Meyers - Scott fitzgerald: a biography

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the assistance I received while writing this book. My friend Jackson Bryer encouraged and helped from the very beginning; and the University of California at Berkeley appointed me a Visiting Scholar. For interviews I would like to thank Sally Abeles-Gran, Ellen Barry, Helen Blackshear, Fanny Myers Brennan, Tony Buttitta, Alexander Clark, Honoria Murphy Donnelly, Virginia Foster Durr, Marie Jemison, Frances Turnbull Kidder, Eleanor Lanahan, Ring Lardner, Jr., Joseph Mankiewicz, Margaret Finney McPherson, Julian and Leslie McPhillips, Edgar Allan Poe III, Landon Ray, Frances Kroll Ring, Budd Schulberg, Courtney Sprague Vaughan and Hugh Wynne.

During my quest for Bijou OConor I also interviewed Sir Brinsley Ford, the Earl of Minto, Michael OConor, Gillian Plazzota and Sir William Young; and received letters from Frances Bebis, Anthony Blond, Claire Eaglestone of Balliol College, Margaret Elliot of the Elliot Clan Society, William Furlong, Francis King, Joyce Markham of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Honourable Mary Alington Marten and the National Portrait Gallery, London.

During my search for Beatrice Dance I received help from Bond Davis, Helen Handley, Joan Sanger and Dan Laurence as well as from the Bexar County Courthouse, the Historical Society of San Antonio, the San Antonio Bar Association, the San Antonio Conservation Society and the San Antonio Public Library.

For other letters about Fitzgerald I am grateful to Sally Taylor Abeles, David Astor, Dr. Benjamin Baker, John Biggs III, Jonathan Bishop, Sarah Booth Conroy, Anthony Curtis, the Marquess of Donegall, Maureen, Marchioness of Donegal, Susan Mok Einarson, Armand Forel, Ian Hamilton, Valerie Hemingway, John Howell, Samuel Lanahan, Whitney Landon, Richard Lehan, Allan Margolies, Samuel Marx, Linda Miller, Dr. Paul Mok, David Page, Henry Dan Piper (who sent me the notes of interviews he conducted in the 1940s), Anthony Powell, Ruth Prigozy, Cecilia Lanahan Ross, Marie Sauer, Meryle Secrest, Henry Senber, Dodgie Shaffer, Robert Squier, Joan Kennedy Taylor, Rosalind Wilson, Archer Winsten and Roger Wunderlich.

I received useful information from the following institutions and libraries: the Alabama Department of Archives and History; the Archdiocese of Baltimore (Reverend Paul Thomas); the Association of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers; Bryn Mawr School, Baltimore; BBC Television (Jill Evans); the Lord Chamberlains Office, Buckingham Palace; Highland Hospital (Carol Anne Freeman); Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts; National Archives and Records Administration, St. Louis; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; National Sound Archive, London; Harold Ober Associates; Hpital de Prangins; Public Broadcasting Service, Alexandria, Virginia; Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, Montgomery, Alabama; the Embassy of Switzerland; and Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital (Eleanor Barnhart). Also: the Firestone Library, Princeton University (the main collection of Fitzgeralds papers); Catholic University of America; Cornell University; Harvard University; Southern Illinois University; the University of Alabama, Birmingham; the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; the University of Cincinnati; the University of Delaware; the University of Pennsylvania; Stanford University and Yale University.

As always, my wife, Valerie Meyers, scrutinized each chapter.

Poe and Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald was influenced not only by Poes literary works, but also by a keen awareness of the parallels between Poes life and his own. Both men were the same height and weight: five feet eight inches and 140 pounds. Both had eminent ancestors: Poes grandfather was a quartermaster in the Revolutionary Army, Fitzgerald was descended from Francis Scott Key. But since Poes father was an alcoholic actor and Fitzgeralds father a pathetic failure, the writers, uneasy about their dubious social status, were attracted to old families and envied solid wealth. Both emphasized the dark side of their character by falsely claiming to be descended from the Revolutionary War traitor, Benedict Arnold. Though Poe was born in Boston and Fitzgerald in St. Paul, they associated themselves with the Southern gentility and courtly manners of Virginia (where Poe grew up) and of Maryland (where Fitzgeralds father was raised). Poe left the University of Virginia, as Fitzgerald left Princeton, without graduating. After serving as an enlisted man, Poe was expelled from West Point; Fitzgerald had an undistinguished career in American military camps and never crossed the ocean to fight in the European war.

Fitzgerald strongly identified with the histrionic personality of Poe, whose tragic life initiated the pattern of the self-destructive American writer that Fitzgerald was to follow. In This Side of Paradise , Amory Blaine reads The Fall of the House of Usher and used to go for far walks by himselfand wander along reciting Ulalume to the cornfields, and congratulating Poe for drinking himself to death in that atmosphere of smiling complacency. Both men were alcoholics who became drunk after only one or two glasses, often lost control of themselves, and acted in an abject and humiliating manner. Like Poe, Fitzgerald sometimes drank for a week at a time, was jailed for drunkenness and sobered up in towns like Brussels without any idea of how he had got there. Francis Melarky, the hero of Our Type , an early version of Tender is the Night , suggests a modern counterpart of the myth of Edgar Poe. A Southerner who had been dismissed from West Point, Melarky later gets into a drunken brawl and falls into habits of waste and dissipation.

Though the pattern of Poes life was tragic, Fitzgerald was proud of their similarities. When he visited Baltimore in September 1935, he found the decadent city warm and pleasant, and nostalgically wrote: I love it more than I thoughtit is so rich with memoriesit is nice to look up the street and see the statue of my great uncle and to know Poe is buried here and that many ancestors of mine have walked in the old town by the bay. I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.

Both men proposed to their beloved in a cemetery and had tragic marriages. Virginia Poe died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four; Zelda Fitzgerald became insane when she was twenty-nine. Fitzgerald tutored his mistress Sheilah Graham just as Poe had tutored Virginia. Both men wasted their artistic talent as hack writers for popular magazines, yet were desperately short of money and frequently had to borrow from their friends. Poe ruined his chances by offending influential literary editors just as Fitzgerald did with powerful film producers. Both attempted suicide, and pleaded with women to save them from their self-destructive impulses. Both authors suffered from hypoglycemia, which made it difficult to metabolize alcohol, died from the effects of drink and were buried in the state of Maryland. Their reckless personal life damaged their literary reputations, and their work was not revived until many years after their deaths.

Fitzgeralds identification with Poe was strengthened during his own decline in the 1930s by his friendship with the lawyer Edgar Allan Poe, Jr., who was a collateral descendant of the writer and had been at Princeton with Fitzgerald. Early in 1937 Fitzgerald mentioned the lawyers name to a friend and then exclaimed: Conceive of thatEdgar Allan Poe and Francis Scott Key, the two Baltimore poets a hundred years after!

Zeldas Illness

First breakdown:

April 23May 2, 1930 (ten days). Malmaison Hospital, west of Paris. Treated by Professor Claude. Discharged herself against the doctors wishes.

May 22June 4, 1930 (two weeks). Valmont Clinic, Glion, above Montreux, in Switzerland. Dr. H. A. Trutman. Transferred from a hospital that treated physical disease to a psychiatric clinic.