6 Ways to Drink Like F. Scott Fitzgerald

A 1971 biography shares drinking lessons from the sloppy Gatsby

Fitzgerald wrote one perfect novel… ‘The Great Gatsby.’ The rest of it was quite sad.’

-Gore Vidal

The Great Gatsby, in less than 50,000 words, rewards readers with sentence-level philosophies and existential romance narrated by befuddled voyeur Nick Carraway. Carraway, a new resident of Long Island and incidental bank trader, lives among the coolly wealthy and gives us the perspective of an outsider looking into a world he can visit, but never inhabit. Reading the book for the first time as a sensitive and self-conscious high schooler, I saw myself in Nick and identified him as F. Scott Fitzgerald, too. From then on, until recently, I thought of Fitzgerald as the sensitive and delicate foil to Hemingway’s distastefully bold barbarism.

Some time ago on Litverse, I admitted I was wrong about Hemingway. Now, it’s time to admit that I was wrong about Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, as it turns out, was kind of a bro. In 1971’s Exiles from Paradise, a biography of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald by Zelda’s childhood friend Sara Mayfield, shows that Fitzgerald was Nick Carraway on the inside, but Jay Gatsby on the outside. He spent too much money on dumb things because he loved the idea of wealth and only found real peace in partying. In her book, Mayfield shows us F. Scott Fitzgerald the Belligerent Bro, “a hothouse product of St. Paul soirées, Princeton clubs, and New York cocktail parties.”

There’s no doubt there’s bias in the book, a clear product of the pocket-size tell-alls once stocked in pharmacies and grocery stores. Mayfield, a Montogomery, Alabama, native just like Zelda, takes pages in Exiles from Paradise to detail Zelda’s superior lineage and lovingly lingers on the lost utopia of the Confederacy. She refers to Fitzgerald’s biographers as “apologists” and, rather than his creative process, Mayfield illuminates Fitzgerald’s partying instead of his prose. Want to know how hard Fitzgerald partied? This is the book to read.

Unwilling to pick up a yellowed edition of a 1971 book? Litverse has got you covered.

Here are six surefire ways to drink like one of America’s greatest authors:

1. Forget You’re an Alcoholic.

I havn’t [sic] even had a glass of beer for a month + shall try it again… The fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps. But not renunciation.

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, letter to his daughter

In Litverse’s piece on the frenemy relationship between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, I took some time breaking down the alcoholic habits of both literary legends. In Exiles From Paradise, it’s evident that Fitzgerald’s life would have been much easier if he had stopped drinking. Not necessarily beer or wine, which he didn’t even count as alcohol. It was apparently the gin that got him. As Mayfield writes, Scott could keep it together until the liquor came out. In which case, he was known to go on “sprees” that could last days.

Recounting a time she visited the Fitzgeralds at a beach in France, where she takes some time to recount how Scott’s pot belly had grown and how bad it looked, we encounter a scene when Scott, who had been trying to take a break and telling everyone about it, gets so excited that Mayfield is visiting that he sprints to his car and comes back with a full bottle of gin. As she writes:

Scott, who had forgotten that he was an alcoholic and could have only one drink…” got a bottle of gin in the car…

“Two drinks put him in a manic state,’ Zelda said, patently frightened.

Want to drink like Fitzgerald? Forget you’ve got a problem.

2. Nurse an Inferiority Complex.

That young man must surely be mad. If he’s not watched, he will certainly do himself some injury.

-James Joyce on F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sara Mayfield, daughter of Montgomery, Alabama, takes considerable word count in Exiles from Paradise to recount the faultless traditions of Confederate chivalry and, in taking the trouble to record Zelda’s proud lineage, proudly explains that it was destiny that Zelda would prefer the finer things in life from any future husband (without exploring what “tobacco farmer” meant for any records of planation-owning grandparents).

This presented the same problem for Fitzgerald as it did for Jay Gatsby: wooing women that were out of their league… financially. Because of old money.

Mayfield’s most pointed investigative journalism is dedicated to dismantling F. Scott Fitzgerald’s own claim that his ancestors were classy at all, writing:

The first time that I met Scott was in September 1918… Scott claimed that his father’s family could trace their ancestry back through a long line of Irish early to the Italian noble family of the Gheradinis and his relation to Francis Scott Key, the author of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’

Mayfield detects an air of desperate dishonesty and checks the records. She assures the readers that Francis Scott Key was “a very distant relative” of Fitgzerald and cites a letter from Fitzgerald to a friend as testament to an ideology that infected him because of this natural inferiority:

I am half black Irish and half old American stock… so being born in the atmosphere of crack, wisecrack and counter-crack I developed a two-cylinder inferiority complex. I spent my youth in alternately crawling in front of kitchen maids and insulting the great.

