The Many Ways F. Scott Fitzgerald Made an Absolute Fool of Himself

i'm not gonna lie to you i love the great gatsby there was a lot of required reading in high school that i only pretended to read but i genuinely read and enjoyed that one i never knew much about the author behind it f scott fitzgerald up until a few years ago when he popped up a few times in my research on jc liondecker who is this man that created the most well-known book about the roaring twenties this video will not be a comprehensive biography on f scott fitzgerald but rather an elaborated collection on the six phases of his life story with an emphasis on his bad bad decisions because as it turns out fitzgerald was a weird man with a lot of issues and because i can already sense some of you scrolling down to the comments to complain about me bullying a dead guy or something i'll be getting into his extreme racism and anti-semitism later so hold your horses okay let's get into it [Music] the fitzgerald's family physician once recalled the francis scott key fitzgerald he was a patient of mine when he was a small boy and until he went off to prep school he was a very difficult and temperamental patient and refused to accept any regime which was not his liking this attitude he preserved throughout life fitzgerald grew up in a fairly gloomy attitude due to the deaths of all but one of his siblings before and after his birth which left him with a deep case of survivor's guilt his mother who was an eccentric woman for her time grieved heavily for the rest of her life and his father coddled scott in order to try and protect him but he developed an extremely temperamental disposition so much so that when the family enrolled him in a children's school he screamed and cried so much he was removed after only one day he didn't have a fantastic reputation with the other children obviously in a desperate bid to reinvigorate his social circle he sent out invites to his seventh birthday party but no one showed up in part due to the weather buddy i can sympathize with that like that really sucks utterly humiliated he was allowed to eat his entire birthday cake all by himself and some of the candles and then went on to eat tallow as a delicious snack for over seven years listen i know that people in history ate raw tallow sometimes and cooked with it but just the thought of eating rawtala was really gross to me personally his position at the bottom of the social pyramid stuck until one day at summer camp when he got thwhacked in the head with a baseball and was heralded as a hero god it doesn't take much in 1907 does it but then he was so obnoxiously self-congratulatory about it that everyone hated him again come on scott we were rooting for you in your heroic minor concussion fitzgerald made a habit of blaming his own weird temperament on his mother whom he considered ugly neurotic and hysterical he resented her for spoiling and coddling him while simultaneously acknowledging his own survivor's guilt due to the deaths of his siblings in his failure to connect all of this to his mother's own grief i personally feel like he missed out on a chance to understand why she was the way she was even if only through his own biased view but this was the turn of the century and child death was as common as women's valid emotions being passed off as hysteria not only that but fitzgerald dreamed of luxury and prestige something that's apparent both in his writing and in his deliberate preference for his aunt who had many social connections and fitzgerald emphatically preferred his father until 1908 when the man lost his job and became a wreck until he died fitzgerald was always caught up in his own world unable to truly understand anything beyond his own nose as his friend sarah murphy once wrote to him i have always told you you haven't the faintest idea what anybody else but yourself is like and ernest hemingway later told max perkins scott can't invent true characters because he doesn't know anything about people tough sentiments from people apparently close to fitzgerald and hemingway was one of his closest friends and often spoke highly of him and lowly of him hemingway said everything about him although i can't defend fitzgerald's mother too much because she was also aggressively bigoted and anti-semitic what else is new great so fitzgerald's childhood was a giant mixed bag of simultaneous humiliation and self-aggrandizing jumbled together with familial shame and pride the stage is set for all manner of contradictions in the soul of one man but before we get into part two desk caz has a quick message hi it's me desk caz welcome to my desk as with all the research i do when looking for info on fitzgerald i had to look into a lot of websites and databases where scholarly works and books live and it's hard to do that when some websites only allow access to certain countries or areas or have janky security which is where our sponsor for today's video comes in atlas vpn i cannot recommend having a vpn enough atlas vpn 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three year plan for just 1.39 cents per month you can grab this deal by clicking our special link in the description or in the comments below so you can start exploring the internet knowing that your