Book Review: F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography, Niklas Salmose and David Rennie, Editors (2024)

The cover of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography, Niklas Salmose and David Rennie, editors, 2024. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

An unusual new biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald was published earlier this year. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography, edited by Niklas Salmose and David Rennie, splits Fitzgerald’s 44-year lifespan into two-year periods. Salmose and Rennie assembled an all-star roster of 23 Fitzgerald scholars to each write a chapter, with the twenty-third chapter covering 1940, the last year of Fitzgerald’s life. It’s a fascinating concept for a biography, and one that works surprisingly well. I wrote a review for the Ramsey County Historical Society, which you can find online here. This piece is a collection of leftover thoughts that I didn't have space for in the review.

The trickiest task falls to the scholars covering Fitzgerald’s earliest years, as there simply isn’t that much material about his very early life. What can you say about 8-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald? But the scholars do an excellent job connecting the patterns of Fitzgerald’s young life to his writings. In particular, Helen Turner, covering the years 1896 and 1897, paints an excellent picture of Fitzgerald’s relationship with his parents. Similarly, Martina Mastandrea does a nice job of covering 1898 and 1899, as the Fitzgerald family moved from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to Buffalo, New York.  

Thinking about Fitzgerald’s life in two-year segments is an interesting task. I tend to think of his life in general patterns, but not in such discrete time segments. I didn’t realize until I was reading Jade Broughton Adams’ chapter how little work Fitzgerald did in 1926, when he only wrote two short stories, and was making little progress on his fourth novel. 

There are fascinating little tidbits throughout the book. I was moved by reading Fitzgerald’s reaction to the death of Joseph Conrad, one of his favorite authors. Author Gilbert Seldes was visiting Fitzgerald in France when one morning he found Scott looking off his balcony, towards the sea. Without turning around, Fitzgerald said “Conrad is dead.” (p.240-1) It’s fitting that Scott was gazing out upon a body of water contemplating Conrad’s writing, as Conrad wrote so often of the sea.  

Another fun anecdote is the French writer Andre Chamson’s memory of Fitzgerald showing off his many ties and handkerchiefs and urging the young writer to take one. Shades of Fitzgerald as Jay Gatsby, showing off his shirts for Daisy. (p.278)  

Scott Donaldson gives us the tidbit that Fitzgerald, not known for straying into politics, spoke at an anti-war rally in 1932, although he may have lost the sympathy of his audience when he addressed them as “fellow cranks.” (p.327)  

I was disappointed there was no mention of Fitzgerald’s 1939 break with Harold Ober, his longtime literary agent, when Ober finally refused to lend Fitzgerald any more money. The break was significant in that it ended a twenty-year professional relationship and friendship. But it didn’t have a huge effect on Fitzgerald professionally, as by that time he was only selling his short stories to Esquire magazine, and he was dealing with publisher Arnold Gingrich directly, bypassing Ober.  

F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Composite Biography is a reminder of the fascinating life that F. Scott Fitzgerald led. Even though the biography comes in at around 400 pages, there is still so much to be said about his life. And that isn’t even mentioning his posthumous literary life, which has seen Fitzgerald lifted into the pantheon of great American authors, where he remains to this day. If you’re interested in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s life, go read A Composite Biography, and you’re sure to learn something new about his life and work.  

Book Review: Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes, Essays by Scott Donaldson (2022)

Paperback cover of Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes, essays by Scott Donaldson, 2022. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Scott Donaldson was a literary biographer, and one of the most astute biographers of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Donaldson wrote an excellent biography of Fitzgerald, Fool for Love, a book about the contentious relationship between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, and Donaldson’s additional essays about those two authors were collected in Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days.  

Donaldson passed away in 2020, at the age of 92, and his final book was published in 2022, Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes. A collection of essays, the book stands as a tribute to Donaldson’s probing intelligence, and his lifelong study of Fitzgerald.  

