Fitzgerald in Delaware

Walking with Writers F. S C O T T F I T Z G E R A L D I N D E L AWA R E : A G U I D E

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Chronology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Ernest & Scott Taproom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 John Biggs’s birthplace. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 John Biggs’s home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Chemours Edge Moor plant. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

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CHRONOLOGY 24 September 1896 - Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald born at 481 Laurel Avenue, St. Paul, Minnesota.

26 March 1920 - Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, published by Scribner’s.

3 April 1920 - Fitzgerald marries Zelda Sayre at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

26 October 1921 - Birth of Scottie Fitzgerald, the Fitzgeralds’ only child.

10 April 1925 - Publication of The Great Gatsby.

May 1925 - Fitzgerald meets Ernest Hemingway in Dingo Bar, Paris.

January 1927 - The Fitzgeralds go to Hollywood, where Scott works on the unproduced film ‘Lipstick’.

April 1930 - Zelda experiences her first psychological breakdown in Paris.

November 1931 - Fitzgerald’s second spell in Hollywood, this time to work on RedHeaded Woman for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

12 April 1934 - Publication of Tender Is the Night.

July 1937 - Fitzgeralds returns to Hollywood for the third time, working for MGM at $1,000 per week. He moves into an apartment at the Garden of Allah Hotel on Sunset Boulevard.

July 1937 - Fitzgerald meets Sheilah Graham, who becomes his partner.

April 1938 - Fitzgerald rents a bungalow at Malibu Beach, California.

October 1938 - Fitzgerald relocates to a cottage at ‘Belly Acres’, Encino.

May 1940 - Fitzgerald moves to 1403 North Laurel Avenue, Hollywood.

21 December 1940 - Fitzgerald dies of a heart attack at Sheilah Graham’s apartment, 1443 North Hayworth Avenue,

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MAP

1. Ernest & Scott Taproom 2. John Biggs’s birthplace 3. John Biggs’s home 4. Chemours Edge Moor plant

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Fitzgerald in Delaware Bordered by Pennsylvania to the north, New Jersey to the east, and Maryland to the south and west, Delaware is the second smallest American state and one of the least densely populated. It has its share of cultural heritage, however.

From the 1630s onward Dutch, Swedish, and English settlers displaced Native Americans in the region, and Delaware’s colonial past can still be seen in the historic town of New Castle, just outside Wilmington. The noted illustrator Howard Pyle (1853-1911) was born here and the Delaware Art Museum holds a large collection of his works, alongside a fine display of Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

It was also in Wilmington that the French-American chemist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont (1771-1834) founded the E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, which would go on to become the nation’s chief manufacturer of gunpowder and, latterly, one of America’s biggest conglomerates. Bisecting downtown Wilmington, the Brandywine Creek leads inland into an area of stunning rural beauty, around which lie the grand riverside estates and homes of the Du Pont’s.

In 1926 Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s editor at Scribner’s, suggested a change of scene would alleviate the author’s struggle to focus uninterruptedly on writing.

Perkins recommended Delaware, where he had just visited their mutual friend John Biggs. In March the following year the Fitzgeralds – with their young daughter, Scottie – moved to the small town of Edgemoor, just outside Wilmington.

Though they spent summer 1928 in Paris, this was their main US home until March 1929, when they returned once more to Europe. Perkins no doubt felt the then relatively unspoilt and quiet surroundings of Wilmington would offer Fitzgerald the distraction-free environment he needed to recommence working on his latest novel.

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Along with many other Americans working in the arts, Scott and Zelda decided to sample expatriate life in Europe, where they relocated in 1924. There Fitzgerald completed his third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), which, though not a commercial success, netted welcome income from film and theatrical rights.

Fitzgerald also made important friendships with Ernest Hemingway as well as Sara and Gerald Murphy, but the European sojourn was not uniformly positive.

Fitzgerald’s productivity waned, his drinking increased, and his marriage to Zelda became strained. ‘Having gone to France to escape the distractions of New York’, Matthew Bruccoli notes, ‘they now returned to America to escape the dissipations of France’.

The Fitzgeralds took a two-year lease on Ellerslie, a 30-room Greek Revival house on the bank of the Delaware River with a $150-per-month rent. John Biggs, formerly Fitzgerald’s Princeton roommate and now a successful lawyer, helped the couple find the property. Andre le Vot describes Ellerslie as ‘a pastoral paradise of oaks and chestnut trees surrounding a house with a fourcolumned portico’. In May their first guests arrived, including the literary critic Ernest Boyd and writer Carl Van Vechten. It was the weekend in which Charles Lindbergh made the first solo flight across the Atlantic, and the party celebrated with a riverside picnic.

