ST. PAUL, HOME OF THE SAINTS
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snow on her grave and thinks some bitter thoughts about the society
she finds in Minnesota, with Fitzgerald obviously on her side: " ... the
men seemed to do most of the talking while the girls sat in a haughty
and expensive aloofness.... They just fade out when you look at
them. They're glorified domestics. Men are the center of every mixed
group."
It
isn't that way now, and even then it must have been truer
of Minnesota than of St. Paul and/ or the Irish.
Obviously, given
his
name and antecedents, Fittgerald longed
to have been born where there was a history not just of settlers and
Indians. "France was a land, England was a people, but America,
having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter-it
was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its
great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase
that was empty before their bodies withered.
It
was a willingness of
the heart." In one story he says, "Warren was nineteen and rather
pitying with those of his friends who hadn't gone East to college."
If
Fitzgerald himself was above "pitying" he was still too aware of
going to Princeton, coming home for the holidays, a good part of the
going because then he was "from"
somewhere,
so that one feels he
was consciously fortunate- it's almost as though he just missed being
sent to the state university. Where he lived on Summit Avenue was
and is on the fringe-a building of the most impressive stone pos–
sible, but an apartment building nonetheless. Here, after running a
half mile at its best, Summit Avenue seems to pause and relax before
it begins again.
The Scandinavians who abound in Minnesota are described as
"righteous, narrow, and cheerless, without infinite possibilities for
great sorrow or joy." This, one feels, is a real complaint with Fitz–
gerald, and the situation remains critical today. Minnesota has still
another Swedish governor, another honest man, another reformer.
In the last election, alone among cities, St. Paul voted against him
--not for sinful reasons entirely, but more out of boredom. St. Paul
is
now cleaner than Minneapolis, though once the haven of high–
ranking public enemies who showed their gratitude by performing
their duties elsewhere_ Clean and dismal. It is impossible for an
exiled horse-player to find a bookie, things have gone that far. The
voice of the slot machine is no longer heard in the land_ There is
much betting, however, on football games-a very low-church form
