Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on Something ‘Savage, Uncanny and Frightening’ in the South)

“[I]t was in a small Southern city… that I once saw the surface crack for a minute and something savage, uncanny and frightening rear its head. Then the surface closed again—and when I have gone back there since, I’ve been surprised to find myself as charmed as ever by the magnolia trees and the singing darkies in the street and the sensuous warm nights. I have been charmed, too, by the bountiful hospitality and the languorous easy-going outdoor life and the almost universal good manners. But all too frequently I am the prey of a vivid nightmare that recalls what I experienced in that town five years ago.”—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “The Dance,” The Red Book Magazine (June 1926), reprinted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (March 1953)

A century ago this month, The Red Book Magazine published something unusual for F. Scott Fitzgerald: a murder mystery. He was not completely averse to genre fiction (his short stories “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and "A Short Trip Home" have Gothic/horror elements), but his foray into detective stories was another matter entirely.

How much of  it was a lark while he did the rounds of night spots in France, where he had moved so he and his family could live more cheaply? (His output for the year consisted of the short story "Your Way and Mine" and the essay "How To Waste Material.") And how much of it was part of a fascination with murder that was leading him on a dead end in his initial stages of creating the long-gestating Tender Is the Night? 

To be sure, neither Agatha Christie, with her cunning plots, nor Dashiell Hammett, with his terse dialogue and morally compromised characters, had much to fear by this interloper in their territory.

But Fitzgerald being Fitzgerald, he had to bring something of himself to this exercise. There’s his fascination with the South, where he had met his wife Zelda; his almost effortlessly lyrical writing style; and his “flaming youth” characters, this time transplanted to a Charleston small-town ball.

And with a single phrase that sounds distinctly politically incorrect in our time—“singing darkies in the street”—he introduces a concern he had slipped into his novel from the year before, The Great Gatsby: race. 

Recall that from that Jazz Age masterpiece, his hideously brutal and idiotic recipient of inherited wealth, Tom Buchanan, launches into an incoherent rant about “Nordic” superiority—a precursor of the “great replacement theory” advocated most prominently today by Tucker Carlson.

In “The Dance,” suspicion of the murder that unexpectedly breaks out in this “small Southern city” falls on one of the “singing darkies” evoked by the story’s female narrator—and the threat of lynching hangs very much in the air.

“The Dance” was not included among the 43 tales collected in 1989 by literary scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli for The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But as far as I’m concerned, just about everything Fitzgerald wrote had some mark of charm or style—and this curious work of short fiction is no different.

This Day in Literary History (Death of Scottie Fitzgerald, Dutiful Daughter of Jazz Age Dazzlers)

June 18, 1986— Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, who was instrumental in reviving the tattered reputation of her father, Jazz Age author F. Scott Fitzgerald, died of cancer in Montgomery, AL, at age 64.

“Scottie,” as everyone called her, was a talented writer in her own right, as readers of her contributions to The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other publications could attest. 

Perceptive and self-aware from an early age, she also served as the model for Cecilia Brady, the teenaged narrator of Scott’s unfinished Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon.

But as the only child of Scott and his wife Zelda, and the executrix of his estate, she became the indispensable source for scholars and editors of his posthumous works, through her recollections and the massive artifacts she had saved: correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts, revised proofs, scrapbooks, photographs, clippings, and recordings.

In the aftermath of her father’s death by heart attack at age 44 in 1940, males advising Scottie on the estate pressured her to dispose quickly of his collection of papers, even if it involved accepting a price that she regarded as too low. When Princeton University’s library offered her $700 for the whole thing and no provision to keep it intact, she balked.

In 1950, she got what she wanted: triple their original price, along with the crucial stipulation that the collection be retained in its entirety, so scholars could consult one source and weigh everything about Scott and Zelda’s lives in context. 

(The arrangement ended up beneficial to the university, too: as the first personal author archive, it served notice that the institution would be a leading literary scholarly repository, as noted in a 2007 exhibit at the University of South Carolina, "Scottie Fitzgerald: The Stewardship of Literary Memory.")

All of this happened at the right time: Zelda’s death in a fire in a mental institution only a few years before Scottie’s agreement with Princeton meant that, for the first time, biographers could write with greater understanding about the biggest emotional upheaval in the last decade of Fitzgerald’s life.

Those papers, along with friends’ reminiscences, created a whole cottage industry of Fitzgerald studies. The level of interest was so extraordinary that, by the end of the Seventies, the Fitzgerald papers were being used more often at Princeton than the university’s collection of the papers of Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal—two people with far more influence on 20th century history than Scott and Zelda.

As the guardian of her parents’ legacy, Scottie had to balance access and exposure of their work for a new generation against what she viewed as violation of their literary intentions or invasions of their privacy.

As I mentioned in this post from a dozen years ago, when Paramount Pictures set about on a big-budget remake of The Great Gatsby in 1974, Scottie was chary about overemphasizing the gangster elements of her father’s classic. 

It was also probably just as well that the studio and director Jack Clayton dispensed with Truman Capote’s draft, which would have annoyed Scottie with its depiction of narrator Nick Carraway as gay and Jordan Baker as lesbian.

Zelda’s mental health aroused Scottie’s protective instincts even more than willful screenwriters and directors. Nancy Milford’s pioneering feminist biography, Zelda—the first full-length treatment of Scott’s wife—so distressed Scottie with its details about its subject’s psychiatric sessions and sexual orientation that she even threatened suicide, Milford noted in a 1980 essay.

