Madison Smartt Bell on F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The Great Gatsby," has been dissected by countless students and teachers. This week, during the 10th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Conference, skilled literary surgeons gathered in Baltimore will discuss that work and others. We asked author and Goucher College professor Madison Smartt Bell, who will deliver Thursday's keynote address, to give us a taste of Fitzgerald's influence and Baltimore connections. Luckily, Bell was able to squeeze it in among deadlines and preparations for the release of his novel, "Devil's Dream," due out in November. Here's Bell:
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote something memorable, if not especially complimentary, about Baltimore: “I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite.” Everybody has knows that bit, but…
Truth to tell, Fitzgerald never figured very large in my literary pantheon. I read "The Great Gatsby," voluntarily, in my early teens and didn’t like it much, and later on as a high school assignment and still didn’t like it much—I don’t know why not. I didn’t understand what the characters were all fussed up about, I think. I come from a handful of “old” Southern families, ruined once in the Civil War, ruined again in the Depression (the nineteen-thirties one I mean), and at the time of my two readings of Gatsby I was living on a working farm, mucking stalls and milking the cow, at the same time as attending a good prep school in Nashville, and social success as the kind of parvenu that Gatsby was didn’t seem that interesting a subject to me.
I don’t seriously mean my family’s old though, except that like yours it’s descended from Eve. I have a European friend who’s a seriously practicing anarchist, who can travel the circumference of the globe with luggage the size of a disco purse, and who knows the name of his ancestor who fought in the Crusades—now that’s an old family.
Another thing too, in my teens I read "A Moveable Feast," with more enthusiasm, and learned from Hemingway to despise Fitzgerald a little—for his weaknesses, real or alleged. The invidiousness of that I only understood much later, with a little help from Andrew Lytle.
The problem of inventing oneself, and persuading the audience your invention is real, was not being so successfully solved by the Fitzgeralds, Zelda and Scott, by the time they turned up in Baltimore, where they lived from 1932 to 1935. They came as consumers of mental health services. Zelda went straight to the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Fitzgerald rented a house on the Turnbull Estate, north of Baltimore, for her eventually to be released to.
I pass La Paix Lane regularly as a commuter along York Road (which used to be an Indian trail, but that’s another story). I was always mildly curious about the name, for it seems an odd spot for an avenue commemorating any sort of international or national or local but Francophone Peace. In fact it must have been the driveway to the house Fitzgerald rented, also called La Paix. It dead-ends now at the edge of the Saint Joseph’s Hospital Grounds. But when the Fitzgeralds lived there they could have walked across the Turnbull estate all the way to Sheppard Pratt Hospital, where Zelda also logged some time.
They quarreled, during their sojourn in Baltimore, over using the history they shared to make fiction. Zelda wrote "Save Me The Waltz." Scott wrote "Tender is the Night." Between the two publications they fought, like a cat and a dog, more like two dogs really, over the right to write what they’d lived together. One of these arguments was refereed by a shrink and recorded by a stenographer, to a length of more than a hundred pages. For some reason I picture it taking place on a deep shady porch of the La Paix house, overlooking a vast sun-dappled greensward, but given the content it is more likely to have happened behind multiply closed doors.
This dialogue was a marital squabble as well as an artistic dispute. Some choice morsels:
Scott: Our sexual relations were very pleasant and all that until I got the idea you were ditching me. They were all very nice to then, weren’t they?
Zelda: Well, I am glad you considered them satisfactory.
And Z: I think the cause of it is your drinking.
S: … if I ever stop drinking her family and herself would always think that was an acknowledgement that I was the cause of her insanity, which is not so.
And then Z: What is the matter with Scott is that he has not written that book and if he will ever get it written, why, he won’t feel so miserable and suspicious and mean towards everybody else.
S: It has got to be unconditional surrender on her part. … it is necessary that she give up the idea of writing anything… the important point is that she must only write when under competent medical assistance I say that she can write.
Ugly stuff, as you get toward end, and this conversation marked, for all practical purposes, the end of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage. After Zelda’s return to Phipps in 1934 they never lived together again.
I read "Tender is the Night" for the first time recently, and…. And. Yes, I do think it was worth it. Though the cost was tremendously high.
Now here’s the whole passage: “Baltimore is warm, but pleasant—I love it more than I thought. It is so rich with memories. It is nice to look up the street and see the statue of my great-uncle [Francis Scott Key]. And to know that 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. And I wouldn’t mind a bit if in a few years Zelda and I could snuggle up together under a stone in some graveyard here. That is a really happy thought and not melancholy at all.”
Quotations from the Fitzgeralds’ conversation at La Paix are from "Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald," by Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981) pp 349-353.
Photo by Caryn Coyle
