It’s going to be a big deal when some 200 scholars from around the world meet in St. Paul next Sunday for the weeklong 14th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society conference, a celebration and exploration of the life and work of the St. Paul native son considered one of the giants of American literature.
Fitzgerald is so embedded in popular culture that John Grisham’s new novel, “Camino Island,” is about stolen Fitzgerald manuscripts. And the folk-rock band Fleet Foxes’ new album is titled “Crack-up,” a reference to Fitzgerald’s 1936 essays about being in despair.
The Fitzgerald conference, which alternates between Europe and the United States, was held here in 2002, and participants had such a good time they’re returning. Stu Wilson, president of the host organization, Fitzgerald in St. Paul, says the international event has never before gathered in the same city twice.
Scholars are coming from all over the United States, as well as England, Holland, Germany, Iran, Sweden, Scotland, Japan, Australia, India and Macedonia. An example of Fitzgerald’s global impact is Raheleh Akhavizadegan of the University of Tehran, who will speak at the conference about Fitzgerald’s short story “Winter Dreams,” set in fictional Black Bear, Minn., a state that’s about as far from Iran as you can get.
High-profile presenters include Anne Margaret Daniel, editor of “I’d Die for You,” the last complete collection of Fitzgerald stories; Scott Donaldson, former Minnesotan and Fitzgerald biographer; James L. West III, general editor of the Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition; Greg Barnhisel of Duquesne University, and A. Scott Berg, a consultant and executive producer of Amazon Studios television series based on “The Last Tycoon,” Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel. Among local presenters is Hmong-American Kao Kalia Yang, author of “The Song Poet.”
Although the 70 papers to be presented offer a wide range of perspectives on Fitzgerald’s work, a foundation of the conference is how important St. Paul was to Fitzgerald, who was born at 481 Laurel Ave. in 1896. He attended St. Paul Academy until he was 15, when he left for the Newman School in New Jersey. In 1913, he enrolled in Princeton University but returned to St. Paul in 1919 broke and unhappy because Zelda Sayre broke off their engagement. With nothing to lose, he re-wrote “This Side of Paradise” and became the inventor — and chronicler — of the Jazz Age. After their marriage, Scott and Zelda returned for the birth of their daughter, Scottie.
Fitzgerald never came back to St. Paul after 1922 (despite urban legends that place him at various places in town over the years). But he kept in touch with his St. Paul boyhood friends until his death in Hollywood in 1940 at the home of his lover, columnist Sheilah Graham. He was only 44.
MEET THE HOST
The not-for-profit organization Fitzgerald in St. Paul is only 5 years old, but it has grown up so fast it is hosting this world conference and has just published its first book, “F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer & His Friends at Home,” written by Minnesota Fitzgerald scholar Dave Page with photos by Minnesota photographer Jeff Krueger.
“We have grown beyond our expectations,” says president Stu Wilson, who helped shepherd the organization from its beginnings at Fitzgerald’s birthplace on Laurel Avenue, where University of Minnesota speech-language-hearing sciences professor Richard P. McDermott lived for 35 years. Following his retirement, McDermott became a passionate promoter of Fitzgerald’s work and story.
Before McDermott died in 2012, he set up a fund with instructions, as Wilson puts it, “to go forth and do more to promote Fitzgerald but also to do more for Fitzgerald in St. Paul.”
Wilson is proud of the the concrete things the organization has done in three years (it took two years to get organized), including running Fitzgerald programs for the library, co-sponsoring with Common Good Books bookstore the monthly reading series Fitz@Four, and hosting the annual McDermott Lecture, as well as facilitating one-time fundraisers at Fitzgerald sites that drew attention to the organization.
Success is in numbers, and Wilson points out that he has a thousand people on the organization’s contact list and more people are attending programs.
“I get emails and phone calls almost every day now, from Rotary Clubs to Chinese students coming to study the American dream,” he said. “People are even asking how to hold weddings at a Fitzgerald site. I did not expect that.”
EDITING THE LAST UNPUBLISHED STORIES
Anne Margaret Daniel will be a main speaker at the conference, discussing how she edited “I’d Die for You,” made up of the final stories and screen scenarios by Fitzgerald that were found by the estate’s trustees in a bank vault in 2012. Most of these stories were never published, although some were purchased by magazine editors. Critics agree some of these stories are not very good, but they all applaud Daniel’s clear and cogent introductions tracing the stories’ development and putting them in perspective.
“These stories are predominantly from the middle and late 1930s,” Daniel said in an interview while vacationing in Nova Scotia. “They are not from the Jazz Age but from the Great Depression, and they feel like that.”