Mayfield proclaims triumphantly that, when pressed, Fitzgerald “confessed” that his family is “strictly 1850 potato famine Irish.” She explains with the air of a Proust salon that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mother was an embarrassment, a plain and unattractive woman who wore unfashionable clothes. Fitzgerald, as would later become apparent in his work, always wanted not only the grandeur of wealth but the grandeur of a greater bloodline. These insecurities surfaced in strange ways when he drank. Mayfield writes that he would alternate between admiration and abhorrence for the wealthy company he collected as a result of his literary stardom. With his success, he started to suffer from both a superiority and inferiority complex without resolving either.

Like both Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald hated the company, but he loved the party.

Want to drink like Fitzgerald? Feel left out - both above and below.

3. Rely on Your Good Looks for Forgiveness.

Exiles from Paradise is a treasure trove of cringe-worthy moments. According to Mayfield, F. Scott Fitzgerald bullied peasant women in rural France and kidnapped others as a prank. Sailing on the Riveria, he chewed hundred-franc notes and spit them in the crew’s face. One time, he bought a wagon full of chestnuts just to throw them down the street. On another, he commandeered a hearse and used it as a party bus. After dinner with James Joyce, he ran through the streets yelling, “Behold! I am Voltaire! I am Rousseau! I am Victor Hugo!”

That said, Exiles from Paradise leaves no room for doubt: Fitzgerald was hit. He drank to numb the isolation of his own insecurities and became the monster within the man and he could get away with it, because he was easy on the eyes.

Mayfield regularly assures readers that this great American writer resembled a “blond Adonis in a Brook Brothers uniform” with features as “regular and clear-cut as if they had been coined in a Greek mint.” She even finds third-party sources for cross-reference.

As his Princeton peer, Lawton Campbell, recollects to Mayfield:

[Fitzgerald] was the handsomest boy I’d ever seen. He had yellow hair and lavender eyes.

Fitzgerald could fall apart from drink, but it was perhaps like witnessing the crumbling of a Greek statue to dust. At least for a while.

Want to drink like Fitzgerald? Get hot.

4. Make Early Success Your Identity.

A writer like me… must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothing can- happen-to-me, nothing-can-harm-me, nothing-can-touch-me.

-F. Scott Fitzgerald

With the explosive celebrity success from the poetic autofiction of his chart-topping first novel 1920’s This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald, at twenty-three, felt destined for the stars. “Fame and fortune had come to Scott almost overnight,” Mayfield writes, and tells readers with no surprise that he wasted it. In the rest of the book, we see how Fitzgerald wasted himself and his wealth trying to find love and only found wonder in waste. In the bloom of his first novel’s success, Mayfield explains:

In the money now, and out to prove it, ostentatiously and alcoholically, [Fitzgearld] had gone on a monumental spree…

He persuaded Zelda that he was destined to become a great writer who could open for her the glittering gates to fame and wealth.

Fitzgerald partied to celebrate his success, but became poisoned by a potential that he never reached again in his lifetime and died thinking himself a failure. Ironically, it was The Great Gatsby that ended the party for him. In The Washington Post’s account:

When his third novel, “The Great Gatsby,” met with mixed reviews and poor sales, Fitzgerald descended deeper into drinking and Zelda lost herself in an obsession with becoming a ballerina that culminated in a nervous breakdown, causing her to be hospitalized in Switzerland from June 1930 until August 1931. The letters they exchanged were poignant. “We ruined ourselves,” Fitzgerald wrote. “I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.”

Want to drink like Fitzgerald? Dwell in old greatness without growing.

5. Keep up with Hemingway.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it--don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist.

-Ernest Hemingway, letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald and Hemingway drank for different reasons, but they enjoyed drinking together upon meeting in Paris.

As Litverse said about the start of this lovable bromance:

It’s likely this restlessness that F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway saw in each other when they met at a bar in Paris in 1925. Fitzgerald was 29. Hemingway was 26. Fitzgerald had published This Side of Paradise in 1920 and had now lived as a celebrity author for five years. Hemingway, who had gone abroad with his wife as a foreign correspondent had, by 1925, acquired a passion for bullfighting, an affair that would end his marriage, and an appetite, above all, to publish what would be his first novel: The Sun Also Rises.

Fitzgerald helped Hemingway publish his first book and constantly lent him money. In his view, his new friend could do no wrong. As Mayfield puts it, amid more than one implications that Hemingway was gay or otherwise deviant:

Hemingway appeared as a Byronic hero - for he had been decorated for bravery during the Italian campaign in World War I, while Scott, to his regret, had not even been sent overseas…

He was impressed by Hemingway’s war experiences and the terse, muscular prose with which he had reported them as well as by his prowess as an athlete and sportsman who hunted, fished, skied, fenced, and boxed.

Even as she clearly detests Hemingway’s nature, there is an admiration of man and writer. As Mayfield writes:

A lion of Parisian salons, Hemingway was a struggling journalist, clumsy on the tennis court, boorish in his mater, and something of a roughneck.

