Eternally Modern F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Social Commentary Hasn’t Lost Its Appeal

Under glass in a university exhibit, a book published in 1922 shows a couple forever young. A tuxedo-clad man with a strong, jutting jaw line poses next to a fine-featured beauty with a thick, blond bob, her slender arms naked in an evening gown.

This fictional pair could be anyone, but it is no accident that they look almost exactly like the book’s author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his wife, Zelda.

Fitzgerald, born 100 years ago this week, made a career out of blurring the line between life and art, creating an irresistible image of youth, celebrity and excess - an image even more potent today than it was in the 1920s.

He was only 23 when he published “This Side of Paradise,” his first and immensely successful novel about the yearning and cynicism of a Princeton undergraduate. “Here was a new generation,” he wrote at the end, “… a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken …”

With these words, Fitzgerald established himself as the chronicler of an era - the one he christened the Jazz Age. But he could easily have been writing about the aspirations of aging baby boomers or the anxieties of Generation X. Eternally modern, Fitzgerald, like no other writer, is a bridge from the century’s start to its end, built by the lyricism of his fiction and the wild drama of his short life.

So omnipresent is Fitzgerald today it seems impossible anyone could grow up in America without knowing something about him. “The Great Gatsby,” along with “Romeo and Juliet” and “Hamlet,” has for decades been one of the top 10 required texts for high school juniors.

You might envision Fitzgerald looking something like Robert Redford, who played Fitzgerald’s misguided hero - Jay Gatsby, the dreamer who accumulates an illgotten fortune in a vain attempt to repeat the past and recapture the rich girl he loved years before.

Or maybe you rented your prom outfit at a formal-wear shop called Gatsby’s, or got your hair permed at Zelda’s salon. Maybe you got soused at one of the many bars called Gatsby’s or Zelda’s or Scott and Zelda’s, a somewhat insensitive homage considering the alcoholism that led to Fitzgerald’s heart attack at the sad age of 44. Princeton, where Fitzgerald went to school, is no exception: It, too, has a Zelda’s.

But the cultural icon that F. Scott Fitzgerald has become is far wider than all that. The very names - real and fictional - from Fitzgerald’s world summon images of youth, beauty, wealth and decadence, and the pursuit of only the best of times.

“The names have become synonymous with style,” says Princeton historian Don Skemer, who every Sunday searches The New York Times for a Fitzgerald reference and every Sunday finds success. One week a “Great Gatsby” passage in a book review about Afghanistan. The next, a 15-letter crossword answer: Fitzgeraldesque.

Skemer, an animated scholar with large glasses and a ready wit, is strolling among the glass cases of the Fitzgerald exhibit he organized for the Princeton University Library in honor of the Sept. 24 centenary.

“I’m not a Fitz-head,” says Skemer, curator of manuscripts for the library’s rare book and special collections department. “I’m just fascinated at how he works on two levels. On one level, he’s this serious writer studied by serious scholars. And on the other level, there’s this popular appeal.”

Skemer calls this “Pop Fitz” - a phenomenon far from popular with Fitzgerald’s most detailed biographer, Matthew J. Bruccoli, a grouchy defender of his subject’s work and character. As much as he worships the literature, Bruccoli despises the myth of Fitzgerald as talented youth and ruined genius.

“It detracts attention from what’s important,” he says, raising his voice on the phone from his office at the University of South Carolina. “And what’s important is little black marks on pieces of paper. These legends portray Fitzgerald as a fool and a clown and a weakling and irresponsible, and they interfere with the reader’s proper response. And, of course, the proper response is my response.”

But even Bruccoli acknowledges - grudgingly - that the Fitzgerald lore of glamour and decadence is “bait” for adolescent readers. And once they’ve bitten, some grow to savor the writing’s beauty and depth.

In other words, they have the Bruccoli response.

A trip through the Princeton exhibit, culled from its formidable collection of Fitzgerald’s papers, is a bit like seeing Madonna walking up your driveway licking an ice cream cone. It’s a myth made real, but the everyday details only enhance the mythology.

The glass cases start with a boyhood scrapbook from St. Paul, Minn., where Fitzgerald was born on Sept. 24, 1896. He was named for Francis Scott Key, the poet who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a distant relative of Fitzgerald’s father.

From those early days, the exhibit moves on to a display of lyrics for the musical “Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi,” which Fitzgerald wrote during his less-than-studious years as an undergraduate. Another case displays his Army enlistment from World War I when he was sent to the South and met Zelda Sayre. He declared her “the prettiest girl in Alabama and Georgia.”

With the publication of “This Side of Paradise” - a revision of an earlier rejection titled “The Romantic Egoist” - Zelda agreed to marry Fitzgerald in 1920 and the two embarked on a spree of celebration and celebrity that led one of their friends, the humorist Ring Lardner, to declare them “the prince and princess of their generation.”

