The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King, His First Love - Hardcover

West II, James L.W. I

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400063086 ISBN 13: 9781400063086

Publisher: Random House, 2005

Synopsis

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a handsome, ambitious sophomore at Princeton when he fell in love for the first time. Ginevra King, though only sixteen, was beautiful, socially poised, and blessed with the confidence that considerable wealth can bring.

Their romance began instantly, flourished in heartfelt letters, and quickly ran its course–but Scott never forgot it. Now, for the first time, scholar and biographer James L. W. West III tells the story of the youthful passion that shaped Scott Fitzgerald’s life as a writer.

When Scott and Ginevra met in January 1915, the rest of the world was at war, but America remained a haven for young people who could afford to have a good time. Privileged and mildly rebellious, the two were swept together in a whirl of dances, parties, campus weekends, and chaperoned visits to New York.

“For heaven’s sake don’t idealize me!” Ginevra warned in one of the many letters she sent to Scott, but of course that’s just what he did–for the next two decades. Though he fell in love with Zelda Sayre soon after learning of Ginevra’s engagement to a well-to-do midwesterner, Scott drew on memories of Ginevra for his most unforgettable female characters–Isabelle Borgé and Rosalind Connage in This Side of Paradise, Judy Jones in “Winter Dreams,” and above all Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Transformed by Scott’s art, Ginevra became a new American heroine who inspired an entire generation.

About this title

About the Author:

JAMES L.W. WEST III is Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been a Fulbright scholar to England and Belgium. He is the author of William Styron: A Life and is general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1

Ginevra and Scott

Ginevra King was the eldest of the three daughters of Charles Garfield King, a wealthy Chicago stockbroker, and Ginevra Fuller King, his wife. There was money on both sides of the family, earned by Ginevra’s grandfathers, both of whom were self-made men. Her paternal grandfather, Charles Bohan King, had come to Chicago from upstate New York in 1863. At first he worked as a wholesale grocer, then as a jobber in hats, caps, and furs. He eventually moved into banking and prospered, retiring in 1885 as president of the Commercial Safe Deposit Co. He was a Republican and a Presbyterian; he sent his older son, Rockwell King, to Harvard and his younger son (Ginevra’s father) to Yale.

Ginevra’s maternal grandfather, William Alden Fuller, was a native of Massachusetts. He began his working life in 1852 as a station agent for the Worcester & Nashua Railroad; in 1854 he came to Chicago and entered the lumber trade as a bookkeeper. Twelve years later, with backing from Potter Palmer, the dry goods magnate, he struck out as a dealer in building materials. He formed the corporation of Palmer, Fuller & Co.; the business was a success, and he became wealthy during the commercial boom that followed the Civil War. He belonged to the Episcopal Church and the Union League. Ginevra, as a teenager, knew him as a widower who lived in a large house at 2913 Michigan Avenue.

Ginevra’s mother and father had married in January 1898, four years after he had taken his degree at Yale. When he wed Ginevra Fuller, Charles King was still a mortgage banker at Shanklin & King, a business backed by his father’s money, but in 1900, when Ginevra turned two, he began working on the side as a stockbroker. In 1906 he became a full-time broker, organizing the firm of King, Farnum & Co., of which he was senior member. The brokerage prospered, operating from seats on both the Chicago and the New York exchanges. He and his wife and children were still living with her father in the house on Michigan Avenue when Ginevra met Scott, but Charles King had already acquired a large summer residence (which he called “Kingdom Come Farm”) in Lake Forest, and he was building an elegant four-story mansion in the city at the corner of Astor and Burton.

Charles King and his wife belonged to Onwentsia, an exclusive country club in Lake Forest, where he played golf and polo. He built his own string of polo ponies, which he stabled on his Lake Forest property, and he played for the club in competitions against other teams during the 1890s and early 1900s. The Kings socialized with the other prominent families in Chicago—the Swifts, Armours, Cudahys, Palmers, McCormicks, and Chatfield-Taylors. The children of these families went to schools and churches together and played with one another in Lake Forest during the summers. Their parents sent them to fashionable New England prep schools; the sons usually stayed in the East to attend Harvard or Yale. This was a tightly knit community: its members were held together by money, property, shared values, and high social status.

