Fun fact about F. Scott Fitzgerald: he was a terrible
speller. No, really. And his grammar wasn’t much better. Literary critic Edmund
Wilson described his debut novel This Side of Paradise (find in our Free eBooks
collection) as “one of the most illiterate books of any merit every published.”
Hemingway couldn’t spell either, and neither could Faulkner. Without the
patient revision of great editors like Maxwell Perkins, much of the prose of
these American masters may well have been unreadable. Novelists are artists,
not grammarians, and their manuscript quirks—of spelling, handwriting,
grammatical mistakes—can often reveal a great deal more about them than the
typical reader can glean from clean, typeset copies of their work.
Take, for example, the evolution of Fitzgerald’s signature
(above). From the labored scrawls of a five year-old, to the practiced script
of an eleven-year-old schoolboy, to the experimental teenaged poses, we see the
lettering get looser, more stylized, then tighten up again as it assumes its
own mature identity in the confidently elegant near-calligraphy of the
21-year-old Fitzgerald–an evolution that traces the writer’s creative growth
from uncertain but passionate youth to disciplined artist. Alright, maybe
that’s all nonsense. I’m no expert. The practice of handwriting analysis, or
graphology, is generally a forensic tool used to identify the marks of criminal
suspects and detect forgeries, not a mindreading technique, although it does
get used that way. One site, for example, provides an analysis of one of
Fitzgerald’s 1924 letters to Carl Van Vechten. From the minute characteristics
of the Gatsby novelist’s script, the analyst divines that he is “creative,”
“artistic,” and appreciates the finer things in life. Color me a little skeptical.
But maybe there is something to my theory of Fitzgerald’s
growing maturity and self-conscious certainty as evidenced by his signatures.
He published This Side of Paradise to great acclaim three years after the final
signature above. In the prior signatures, we see him struggling for control as
he wrote and revised an earlier unpublished novel called The Romantic Egotist,
which Fitzgerald himself told editor Perkins was “a tedious, disconnected
casserole.” The outsized, extravagant lettering of the artist in his late teens
is nothing if not “romantic.” But Fitzgerald achieved just enough control in
his short life to write a veritable treasure chest of stories (many brilliant
and some just plain silly) and a handful of novels, including, of course, the one
for which he’s best known. Most of the rest of the time, as most everyone
knows, he was kind of a mess.