Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography Read Online Free Page A

pulpit a kindly thought struck me—perhaps inspired by the faint odor of sanctity which exuded from the saintly man. I spoke. ‘Don’t mind me,’ I said, ‘go on with the sermon.’ Then, perhaps unsteadied a bit by my emotion, I passed down the other aisle, followed by a sort of amazed awe, and so out into the street. The papers had an extra out before midnight.” 11
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    Three crucial entries in Scott’s autobiographical Ledger for his boyhood years from 1901 to 1904 expressed his acute anxiety and shame about his feet, which he associated with fear of exposure, with filth and with perversion. Scott’s bizarre obsession with and phobia about his feet were closely connected not only to his childhood guilt about sex and revulsion when kissing girls—the result of what he called “a New England conscience, developed in Minnesota”—but also to adult doubts about his masculinity and fears about his sexual inadequacy:
    He went to Atlantic City—where some Freudian complex refused to let him display his feet, so he refused to swim, concealing the real reason. They thought he feared the water.
    There was a boy named Arnold who went barefooted in his yard and peeled plums. Scott’s Freudian shame about his feet kept him from joining in.
    He took off John Wylie’s shoes. He began to hear “dirty” words. He had this curious dream of perversion.
    In a Smart Set interview of 1924, Fitzgerald commented on the childhood phobia that had made him so unhappy and falsely claimed that it had suddenly vanished when he reached adolescence: “The sight of his own feet filled him with embarrassment and horror. No amount of persuasion could entice him to permit others to see his naked feet, and up until he was twelve this fear caused him a great deal of misery. . . . This complex suddenly disappeared one day without any reason.” 12
    Frances Kroll, Fitzgerald’s secretary in Hollywood, observed that he was slightly pigeon-toed, always wore slippers and never went about in bare feet. Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald’s companion during the last years of his life, wrote that he had mentioned his “mysterious shyness” about his feet, and during the years that she knew him always refused to take off his shoes and socks on the beach. When Tony Buttitta, who visited Fitzgerald’s hotel room in Asheville in 1935, noticed his “stubby and unattractive feet,” Fitzgerald “fumbled for his slippers and hid his feet in them.” Most significantly, Lottie, a prostitute who became Fitzgerald’s mistress that summer, described his foot fetishism and said that he “caressed her feet, the toes, instep, and heel, and got an odd pleasure out of it. . . . It seems that the sight of women’s feet has excited him since he first started thinking about sex.” 13
    Early in his career Fitzgerald used his curious obsession to suggest the presence of evil. In This Side of Paradise, in a five-page scene called “The Devil,” Amory Blaine and a friend pick up two chorus girls in a nightclub, where he notices a pale, middle-aged man dressed in a brown suit. They then go up to the girls’ apartment to get drunk and have sex. Just as Amory is tempted by Phoebe, the minatory devil figure from the nightclub mysteriously appears in the apartment: “suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a rush of blood to the head [instead of the penis] he realized he was afraid. The feet were all wrong . . . with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather than knew. . . . It was like weakness in a good woman, or blood on satin; one of those terrible incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain.” Associating the horrific feet with sexual immorality and sexual violation, Amory rushes out of the sinful apartment and descends in the elevator. As he reaches the lower floor, “the feet came into view in the sickly electric light of the paved hall.”
    This fictional scene made an emotional impact on Scott’s boyhood friend Stephan Parrott,