Author Topic: F. Scott Fitzgerald drank whiskey on Main Street at 17.  (Read 11505 times)

Offline Editor

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F. Scott Fitzgerald drank whiskey on Main Street at 17.
« on: August 09, 2011, 09:11:50 AM »
The great Great Gatsby

Robert Fulford, National Post · Aug. 9, 2011 | Last Updated: Aug. 9, 2011 5:11 AM ET

In 1929 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a little piece for The New Yorker that defined 16 years of his life by listing drinks consumed on notable occasions.

The entry for 1913 reads: "The four defiant Canadian Club whiskeys at the Susquehanna in Hackensack." Under 1918 he wrote, "The Bourbon smuggled to officers' rooms by bellboys in Louisville." In 1922, with Prohibition depriving him of legal liquor, he consumed "My own first and last manufacture of gin." For 1923 he recalled "Oceans of Canadian ale with R. Lardner in Great Neck, Long Island."

This item appears along with 18 others in A Short Autobiography (Simon & Schuster), a collection of Fitzgerald's sometimes touching, sometimes painfully facetious non-fiction contributions to magazines, edited by James L.W. West. The fact that a major publisher believes this slight and uneven work deserves reprinting is one more proof of Fitzgerald's enduring status.

The account of his drinking was probably amusing at the time but it makes uneasy reading for those who know, as millions do, that when he wrote it he was drinking himself to death. Eleven years after he set down that apparently jovial chronicle, his heart gave out and he was dead at 44.

Seven decades later, his career remains a source of wonder, admiration and retrospective anxiety. In almost every corner of life, from handling money to handling liquor, he lacked shrewdness and a sense of survival. Yet he had a strong sense of himself, and a feeling for the demands of literature. In this book we find him writing: "My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer, I think, writes for the youth of his own generation, the critic of the next and the schoolmasters of ever afterward."

He was critically dismissed during his last years and died believing himself a failure. But the sales records of today, the opinions of other writers and the current judgments of critics suggest that he was an author of spectacular resilience. When The Great Gatsby was published, T.S. Eliot wrote to Fitzgerald: "It seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James." Eliot had it right.

In 2002, a trade magazine asked a group of authors, editors and agents to name the most powerful character in literature since 1900. They chose Jay Gatsby and, in second place, Holden Caulfield, from J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. It was Holden who famously told us "I was crazy about The Great Gatsby. That killed me." So Fitzgerald came both first and second in the same poll. (Third and fourth were, respectively, Nabokov's Lolita and Joyce's Leopold Bloom.)

Writers not only imitate Fitzgerald but, like Salinger, often insert his name or his titles in their stories, perhaps as a kind of good luck charm. Four years after Fitzgerald died, The Great Gatsby turned up in Charles Jackson's bestseller, The Lost Weekend, where the protagonist admits there's no such thing as a flawless novel "But if there is, this is it."

In 1981, in A Savage Place, Robert B. Parker had his detective, Spenser, buy a paperback copy of Gatsby because "I hadn't read it in five years, and it was time again." Three days ago, the Sydney Morning Herald carried an interview with Nick Earls, who explained that he had found the tone for his new crime novel, The Fix, by noticing the way "the corruption and emptiness of the American dream" are handled in Gatsby. He studied Nick Carraway's observations of the mansions on Long Island Sound and used something similar to describe the developments on Brisbane's riverfront and Gold Coast.

Fitzgerald made a stranger appearance in another literary imagination. The recently published collection Saul Bellow Letters contains a five-page fantasy that Bellow wrote from Germany in 1948 to his agent and close friend, Henry Volkening. It's printed like just another letter and I imagine I'm not the only reader it startled.

