Saturn,
Pluto = 010
Uranus = 021
Sun = 032
Jupiter = 111
Moon = 141
Mercury = 300
Venus = 310
Neptune = 311
Mars = 321
[Least-aspected
Saturn- Pluto]
He thought of the Riviera, as
it was then before it had all been built up, with the lovely stretches of
blue sea and the sand beaches and the stretches of pine woods and the mountains
of Esterel going out into the sea.
–Ernest Hemingway on F.
Scott Fitzgerald, from A Moveable Feast.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lost
Generation luminary Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota,
a location untouched by any planetary lines. Minnesota is about midway between
Fitzgerald’s two equally underaspected Primary Transcendentals: Saturn, which
runs in a vertical, Midheaven position over the western United States, and
Pluto, which runs in a vertical, midnight position along the East Coast.
Fitzgerald relocated east
to attend the Newman School and Princeton University, each located in New
Jersey, just several degrees east of his Primary Pluto. Fitzgerald’s first
novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), is set in
Princeton: its central theme is the morally and spiritually “corrupt” (Primary
Pluto) postwar generation who revel in the glitter and hoopla of the frenetic
Jazz Age.
Following its publication,
Francis married Zelda Sayre in 1920 and moved to New York, where they commenced
their notoriously “decadent” (Pluto) lifestyle: one not completely dissimilar
to the one imagined in Paradise.
Indeed, his next novel, The Beautiful
and the Damned (1922), chronicles the “self-annihilating” (Primary Pluto)
lifestyle of an artist and his wife, which ultimately leads to their “destruction”
(Pluto).
Fitzgerald expatriated to
France in 1924 in order to write what many consider his most successful work,
The Great Gatsby.1 His association with
Ernest Hemingway and with other expatriates who formed the “Lost Generation”
in Paris is particularly notable in that his Primary Pluto rises directly
over France, crosses the French Riviera (where he and his wife lived for several
years, in the Pyrenees), and continues over Paris and across the northern
French coast. (His friendship with Hemingway is chronicled–somewhat disparagingly–in
the latter’s A Moveable Feast and
in numerous other literary biographies.) Therefore, Fitzgerald, who was not
born in a Primary Location, traveled near his Primary Pluto in New Jersey
and then continued to follow this Primary line when he traveled to Europe.
With the completion of The Great Gatsby in 1925–the story of a
man who “achieves great material success” (Primary Saturn) but who “destroys
himself and others in the process” (Primary Pluto)–Fitzgerald’s “place in
the pantheon” (Saturn) of American novelists was secured. Yet, Gatsby eerily foretells of a man’s path
to “self-annihilation / after achieving his professional goals” (Pluto /
Saturn).
Fitzgerald’s final years were
difficult ones: suffering from an extreme case “alcoholism” (symbolized by
his second most aspected or Leading Planet, Neptune),2 and falling increasingly
into debt, he moved to Hollywood (a location bereft of Transcendental lines),
where he worked as a scriptwriter. In 1940, when he was only forty-four years
old, he suffered a fatal heart attack.
1. In his autobiography,
H. L. Mencken writes that Fitzgerald’s This
Side of Paradise (1920) was “one of the best first novels ever done by
an American,” but he adds that The Great
Gatsby (1925), while “a book full of faults, … [was] still enormously
better than anything he had done before.”
In Mencken’s view, Gatsby was Fitzgerald’s most notable accomplishment.
He called Tender Is the Night (1934;
one of Fitzgerald’s last major works) “poor stuff indeed.” This critique was
in accord with other contemporary reviewers, whose criticism of the work
was so harsh that the author became estranged from the literary world.
According to Mencken, “Fitz
and Zelda remained in Paris, save for a brief trip to Brussels and a stay
at Juan-les-Pins, through 1925 and most of 1926.” H. L. Mencken, My Life As Author and Editor, as excerpted
in Current Books magazine, vol.
1, no. 4, Summer 1993, p. 38, 40.
2. “Even Ernest Boyd, himself one of the heaviest drinkers of modern times,
came back from a visit [to the Fitzgeralds] with the report that the pace
was too hot for him.” “Most of my news of [Fitzgerald] came from the young
Johns Hopkins doctors who attended him in succession … He was constantly on
the verge of delirium tremens, and would often call up his current doctor
in the middle of the night, demanding immediate help. Before the appeal of
the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect he always accompanied these demands
with suggestions–added as apparent afterthoughts–that the doctor bring him
a bottle of gin. […] His physical deterioration had gone so far by the time
he got to Hollywood that there was no hope of amelioration, even by the most
rigorous abstention. The liver disease [cirrhosis of the liver] that beset
him was completely incurable, and his heavy drinking for so many years hurried
it on.” Ibid.
