{"id":98980,"date":"2016-06-07T13:23:26","date_gmt":"2016-06-07T17:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=98980"},"modified":"2016-06-08T17:12:38","modified_gmt":"2016-06-08T21:12:38","slug":"falling-for-fitzgerald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/07\/falling-for-fitzgerald\/","title":{"rendered":"Falling for Fitzgerald"},"content":{"rendered":"

A\u00a0hopeless\u00a0affair with\u00a0America\u2019s greatest\u2014and deceased\u2014man of letters.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"FITZ\"<\/a>

F. Scott Fizgerald.<\/p><\/div>\n

Last year, I confessed to my best friend that I had fallen in love with another man. When she heard this man\u2019s identity, she knew I was in trouble.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst of all,\u201d she told me, \u201cyou\u2019re married. And so is he.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI know,\u201d I said miserably.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlus, he has a mistress,\u201d she pointed out.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes,\u201d I conceded.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd, you know,\u201d she went on, \u201che also happens to be dead.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

I had to admit that it was all rather inconvenient, but I was smitten and there was nothing I could do about it. The object of my affection: F. Scott Fitzgerald, oracle of the Jazz Age, author of the great American novel. We had first become acquainted when I was a nerdy, thick-ankled teenager (and God, how Fitzgerald reviled thick ankles in ladies). He intimidated me, and then I outgrew him. But recently our paths crossed again; now blessed with slimmer ankles and after years of training in the art of moderate decadence, I considered myself more up to his standard. Then, to my surprise, I fell for him.<\/p>\n

To be fair, I\u2019ve had other ill-fated affairs with dead authors: those years of pining for the attentions of Truman Capote (you can see the complications\u00a0there<\/em>); the make-out sessions with W. Somerset Maugham (although his worlds always proved a tad too humid for me); the obsession with Edith Wharton (my first and only time playing for the other team). But the affair with Scott Fitzgerald was the gravest affair yet, the most exquisitely anguished\u2014and the most embarrassing.<\/p>\n

This is how it went down.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

A\u00a0few years ago, I began researching a book recounting the genesis of Ernest Hemingway\u2019s debut novel<\/a>,\u00a0The Sun Also Rises<\/em>. Fitzgerald played a crucial role in this story, first by paving Hemingway\u2019s path to Charles Scribner\u2019s Sons, Fitzgerald\u2019s own publisher since 1920; he then offered Hemingway some shrewd, crucial advice on the manuscript of\u00a0Sun<\/em>\u00a0itself.<\/p>\n

Each day, I had been making my way from New York out to the Scribners and Fitzgerald archives at Princeton University. By then I\u2019d reread and adored Fitzgerald\u2019s novels and most of his short stories, but it was his correspondence that got to me. In the early days of Fitzgerald\u2019s career, reviewers often described his prose as \u201cvivid\u201d or \u201calive,\u201d but his letters felt especially electric. It seemed criminal to me that all of that vivacity had been smothered for so long in drab olive-green folders in New Jersey. Many of those letters have been reproduced in anthologies, but seeing them in person felt like meeting Fitzgerald himself in person. He wrote as he might have spoken; I could almost hear his voice saying the words aloud as he penned them.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A letter to a fan.<\/p><\/div>\n

There was also something about his crazy handwriting\u2014educated but unbridled\u2014and I was charmed by the childish, relentless misspellings. (He never could, for instance, master Hemingway\u2019s name, usually prescribing an extra m<\/em>.) On a good day, I would turn a page and be rewarded with an amusing Fitzgerald sketch. In one 1926 missive to Perkins, he wrote, \u201cThere was something else I wanted to ask you. What was it? damn it!\u201d Unable to recall, he switched gears and informed the editor that he intended to \u201clive and die on the French Rivierra [sic]\u201d and then asked if Perkins had \u201cthe inside dope on the Countess Carthcart case.\u201d But the first forgotten question plagued him: \u201cI can\u2019t remember my other question and its [sic] driving me frantic. Frantic! (Half an hour later)\u00a0Frantic!<\/u>\u201d He festooned the last \u201cfrantic\u201d with a self-portrait of himself in a state of frenzy; I laughed out loud. On the flyleaf a\u00a0copy of\u00a0The Great Gatsby\u00a0<\/em>that Fitzgerald presented to Beach,\u00a0he drew a Last Supper\u2013style sketch of a several Lost Generation greats dining together: he portrayed himself kneeling at the side of James Joyce, whose head is ringed with a halo. Beach and her lover Adrienne Monnier are portrayed as mermaids, holding court at either end of the table.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"fitzgerald-drawings\"<\/a>

