Portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda by Alfred Cheney Johnston, 1923

Source: Public Domain

I’ve been catching up on my reading of late, and here’s the one and only Papa Hemingway’s advice to writers: “Don’t let them suck you in to start writing about the proletariat, if you don’t come from the proletariat, just to please the recently politically enlightened critics.” Hear, hear! Leave it to Papa to tell unpalatable truths, especially true today with the proles all-conquering and the nobs in hasty retreat. Papa was right to warn us.

As it’s Christmas time, Hemingway’s advice on what we should be reading during the holiest of Christian dates is: “John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, because it’s by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well.” Papa was at times rough on O’Hara, another of my hero writers, stating in an interview that we should all chip in and send John to an Ivy League University. The rambunctious and heavy-drinking Irish-American was a terrific writer, and held Ivy Leaguers with impeccable backgrounds in high esteem, but so did the great Scott Fitzgerald, or did he?

I’ve just finished the umpteenth book on the tragic Scott, and will get back to his Princeton problem in a jiffy, but first some more about Papa. Hemingway reinvented modern American prose, and his best work is deeply moving and rich in meaning and psychological complexity. He also lived on an epic scale in fascinating times and in fascinating places. None of those grungy, dirty tenements and lowlifes for Papa to write about. He and F. Scott wrote about the upper classes and their salubrious whereabouts. Papa was mythologized by the masses for his bravado both in life and in his fiction. Fitzgerald was greatly misunderstood because of his drunken shenanigans early in his life. People forget that Scott hit the big time in his very early 20s, and was considered finished by the time he was 30. Both Papa and Scott were masters at their game, both turned their storytelling into melodies, and both knew that only bad novelists are editorialists for their own convictions. Both were later on betrayed by their bodies due to booze, and in Hemingway’s case terrible head injuries caused by not one but two airplane crashes in the same week.

Yep, neither Scott nor Papa editorialized, instead letting the reader make up his mind, the sign of a great writer. In Dick Diver, Jay Gatsby, and Monroe Stahr, the reader encountered a series of ill-fated characters unable to overcome personal weaknesses. Fitzgerald knew all about that. Papa had set the stage with lean, hard, athletic prose in The Sun Also Rises, where Jake Barnes had his manhood shot off during the war through no fault or weakness of his own. The rhythm, the idioms, the pauses of that first novel of his set the standard for living speech. Frederic and Catherine’s tragedy in A Farewell to Arms was again through no fault of their own, but the vicissitudes of life.

Scott blamed it on personal weaknesses, Papa on life; both were right, Scott being more critical, whereas Papa was more romantic. Fitzgerald’s characters were injured by wealth, Hemingway’s by fate. Neither writer liked the rich, and Scott got a raw deal because he wrote about them. In real life, Scott warned his daughter at Vassar “not to go Park Avenue,” as he saw the ruling WASPs of the time (and old Princeton classmates) as vulgar when compared with his Baltimore clan. He called the Tom Buchanan character in Gatsby “the one percent at its worst.” The growing power of industrialists and financiers (read the techies of today) offended Scott’s romantic sensibilities, and he wondered if this rising republic of consumers could ever recover its old idealism. He depicted those doubts so brilliantly in the shimmering green light that watches silently over Gatsby’s grand illusion.

Fitzgerald’s moral concern about corruptive wealth and a culture too impressed by fame and fortune would stand up today, in fact today more than ever. Papa also held the rich in contempt, and in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” calls the rich “dull and repetitious and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon.” Both men had some very rich and good friends like Winston Guest in Papa’s case, and Gerald and Sarah Murphy in Scott’s. Both writers died much too young, Papa at 60, Scott at 40. But even dead, both men have remained more alive than ever in their novels, especially because those who came after them were dead already.