The party rolls downhill from there. Photographs show Scott, Zelda and their daughter, Scottie, in Paris, smiling in a jaunty kick line in front of a Christmas tree, and standing, dignified, on an ocean-liner deck. It’s an impossibly handsome family, but life among the Lost Generation was all but smooth. A chart shows how sales declined on each of Fitzgerald’s novels. A letter from Ernest Hemingway chides him for being a “rummy.” An intense, geometric work of art is Zelda’s self-portrait, painted in the institution after her mental breakdown.

Fitzgerald spent his final years bloated with drink, struggling to make it as a Hollywood screenwriter. His final papers include the unfinished manuscript of “The Love of the Last Tycoon,” which some call his best work. They also include circled newspaper ads, one for a psychic “swami,” another for a lonely-hearts club. A postcard says, “Dear Scott: How are you. Have been meaning to come and see you …” Fitzgerald wrote it to himself.

In December 1940, he was making a list of Princeton’s most promising new football recruits when his heart stopped. The Times obituary said: “Roughly, his career began and ended with the Nineteen Twenties.”

It is 1974. Mia Farrow and Robert Redford, both wearing white, recline next to a stream sparkling in the golden afternoon sun. A breeze ruffles Farrow’s chiffon dress. A pair of swans drifts by.

Cut.

The blockbuster movie, “The Great Gatsby,” pushed the Fitzgerald renaissance from academic circles into popular consciousness. The acting was mostly awful but the sets and costumes were gorgeous, a superficial spectacle tailor-made for the Me Generation.

The Roaring Twenties revival “wasn’t an ironic retro-thing, like we have now,” says cultural commentator Douglas Coupland, who coined the term Generation X. “It was more like, ‘What a cool decade.”’

Magazines from March 1974 were full of Gatsby. Time called it “The Great Gatsby Supersell.” Gentleman’s Quarterly declared: “Gatsby Flair: The Movie That’s Influencing What You Wear.” In Town and Country, socialite Berry Berenson models “… as Daisy Buchanan.” From her Vidal Sassoon clip job to her knit wrap dress, she looks as much like Gatsby’s dream girl as a hoop skirt resembles an Armani suit.

Fitzgerald’s posthumous rise chimes in the public psyche. The moral of his stories about the dissipated rich was lost on struggling Depression-era Americans and the earnest patriots of the second World War. But with the first biography in 1951, a more prosperous nation was ready to re-embrace the Fitzgerald blend of irony and optimism - and revive the cult of materialism and youth.

Eleanor Lanahan, one of Fitzgerald’s granddaughters, says the fall from grace only helps the myth. “Somehow he’s more human because he got punished,” she says. “And it’s really fitting, because he was raised Catholic and he lived with this idea that you paid for every good time.”

Far from trying to hide how much he did pay, spiritually and financially, Fitzgerald wrote about it in confessional essays. In “How to Live on $36,000 a Year,” he wonders how he and Zelda managed to race through their generous income. His most famous mea culpa, “The Crack-up,” describes how - ill, drunk and in debt - he lived in a string of North Carolina hotels to be near his wife’s sanitarium. Here Fitzgerald was ahead of his time. Criticized then as self-indulgent whinings, these essays seem perfectly postmodern in the 1990s, when every other book is a memoir of dysfunction or recovery.

To pop culture scholar Karal Ann Marling, today’s relentless self-examination dovetails nicely with the Gatsby quest - the obsession with creating an idealized version of the past.

“That’s what therapy shows are all about. You can be Tammy Faye Bakker one day, down and out, and the next day be on national television,” Marling says. “That’s the quintessential American view of the world: that you can, in fact, fix the past and make everything wonderful again.”

Of course, the Gatsby lesson is that you can’t fix the past, as Marling points out in the final paragraph of her recent book, “Graceland: Going Home With Elvis.” On her own drive home, from Graceland to Minneapolis, Marling describes her weeping and gives her book a self-referential 1990s twist.

“… with Memphis back there someplace in the void beyond the rearview mirror, I cried. For all of us. Grampa and Grandma. Gatsby. Paw-paw. For poor Roseanne and love gone wrong. For O.J. For Elvis, bless his heart. And for me.”

Who knows how many people down their first martini in the name of old F. Scott? Or apply to Princeton with dreams of finding their own side of paradise? Upwards of 350,000 Fitzgerald books sell every year, more than he sold in his lifetime. The motivation for reading them is less important than their effect. His words have influenced countless writers and will surely influence countless more.

Tobias Wolff, author of “This Boy’s Life” and other acclaimed novels, remembers being a teenager in the 1950s and reading about some of Scott and Zelda’s wilder exploits - dancing in a fountain and driving a boat off a pier just to see how it felt.

“I thought, ‘How cool. How utterly cool.’ And then the work caught me, after the image.”

Wolff speaks with passion and awe about Fitzgerald’s style. He quotes, from memory, passages of “The Great Gatsby,” which he read for the first time during high school and still rereads for inspiration and nostalgia.

He thinks back on his adolescent excitement about the Fitzgerald mystique and says, “How young, how young …”