Yesterday, Sept. 24, F. Scott Fitzgerald reached his 113th birthday.
That is, he would have reached that age if he had not died at 44 on Dec. 21, 1940. And his death is what concerns me most: F. Scott Fitzgerald, my favorite of all American writers, is buried 10 minutes from where I was born and raised in Bethesda, Md.
Although no introduction is necessary, Mr. Fitzgerald is the author of “The Great Gatsby,” “This Side of Paradise,” “Tender is the Night,” and other peerless examples of the short story, essay and novel. Even if you abandoned your study of American writers soon after you faked your way through the AP Lit exam, you must know of the works of this man, and the way in which our country has been perceived according to his prose.
I have read enough in college to potentially find hundreds of books better than “Gatsby,” but I still feel a certain affinity for it, an attraction that transcends the subject matter’s obvious allure of sex, liquor and jazz. To this day, I am still struggling to find a novel more complete than Fitzgerald’s masterpiece—and, to be honest, I do not think I ever will.
As evidenced by the extravagance of his stories, his life was lived to excess—and thank God it was! Without his intimate knowledge of how champagne spurred on wild exploits and recklessly bad decisions, his fiction would not have featured the savage wit and priceless insight that keeps it fresh well into the 21st century.
And however tragic it is that his joie de vivre expedited a romantic “author’s death,” I am still compelled by it. I, too, am a writer, and the fact that he is buried so near to where I was born has been an inspirational frustration—because my own birthplace is so near to his grave, I have tried not to dip below the standard he set for himself.
This may sound morbid, but it’s actually an example of true reverence: I think of Fitzgerald as a forbearer—a person whose family settled on the land of my birth long before I staked my own claim.
His father, Edward Fitzgerald, was born on the Maryland estate founded by his grandfather’s great-grandfather (who was, in turn, the father of Francis Scott Key, the author of the Star-Spangled Banner). F. Scott would return to this area often in his childhood: first, to avoid the tubercular cold of his early home of Buffalo; next, to attend the wedding of his cousin Cecilia in 1903; then, two years later to again visit his extended family.
Fitzgerald’s next consequential visit to my Montgomery County would not be until 1931, when he came to attend his father’s funeral. “Scott felt a strong attachment to this corner of the Maryland earth, which his years of wandering had made emblematic of the stability and permanence to which he would aspire for the rest of his life,” Andre Le Vot writes in his biography of Fitzgerald, remarking upon the effect Maryland had upon him.
Unfortunately, Fitzgerald’s next visit to my hometown would be upon his death. He died in Hollywood but hated it there, so his bereaved (and, so it is told, insane) wife Zelda made the decision to ship his body back to the East. Fitzgerald’s wish was to be buried in a Catholic cemetery, but he was denied—he had not been a practicing Catholic at his death, and the Baltimore Diocese forbid him a proper burial.
So he was sent to the Pumphrey Funeral Home in my hometown of Bethesda—yards away from the places where I have sat and thought and written in Moleskine notebooks. Only 30 people attended the service, and soon afterward he was set to rest at the non-Catholic Rockville Union Cemetery, not the burial grounds that his father was pious enough to enjoy.
Then, in 1975, Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie obtained permission to move her father’s remains to St. Mary’s Church, the Catholic burial plot in Rockville, Md. where the rest of his family is buried. And he is still there today, not 10 minutes from the house in which I was brought up, and not 5 minutes from where I was born.
But I have not yet driven out to St. Mary’s to see the great novelist’s grave. Though I consider myself a writer, I don’t feel like enough of one to visit his cemetery.
So, Scott Fitzgerald, happy birthday. Maybe someday it’ll be time for me to stop by and say hello.
Nathan Freeman is a Trinity senior. His column runs every Friday.
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