privacy is protected thank you so much to alicevpn for sponsoring this video so now let's get back to me gently bullying f scott fitzgerald i'm pausing so you can prepare yourself for the sentence that you're about to read [Music] fitzgerald's mother's bigotry was closely tied to her heavy catholicism which made a deep and piercing impression on fitzgerald's psyche he outright rejected religion but it still had its clause in him in insidious ways one of which being his own sexuality he often found himself repulsed by advances from women and sometimes that made its way into his books and yet he took great pride in the fact that girls were attracted to him his sexual conundrums manifested in interesting ways like a phobia of his own feet for instance he wrote in the third person there was a boy named arnold who went barefoot in his yard and peeled plums scott's freudian shame about his feet kept him from joining in he took off john wiley's shoes he began to hear dirty words he had this curious dream of perversion the side of his own feet filled him with embarrassment and horror no amount of persuasion could entice him to permit others to see his naked feet and up until he was 12 this fear caused him a great deal of misery this complex suddenly disappeared one day without any reason if you've ever read this side of paradise this might make a few passages in there make a lot more sense to you now but feet weren't the only body part that fitzgerald had a paranoid preoccupation with the other one was a bit more obvious but first we need to introduce two major characters in fitzgerald's life ernest hemingway and zelda fitzgerald ernest hemingway had an extremely contradictory relationship with fitzgerald they were super close but at the same time at odds with each other balancing a competitive relationship with one of affection polar opposites and yet they had a lot in common hemingway described fitzgerald as a man who then looked like a boy with the face between handsome and pretty he had very fair wavy hair a high forehead excited and friendly eyes and a delicate long-lipped irish mouth that on a girl would have been the mouth of a beauty his chin was well built and he had good ears and a handsome almost beautiful unmarked nose the mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more high praise but hemingway also hated a lot of things about fitzgerald particularly his immaturity and lack of self-awareness hemingway though macho and aggressive was perceptive enough to pick up on the early warning signs that fitzgerald's marriage was about to explode in flames his marriage of course to zelda fitzgerald so while we'll get more into zelda and scott's relationship later i need to bring up the incident that happened after zelda told him that his dick is too small and could never satisfy a woman according to hemingway fitzgerald could really dish out offensive remarks but he could never take them this comment sent him into a tailspin of paranoia about his parts which he told hemingway about one day during lunch at michoads on the rue jacob hemingway ever the supportive friend was like okay well come with me to the bathroom and i'll evaluate it for you what are bros for fitzgerald followed him there and dropped his drawers hemingway was like um this seems completely normal to me fitzgerald was having none of it complaining that he still thought it looked too small hemingway said oh no no no no no no no you think it's too small because you're looking at it from above and so what you're seeing is foreshortened you need to look at it through a mirror duh this did not change fitzgerald's mind in the slightest but this incident does bring up a topic that's been explored a bit more in recent years similarly to my exploration of bram stoker sexuality we may never know the true answers to the many questions we have about fitzgerald and hemingway's sexualities for one thing a lot of readers both today and in decades past have picked up on the uncannily gay undertones of the relationship between nick and gatsby in the great gatsby and the book itself allegedly may have in part been inspired by jc lindecker and charles beach and fitzgerald and hemingway both wrote about the deep love and devotion that they had for each other but fitzgerald wrote in one of his notebooks i really loved him but of course it wore out like a love affair the fairies have spoiled all that the fairies being the feminine gay men that he'd attested so much i've discussed fairies as a pre-war gender category in previous videos see the description this passage references how the rumors about him and hemingway may have spoiled their close friendship in a way he had a deep paranoia about people thinking that he was a fairy and outspokenly decried homosexuality once writing that it was nature's attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them fitzgerald had struggled with anxiety about his own masculinity since childhood having continually failed at sports and never having gone off to fight overseas in world war one zelda didn't help these anxieties she accused him not only of being a fairy but of having a relationship with hemingway to which he told her that that was the closest he ever came to leaving her but rather than being based on the truth