Borne back ceaselessly into the past

‘I do not like the idea of the biographical book,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins in 1936. Fitzgerald may not have liked it, but he certainly let himself in for it. As he wrote, with a grin, in 1937: ‘Most of what has happened to me is in my novels and short stories, that is, all the parts that could go into print.’

Of all the male American modernist writers with tragic lives, including Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane and Eugene O’Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald still serves to many people as the defining figure. A glittering success as a writer when he was just 23, Fitzgerald died 20 years later, still a young man, but with most of his works unread by the public, and his status as one of the most skilled and popular American writers unestablished.

His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), is the story of a bright young man who goes to Princeton and, upon graduation, finds the social and business world of New York made strangely incomprehensible to him in the aftermath of a great war he was — like Fitzgerald — too late to fight. The financial success Fitzgerald found in Paradise let him live his life as a full-time writer, and marry Zelda Sayre. a southern belle with red-gold curls from Montgomery, Alabama. The Fitzgeralds — their life together during the 1920s, and lives apart during the 1930s — proved compelling fodder for contemporary newspapers, and for novels, plays, and screenplays ever since.

So a major biography of Fitzgerald is long overdue. Zelda has been intensely chronicled in Nancy Milford’s Zelda (1970) and Sally Cline’s Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise (2002); but both of these are, to varying degrees, partisan polemics in which Scott is a failure, a villain and a plagiarist of Zelda’s writings.