A Gin Rickey on Cold Stone
Not far from here is St. Mary’s Catholic Church, a big complex with its own school, where years ago on a September evening my daughter attended her first dance. When we arrived, she was mortified that I pulled into a spot and shut off the engine. ‘You’re not going to stay here, are you?’ she asked. That would throw a serious wrench into finding her friends and disappearing into the large crowd of eager Seventh Graders.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We’re going to go see the guy who wrote the book on Friday nights.’ My wife and I were headed to the cemetery on the other end of the property.
More than 80 years after his death, the grave of author F. Scott Fitzgerald still attracts admirers, many of whom leave bottles of gin, large and small, as well as coins or pens in tribute. When my wife and I arrived, we realized with some surprise that somebody was already there. A young woman was holding a gloomy vigil, seated at the grave in the growing darkness.
We stood back to be polite. ‘Both Scott and his wife Zelda are buried here,’ I whispered.
The woman rose and walked off.
Quickly, I knelt next to the stone for a few pictures, hoping the woman would see we’d soon be gone. She seemed to need the visit more than we did.
A novelist, essayist, short story, and screen writer, Fitzgerald wrote about life, love, meaning, and desire in numerous combinations. In so doing he chronicled the ‘excesses and flamboyance of the Jazz Age,’ as introductory descriptions so often say, but really he was interested in the excitement of being young in an America that had just saved Europe in the First World War and was fast transforming into a modern society. Fitzgerald’s great talent was his crystal clarity, which could impart all the promise of a crisp Fall day on the leafy Princeton campus or the the sense of Fate Knocking as a train rumbles into a station. His landscapes set the emotional scene, whether it’s the sun’s limitless reflection shimmering on the ocean, wind and snow angrily slanting across an empty golf course, or on a summer’s evening, music floating out of the country club, down the lawn, and out across a moonlit and silent lake. These are the hearts of his young male characters laid bare, and on this ground the entanglements with beautiful, fearless young women are exhilarating and often terrifying. We feel the turmoil of young men with uncertain futures.
Fitzgerald’s was an uncertain life, perhaps marked most significantly by the heartbreak of losing his first love, the glamorous Chicago debutante Ginevra King, the result of his apparently limited financial prospects. He then fell in with another debutante, the Southern belle Zelda Sayre, glamorous and exciting in her own way but increasingly difficult after they were married, to the point of needing numerous sanitarium stays. Fitzgerald ultimately became a figure of frustration and defeat. When he could find moments to himself, he produced works of genius. However, his peers and publishers lamented, Zelda was crippling his ability to produce more novels. She insisted on the easy money that short stories would always bring, the better to support the high rolling lifestyle they had adopted, decadence and excess that seemed to be a counterpoint to the strain of marital unhappiness and Zelda’s private demons. Even on their wedding day, Fitzgerald knew he was making a terrible mistake.
The courses of his characters’ lives are determined by mostly critical moments in courtship, but also at school, the country club, or office. Fitzgerald’s trajectory is the most errant of them all. In one experience perhaps too cruel to commit to paper, Fitzgerald was reunited late in life with his long lost love, Ginevra. He dreaded the meeting, since he had forever held in his mind’s eye an idealized version of her - and he certainly couldn’t bear the thought of her seeing what had become of him.
He had drunk himself to death by the age of 44. It’s enough to make one wonder what might be happening beneath the ground at St. Mary’s. Is he desperate to escape the suffocation created byZelda? Are all those people brooding at his graveside or leaving bottles of gin having similar crises in their lives?
It’s not a crisis and maybe even not a shortcoming, but my connection to Fitzgerald has been less a brooding vigil and more a mere set of snapshots. I’ve long been a fan but not an expert. In fact, those paragraphs above represent my deepest attempt to understand his life. In college, intrigued by a class discussion of his story ‘Winter Dreams’ and assigned a paper on an author of my choosing, I found myself in the Fitzgerald section of the stacks down on a basement level of the library. I was immediately captivated by a short story entitled ‘The Sensible Thing.’
Panicked, delaying the inevitable as long as he can, the desperate and unhappy young insurance clerk George O’Kelly rushes several hundred miles from New York to his Tennessee hometown to convince his love, Jonquil, not to lose faith in him or his prospects for providing a stable basis for marriage. Despite a degree in engineering at MIT and dreams of steel, concrete, and skyscrapers, he is stuck professionally and consequently bankrupt - financially and emotionally.
His relationship with Jonquil dissolves within hours, minutes really, of his arrival. The ‘sensible thing’ of the title is her mothers’ gentle suggestion that it’s time to move on. George feels ‘ridiculous and weak;’ his farewell at the train station is marked by an ‘ill-concealed agony.’
‘Dumb, almost blind with pain, he seized his suitcase, and in some dazed way got himself aboard the train.’
It’s as brutal as the next scene is awesome: 15 months later, George steps off a train at that same platform. He’s tanned, scarred, and cuts a rugged, swashbuckling figure. He’s been in Cuzco, Peru, raising a city from the jungle. He had lucked into a surveying expedition and then suddenly into an important role when one of the lead engineers died of yellow fever. His life and his prospects have turned around entirely.
At the time I read this, early freshman year in college, I too had recently undergone a brutal separation from a girlfriend as we headed off to separate colleges. Our futures had been tossed into the air as dramatically as George’s, which made a similar validation an ambition of mine as well.
George and Jonquil do not reunite. ‘There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice,’ Fitzgerald says. However, as the two stroll during his visit, they lock eyes in an instant that surprises them both. It’s their first truthful moment in the midst of a giant pretense, but the significance is clear: the score has changed, and they both know it.
That was the happy ending for me, his showing her what he was truly made of. I ignored the rest of it.
When I was a high school sophomore, my English class studied THE GREAT GATSBY, an experience that went largely over my head. I grasped the descriptions of Gatsby’s grand parties and all the excess, but I utterly lacked the life experience and emotional depth to pick up on the longings and cruelties Fitzgerald also depicted, let alone that he was expressing disillusionment with the idea of winning one’s way back into someone’s heart. It’s possible that Fitzgerald did once feel that success and daring were all a man needed to win at life, but many of his short stories make us realize that’s not so easily done or even true for the guys who do hit the ball straight down the fairway. Maybe the short stories show an evolution of thought, or maybe he was circumspect about the ‘Jazz Age’ all along.
I’m the simpler case study. Decades ago I was concerned only with heartbreak and the need to prevail over it one way or another. Now I’m worldly enough to pick up some of Fitzgerald’s misgivings even as his direction seems clear. I had completely glossed over how in ‘The Sensible Thing,’ George is struck with a realization upon his triumphant return to Tennessee: ‘For four long seasons every minute of his leisure had been crowded with anticipation of this hour, and now this hour was here. He had thought of finding her married, engaged, in love--he had not thought she would be unstirred at his return.’
She’s ‘unstirred?’ How’s a guy supposed to swagger in and win the day - win that long year and win her heart if she’s not emotionally invested? Things change, Fitzgerald is telling us. All those absolutes by which a young man can chart his course might not be so absolute after all.
Now I’m thinking about those brooding vigils and the bottles of gin left at Fitzgerald’s grave. Maybe those people are not commiserating. Maybe they did find themselves in a tough spot, but they’re thanking the Master for one of his lessons. ‘You taught me to see truths I would have missed otherwise. Can I buy you a drink?’
