notes they wrote back and forth to each other, some of which are reproduced in the book.

Kroll had a deep affection for Fitzgerald, and it shows through every page of her book. F. Scott Fitzgerald was not a perfect person, by any means, but Kroll captures that which was most entrancing and beguiling about him. Fitzgerald’s enthusiasm comes alive as he was working on a screenplay of his own short story “Babylon Revisited.” It’s one of the most vivid scenes in the book, as Kroll writes: “Scott was the writer, the actor, the director. And it was a one-man show…as he paced, he talked, gave directions, grew animated, intense, sad, nervous.” (p.97) As Kroll typed his revisions, Fitzgerald hovered over her shoulder, and she shooed him away. “With exaggerated apology, he would move over to the window, smoke a cigarette, stare into space and talk about women of beauty…he was incurably romantic, forever reaching for an elusive fragment of love, forever conjuring up illusions.” (p.98-9) Isn’t that exactly how you’d picture F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Fitzgerald would then call producer Lester Cowan and read the screenplay to him. “Scott, looking like a matinee idol who had seen better days, would give such a touching portrayal that Cowan would dissolve in tears at the other end of the line and Scott would cry at his end.” (p.99) Kroll also informs us that the poetry of Keats moved Fitzgerald to tears. (p.34)

Kroll is astute about Fitzgerald’s feelings and attitudes and she provides Fitzgerald devotees with sharp analysis about his political views: “Politically, Scott thought of himself as a liberal. He had voted for Roosevelt twice, but he was a passive, theoretical liberal, not an active one.” (p.71) Before his death, Scott voted for Roosevelt once more.

Fitzgerald’s relationship with Ernest Hemingway is sometimes referenced, and Fitzgerald felt that Hemingway “had to prove himself to himself” by his dangerous actions. (p.72) Another time, Fitzgerald went out for dinner with Frances and her younger brother Morton, an aspiring writer. The conversation drifted towards Hemingway, and Scott “called him a poseur who was trying to prove his manliness by going off to Spain and Africa in pursuit of adventure. He was running dry and had to search out experience just to have something to write about.” (p.101) I’d say that Scott was right. Morton Kroll came away from that meeting with a great deal of respect for Fitzgerald: “Scott had treated him like a young writer and had talked to him about Hemingway. He would never forget it.” (p.102)

Kroll and Fitzgerald’s relationship never turned romantic, save for a drunken pass that Scott made one evening and Kroll wisely deflected. Scott was instantly ashamed and promised her it would never happen again. He kept his promise. Kroll obviously had a deep, friendly affection for Fitzgerald, and she writes that “Most ‘boys’ seemed a bit dull after a day with Scott.” (p.80) She also writes movingly of his late-night phone calls to her. She would take the phone into the bathroom, so as not to disturb her family and listen to him share his insecurities with her. (p.116)

After Fitzgerald’s sudden death from a heart attack on December 21, 1940, many of the mundane tasks of settling his estate fell to Kroll, including the selection of a coffin. If F. Scott Fitzgerald could somehow read Against the Current, I think he would be most impressed by Kroll’s devotion to him and his writing.

Book Review: An F. Scott Fitzgerald Companion, published by Book-of-the-Month Club (2000)

Cover of An F. Scott Fitzgerald Companion, 2000, with some other Fitzgerald titles in the back. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896-1940.

An F. Scott Fitzgerald Companion, published by the Book-of-the-Month Club in 2000, is a slim little volume. Just 90 pages long, it includes some of the key writings about Fitzgerald. Excerpts are included from A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway’s posthumously published memoir about his life in Paris in the 1920’s, The Disenchanted, Budd Schulberg’s 1950 novel featuring a character based on Fitzgerald, and Beloved Infidel, Sheliah Graham’s 1958 memoir about her romance with Fitzgerald in the last years of his life.

There are also two short pieces written by Frances Kroll Ring, who was Fitzgerald’s secretary in Hollywood for the last eighteen months of his life. Ring presents a sympathetic portrait of the great writer as he toiled on screenplays while trying to finish his novel The Last Tycoon, which he was hoping would return him to literary prominence. Ring sheds some light on Fitzgerald as a writer:

“He set very high standards for himself and fortunately he had the originality and creativity to achieve them. But his concern with minor corrections, once a story had gone out to a publication, indicates a certain unsureness of acceptance. Sometimes, the revisions were hardly more than a word or two on a given page which in no way affected the story, but seemed to relieve some desperate, perfectionist standard of his own.” (p.54)

I would perhaps quibble with Ring’s phrase “a certain unsureness of acceptance,” as I interpret Fitzgerald’s constant editing of his work as an effort to make his work as good as it could possibly be. At the very end of Arthur Mizener’s biography of Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise, Mizener presents the reader with three different versions of the same scene from The Last Tycoon, and we are able to read it the way Fitzgerald wrote it initially, and then two revisions of it. Each time, small details are changed that strengthen the mood of the short scene. As Ring wrote, sometimes it’s only a word or two that has been changed, but that can make all the difference.

I think it’s important to appreciate the work that went into Fitzgerald’s writing. As I mentioned in my review of his novel This Side of Paradise, there are some literary critics who assumed that Fitzgerald was a sort of stupid genius, someone who just happened to write brilliant sentences in the first draft, and then went off to an elegant cocktail party. If you take the time to read anything about Fitzgerald’s work, you will find out that simply wasn’t the case. He worked extremely hard at editing his writing, from the flimsiest short stories to the complicated structure of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night.

I would argue that part of the implication behind the idea that Fitzgerald was this freakish natural talent is the assumption that he wasted his talent, focusing too much on parties and the good life during the 1920’s, and then toiling on screenplays in Hollywood during the 1930’s. I’m not going to say that Fitzgerald made the best use out of every single hour of every single day of his all too short forty-four years on this planet, but if he had truly wasted his talent, he wouldn’t have been able to produce four novels, (with a fifth unfinished at his death) and more than 180 short stories, plus other assorted works like the “Crack-Up” essays.

An F. Scott Fitzgerald Companion also reprints some fascinating tidbits, like Fitzgerald’s 1940 obituary from The New York Times. The Times obituary makes for interesting reading, and it is very hard on Fitzgerald: “Roughly, his own career began and ended with the Nineteen Twenties.” (p.79) It goes on to say “The promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” (p.80) Ouch. But that was certainly how some people felt in 1940, before the Fitzgerald revival began in the second half of that decade, and he rightly took his place as one of the greatest American writers of the 20^th century.