In this final look look at Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s trip to Europe in 1921 we see the couple head back on the RMS Celtic to New York. Topics include The Anglo-Irish Treaty, the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Shane Leslie’s review of Ulysses, Prince Val Engalitcheff, the Cotillo-Jesse Clean Book Bill and Sherwood Anderson’s The Triumph of the Egg.
The trip back to New York from England appears to have been just as entertaining as the trip there. Joining the couple in First Class was British Privy Councillor, Viscount James Bryce and his wife, Elizabeth. Pressed for a response to developments in Ireland the former Ambassador to the US told reporters in his writing room on the ship that he was not going to saying anything about the Irish Question either here or in America. There was strange kind of balance to the trip. The incoming US Ambassador, George Harvey had accompanied Scott on his journey to England back in May and the former British Ambassador to the US would be joining him and Zelda as they made their eager way back home. Scott had brought the New World with him and was returning with the Old World.
Among the 105 first class passengers on board, Bryce was by far the ship’s most precious cargo, having served as British Ambassador to the United States from 1907 to 1913. Bryce had also been among the most esteemed members of the American Society in London Club attending the 4th July celebrations at the Hotel Cecil in the last few days of Scott and Zelda’s stay in London. At the beginning of June, Bryce and Winston Churchill had chaired a meeting at the Carlton Hotel to welcome Chautauqua leader, Dr George Edgar Vincent, President of the Rockefeller Foundation and several other of its representatives to London. Eleven years before, Bryce, like former President Theordore Roosevelt, had expressed his view that the Chautauqua Movement was the most ‘American thing’ that America had ever produced. [1] The day would mark the beginning of a new era of Anglo-American research, with Dr Vincent expressing hope that Britian and the United States could one day be “bound together in the closest bonds of goodwill” through scientific and philanthropic enterprise. These ‘merchants of light’ would search for truth and apply it to the human need in the spirit of global cooperation. [2] For a time at least, the fierce rivalries between the countries to exploit the “largest remaining oil possibilities” in the world in Mesopotamia would be put on hold.
Although Bryce refuted any suggestion that he was heading to the United States in any official government capacity, the series of lectures and meetings that made up his packed itinerary left Americans in no doubt that there was a strong political and diplomatic dimension to Bryce’s three-month visit. At one of his first formal addresses in Williamstown, the Belfast-born Bryce reiterated Britain’s pledge to free Ireland of its English-burden. [3] In a letter to The Times of London in February, Bryce had written that Britain could “no longer contemplate holding Ireland down forever by force and terror.” [4] Negotiations had entered a critical stage and the far-reaching compromises desired by both sides were long overdue. Bryce was also under no illusions that solving the Home Rule question would also be a crucial factor in improving America’s relations with Britain. It was exactly the kind of mission Scott’s friend Leslie had been on during his teaching days at Newman: that the key to an Anglo-American partnership was through successful rapprochement with Ireland. In his 1917 book, The Irish Issue in Its American Aspect, Leslie had written that the heyday of reconciliation had been reached under the theories of ‘Modern Democracies’ being advanced by Ambassador Bryce — a lifelong ‘American Dreamer’ if ever there was one. Bryce’s literary tribute to the American Constitution in his 1888 publication, American Commonwealth, Leslie continued, had marked the former Ambassador as “more American than most Americans.” Respect for the Brit was such that when Bryce received his peerage from the British crown in 1914 it was felt that they had they had “lost one of themselves.” [5] At Bryce’s lecture at New York’s Hotel Biltmore on the eve of his trip back home, he had too had voiced his worry that the resolutions made at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 were sowing the seeds of a future world conflict. [6] It was Bryce’s opinion (and probably Scott’s too) that France was the last place on earth they should have held these discussions.
Scott mentions his encounter with Bryce on the trip back home in both his ledger and in a letter that he would write to John Franklin Carter, then serving as Secretary to the American Ambassador in Rome: “Dear John: The Queen arrived here safely. She’s excellent isn’t she. Even such an old Tory as Viscount Bryce, with whom I had a talk on the boat coming back, thinks it’s a great book, tho he considered Eminent Victorians an outrage.” [7] Scott had just received a copy of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria from Carter and it was clear that Bryce had shared his enthusiasm for the book, even if he had showed little enthusiasm for Strachey’s earlier effort, Eminent Victorians, a collection of biographies of four leading figures from the late Victorian period. One biography of those biographies told the story of Cardinal Manning and his battle with Cardinal Newman, the man who Scott’s Catholic prep-school in Hackensack, New Jersey had been named after. [8] In another letter to Zelda years later, Scott would recall not only their encounter with Bryce but their entertaining encounter with The Duncan Sisters and their dogs. This popular vaudeville act consisted of two twenty-something sisters impersonating twelve year old girls. P.G. Wodehouse would write that they “looked like something left over from a defunct kindergarten.” Their forte was tap-dancing, close-harmony singing and the slightly creepy ‘Topsy and Eva’ act — a show based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin in which Rosetta portrayed a young American slave girl, her face coloured black with boot polish in an appalling comic display of racism. Scott would include a reference to the sisters, Rosetta and Vivian, in his 1928 story, Magnetism, a tale of twisted and obsessional love. A few years later, Vivian would marry fellow gay actor, Nils Asther in a so-called ‘lavender’ union.
Any progress that the Belfast-born Bryce had been able to make during his post-war tour of America was brought to a crashing halt in January the following year. After arriving back on the Adriatic in mid-October the old man reflected on the hopes and fears of modern-day America as he had observed on his tour. In an article he prepared for the press, Bryce translated the sentiments of an often misunderstood nation. In electing Harding as President America had shown its scepticism of the League of Nations, but its commitment to world peace, he wrote, should never be doubted. Bryce believed that the upcoming disarmament conference being organised in Washington that November was testament to this commitment. Despite their vehement fighting spirit, the Ambassador thought Americans to be more ‘pacific’ in temper than “any of the European nations.” For many of them war seemed to be relic of a barbarous age. Even so, Americans were now coming round to the idea that they had a duty to the rest of the world. Unlike Scott, he might not have used the phrase, ‘the White Man’s Burden’, but that’s exactly what Bryce had meant it and how Kipling had first intended it to be understood. Contrary to what many people think, the phrase had been used not to express the imperial chauvinism of an all-conquering British Empire, but the duty that America had in ‘taming’ the Philippines during the Philippine–American War. The nation’s commitment to ‘World Peace’, the ex-Ambassador went on, remained unwavering. [9] Scott may have used the phrase fairly sardonically in his letter to Wilson the previous week, but Bryce was perfectly serious. After fifty years in diplomacy, Bryce understood that it wasn’t the reality of other nations that made them what they were, but our perceptions of them. Britain’s relations with America were based on the assumptions we made about their opinions and world views. Britain had failed to grasp the true, complex nature of American Isolationism and risked missing an opportunity to broaden the horizon of international cooperation by failing to recognize the true value of the Washington conference in autumn. In the first week of January 1922, Bryce would make an address on ‘The Value and the Use of Original Authority in History’ at Kings College, London. A reporter for The Scotsman newspaper duly reminded its readers that ‘original authority’ in history was rather scarce, the earliest writers rarely citing actual evidence and taking for their sources pretty much “anything that they could get their hands on”. The tendency among modern historians was one of “post-jection”— of throwing our own feelings back on the past and to think of men of the past “as if they were ourselves”. [10] Within days it had opened up a debate on what was truth and what was opinion — the most unreliable sources of history being the newspapers themselves. Time, however, was catching up Bryce and just two weeks later the ‘eminent Liberal statesman’ was dead. His Lordship, now in his 84th year, had died suddenly between lectures in Sidmouth, energetic to the last.
The Irish Question
Joining Scott and Viscount Bryce on the first-class decks of the RMS Celtic that week were Reverend Wythe Leigh Kinsolving — a Democratic activist and virulent anti-Communist — and British journalist and economist, Francis W. Hirst. Hirst, a respected correspondent for the American Association for International Conciliation, had spent several years serving as assistant legal adviser to the British Foreign Office. He was there to tell America that “drastic economy” was the only way that the new states of Europe of could save themselves from insolvency, supporting Bryce and President Harding’s contention that the world was heading for trouble if all of the leading nine nations of the world (and not just Germany) couldn’t agree on a large-scale disarmament program. The Disarmament Conference was due to take place in Washington and it was the opinion of Churchill and Lloyd George that the ‘Pacific Question’ would be central to any solution. Bryce and Churchill also firmly believed that solving the Irish Question would be crucial in securing the cooperation of Harding and America. It was a belief shared by Shane Leslie who had already seen that a pledge to settle the issue of Home Rule would see America throw over her neutrality during the war.