it's probably more likely that this was more of a jealousy thing or as we'll see later possibly zelda projecting her own anxieties about her own sexuality onto her husband fitzgerald and hemingway likely didn't have a relationship like that and if not due to their sexualities then due to the fact that both of them had very deep rooted masculinity complexes and felt that they had something to prove especially as rumors about them grew so i'm not here to make a determination on if they were gay or not a homoerotic book or a close friendship surrounded by rumors does not necessarily a gay man make but fitzgerald did write a lot about his struggles with sexuality in general how he struggled to feel love for anyone how women scared him in his young adult years how he felt ashamed and disgusted by contact with them how he never felt quite right about sex some historians chalk this up to his aggressively catholic upbringing maybe that's the case but these issues are worth taking a look at when it comes to zelda [Music] fitzgerald met zelda at a country club dance in 1918 and was immediately infatuated with her she came from the respectable sare family which had some internal issues the first time fitzgerald visited for dinner zelda pestered her father so much he chased her around the table with a knife and this wasn't the first time that he did that zelda's mother had lost her mother and sister to suicide and zelda's siblings suffered from intense mental illnesses zelda herself had a less than fantastic reputation by the time fitzgerald met her and it all made him love her more he wrote she treats men terribly she abuses them and cuts them and breaks dates with them and then yawns in their faces and they come back for more she smokes sometimes drinks alcoholic punch frequently kissed she's prone to make everyone around her pretty miserable when she doesn't get her way she believes the only excuse for women was the necessity for a disturbing element among men zelda excited fitzgerald in a way that no one else had before she was stubborn and fearless and they had a lot in common they looked similar liked the same clothes enjoyed crossdressing on occasion they had unconventional feelings about gender fitzgerald once wrote i am half feminine that is my mind is and zelda told her friend i've always been inclined towards masculinity so they did complement each other in the beginning but both were insufferable personality wise within their own ways it was toxic they liked toxic zelda would use the intense influence she had over men to make fitzgerald jealous and to toy with him it made him love her more because the conflict was romantic to him she felt like the heroine of a reality that he wanted to be his rather than the reality he lived in where he continually failed at the things he pursued of course he sought to marry her but he needed money but as most people know fitzgerald was basically alcoholic by the time he graduated university so yes fitzgerald had an infamous drinking problem alcoholism is a complex issue and addiction is a very serious condition that's worth being treated with compassion and empathy for all parties involved okay i'm gonna be including some resources in the description below for you if you or anyone you know is struggling with addiction that said his drinking doesn't excuse whatever bad behavior he had later on at this point it prevented him from making enough money as easily as he wanted to and when he got drunk he would resort to butt-headed pranks that nobody liked once he threatened to jump out the yale club window and when nobody tried to stop him he was bummed out one may day in child's restaurant at columbus circle famous for being a gay men's hub of the 20s fitzgerald got drunk and mixed together eggs hash browns and ketchup in a friend's hat zelda's parents distrusted fitzgerald due to his drinking and bad behavior and felt that he wouldn't be able to calm down the equally erratic zelda spoiler alert he couldn't because both of them behaved poorly and had issues and well fire meets fire equals bigger fire but they still married and immediately things started going downhill fitzgerald later told his daughter i was sorry immediately after i had married her the couple started their marriage off by beginning the things they would later be well known for insufferable pranks and behavior that annoys everyone around them and earns fitzgerald more than his fair share of black eyes once at a comedy show they made a point of laughing at inappropriate moments after being kicked out of the biltmore hotel they spun around in the revolving doors for 30 minutes they rode on the roofs of taxis they jumped into the fountains at union square zelda flashed her boobs and butt to strangers and as their combined drinking increased these acts transformed from harmless youthful jests to something more insidious once zelda challenged fitzgerald to fight the bouncer at the jungle cabaret which left him with two bleeding black eyes once at a dinner party fitzgerald was urged that people weren't paying enough attention to him so he started throwing expensive gold-flecked venetian wine glasses over the garden wall and when the host banned him from future parties he came back and threw a garbage can onto their patio