At Scottie’s urging, the biographer toned down these references, though it provided grist for later scholars who portrayed Zelda as medically misdiagnosed and frustrated in her artistic ambitions by her husband.

Throughout the rest of the 1950s, film and TV adaptations of Fitzgerald’s works—and biographies—exponentially increased attention to his life and work, bringing a steady string of royalties and subsidiary right revenues.

It was an unexpected source of financial security for Scottie, who lived at the Scarsdale, NY home of his literary agent, Harold Ober, while Scott tried to earn enough money to pay for her prep-school and Vassar education and Zelda’s ongoing psychiatric care.

Though more emotionally stable than her parents, Scottie couldn’t entirely avoid their heartaches, including her own affairs and those of the two husbands she divorced, as well as substance abuse (she had a fondness for alcohol, like her father and paternal grandfather, and her younger son was arrested for smuggling 325 pounds of marijuana into Arizona) and insanity (elder son Tim first horrified his mother by declaring his Nazi inclinations, then killed himself in 1973).

(Much of her story is related in the 1995 biography by daughter Eleanor Lanahan, Scottie the Daughter Of...)

Surrounding this dutiful daughter was a protective cocoon, an instinct not to unload her troubles on her family nor for them to do the same to her. Caught up in the Washington social circle and her tireless activism for liberal Democratic candidates, she, like Zelda, displayed little of the nurturing gene.

At the same time, she stayed silent on painful memories (e.g., dodging an inkwell hurled by her drunken father) and, as her health began to decline, the cancer that finally claimed her. At best an imperfective emotional defense mechanism, it may have been the only one that enabled her to live two decades longer than her more fragile parents.

Again like her father, any “partly self-inflicted torments” were outweighed by other virtues: “I knew that he was kind, generous, honorable and loyal, and I admired and loved him.” Many felt likewise about her.

Though she had moved to Montgomery in 1979 at least partly to look after her mother’s ailing elder sister Rosalind, she chose to be buried at the foot of the gravesite of Scott and Zelda in Rockville, MD.

It was a final act of family devotion, as she succeeded 10 years before in persuading the Archdiocese of Baltimore to rescind its denial of Scott’s wish to be buried in the same cemetery as his father.

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on an Invitation to an Early June Wedding)

“There was the usual insincere little note saying: ‘I wanted you to be the first to know.’ It was a double shock to Michael, announcing, as it did, both the engagement and the imminent marriage; which, moreover, was to be held, not in New York, decently and far away, but here in Paris under his very nose, if that could be said to extend over the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity, Avenue George-Cinq. The date was two weeks off, early in June.”—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “The Bridal Party,” originally printed in Saturday Evening Post (August 9, 1930), reprinted in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1989)

F. Scott Fitzgerald and a June wedding—how could I resist blogging about this? Well, as you see, I couldn’t.

But “The Bridal Party” is of interest for another reason: it was Fitzgerald’s first piece of fiction to take into account the Great Crash of the prior autumn. Though the bridegroom in the story, we are told, is “heavily involved” in the stock market, nobody knows how much he had lost on Wall Street: “Anyhow, nobody ever tells you the truth.”

Fitzgerald would later address this financial and cultural cataclysm more fully and piercingly in several essays that form the heart of his posthumous collection The Crack-Up.

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Comparing Writers and Actors)

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.” — American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), The Last Tycoon, edited by Edmund Wilson (1941)

My favorite author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was born on this day in 1896 in St. Paul, MN. Though his prose is marked by the feathery style of poetry, his literary aspirations revolved, to one extent or another, around acting:

*In the short story “The Captured Shadow,” his youthful alter ego, Basil Duke Lee, casts a girl he has a crush on as the lead of a play he’s written;

*As a student at the now-defunct Cardinal Newman Prep in Hackensack, NJ, he loved the opportunity to take the train into New York to catch plays;

*In college, he wrote music and lyrics for the Princeton Triangle Club, the university's undergraduate musical comedy troupe;

*In 1923, hoping for a Broadway smash, he wrote (and invested money in) his only published play, The Vegetable, only to see it die after a single performance in Atlantic City;

*Though no record of it has ever been found, the actress Lois Moran claimed to have arranged a screen test for the author—which, predictably, did not work out well; and

*In his later years, as he struggled with creditors and alcoholism, Fitzgerald found much-needed temporary employment (and eventual heartbreak) as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Well, no matter. To his credit, Fitzgerald recognized the potential for motion pictures as a new art form, and even in its unfinished form The Last Tycoon may well still be the best novel ever written about Hollywood.

(For an interesting take on a surprising Fitzgeraldian influence on a recent film-- Damien Chazelle’s sprawling examination of the transition from the silent to sound eras, Babylon—see Kathy Fennessy’s December 2022 post from the “Seattle Film Blog.”)

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on People’s Destinies)

“The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny.”—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “Majesty,” first published in the Saturday Evening Post, July 13, 1929, reprinted in Taps at Reveille (1935)

Flashback, December 1924: The Scott Fitzgerald Roman Misadventure That Inspired ‘Tender Is the Night’

Shortly before Christmas 1924, in the midst of trying to finish the crucial last edits of the novel he hoped would cement his literary reputation and lift his finances, F. Scott Fitzgerald engaged in a drunken quarrel in Rome that ended up with him being beaten by the carabinieri, or the national police force.

