Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography Read Online Free

characters because he doesn’t know anything about people.” 8
    Scott did develop a new awareness, however, when he perceived that he was popular with girls (if not with boys) and that they created strangely mixed feelings within him: “For the first time in his life he realized a girl is something opposite and complementary to him, and he was subject to a warm chill of mingled pleasure and pain.” His chaste adolescent heroine, Josephine, likes the daring experience of kissing boys, but has no real sexual feeling. And in a potentially lyrical moment in This Side of Paradise, when the thirteen-year-old Amory Blaine kisses a girl for the first time, she responds with conventional romantic modesty while he is overwhelmed by nauseous repulsion: “Their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind. ‘We’re awful,’ rejoiced Myra gently. She slipped her hand into his, her head drooped against his shoulder. Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss any one.” 9
    Scott’s sexual revulsion was undoubtedly connected to what his Anglo-Irish friend, Shane Leslie, called the “middle-class, dull, unpoetical and fettering” Catholicism of the Middle West. His mother was fanatical about religion, went to Mass every day and, as he told Sheilah Graham, “believed that Christian boys were killed at Easter and the Jews drank the blood. She was a bigot.” He had attended two Catholic schools in Buffalo, and had shocked himself by lying in the confessional and telling the priest that he never told a lie.
    When his family, still clinging precariously to the fringe of “good society,” returned to Minnesota, the twelve-year-old Scott entered a nonsectarian school, St. Paul Academy, which had forty boys between the ages of ten and eighteen. During his three years there, he energetically began his literary apprenticeship. He would memorize titles in bookstores and confidently discuss works he had not read (the same intellectual pretentiousness would permeate his first novel). He attempted to achieve popularity with his classmates, as he had in Buffalo and at summer camp, but failed abysmally because he observed and criticized their faults. As he would later do at Princeton and in the army, he ignored his studies and “wrote all through every class in school in the back of my geography book and first year Latin and on the margins of themes and declensions and mathematics problems.” 10
    He wrote many juvenile adventure stories for the school newspaper and melodramatic plays for the Elizabethan Dramatic Club, which was named after the director, Elizabeth Magoffin. Scott’s first published story, “The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage” (1909), echoed the title and imitated the characters and themes of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Though he neglected to bring the mortgage into the story, no one seemed to notice. “When it came to rewriting,” Magoffin recalled, “Fitzgerald was indefatigable, retiring to a corner and tossing off new lines with his ever-facile pen.” Scott was also capable of the kind of heroic action that fulfilled his childhood fantasies. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported that in September 1914, during a performance of his fourth play, Assorted Spirits, a fuse suddenly exploded and the audience panicked. The young playwright saved the evening by leaping onto the stage and calming the frightened audience with an improvised monologue.
    Another incident that made the newspapers took place during a Christmas service at St. John’s Episcopal Church the previous year. Scott made a dramatic gesture, drew attention to himself and expressed his defiance of convention and rejection of religion. Though he called it “the most disgraceful thing I ever did,” his cocky tone suggests that he welcomed the notorious publicity he had inspired: “I plodded toward the rector. At the very foot of the