A Winter Institute Conversation About F. Scott Fitzgerald

The site of this year’s Winter Institute — Asheville, North Carolina’s Grove Park Inn — was once a destination for one of the American literary canon’s brightest stars: F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The selection of the 101-year-old hotel as the host hotel for the 2015 Winter Institute provided the American Booksellers Association a rare programming opportunity given the fact that two noted authors had new books focusing on Fitzgerald. Maureen Corrigan, the author of So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures (Little, Brown), and Stewart O’Nan, author of West of Sunset (Viking), were scheduled to join with moderator Erik Larson (Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, Crown, March 2015) in the featured talk “The Man in Room 441: A Conversation About F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

Erik Larson, Maureen Corrigan, Stewart O'Nan, and ABA CEO Oren Teicher

When Wi10’s Tuesday breakfast plenary speaker, Boston-based author Sarah Lewis, was forced to cancel her appearance due to snow, Corrigan, O’Nan, and moderator Larson graciously agreed to move their featured talk to the morning plenary.

After admitting, “for full disclosure,” that he’s more of a Hemingway fan, Larson asked Corrigan and O’Nan why they chose to focus on Fitzgerald — Corrigan, on his most enduring work, The Great Gatsby, and Larson, in a novel told from Fitzgerald’s point of view during the last years of his life as he wrote for Hollywood.

“Because he’s the best. Because you can’t beat Fitzgerald’s language,” said Corrigan, a book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and a professor at Georgetown University, who has taught Gatsby for 30 years.

“The Great Gatsby is our greatest great American novel about class,” she said. “I think any time in our history when we’re feeling anxious about our financial stability, when ordinary Americans are having that sense of, as Barbara Ehrenreich said, this ‘fear of falling,’ then Gatsby becomes our text because it is about reaching for the stars and falling, falling, falling down.”

That same fear and fall was a driving force in Fitzgerald’s own life, and became the topic of O’Nan’s book. No clearer is this than in “The Crack-Up” (1936), a series of essays Fitzgerald wrote for Esquire while staying at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville.

Fitzgerald lived at the hotel for two summers in the 1930s while attempting to revive his writing career, in decline following The Great Gatsby’s 1925 publication and the author’s battles with depression and alcoholism. The second summer he stayed at the Grove Park, Fitzgerald brought his wife, Zelda, to Asheville's Highland Hospital, a psychiatric facility, where she was then treated on and off for years until her death there in a tragic fire.

It was the post-Gatsby Fitzgerald who was the inspiration for O’Nan’s book.  In “The Crack-Up,” O’Nan said, “Fitzgerald is so open and emotional about his inner state, and, yet, he is objective enough to look at himself and see that this could happen to almost anyone.”

These essays, or “confessions, really,” O’Nan said,“[talk] about all the blows that happen to you throughout your life and how you don’t know they’re taking away the best that’s in you, leaving you much less of a person. He sort of mourns the person who he has lost, who is no longer generous, who can no longer give his time to other people and help other people out because he is just flailing so…They’re really heartrending stuff.”

Corrigan, on the other hand, chose to focus on Gatsby, which one of her students at Georgetown once described as “The Sistine Chapel of literature in 180 pages.”

“I want to figure out how he did it,” she said. “Why he started writing Gatsby and how a great work like this happens. Not like I wanted to solve that question. I wanted to go deeper into the miracle of Gatsby.”

People in the 1930s, as do some readers even today, missed the satire and the social criticism inherent in the novel, she said. “They just thought [Fitzgerald] was in love with wealth and excess and luxury. They didn’t see the other story underneath Gatsby, which is criticizing mindless consumption.”

Both Corrigan and O’Nan said they loved doing the research for their books. For Corrigan, this included a trip to the University of South Carolina to see the Fitzgerald manuscript collection there as well as Fitzgerald’s original ledger, where he recorded his earnings from writing as well as monthly diary entries.

“By the time I finished writing this book I felt like I could write a whole other book about Gatsby and Fitzgerald. There are just so many stories,” Corrigan said. O’Nan said he did three months of reading and note-taking on Fitzgerald’s life story just to find out how he was going to start his book.

“The narrative of Fitzgerald’s life itself is kind of an urtext for Americans,” he said, “that early success and then that spectacular fall after 1929. I think we’re all drawn to that shining gold young couple there, and then they sort of just piss it all away.”

By the time he moved to Hollywood in 1937, O’Nan said, Fitzgerald had so much riding against him: He was broke and his writing career had stalled; Zelda was in and out of institutions, and he was parenting their daughter alone, not to mention the fact that he was suffering from a serious case of alcoholism.

But while hobnobbing with movie stars and producers at the famous Hollywood hotel Garden of Allah, Fitzgerald actually succeeds in paying off his debts, begins his great unfinished work The Last Tycoon, and falls in love again, this time with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. O’Nan said he wanted to tell the story of “a legendary character in a legendary time and place,” when Fitzgerald was trying to reclaim the person he was before he “cracked up.”  

“In Hollywood, he regains his love of writing and he regains his love of the world,” he said. “That really is the spine of the whole book.”