The American was so embarrassed that he avoided writing or talking in anything more than general terms about this incident that brought out the worst instincts of himself and the nation he was visiting. The fullest description, in fact, found its way into the book he produced, at great emotional cost, a decade later, the last novel he completed in his life: Tender is the Night.

Riotous misadventures on Long Island had already delayed progress on The Great Gatsby. He came with wife Zelda and daughter Scottie to the French Riviera in the belief that he could live more cheaply abroad than in the United States, and he wanted to concentrate on his third novel instead of being forced to churn out short fiction that merely satisfied the couple’s needs to meet their mounting expenses. 

(See my blog post from 15 years ago on his tongue-in-cheek essay from the spring of 1924, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year.”)

But living beyond their means continued to plague the couple. And this time, there was an additional complication: while Scott sat at his typewriter, providing his Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins with rewritten passages that would bring Jay Gatsby into greater focus for readers, Zelda—with no creative outlet to occupy her time—became infatuated with a French aviator, in an affair that threatened the marriage.

Partly to satisfy Zelda, who wanted to see the sights associated with the Henry James novel Roderick Hudson, the Fitzgeralds visited Rome in November. The first time they had gone there, three years before, Scott had not found the “Eternal City” at all to his liking, with their flea-infested hotel suite provoking his scorn. This time, it proved near-catastrophic.

The novelist found a city that had changed for the worse, and was spiraling downward by the day. Benito Mussolini’s insurrection in 1922 had brought him to power, and right after New Year’s Day in 1925, he delivered a speech to the Italian parliament in which he took personal responsibility for violence staged by his “blackshirts” and began dismantling the last remaining shreds of democracy in the nation.

It was not a good environment for a foreigner to be involved in an altercation.

Exactly when this incident occurred is uncertain, but it can be placed after December 20, when Fitzgerald wrote to Perkins:

“I'm a bit (not very—not dangerously) stewed tonight & I'll probably write you a long letter. We're living in a small, unfashionable but most comfortable hotel at $525.00 a month including tips, meals etc. Rome does not particularly interest me but its (sic) a big year here, and early in the spring we're going to Paris. [...] I've got a new novel to write—title and all, that'll take about a year. Meanwhile, I don't want to start it until this is out & meanwhile I'll do short stories for money.”

If you’re like me, knowing what Fitzgerald could be like, your antenna might rise when you come across that statement about being “a bit (not very—not dangerously) stewed tonight.” It didn’t take long for him to go from being buzzed to being idiotically and violently intoxicated.

Fitzgerald’s reference to the incident came in the new year—but he still couldn’t tell agent Harold Ober exactly what bothered him about Italy this time: "I hate Italy and the Italiens [sic], so violently that I can't bring myself to write about them for the Post."

A note that Fitzgerald wrote in 1929—spare but suggestive—implies depths of antipathy not previously expressed: “After I — after a thing that happened to me in Rome I used to imagine whole auditoriums filled with the flower of Italy, and me with a machine gun concealed on the stage. All ready. Curtain up. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap.”

This incident would be just one more stop along the way of “The Drunkard’s Progress” (a 19^th-century temperance pamphlet that could have served as the story of Fitzgerald’s life), except that the novelist used it as a pivotal point in his narrative for Tender is the Night.

One major change that Fitzgerald made in transforming this imbroglio from fact to fiction was in moving the date: from the mid 1920s to closer to the Great Crash. For Dick Diver, as for America, hard times are about to arrive.

Though there are already warning signs that Dick’s drinking is affecting his psychiatric practice, the breakup of his affair with Hollywood starlet Rosemary Hoyt set off reactions that push him to fisticuffs. An evening in a cabaret is marked by the erosion of his faculties and reason: “a distinct lesion of his own vitality,” followed by Dick progressively turning “pale and somewhat noisy,” his “unwilling body” while dancing, then an argument with taxi drivers over his projective fare, slurred speech, shoves and wild swings that end with him at a police station, where his beating bears all the hallmarks of the author’s lived experience:

“[E] ven as a first pang of doubt shot through him the world reeled; he was clubbed down, and fists and boots beat on him in a savage tattoo. He felt his nose break like a shingle and his eyes jerk as if they had snapped back on a rubber band into his head. A rib splintered under a stamping heel. Momentarily he lost consciousness, regained it as he was raised to a sitting position and his wrists jerked together with handcuffs. He struggled automatically. The plainclothes lieutenant whom he had knocked down, stood dabbing his jaw with a handkerchief and looking into it for blood; he came over to Dick, poised himself, drew back his arm and smashed him to the floor.”

Dick’s request for help from “Baby” Warren, the older, disapproving older sister of his wife Nicole—the relative who holds the key to the family’s, and his, finances—becomes the hinge point of the plot: 

“It had been a hard night but she [Baby Warren] had the satisfaction of feeling that, whatever Dick's previous record was, they now possessed a moral superiority over him for as long as he proved of any use."

From here on, as the mental health of Nicole—a former patient of his whom Dick had fallen in love with before marrying—improves, Dick’s drinking worsens. So much of his energy had been devoted to watching over her that he had plunged into what Fitzgerald called, in the title of another of his stories, “emotional bankruptcy.”

As I related in this prior post, Tender is the Night brought mixed reviews and poor sales upon publication. The struggles of an affluent expatriate couple in the Roaring Twenties struck many as out of tune with what average Americans were enduring in the Great Depression, and the novel’s shifts in time and point of view demanded far more than many readers were prepared to give.