The Depression was not a happy time for Fitzgerald, who’d been a celebrity with a beautiful wife and money to burn just a decade earlier.
His health was not good after years of drinking, and he was struggling to make enough money to keep Zelda in an expensive mental hospital and pay daughter Scottie’s tuition at Vassar. Editors of some of important national magazines, who had paid as much as $54,000 (in today’s dollars) for a Fitzgerald story, turned down his darker work. They wanted the lighthearted stories like those from the 1920s.
“Fitzgerald wanted to stretch, ‘opening a new vein,’ as he said, but that isn’t what the editors wanted, and who knows what the readers wanted,” Daniel said. “It’s clear that ‘The Crack-Up’ made a sensation when it appeared in Esquire. It is not a jolly, happy read. Interestingly, a lot of people who had not been his readers before and fell on hard times sent him letters about being in the same boat, struggling with problems of poverty and troubles the way Fitzgerald was. If some of these stories, like the title one, had been published at the time, response would have been sympathetic and enthusiastic.”
Two of the stories, “Thumbs Up” and “Dentist Appointment,” are different versions of a tale about a man who’s hung by his thumbs during the Civil War and show how Fitzgerald played with alternate endings. In “Dentist Appointment,” his elegant prose shows in a description of St. Paul in 1866:
“The rude town was like a great fish just hauled out of the Mississippi and still leaping and squirming on the bank.”
Daniel describes as “garbage” the idea that Fitzgerald was a golden party boy, out playing and drinking, who somehow wrote beautiful stories and novels.
“This man was a professional writer from his earliest days,” she says. “I have seen his revisions. He never stopped revising, even after his stories and novels were published. There are changes throughout a first edition of ‘The Great Gatsby.’ He was still tinkering with perfection.”
FITZGERALD IN HOLLYWOOD
In 1936, Fitzgerald headed for Hollywood, hoping to make more money. He wrote screenplays that never were filmed, but he was finding joy in writing “The Last Tycoon,” a novel about Hollywood.
A. Scott Berg, who jokes that he’s “the Fitzgerald cop” on the set of Amazon’s show inspired by the novel, points out that Fitzgerald was trying to make a comeback in the last years of his life.
“For many years, everybody talked about how Fitzgerald died poor and forgotten,” Berg says. “I am one of the proponents of the fact that his last year or two in Hollywood were among the best in his life. He was working on what would be his last novel, had fallen in love with Sheilah. His health seemed OK and he was off the bottle for awhile. He appeared to be gaining mental and physical health. The tragedy in the midst of this period of productive work is that he should have a sudden heart attack. He was also making some very good money doing work on movies. He didn’t like the work, but he liked the paycheck. I would say he was going out on a high note, doing perhaps the best writing he had ever done.”
Berg is uniquely qualified to oversee production details on the “The Last Tycoon” set, which has been widely praised by critics, because he has written biographies of literary editor Maxwell Perkins, who discovered Fitzgerald, and studio head Samuel Goldwyn. He will present at the conference with Christopher Keyser, a co-executive producer of the show.
“I am there to see that they remain faithful to and appreciate the material, that nobody violates the spirit of the plot, where Fitzgerald might have taken this,” Berg says. “We don’t know what the book would have ended up as (but) we did not want to junk this up. Fitzgerald had a very distinct sensibility and and my primary concern is to remind everybody that he was writing a romance here, and the romance was the protagonist’s love interests, but also the romance of Hollywood. He loved Hollywood and the characters in the book love Hollywood.”
A VIEW FROM THE SOUTH
Shawn Sudia-Skehan, a board member of the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Zelda’s hometown of Montgomery, Ala., re-read “The Great Gatsby” as an adult and was so moved she began researching a book about Fitzgerald. Along the way she collected dozens of pictures of the Fitzgeralds from five collections around the country, including the Minnesota Historical Society.
She is sharing some of these images as curator of “Sight Unseen: Rare Photographs of F. Scott Fitzgerald with His Family and Friends,” open to the public at the George Latimer Central Library in St. Paul.
“One of my goals is to counteract a lot of falsehoods that have been portrayed about Mr. Fitzgerald for years, and that have continued a lot lately,” she admits. “People wrote about how horrible he was. They maintained Zelda did all of the writing and that he abused her. The more I read the angrier I got, and I started researching my book.”
Her second goal is “to let people know there is a lot out there, not just what’s been published over and over.”
