Anne Margaret Daniel

Exploding the myth that Fitzgerald died thinking about long-past college football games instead of "good prose."

The Last Thing He Wrote
by Anne Margaret Daniel

A particularly silly myth about the late, great Scott Fitzgerald dies today.
Here is the myth: when a heart attack flung him to the floor and killed him in Sheilah Graham's apartment on December 21, 1940, Fitzgerald died as he had lived, looking pathetically back on the glory days of Princeton when he and the century were both in their teens. The myth is that he died comparing the Princeton football team of that fall to the ones of his undergraduate years, to the teams whose young men died in that first World War. Fitzgerald's last writing -- the scribbled pencil notes comparing teams past and present by names -- has always been regarded as a sad and futile act, bound up entirely to the past.
Here is the myth's genesis: on the day of his death, Fitzgerald was at Graham's reading some mail that his secretary, Frances Kroll, had dropped off that morning. By Graham's account in "Beloved Infidel," they were in her living room after lunch, and she was reading a book about Beethoven while Fitzgerald, eating a chocolate bar, read the "Princeton Alumni Weekly." Graham noticed "that Scott, with one of his stubby pencils, was making notes on the margin of an article about the Princeton football team." A moment later, he stood suddenly from his chair, and then fell dying.
Fitzgerald's last copy of the PAW is among the papers Sheilah Graham gave to the Princeton University Libraries years after his death. The date of the magazine is December 9, 1940, and the issue is chiefly devoted to war preparations on the Princeton campus. On the cover is a handsome young man in R.O.T.C. uniform, Andrew R. Jones '42, looking every inch and almost eerily the perfect Fitzgerald hero, his blond hair smooth and blue eyes bright. As Fitzgerald picked it up and began to read, did he think of his own officer training on campus in 1917? As Fitzgerald looked at Andrew Jones on the cover, and the photographs of students practicing military drill on the Princeton campus, was it more likely this, and not the slight story on football, that had him remembering his own college days long past -- and of the "War to End Wars" that, everyone knew by December 1940, had not?
After a series of military drill photographs, and patriotic supporting text unmarked by any pencil or other annotation, the football story begins on page 9. "Plus and Minus: An Analytical, Long Range View of the 1940 Football Team; The Outlook for Next Year" is by Gilbert Lea '36, an All-American in football at Princeton who covered football for the PAW from 1938, while living in the area and working in advertising in New York.
The following paragraph is circled in pencil:
"Faced with such men as Reagan [a Penn player], Arico of Dartmouth, Willoughby of Yale, or Mazur of Army, a player has his work cut out for him. The first prerequisite of a good tackler is his desire to tackle. You must want to tackle. After that it is a matter of training and the ability to think quickly and act quickly."
In the margin of this clean, clear, to-the-point, and -- dare one say -- Hemingwayesque passage is the following comment, in Fitzgerald's unmistakable pencilled writing: "good prose."
Page 9 is a little torn, just by the football photograph, and on page 10 there is in Fitzgerald's hand a list of names of football players past, written in lineup fashion, one across from the other. A long line runs from one name to the top margin, where in a very faint scribble is the word "used." Used to play at some prep school? Used to be one of the best on the team? Used in the Yale Game, 1915? On this page, too, is just a suggestion of some very light brown discoloring spots in the margin, spaced as fingertips on the page would be, right where one holds a magazine as one reads. They are not iron spots near the staples, engendered by age, but, I believe, the sweet sad traces of chocolate fingerprints.
Yes, Fitzgerald did write, moments before he died, a list of football players. But he also noticed, moments before he died, writing he thought worthy of critical comment, and he made such comment.
So much attention has been given to what Fitzgerald did not do, and never achieved, in the last years of his life. Not enough has been given to what he did do, and did accomplish, despite all the circumstances of ill health and alcoholism and financial distress. Frances Kroll Ring, and others, have always staunchly maintained that Fitzgerald's command of writing, and gorgeous ability to string words together into one sometimes unforgettable phrase or paragraph, remained to the end -- and that his interest in good writing by others was constant. What was done of "The Last Tycoon" bears out the former; and the very the last words Fitzgerald wrote -- other than some names - irrefutably bear out the latter.
Gilbert Lea lives in Florida, where he retired after a long career in advertising (for Time, Business Week, McCall's, and ultimately at Ogilvy & Mather). At 89, on the telephone from his home last year, Lea recalled his story from 1940 well. He knew that Fitzgerald had been reading it when he died, and was happy to hear, for he had not known until I told him, that Fitzgerald had praised his prose. And Fitzgerald's interest in the football team, Lea reminded me, was no sad memory of some imagined glory days. When Lea himself played for Princeton, they only lost one game during his four years there, and twice finished first in the nation. Any contemporary college football fan, or alumnus/​a of a national football powerhouse, would hardly be thought pathetic and trapped in the past today for following a winning team years after graduation.
A final note, on the radiant cover of this last edition of the PAW Fitzgerald ever saw. Andrew Jones wore his uniform proudly on the cover of the PAW, but he never went to war. A senior at Princeton in the fall of 1941, he was out hunting alone on his father's farm in nearby Hopewell Township when, holding his rifle, he attempted to climb over a barbed-wire fence. The gun discharged. Andrew Jones died on October 20, 1941, by that fence on the family farm. He was only 21.



Anne Margaret Daniel w'86 *99
The New School University
New York, NY August 2004


Copyright Anne Margaret Daniel 2004