Today, we can better appreciate Tender for what it is: an unexpectedly tough-minded critique of the very rich, scenes from a marriage of a golden couple that modulate from love to dissolution, and with Fitzgerald’s creative alchemy transforming the ugly circumstances of his life into poignant and beautiful art.

Though Fitzgerald had over the years lapsed from the Catholicism of his childhood and youth, perhaps he pondered the account of the talents in Matthew 25:14–30—a parable as applicable to himself as to the once-promising psychiatrist he was bringing to life.

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on ‘Everybody’s Youth’)

“ ‘Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.’

‘How pleasant then to be insane!’"—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” in Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)

A Disturbance in the Atmosphere: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ as a Summer Novel

“We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

“The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), The Great Gatsby (1925)

A week or so ago, a friend’s quote from The Great Gatsby—"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer”—led me to ponder what had never really occurred to me in nearly a half-century of reading and re-reading my favorite book: the extent to which F. Scott Fitzgerald had written a summer novel.

What previously came to mind when I heard the phrase “summer novel” was fiction in a seaside or resort setting, often featuring young or forbidden love that was fully a match for the hottest season of the year (as in Edith Wharton’s underrated 1917 book Summer), or some combination of the two.

Occurring in New York City and Long Island, The Great Gatsby had not had the same seasonal or geographic associations for me.

But even in its first chapter, narrator Nick Carraway casually observes that he will be presenting “a history of that summer” when the mysterious figure of Jay Gatsby entered his life.

Far from throwaway lines

With that in mind, let’s look more closely at my “Quote of the Day.” It’s nowhere near as rhapsodic as the “boats against the current” ending that, for instance, inspired the title of this blog. But these are far from throwaway lines.

What seems like a simple wind shifting objects around in the room symbolizes the disturbance in the emotional atmosphere during this fateful summer, represented by the arrival of Jay Gatsby.

Air conditioning is now so taken for granted that it’s hard to imagine how summer heat affected Americans a century ago—and how they reacted to it, architecturally and psychologically.

Cooling units were too big and bulky for the home in the 1920s, so Americans adjusted through light-colored apparel and homes filled with long draperies to keep out the heat and multiple large windows to circulate air. (For an excellent short history of air conditioning, see this summary from the Department of Energy.)

But when heat waves stretched the limits of endurance, tensions rose and people often acted aggressively—with or without the cool drinks that momentarily fed the illusion of comfort and ease.

Over a year removed from his disastrous attempt to write a profitable play, The Vegetable, Fitzgerald had absorbed a valuable lesson from this ill-starred foray into the theater: Don’t provide a static description, but one that also includes action, highlighted here by verb forms involving movement: “blew,” “twisting,” “rippled,” “fluttering,” “shut,” and, in a quiet fall, “died out.”

The color of money

The passage does more than vividly detail the setting: the Georgian Colonial mansion of narrator Nick Carraway’s second cousin Daisy Buchanan and her husband Tom, among “the white palaces of fashionable East Egg” that represent the attainment of dreams.

The passage also foreshadows the tragic arc of the novel, in which the exertion of force results in the end of Gatsby’s dream.

In these two paragraphs Fitzgerald is already suggesting associations for the complex color scheme that will dominate this most concise of American literary classics.

White is the most commonly repeated here—particularly in the summer dresses worn by the two young women on the coach, Daisy and her friend, the “incurably dishonest” golfer Jordan Baker (or, in the image accompanying this post, actresses Mia Farrow and Lois Chiles from the 1974 film adaptation)—but also in the “gleaming white” windows and, implicitly, in the “frosted wedding cake of the ceiling.”

That last, striking metaphor signals the motifs of acquisition and possession that will become more pronounced with the appearance of Jay Gatsby later. During infantry training in Kentucky for WWI, Gatsby had fallen in love with the 18-year-old Daisy, but he lacked the money to marry the debutante.

Tom has had the wedding that Daisy wanted, and her white dress even now parallels the white gown she would have worn at the ceremony. For Gatsby, Daisy will always be the symbol of innocence and purity he just missed and hopes to have again, no matter what may have transpired since then—or her moral failings that he will be too blind to recognize.

The non-white colors in this passage are implied rather than explicitly drawn out. The “fresh grass” is green, and will be echoed in the novel’s famous conclusion that evokes “the fresh green breast” of the New World encountered by Dutch sailors three centuries before.

The red in the “rosy-colored space” and “wine-colored rug” evoke wealth, risk, and blood—the violence that erupts periodically, including:

*Daisy’s accusation that Tom caused her black-and-blue knuckle, even though he didn’t mean to—hinting at coercive control he wields over her, whether physically or psychologically;

*Tom’s breaking of the nose of his mistress, Myrtle Wilson, during a drink-fueled squabble—witnessed by Nick, instead of being inferred, as with Daisy;

*The party that Nick attends at Gatsby’s mansion, a riotous affair, concludes with women fighting “with men said to be their husbands” and, lying in a ditch, “a new coupe” wrecked by one of the tipsy revelers;

*The party in a suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel, preceded by a “loud and tumultuous argument” that worsens when drinks are consumed—and Tom and Gatsby have it out over Daisy;

*The auto accident on the way back, when Daisy, driving Gatsby’s car, runs over Myrtle Wilson;

*Gatsby’s murder in his pool at the hands of George Wilson, maddened to violence by Tom’s false suggestion that Gatsby rather than Daisy drove the car that killed his wife.

