Fitzgerald's French - F. Scott Fitzgerald - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2003 by Michael Hollington

In Fitzgerald's representation of these places, the glamour is shadowed by shallowness or emptiness and callow egotism. Fitzgerald's French is not only the language of dreams but also (again perhaps reflecting his St. Paul background) the language of social pretension and snobbishness. This point comes across amusingly in the story "O Russet Witch!" where the indigent Merlin Grainger takes Miss Masters out to dinner at a French restaurant in New York as the fit setting for a solemn occasion: "it was at Pulpat's on Saturday night and over a $1.75 bottle of water diluted with vin ordinaire that the proposal occurred" (Jazz Age 358). Here, at the lowest end of the scale, the principle of Fitzgerald's French as a marker of social class in America is unveiled: people live or attempt to live, in varying degrees according to their status and wealth, as if they were Louis XIV at the Chateau de Versailles. At the top end, in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, "John Unger is "enchanted by the wonders of the chateau and the valley" where Braddock Washington had caused to be kidnapped "a landscape gardener, an architect, a designer of state [sic] settings, and a French decadent poet left over from the last century" (Jazz Age 302). In the upwardly mobile middle range, Mrs. Fairboalt in "The Cut-Glass Bowl" admires the Pipers' home: "the nicest smaller house in town, and Mrs. Piper had talked of moving to a larger house on Devereaux Avenue" (Jazz Age 84). Mrs. Fairboalt obviously shares Mrs. Piper's view that she must now "go French" on a street whose name anticipates Tender Is the Night and Nicole's father's first name (Tender 140).

At Princeton, Fitzgerald's fascination with the sounds of a language he was unable to master grammatically took on new dimensions. It became the language of specific intellectual and philosophical pretensions, with French names given in This Side of Paradise to characters like Thomas Parke d'Invilliers (a portrait of John Peale Bishop), infatuated by the fantasy of achieving glory as a symbolist poet, or to the philosophers whom Horace Tarbox admires in "Head and Shoulders" in Flappers and Philosophers--the real-life Henri Bergson and the fictional Anton Laurier. And Fitzgerald would later pay humorous homage to Christian Gauss, the professor of French and Italian (but of German origin) whom he so much admired at Princeton, despite his own inability to make academic headway with French, by inscribing a frenchified version of his name in Tender Is the Night, giving it to Gausse, the Alsatian hotel keeper.

Laurier, like Holderlin's Socrates, moves from wisdom to beauty, subverting the apparent superiority of the world of philosophy over the world of the flapper by ending up as an admirer of Horace's wife. Yet Fitzgerald's flappers and their appropriately named beaux are just as much associated with French as his philosophers are. Racine's Berenice becomes Bernice in the story "Bernice Bobs Her Hair": she comes from Eau Claire, and when she goes to the Sevier Hotel Barber Shop to have her hair bobbed she "had all the sensations of Marie Antoinette bound for the guillotine in a tumbril" (jazz Age 120). There is Genevieve Ormonde in the same story, "who regularly made the rounds of dances, house-parties, and football games at Princeton, Yale, Williams, and Cornell" (103). More interesting still, perhaps, the names of the flapper-chasing football heroes are frequently French. In The Beautiful and Damned, for instance, there is "Touch down" Michaud--Gloria is "flattered that 'Touch down' Michaud had 'rushed' her all evening" (117). There is Severance the quarterback, who has a double association with France, first through his name and second through the fact that he carries the ethos of the playing fields of Harvard and Princeton into the battlefields of France, "for he had given up his life rather neatly and gracefully with the Foreign Legion on the Aisne" (224).