while they were eating but often fitzgerald's misbehavior was actually thoroughly calculated on purpose in order to keep him in the papers and the public eye crafting an image of himself that would sell his books and he encouraged zelda to do anything that she wanted because she would do anything and her bizarre antics gave him things to write about hold on to that note for later what fitzgerald didn't like was when zelda flirted with and kissed his friends although he loved having a woman that was pursued by so many other men though they frequently had explosive fights in public and zelda wouldn't let him get work done fitzgerald was still obsessed with her they were madly in love but they were so so bad for each other zelda may have been able to channel some of her energy into writing of her own she did keep dedicated diaries and love to write but that brings up the other infamous issue [Music] yeah you may have heard of this one it's a contentious topic in the summer of 1924 when fitzgerald was writing the great gatsby zelda had an affair with a french aviator named edward jason she even asked fitzgerald for a divorce because she had fallen madly in love with him this was after the birth of their daughter scotty but josan only wanted romance not marriage when he left she tried to take her own life fitzgerald wrote that september 1924 i knew something had happened that couldn't be repaired the chaotic bliss of the beginning of their marriage was officially over this experience heavily informed the story of the great gatsby fitzgerald stories all pilfered information and direct events from the people and experiences in his life and sometimes not even his own in the late 20s zelda started publishing some really good stories fitzgerald would sign them as his work with zelda's permission so they could pull in more money fitzgerald believed that she was jealous of his writing and that that must be why she would always try to distract him while he tried to work his publishing related jealousy persisted in 30s when zelda published her fictionalized autobiography save me the waltz fitzgerald was upset that she published it because he believed that she'd stolen plot points that he was going to use in his books by writing about her own experiences especially related to her own mental health all right in response to a reporter from the new york tribune asking her about the beautiful and the damned zelda said it seems to me that on one page i recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage and also scraps of letters which though considerably edited sounded to me vaguely familiar in fact mr fitzgerald i believe that's how he spelled his name seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home of course one of the most famous lines that fitzgerald lifted from zelda was the phrase that she said after giving birth to scotty i hope it's beautiful and a fool a beautiful little fool this line was given to daisy buchanan in the great gatsby it's not true that fitzgerald plagiarized all of his writing from zelda or that zelda ghost wrote it all fitzgerald was a writer who operated by logging instances that he observed or things that people he knew said and using those in his work zelda had powerful imagination and lively writing but her work definitely needed both technical editing and because she was a woman in 20s couldn't be published either or for as much money as a man's work or even at all fitzgerald considered the shared experiences of their lives to be his fair game or even his writing dominion because he considered himself to be both the better writer as well as truthfully the salary provider if he couldn't use the best material in his books he thought how could he provide money it doesn't excuse everything zelda herself said that she was fine with fitzgerald using her anecdotes or even her diary entries in the beginning but situations like this don't last before becoming a complicated mess of morals and ethics fitzgerald as zelda said earlier hid her diary from her so he could use its contents before she could and we can't forget the fact that fitzgerald often encouraged zelda's erratic behavior because she was his muse and provided him with good material in the end i say zelda should have been able to punish her own work regardless so we've kind of established that fitzgerald had a weird superiority complex that came from basically nowhere right he was openly anti-semitic even towards the mistress that he had in his later years shalilah graham he desperately tried to conceal her jewishness for her own safety but once while drunk fitzgerald screamed to his nurse that graham was jewish and of course most people may remember the anti-semitic caricature of an antagonistic figure in the great gatsby meyer wolfsheim almost every jewish character in fitzgerald's writing is written as loud obnoxious suspicious villainous or otherwise disgusting it didn't become more sympathetic until his later years when he actually made friends with some jewish people and likely had to think seriously about their struggles when late against the backdrop of the oncoming third reich in germany but he still tried to pull the my best friend as a blank excuse as he wrote in the notes of his final book hell the best friend i