The key essay, comprising almost half of the book, is a close reading of Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender Is the Night. It’s a marvelous essay, and Donaldson makes a powerful argument for the novel standing aside The Great Gatsby as Fitzgerald’s twin achievements.  

Donaldson writes of Dick Diver, the protagonist of Tender, “He needs the admiration—the love—of others to validate his existence, and he exerts his charm in order to earn it. It is the source of his extraordinary appeal, and his greatest weakness.” (p.18) Donaldson might well be writing about Fitzgerald himself.  

Class and status were always important themes in Fitzgerald’s writing, and as Donaldson writes, “Fitzgerald was convinced that something was terribly wrong at the very heart of Western civilization.” Fitzgerald was influenced by the German author Oswald Spengler’s book Decline of the West, and Donaldson writes, “we should think as well of the statement Fitzgerald is making in this novel, as in The Great Gatsby, about a culture in which the very rich are empowered to buy and discard other people at will.” (p.47)  

In closing, Donaldson writes about Tender Is the Night, “Rereading the novel recently for perhaps the tenth time...I was carried away by sorrow and sympathy for Fitzgerald’s leading character.” (p.61)  

There’s a brief essay on “Gatsby and the American Dream,” a beautifully constructed piece that illuminates Fitzgerald’s masterful novel. Donaldson makes connections that hadn’t occurred to me. Gatsby has the famous line “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can.” Donaldson writes, “Gatsby will discover that he cannot, while it is Tom who manages to turn back the pages of the calendar. ‘I’ve heard of making a garage out of a stable,’ Tom tells Gatsby, ‘but I’m the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage.’” (p.71) I had never thought of this as being a victory for Tom, and a contrast with Gatsby, who cannot quite manage to perfectly recapture the glory of his romance with Daisy. 

There’s another small connection that I never made until I read this essay on Gatsby. Donaldson quotes Gatsby saying to Nick, “My house looks well, doesn’t it?” Then a page later, Donaldson reminds us that Henry Gatz brings out a battered photograph of his son’s mansion and shows it to Nick. The old man says to Nick, “It’s a very pretty picture. It shows up well.” Both father and son use the same word “well” when speaking of the house. Maybe it’s meaningless, but maybe Fitzgerald deliberately used “well” in order to show a connection between the way both father and son talk about the house.  

The chapter “Summer of ‘24: Zelda’s Affair,” was previously published in Donaldson’s excellent 2015 book The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography. It’s a treatment of how 14 different biographers, Donaldson included, treated the relationship between Zelda Fitzgerald and Edouard Jozan, a French aviator with whom she had a flirtation during the summer of 1924. Was this merely a flirtation, or was it something more serious? Well, there are 14 different answers to that question. Donaldson points out some interesting differences: “A majority of the female biographers...tend to deny that the affair actually took place and assume that the crisis it generated was more or less fabricated by the Fitzgeralds. Most of the male biographers...follow the lead of Mizener and Turnbull in believing that Zelda and Jozan’s relationship was indeed adulterous.” (p.78)  

Donaldson astutely writes of the differing accounts of the relationship, “It can safely be said that the single trait all biographers share is a certain arrogance as they undertake to understand how it must have been, say, for Zelda and Scott and Edouard a long time ago...This illustrates what has often been remarked: that every biography conceals within itself the autobiography of its author.” (p.91) 

Donaldson doesn’t let himself off the hook, as he writes: “Let my own case serve as an example. In writing Fool for Love, I emphasized an angle that others tended to ignore: the way in which not knowing what his wife had done exacerbated Fitzgerald’s feelings of jealousy...you might well conclude that at least as much as F. Scott Fitzgerald, I was somewhat troubled by epistemological uncertainties in these our lives and shared his tendency to harbor and cultivate jealousy. You might even be right.” (p.91-2)  

