Arthur Mizener
FITZGERALD IN THE TWENTIES *
THE EARLY TWENTIES
Scott Fitzgerald spent the day
This Side of Paradise
was
published in Princeton. Max Perkins had written l1im temptingly that
"The pyramid we have made of it in our window [on Fifth Avenue]
is striking"; in somewhat the same spirit Scribner's advertising de–
partment had run wild in the
Daily Princetonian
with a very small
ad;
((The First Novel
of
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
' 17 ... A Story about
a Princeton Man," they asserted boldly.
As
an advertising man with a
long experience in selling the services of the Muscatine, Iowa, Steam
Laundry, Fitzgerald was disgusted by this conservative policy and
complained bitterly. But there was something like a stampede in the
Princeton University Store on March 26, 1920, just the same.
By this time plans for Fitzgerald's wedding to Zelda, which was to
take place in New York, had reached the point where he wired her:
"I HAVE TAKEN ROOMS AT THE BILTMORE AND WILL EXPECT YOU
FRIDAY OR SATURDAY WffiE ME EXACTLY WHEN"
(The plural
"ROOMS"
is a polite exaggeration). Then he added his usual conclusion to his
love letters:
"BOOK SELLING ALL MY LOVE."
Two days later they were
still arguing about the exact date for the wedding, but by announcing
that he would
"BE AWFULLY NERVOUS UNTIL IT IS OVER"
and that the
"FffiST EDITION OF THE BOOK IS SOLD OUT ... LOVE,"
Fitzgerald pre–
vailed on Zelda to arrive in New York in time to be married on
Saturday, April 3. Perhaps Zelda's last-minute delaying tactics were
based on fear. For all her established position in Alabama, she had had
very little experience of a larger world, and the very fact that she
valued that larger world highly must have increased its terror for her.
Nor was
it
any exaggeration that Fitzgerald was nervous; he was
frightened to death, in a hundred different ways, at the prospect of
marriage and its responsibilities. For Zelda, setting out alone from
*
Two chapters from a work in progress on F. Scott Fitzgerald.