In September Scott and Zelda were visited by Ludlow Fowler, a Princeton friend who had served as the best man at Fitzgerald’s wedding and the model for Anson Hunter in ‘The Rich Boy’ (1926). Also in attendance were Townshend Martin – another Princeton associate – and the writer John Dos Passos, who, like Fitzgerald, would also become one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated authors. Dos Passos recalled: ‘Those delirious parties of theirs; one dreaded 7

going. At Wilmington, for instance, dinner was never served. Oh, a complete mess. I remember going into Wilmington – they lived some miles out, trying to find a sandwich, something to eat. A wild time’.

Fitzgerald began sketching out the follow-up novel to The Great Gatsby in 1925, but high living continued to hinder progress. Maxwell Perkins described a visit he paid to the Fitzgeralds in a letter to Ernest Hemingway, noting that Ellerslie was ‘solid and high and yellow, and has more quality of its own than almost any house I was ever in’. Perkins was worried about Fitzgerald’s health, however, and convinced him to switch to nicotine-free cigarettes. Ultimately, there would be an agonizing nine-year wait between The Great Gatsby and the eventual appearance of Tender Is the Night in 1934. In the meantime, Fitzgerald returned to writing profitable stories for The Saturday Evening Post. Despite disappointing progress on the novel, Fitzgerald’s Post story fee increased to $3,500 and he earned nearly $30,000 – making 1927 his most lucrative year to date.

While in Delaware Zelda began attending ballet lessons, kindling a passion she would pursue obsessively. She travelled into Philadelphia three times a week to study under the director of the Philadelphia Ballet and installed a vast gilt mirror in the front room at Ellerslie, where she practised constantly. Zelda had ambitions – which went unrealised – of becoming a professional dancer, but as Fitzgerald struggled to focus on his writing, her strong commitment to ballet became a source of tension in their relationship.

In February 1928 Edmund Wilson was invited for a weekend visit. Wilson recalled the unorthodox party Fitzgerald hosted. Scott gave a tour of the house 8

(which, he pretended, was haunted), then the guests listened to Stravinsky.

Things were going well enough until the playwright Zoe Akins – who would go on to win the 1935 Nobel Prize for Drama – impressed the gathering with recitations of Shakespeare, emerging as the dominant force at dinner. Irked not to be the centre of attention at their own party, Scott and Zelda went to bed, leaving the guests to amuse themselves. The following night, Scott tried once more to convince his visitors the house was haunted, this time by creeping into Gilbert Seldes’s room while wearing a white sheet and moaning like a ghoul.

Things turned sour when Seldes attacked the apparition and the sheet caught fire from a cigarette Fitzgerald was smoking. Wilson described the weekend as a ‘specimen of the literary life of a period in which nonsense and inspiration, reckless idealism and childish irresponsibility, were mingled in so queer a way’.

Zelda’s devotion to ballet was partly behind the Fitzgeralds’ decision to spend the summer of 1928 in Paris. They moved into an apartment adjacent to the Luxembourg Gardens at 58 rue Vaugirard in April. Here Zelda took lessons from leading ballet instructor Lubov Egorova – experiences Zelda would draw on in her semi-autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932). Fitzgerald’s main achievement that summer was work on his popular series of ‘Basil Duke Lee’ stories, which, though lucrative, made him fear his name would become associated with popular rather than serious writing.

In October the Fitzgeralds returned to Ellerslie, with a new addition to the household – a Frenchman named Philippe, whom Fitzgerald hired as a chauffeur-cum-butler who also served as a drinking companion. In November the Fitzgeralds hosted Ernest and Pauline Hemingway. They attended the Yale-Princeton football game at Princeton, at which, according to Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964), Fitzgerald indulged in embarrassingly eccentric

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behaviour. He redeemed himself in December, however, when Fitzgerald loaned Hemingway money for the journey to Chicago following his father’s death.

After his return to Ellerslie in 1928, Fitzgerald made little progress on Tender Is the Night and continued with the Basil stories. He did, however, write one of his finest pieces of short fiction ‘The Last of the Belles’, in which a young World War I soldier is scorned by the beautiful southern belle Ailie Calhoun. In March 1929 the lease expired at Ellerslie and the Fitzgeralds decided to try Europe again, embarking on their fourth trip across the Atlantic.

Fitzgerald’s time in Wilmington left little direct trace in his fiction, with the exception of his touching short story ‘Outside the Cabinet Maker’s’ (1928). In this vignette, while his wife commissions a doll’s house from a cabinet maker, a man waits outside in a car with his daughter, whom he entertains with an invented tale about an imprisoned princess. ‘Outside the Cabinet Maker’s’ may have been inspired by the doll’s house Zelda designed and decorated for Scottie while they were at Ellerslie. In the story, the car is parked on Wilmington’s 16th Street.

When the mother returns she says, in French, that the cabinet maker has made doll houses for the Du Ponts – further linking ‘Outside the Cabinet Maker’s’ to the city. The story is animated by the unnamed parents’ touching investment in their daughter’s imaginative life – and thereby a thinly-veiled reflection of the Fitzgeralds’ feelings toward Scottie. The father is thoughtful enough to realise this shared moment with his daughter – who is enraptured and excited by his tale – will go on to be among the most valued of his memories.