On the very day that Bryce had made his address on history, history was being made in Ireland as Sinn Féin leaders Arthur Griffith and Eamon de Valera, who had very different ideas on Ireland’s future, began to thrash out a solution to the proposals of the Treaty that would determine just how much control they would have of the country’s affairs. Viscount Bryce, Britain’s ex-Chief Secretary of Ireland, who had served Chief Secretary of Ireland at the time that Griffith had founded the Sinn Féin Party, remained a key influencer and observer in the country’s affairs. Just twelve month earlier, Bryce’s sister-in-law, Violet L’ Estrange Bryce had been arrested by British authorities in Ireland, her promotion of the Irish Cause a tad more direct than his own. [11] In December 1921 Bryce had addressed the Lords for the last time, urging them to adopt the Irish Treaty. His only regret was that the offer had not been made sooner. Contrary to what many politicians in Britain would have people believe, there was, he said, “friendly and neighbourly good feeling between Catholics and Protestants all over the south and centre of Ireland.” He ended his speech by congratulating the government for the “boldness” they shown in trying this “experiment”. [12]
The ceasefire ‘truce’ between Irish Republicans and British Forces that was put in place whilst Scott and Zelda were enroute back home had been arranged to provide further proof of just how serious Britain now was about Home Rule. On the day that Scott set sail on the Celtic with Lord Bryce, the headlines in the New York Times read: “Truce in Ireland Declared.” [13] In March,Scott’s friend, Shane Leslie, with whom he shared a birthday,had been forced to challenge Lord Hugh Cecil’s belief that the ultimate responsibility for the Irish situation rested with its Catholic Bishops. Leslie pointed out that it wasn’t the Catholic Bishops that governed the country, it was politicians. The solution, he suggested, rested almost entirely with a change in government policy. [14] A few weeks later The Times of London recruited Leslie to report on the Catholic Bible Congress in London. [15] The following year, Leslie would be made Chamberlain to the Pope in Rome, his services in Anglo-Irish relations having long been regarded with the utmost admiration. As we know, Leslie and Father Sigourney Fay —two of Scott’s most valued tutors at the Newman School for Boys — had been recruited by British ambassador Cecil Spring Rice and Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour to help prise American-Irish support away from Germany to Britain during the war. By 1917 the pair’s deep, abiding friendship with Cardinal Gibbons, the Pope’s prelate in America, had allowed them to open-up a deep and powerful communication channel between America, Britain, Petrograd and Rome. Even after his return from America in 1919, Leslie remained a key diplomatic figure in Anglo-American and Irish relations, his counsel often sought by those who occupied the highest office. Just days before Scott and Zelda arrived at his home in Talbot Square in May, Leslie had recorded in his diary a meeting with the Irish Viceroy Lord Fitzallan at the home of Lady Sibyl Colefax. The topic of discussion that day had been Eamon de Valera and Arthur Griffith. For almost two hours Leslie had done his best to present the Republican leaders as “good characters” who the British government would be wise to view as a part of the solution to the troubles in Ireland. As Scott and Zelda spent their final few days in Rome, Fitzallan had advised Leslie on how to proceed in arranging a meeting with Ulster Unionist, James Craig and Eamon de Valera, President of the Dáil Éireann, a meeting that would prove crucial to the creation of the Irish Free State the following year. By the time that Scott was back in London, all the details had been arranged. [16]
Not everyone was happy of course. Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins still had their concerns about Leslie whose ambiguous relationship with British Intelligence in Washington during the closing years of the war had made them more than a little cautious in how they approached him. [17] Keeping men like Arthur Griffith on-side had been central to English objectives, and there was no one more aware of this than de Valera, who remained sceptical of the pro-Empire terms of the recent agreement. Shortly after an encounter with Leslie and his brother-in-law, William Bourke Cockran during a fund-raising mission in New York in August 1919, de Valera wrote to Griffith back in Dublin: “I was playing with one of the children when Mrs Leslie brought out camera to take photo. I saw use to which Leslie could put such a photo, to make it appear I was on very intimate terms with him, but decided better to dissimulate – not let on. He has taken the photo with him – should you find he has been using it either publicly or privately in any clandestine way explain publicly how it was procured. He is in the Northcliffe and British service and is gone to help in the Plunkett campaign. He will be used with the bishops mainly I think.” [18] Valera was half-right; Leslie, who had announced his support for Sinn Fein in spring that year, had been assigned as Secretary to Frederick Keating, the Labour-loving Bishop of Northampton who had been urgently dispatched to Washington D.C. Once there Keating had been instructed to establish a “uniformity of policy” on the Home Rule issue among English speaking Catholics. Speaking at a luncheon at Monsignor Fay’s Catholic University in Washington, Keating explained how the failure of the Home Rule movement had been the failures of the Irish themselves who had been unable to agree on an ‘acceptable form of government’. A “new day was dawning for an old land”. Keating went on to explain how things were very different now back on the British mainland. It was now the will of the English people that Ireland should be freed. There would soon be justice in Ireland — only on terms that still favoured the empire. [19]
Scott would write in his first novel, This Side of Paradise, of an imagined but entirely plausible scenario in which his Newman mentor, Sigourney Fay, had attended a meeting in Boston held by ‘President’ Eamon de Valera. In the usual Fitzgerald style, the young author had been able to knit imagined events into real life situations. Eamon de Valera had visited Saint Paul in October 1919. On October 19th he would take mass at the Church of St Luke at 1079 Summit Avenue/Lexington Parkway, just yards from Scott’s home. It was part of a 15 month tour of the States. In the afternoon he was joined by 250 men and women of Irish descent at the Saint Paul hotel for a formal luncheon. A crowd of 9, 000 people had gathered outside the hotel waiting for his address waving the Irish flag. [20] But by this time Fay was dead and was no longer in any position to have an opinion one way or another or the ‘dignity’ of the way they behaved at gathering. If his alter ego, Amory Blaine is anything to go by, Scott had begun to tire of the Irish Question, despite there being a time when his own “Celtic traits” had been “the pillars of his own personal philosophy”. Nevertheless, the excitement of having de Valera in town had revived “old interests”, even if it was only briefly. His real fear was that this revival in the “romantic lost cause” of Ireland was taking him further and further away from what was happening now. [21] Fay has told him not be embarrassed or in the least bit anxious by his Irish roots, but proud of them rather. There was, however, a difference between not being embarrassed about being Irish and making it the dominant point of reference in everything you set out to achieve in life. The meaning of the phrase Sinn Fein was “self-reliance”. This was the part that he was now holding on to: the means to determine your own life. That same month Scott would receive a letter from Leslie in Ireland, suggesting that he might like to submit an essay on Saint Paul’s Archbishop John Ireland for publication in the Dublin Review. He could arrange interviews with the Bishop’s friend, if necessary. The letter coincided with his mother Mollie buying him a number of ‘religious books’. [22] As it was, Scott was more interested in getting his novel ready for publication and working on a story called, Head and Shoulders that would explore the tense rivalry between thinking and actually doing and the sharp reversal in fortunes that often come with love.
