Who the Heck is F. Scott Fitzgerald?

When Ms. Rosenberger asked “No Swifties?”, almost incredulously, during the discussion of Sherman Alexie’s father and Jimi Hendrix, I didn’t say anything, fought the urge and killed it, didn’t raise my hand. I know what I would have said: some faux-nonchalant, socially acceptable spiel about how she was a billionaire or her music was mediocre or her MAGA-affiliations or performative activism—the ex-Swiftie, I am an ex-Swiftie, but I can’t wash away the past just like I can’t undo my neuron paths where every lyric from every song I played too many times and every “Taylor Swift being relatable” compilation and even the script from every Target advertisement is carved there like dormant volcanoes. Or that I bought three of her CDs without even owning a CD player, or once had her as my WeChat profile picture once or started lurking on a Taylor-hate subreddit and wondered why I ever liked her at all or didn’t say anything not a message not a syllable to my Swiftie friend in China about her new album.

Disillusionment is a strange thing. All the physical media I have of her music, CDs and the photoshoot cards said Swiftie friend bought for me is just that—physical things, as spiritual and as memorable as someone else’s license plate or the hedges in my front lawn I pass every day to the bus stop in the morning. Like childhood friends with whom you were once attached at the hip to but now have forgotten what they look like. Imaginary friends who died. Something lined in the lint roller of time that exorcised the magic into apathy.

I have trouble reconciling the art with the artist. With Taylor Swift it was mental boycott, was getting giddy from hate comments instead of the former incessant praise. With F. Scott Fitzgerald it was intrusive ambivalence. I guess it’s not a bad thing—that I am thinking critically now instead of worshipping the author of every classic that I enjoyed. But there is something tainted, ominous about it, a looming undertone; with every line about Nick and Daisy and Jordan I could not stop also thinking about Fitzgerald roaring drunk or cheating or digging through Zelda’s manuscripts looking crazed and shifty—the literal “ghostwriter,” the ghost of Fitzgerald as he is in the black-and-white photo on the back cover staring through the blinds of the lines on the page. Or sometimes it is me that is looking through the blinds, vaguely scandalized but unwilling to look away.

Something that I have begun this year in Lang is rabbit hole-researching every proper noun in our readings before I read the text itself, or as they pop up in the lines. I don’t know if I like it or hate it. I don’t know if I am authentically recreating what it was like to read the piece as a reader of the times or if this is barely-altered voyeurism. If I am manufacturing my own biases, chaining my biases to the lines of context I research before actually stepping into the text which in this case, I guess would be a metaphorical rowboat, how “pure” my experience of the work actually is now that I have background information about it.

It’s strange, seeing it written on the page, that I am essentially equating ignorance with purity. Pure in the way that glacier water in those TikToks are pure, the way cow’s milk is pure before being chemically treated; “natural” not as a romanticized term but in its literal meaning, probably infested with millennia-old bacteria or at the least not fit for human consumption. But each layer we add before consuming is at its core a biased filter or a new color splashed across the palette. “Maybe the curtains were just blue,” and there is something to be said about that, how what the writer puts on the page is inevitably a different version than what arrives in the reader’s mind. Different time stamps, different ages, background knowledge, biases and beliefs and values, a chaotic kaleidoscope lens of telescopes all fixated on that one moment in time on a planet that only passes the earth every some number of years, trying to recreate and decipher that one combination of neurons and the light in the room and the smell and color of the ink as it appears unaltered and untainted onto the manuscript—what the heck the author was actually thinking when something was written.

It makes me think of light from the sun taking eight minutes to reach Earth, after traveling through a hundred million miles of empty space and space rocks and then the atmosphere to light everything up so we can see. I’m quite proud of that analogy. But the point is everything is touched by distortion in some way and then I am scrolling on Reddit or another Medium article saying some author was a sociopath or a male manipulator or a pedophile or some other ringing, noisy buzzword, and I am standing on the higher ground holding this bare-boned scripture and everything is clean-cut and sharp even though it’s so small and distant from up here.

But then I am reading Gatsby and the city is “rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps” and “the sunlight rising through the girders making a constant flicker among the moving cars” and I am plunged back into cold water and gasping for air because who on earth writes like this. And maybe it is because I am hyper-susceptible to a brilliant way of writing an observation of the world but the words are now a three-dimensional, fully-fledged and kicking entity of their own and I am reminded of why I have and still do worship the authors that I admire; why I thought for the longest time that great writers had to be the greatest most noble people—why it stung when I learned that Rousseau left his children at an orphanage and Benjamin Franklin apparently had a pearl necklace with a pearl for woman he slept with or that genius Chinese poet who murdered his wife on an island with a hatchet. Someone who could approach so close to divinity in understanding human nature, but there was no model-citizen prerequisite for that. When I read On Writing Well by William Zinsser I conceded to myself for the first time that writing is just a craft. Just a sensitivity to the way words are placed and feel on the page. Just as a knife or a pill or a gun, non-autonomous objects are by themselves innocuous tools.

But writing as a sphere is not the same as great literature the sphere. Or the colloquial, less-pretentious phrase “good writing that makes you feel things.” I think about the paradox that every winning piece in writing competitions, for one, and the creative nonfiction I read in literary journals for another are vulnerable; it’s the irony that bearing the ugly, trodden parts of yourself as a writer also grant your writing credibility and sanctity. That I might revere some writer that explicitly mentions in their piece that they feel inadequate or get angry or are mildly annoyed sometimes. And if those things sound trite, that is the point—that in writing you can make everything interesting or refreshing, if you believe in it, if you don’t lie to yourself, if you find some clever angle or description; if Ernest Hemingway can write a piece entirely using symbolism about opening a can of beer then the world is your oyster. When I write I feel like the entire world is a photo book to be trampled. Why I love writing, and poetry, and to some extent the premise of the humanities itself is that everything can be justified. Everything is an argument; you get the truth with elements of cognitive dissonance to it, and that’s just thrilling, just vindicating, in the way conspiracy theories are.

It’s especially weird, the paradox of vulnerability, when I consider myself as a person who writes and my writing; writing is a breeding ground for imposter syndrome, when people might appreciate your work and think you must be so special when all you can think of are your ugliest thoughts and the thousands of drafts and edits to become ugly in a breathtaking way. Raw in a polished way. Writing is a performance as with anything else, since everything is edited it is always contrived, and the world through someone’s words is almost never the world or the person stripped from them.

All those tips about “writing for yourself” which only means to lie to yourself to get words on the page. Sure, there are journal entries and stowaway manuscripts, but the majority of writing is a press conference and if we take its purpose to be communicating ideas to an audience, that could be argued to be the only kind of writing that matters. The writer is never free from the audience, even if they are spiritually free from it. Writing is always a product, an artifact, and the lines between art and artist are distinct and only blurred by the metaphorical eyeglass that is the reader.

I think of pseudonyms—O. Henry to separate himself from William Sydney Porter the prison writer. Of the “crassness” of Wuthering Heights that fooled critics from ever guessing Ellis Bell was a woman; writing is a portal and an escape. I think the best metaphor is Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”: the undead corpse levitating down the street to the “peanut crunching crowd” while they clutch and shout their bids to touch her hair, listen to her heart; “I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air”; and then the great sweep of meta-ness, that the writer is both the corpse and a spectator with a typewriter recording the scene. And both the scribe and the puppetmaster of the play act. That is writing, to me.