Delaware did not prove to be the restorative, productive haven Maxwell Perkins had hoped, though the period from 1927-29 did generate some of Fitzgerald’s most memorable short fiction. The Ellerslie years – with their parties and 10

eccentricities – do, however, form another chapter in the captivating extravagance of the Fitzgeralds’ lives. Scott’s and Zelda’s undeniable – though often destructive – verve has formed a constant point of intrigue for Fitzgerald fans. While his lifestyle often distracted Fitzgerald from enhancing his literary legacy, there is also the sense in which that occasional failure renders more precious what he did achieve. As such, the Delaware years add to the Fitzgeraldian pattern of promise unrealised, a candle burnt of both ends, of literary gifts all the more precious because of their intermittent ability to shine.

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WILMINGTON

Ernest & Scott Taproom 902 N Market Street

While it has no direct link with them, this gastropub celebrates the memory of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. The Taproom is located in the former Delaware Trust Building, a Classical Revival-style bank built in 1921.

The building’s former purpose is reflected in the Taproom’s high ceilings and carved pillar capitals. Food writer Iris McCarthy believes that Hemingway and Fitzgerald would be ‘overwhelming proud to have their grace the door’.

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John Biggs’s birthplace 1310 W. 14th Street

Fitzgerald’s Princeton roommate John Biggs was born here in 1895. Biggs had a private law practice in Wilmington and rose to become Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Biggs also had a – far less successful – career as a writer, publishing the novels Demigods (1926) and Seven Days’ Whipping (1928) with Scribner’s. Biggs not only found Ellerslie for the Fitzgeralds but, by his account, also liaised with the local authorities when Scott and Zelda’s night-time antics became excessive. Biggs remembered being called by the police to collect Scott and Zelda, who, as a gentleman and lady, were afforded the privilege of being kept in a gymnasium, rather than the cells.

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GREENVILLE

(Formerly) John Biggs’s home 2 Foxhill Lane

John Biggs was a lawyer and federal judge who had roomed with Fitzgerald at Princeton. After Scott’s death, Biggs served as an executor of Fitzgerald’s literary estate. He performed these duties for free, meaning Zelda and Scottie benefitted as much as possible from Fitzgerald’s modest estate. 2 Foxhill Lane was Biggs’s home, and Scott and Zelda would more than likely have visited here. In 2015 the house – which has five acres of grounds and six bedrooms – was put on the market for $2,225,000.

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EDGEMOOR

Chemours Edgemoor plant 104 Hay Road (Approximate former site of Ellerslie)

Sadly, the Fitzgeralds’ home is no longer extant. Having been used as office space for forty years, Ellerslie was demolished in 1973. Ellerslie was built in 1842 and sold to William and John Sellers, who founded the Edge Moor Iron Company. The Company plant was located nearby, though the surrounding area remained agricultural. The site was later bought over by Du Pont who manufactured pigments here, using Ellerslie as office space in the decades prior to its demolition. In 2015 Chemours – a Du Pont spin-off – announced the closure of the plant.

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Decades of intensive commercial activity at Edge Moor no longer make this area an attractive retreat for a writer! It is hard, today, to imagine the likes of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Maxwell Perkins, and Edmund Wilson visiting the Fitzgeralds in the pastoral seclusion of Ellerslie. Perhaps, however, Fitzgerald would have understood. In The Great Gatsby, between West Egg and New York lies the Valley of Ashes, a formerly pastoral area now polluted and rendered barren by the brutal incursions of industrialisation. In the novel, the Valley acts as a symbol of the moral and ecological results of the unbridled pursuit of wealth. The themes of affluence, power, and social mobility were an enduring fascination for Fitzgerald, who was nevertheless attuned to their corrupting as well as alluring consequences.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY This Side of Paradise, ed. James L. W. West III (1920; rep. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)] Flappers and Philosophers (1920; rep. London: Alma Classics, 2014) The Beautiful and Damned (1922; rep. London: Penguin, 1994) Tales of the Jazz Age (1922; rep. London: Penguin Classics, 2011) The Great Gatsby, ed. by Matthew Bruccoli (1925; rep. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991) All the Sad Young Men (1926; rep. London, Alma Classics, 2013) Tender Is the Night, ed. James L. W. West III (1934; rep. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Taps at Reveille, ed. by James L. W. West III (1935; rep. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) The Love of the Last Tycoon, ed. by Matthew Bruccoli (1941; rep. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) The Crack-Up, ed. by Edmund Wilson (1945; rep. New York, NY: New Directions Books, 2009) The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. by Andrew Turnbull (London: The Bodley Head, 1963)

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Written by: David A Rennie Illustrations by: Agata Urbanska Designed by: Laura Craig A Global Trails production. www.walkingwithwriters.com francesoneill@me.com