Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This very slight little book explores the here-to-fore little known facts regarding Fitzgerald's early infatuation with the upper class Chicago deb Ginerva King. The Kings were a very wealthy family from Lake Forest and their daughter on the surface quite out of Fitzgerald's league. As Fitzgerald wrote about all this in 1916, "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls." Ginerva was athletic and very personable - and attractive - in 1918 simultaneously announcing her engagement while appearing on the cover of Town and Country magazine. Yet before this a romance of some sort with the poor Fitzgerald ensued, and the author compiles a remarkable amount of information about this youthful relationship, mostly from unknown letters and diaries saved and put away by Ginerva, and donated in 2003 by her granddaughter to the Fitzgerlad archives at Princeton.
These are full of interesting things, and for any Fitzgerald scholar or even just an ardent fan are a must. As one reads through the book the ghosts of early Fitzgerald heroines float in and out of our consciousness. Reminders of this moment in a particualr story, or how someone spoke or felt about a moment in one story or novel can suddenly quite vividly hit us. And it is not only the earlier material. The Perfect Hour serves to remind us all, again, that Daisy and Zelda are not interchangeable - Daisy is much more of a composite character, and many of her traits, from the voice that sounded like money, as Gatsby put it, to her best friend, the tennis champ, are taken from Ginerva's life.
Moreover, Ginerva's stockbroker father who owned a string of polo ponies is yet another source for the composite that is Tom Buchanan. And that rather subtly incestous concept reminds us that Fitzgerald's next novel after Gatsby was initially planned to be about a boy who killed his mother. There is much more going on in Fitzgerald than is generally thought.

About a year ago I did a research project about F. Scott Fitzgerald. I found a lot of information about his wife Zelda who intrigued me. She inspired many of Scott's works and was a lasting influence on his life.

This book exposes another influence, perhaps an even greater one because of how early Ginevra King met Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald fell in love with the vivacious girl and shared a romance with her that helped shape his ideal woman.

The problem with this book is it's brevity. It details the backgrounds of both participants in the relationship and discusses their lives after the romance ended. For the time they were together, letters that were saved and diary entries are used to explain the relationship. However, although the author says that Ginevra King influenced Fitzgerald's works and gives examples, he never explains why she made such an impact.

I was disappointed that although Ginevra King was shown to be as much an influence on Fitzgerald's work as Zelda, she was shown to be less eloquent, vivacious, beautiful and articulate. Out of the five letters in the appendix of the book and the other many diary, story and letter references, I found one quote from Ginevra that was easy to relate to. The rest was chatter and not worth saving or dwelling over. This only adds to the confusion over why King made such an impact on Fitzgerald's life or why this book was even written.

This book illustrates one facet of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing, which is based on his sensitivity to his family's financial situation, which was not quite what the top social strata in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Chicago, Illinois, New York City, or at Princeton University considered enviable. In August 1916, the summer after Fitzgerald left Princeton, he saw Ginevra King in Lake Forest, Illinois and someone there told him, "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls." (p. 61, 62). The subtitle describes Ginevra as his first love, but they rarely saw each other, and the major literary contribution to this book by Ginevra is a story on pages 51-56 in which they can finally get together for a perfect hour after she has already married a Russian count and he remarks, "My wife ought to be home directly!"-- (p. 56). Among the parallels to THE GREAT GATSBY pointed out in this book, I was most impressed that "Fairway Flapper" Edith Cummings, who won the U.S. Women's Amateur tennis title in 1923, was a friend of Ginevra with an identical pinky ring and obviously the original for character Jordan Baker in THE GREAT GATSBY.

Fitzgerald wrote a tremendous number of letters to Ginevra, but we don't have them. Before he destroyed the letters Ginevra sent him, he had a typed transcript made, 227 double-spaced pages, and kept it in a ring binder. After his death, the transcript was returned to Ginevra King Pirie after she had married John T. Pirie, Jr., who would become chairman of the department store, Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co. Surprisingly few original sources are actually quoted in this book, THE PERFECT HOUR, by James L. W. West III.