An Odyssey of the Sewer
Whilst things were not entirely cosy with de Valera and his friends, Leslie was able to repair his relationship with the more devout members of the Irish Republican stronghold when he published his scathing review of Joyce’s Ulysses, which had been scheduled, rather provocatively, for publication within weeks of the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and its ratification in January 1922. It was Leslie’s opinion that the Dublin of Joyce’s Ulysses was depicted as a ‘dirty’ place and its menagerie of revolting characters full of ‘jocular contempt’ for a city that would become the capital of the Irish Free State. In a series of essays for the Dublin and Quarterly Reviews in summer 1922, Leslie had torn into Joyce with his teeth bared: “no adequate meaning” could be attached to the book and for this reason alone the novel was an “assault upon divine decency as well on human intelligence.” Despite his friendship with the book’s sponsor, John Quinn, Leslie regarded Ulysses, the ‘size and colour of the London telephone book’ as an indulgent stab at a scandal. It was an ‘Odyssey of the sewer’, a ‘work of literary Bolshevism’ whose only obvious intention was to bamboozle and corrupt. It was ‘anti-conventional, anti-Christian, chaotic and totally immoral’ decoying its chapters to ‘political uses’ and showing that he cared little for the ‘sacra’ of Catholic and Protestant’ belief. As far as Leslie was concerned, Joyce was plumbing the depths of ‘Rabelaisian realism’ as part of one ‘gigantic’ extended joke. The worst of the book’s offences was that it was wilfully obtuse, with the author abandoning form in a mad ‘Shelleyan’ effort ‘to extend the known confines of the English language’. Writing under the pseudonym, Domini Canis in the Dublin Review a few months later, Leslie was more cutting still: this deeply ‘frustrated Titan’ was spinning and spluttering hopelessly “on the flood of his own vomit.” [23] Leslie got that the work was an experimental ‘24 hours in the life’ of its desultory hero, Leopold Bloom, and as such should be granted a certain amount of license, but he wasn’t prepared, either personally or politically, to tolerate the novel’s sneering depiction of his much-loved Dublin.
After years of effort, Leslie’s campaigning on Irish Home Rule had finally paid-off. Just ten weeks before Ulysses was published an Anglo Irish Agreement had been thrashed out in Downing Street. A new republic was about to be born and much of Ireland would now be free. The terms defined in the agreement would be effective from March 1922, the month following its publication. From Leslie’s perspective, Joyce’s decision to publish it couldn’t have been worse timed. The author had dabbled with learning Gaelic before eventually rejecting any idea of Nationalism that any man or woman inadequate room to express their individuality or fostered ethnic or religious divisions. The whole issue of Irish Nationalism had been parodied in the book during a scurrilous retelling of the ‘Cyclops’ episode in Homer’s Odyssey. In Joyce’s novel, the hero’s encounter with the one-eyed monster is provided at a figurative level. The scene of the battle is bar in Dublin. In one corner is ‘The Citizen’, a short-sighted Irish nationalist who shares a volley of bigoted insults at Jews and other minorities. In the opposite corner is Bloom, more moderate and part-Jewish, who makes a heroic attempt to defend them. Fitzgerald would retell it in his own way with Tom Buchannan, the hulking one-eyed monster in Gatsby, but in the context of Home Rule and the Irish Republic, Joyce’s decision to include the episode was about as tactless and provocative as one could get.
Throughout Ulysses, Joyce had drawn on his conversations with Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin and a key member of the negotiation team that had produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty some six months earlier. [24] For men like Leslie, keeping the relatively moderate Griffith on-side had been central to English objectives. Unlike his Sinn Féin comrades Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins, Griffith wasn’t regarded as a ‘mob-led’ fanatic intent on delivering freedom at all costs. Despite his arrest, Griffith had taken no part in the Easter Rising, whilst de Valera had commanded a team of volunteers at Boland’s Hill and Collins had served at the rebellion’s headquarters in Dublin. There was no one more keenly aware of Leslie’s covert influence that de Valera, who remained sceptical of the pro-Empire terms of the recent agreement. Shortly after an encounter with Leslie and his American brother-in-law, William Bourke Cockran during a fund-raising mission in New York in August 1919, de Valera wrote to Griffith back in Dublin: “I was playing with one of the children when Mrs Leslie brought out camera to take photo. I saw use to which Leslie could put such a photo, to make it appear I was on very intimate terms with him, but decided better to dissimulate – not let on. He has taken the photo with him – should you find he has been using it either publicly or privately in any clandestine way explain publicly how it was procured. He is in the Northcliffe and British service and is gone to help in the Plunkett campaign. He will be used with the bishops mainly I think.” [25] Valera was half-right; Leslie, who had announced his support for Sinn Féin in spring that year, had been appointed Secretary to Frederick Keating, the Labour-loving Bishop of Northampton who had been dispatched with Washington DC to establish a “uniformity of policy” on the Home Rule issue among English speaking Catholics. Speaking at a luncheon at the Catholic University in Washington, Keating explained how the failure of the Home Rule movement had been the failures of the Irish themselves who had been unable to agree on any ‘acceptable form of government’. A “new day was dawning for an old land”. Keating went on to explain how things were very different now back on the British mainland. It was now the will of the English people that Ireland should be freed. There would soon be justice in Ireland — only on terms that still favoured the empire. [26] Keating and his team would work closely with the propaganda bureau established by Lord Beaverbrook, Northcliffe’s successor on a vision that wasn’t unlike the one being shaped for British Mandate Palestine. [27] As the twenty-seven victors of the Great War assembled in Paris in January 1919, the Zionists, the Roman Catholic Church, the Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and the Irish were all looking to re-set their own national clocks to zero. They were attempting to repeat the past, and for once they were looking like they were going to do so bang on schedule.
Leslie’s negative and alarmist reviews might not have led to Ulysses being banned as some writers have suggested, but they certainly did little to earn it a fair and fresh hearing. [28] How much of his opinion was based on literary or moral objections, and how much of it was informed by the demands of politics and diplomacy might never be known but there are some clues in a letter that Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver a few months after the review was published. In the letter Joyce appears to have been quite philosophical about the essays, believing the deep sense of Catholic injury expressed in the reviews was probably the best thing that Leslie could have done to give Ulysses credibility in Protestant England. At the end of the letter Joyce offers a last-minute teaser: “In conclusion I think Leslie likes Ulysses as strange as it may seem but I shall write to you about that later on.” [29] Shortly before his death in August 1922, Griffith had considered nominating Joyce for the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature, the author’s attendance of the Irish Race Congress in Paris on the Dáil’s behalf earlier that year having clearly been much appreciated by the Irish leader. Ten years later, Griffith’s leadership rival (and eventual replacement) Eamon de Valera rolled out the book censorship laws. From now on, the Committee on Evil Literature would weed out those books that did not observe the holiest church traditions. Whilst never banned as such, Ulysses remained unpublished and unavailable in Ireland for years — probably because no one actually dared to buy the six copies required by the Censorship Board. When a radio adaptation of the novel came under the scrutiny of a Catholic pressure group in Dublin in the 1950s, a local newspaper did a trawl of the city’s main booksellers looking for a copy, only to be told that they hadn’t seen a new copy of the book for years. [30]
The terms defined in the Anglo-Irish Treaty would be effective from March 1922, the month following its publication. From Leslie’s perspective, Joyce’s decision to publish the novel couldn’t have been worse timed. The whole issue of Irish Nationalism had been parodied in the book during a scurrilous retelling of the ‘Cyclops’ episode in Homer’s Odyssey. In Joyce’s novel, the hero’s encounter with the one-eyed monster is intended to function at a figurative level. The scene of the battle is a bar in Dublin. In one corner is ‘The Citizen’, a short-sighted Irish nationalist who shares a volley of bigoted insults at Jews and other minorities. In the opposite corner is Bloom, more moderate and part-Jewish, who makes a heroic attempt to defend them. Fitzgerald would retell it in his own way with Tom Buchannan, the hulking one-eyed monster in Gatsby, but in the context of Home Rule and the Irish Republic, Joyce’s decision to include the episode was about as tactless and provocative as one could get. [31] Leslie’s blistering rejection of Joyce’s book in October that year would almost certainly have got Griffith back on his side, published as it was just weeks before Griffith and his party convened to approve the Irish Constitution and form a parliament. [32]
If the confessions of his fictional alter-ego, Amory Blaine, are anything to go by, Scott had never been particularly passionate on the Irish cause, despite all the attempts of his mother Millie McQuillan and Sigourney Fay to invigorate that side of his heritage. Instead, the author would draw greater significance from the links on his father’s side to Francis Key Scott, composer of the now ubiquitous national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner. Efforts by Fay and Leslie to re-energise both his Catholicism and his Irish Nationalism had gained little in the way of traction throughout his time at his prep-school and Princeton. After picking up a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses from the from the Brick Row Bookshop, Scott’s feelings of inadequacy returned: “I wish it was [set] in America—there is something about middle-class Ireland, that depresses me inordinately—I mean gives me a sort of hollow, cheerless pain. Half of my ancestors came from just such an Irish strata or perhaps a lower one. The book makes me feel appallingly naked.” [33] Scott would later to confide to his friend, John O’Hara, that the Irish side of his family had only given him an intense social self-consciousness, in which feelings of inferiority had taken root.
