Fitzgerald at 100 The citizens of Minnesota gather to celebrate one of their own Our columnist reports
McCarthy, Abigail
ABIGAIL MCCARTHY FITZGERALD AT 1OO Great fiction, great history F Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), one of the most influential and famous of American writers, left behind a body of work that defined...
...I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name...
...Among the writers-as-readers were E.L...
...Although Fitzgerald joined the parties and chronicled them, he wrote in judgment," Bruccoli writes...
...His mother's mercantile family was on the edge of the Saint Paul ascendancy, the scions of the traders, and the lumber and railroad barons who developed the city...
...It stretched from September 24 through September 28 with a marathon reading of Fitzgerald's novels and short stories by actors and writers and Fitzgerald connections like his granddaughter Eleanor Lanahan and his wife Zelda's cousin, Robert Sayre...
...Thus he wrote of Tom and Daisy Buchanan (Westerners by his definition), They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...
...The planned events ranged from the unveiling of a bronze statue of Fitzgerald, the issue of a Fitzgerald stamp, and a festive theater parade to a special live broadcast of "A Prairie Home Companion," featuring Fitzgerald and a Great Gatsby Ball...
...And in the end, Carraway concludes that he, and the other characters— Gatsby, Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Jordan Baker—were "Westerners...
...It is generally agreed that his The Love of the Last Tycoon, even unfinished, is the best novel ever written about the movies—the quintessential American industry of the twentieth century...
...We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again...
...He attended private schools with their young—Saint Paul Academy, Newman, Princeton—and his time at these schools served to intensify his feeling that he was always near, but never really of, great wealth...
...According to Keillor there was a time that "Saint Paul was wary of Fitzgerald's flamboyance and his alcoholism, and perhaps it was embarrassed by his burnout and all the small, mean anecdotes told about him, but now it's time to celebrate him as the magnificent writer and brave man that he was...
...But he was of Saint Paul...
...subtly, unadaptable to Eastern life...
...Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o'clock of a December evening with a few Chicago friends already caught up into their own holiday gaieties to bid them a hasty goodbye...
...Perhaps the best evaluation of his work is Fitzgerald's own, in a letter to his daughter at college: "I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur" (italics mine).r" (italics mine...
...Appropriately enough, the biggest celebration of the Fitzgerald centennial was organized in Saint Paul by radio personality Garrison Keillor of "A Prairie Home Companion...
...In the same way, Fitzgerald as a screenwriter in his last years was part of the movie industry world...
...Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli notes this in his introduction to Gatsby and adds, "great fiction is great social history...
...In The Great Gatsby, the novel most evocative of Fitzgerald's genius, the character who is his alter ego, Nick Car-raway, writes that he comes from "a country of wide lawns and friendly trees...
...That's my middle-west—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow...
...What struck me most forcibly was the realization that, unlike many writers today whose books seem to come from a world apart and smell of academe, he wrote as a man of his own time about his time...
...Rockville, Maryland, where Fitzgerald is buried in the family plot in Saint Mary's Cemetery, has held a year-long observance culminating on September 28 in a literary conference at Montgomery College, at which author William Styron was awarded the first F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Award and read from Fitzgerald's works...
...Fitzgerald understood his world...
...As one writer asked to participate in the Saint Paul marathon, I reread Fitzgerald...
...Doctorow, Donald Hall, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jane Smiley, Michael Dorris, Patricia Hampl, etc...
...His characters are in this great drama seeking God and seeking love...
...There was an element of the prodigal son in the Saint Paul celebration...
...His Gatsby rose and fell in the context of the realities and illusions of that era of which the author was a part...
...It was finally recognized that, as he himself said, his portrayal of life was essentially moral...
...Fitzgerald may lie among his father's ancestors in Maryland but he himself was formed and his view of life determined by his upbringing in Saint Paul, Minnesota, his birthplace...
...The observance will end with a memorial service at Saint Mary's Church in December...
...One of my most vivid memories is of coming back west from prep school and later from college at Christmas time...
...Because this September 24 was his hundredth birthday, there have been widespread celebrations of the Fitzgerald centennial throughout the year, including the reissuing of Fitzgerald's The Jazz Age (New Directions...
...Fitzgerald's feeling about the very rich, epitomized in the famous quotation "The very rich are different from you and me," began in his Saint Paul experience...
...ABIGAIL MCCARTHY FITZGERALD AT 1OO Great fiction, great history F Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), one of the most influential and famous of American writers, left behind a body of work that defined an age—"the jazz age"—and a generation, and did much to illuminate the American character and probe the American soul...
...When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air...
...In the end he was uncompromising about writing its story well...
...When Cardinal William Baum secured permission for the interment of the nonpracticing Catholic Fitzgerald in a Catholic cemetery, he described Fitzgerald as "an artist who was able, with lucidity and poetic imagination, to portray the struggle between grace and death...
...But at the end of his life his genius returned and was evident in the brilliant, unfinished novel The Love of the Last Tycoon...
...It was also the decade of the beginnings of organized crime and unprincipled speculation in the stock market...
...For example, The Great Gatsby is accepted as the defining novel of the twenties—the get-rich-quick decade of opportunity, great possibilities, and hedonistic pleasure...
...It is true that, after the halcyon days of American writers and artists in Paris, when Fitzgerald himself was wealthy enough so that he and Zelda moved among the rich with ease, Fitzgerald seemed to lose his compass and his gift...
Vol. 123 • October 1996 • No. 17