have in hollywood is a jew another of my dozen best friends is a jew two of the half-dozen men in america that i admire the most are jews and two of my half-dozen best men in history are jews but why do they have to be so damned conceited yikes fitzgerald's ire wasn't limited to jewish people of course he had a performative superiority to most people but when it came to black people he just couldn't help but start spewing the most unbelievably obtuse garbage in a 1921 letter to edmund wilson he wrote the blank streak creeps northward to defile the nordic race already the italians have the souls of the blank and he later said i believe at last in the white man's burden we are as far above the modern frenchman as he is above the blank even in art in a letter to tony boutita in 1935 he wrote that civil rights and equality for black people was gibberish fitzgerald's black characters in his books are only written as comedic relief or in service jobs this reflects his real-life tendencies such as one time at a dinner party with ernest hemingway when he got drunk and started shouting sexual profanities at the black maid his short stories of the 1920s had no shortage of casual usage of the n-word and other offensive stereotypes and slurs particularly weaponizing the deep south as a location and narrative tool and before you go commenting in the comments about oh he was just writing the way real people spoke at the time or it was the early 1900s everyone thought that was normal or some other crap people at that time literally didn't always think that this was fine or normal it was still racist in 1934 after fitzgerald published yet another racist short story in the saturday evening post one of his readers sent him a three-page letter criticizing his racism it read well this fitzgerald sent a reply but we don't know exactly what it said his bigotry didn't stop there he also loved to stereotype mexican characters as lazy or violent or native americans as barbaric it was common at the time for writers then to rely on racial stereotypes in order to emphasize certain traits of characters or easily craft a character that their white readers would seemingly understand with ease because those stereotypes were so painfully prevalent and it sucks it's a blight on the skills of these writers their work though persistent in national memory suffers for it it's disappointing but these prejudices that fitzgerald harbored were completely in line with his lack of social awareness and narcissism that he already had anyways as hemingway said scott doesn't think so this is going to be a rough section content warning for discussions of mental health suicide self-harm etc you can skip to this time code if you feel uncomfortable with these subjects yeah it's about time i bring up the elephant in the room zelda fitzgerald's mental breakdowns and institutionalization zelda as we've seen had a family history of struggles with mental health and had always had erratic behavior she desperately needed structure and help that fitzgerald couldn't or wouldn't provide clearly they loved each other but the fact is they weren't good for each other and almost everyone that knew them believed so after zelda's affair with josan fitzgerald became confused and paranoid and began pursuing other women in 1927 he had a fling with the 18 year old lois moran which upset zelda deeply fitzgerald told zelda's psychiatrist in 1932 about her affair with joshua in 1925 and mine with lois moran in 1927 which was a sort of revenge zelda had done self-destructive behaviors to get back up its gerald before like throwing herself down a flight of stairs and setting her clothes on fire in a bathtub fitzgerald later told shalilah graham zelda and i never should have married we were wrong for each other she would have been happier married to almost anyone else she was beautiful and talented it was her tragedy that she couldn't bear to be overshadowed by the attention i received from my early books for instance she hated it when gertrude stein only talked to me while her companion alice betoclass talked to her she had a compulsion to compete with me she couldn't be a writer so she decided to be a famous ballerina and studied with the russian ballet in paris but it was too late for her when she realized this instead of accepting the fact and bending with it she broke but there were other more direct things that later led into her pain in the early 20s fitzgerald persuaded zelda to have abortions which left her with painful persistent gynecological issues that she resented him for she channeled her pain into her ballet obsession withdrawing into an eternal world she also had no support system outside of her husband whose excessive drinking continued in 1929 zelda tried to drive a car over a cliff with other passengers inside which fitzgerald fictionalized and tender is the night all of this culminated in april 1930 when zelda finally broke down outside of just the interpersonal issues in their relationship i also feel it's important to note the stock market crash of 1929 which set off the great depression the fitzgeralds had always lived far beyond their means and the depression put them in a stressful place financially another thing i do feel needs to be noted is the fact that the