Fitzgerald\u2019s sketch of several Lost Generation greats dining together.<\/p><\/div>\n

Before I\u2019d gotten to the Fitzgerald letters, I had been dragging myself out to those archives in baggy yoga pants, ratty T-shirts, hair wadded on top of my head. But then, one morning, my little family heard the alien sounds of high heels tapping down the stairs to breakfast. What was more: those heels were on\u00a0my feet<\/em>. I was wearing a belted dress and a fedora, jauntily angled over one eye. Scott would like that, I had thought.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you wearing\u00a0lipstick<\/em>\u00a0to the archive?\u201d my husband asked, peering over his coffee.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always wear lipstick to the archive,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, you don\u2019t,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, I always wear Chap Stick, at the very least,\u201d I countered feebly, and off I went.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yes: I was dressing up for F. Scott Fitzgerald and lying about it. If the archivists at Princeton also noticed the change, they politely declined to comment. The other researchers, however, were well within their rights to hate the new me. Usually the only sounds that echoed through that high-ceilinged room came from turning pages and pencils scratching across paper, but now everyone had to endure my chortles and coos over Fitzgerald\u2019s missives.<\/p>\n

Who knows why some people enthrall us, while other supposedly charismatic figures leave us cold? I always felt wonderful after being with him\u2014like you do after a hilarious, slightly drunken lunch with someone you have a crush on. After a particularly amusing or poignant afternoon spent with him on paper, I\u2019d get a coffee and sit on the lawn of his old eating club, Cottage, and bask in the sun and think about what I\u2019d read. At Princeton, you still feel his presence everywhere. There was a certain irony to this: back in 1920, the president of the university sent Fitzgerald a disappointed letter following the release of\u00a0This Side of Paradise<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The] characterization of Princeton has grieved me,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI cannot bear to think that our young men are merely living for four years in a country club.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps he needn\u2019t have worried: even if it failed to imbue\u00a0Princeton with a certain gravitas, the book undeniably helped ensure Princeton\u2019s popularity for decades to come.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

One thing my new boyfriend and I had in common: a love of\u00a0<\/em>gossip. That said, Scott wasn\u2019t malicious or petty. His correspondence show him strategizing behind the backs of others\u2014but often to boost the fortunes of fellow writer. He connived behind the scenes, for example, to help bring Hemingway into Perkins\u2019s stable of Charles Scribner\u2019s Sons; after this goal was successfully met, he instructed Perkins to treat Hemingway gently.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cDo ask him for the absolute minimum of necessary changes, Max,\u201d he wrote. \u201cHe\u2019s so discouraged about the previous reception of his work by publishers and magazine editors.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fitzgerald did, of course, famously hand Hemingway his own roster of tough edits for the manuscript of\u00a0The Sun Also Rises\u2014<\/em>yet he delivered the medicine with sugar. \u201cRemember this is new departure for you, and that I think your stuff is great,\u201d he encouraged Hemingway. \u201cThe novel\u2019s damn good.\u201d<\/p>\n

