ineligible for Triangle, and barely managed to survive without expulsion. He never even learned how to spell and, despite his training in Latin and French, was hopeless at foreign languages.
In November 1915 Fitzgerald entered the infirmary with a touch of malaria, then endemic in the marshlands around Princeton. Though his illness (which he preferred to call tuberculosis) was real, it also provided an excellent excuse to leave college honorably as an invalid instead of failing out after his midyear exams. “After the curriculum had tied me up,” he defensively explained to the president of Princeton in 1920, “taken away the honors I’d wanted, bent my nose over a chemistry book and said, ‘No fun, no activities, no offices, no Triangle trips—no, not even a diploma if you can’t do chemistry’—after that I retired.” He was extremely sensitive about his failure and persuaded the dean to give him a letter stating that he had voluntarily withdrawn “because of ill health and that he was fully at liberty, at that time, to go on with his class, if his health had permitted.” At the same time the exasperated dean rubbed salt in the wound by including a caustic note to Fitzgerald: “This is for your sensitive feelings. I hope you will find it soothing.” 13
After idling away the spring of 1916 in St. Paul, he returned to Princeton to repeat his junior year. But his spirit was crushed. He felt it was stupid to spend four hours a day in his tutor’s stuffy room enduring the infinite boredom of conic sections. He had been deprived of the recognition he craved and had lost all chance of winning honors during his final years. “After a few months of rest I went back to college,” he explained in The Crack-Up. “But I had lost certain offices, the chief one was the presidency of the Triangle Club, a musical comedy idea, and also I dropped back a class. To me college would never be the same. There were to be no badges of pride, no medals, after all.” If he could not achieve great success at Princeton, Fitzgerald did not see the point of struggling through his courses.
He confessed that when his morale was at its lowest point he had even sought solace from a prostitute. “It seemed on one March afternoon [in 1917] that I had lost every single thing I wanted—and that night was the first time that I hunted down the spectre of womanhood that, for a little while, makes everything else seem unimportant.” But this kind of behavior was out of character. On one occasion, when Bishop and another Princeton friend, Alexander McKaig, had gone off to pick up two girls, Scott priggishly told Edmund Wilson: “That’s one thing that Fitzgerald’s never done.” 14
In 1916 Wilson and Bishop, his fellow highbrow, published a cruel satiric poem that put the popular but cheeky Fitzgerald in his proper place. They contrasted his shallowness to their learning, and deflated his flashy cleverness, superficial reading, derivative cynicism and unworthy ambition by having Fitzgerald exclaim:
I was always clever enough
To make the clever upperclassmen notice me;
I could make one poem by Browning,
One play by Shaw,
And part of a novel by Meredith
Go further than most people
Could do with the reading of years;
And I could always be cynically amusing at the expense
Of those who were cleverer than I
And from whom I borrowed freely,
But whose cleverness
Was not the kind that is effective
In the February of sophomore year. . . .
No doubt by senior year
I would have been on every committee in college,
But I made one slip:
I flunked out in the middle of junior year.
In his Ledger Fitzgerald honestly characterized 1916 as “a year of terrible disappointments & the end of all college dreams. Everything bad in it was my own fault.” But he never completely accepted his share of the blame. In 1937, when Bishop truthfully stated that Fitzgerald had failed out of Princeton and used illness as an excuse for his departure,
In November 1915 Fitzgerald entered the infirmary with a touch of malaria, then endemic in the marshlands around Princeton. Though his illness (which he preferred to call tuberculosis) was real, it also provided an excellent excuse to leave college honorably as an invalid instead of failing out after his midyear exams. “After the curriculum had tied me up,” he defensively explained to the president of Princeton in 1920, “taken away the honors I’d wanted, bent my nose over a chemistry book and said, ‘No fun, no activities, no offices, no Triangle trips—no, not even a diploma if you can’t do chemistry’—after that I retired.” He was extremely sensitive about his failure and persuaded the dean to give him a letter stating that he had voluntarily withdrawn “because of ill health and that he was fully at liberty, at that time, to go on with his class, if his health had permitted.” At the same time the exasperated dean rubbed salt in the wound by including a caustic note to Fitzgerald: “This is for your sensitive feelings. I hope you will find it soothing.” 13
After idling away the spring of 1916 in St. Paul, he returned to Princeton to repeat his junior year. But his spirit was crushed. He felt it was stupid to spend four hours a day in his tutor’s stuffy room enduring the infinite boredom of conic sections. He had been deprived of the recognition he craved and had lost all chance of winning honors during his final years. “After a few months of rest I went back to college,” he explained in The Crack-Up. “But I had lost certain offices, the chief one was the presidency of the Triangle Club, a musical comedy idea, and also I dropped back a class. To me college would never be the same. There were to be no badges of pride, no medals, after all.” If he could not achieve great success at Princeton, Fitzgerald did not see the point of struggling through his courses.
He confessed that when his morale was at its lowest point he had even sought solace from a prostitute. “It seemed on one March afternoon [in 1917] that I had lost every single thing I wanted—and that night was the first time that I hunted down the spectre of womanhood that, for a little while, makes everything else seem unimportant.” But this kind of behavior was out of character. On one occasion, when Bishop and another Princeton friend, Alexander McKaig, had gone off to pick up two girls, Scott priggishly told Edmund Wilson: “That’s one thing that Fitzgerald’s never done.” 14
In 1916 Wilson and Bishop, his fellow highbrow, published a cruel satiric poem that put the popular but cheeky Fitzgerald in his proper place. They contrasted his shallowness to their learning, and deflated his flashy cleverness, superficial reading, derivative cynicism and unworthy ambition by having Fitzgerald exclaim:
I was always clever enough
To make the clever upperclassmen notice me;
I could make one poem by Browning,
One play by Shaw,
And part of a novel by Meredith
Go further than most people
Could do with the reading of years;
And I could always be cynically amusing at the expense
Of those who were cleverer than I
And from whom I borrowed freely,
But whose cleverness
Was not the kind that is effective
In the February of sophomore year. . . .
No doubt by senior year
I would have been on every committee in college,
But I made one slip:
I flunked out in the middle of junior year.
In his Ledger Fitzgerald honestly characterized 1916 as “a year of terrible disappointments & the end of all college dreams. Everything bad in it was my own fault.” But he never completely accepted his share of the blame. In 1937, when Bishop truthfully stated that Fitzgerald had failed out of Princeton and used illness as an excuse for his departure,
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