Rising temperatures…and aggression

Violence also lurks beneath the surface in the backgrounds of two other figures, in ways that Fitzgerald did not need to spell out for contemporary readers but which probably require an explanation for those who encounter the book for the first time in 2023.

Bootlegging, for instance, lurks beneath the surface, conducted in defiance of the Prohibition laws on the books in the Roaring Twenties (underscored, again, by the “wine-colored rug”).

Meyer Wolfsheim (the name translates, roughly, as “home of the wolf”), Gatsby’s business partner and friend, is an organized crime figure who, rumor has it, had “fixed” the 1919 World Series.

Moreover, although never spelled out in the novel, Gatsby, as a member of an organized-crime enterprise, could only have maintained his market “niche” by forcibly removing competitors.

But Fitzgerald judges Gatsby (and even, admittedly to a far lesser extent, Wolfsheim) less severely than another purveyor of violence: Tom.

Reading the list of bulleted items above leads to the inevitable (and correct) impression that much of the aggression it summarizes happens through the instigation of Tom, who possesses “a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.”

“Leverage” is defined as the exertion of force. But Fitzgerald, wanting to leave no doubt of its possessor’s intentions, adds that Tom’s is a “cruel” body—and Tom prefigures how he will impose himself on the threat to his marriage represented by Gatsby even on the mildly ruffling breeze coming through the windows as his wife and Jordan await the arrival of Nick.

With not just his new-found wealth but with his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” Gatsby imperils Tom to such an extent that he even disrupts how the Buchanan house keeps the outside world at bay. The “fresh grass outside,” like Gatsby’s hope for Daisy again, “seemed to grow a little way into the house,” which itself is, like the Buchanan marriage, “fragilely bound.”

Tom reacts the only way he knows how: by crushing any outside influence on his home through power. You can feel it through four words used as nouns here but which double as verbs: “whip,” “snap,” “groan,” and “boom.”

As a lover of poetry, especially Keats, Fitzgerald was acutely aware of the weight, feel and rhythm of words, and in the last sentence of the quoted passage, you can sense Tom's almost tactile deflation of Daisy and Jordan:

“Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”

If you associate summer novels with “light,” “beach” reading, then The Great Gatsby doesn’t fit the bill. But if you think of this genre as evocative of the senses, of depicting a time when the rules of life may seem suspended but when so much can turn on unexpected moments of exultation and deflation, then Fitzgerald’s classic eminently qualifies.

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, With Good Words to Live By)

"In any case you mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat."—American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), Tender Is the Night (1934)

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the Search for Love by ‘The Rich Boy’)

"I don’t think he was ever happy unless someone was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart." — American novelist and short-story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “The Rich Boy,” in All the Sad Young Men (1926)

Appreciations: John Cheever’s Tale of Midsummer Dissolution, ‘The Swimmer’

“It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night.’ You might have heard it whispered by the parishioners leaving church, heard it from the lips of the priest himself, struggling with his cassock in the vestiarium, heard it from the golf links and the tennis courts, heard it from the wildlife preserve where the leader of the Audubon group was suffering from a terrible hangover. ‘I drank too much,’ said Donald Westerhazy. ‘We all drank too much,’ said Lucinda Merrill. ‘It must have been the wine,’ said Helen Westerhazy. ‘I drank too much of that claret.’” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer John Cheever (1912-1982), “The Swimmer,” originally printed in The New Yorker, July 18, 1964, reprinted in The Stories of John Cheever (1978)

In the middle of yet another ungodly heat wave, there’s nothing like a nice, cool swim.

Well, even a good idea can be carried a little too far sometimes. Just how far—and how wrong—that kind of idea can be was conjured up by one of the great chroniclers of postwar suburbia.

A full immersion in the waters of John Cheever is enough to get you drunk by osmosis, and one of his most anthologized short stories, “The Swimmer,” wastes no time doing so, in this first paragraph.

Even on Sunday, a day not just of liturgical but recreational grace, inebriation cuts across vast cross-sections of the New York suburb in which this tale is set. Not only is the phrase “drank too much” used four times in the quoted paragraph above, but “drank” is italicized in each case.

Even before the title character is introduced, the major cause of his ultimate degeneration has been identified, albeit as a characteristic shared with the friends and ex-friends increasingly nettled by his presence.

“Drunk” is not the only word repeatedly employed throughout the story. So are “seemed” and “might,” with each use attached to an associated image indicating that the perceptions of the protagonist, Neddy Merrill, will be fragmented and unreliable.

In a 1971 essay, Cheever hailed F. Scott Fitzgerald for his “acute awareness of the meaning of time,” with characters who “lived in a temporal crisis of nostalgia and change.”

By the end of this story, the crisis that Neddy Merrill has been denying becomes increasingly apparent, despite his impulsive, startling decision to recapture his youth by swimming the eight miles from the Westerhazy’s pool to his own.

I haven’t yet seen the 1968 film adaptation of thisstory, but it’s hard for me to imagine a better actor to portray Merrill onscreen than Burt Lancaster (in the image accompanying this post). 

Two decades into his film career, the Oscar winner still showed the amazing physique he had achieved as a youthful acrobat. But few actors were better at depicting the complexity and insecurity below this kind of magnetic presence than he was.

Almost as soon as Merrill has conceived his almost surreal ambition, Cheever is undercutting him as a figure of epic self-delusion:

“He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda, after his wife. He was not a practical joker, nor was he a fool but he was determinedly original and had a vague and modest idea of himself as a legendary figure.”