After the usual letter-writer's opening, Bellow announces that he's seen F. Scott Fitzgerald - who, as it happens, has been dead for eight years. Bellow reports that Fitzgerald "had me to his sumptuous ap't. near the Bois for lunch and three or four gallons of wine, cognac, whiskey, etc." Bellow finally said goodbye to Fitzgerald in the Ritz Bar "where he was entirely surrounded by Princeton boys, all nineteen years old, all drunk." As Bellow spins the story, this resulted in Bellow having a kind of nervous breakdown. There's nothing else in the book remotely comparable to this spectral walk-on by Fitzgerald.

In the 21st century, Fitzgerald remains very much with us. A few years ago, a Tokyo producer staged The Last Party: S. Fitzgerald's Last Day, a musical adaptation of his life. Producers continue to find uses for even the least-known of his writings, such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a story he wrote in 1922. It became a 2008 movie starring Brad Pitt as a man who begins aging at birth and regresses to infancy before dying, 70 years later - an endlessly clever film, if not quite persuasive. A version of The Beautiful and the Damned has been passed around in Hollywood recently, with Leonardo DiCaprio cast (maybe) in the Fitzgerald part. In Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, Tom Hiddleston gives a Fitzgerald impersonation, looking gorgeous in a 1920s suit, sparkling with alcohol-fuelled energy.

The key to Fitzgerald, writer and legend, is "romantic." James West says: "He lived his life as a romantic, equally capable of great dedication to his craft and reckless squandering of his artistic capital." Fitzgerald had a nostalgic love for the American past and a distrust of its future. He embraced the Old South that his father (a Confederate veteran of the Civil War) conveyed to him. He had a romantic affection for lost causes and believed there was an innocent nobility in the quest for something unattainable, like Jay Gatsby's dream of possessing Daisy.

Fitzgerald was an outsider among the American elite he encountered at Princeton, an Irish Catholic from the Midwest, and in the 1920s he embraced the frenzied life of the rich without really approving of it or feeling accepted. The evidence suggests he was destroyed by his own myth, the same myth that made him a writer of permanent value.

robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
___________________________________________

Susquehanna Hotel, 179 Main Street:


F. Scott Fitgerald also attended the Newman School in Hackensack from 1911 to 1913.
http://www.notablebiographies.com/Fi-Gi/Fitzgerald-F-Scott.html
« Last Edit: June 11, 2012, 11:08:29 PM by Editor »



Offline Editor

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Re: F. Scott Fitzgerald drank whiskey on Main Street at 17.
« Reply #1 on: August 09, 2011, 11:16:39 AM »
The 1929 New Yorker article is behind their pay-wall here: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1929/05/25/1929_05_25_022_TNY_CARDS_000193262

Image of the first page of the article:

Offline Homer Jones

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Re: F. Scott Fitzgerald drank whiskey on Main Street at 17.
« Reply #2 on: August 09, 2011, 12:58:40 PM »
I always knew that there was something I liked about the guy.

Offline Oratam_Weaping

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Re: F. Scott Fitzgerald drank whiskey on Main Street at 17.
« Reply #3 on: August 09, 2011, 01:16:34 PM »
That whiskey drunk in Hackensack was available during prohibition, it was more than likely distilled in South Hackensack, then watered, flavored, and bottled at a number of locations including Hackensack. :)  That's the truth.

Offline Homer Jones

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Re: F. Scott Fitzgerald drank whiskey on Main Street at 17.
« Reply #4 on: August 09, 2011, 01:34:07 PM »
I must agree with you on that one since I am sure that the oldtimers in Hackensack were never supporters of Carrie Nation and the 18th amendment.
As a matter of fact, many an oldtimer would smile at the then popular saying that  "There is no law south of Essex Street."

Offline just watching

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Re: F. Scott Fitzgerald drank whiskey on Main Street at 17.
« Reply #5 on: August 10, 2011, 07:25:21 AM »

Just wanted to note that on this string is a picture of the Susquehanna Hotel, 179 Main Street.  The same 179 Main Street where the CSPnj mentally ill program has been located for about 20 years. The one that wants to move to 1 Essex Street.

They did a great job rehabilitating the building recently.  Does anyone has a recent picture