Profiled by F. Scott Fitzgerald
How did he know?
I’d have never read F. Scott Fitzgerald of my own volition. Too white. Too male. Too traditional. But I took a comparative literature course during my three uneventful semesters at Case Western Reserve University that covered the big hits by F. Scott and Hemingway. Having paid for this abuse I decided to just suck it up and see what I could get out of the experience.
Turned out I was right about Hemingway. He really was wayyyy too white, too male, and entirely too pleased with himself. His stories, his characters, his whole way of seeing the world bordered on caricature. You disagree? That’s nice. I bet you’ve got a novel to write.
But I was taken by surprise by F. Scott’s writing. The man could turn a phrase and while many of his characters came off as oddly mannered and not quite fully formed, there was something about his work that was incredibly engaging. I didn’t find “The Great Gatsby” to be all that, but “Tender is the Night” was haunting and embracing. That’s where I encountered one line that stopped me mid-page:
“a wild submergence of soul, a dipping of all colors into an obscuring dye”
I felt as if somehow this dead man knew me. He saw my life-long pattern of dipping my colors into the obscuring dye of someone else’s values, dreams, interests, and…
