The Guardian’s edited version of “The Other Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald, 40, Engulfed in Despair” by Michel Mok, first published in the New York Post, September 25 1936
The author’s wife, Zelda, had been ill for some years. There was talk, said his friends, of an attempt at suicide on her part one evening when the couple were taking a walk in the country outside Baltimore. Mrs Fitzgerald, so the story went, threw herself on the tracks before an oncoming express train. Fitzgerald, himself in poor health, rushed after her and narrowly saved her life.
and
. . . for some months Fitzgerald wrote slogans for street car cards.
“I remember,” he said, “the hit I made with a slogan I wrote for the Muscatine Steam laundry in Muscatine, Iowa - ‘We keep you clean in Muscatine.’ I got a raise for that. ‘It’s perhaps a bit imaginative,’ said the boss, ‘but still it’s plain that there’s a future for you in this business. Pretty soon this office won’t be big enough to hold you.’”
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Sep 21st, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Certainly a depressing interview. Fitzgerald comes across as a hopeless alcoholic which I guess means the illness really had him in its grip. Of course he thought he was a failure as a writer and it took history to prove him wrong - something he couldn’t possibly know at that point. I don’t know what the moral of the story is - or if, indeed, there is a moral. Maybe you just have to keep battling on against the current regardless, because there is no alternative.
I didn’t know that’s where the quote “…in a long dark night of the soul…” came from, or did he use it elsewhere?
He remains the best writer I’ve ever read and I would sell my soul for a tiny fraction of his talent.
jb says: Hi Bill. Yes, strange, isn’t it. All that stuff is swept away, all his foibles and failings, his depressions and his terrible self-image, as soon as you begin one of his novels or stories. The Great Gatsby is still one of the finest American novels.