One ill-fated night time in December 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald bought right into a drunken brawl that ended up in a Rome police station, the place he punched an officer and was severely overwhelmed by some others.
In a letter to a pal ten years later, Fitzgerald described it as “the rottenest factor that ever occurred in my life,” an occasion so traumatic that his biographers say he couldn’t bear to debate it. However Fitzgerald fictionalized the incident twice, initially in a travelogue referred to as “The Excessive Value of Macaroni,” written in 1925 however printed posthumously, and extra famously in his 1934 novel “Tender is the Evening.”
Within the novel, a really intoxicated Dick Diver, the protagonist, has a vicious scuffle in Rome with some taxi drivers, will get arrested and, after hitting an officer at a police station, is “clubbed down, and fists and boots beat on him in a savage tattoo.” He finally ends up arrested, bloody and damaged, solely to be salvaged by his sister-in-law and officers from the U.S. Consulate. In Fitzgerald’s case, his spouse Zelda got here to the rescue.
Biographers of Fitzgerald have taken the author’s fictitious accounts as truth. However official stories by Italian police and diplomats from the consulate in Rome, uncovered by Sara Antonelli, a professor of American literature on the Università Roma Tre, counsel that doing so can obscure the total fact.
“I had this buzzing factor in my head for years,” she mentioned. “The proven fact that in all of the biographies they stored saying that what you learn in ‘Tender’ occurred to Fitzgerald. However I’m a literary critic — this isn’t the way in which issues work.”
Antonelli’s quest for readability took greater than three years and plenty of hours mining the historic archives of Italy’s varied police forces. At Rome’s central state archive, she uncovered a single pink folder labeled “Arrest of the Foreigner Scott Fitgerat” with 5 sheets of paper inside: an preliminary report by the carabinieri, the navy police pressure that detained and beat up Fitzgerald on the night time between Nov. 30 and Dec. 1, 1924, together with follow-up stories by the Italian nationwide police, the nation’s civilian pressure.
She in contrast these stories with an account of the incident drafted by a lawyer for the U.S. Consulate in Rome, which she discovered on the Library of Congress. “The two don’t agree on many factors,” she mentioned of her findings, that are included in “Domani Correremo Più Forte” (“Tomorrow We Will Run Sooner”), a biography and literary evaluation of Fitzgerald that will likely be printed in Italian on April 1. The chapter on Rome will likely be printed in The F. Scott Fitzgerald Overview in late spring.
In accordance with the quick carabinieri report, “a quite tipsy” Fitzgerald had been stopped by a few night time watchmen who discovered him attempting to get into the Caffé Imperiale, an evening membership, that had already closed for the night. The creator was detained at a carabinieri station, the place he flew right into a rage, then punched an officer in the nostril, upsetting “a response” from different officers who locked him in a cell “after an brisk scuffle,” the doc says.
After being alerted concerning the scuffle, Zelda instantly requested the U.S. consulate to intervene. In a memorandum drafted by the consular official overseeing the case, there isn’t any reference to Fitzgerald being drunk, and blame is shifted to aggressive taxi drivers and an argument over the price of a fare. The beating in the police station is talked about nearly in passing, with Fitzgerald having “recollection of getting been handled very sick.”
It’s clear, Antonelli mentioned, that either side determined it was higher to let the matter drop. Fitzgerald risked jail time for hitting an Italian officer, and the police had no curiosity in pursuing a case in opposition to a person who had been badly overwhelmed by the carabinieri. Furthermore, Romans had been distracted on the time by stories of a serial killer, briefly cited by Fitzgerald in “Tender Is the Evening.” “That they had one thing else to consider” than a disorderly drunk, Antonelli mentioned.
She added that she believes the total story explains why each Scott and Zelda determined to not inform anybody about what occurred in Rome. “It was evidently too violent, too insufferable, too surprising for each of them,” she mentioned.
“We hate Rome,” Fitzgerald wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, simply earlier than the author and Zelda left for the island of Capri in February 1925. Including to Fitzgerald’s contempt for the town was that they’d arrived in Rome forward of a Roman Catholic Jubilee. The couple had been used to renting houses after they traveled, however he wrote in “The Excessive Value of Macaroni”: “To the Roman enterprise man, Holy Yr is that interval when he counts on making sufficient revenue out of international pilgrims to allow him to relaxation for twenty-five years extra.” That’s nonetheless the case in 2025, one other Holy Yr, in which an anticipated inflow of pilgrims has pushed housing prices sky excessive.
Luca Saletti, an archival skilled who helped Antonelli observe down the police paperwork, mentioned it was “believable, that the state of affairs bought out of hand as a result of neither the carabinieri nor Fitzgerald understood one another.” This was possible aggravated, he mentioned, “by Fitzgerald being a foreigner throughout a time of rising nationalism.”
The paperwork counsel that either side tried to “shut down one thing that might have turn into very disagreeable,” Saletti mentioned.
Kirk Curnutt, a Fitzgerald scholar and professor on the Troy College in Alabama, mentioned “the incident was a deep supply of disgrace and embarrassment to him, however he wasn’t so embarrassed that he wasn’t ever going to make use of it as materials.”
“That’s what a author does,” Curnutt added. “You utilize your parts of your biography to create artwork.”
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