For the Scott Fitzgerald of 1922, Ulysses represented the moment in life when the ceiling of the great world should by rights have come crashing. If Scott had his way there would have been an almost deafening tear in space and time and the whole backward world of Europe and America would take a heroic leap forward. Saints would be forgotten. Oceans would emptied and writers like Joyce would be hailed across the globe as the prophets of a new age. And when this didn’t happen, it made the views shared by his old friend Shane Leslie all the more frustrating. The furore around its publication in Paris and its banning in America impacted on his writing perhaps more than any other single event. The watchers were not only watching now, they were making devastating interventions into the creative life of writers. The bookshops weren’t safe, nor were the newspaper columns. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice — a kind of literary Inquisition that had played the biggest part in getting Ulysses banned — had eyes and ears everywhere.
By May 1923, a whole new campaign on censorship was underway. Responding to this news, Scott scribbled off a disgruntled letter to the editor of The Literary Digest: “The clean-book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap where it rested comfortably between the Civil War and the World War.” Scott couldn’t understand how a book like Simon Called Peter, a testy and provocative novel openly critical of Catholicism, could pass the censors and not books by more powerful and deserving authors like Theodore Dreiser, James Joyce and James Branch Cabell. [34] The Cotillo-Jesse Clean Book Bill that Scott refers to in his had just been passed by the New York Assembly. Within days it was being presented to a specially prepared Senate hearing. The man doing all the running on the bill was John S. Sumner of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. At the opening of the sessions, Sumner had placed in the hands of the Senate Committee a half-dozen sealed envelopes which he alleged contained evidence of some serious obscenities. Those challenging the bill immediately objected on the basis that it was impossible to judge a book based on a selection of paragraphs taken out of context. Among those who raised their objections at the hearing was Horace Liveright. The sponsors of the Bill were Justice John Ford and Martin Conboy Jnr, President of the New York Catholic Club and a powerful Irish-American ally of Scott’s mentor, Shane Leslie and Shane’s father-in-law, William Bourke-Cockran. [35] Conboy Jnr had come out with all guns blazing against the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses. His reasons were twofold: the first was that he loathed the casual obscenity used by so-called ‘artists’ and the second was that the book’s Cyclops scene featured what many believed to be a brutal caricature of Sinn Fein leaders. Arthur Griffith, who Joyce mentions several times throughout the novel, was politically and personally aligned with an associate of Conboy’s friend (and legal client), the Irish Republican leader, Éamon de Valera. Although Joyce’s take on Griffith was more complex and more nuanced than Conboy would have known, the scene threw a heavy satirical punch against the bigots and the thugs that had assumed control of the movement.
Leslie’s negative and alarmist reviews might not have led to the novel being banned as some writers have suggested, but it certainly did little to earn it a fair and fresh hearing. [36] How much of his opinion was based on literary or moral objections, and how much of it was informed by the demands of politics and diplomacy might never be known but there are some clues in a letter that Joyce wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver a few months after his review was published. In the letter, Joyce appears to have been quite philosophical about the essays, believing the deep sense of Catholic injury expressed in the reviews was probably the best thing that Leslie could have done to give Ulysses credibility in Protestant England. At the end of the letter Joyce offers a last-minute teaser: “In conclusion I think Leslie likes Ulysses as strange as it may seem but I shall write to you about that later on.” [37] The statement may have prompted in part by a letter that Leslie had written to their mutual friend, John Quinn in May 1922 in which he revealed his true feelings about the book: “My Dear Mr Quinn, How about Ulysses! I believe James Joyce is a protégé of yours for you were the first to recommend his Portrait of the Artist to me. I think you were among the generous who supported him during the long incubation of Ulysses … It is an immensely powerful and fantastic book … he fascinates, disgusts and bores, infuriates and astonishes.” Leslie may have thought the book represented “the suicide of the whole Irish literary movement”, and that it was almost impossible to read without furious, concerted effort, but political objections aside, there was little doubting his admiration for Joyce’s work on purely literary or artistic merit. [38]
A few weeks before the death of his aunt, Lady Randolph Churchill, Shane had received some more bad news: the American father of his wife, Henry Clay Ide, a powerful figure in the Taft and Roosevelt Administrations had died at his home in Vermont. According to an item in the New York Times dated July 29th 1921, Shane and his wife Marjorie had also spent some of June and July in Paris, although it is not known if they had been able to hook-up with Scott and Zelda. [39] The report told how Ide’s elder daughter Anne, or Mrs Bourke-Cockran as she known at this time, was visiting Mrs Shane Leslie and had dressed in mourning black for the full duration of the trip. There was better news later in the month when the couple celebrated the christening of their son Desmond in St John’s Wood with his godparents Lord Tredegar (‘the black monk’) and Countess Ethel Beatty. [40] Three years later, Tredegar’s daughter Gwyneth Ericka Morgan would be pulled dead from the Thames. Like Leslie, it is believed she had been interested in the social problems of the East End, but in a much more lurid account of the tale it was being suggested that Gwyneth had overdosed in one of its ‘dope dens’. The last sightings of the poor woman were at a restaurant in Limehouse, the same district of London with its dark winding lanes and narrow throughfares that Leslie had escorted Scott and Zelda around in 1921. She was 29 years old. [41]
Goodbye Prince Engalitcheff
As we have seen already, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were heading back to the United States at a time when American and British relations were approaching a world-changing fork in the road; the long-cherished American Dream was about to go International. One can only speculate on the kind of conservation that Scott and former Ambassador Bryce were engaged in as the Belfast-built keel of The Celtic tore through the waves of the Atlantic — but given the shape and pace of events — and his contact with dramatic Irish Nationalists, St John Ervine, Lennox Robinson and Shane Leslie during his two bookended stays in London — one might assume that it wasn’t confined to books.
Among some of the other colourful ‘personages’ joining Scott on his trip back home were railroad journalist, Edward Hungerford, Secretary of the Merchants Association, S. Cristy Mead, Broadway director and theatre mogul, Fred G. Latham (whose trip to London would result in a production of E. Temple Thurston’s The Wandering Jew with David Belasco) and Malcolm C. Dizer, a respected British-American philatelist who had served as aide to Wall Street millionaire, Bernard Baruch, one of the most powerful US War Industries Board members and a man who had personally advised President Woodrow Wilson on the League of Nations. [42] The following year, Baruch would be among the ‘bordello of interesting people’ turning-up at the home of Herbert Baynard Swope, an associate of Scott at his new home in Great Neck. Also sharing the decks with Scott and Bryce that day was super-lawyer and lobbyist, S. Christy Mead who had been attending the annual meeting of the International Chamber of Commerce in London. As secretary of the two year old ‘Trade League of Nations’, Mead had been conducting a comprehensive survey on the gruellingly prohibitive US passport restrictions that were now crippling trade with Europe. Mead had returned with a pioneering ‘no borders’ suggestion: that arrangements should be made by international agreement so that citizens of many countries could enter the United States without a passport — and vice versa. [43] Like Scott and Zelda, Mead had been lodging at the Hotel Cecil immediately prior to embarking in Liverpool.
One of the couple’s more entertaining travelling companions on the R.M.S Aquitania during that first journey to England was the continent-hopping, Prince Vladimir ‘Val’ Engalitcheff. Sadly, Val didn’t make the voyage back with them, having stayed on in Paris at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée with his estranged mother, Evelyn Partridge, daughter of a Chicago millionaire. [44] The Prince’s father, Prince Nicholas Engalitcheff was a noble of Russian and German heritage who had served in Chicago as Imperial Russian Vice Consul during the early 1900s. It was here that he had committed himself to a lifelong pursuit of cash-for-titles romances with some of America’s most eligible heiresses. After his tenure as Vice Consul came to a close in 1909, Nicholas had taken up a lucrative role as head of the Foreign Department at the La Salle Street Trust and Savings Bank, at that time operated by slippery Republican, Senator William Lorimer, the British-born “blond boss” of Chicago.