This encouragement was even more extraordinary given that it came at a time when Hemingway was beginning to eclipse Fitzgerald. Until that year\u20141926\u2014Scott had reigned as their voice of their postwar generation, until then known as the Jazz Age; Hemingway, with the publication of\u00a0Sun<\/em>\u00a0was about to dethrone him and begin his own reign as leader of the Lost Generation. Those in their world noted that Fitzgerald\u2019s own writing style seemed to belong to a more romantic time, while Hemingway\u2019s style felt like the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople watched Hemingway and watched what Hemingway was doing and cared deeply about it, as I did, and weren\u2019t too much impressed by Scott,\u201d said their friend, poet Archibald MacLeish. \u201cScott doesn\u2019t exist when you\u2019re talking at the level of Picasso and Stravinsky.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fitzgerald too eventually began to feel himself Hemingway\u2019s inferior, but it never seemed to make him bitter\u2014at least not toward Hemingway himself. His 1920s letters to Hemingway evidenced his selfless capacity for love. It was extraordinary, in a way: in certain respects, Scott was said to be homophobic (he used to taunt Gerald Murphy, an unrepentant dandy, with little innuendo-laden barbs such as \u201cWhy do you have such a passion for buckles?\u201d), but he had no qualms about expressing his deep admiration and affection for someone as brusquely masculine as Hemingway. He continued to champion his friend though his professional debut and offered consolation when Hemingway\u2019s first marriage fell apart shortly after\u00a0Sun<\/em>\u2019s release.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sorry for you and for Hadley \u2026 and I hope some way you\u2019ll all be content and things will not seem so hard and bad,\u201d he wrote to him. \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how much your friendship has meant to me during this year and a half,\u201d he added. \u201cIt is the brightest thing in our trip to Europe for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

It began to seem unfair to me that Hemingway was the recipient of all that affection. After all, practically everyone in New York and Paris adored Hemingway by that point\u2014even Dorothy Parker, who hated\u00a0everyone<\/em>. Why did he have to hoard Fitzgerald\u2019s admiration, too? I sulked about it, until I remembered how my grandmother said that jealous women tend to purse their lips in an ugly way. That would never do. I walked it off, and came back the next day, conciliatory as a lamb.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Of course, I could not and did not keep this affair to myself. I began confessing to an unlucky selection of friends over dinners, giving the details in a state of fever dream. I sought out other F. Scott obsessives in a bid to decipher why he was so addictive. One fellow devotee pointed out that the Fitzgerald of later years would have made an exasperating and even repellent addition to the restaurant table that evening: he became, after all, an alcoholic who often drank himself into oblivion, and even hospitalization. How could someone like that have made an exciting lover, or even an adequate one?\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was then that I realized that my own affair with Scott had nothing to do with sex. Even in his younger years, Fitzgerald seemed to have precisely zero come-hither. I just irrationally wanted to be his\u00a0girl<\/em>, his comrade, his partner in crime. In the early and midtwenties, Fitzgerald and his actual girl, Zelda, were badly behaved\u2014wonderfully so. Their antics on both sides of the Atlantic have been described as madcap or sophomoric at best and grossly self-destructive at worst. But to me, however, those misadventures just seemed like\u00a0fun<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Zelda-Fitz\"<\/a>

Zelda and Scott.<\/p><\/div>\n

And when I was rediscovering F. Scott Fitzgerald, I happened to be having less madcap, self-destructive fun than ever. There was that hideous, pressure-cooker of a book deadline; those sleepless nights with a baby back home; that grueling commute. God, how I wanted to be at Scott\u2019s side at his rented villa in Antibes, dousing myself in champagne, flinging ashtrays at pretentious expats, hurling crystal glasses toward the azure Mediterranean, kidnapping annoying local waiters and threatening to saw them open. I mean, who hasn\u2019t wanted to give the middle finger to the humorlessness and anxiety of adulthood? Who wouldn\u2019t want to be naughty without being bad?<\/p>\n

There were, of course, loftier reasons behind my affection as well. Since we\u2019re on the topic of being bad, I think one of the reasons I loved Fitzgerald is precisely because he was so good. Sylvia Beach nailed Fitzgerald\u2019s essence when she described his \u201cfallen angel fascination.\u201d I revere goodness and honor in men, and Fitzgerald was just so goddamn pure and loyal. I loved his no-strings-attached generosity, even toward those who didn\u2019t always repay him with gratitude.<\/p>\n