They knew each other about a year before Ginevra wrote to Scott on January 31, 1916, "Honestly and truly, it would be wonderful to have that perfect hour, sometime, someday and somewhere." (pp. xiii, 50). Ginevra's diary entry for Monday, January 4, 1915, when they met. (p. 21, 22). Place cards from a party, preserved by Scott in his scrapbook. (p. 23). Her diary entries for January 5, 14 and 15. (p. 25). Draft of a telegram written by Scott on a train with a shaky hand. (p. 26). Diary entries for January 23, 28, and February 6 and 12, and letter she wrote him on February 7. (p. 26). Her first letter, written on January 11, and letter of October 13. (p. 27). Her letter of January 11 and 25. (p. 28, 29-30). By January 29 she wrote, "I want you to apologize for calling me a vampire. (p. 31). Letter of January 20 and telegram of February 6. (p. 31). Letters of January 25 and February 8. (p. 33). Letters of January 29 and April 4. (p. 34). Letter of February 8 and diary on February 20. (pp. 35-36). Letter of March 10. (pp. 36-37). Letters of February 25 and March 12. (p. 37). Letters of March 12 and 25 and diary for March 16. (p. 38). Letters of March 25 and 26 and April 26. (p. 39). Diary for June 8 (pp. 40-41) and letter of August 25 stating, "I told you, didn't I, that I figured out that we have seen each other for exactly 15 hours." (p. 40). Letter of May 14 and "She would turn seventeen in November;" (p. 43). All of this has been about a high school girl? So she could go to the Yale-Princeton football game in New Haven in November 1915, so the next letter of January 27 must be 1916. (p. 44). Fitzgerald had written a Princeton University Triange Club show with future literary critic Edmund Wilson, and Ginevra saw two performances in Chicago and sent him a letter on January 17, 1916. (p. 45). She also wrote a letter May 22 about getting kicked out of school for leaning out the windows of the dormitory to talk to boys. (p. 48).

The remainder of the book furnishes details about stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, after her wedding march to Rolls-Royce to large grand piano story. After Scott sent her a story, she wrote him on May 24. (p. 61). The "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls" in Scott's ledger is on page 62, with "It would be slick to have you write a story about me," she told him on November 3rd. The romance was over by the end of January, 1917. (p. 64). She announced an engagement to the son of a bank president who was an ensign in naval aviation on July 16, 1918. They were married September 4, 1918, just a few months before she was twenty. An exciting robbery during a dinner party on the evening of Saturday, November 21, 1931, involving four armed thieves (p. 81) was thwarted and most of her jewelry was recovered inside the pockets of an overcoat that had snagged on a wire fence. (p. 82). She lived until 1980.

There are a few times in the book when privacy issues are raised, but most of the events in the book take place when Ginevra King was too young to be allowed to get into trouble, and the thrill is all about trying to get things down on paper. There are so many people in modern society that few of them ever develop much sense of who they are talking to. Scott had Ginevra's attention long enough to help define who he wanted to address and why. But he could never write for enough money to put him in her class. Scott and Zelda were spending as fast as it came to them and never could have caught up. There is an intellectual problem here, but it looks more emotional than economic.

Anyone who's ever had a serious interest in the life or writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald should read this book. I became interested in Fitzgerald in my teens, read the biographies, and always felt disappointed by the lack of information about Ginevra King, who obviously played an important role in Fitzgerald's life and work. There were so many tantalizing glimpses of Ginevra, both in fictional form (Judy Jones and Josephine Perry) and reality (the essay where Scott mentions that Ginevra "made luminous the Ritz roof" on a visit to New York).
What follows is the version of events given by James L.W. West III in The Perfect Hour. Scott was 18 and Ginevra 16 when they met at a party in January 1915. Mutual friends thought Ginevra and Scott might hit it off, and they did. For most of their relationship, however, the two were separated: Ginevra lived either at boarding school or at home in Chicago, while Scott was either at Princeton or at home in St. Paul. Since they couldn't be together, they did the next best thing, writing long letters to each other. As portrayed by West, the relationship seems to have been a friendship with elements of romance. Ginevra confessed to her diary that she was "dipped about" and "gone on" Scott, which indicates that she was enjoying a teenage crush. He apparently took the relationship much more seriously, as his fictionalized versions of it later showed. In one of the letters from Ginevra to Scott that appears in Appendix Two of The Perfect Hour, Ginevra diagnosed the problem exactly. "You know you can't help falling madly for a girl," she wrote, "It isn't really you yourself that does it, it's an indescribable thing inside you." Ginevra ultimately tired of corresponding with a young man her family would not have considered marriage material, and the relationship ended. The version of the relationship Fitzgerald gave his daughter was that, "Ginevra had a great deal besides beauty," but "she ended up throwing me over with the most supreme boredom and indifference."
Some reviewers of The Perfect Hour have wondered why the Fitzgerald-King relationship interests people today, almost 100 years later. This is why: the "indescribable thing" that led Fitzgerald to obsessively recreate versions of Ginevra and his romance with her gave American fiction some of its most lyrical and evocative scenes and characters. Fitzgerald's writings continue to inspire us today, and the more we can learn about their genesis, the wiser we will be.