In the essay “Scott and Dottie” Donaldson examines the rumor that Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker may have had a relationship. The claim comes from Lillian Hellman’s memoir, written after both Fitzgerald and Parker were dead. And Lillian Hellman is someone who would fall under the category of an “unreliable narrator” to put it lightly. As Donaldson writes, “A biographer wants to come as close as possible to the truth, and that depends in good part on whether one can trust Hellman as a source. The quick and easy answer to that question is no.” (p.108)  

Donaldson does an excellent job of detailing Fitzgerald and Parker’s friendship. One of the tidbits I gleaned from this essay was the role that Fitzgerald played in offering encouragement to the author John O’Hara. Fitzgerald spent an evening with Parker and O’Hara in New York City in early 1934, and O’Hara was ready to throw in the towel on his first novel, but Fitzgerald told him to stick with it. The novel was Appointment in Samarra, a superb novel that launched O’Hara’s career. At his finest, Fitzgerald had a gift for inspiring other authors, and he had a knack for treating younger authors with respect, even if they weren’t established yet. The connection with O’Hara intrigued me because of the similarities in O’Hara’s style and subject matter to Fitzgerald’s own writing.  

Donaldson mentions Fitzgerald’s flirtation with communism during the 1930’s and gives us the fascinating detail that “Fitzgerald briefly considered founding a radical magazine of his own.” (p.107) I love thinking about what that magazine would have been like. “The sunset over Antibes exploded into a rich fury of crimson and purple. Gerald and Sara were serving smart after-dinner drinks of port and sherry. I put down my copy of Spengler, turned to Ernest and said, ‘Do you think the inevitable collapse of the morally bankrupt capitalist system will lead us towards socialism or communism?’ Ernest grunted, took a drink, and replied, ‘It doesn’t matter much one way or the other.’”  

Fitzgerald compared communism to church, writing of Parker in a 1940 letter “Dotty has embraced {that} church and reads her office faithfully every day.” (p.110) This was exactly part of why communism was unappealing to Fitzgerald. He had rejected the Catholic faith he was raised in by his early 20’s, and he remained a skeptic and a firm individualist, never one to join the crowd in politics or religion.  

Discussing his friend Edmund Wilson’s attachment to Communism, Fitzgerald wrote: “A decision to adopt Communism definitely, no matter how good for the soul, must of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.” (January 19, 1933, letter to Maxwell Perkins. Dear Scott/Dear Max, p.177) Fitzgerald had tasted the “intellectual pleasures of the world” and he had no room for bland Communism on his plate.  

The final essay in the book focuses on Fitzgerald’s autobiographical writings, and is a fitting finale to Donaldson’s fine career, much of it focused on illuminating the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  

Book Review: The Paris Husband: How It Really Was Between Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, by Scott Donaldson (2018)

 

Cover of The Paris Husband, by Scott Donaldson, 2018. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Literary biographer Scott Donaldson, 1928-2020.

The Paris Husband: How It Really Was Between Ernest and Hadley Hemingway, published in 2018, was the last book published during Scott Donaldson’s lifetime, before his death in December 2020. (Donaldson’s obituary states that a volume about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night will be published posthumously.) Donaldson wrote several books about Ernest Hemingway: a 1977 biography, By Force of Will, the excellent 1999 volume Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, which examines the sometimes contentious relationship between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and 2009’s Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days, a book that collected Donaldson’s numerous articles about the two authors.

The Paris Husband examines Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage, to Hadley Richardson. Ernest and Hadley were married from 1921 to 1927, a formative time in the young writer’s life and career. Donaldson’s expertise on Hemingway shows in his deft use of Hemingway’s unpublished writings, in which the author often reveals more of his inner emotions. Throughout the book, Donaldson attempts to set the record straight about Ernest’s marriage to Hadley.

Donaldson knows that Hemingway himself was not always accurate in his descriptions of his own life and actions. To cite just one example, after the theft of a valise from a Paris train station that contained nearly all his early writing, Hemingway claimed in his memoir A Moveable Feast that he took the first train back to Paris when Hadley told him what had happened. Donaldson provides evidence to the contrary, writing that Hemingway didn’t return to Paris until a month and a half later.