Like his character Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald had a heightened sensitivity to the dynamics among men and the rhythms of time, history and loss; yet like Gatsby, he also had astonishingly adolescent na\u00efvet\u00e9 and behaviors at the same time. If Hemingway\u2019s savvy high\/low approach to authorial style interested me, Fitzgerald\u2019s central dichotomy\u2014youth\/wisdom\u2014proved positively engrossing, precisely because it was so unfathomable.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A letter of gratitude to Ernest Hemingway.<\/p><\/div>\n

*<\/p>\n

I\u00a0didn\u2019t have to spend so many months lurking in the Princeton archives, but I drew out the process until my deadline got scary: I knew that I\u00a0had\u00a0<\/em>to sit down and write my book. Suddenly there was no room for frivolity, no appetite for pleasure, no time to pine for Antibes. There was only the writing, the daily word count, the necessarily crushing routine. Then, when I\u2019d finished the manuscript, with my darling Fitz playing a heroic role in its pages, fate appeared ready to sever the affair permanently: my husband\u2019s job was transferred from New York to Los Angeles and we moved across the country. Suddenly, I was an expat myself. Fitzgerald and Paris and Antibes felt very far away indeed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Until this happened:<\/p>\n

INT. DINNER PARTY, BEVERLY HILLS.<\/p>\n

BLUME\u00a0<\/em>is seated next to a veteran Hollywood FILMMAKER who reveals his own interest in Lost Generation writers. They are discussing Fitzgerald\u2019s brief and unsuccessful tenure in Hollywood at the end of the 1930s.<\/p>\n

BLUME<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always read that his screenplays were supposed
to be pretty terrible. That he overwrote them,
and didn\u2019t understand screenwriting.<\/p>\n

FILMMAKER<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read excerpts from some of those
screenplays, and they shocked me.<\/p>\n

BLUME<\/p>\n

Why\u2014were they worse than you expected?<\/p>\n

FILMMAKER<\/p>\n

No, they were pretty great, actually. Totally produceable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

BLUME<\/p>\n

(stunned<\/em>)
Where did you see the screenplays?<\/p>\n

FILMMAKER<\/p>\n

They\u2019re all over town, in various archives.<\/p>\n

The following\u00a0Monday\u00a0morning, my husband and daughter were at the breakfast table, when they heard an ominous sound: high heels\u00a0clack-clack-clacking<\/em>\u00a0toward the kitchen. I rounded the corner. My red lipstick confirmed the worst: the affair was back on. My husband put his head in his hands.<\/p>\n

And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.<\/p>\n

Lesley M. M. Blume is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Everybody Behaves Badly<\/a>, now available from Eamon Dolan Books \/ Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A\u00a0hopeless\u00a0affair with\u00a0America\u2019s greatest\u2014and deceased\u2014man of letters. Last year, I confessed to my best friend that I had fallen in love with another man. When she heard this man\u2019s identity, she knew I was in trouble. \u201cFirst of all,\u201d she told me, \u201cyou\u2019re married. And so is he.\u201d \u201cI know,\u201d I said miserably. \u201cPlus, he has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":409,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[12672,5733,571,660,22668,22666,22665,22667,11480,5374,182,22664,10057,659],"class_list":["post-98980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-affairs","tag-correspondence-2","tag-ernest-hemingway","tag-f-scott-fitzgerald","tag-falling-in-love","tag-fitzgerald-archives","tag-fitzgerald-sketches","tag-hopeless-love","tag-jay-gatsby","tag-jazz-age","tag-letters","tag-princeton-library","tag-roaring-twenties","tag-the-great-gatsby"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFalling for Fitzgerald<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A hopeless affair with America\u2019s greatest\u2014and deceased\u2014man of letters\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/07\/falling-for-fitzgerald\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Falling for Fitzgerald by Lesley M.M. Blume\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 7, 2016 \u2013 A\u00a0hopeless\u00a0affair with\u00a0America\u2019s greatest\u2014and deceased\u2014man of letters.Last year, I confessed to my best friend that I had fallen in love with another man.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/07\/falling-for-fitzgerald\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-06-07T17:23:26+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-06-08T21:12:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/fitz.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"475\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Lesley M.M. 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