The irony will only mount as Merrill stops periodically at one party after another, in the course of which he is not only stopped by one hostess but “slowed by the fact that he stopped to kiss eight or ten other women and shake the hands of as many men.”

Midway through his swim (after, not so coincidentally, about a half-dozen drinks), a storm breaks out, and Merrill’s temporal perceptions become progressively unsure. A neighbor had bought Japanese lanterns “the year before last, or was it the year before that?” It’s supposed to be midsummer, but Merrill finds himself shivering, as if it’s already autumn.

Before long, he is finding a less hospitable landscape: neighbors’ properties overgrown with weeds and the doors locked; jeering by passersby as he crosses a highway barefoot; sneers by another hostess at this “gatecrasher”; and remarks and gossip he doesn’t register about his “misfortune.”

While the story is seen entirely through the consciousness of Merrill, the voice of Cheever slips through at times, as when Neddy wonders if he was “losing his memory” or if his “gift for concealing painful facts let him forget that he had sold his house, that his children were in trouble, and that his friend had been ill?” 

By the end, Neddy has been exposed as an alcoholic, a philanderer, and a spendthrift whose financial ruin has destroyed his family and left him friendless and locked out of his suburban paradise.

Like the Lucinda River, alcoholism runs like a subterranean stream in a number of Cheever stories, such as “Reunion” and the novel Falconer. But seldom has the psychological dissolution it unleashes been rendered with such irony and phantasmagorical brilliance as in “The Swimmer.”

Cheever shared far more than a thirst for liquor and an equally desperate quest for grace with Fitzgerald: Both also have tempted filmmakers to create on-screen visual counterparts to prose whose shimmering effects are felt primarily in the imagination.

So it was with The Great Gatsby, and so it was in the late Sixties when the husband-and-wife screenwriter-director team of Eleanor and Frank Perry tried to adapt Cheever’s tale of altered consciousness. 

Frank Perry was fired midway through, and even a young Sydney Pollack, hired to complete filming, couldn’t steady a production that had become as uncertain as Neddy’s nautical journey home.

Despite a pleasant on-location experience in Westport, CT (where Cheever made a cameo appearance at a poolside cocktail party, where, Neddy-like, he marveled at a “terrific 18-year-old dish”), the author loathed the finished product of the troubled production. (I’ll have to wait till the next time it comes on TCM to assess the merits of his complaints.)

In a way, Cheever is the missing link between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mad Men (just a few of the many literary references on the late, great series examined in Jenny Tighe's post on the "Bloomsbury Literary Studies" blog). It’s apparent symbolically even in the opening credits of the classic AMC series, in the vertiginous fall suffered by its main character.  

Mad Men’s showrunner, Matthew Weiner, took his time (seven seasons) showing how ad man Don Draper hit rock bottom, just as Fitzgerald took an entire novel to detail the warped promise of its once-dazzling protagonist, psychiatrist Dick Diver.

In contrast, Cheever compressed the story of Neddy Merrill, but the result is the same in all three cases: men fooled by the shimmering surface of the American Dream, with not enough intestinal fortitude to survive the loss of their illusions.

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sending Up a Down-at-the-Heels Screenwriter)

“[Studio exec] Jack [Berners] looked at him—he saw a sort of whipped misery in Pat's eye that reminded him of his own father. Pat had been in the money before Jack was out of college—with three cars and a chicken over every garage. Now his clothes looked as if he'd been standing at Hollywood and Vine for three years.”—American novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), “A Man in the Way,” in The Pat Hobby Stories (1941)

Longtime readers, I hope, have noticed a pattern in this blog: the first and last days of the workweek feature a humorous quote. (Comic relief is seldom more necessary than during these times, I think.) But I don’t think many of you would have expected to see such an item from F. Scott Fitzgerald, born 125 years ago today in St. Paul, Minn.

But, as I made clear in this post from three years ago, Fitzgerald’s life—even his desperate last few years as a Hollywood screenwriter—furnished material for his irony and wit.

Few were more responsible for his tragic image than himself. He often obscured his humor through his self-mythologizing as the symbol of Jazz Age excess and comeuppance, as well as his discounting of short stories produced under the crushing financial pressure to pay for his wife Zelda’s mental treatment and daughter Scottie’s education.

The 17 Hobby stories, written for Esquire Magazine, did help relieve some of this stress. According to David S. Brown’s biography of the novelist, Paradise Lost, they earned him a total of $4,250, or $68,000 in current dollars.

In a sense, the series—neither as long nor as complex as his more ambitious short stories of the Twenties and early Thirties—enabled him to tap into personal and creative instincts towards comedy that had existed from his early manhood. All his life he loved pranks, and friends remembered how he would laugh at his own expense.

A quarter century before The Pat Hobby Stories, he had written pieces for Princeton’s humor magazine and a two-act musical comedy for the university’s Triangle Club.

Moreover, several of his 1920s works sparkled with elegant mockery:

*“The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922) centers on the world’s richest man, Braddock Washington, who conceals from the world a diamond so large that “if it were offered for sale not only would the bottom fall out of the market, but also, if the value should vary … there would not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth of it.”

*“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922) has a title character who so unnerved all around him by a process he can’t control—aging in reverse—that they are driven to upbraid him without hope for his correction: “There’s a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate."

