Fitzgerald's Follies: A Rambling Regarding Gatsby's Girl

My wife and I recently took a trip, by train, to Washington, D.C. We each brought books to read on the train. She finished hers a few hours shy of D.C. I, on the other hand, am a slow reader and was not even close to finishing my book, Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons. I was far, far from the end of the book when the train rolled into Union Station that evening.

Upon departure back to Greensboro, Mandy was faced with no reading prospects for the train. We stopped in the Barnes & Noble in Union Station and bought a couple books. She settled on Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

I found an interesting book entitled Gatsby's Girl. Even though I was surely not going to finish Thirteen Moons on the trip back, I still couldn't resist a good book purchase…

Interestingly enough, I ran into a snag in my reading (about an hour south of D.C.): I read to the bottom of a page, moved up to the next and stopped. I went back and tried the sentence again. Nope, didn't make sense. I tried it one more time before glancing up to see that I was missing about forty pages. Mandy had bought Thirteen Moons for me earlier this year, and I'd started it on a bed and breakfast trip for her birthday. For whatever reasons, though, I'd put it down and didn't return to it until this trip. So much for finishing it on this trip, I thought.

I picked up Gatsby's Girl and dove in.

Isn't it a wonderful thing to be deeply engrossed in, say, pre-Civil War North Carolina, following a tale of Cherokee removal, and then, with the close of one book and the opening of another, find yourself a hundred years removed and in suburban Chicago? That's fiction for you!

Anyway, Gatsby's Girl was excellent. It's reminiscent of a really good biopic. It has that feel of history and truth without actually being true. Caroline Preston did her research, and the novel swims expertly in the myth and man of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the roaring twenties. Much like my viewing of Julie Taymor's Titus, I followed the narrative with an every-so-often head nod of complete approval. In addition to breathing life into the myth of Fitzgerald, Preston also manages to create a unique, multi-dimensional female anti-hero in Ginevra Perry.

Here's the thing, though. I think I liked the book so much because I have a graduate school connection to F. Scott. I had the pleasure (long pause… soak in sarcasm… continue…) of taking a modern American literature class my second semester in graduate school. Lucky me, I drew Fitzgerald from the hat and had to research him, his work, etc. for a presentation to the rest of the class. It was also my job to lead discussion of Fitz's Tender is the Night.

I did what so many graduate students do: I smoke-and-mirrored my way through the "project." I did my "research," which involved lots of photocopying and very little actual reading. I skimmed a less than authoritative biography and then read the novel. In the end, my presentation was certainly not the best in the class, but it certainly was not the worst.

Nobody in the class liked Fitzgerald (Hack! Hack! they screamed), and only a few actually read Tender is the Night. Now, it's important to point out that English graduate students can be a pretentious bunch who think an awful lot of themselves. My classroom experiences boiled down to either intellectual group masturbation sessions or pissing contests.

Or both.

How could a self-respecting (puffed out chest, upturned nose) English graduate student claim to like the elementary prose of a short, overly self-conscious ponce like Fitzgerald? Famed for publishing stories in the Saturday Evening Post?! Why that's like publishing a limerick in the Reader's Digest!

Now, James Joyce…

And let's face it, Fitz had his faults. A self-proclaimed outsider, he never really fit in to either the life that had been given him (poor; crazy mother) nor the one he made for himself (popular writer; half of a nutty celebrity couple). All the faux glitz and longing in his writing came from a very personal place-- and, much like Preston's novel suggests, he was never really able to completely distance himself from himself in his work.

I guess you can say, though, that I developed an affinity to Fitzgerald that semester.

I'm not a champion of the underdog; rather, I like to think of it more as a symptom of my empathetic heart. And so, I clicked with Fitz-- and Tender is the Night. I found something worth attending to in the book and the man.

Plus, he looked good in a dress (see pic).

He was a wonderful, tragic failure. His success only punctuated the weaknesses he saw in himself. His relationship with Zelda was a grand escape that always circled back to a truth too shocking: This world isn't built for deeply caring or deeply affecting people.

Interestingly enough, that last statement circles us back to Gatsby's Girl and the other point I made earlier about Ginevra Perry. In some ways, Fitzgerald represents the extreme outside, the man who can't find self-love and so caterwauls through a self-destructive life. Ginevra Perry, on the other hand, is full of self-love, but the results are much the same (if a bit more mundane and a little less self-destructive).

Huh? Well, I'll take that "deeply affecting" part.

Ginevra is a hottie. Everyone falls in love with her; everyone is entranced by her. But that doesn't mean that she's got it made, that she's fulfilled. Fitzgerald, with his nose pressed against the glass looking in, sees only the pretty girl-- and uses her as a cypher for his own thoughts and insecurities.

I'm reminded of comments I've made in regards to the myth of Cupid and Psyche. I like to call Psyche the "poor little pretty girl." Everyone loves her for her looks but not for her inner being. The "Don't hate me because I’m beautiful" thing.

Here, though, we have Ginevra who doesn't realize that being loved for her looks isn't fulfilling. (This is probably Preston's greatest achievement: the creation of a truly selfish character with which we can identify and sympathize.) It comes as quite a shock to her that she's not happy-- because everything in her life has gone exactly as she thought it should. She throws Scott Fitzgerald over because he's not a solid match-- he's not the tall, handsome aviator. She gets her aviator, but that doesn't make her happy. She has daddy's money, kids (that she doesn't really want), an affair, and an outwardly "perfect" life.

But her secret longing (her unfulfillment) manifests in her greedy savoring of herself in Fitzgerald's published works.

It's as if she loves her fictionalized self more than her real self.

Eventually, she gets it. We get it.

Hmm… Yeah, that works. But… Where was I?

Fitzgerald appeals to me because of his tragic flaws. He was obviously talented (despite boos from the bleachers), but as part of that "lost generation," he had no way of balancing his inadequacies with his talents. There's something deeply human about that.

And despite the morbidity of it, I'd add that there's also something comforting about that.