An Interview with F. Scott Fitzgerald Scholar Matthew Bruccoli
by Katie Bowler

When Matthew J. Bruccoli tells me that one of the benefits of a recently acquired archive of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s writings will be to dispel the myths about Fitzgerald’s Hollywood years, I ask him to set me straight. He laughs and says, “That would take days.”

Fitzgerald’s 18 months in Hollywood, according to Bruccoli, “are probably the most distorted of his life.”

Bruccoli tells me the shorter version instead—how the 2,000-plus pages of manuscripts, revisions, and working drafts of screenplays Fitzgerald wrote for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1937 until 1938 illustrate how he took his new role seriously.

“He was determined to master a new genre, to reinvent himself at 40,” says Bruccoli from his University of South Carolina office on a morning in early October. “He worked very hard. He was not a success as a screenwriter because he was a born novelist, but he worked very hard at it.”

Bruccoli is the pre-eminent Fitzgerald scholar. He has built an extensive literary archive at the University of South Carolina, where in addition to being the Emily Brown Jeffries Professor of English, he is also curator of American literature. He has developed the library’s Fitzgerald special collection, and increased holdings of Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Heller, James Ellroy, and others.

He began collecting as an undergraduate at Yale, not quite certain why he was doing it, but knowing that it was important to gather every copy of The Great Gatsby he could find. It was as a student there that he first purchased a first edition hardback.

At Yale, he studied under Charles Fenton, who wrote “the first good book” on Hemingway, and who encouraged Bruccoli to seriously pursue his research of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. “He encouraged me at a time when neither was regarded as a major writer,” says Bruccoli. “Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton—yes. But Fitzgerald and Hemingway—we were actively discouraged from read them.”

His studies continued, and today Bruccoli has written and edited more than 80 books on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and others.

“Matthew Bruccoli’s done so much in terms of textual criticism, bibliographies, and archiving—a bit of everything,” says Dale Edmonds, an associate professor in the English department at Tulane University. “I’ve taught a Fitzgerald and Hemingway course on a number of occasions, and his book Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship is my bible for that class. He’s very balanced in his view on the two writers and their relationship. I trust him more than just about anybody in terms of accuracy and good sense about what the writers were like individually and as friends and literary associates.”

Given that Bruccoli’s an authority on both, I can’t resist asking which he most admires.

“If you’re asking me which would I rather spend eternity with?” he asks. “Fitzgerald. He was, when sober, a very nice, generous man, particularly generous to other writers.”

At a time when his own career was in high-gear, Fitzgerald was helpful to Hemingway. He even provided Hemingway introduction to Scribner as a publisher. But Hemingway, as Bruccoli says, could be “mean and ungrateful”—even if he was a great writer. He was selfish, and prone to exaggerated self-creation. As Bruccoli wrote in an introduction to the Hemingway special collection, Hemingway’s most enduring character was Hemingway.

“Fitzgerald was a far more gifted writer in terms of style, language, and rhythm of his prose,” Bruccoli says.

There are similarities between the writers Bruccoli studies—even as those studies cross genres. He’s an aficionado of good spy novels—with particular attention to John Le Carre, Alan Furst, Charles McCarry, Ross Macdonald, George V. Higgins, and others.

Le Carre’s work, like that of Fitzgerald’s, extends an acute awareness of class and a careful study of human character. “All of Le Carre’s work is about British class. Fitzgerald’s America in the 1920s was not nearly as vicious,” says Bruccoli, remarking that both writers portray the barriers of class and class exclusion.

Other similarities, not as obvious at the surface, could be drawn. But what all of these writers—Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Le Carre and others—have in common is that they’ve passed Bruccoli’s Holy Christ test.

“What’s a Holy Christ test?” I ask.

“If you don’t say Holy Christ [when you’re reading it],” he says, “go on to something else.”
When I laugh, he says, “You can substitute ‘sweet Jesus.’

“I’m 73,” he says. “I’m not going to be reading many years more. To my surprise, I find myself gravitating to sure things.”

Just a couple of weeks ago, he was caught in the airport in Oslo for 24 hours, and luckily he had some “sure things” with him.

“I reached into my emergency bag—because you learn to carry an emergency bag—and found books by Furst and McCarry,” says Bruccoli. “They got me through the 24 hours.”

We return to discussing the other spy novelists, many of whom I’m learning of for the first time, and he mentions that today’s mail should bring a copy of The Easiest Thing in the World by Higgins, his deep voice growing animated. I imagine that he’s using arm gestures despite the fact that I can’t see them.

Higgins’ book includes short stories, film treatments, and two previously unpublished novellas. It’s an important book, Bruccoli says, and he’s excited that it’s on its way.

Then he laughs and adds, “Assuming, of course, that the mailman doesn’t get mistaken for a Yankee and shot before he arrives.”

He pauses for my laughter but doesn’t miss a beat, immediately returning to telling me about the late Higgins, and how he hopes that Higgins’ death will generate a process of reappraisal of his work.

Higgins’ novels are driven by his years of working in the criminal justice system, and his hard-boiled fiction has been compared to that of Hemingway’s for how he uses dialogue to unfold stories and depict character. His books are among Bruccoli’s “good and warm” friends, the ones he returns to over and over.

The Great Gatsby is another one of those books. “It’s one of those novels,” says Bruccoli, “that good writers never recover from.”

“I haven’t recovered from The Great Gatsby,” says writer Christine Wiltz, whose books include The Last Madam and Glass House. “For a long time, whenever I got stuck or needed inspiration I would turn to it, like a masochist, because it usually convinced me I couldn't write very well at all. That Fitzgerald could really turn a sentence. I love it for its being a short, intense, powerful read. The very last sentence has been for me the standard as to how one should end a book--and so we beat on, boats against the current--a sentence that sums it up and does it with such a memorable image.”

Bruccoli believes that The Great Gatsby is a book all good writers return to over and over. And he is continually pleased at the further evidence of its impact. He saw the premiere of it, for example, as a ballet in Pittsburg.

“I don’t know anything about ballet,” he says, “and I don’t pretend to. But it’s another example of the enduring power of Gatsby.”

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