By the time that the 19-year old Val had joined Scott on his trip to England in May 1920, his wily old father, Prince Nicholas, had clocked-up some $2,500 in debt and found himself at the centre of a fraud investigation featuring his new wife, Princess Melanie de Bertrand De Lyteuil, freshly divorced from a serving French Minister. [45] Scott would subsequently use the 19 year Val as the basis for his character Prince Val Vostoff in his short story, Love in the Night, published in The Saturday Evening Post in March 1925, just a few weeks before The Great Gatsby hit the shelves in America.On the couple’s arrival back in New York, Prince Val would become a frequent visitor to Scott and Zelda’s house in Great Neck. Joining him on several occasions would be their Hollywood pal, Ted Paramore and Edmund Wilson, the letters written during this period hinting at long days and long nights of pills and booze-fuelled parties. [46] The couple’s friendship with Val ended in tragedy when the body of the young ‘Prince’ was discovered lifeless in his Fifth Avenue apartment some 18-months after the voyage to England. Details about his death remain sketchy. The official cause of death was heart and kidney failure, but an entry in Scott’s ledger dated January 1923 puts an altogether different slant on the Prince’s demise. It reads simply: “Val Engalitcheff kills himself.” [47] The Browns University student was dead at just twenty-one years of age. Ninety years later the same 12 storey apartment block at 907 Fifth Avenue would feature in the scandalous death of heiress and philanthropist, Huguette Clark, the daughter of a US Senator, William A. Clark, famously described by Mark Twain as the embodiment of Gilded Age excess. The family had been raised in Paris and had taken over the Fifth Avenue plot some two years after the death of Val. Residing at the address at the time of the Prince’s death was Hungarian monarchist and diplomat, Count Antal Sigray and his wife Harriot Daly, the sister-in-law of former US Ambassador, James W. Gerard who had visited the block in December. [48] At the time of his death, Val’s father Nicholas was in France. A short report in the Comoedia newspaper of Paris placed him in the company of General Sir Archibald Paris, Lady Watts, the Count and Countess of Bourbel, the Honourable Lord Waleran and Lady Waleran at a lunch at the Anglo-American Club in Menton — a rather Conservative colony of ex-pats near Monte Carlo on the French-Italian border. [49]
Trouble Back at Home
Back in Minnesota, Scott was feeling rather tired and discouraged with life. The generally negative response to his first novel in Britain had probably dictated the mood of the entire trip. The Manchester Guardian had thought it “lively” and praised it for having raised some good “moral questions” but it wasn’t heralding the birth of a literary genius, which was the kind of response that Scott preferred. The “casual philosophy” it offered was said to be that of a “youthful egotist.” The review, ‘Young America’ had been published by the newspaper when the couple had been in Venice at the end of May. The way Scott saw it, he’d been “damned with faint praise.” The paper looked favourably on its lively methodology and his ability to marshal his ideas, but all in all it was “a little bit overdone”. The semi-occult stuff about the devil was a little “queer” but the way he dealt with “bitter disillusion” was “well done” — even if it would be done a good deal better in Gatsby a few years later. [50] The Times and several other newspapers thought it a little “artificial” and several others thought it a little too similar to Compton Mackenzie’s coming of age book, Sinister Street. [51] Boasts of the novel’s sales varied from one review to the next. The Bookseller, who thought it provided an “exceptionally fresh picture of the youth of New York in the gayest mood” claimed that over 30, 000 copies had been sold in the US, whilst The Westminster Gazette amplified that figure to 75, 000. All agreed that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a “very clever young man” but it was clear they had enormous difficult in trying to rate to the book’s literary value. What it did was tear the veil from the face of American youth, leaving all the “intolerable vulgarities” of the age absolutely nowhere to hide. If nothing else, it was great piece of social history.
During his trip to Italy, Scott had the idea for a movie but back at his parents’ house in Saint Paul his thoughts had turned back to promoting his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned. Writing to his editor, Max Perkins, at Scribners Scott sketched out the idea of how the bookcould be published simultaneously in America and Britain. He had loathed Italy but his time in England had been wild and inspirational. He was anxious to get back to work. Loafing around at home with Zelda was making him particularly obnoxious and as far as his intellectual wellbeing was concerned he was getting a little too soft and flabby. It was entirely likely that the third novel was going to be as “black as death”. [52]
Scott wasn’t the only one feeling tired and discouraged. A failure to preserve some fragile harmony in the aftermath of the Tulsa Race Riots in May and June 1921 had left President Harding with an almost insurmountable challenge. On the one hand he had to deescalate the violence, redress the rather obvious civil imbalances and maintain his once muscular standing with rank and file Republican voters. An address that Harding made in Birmingham, Alabama in October 1921 went some way toward defining the challenges that lay ahead of them. It also may have provided a workable solution: it was thought that providing the blacks with certain civil privileges like voting and education would give them broader opportunity with social equality. But on this point he was very clear: having social equality should not be mistaken for handing them racial equality. The ‘negro’ would have a right to broader political, economic and educational advantages but they would never be granted the same rank. Harding asked the people of the America to lay aside old prejudices and old antagonisms and give support to a “constructive policy of racial relationship.” Violence and conflict were based in ‘want’. The logic he had sought to apply to the situation came down to this: if Black Americans could be offered greater opportunity for self-improvement this would almost certainly lead to greater contentment. They would have better prospects but not equality.
The approach that Harding was taking worked rather well with his broader capitalist rubric; the more wealthy and satisfied the Blacks became, the better consumers they would be, and the more consumers America had the greater the need and rewards of production. Harding had to get the balance right: Blacks would be given the right to vote if they had “proved themselves fit to vote.” The President stressed that he was not advocating “race amalgamation” but a partnership rather: “The black man should seek to be should be encouraged to be the possible block man and not the best possible imitation of a white man.” The golden period of limitless immigration must come to an end. As a result of increasing tensions in Russia and Central Europe, America had seen rapid increases in population, but only a small percentage of those who made the journey to the Promised Land had been adding to its wealth and prosperity. Greater restrictions would need to be put in place to retard the swelling influx of poor and uneducated refugees, and greater incentives offered for those with wealth and skills. The war had pulled more “people of color” to the West but their worth as dependents was high and their power as consumers was weak. Harding was adamant that if America was to prosper the milk and honey would have flow at a much rate. No, equality wasn’t the answer, ‘opportunity’ was. Attempting to bring clearer definition to the point he was making and allay the fears of his bigoted core voters, Harding roped in Mr Stoddard:
“Whoever will take time to read and ponder Mr Lothrop Stoddard’s book on the rising tide of color, or say the thoughtful review of some recent literature of this question which Mr F. D. Luggard presented in a recent Edinburgh review, must realize that our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts.”
The race war was a global phenomenon. And as Harding saw it at least, the best way to end conflict was to provide wealth. It was possible to “elevate the negro as a negro and not as a white man”.[53]
During the early 1920s, the vast ‘melting pot’ that Israel Zangwill had once believed to be the unique triumph of this Brave New World was to be re-moulded in such a way that it would help preserve the sovereignty of the distinct ethnic molecules being poured into the crucible. In his book, The Rising Tide of Color, Lothrop Stoddard had described how conquest and migration had brought to the shores of America an almost continuous stream of “new heterogeneous elements” producing the “most diverse racial amalgamations.” It was his absolute conviction that in reality there was no such thing as a ‘melting pot.’ The “shibboleth of the ‘melting-pot’” was, he explained, no more than an “absurd fallacy.” What went into the ‘melting pot’ may mix successfully enough, but it did not melt. Zangwill’s ideal would not and could not lead to the “true American”. It was Stoddard’s belief that the melting pot ideal would lead only to a “perplexing diversity in ancestry” and increase the uncertainty of future generations. [54]
Whether Harding believed it or not, he was certainly prepared to get behind it if meant making all the necessary changes without losing anything in the way of popularity. American Populism was on the rise.
