The Literary Genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald

On many of the world’s lists of the best books ever written in the twentieth century, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is admirably almost always second, painfully always pipped by the old genius of Joyce’s Ulysses, forever in the ascendancy. Still, I suppose second greatest writer to have ever put pen to paper is not too bad an accolade to have bestowed upon you by generations of avid bookworms. Especially, when you take into consideration that many critics reckon that he never reached his full potential, dogged as he was by the excesses of the very age that he was attempting to chronicle. Indeed, he is more often than not lumped into what is called the Lost Generation, a tab applied to American writers who lived in Paris after the First World War, others piled in there of note, include Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Ezra Pound and Sherwood Anderson. He was born into an Irish Catholic family, hence the Fitzgerald part and named after his famous ancestor who wrote Star Spangled Banner hence the F. Scott part. He attended the prestigious institution of Princeton University, which would provide the backdrop for his first novel This Side of Paradise. It features the hero Amory Blaine drinking his way through the sacrosanct halls of Princeton, who famously grows up ‘to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all fates in man shaken.’ It marked the beginning of an era, an era in which youth and young manhood was fed up to the teeth with Victorian sensibility and the horrors of World War One that it led to, Fitzgerald was to define the beginnings of the roaring twenties and he was the one who labelled it, calling it the Jazz Age.

F Scott Fitzgerald had managed to find away to Princeton after he excelled at a prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey, which he was able to attend after receiving a modest inheritance from his grandfather and passed the entrance exams into Princeton. He was poor however and surrounded by the wealthy, it gave him an angle, as he always thought himself inferior in a social capacity which granted him the view of looking in and it helped his writings massively. He was a dosser academically, immersing himself in all that Princeton had to offer except what many would have perceived as the most important facet, that which was going on in the classrooms. In fact, he never graduated, bailing out and joining an Army officer training school for World War One. He was stationed at Camp Sheridan in Montgomery, Alabama and it was her he first met Zelda Sayre who would feature most prominently of all in Fitzgerald’s life. However, fortunately the war was wrapped up before he shipped out, leaving him dangling, he slopped around New York for a while, toiling as an ad writer whilst working on a novel which he would never finish. Although it did form the basis of his debut novel This Side of Paradise (1920), it was an immediate best seller and Fitzgerald was well on his way, but to where? He had it all - fame, money, success but he was fond of drink and he also was fond of Zelda who was anything but conventional. In a prophetical line of the way the world was to go as regards celebrity, Fitzgerald once stated that he was quite unsure whether he and Zelda were real are merely characters in one of his novels.

F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda were simply outrageous, throwing wild parties, riding the roof tops of cabs and driving the stuffy theatrical set crazy with their antics. They were married on 3 April 1920 and moved to Westport Connecticut where they disgraced the affluent, conservative town with their wild parties. Their daughter and only child, Frances Scott ‘Scottie’ Fitzgerald was born on 26 October 1921. Despite his hedonistic lifestyle, Fitzgerald continued to work, producing two collections of short stories entitled Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) and his second novel The Beautiful and the Damned (1922). The latter work possessed definite autobiographical strains describing the life of Anthony Patch and the turbulent relationship he has with his wife Gloria. It deals with the complexities of marriage and it is based around the world of the social elite hanging onto the rollercoaster of the Jazz Age as it reached it’s zenith. He began working on The Great Gatsby in the summer of 1922, but perhaps due to his hectic lifestyle, he found the going tough, failing to make much progress. In May 1924, desiring a new scene, the Fitzgeralds moved to the French Rivera, making many trips to Paris, hanging in artistic circles and befriending many of the American writers living here. One of which was Ernest Hemingway, who looked up to Fitzgerald, being somewhat in awe of his craft as a writer. Indeed it was Hemingway’s romantic depiction of Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast (1964) that established the myth of Fitzgerald’s dissipation of his genius and the abandonment of his muse caused mainly by the destructive and peddling nature of Zelda.