treatments for mental illness in the 30s were extremely abusive cruel and painful no matter who zelda's husband was she was never going to get the ideal treatment because it simply wasn't a thing fitzgerald felt partially responsible for her condition and was highly involved in her treatment but the treatments did not help because the treatments of the 30s were not helpful institutionalization was exceedingly common because people didn't know what else to do it's not an excuse to any of this the entire situation is tragic zelda deserved a care plan that she was never gonna get i also refuse to try and diagnose or put any credence to a specific diagnosis of zelda's condition we may never know exactly what she struggled with and that's okay some questions of history will never have answers but what we do know is that zelda suffered from intense hallucinations and was shuffled around seven different hospitals over the course of six years she had a deep fear and anxiety about working and dancing and dying she had an intense fear becoming a homosexual because she said she had always thought about being in love with women and may be in love with her dance teacher madame x while in a number of the hospitals she developed intense crushes on a nurse and another girl who was an inpatient she often sent fitzgerald despairing letters from the hospitals which he would pull sentences from to use in his books zelda's doctors wanted to treat fitzgerald's alcoholism along with zelda's issues as each exacerbated the other but fitzgerald refused to get help because he feared that getting psychiatric treatment would stunt his creativity he didn't know how to function without drinking anymore but if i'm going to be honest he was not functioning while drinking he was starting fights at parties stripping naked tearing a dress off of his daughter because he didn't like it during the summer of 1935 while zelda was locked in yet another asylum fitzgerald was struggling with some tuberculosis and intense depression and found himself several mistresses in 1936 he transferred zelda to highland hospital in asheville north carolina by the time she entered highland zelda was wasting away she weighed only 89 pounds and had developed an obsession with the bible fitzgerald hoped the hospital's emphasis on lifestyle and exercise's treatment might help her but it's unlikely any treatment that existed at the time could have helped her much by this point in 1937 fitzgerald in need of money desperately moved to california and worked as a screenwriter for hollywood mgm he did try to have zelda shifted to only part-time institutionalization but her doctor advised against it and so there she stayed until the unceasing despair of their situation drove fitzgerald into yet more affairs with other women he passed away in 1940 at the age of 44. in the final years of her life zelda actually was in and out of highland hospital and sometimes had periods of lucidity though the religious obsession persisted when she felt she was sinking into a bad period again she would check herself back in for shock treatments on march 10 1948 zelda was asleep on the top floor of highland hospital when a fire broke out zelda and eight other women were locked inside unable to escape and unfortunately passed away i don't know if i would count this section solely as f scott fitzgerald making an absolute fool of himself unlike the other sections there are a lot of factors at play that made the tragic institutionalization of zelda the horrible situation that it was too many to blame on just one person honestly i think he made a fool of himself through his whole marriage his whole life even he made some good books during the short time that he was alive but his own life was the most buckwild plot of all for better or for worse thank you so much for joining me on this journey through the many complicated phases of f scott fitzgerald and the very bad decisions that he made what a roller coaster huh f scott fitzgerald is one of the most idolized and beloved and mythologized authors in american history and when it comes to historical figures like that i do think it's extremely important to look closer at them and recognize where they had faults i rarely see people bringing up fitzgerald's racism and conversations about him probably because it's not as fun to talk about as the weird goofy things that he and zelda did running around new york city but it's still important when we write off all racist historical figures as simply products of their time we only succeed in excusing that racism and ignoring the fact that people of any time period are not monoliths and people were against these bad things then too and it's worth talking about thank you again to atlasvpn for sponsoring this video don't forget to get in on that great deal to get 86 off by clicking the link in the description or the comments below and until next time wash thy hands wear they mask and yes you do still need to wear thy mask [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Kaz Rowe

Views: 683,114

Keywords: f. scott fitzgerald, zelda fitzgerald, ernest hemingway, 1920s, literature, biography, new york, hollywood

Id: 1lhUMjqyOgU

Length: 31min 11sec (1871 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021