* “The I.O.U.” (once thought lost, then finally published in The New Yorker in 2017) is narrated by a publisher with unabashedly commercial instincts. (“I would rather bring out a book that had an advance sale of five hundred thousand copies than have discovered Samuel Butler, Theodore Dreiser, and James Branch Cabell in one year. So would you if you were a publisher.”)

* “How to Live on $36,000 A Year" (1924, later part of his posthumous collection, The Crack-Up), is a tongue-in-cheek essay on living well beyond one’s means. (According to the budget he and Zelda had formulated, as their early spending spree ended, “Our allowance for newspapers should be only a quarter of what we spend on self-improvement, so we are considering whether to get the Sunday paper once a month or to subscribe for an almanac.”)

The subjects of Fitzgerald’s early satire were social status and social expectations. By the time of The Pat Hobby Stories, the source of his humor had become the absurd lengths to which characters will go to avoid personal catastrophe.

The protagonist of these stories, Pat Hobby, became, in effect, a means by which Fitzgerald could laugh at his own straitened circumstances by imagining someone even more desperate—not just an alcoholic devalued by the Hollywood dream factory, but a womanizer and con artist without the esteem that the novelist’s contemporaries felt for him.

“The series is characterized by a really bitter humor,” Fitzgerald wrote Nathan Kroll, who was considering turning it into a play, “and only the explosive situations and the fact that Pat is a figure almost incapable of real tragedy or damage saves it from downright unpleasantness.”

Nobody will ever group Fitzgerald with Mark Twain, Robert Benchley and James Thurber among the greatest American humorists. But, unlike frenemy Ernest Hemingway, his was a generous humor, unmarked by cruelty, even as he depicted those like himself who lost their footing on the ladder to success.

Ironically, though unsuccessful in his attempts to succeed on screen and stage, Fitzgerald provided comic fodder for others through The Pat Hobby Stories. In 1987, Christopher Lloyd (most famous as the erstwhile Rev. Jim of Taxi and Dr. Emmett Brown in Back to the Future and its sequels), took on the role of the hilarious hack in the “Pat Hobby Teamed With Genius” installment of the PBS trilogy Tales From the Hollywood Hills.

Then, two years ago, the Edinburgh Fringe mounted its own adaptation of the stories, with Paul Birchard (in the image accompanying this post) as the screenwriter.

Flashback, August 1936: Hemingway Weighs Price of Fame in ‘Snows of Kilimanjaro’

When Esquire Magazine published “Snows of Kilimanjaro” in its August 1936 issue, readers unfamiliar with the recent circumstances surrounding Ernest Hemingway would have regarded the short story, rightly, as one of the finest of his career, representing an artistic summit analogous to the African peak which served as the ultimate destination of his fictional character Harry.

With prior short stories and novels preoccupied with the theme of death, his return to the subject would not, at first glance, seem unusual. 

But this time, the treatment became more coruscating, even self-lacerating, as Hemingway created a protagonist with fears all too close to his own—and imagined a heedlessness in the face of danger paralleling the same tendency in himself.

In its own time, the story raised more than a few eyebrows because of its shot at F. Scott Fitzgerald, who a decade before had offered Hemingway both a useful introduction to influential Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins and astute editing advice, when the fledgling fiction writer needed both.

Fitzgerald’s recent series of confessional essays, later collected as The Crack-Up, had recounted, in what now seems oblique if elegant terms, his emotional anguish. Together with his 1934 novel Tender is the Night, that malaise suggested self-pity—or, put in more basic terms, weakness—to Hemingway.

Fitzgerald felt rightly aggrieved when he turned to page 200 in the August issue of Esquire only to read:

The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamourous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.

The quote referred to the famous beginning paragraph of Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Rich Boy.” All things considered, his response to the younger writer he had considered a friend brimmed with restraint:

“Dear Ernest:

“Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it in a book would you mind cutting my name?

“It’s a fine story– one of your best even though the ‘Poor Scott Fitzgerald etc.’ rather spoiled it for me.”

A change of the name from “Scott” to “Julian” for later collected editions of the story provided the merest figleaf concealing the author’s identity. The immediate effect of "Snows" was that it commenced “open season” on Fitzgerald, noted biographer David Brown’s Paradise Lost. The following month, New York Post reporter Michael Mok profiled Fitzgerald as an alcoholic wreck, his youthful promise evaporated at age 40. Not long after, Fitzgerald attempted suicide.

The very public jab at Fitzgerald puts Hemingway admirers such as me face to face with an unsettling situation in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”: a writer creating some of his most subtle, controlled and beautiful work, but unable to hide his more obvious, uncontrolled and ugly emotions.

The denigration of his early champion and friend took as much chutzpah as it did rewriting history. Nobody—certainly not Hemingway—made to Fitzgerald the wisecracking rejoinder about the rich included in the story.

Instead, the remark came at Hemingway’s expense, when he grandiosely remarked to visiting friends that he was studying the very rich. As biographer Brown noted, the fact that the crack came from a woman—the Irish writer Mary Colum—could only make Hemingway smart even more.

Decades later, however, knowing how Hemingway’s life turned out, many readers might feel that certain women in his life might have even greater reason than Fitzgerald for annoyance about "Snows," including his wife, Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway.

Or, I should say, his second of four wives. Hemingway had written about her in Green Hills of Africa with what passed for his highest praise: the good sport who shared his big-fame adventures on the continent.

But, fatally for their marriage, Hemingway also associated her with the end of his youthful innocence: as the woman who lured him away from his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and introduced him to a world of wealth he believed undermined his discipline as a writer.