I fell in love with Gatsby when I was 14. Since then, I've tried to read every available Fitzgerald biography, especially works from the late Fitzgerald chronicler Matthew Bruccoli. When The Perfect Hour was published, I read it immediately. As other reviewers have indicated, this book opens the door to a romance that, due to social imperatives of the time, was destined to be temporary. Although bright, handsome and Princeton-educated, young Fitzgerald was not remotely in the social class to be considered marriageable to the very wealthy Miss King.

The material in the book confirms that Ginevra King was very much part of a composite of the unattainable woman exemplified by Daisy Buchanan (Gatsby), Judy Jones (Winter Dreams)and Paula Legendre (The Rich Boy). James West does an admirable job in researching the very limited amount of information available, both in writing and from those who knew both Fitzgerald and King. He enlightens us with information about Ginevra's friends, especially the golfer Edith Cummings, who was to serve as a model for Gatsby's Jordan Baker.

I live in the Chicago area, am fortunate to have trod where Ginevra once did: The beautiful old Episcopal church where she married Billy Mitchell, her first husband; the clubs her family frequented; and the old-money environs of Lake Forest. The best surprise of this book had nothing to do with its content: My mother-in-law recognized the cover photo, and said, "Oh, is it about that nice Mrs. Pirie?" Ginevra had divorced Billy Mitchell and married a scion of the Carson Pirie Scott department store family. Of course I was immediately all over my mother-in-law with questions about the legendary lady who, as it turned out, was a founding member of an exclusive women's club to which my relative belonged.

My mother-in-law knew Mrs. Pirie only in her older age, but described her as charming, elegant, witty and very sure of herself. So sure, she would wear the same dark green wool, velvet-trimmed suit to her club's annual meeting - year after year, while other club members strived to outdo each other in the latest fashions. It appeared Mrs. Pirie had no interest in discussing her fabulous youth. Her friends did not mention Fitzgerald in her presence. That chapter of her life was very much ended, and she was content to enjoy her long life. One wishes she had shared more memoirs of her youth. Ladies of her kind did not do that, and she was very much a lady.

I have to admit that I really don't know that much about the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I had read such good things about this book that I wanted to read it.

That being said, I think this would be a good book for anyone who doesn't know alot about this man. It gives some interesting information about his first romance. Plus, it is a short book and easy to read.

Also, the historical background on the way life was back then was very interesting.

It's a small book but a very important book For FSF Scholars & Lovers

of the writings & biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I believe most of us can relate to that, 'that first love'...'that perfect love' &

'that lost love'.

Many readers for the first time will realise that all of Fitzgeralds Heroines

were not based on Zelda alone. Zelda was Scott's True Love but many of his most important heroines were based on Ginevra. e.g. 'Daisy'...

'she loves me she loves me not' in 'Gatsby.

Theofanicus Cosmicos August 29 2005

The story takes you to a different time, a time before cell phones, when letter writing was the main form of communication and young ladies wrote their private thoughts in a journal instead of a blog. Ginevra was rich, privileged and flirted with love. F. Scott Fitzgerald was handsome, charming and in love with Ginevra. Their lives would cross and uncross. Both would marry others. But their love lived on in F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing and in Ginevra's heart. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it -- and knowing it is the true love story about a man who wrote love stories made it all the more interesting.