The reader is given evidence of Hemingway’s habit of duplicity, as he wrote journalism articles under a pseudonym for a news service, even though he was under exclusive contract at the time to the Toronto Star. Not surprisingly, Hemingway’s duplicity was eventually discovered by his boss at the Star.

Donaldson corrects errors or misstatements by others—in A.E. Hotchner’s Hemingway in Love, Hotchner informs the reader that Hemingway met his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer through Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Donaldson reports that Ernest met Pauline for the first time in mid-March of 1925, about two months before he met Fitzgerald for the first time. (p.93) To be fair to Hotchner, he often took Hemingway at his word, and Hotchner didn’t always do the extra work to report Ernest’s inaccuracies to the reader.

We learn that Ernest acquired his nickname of “Papa” from Gerald Murphy, due to Ernest’s “instructive attitude.” (p.110) In other words, Ernest was a mansplaining expert who thought he knew everything.

Hemingway was ruthless in every aspect of his writing career. When F. Scott Fitzgerald convinced Hemingway that he should try to change publishers in order to join Fitzgerald at Scribner’s, Hemingway figured out a way out of his contract with Boni & Liveright. If Boni & Liveright rejected a book that Hemingway submitted to them, he would become a free agent. Hemingway then rushed through writing a novella The Torrents of Spring, that was a parody of Sherwood Anderson, who had been a benefactor of Hemingway’s, and provided Ernest with letters of introduction when he and Hadley moved to Paris. Anderson was also one of Boni & Liveright’s leading authors. Predictably, they rejected The Torrents of Spring, and thus Hemingway was free to move to Scribner’s. Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribner’s, was willing to publish the sub-standard The Torrents of Spring in order to be able to publish Hemingway’s first real novel, The Sun Also Rises.

It’s interesting to me that Hemingway didn’t seem to care about what effect publishing The Torrents of Spring would have on his own literary reputation. Hemingway had published a successful book of short stories, In Our Time, and he was in the build-up phase to the all-important first novel, which would be The Sun Also Rises. Wasn’t he worried that publishing a mean-spirited satirical novella would blunt the momentum of his career? Or was he just filled with such overconfidence that it didn’t matter? I strongly suspect the latter. It ended up being a moot point, as The Torrents of Spring didn’t damage Hemingway’s career at the time, and subsequent critics have paid little attention to it.

By the time The Sun Also Rises was published, Hemingway’s marriage to Hadley was on the verge of breaking up. Hemingway was filled with remorse about his affair with Pauline, and as a gesture of kindness to Hadley, Ernest wrote Scribner’s that all the royalties to The Sun Also Rises should be given to her. I’d be fascinated to know how many millions of dollars that gift was worth over the years.

Donaldson offers perhaps the best succinct summary of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s posthumous memoir of Paris during the 1920’s, writing: “A Moveable Feast is an odd book, half fond reminiscence and half ill-tempered attack.” (p.133) It’s an accurate judgement, as throughout the book Hemingway veers between romanticizing his poverty and attacking anyone who isn’t Hadley or Ezra Pound. (Hemingway’s poverty was overstated, as he and Hadley had a yearly income of about $2,000 from her trust fund, at a time when most Americans made less than $800 a year.)

In one of the drafts for A Moveable Feast that never made it into either the 1964 edition of the book or the 2009 “restored edition,” Hemingway wrote: “If you deceive and lie with one person against another you will eventually do it again.” (p.135) That piece of self-knowledge was hard won through the collapse of Ernest’s first two marriages. For a writer as committed to documenting the truth as Hemingway was, that line should have made it into the book. Oh well, for devoted Hemingway fans, it’s in Donaldson’s book.

The Paris Husband is an interesting examination of Ernest and Hadley’s marriage, and it’s a good corrective to read after the self-mythologizing A Moveable Feast.