Every Saint
Patrick's Day my mother would wake us with put-on cheer, decked out in one of
those drugstore-quality plastic green hats and a kelly green sweater. In her
best Irish English, drawling her o's and r's, she would call out, "Top o'
the morning to ya!", only to be greeted by silence, groans, or outright
rebellion.
The rest of the
morning featured breakfast-table negotiations about the wearing of the green.
The pickings? Sweaters, shirts, shamrock ribbons, and "Kiss me I'm
Irish" stickers, the last of these seeming a rather foolhardy choice to
wear to my pugilistic, all-boys Catholic high school. I'm convinced she chose
the most garish shades of green in order to make Saint Patty's Day a crucible
-- the declaration "I'm proud to be Irish" to be translated as
"I love my mother." But her heavy sell succeeded in making me only
reluctantly Irish. As far as I could discern, there was no history behind any
of it. If all that remained of my Irish heritage were a few tired clichés --
"Top o' the Morning" entered the American pop lexicon through a late
1940s Hollywood movie by that title -- there wasn't much choice but to renounce
your mother and save face with your peers.
It wasn't until
I was in high school, reading James Joyce's Dubliners in a requisite
English class, that I began to embrace the melancholy joys of being Irish.
Joyce's spare, rigorous, sorrowful yet idealistic stories instilled the romance
of Ireland in me. In tales of houses haunted by the memory of dead priests, in
reminisces about a great nineteenth-century leader of Irish parliamentary
nationalism, Joyce brought to life a people yearning for self-determination
while proudly believing themselves unconquerable, despite a long history of
brutal British rule that proved otherwise.
Around the time
I discovered Joyce, I also began reading the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Scott became (and remains) one of my favorites, someone whose story I went on
to explore in my new novel, Beautiful Fools. And while
in my boy's mind, Joyce was as Irish as they come -- making me wish to be
enrolled in the ranks of beleaguered Irish fighting for their independence --
it hardly occurred to me to read Fitzgerald as a standard bearer for the
American Irish.
Certainly, I'm
not alone in the failure to think of Scott Fitzgerald as Irish Catholic. To
this day he's rarely read, or taught, as an Irish writer. Mythically wrapped in
the glamor of the Jazz Age, he's remembered as a prophet of an era in which
Americans, though disillusioned by world war, were basking in their newfound
prominence as a nation and the unlimited possibilities of their freedom. In his
glorious debut novel, This Side of Paradise, and in countless Saturday
Evening Post stories from "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" to "The
Bridal Party," Fitzgerald urged a new generation to cast off the past
while glorying in exuberant and youthful self-absorption.
An overnight
success, he wrote himself into American myth as anything but a proper Papist.
As someone from the Irish upper middle class, Fitzgerald was afforded access to
the world of the Protestant rich. At Princeton University he acquired the
dreams, skills, and aspirations of the social climber who was granted a seat at
the table - albeit one always, at least in his mind's eye, precariously close
to the door. Indeed, if Scott was considered a Catholic at all, he was
considered one who had abandoned both his faith and his Irish foundation
shortly after college. But is this accurate? Or is he the great Irish American
writer who couldn't get out of the way of his own Catholicism, even if he
wanted to?
Scott's Irish
father hailed from a dignified Maryland family, Scott himself a distant cousin
of Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star Spangled Banner." His
father proved a failure in business, thereafter having to rely on money from
his wife's family, the McQuillans, people who'd come (as Scott
self-deprecatingly recalled) from Irish potato famine stock. His mother's
father started as a humble grocer, and on his wits and work ethic built a respectable
and sizeable business in St. Paul, Minnesota. His Irish mother doted nervously
on the young Scott, but he lamented her attentions and for the rest of his life
thought of her as somewhat gauche, referring to her here and there as an
"old peasant." Always slightly embarrassed by his family's origins,
by where their money came from but also by the fact that there was never quite
enough of it, he riffed in his own fiction on Horatio Alger's famous
rags-to-riches formula, but with a tragic twist. Heroes who make their fortunes
in the crass world of American commerce, strivers such as his maternal
grandfather or Scott himself, often come too late to the party. Gatsby's
ambition might prove admirable -- he's "better," as Nick Caraway
says, "than the whole damn bunch put together" -- but he's still left
holding the dream, and not the girl.