It is true that Zelda was not the most steadying influence in Fitzgerald’s life but it would be a fallacy to depict it in such a way as to suggest that Fitzgerald’s demise was completely related to Zelda. Fitzgerald was well capable of destroying the greatness of Fitzgerald all by himself. In essence, the marriage had both a positive and negative effect on Fitzgerald’s writings. For Zelda was the man’s muse, or at least one of them, he fed off her crazy way of life and her extravagant, obsessive and inflated ways but it became to much and eventually it swallowed him and his writings up. He and Zelda’s expensive lifestyle far outweighed the income that he was deriving from his writings, indeed none of his novels had sold near the same as his 1920 debut This Side of Paradise. He eventually finished The Great Gatsby and it was published in April 1925, it was to be later hailed as Fitzgerald’s masterpiece and is touted by many as being the Great American novel but it was not regarded so upon it’s release, selling fewer than twenty-five thousand copies during the writer’s life. Fitzgerald himself thought it his masterpiece, it was narrated by Nick Carraway, a young man who becomes drawn into the lives of his wealthy neighbours. One in particular, the mysterious Jay Gatsby begins to really peak Nick’s interest while he attends his raucous, bizarre and lavish parties which the host himself rarely attends. Gatsby and Nick strike up a friendship, it is revealed that Gatsby is in love with Nick’s cousin Daisy Buchanan and wishes to meet her, which he does and they embark on an affair. However, disaster strikes all parties when Gatsby and Daisy accidentally kill Daisy’s husband’s mistress which results in her husband murdering Gatsby!

On the surface The Great Gatsby appeared pretty straight forward but underneath it possesses wild, thrashing themes dealing with the unwinding 1920s and the utter disintegration of the American dream. Idealism withered as everybody became distracted by the pursuit of folly and pleasure. Curiously, Fitzgerald dwelt in the very apogee of the thing that he thought the most beastly, like everybody else he was reeling from the hell that was the First World War, immersing himself in the hedonist pursuits that the 1920s boom allowed, it doesn’t mean he or anybody else thought it the right way. However, it was the way that he had chosen and it was what ate him up, he began work on his fourth novel in the late 1920s as the decadent decade was drawing to a close. Once again he found it difficult to work, wracked by financial difficulties, it was necessary to write commercial short stories to sell to magazines. His strive was compounded by the tragic diagnosis of Zelda with schizophrenia in 1930, which would dog her for the remainder of her life. Once again, Fitzgerald looked to his own life from which to write his novel. It detailed the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist who falls in love and marries one of his patients, Nicole Warren. The result, Tender is the Night (1934) was his fist novel in nine years and the last that he would complete. Poignantly but puzzling it illustrated how one person can become strong by destroying another, but it is uncertain who exactly Fitzgerald was referring to, was it he or was it Zelda? It took him almost a decade to write, he started it immediately after The Great Gatsby was published in April 1925.

He and Zelda returned to the United States in 1927, he moving to Hollywood to write for the movies, a job which he found revolting and demeaning for a true literary giant. Tender is the Night was put on the backburner with Fitzgerald mired in Hollywood, involved in a passionate affair with a beautiful young actress named Lois Moran and dealing with Zelda who was beginning her sad descent into madness. With nothing working out, the Fitzgeralds moved back to Europe but their misfortune followed them, Zelda being institutionalised in Switzerland and Fitzgerald returning to America on his own. Eventually he found his mojo, pouring his whole soul and being into the work, all that had befell him went into it - his wasted talent, Zelda’s illness, their decaying marriage, his affair with Lois, Zelda’s affair with the French aviator Edouard Jozan and his descent into terrible alcoholism. Initially it was received well but the noise about it soon died out and it was never appreciated as the great piece of work it was, during Fitzgerald’s life and it did not sell well. Once more, Fitzgerald found himself in dire financial straits, forcing him to return to Hollywood to ’whore’ himself once again. However, he still had it into him to write literature and he began work on his fifth and final novel The Last Tycoon, sadly he would die before he managed to finish it. The plot focussed on the life of a film executive working in Hollywood in the 1930s, once again it returned to the theme that obsessed him all his life - the end of the American dream. In many ways he was living the end of his American dream estranged from Zelda and living with Shielah Graham, a gossip columnist in Hollywood. He wrote a series of self sneering stories depicting himself as a Hollywood hack named Pat Hobby. His health was shoddy, terribly compromised by the years of heavy drinking, he suffered a heart attack and died on 21 December 1940, he had not seen Zelda in over a year and a half. Zelda was a patient in the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina where she died in 1948, she had been working on her second novel at the time of her death. F Scott Fitzgerald had defined a generation though many believe that his real genius was never seen and that he never produced the genius that he most certainly had the talent to do.