The Myth of Success in Fitzgerald's Boyhood

THE MYTH OF SUCCESS IN FITZGERALD'S BOYHOOD Carol Irish* Too often Fitzgerald's biographers have assumed that the novelist's early desire for financial success, social prestige, and athletic glory was an aberration generated by a youthful sense of inferiority about his own family's social and economic status. Some autobiographical material reinforces this view and, moreover, suggests a shallowness in Fitzgerald's values. Reading in "The Crack-Up," for instance, his confession that his "two juvenile regrets—at not being big enough (or good enough) to play football in college, and at not getting overseas during the war"1 continued to haunt him even when he was in his thirties, one begins to sympathize with some of the criticism levelled at him by Hemingway and others. His talent seems a great diamond, entrusted to one who knows and cares only about rhinestones. Fitzgerald's goals, however, were not atypical in his own day or in his own community, and a knowledge of his boyhood milieu provides a clearer explanation for these goals than theories about his sense of inferiority do. The American drive for "success" is rooted in the nation's beginning, in the Puritan belief that prosperity signified spiritual grace.2 As Puritanism was secularized, the link between material and spiritual was severed; goodness and hard work became the means of obtaining wealth rather than ends in themselves, and the quest for success emerged as a commonplace theme in American literature and lives. An especially relevant example of this theme occurs in Owen Johnson's Stover at Yale (1911); Amory Blaine, the autobiographical hero of This Side of Paradise, regarded this work as "somewhat of a textbook"3 as he prepared for Princeton. Noted for its wide circulation in the opening decades of this century, the book transfers the struggle for success to the adolescent world and seems to question the worth of the pursuit. Even its juvenility helps to qualify the myth that Fitzgerald's school years were wasted on frivolous activities and goals which others did not take so seriously. Dink Stover begins Yale with his ambitions clearly defined: he would like to be football captain and a member of the exclusive Skull and Bones Society. These extra-curricular goals are his chief concern as 'Carol Irish, who now teaches at Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., taught previously at the St. Paul Academy, F. Scott Fitzgerald's prep, school. Studies in American Fiction177 he matriculates: "Four glorious years, good times, good fellows and a free and open fight to be among the leaders and leave a name on the roll of fame."4 Guided by hovering upperclassmen, Dink surrounds himself with the "right " people, those who will advancehis social ambitions. His hesitant friendship with the bright, but rough-hewn Tom Regan reminds one of Fitzgerald's meeting with the unfashionably bookish John Peale Bishop and its fictional counterpart in the meeting of Amory Blaine and Tom D'Invilliers: "[Tom] liked books, and it seemed forever since Amory had met anyone who did; if only that St. Paul's crowd at the next table would not mistake him for a bird, too, he would enjoy the encounter tremendously."5 Dink is not totally unthinking; he realizes after his first football practice that the game is no longer fun: "For the first time, a little appalled, he felt the weight of the seriousness, the deadly seriousness of the American spirit, which seizes on everything that is competition and transforms it, with the savage fanaticism of its race, for success."8 As a sophomore, securely established in one of the societies from which Skull and Bones culls its membership, Dink is confident that his two major goals are within easy reach. He is so confident that he even begins to form friendships with men who are unconcerned about the school's social system. When his club insists that he drop these friends, Dink asserts his independence and resigns, although he is sure that the action will prevent his election to Bones. Ostracized by his old crowd, Dink begins to drink heavily. His recovery belongs to the bootstrap tradition. Refusing to toady to important people, Dink nevertheless gains their respect...