Much of the
romance in Fitzgerald -- "romance" in its original sense focuses on
the stories of valiant losers as opposed to history's winners -- derives from
his Irish sensibility. He was drawn to stories of the American South (in high
school he penned a Civil War drama); and he once claimed that he enrolled at
Princeton because in the annual rivalry football game "Yale always seemed
to nose them out in the last quarter" -- the Yale men seeming brawny and
brutal, the Princetonians by contrast "slender and keen and
romantic."
Scott's first
real intellectual mentor at his Catholic prep school had been a priest named
Father Fay. A worldly, erudite Irishman, Father Fay loved fine foods, wrote
poetry, and seemed altogether romantic in his aesthetics. He introduced his
young protégé to the Irish writer Shane Leslie, who hailed from a wealthy
landowning Anglo-Irish family but had converted while at Cambridge to
Catholicism and the cause of Irish Home Rule. Leslie and Father Fay waxed
eloquent on belles-lettres and Catholicism, holding considerable sway over the
young Scott's imagination even after he was ensconced at Princeton. Later in
life Fitzgerald praised those two mentors for casting a "romantic
glamour" on the "dreary ritual of Catholicism." Leslie also
provided a more practical service, introducing Scott to the folks at
Scribner's, his eventual publisher, asking them to weigh Scott's manuscript in
light of the possibility that the young author's anticipated death in the
battlefields of Europe (the year was 1918 and Scott, in the army, awaited
assignment overseas) might well render him a second Rupert Brooke, the famous
British poet-martyr of the Great War.
Scott's Irish Catholicism
creeps into his fiction in too many places to list. Perhaps the most intriguing
example is the wonderful 1924 story "Absolution," formidable in its
own right, but all the more so because the author once admitted he'd originally
intended it as a prologue for The Great Gatsby. As the story of a
frightened young boy who goes to confession fearing for his soul because he's
been telling lies just before receiving communion and then encounters a dreamy,
distracted priest who tells him not to worry about sin and to learn to
appreciate the beauty of the world, "Absolution" remembers the
romantic influence, in almost ghostly form, of Father Fay. But how much of that
lying young protagonist, Rudolph Miller, survives in one of 20th century American
literature's most mysterious heroes?
Imagine an
Irish Catholic Gatsby. What would that do to American literary history? What
would it do for Irish American literary history? Fitzgerald was almost
certainly right not to include this backstory in the deservedly celebrated
novel, though literary luminaries from H.L. Mencken to Edith Wharton complained
about the thinness of Gatsby's character after the novel's publication. What we
get instead is a Gatsby almost without history. A hero who, by his own devices,
becomes more legend than ordinary person. Someone who freely invents his past
in order to participate in the promises of American self-invention. When Nick
Carraway meets the father of James Gatz (Gatsby's birth name) at the end of the
novel, we realize just how ruthlessly Gatsby has discarded the pieces of his
past self he found unusable; and one can't help but reflect on Scott
Fitzgerald's own restless pursuit of American myth, the pieces of himself he
didn't quite know how to use.
So this Saint
Patrick's Day, on a holiday when everybody becomes Irish without worrying about
the burdens, joys, and costs of being Irish in history, let's remember
America's great Irish writer, Scott Fitzgerald, and also the mother he
sometimes called, with only grudging generosity, a shabby grand dame. At his
mother's death, he regretted those habits of ingratitude, writing to inform his
sister that he and his mother hadn't shared "anything in common except a
relentless stubborn quality," but that nevertheless he couldn't discard
any of her things because, oddly, he appreciated the way "she clung to the
end to all things that would remind her of moments of snatched happiness."
Scott found himself indulging similar habits in the late 1930s; and no American
writer (besides maybe Faulkner) did more to immortalize the bravery of those
who are valiant even in defeat. Certainly, I owe a fair portion of my own
admiration for the noble losers and beautiful fools in life to Fitzgerald,
Joyce, and the memory of Irish ancestors whose dreams somehow survived the
tough knocks of history. And some day soon (it's Saint Patrick's Day, after
all) the Irish and the F. Scott Fitzgeralds of this world are bound to win.