Fitzgerald’s papers are scattered around the country. Fitzgerald’s personal collection is at Princeton, which would not allow Sudia-Skehan into the archives. But she found a treasure trove at the Bruccoli Collection at the University of South Carolina, donated by eminent Fitzgerald biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli (“Some Epic Grandeur”). Most of these photos were in albums Scottie sent to Bruccolli, including her baby book.
Sudia-Skehan’s third goal is to “bring out that these extraordinary people as human beings. I felt a lot of these photos might help do that.”
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale holds the papers of the Fitzgeralds’ good friends Sara and Gerald Murphy. Among them Sudia-Skehan uncovered a photo of Zelda she had never seen before. “It’s a stunning closeup,” she says. “There are so many family pictures of her with what she called her ‘Elizabeth Arden face.’ I wanted to include pictures like one where Scott and Zelda are at a beach, hands on their hips. They’re clearly having a tiff.”
At the Minnesota Historical Society, where Sudia-Skehan found a picture of Fitzgerald and his friend Norris Jackson, “I almost yelled in the middle of the research room.”
Sudia-Skehan hopes people will see these photos and be inspired to read Fitzgerald, for whom she has great respect, especially considering what he accomplished in spite of his alcoholism, depression and the tragedies in his life.
“Forget the legend,” she advises. “Focus on the legacy. The legacy is the work.”
AND A VIEW FROM SWEDEN
Niklas Salmose grew up in southern Sweden and teaches there now, but he first read “The Great Gatsby” as an assignment at Albert Lea High School in Minnesota.
“It made a huge impression on me,” Salmose said of Fitzgerald’s novel. “Each teacher had their own classroom and we painted on the walls, like Gatsby’s yellow car. There were few books I carried with me, but ‘The Great Gatsby’ never left me. It’s not so much for the story, as the atmosphere, the writing, mood, situations. I read it once a year. It’s like listening to music, a perfectly crafted novel.”
Salmose teaches English literature at all levels, as well as film didactics, at Linnaeus University. This fall he will teach a new master’s course about Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age.
At the conference, Salmose will be on a panel about international perspectives on Fitzgerald, joined by Ramzije Nuhiu of the University of Tetova in Macedonia and Mary Wardle, Unversita “Spienza” di Roma.
Salmose’s connection with Minnesota is through his great-grandfather, who left his wife and child behind in Denmark when he immigrated to Minnesota and started a farm near Hollandale. He got married and started another family, never telling them he had a child in Denmark. That child was Salmose’s grandfather. One of Salmose’s second cousins, Paul Goodnature, visited Sweden regularly. When Niklas was 15, Goodnature invited the young man to live with him in Albert Lea during his junior year.
“I loved my year there,” Salmose recalled. “It was a very important year for my development when I was at a crossroads in my life. Paul was a literature teacher and a Teacher of the Year who had enormous influence as a teacher and literary person. He gave me a cultural input that my parents couldn’t give me.” They often visited the Twin Cities, and Salmose remembers listening to music at the Half Time Rec Irish pub on Front Street.
Salmose translated one of Fitzgerald’s most popular short stories “Winter Dreams” into Swedish and directed a short atmospheric film inspired by the story. (It’s on YouTube with English subtitles.)
He sees “The Great Gatsby” as popular everywhere. His students have fallen in love with the book he calls “transhistoric, transnational, universal in the best sense.” His students identify with issues of that era, such as income disparity.
That younger generation will be represented at the conference by nine winners of John Kuehl Travel Fellowships, named for Fitzgerald scholar John Kuehl.
Among them are Salmose’s students Daniel Sundberg and Oscar Svensson (who was an exchange student at Hamline University in St. Paul), and Sadaf Fahim-Hashemi, a postgraduate student at the University of London. She is also a stand-up comedian whose master’s dissertation focused on Fitzgerald’s early satirical play “The Vegetable.”
Anne Margaret Daniel says it’s right to have a comedian as a presenter because “everyone I’ve met who knew Fitzgerald averred he was a brilliant comic, very funny. We welcome people like Sadaf who are becoming Fitzgerald scholars, showing something new about him.”
FITZGERALD GRADUATES
F. Scott Fitzgerald may be one of Princeton University’s most famous alums, but he never graduated. Fitzgerald entered Princeton in 1913 and took time off in 1916 because he was flunking out, spending too much time writing plays for the Triangle Club. He left campus in 1917 as Lt. F. Scott Fitzgerald and never returned. But Princeton is in his writing, especially “This Side of Paradise,” loosely based on his undergraduate days. Now he holds a degree from Princeton, thanks to the class of 2017. Last fall, the class approved Fitzgerald as an honorary member and on June 5 the college made it official with bestowal of a framed diploma, 100 years after Fitzgerald left the campus he loved.