Poor Darlings
On his return to New York in the last week of August 1921, Sherwood Anderson immediately got to work on his memoirs. The trip to the Europe, just as it had for many Americans who had headed to Europe that year — Scott included — had helped provide the perspective and distance needed to understand his and modern America’s place in the post-war world, and his own place in modern America. Anderson had begun to chart the unexplored territories of America’s own divided consciousness in his short-story, The Triumph of the Egg. The story, chronicling the fortunes of a man whose absurd pursuit of the American Dream, had been published in Scofield Thayer’s journal, The Dial in March the previous year. Scott had mentioned it in a letter to Wilson in November that year: “Isn’t The Triumph of the Egg a wonder title? [55] As in Scott’s 1923 stage-play, The Vegetable, the dream is presented as illusory, impractical and for the man in the story at least, the root of all failure and disappointment. In Sherwood’s story, the Egg symbolised the illusoriness and the foolishness of the dream. The man’s pursuit of it is mad, obsessive and fanatical, with any nobility and decency that his dream may have once possessed reduced to a slippery and endlessly deferred quest for simple monetary gain. [56]
As a patient of Sigmund Freud, Andreson might have seen a good dose of irony and symbolism in his ship, the Rochambeau, arriving at Ellis Island suspected of bringing ‘pestilence’. Prior to embarking, the authorities in Le Havre had insisted that each of its passengers be subjected to a rigorous examination and receive on the spot vaccinations. Sherwood was among the 226 Americans who had objected to the measures. An official explained that the procedures at the port were new, and were an essential part of the emergency measures required by the Restriction of Immigration Bill that had been actioned back in May. Many would later protest that the treatment they had been forced to endure prior to embarking the liner in France had been “unsanitary”, “disgusting” and “outrageous”. Several of the passengers had confronted officials complaining that they were being treated “like immigrants”. [57] The fabled ‘American dream’, which for many had been emboldened by the passing of the Emergency Quota Bill and for others completely destroyed, had begun to take on a twisted and nightmarish quality. The Old and New Worlds were colliding, crushing any clear shape the two ‘Eggs’ might once have possessed. As the narrator of Anderson’s story observed, the Egg, which at first had seemed so perfect, evolves into a “bright and alert” chick and from this into an ugly, disease-prone chicken. In the story the father laments that Christopher Columbus, who with the exception of the nation’s perfectly cognisant native population, had been the first to ‘discover’ America, had been nothing more than a fraud. It was a reference to an old, old fable in which the legendary explorer is challenged to make an egg stand on its tip. Columbus succeeds by crushing it at one end. But no matter how many times the father tried to stand the egg up on its tip, it would always roll over. The only way that Columbus had been able to make it stand before his crowd of disbelievers, was by squashing it at one end. He had cheated. [58] It was after this trip to Europe that Anderson began to get a sense of his own ‘Americaness’ and what it took for the average American to become in anyway European. Gulliver returned from his travels with his entire perspective changed.
With land mass of over 9.4 million square miles, America had always presented itself as a country that had been given to man by God with all the space he could possibly need to fulfil his human potential. For three centuries it had been known for its big opportunities and big ideas. It was a land that was big enough for everybody, but now that was no longer the case. As its patriots returned from war in a much bigger, more volatile world, they returned to an America that now seemed so much smaller. The issue wasn’t one of geographical space though, but of headspace. In a world that had begun to accelerate at a furiously blistering pace, Americans had found themselves trying to freeze one precious moment of its short evolution in time. The impulse was now to turn back the clock — to repeat the past. The decision taken by Senate to restrict the admission of aliens to just 3% of each nationality registered in the 1910 census was evidence that were looking to recapture a time when everything in their world seemed safe and recognisable. But the place and the time you in, lived never really defined who you were, even if certainly increased your capacity for prejudice. Scott had said it himself in his letter to Wilson: being on the continent had helped crystallise his sense of American ‘otherness’. Before the trip Scott had said that he hadn’t even been “one half of one percent American”, never mind 100% American. The trip, however, had changed all that. The burden and frustration of negotiating his way around foreign-languages and foreign customs had made a man who had never coped well with uncomfortable realities retreat instinctively into what he knew. The feelings of alienation and insecurity that had defined his youth came flooding back and were threatening to overwhelm the very delicate equilibrium that had been reached. The thing he knew best was America. It was America that had made him a celebrity. In America he was a success. Wilson had been right: accepting the high-standards of a place that could ‘humiliate’ oneself intellectually and artistically, where the standard had been set so high by men like Flaubert, Voltaire and Anatole France, was an intimidating experience for anyone. His friend had been telling him to bear with an environment which demanded higher standards than those which Scott had already attained — not to become a victim of complacency and tradition. Wilson’s words to his friend had been meant to console him. Princeton had never defined the kind of writer he was or who he married, just as his strict Catholic upbringing in Saint Paul would never define who he was spiritually. What had defined America until now, had been the power it possessed to keep ploughing forward, to keep progressing. And the same had been true of Scott. Now, like Benjamin Button, he was still moving, but in reverse. In his Paris notebook, Sherwood Anderson had made an astute observation about America: “The old belief in material progress is lost and nothing new has yet been found.” [59]
The trip to Europe was a hiccup in everything that Scott might have regarded as progress. The young author had poured what was left of his incredible earnings into one overly lavish gesture of discovery and self-expansion, but in a pique of debilitating self-consciousness his little boat on the water had been pulled back and Scott had found himself beating frantically against the current. The world clock had started ticking at such an alarming rate, that it was resetting itself to zero and Scott had been getting himself all caught up in the cogs and wheels. February the following year would see the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses and by December, The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot. It was the dawning of a new era in Modernism. The world and Scott had caught an unexpected glimpse of itself in the mirror and time had begun to slow. America and Scott Fitzgerald were experiencing a delayed adolescence, finally getting a sense of who they were, what they believed in and where they fitted-in in the world. In their haste, certain assumptions were going to be made, and no shortage of errors too. The world was about to change. And for a man who had only just begun to find his feet in that world, the prospect must have seemed nothing less than terrifying.
In August 1921, Scott wrote to his editor, Max Perkins: “Excuse the pencil but I’m feeling rather tired and discouraged with life tonight and I haven’t the energy to use ink, the ineffable destroyer of thought, that fades an emotion into that slatternly thing, a written-down mental excretion. What ink-spilled rot!” [60] It was the bizzarest of expressions: ink was the “ineffable destroyer of thought”. With a pencil there was a special kind of magic that flowed naturally from its impermanence; words could arrive and disappear, mistakes could be corrected. Ink put a stop to all that. Quite literally, it stopped the world. Constant change and self-improvement required the instruments of change and flow. The light brushstrokes of the pencil lead were the barely perceptible footprints of a man putting the lightest of touches to the shape of his own self-idea. Scott was a man in motion. To a sensitive young man who still saw himself as work in progress, ink was a commitment that he could well do without. Not unlike impending parenthood.
On October 26, Zelda gave birth to their daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald. Given the scale of the changes they were facing in their lives, and Scott’s almost completely exhausted funds, the couple had had very little option but to move back to Saint Paul in Minnesota where they could count on the support of family. For a time at least, the little hands on the clock had stopped moving.
In the memoirs that he published the following year, Anderson would write that the older and more sophisticated Old World had never really ‘got’ America. And how could they? The artists and patricians of the Old World didn’t understand the joy in cutting down trees, taking root stumps out of the ground and building towns and railroads. It was an Old World trying to understand a New World. But something had gone wrong. And it had gone wrong at the very beginning. The men and women of this brave new land had started out pretending that they were going to do ‘great things’. America’s vast land was going to be a refuge “for all the outlawed brave foolish folk of the world”. They were going to be “superhuman” and then slowly it became clear that the übermensch were really “very human” afterall. Anderson is not questioning their sincerity. It was the author’s opinion that their intentions had been every bit as earnest as those of the French when building the Cathedral of Chartres in the thirteenth century. The French had built a church to the glory of God and the Americans had been building a land to the glory of Man. But the ideal had collapsed around them. A lack of sustained belief in Man had led to a steady decline in any such dream they may have had. America had wanted heroes. It had wanted brave, simple fine men. Americans, like himself had made every effort to conform to an “unstated and dimly understood American dream” — making themselves successful men in a material world. What they had gained in wealth they had lost in imagination. Sherwood’s early success in business had not brought him happiness. Like many Americans, Anderson sought something more. The cities they had built had only ever been temporary. The very idea of what it was to be American were just “fairy tales in the night”. [61] It wasn’t the fabulous wealth that made them who they were. On the contrary, it was the fabulous striving. America was now torn between the flaky, nostalgic grip of its hoary, Old English pretensions and its infinitely richer cultural inheritance. As Anderson observes in his memoirs, “the blood of the dreaming nations of the world were gradually flowing thicker and thicker in the body of the American”. Things were changing fast. The mass arrival of the Celts, Latins, Slavs and the men of the Ear East, was now ensuring that the” blood of the northern man was getting thinner and thinner”. The old influences were losing their grip. If America was anything, it was this. [62]
It wasn’t just the authors of the Emergency Quota Act who had a problem with the ‘menace’ of America’s rebellious and often unmanageable ‘Melting Pot’ ideals, the immigrants who had sought refuge in the country were having their doubts about them too. Manhattan’s Max Levy, an orthodox Jew who had sought a series of resolutions that would protect the welfare of refugees who faced “political, religious and racial persecution” at the Restriction of Immigration hearings in January 1921, had been sharing his own views about America’s ‘melting pot’ for years. [63] In an article published in September 1913, Levy had expressed his fear that “the American dream of democracy” had led to a version of Judaism that was “without vision” and had “absorbed the peculiar vulgarities which necessarily attend cosmopolitan life”. Young Jewish men and women like these regarded “liberty as license” and the freedom of religious thought as an excuse to “disregard spiritual things” altogether. For all that was gained there was something lost. In a statement that chimed with scores of US patriots anxious to preserve whatever scab of identity had formed around them in the wake of the Revolution, Levy left his readers with an uncompromising message: “We need not the melting pot, no amalgamation, but a stern and relentless struggle to preserve Jewish individuality.” [64] The shaping orthodoxies of knowing what one was, was finally catching on amongst Americans old and new.