The Chicago of the early twentieth century, their Chicago, had been defined by three important events in the last third of the nineteenth century: the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket Square Bombing of 1886, and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. The fire had destroyed the old city, a prosperous but poorly laid-out center of railroading, meatpacking, and shipping, and had given Chicago’s entrepreneurs an opportunity to erect a modern metropolis, with a transportation loop and with some of the world’s first skyscrapers. The Haymarket Square Bombing and the riots that followed had set unions and laborers against capitalists in bitter conflicts that lasted well into the twentieth century. Most of the workers were immigrants (many were Irish), and virtually all of them belonged to the Catholic Church, which was thought to have fomented much of the labor agitation. The Columbian Exposition with its famous “White City”—a collection of fanciful, alabaster-colored buildings covering forty-four square acres—was an announcement to the world that Chicago had arrived. The exposition featured an Electricity Building, a Ferris wheel, a reproduction of one of Columbus’s ships, a prototype of the movie projector, and a sixty-foot cannon that could fire a shell over sixteen miles. More than twenty-seven million people came to Chicago to visit this exposition; most of them went away convinced that the city was a wonderful example of American hustle, ambition, and commercial power. This was the city in which Ginevra King’s family, and other families of the Chicago haute bourgeoisie, were prospering.
Ginevra was the third woman in her family to bear that given name.* Like her mother and grandmother, she was named for Ginevra de Benci, the pensive young Florentine noblewoman of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous portrait, painted in 1474 and familiar to nineteenth-century art students and connoisseurs from etchings and oil reproductions.

Ginevra King had a clear sense of her family’s wealth and position and, from an early age, a highly developed understanding of how social status worked. During the summer of 1914, in an act of arrogance that could probably only be managed by a group of pretty fifteen-year-old girls, Ginevra and three of her friends had declared themselves to be the “Big Four”—the four most attractive and socially desirable young women in Chicago. They had not consulted anyone about this; they had simply anointed themselves. The other three girls were Edith Cummings, Courtney Letts, and Margaret (“Peg”) Carry. The girls had four identical pinky rings made of rose gold; engraved inside each ring, in script letters, was “The Big Four 1914.” (Ginevra’s ring can be seen on her right hand, next to a signet ring, in the frontispiece of this book.) The girls went to dances and house parties together, and they were seen as a foursome on the golf links and tennis courts at Onwentsia. If other girls were jealous, Ginevra and her three friends did not care. The Big Four was complete; it would admit no further members.

Ginevra herself was lovely. She was small, about five feet four inches in height, with refined features and a good profile. She had a slim figure, pretty legs and ankles, and small, graceful hands. Her hair was dark and curly; her eyes, deep brown in color, were lively and sparkling. Ginevra’s voice was her most unusual attribute—low and expressive, with a slight roughness of texture. She liked to sing and laugh: if something truly amused her she would produce a snort. She loved parties, adored dancing, and was adept in social situations, relying on her looks and instincts to see her through.

Ginevra’s diary reveals other things about her. She was intensely competitive and did not like to lose at anything—golf, tennis, or even basketball (for which she was undersized). She loved athletics and was a good enough golfer to hold her own against Edith Cummings, who later won two national titles in the sport. Ginevra was reasonably diligent about her schoolwork but wasn’t terribly interested in it. She preferred athletics and parties, and she liked to sit up late talking with her friends. She was direct in speech and self-confident in behavior; there was little that was studied or calculated about what she did or said. She was not especially interested in discussing the shortcomings of others and was not much inclined toward introspection or self-analysis.

When Scott Fitzgerald met her, Ginevra was halfway through her sophomore year at Westover School in Middlebury, Connecticut. Westover, a country boarding school, was a relatively new institution. It had been founded in 1910 by Miss Mary Robbins Hillard and her associate Miss Theodate Pope. Miss Hillard had taught from 1885–91 at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut (where Miss Pope had been her student), and had been principal of St. Margaret’s in Waterbury for the eighteen years following.

Westover was a small, exclusive finishing school: about 150 girls were enrolled, and their training was focused on languages, literature, history, art, and music. Occasionally Miss Hillard would read aloud from the newspaper to the girls at assembly, but otherwise the outside world did not intrude. Only five or six of the forty or so graduates each year went on to college. Most of the girls were destined to be the wives of wealthy men; they would find fulfillment in social activities, in child-rearing, and, if they wished to, in helping the needy. This was a point much stressed at Westover; the girls were given a strong sense of social responsibility and American-style noblesse oblige.

Accommodations at Westover were relatively spartan; the emphasis was on character-building. The girls were required to take daily exercise, either in sports or in “jogging,” a rapid trotting that was encouraged in the afternoons. Westover had no religious affiliation; most of the students belonged to Protestant denominations and attended churches in Middlebury. Much energy went into singing, plays, picnics, and single-sex dances, which were called “Germans” and were held each Saturday night. Girls attended these dances as couples; crushes between younger and older girls were common.

The dormitory rooms were large and commodious. Maids (all from Trinidad and the Virgin Islands) looked after the laundry and housekeeping chores. Girls often spent the night with one another and stayed awake after lights-out to gossip and talk. Uniforms were required: a khaki skirt with a black patent-leather belt and a white blouse during the day; a white dress with black silk stockings and low-heeled shoes in the evenings...

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1400063086
• ISBN 13: 9781400063086
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240