The problem was tolerance and temperament. As Mayfield recalls:

Hemingway had a Gargantuan capacity for alcohol. He could drink all day and half the night and still work the next morning. But if Scott took more than three cocktails, he was off on a spree that left him shot of a week.

By firsthand accounts, Hemingway had a daily diet of three pre-dinner scotches and two bottles of Claret by the time he moved to Cuba. F. Scott Fitzgerald made a habit of drinking more than thirty beers a day. If the average unit of alcohol is one beer, one glass of wine (six units to a bottle), or 1.5 ounces of liquor, we can add up the math:

• Fitzgerald: 30+ units of alcohol throughout the day

• Hemingway: 15 units of alcohol in measured increments, up to ~20 if the scotches are double, 26 with another bottle of wine, 30 if the wine is followed by a nightcap)

• Morrison: For incidental comparison, Doors vocalist Jim Morrison was remembered as drinking 36 a beers a day during the recording of the bands last album, “LA Woman”

In breaking on through the other side together in their twenties, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, at one point in Paris, the two men ended up in jail. Along with the money her husband constantly let to Hemingway, this incident may account, partly, why Zelda hated Fitzgerald’s new friend. And also Hemingway’s unrestrained disdain for her in real life interesting and conviction that she cheated on him with a French aviator at a casino in the Riveria and that she crippled Scott’s writing with her neediness and manipulation and jealousy.

Even without Zelda, by 1929 Ernest Hemingway hated Fitzgerald - at least when he was drunk. As he wrote:

Last time he was in Paris he got us kicked out of one apt. and in trouble all the time. (Insulted the landlord — pee-ed on the front porch — tried to break down the door at 3-4 and 5 a.m.)… I am very fond of Scott but I’ll beat him up before I’ll let him come and get us ousted from this place — as a matter of fact I’m afraid I’d kill him.

Want to drink like Fitzgerald? Lose yourself by keeping up with someone else. Especially Hemingway or a broken heart.

6. Stress Out Your Wife.

What’s most shocking in Exiles from Paradise is Mayfield’s acid-coated revelation that Zelda had three abortions over the course of her marriage - all operations abroad - after giving birth to their daughter, Scottie, who is rarely ever mentioned in the book. Whatever side of the aisle you sit on when it comes to when life begins, this number seems high - especially in Europe in the twenties. And if it isn’t, that seems like a significant sediment layer of history buried. And if it is a big deal, and maybe even if it isn’t, one can imagine the solitude of Zelda’s journey in deciding, three times, with a husband blazing like a dying star, that she would end the life of some other life in a foreign country and a foreign spouse. Three times.

Over the years, the carriage became just another party and in all the records of all those Gatsby-style parties that Scott and Zelda hosted, it’s clear the Fitzgeralds saw the strangers within themselves more often than each other.

As The Weeknd would explain it: “house so empty, need a centerpiece.” A good song to play as we finish the article.

To think of it, maybe Litverse could clickbait another article about how The Weeknd, trying too hard to be the new Michael Jackson, is actually the world’s Fitzgerald in his guilt and shame and inability to enjoy what - and who - comes with wealth before mutating with radioactive arrogance confused with self-worth.

Towards the end of their life in the South of France - about a decade before Zelda spent the rest of her life in and out of sanitariums before burning alive in one - Mayfield describes Zelda chugging martinis at a cafe, eating nothing but shrimp cocktail and showing only dying light:

The sparkle had gone out of her as it does out of champagne that has been swizzled too long.

Zelda Fitzgerald, a writer, dancer, and artist, is the soul of Exiles From Paradise. Mayfield claims that much of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work should be attributed to his wife. He did, after all, steal her letters for his books. Mayfield assures readers that his dependence on Zelda for creative output was “common knowledge” among friends. She points out that when Zelda was committed to a psychiatric hospital, Fitzgerald never again published nothing commercially without her. These claims are dependent on whether we want to ignore the painfully promising prose and incomplete injury of work of The Last Tycoon (which Litverse covered here).

What’s clear in Mayfield’s book is that the Fitzgeralds drained the life from each other as much as they gave life to each other. Like true artists, they were vampires and feeding on each other as muses and this never ended. Even living across the country from each other at the end of their lives, the legacy of letters between Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald still show some kind of insane love. Having destroyed themselves, they still had some secret language in the ashes.

Fitzgerald would die of a heart attack at age forty-four. Eight years later, Zelda burned alive in a sanatorium and, in what is ostensibly a crucification-level degree of inferno, left only dental records behind. It’s rumored that Scott died when he was eating a chocolate bar. For years, he had been drinking dozens of sodas as a replacement for beer. But also thirty-plus beers when he didn’t.

Want to drink like Fitzgerald? Lead a life where your heart explodes and your love for everything will burn and burn until there’s nothing left.

Most importantly: Mistake numbness for novelty.