At the end of his life, Leslie began to take a rather smug and supercilious view of the vicious downturn in the fortunes of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, whose careers as the Apollo and Electryone of the Jazz Age had begun to crumble almost as quickly as they had risen. The view that Leslie had taken was not unlike that of an Irish priest he had known in Wapping whose flippant but not unreasonable view of the ‘White Slave’ traffic passing through London’s East End had been summed up very neatly: “a short and a merry life to a nameless grave.” There had been another saying going round at this time. There were two things you never saw: one was a dead donkey and the other was a prostitute’s funeral. [65] Biographies by Arthur Mizener and Henry Dan Piper in the late 1950s and early 1960s had both failed to recognise the full extent of his (and Fay’s) influence in his literary start in life, and as a result of this, and the fact that Scott had made little or no effort to contact him before his death, Leslie wrote with surprising cold-heartedness in his memoirs in the mid-1960s of the young Narcissus’s descent to the labyrinth of oblivion: “Poor darlings — they slowly descended like spoiled children until their ghastly ends years later: she was burned alive in a bughouse and he scraped out the last flicker of his talent as a Hollywood hack.” [66] Attempts by Leslie to get the credit he sought for Scott ever having had “touch fame” had been going on since 1958 when an article he produced for the Times Literary Supplement, boasted of the influence he had brought to bear on what would eventually be Scott’s most successful novel, The Great Gatsby: “I think The Great Gatsby was the one in which I had most helped by taking him to Long Island and launching him among the great country houses which then clustered the island. He had his first view of the wealthy and successful.” [67] His piece would draw an angry response from Mizener, who had found himself thumbing through the supplement as he prepared for a BBC interview and a lecture on T.S Eliot at the American Embassy in London. In a letter published in the Times Literary Supplement a few weeks later, Mizener challenged Leslie’s account of the novel’s conception; contrary to what Leslie was implying, Gatsby was “evidently based on Fitzgerald’s experiences in Great Neck”, he snarled. What’s more, the scholar added, “the remote model for Gatsby himself, a man named Max von Guerlach, is still alive to tell about it.” [68] Max was in fact very much dead, having died at Bellevue Hospital in New York just two weeks before Leslie’s article was published. What’s more, Mr Guerlach died without ever having his calls returned by Mizener, who clearly thought little of the old man’s claims that he was the original source for Gatsby. [69] It was small thanks indeed for the letters that Leslie had shared with Mizener a few years before, but the rather cruel and contemptuous view that Leslie had been taking of Scott’s later life in Hollywood, and the tragic death of Zelda as she awaited treatment in a sanatorium in North Carolina in March 1948, curbs any kind of sympathy one might have had for the self-styled ‘author of authors’. Leslie’s response the following week put Mizener firmly in his place as a remote and parasitic observer: “it is only by hashing up memories that the finality of biography is prepared for the biographer.” Mizener had only been half-right, of course. Scott’s novel, The Great Gatsby, was the story of two worlds: East Egg and West Egg. Scott had clearly drawn on his experiences of Port Washington for his unflattering portrayal of the starchy, twofaced ‘Old Money’ world of East Egg and on the orgy of fun he had in Great Neck for his depiction of the wild and gaudy excesses that were then being enjoyed by the ‘New Money’ peoples of West Egg. The world was exactly as he had left it: the two impossible worlds of his youth never quite agreeing and never quite coming together: a pair of unwilling binaries, “identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay”. [70] In the joyful fury of youth Scott had created two eggs for himself, both of them crushed at the end, and neither of them in his own lifetime at least, very fashionable. Although he would never live to see it walk, in those few short years of self-mutilation and self-fashioning, Scott had created a monster: the American Dream in all its fabulous, contradictory and occasionally bizarre entirety.
A tale of twin eggs? Polar opposites in some respects. East Egg and West Egg, perhaps? One has the power of imagination that will push things forward, the other the traction to hold things back. Two incompatible worlds — the Old World and the New World. A whole new story had begun to take shape in his brain.
“In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject: and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.”
— Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley, Third edition, 1869
[1] The Story of Chautauqua, Jesse Lyman Hurlbut, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921, Preface (p.x)
[2] ‘World News Briefed’, Norwich Sun, June 15, 1921, p.2; ‘Miscellaneous’, London and China Telegraph, June 20, 1921, p.412
[3] ‘England Eager to Aid Ireland Says Bryce’ Boston Sunday Post, July 31, 1921, p.36. Bryce had previously served as Chief Secretary of Ireland (1905-1907).
[4] ‘Lord Bryce: Ireland Cannot be Held By Force’, Evening Telegraph, February 26, 1921, p.3
[5] The Irish Issue in Its American Aspect: A Contribution to the Settlement of Anglo-American, Shane Leslie, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1917, p.149.
[6] ‘Bryce Says Treaty Sows the Seeds of War’, New York Times, August 3, 1921, p1, p.5
[7] ‘Dear John, August 3, 1921’, Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.85. Like Churchill, Bryce was a Liberal politician, not a Tory.
[8] Scott’s friend, Shane Leslie had just published a new book on Cardinal Manning.
[9] ‘The Case for the Conference: American Hopes and Fears’, Viscount Bryce, Evening Mail, October 19, 1921, p. 664
[10] ‘Authority in History’, The Scotsman, January 5, 1922, p.6
[11] Hansard 1803–2005, 1920s, 1920, November 1920, 1 November 1920, Commons Sitting, Ireland, Mrs J. Anna Bryce’s Arrest
[12] Hansard, 15 December 1921,Lords Sitting ADDRESS IN REPLY TO HIS MAJESTY’S MOST GRACIOUS SPEECH, Viscount Bryce
[13] ‘Truce in Ireland Declared’, New York Times, January 9, 1921, p.1
[14] ‘Shane Leslie Answers Lord Cecil’, The Catholic Telegraph, Volume LXXXX, Number 9, 3 March 1921, p.1
[15] The Catholic Telegraph, Volume LXXXX, Number 29, 21 July 1921, p.1
[16] Shane Leslie: Sublime Failure, Otto Rauchbauer, The Lilliput Press, 2009, pp.66-67. Leslie’s diary entry had been made on May 9th and the meeting discussed with Fitzallan on June 20th.
[17] Arthur Willert described Leslie as an “unofficial propagandist”. Other authors like Martin Gilbert speak of his secret intelligence role.
[18] Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, 1919-1922, Vol.1, Doc No. 21 UCDA P150/96, Lobby fundraising publicity America, August 18, 1919, Letter from Eamon de Valera to Arthur Griffith, The Waldorf-Astoria, New York, 13 August 1919. When de Valera realised that the terms of a National Home for the Irish were not unlike those for British Mandate Palestine he formed the Anti-Treaty faction within Sinn Féin.