Then, after the Catholic Pauline insisted that they follow the rhythm method in intercourse to avoid a third pregnancy that, doctors had warned, could endanger her life, Hemingway found himself not merely creatively cosseted but sexually dissatisfied.

Hemingway responded, in troubling fashion, to an urge that had last darkened his work the decade before: attacking in print, in thinly fictionalized form, people who had once meant a great deal to him.

In 1926, he had made his reputation with The Sun Also Rises, a roman a clef whose characters—drawn from a booze-filled trip to Spain to watch bullfights—included an anti-Semitic portrayal of the writer Harold Loeb.

A year later, in a move that then-wife Hadley warned him against, Hemingway had used The Torrents of Spring to satirize Sherwood Anderson, an older mentor who gave helpful advice on his early fiction.

By the mid-1930s, Hemingway was lashing out—again, in veiled, fictionalized terms—this time against a trio of women. Two of the three would form the composite character "Helen" in "Snows":

* Jane Kendall Mason, who had engaged in an intermittent four-year affair with Hemingway while he was in Havana, spurred the creation of two of the most misogynistic works in all his fiction: “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and To Have and Have Not.

* Helen Hay Whitney, an heiress who, speculates Paul Hendrickson in Hemingway's Boat, offered to help bankroll a future Hemingway safari—helping to inspire the “Helen” character in “Snows.”

*Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway, the Arkansas heiress whose uncle had not only furnished the money for the Hemingway’s Key West home but also for the recent safari that gave rise to Green Hills of Africa. 

How could Pauline not have thought of herself when she read passages like this in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”?

“It was strange, too, wasn't it, that when he fell in love with another woman, that woman should always have more money than the last one? But when he no longer was in love, when he was only lying, as to this woman, now, who had the most money of all, who had all the money there was, who had had a husband and children, who had taken lovers and been dissatisfied with them, and who loved him dearly as a writer, as a man, as a companion and as a proud possession; it was strange that when he did not love her at all and was lying, that he should be able to give her more for her money than when he had really loved.”

Character assassination remained among the instruments that Hemingway employed throughout his life. Friends who found themselves at the receiving end of his inexplicable cruelty were, more often than not, bewildered by what might have caused the disruption in their relationship.

But, with Hemingway’s multiple eruptions in the mid-1930s, the motive may have been fear. Fame and fortune were complicating his life, propelling Hemingway towards creating a macho image he found increasingly difficult to maintain.

Although the printed version of “Snows” gave the protagonist’s name as, simply, Harry, the manuscript called him “Harry Walden”—a more explicit recognition of the simple life that Hemingway felt he was abandoning.

In an August 1968 article for American Heritage Magazine, Hemingway scholar Carlos Baker spelled out the consequences: “One of Hemingway’s recurrent motivations to literary creativity throughout his life was the conviction that he might soon be going to die without having completed his work or fulfilled his unwritten promise to his talents. At the time when he wrote this story he knew very well that he had climbed no farther than the lower slopes of his personal Kilimanjaro.”

Hemingway compressed his self-doubt into a single memorable sentence in “Snows”: “Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.”

Four italicized vignettes in “Snows” offer a glimpse of the stories Hemingway desperately wanted to write, in some of the most lyrical passages he ever wrote, including this one of an Austrian village he had visited with Hadley:

In Schrunz, on Christmas day, the snow was so bright it hurt your eyes when you looked out from the Weinstube and saw every one coming home from church. That was where they walked up the sleigh-smoothed urine-yellowed road along the river with the steep pine hills, skis heavy on the shoulder, and where they ran down the glacier above the Madlenerhaus, the snow as smooth to see as cake frosting and as light as powder and he remembered the noiseless rush the speed made as you dropped down like a bird….

And an even more nostalgic look back at Paris in the Twenties:

And in that poverty, and in that quarter across the street from a Boucherie Chevaline and a wine cooperative he had written the start of all he was to do. There never was another part of Paris that he loved like that, the sprawling trees, the old white plastered houses painted brown below, the long green of the autobus in that round square, the purple flower dye upon the paving, the sudden drop down the hill of the rue Cardinal Lemoine to the River, and the other way the narrow crowded world of the rue Mouffetard.

In his 1938 short-story collection, The First Forty-Nine, Hemingway concluded his preface with a note ironic and poignant in retrospect: “I would like to live long enough to write three more novels and twenty-five more stories.” In fact, he wrote three more novels published in his lifetime and about twenty short stories not collected till after his death in 1961.

But, except perhaps for For Whom the Bell Tolls, none of these approached in quality the works up to “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” that had made him such an icon of creative self-discipline. As an enthusiastic but none-too-adept amateur boxer, he knew the risks of softness and lack of alertness. Yet he had fallen victim to these dangers in the arena that mattered the most to him: writing.

Moreover, he had, with an uncanny sense of foreboding, anticipated the fate that overcame him in his last decade. As with his short story, a trip to Africa precipitated a medical crisis—in this case, two plane crashes in Uganda in 1954, in which he had suffered a fractured skull, a ruptured liver, a collapsed intestine, several broken vertebrae and a burnt scalp. 

As his fictional stand-in Harry had done in not cleaning his wound with iodine, Hemingway incurred further risk after the crashes by continuing to drink heavily. And his fourth wife, Mary, took on the same role of nurse assumed by fictional counterpart Helen in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in tending to a husband who alternated affection with outbursts of contempt and abuse.