[19] ‘Bishop Keating speaks on behalf of Justice to Ireland’, The Irish Standard, November 16, 1918, pp.1-2.
[20] ‘Program for De Valera’, The Irish Standard, Minneapolis, October 18, 1919, p.1; ‘President Enthusiastically Greeted in the Twin Cities’, The Irish Standard, Minneapolis, October 25, 1919, p.1
[21] This Side of Paradise, p.25, pp.225-227
[22] Ledger, October 1919.
[23] ‘Ulysses’, The Dublin Review, Domini Canis (Shane Leslie), July-September 1922,Vol. 171 No.342, p.119
[24] The Treaty was signed on December 6, 1921 and saw the creation of an Irish Free State.
[25] Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, 1919-1922, Vol.1, Doc No. 21 UCDA P150/96, Lobby fundraising publicity America, August 18, 1919, Letter from Eamon de Valera to Arthur Griffith, The Waldorf-Astoria, New York, 13 August 1919. When de Valera realised that the terms of a National Home for the Irish were not unlike those for British Mandate Palestine he formed the Anti-Treaty faction within Sinn Féin.
[26] ‘Bishop Keating speaks on behalf of Justice to Ireland’, The Irish Standard, November 16, 1918, pp.1-2.
[27] The Irish Standard, April 5, 1919, p.6; Pilot Backs Shane Leslie, Approves his Conversion to Sinn Féin, The Boston Post, April 4, 1919, p.9
[28] Ulysses, Shane Leslie, The Quarterly Review, October 1922, Vol. 238, No. 473, pp.219. Leslie acknowledges in his review that the book has already been banned.
[29] Letters of Joyce, James, 1882-1941; Stuart Gilbert, The Viking Press, p.192
[30] ‘Maria Duce says no to BBC Ulysses’, Weekly Irish Times, November 4, 1953.
[31] The Treaty was signed on December 6, 1921 and saw the creation of an Irish Free State.
[32] Ulysses, Shane Leslie, The Quarterly Review, October 1922, Vol. 238, No. 473, pp.219. Leslie acknowledges in his review that the book has already been banned.
[33] To Edmund Wilson, June 25, 1922’, Life In Letters, p.61
[34] The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bantam Books, 1971, p.482 Scott would mention this book in The Great Gatsby.
[35] ‘Clean Books Bill is Voted Down by New York’s Senate’, Catholic News Service, 7 May 1923, p.1. Martin Thomas Conboy Jr. was a leading defence counsel for Tammany Hall leader, Charles F. Murphy.
[36] Ulysses, Shane Leslie, The Quarterly Review, October 1922, Vol. 238, No. 473, pp.219. Leslie acknowledges in his review that the book has already been banned.
[37] Letters of Joyce, James, 1882-1941; Stuart Gilbert, The Viking Press, p.192
[38] ‘To John Quinn, 24 May, 1922’, Shane Leslie: Sublime Failure, Otto Rauchbauer, Lilliput Press, 2009, pp.271-272
[39] ‘Adriatic Brings Polo Team’, New York Times, July 29, 1921, p.15
[40] ‘Court and Society’, Belfast Newsletter, July 25, 1921, p.8. Tredegar was convert to Roman Catholicism. His nickname ‘the black monk’ was due to his interest in the occult. Desmond Leslie would be among the first to write on UFOs.
[41] ‘Secret Life Led by Gwyneth Morgan’, Thomson’s Weekly News, May 30, 1925, p.1
[42] The Iron Trade Review, July 25, 1918, Vol. 63 No. 4, p.218
[43] ‘Trade League of Nations’, Our World December 1922, Vol 2 No. 3, p.12; ‘International Chamber of Commerce’, Sheffield Daily Telegraph, June 27, 1921, p.5; Passenger Lists leaving UK 1890-1960, Celtic, Liverpool, July 9, 1921.
[44] Matthew J. & Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald Ledger, 1919-1938, p. 177, p.175, May 1921; His full name was Vladimir North Engalitcheff. Another member of the Engalitcheff family, Prince Paul Engalitcheff had served as the Russian Military attaché in Berlin. Prince Val’s grandfather was Prince Vladimir Engalitcheff of St Petersburg and his grandmother, Countess Marie Kleist of Danzig, Germany who arrived in the US to provide a series of counter-revolutionary lectures on ‘Home and Social Life’ in Russia in the late 1880s.
[45] New York Tribune, February 26, 1921; Prince Can’t Pay Debt, New York Times, December 28, 1923, p.4
[46] Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: the Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, ed. Bryer and Barks, Bloomsbury, 2002, p.67.
[47] Obituary, New York Times, March 8, 1923, p.17; Matthew J. & Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald Ledger, 1919-1938, p. 177, January 1923. Val lived at 907 Fifth Avenue. His father had been working as a broker on Wall Street.
[48] ‘Olympic in Port Covered in Ice’, New York Times, 21 December, 1922, p.15
[49] ‘From Monte Carlo’, Comoedia (Paris), March 15, 1923, p.2. Lord Waleran was William Walrond, 1st Baron Waleran. Lord Northcliffe, who spearheaded anti-German propaganda during the war, was another regular feature at the Anglo-American Club in Menton. He also played a critical role in post-war relations between America and Great Britain. Prince Val was to visit his mother at the Hotel Plaza Athenee again June 1922.
[50] ‘Young America’, Manchester Guardian, May 27, 1921, p.5
[51] A Life in Letters, p. 330
[52] F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994, Letter to Maxwell Perkins, Aug 25, 1921, p.48
[53] ‘The Athens Banner, Harding Speaks on Negro Question at Birmingham Affair’, October 26, 1921, p.1, p.8
[54] The Rising Tide of Color, Lothrop Stoddard, p. 54, p. 165, p. 265
[55] To Edmund Wilson, November 25, 1921’, A Life in Letters, p.49
[56] ‘The Triumph of the Egg’, Sherwood Anderson, The Dial, Vol. 68, March 1920, pp.295-304. see: Hu, K.J. (2022) Disillusionment of American Dream in “The Egg” by Sherwood Anderson. Open Access Library Journal, 9, 1-5. doi: 10.4236/oalib.1109240.
[57] ‘Passengers in Rage at Havre Examinations’, New York Tribune, August 20, 1921, p.12
[58] The Egg of Columbus Story. An old folk-tale in which the explorer is challenged to make an egg stand on its tip. He succeeds by crushing it at one end.
[59] France and Sherwood Anderson: Paris Notebook, 1921, ed. Michael A. Fanning, Louisiana State University Press, 1976, p.24
[60] ‘Dear Mr Perkins, August 25, 1921, A Life in Letters, Penguin, 1994, p.48
[61] A Story Teller’s Story, Sherwood Anderson, The Viking Press, 1922, pp.298-310. Fitzgerald wrote very favourably of Anderson’s 1923 novel, Many Marriages, in the New York Herald. Like Ulysses, the book was viciously attacked by American censors.
[62] A Story Teller’s Story, Sherwood Anderson, The Viking Press, 1922, pp.101
[63] Jan 4, 1921, Emergency Immigration Legislation: Hearings…on H. R. 14461. (1921). United States, pp. 189-190
[64] ‘The Menace of the Melting Pot’, Max Levy, The Reform Advocate, 20 September 1913, pp.170-171, p.180
[65] Long Shadows, Shane Leslie, p. 124
[66] Long Shadows, Shane Leslie, p. 252
[67] ‘Some Memories of Scott Fitzgerald’, Shane Leslie, Times Educational Supplement, October 31, 1958, p. 632
[68] Letters, Arthur Mizener, Times Literary Supplement, November 14, 1958, p.657
[69] F. Scott Fitzgerald at Work: The Making of The Great Gatsby, Horst H. Kruse, University of Alabama Press, 2014
[70] ‘A pair of enormous eggs’, The Great Gatsby, p. 6. The story goes that great Italian adventurer, Christopher Columbus had been dining with a party of Spaniards. At one point a member of the party stood up and declared that even if Columbus had not discovered the Indies, someone else would have come along and done it eventually as there were many great scientists in Spain. Columbus is said to have looked at him, and asked for an egg to be brought to the table. Upon being brought the egg, Columbus wagered that no one at the table but himself would be able to make the egg stand up on its end. The Spaniards tried but none succeeded. When Columbus got hold of the egg he said to have crushed at one end and stood it upright on the table.