F. Scott Fitzgerald’s statue — and stature

Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Minnesota Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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A 37-year-old St. Paul man has been charged with the theft of a bronze statue of F. Scott Fitzgerald that was at the former site of St. Paul Academy.

But while it was possible to separate the statue from its base, it’s impossible to separate Fitzgerald from his base in St. Paul.

Minnesota’s capital “provided the fire that forged Fitzgerald into the world-famous author he became,” David Page, author of “F. Scott Fitzgerald in Minnesota: The Writer and his Friends at Home,” said via email. Fitzgerald’s writing while he was at SPA and his playwriting for work performed at the White Bear Yacht Club and other venues “gave him the encouragement he needed to think of himself as a budding artist.”

Other notable landmarks, according to Ava Diaz, communications and marketing manager at Visit St. Paul, include Fitzgerald’s Laurel Avenue birthplace and the Summit Avenue brownstone where he wrote “This Side of Paradise.”

In some ways, young Fitzgerald felt he himself was on the other side of paradise, said Jackson Bryer, the co-founder and current president of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society.

Bryer, a University of Maryland English professor emeritus, said that “across the street from him were the backyards of some of St. Paul’s most successful citizens, and yet he wasn’t on the street.”

The proverbial “exclusion,” said Bryer, “and that desire to be part of it, infused not only his writing but his whole life.”

Indeed, the world-famous author’s St. Paul roots were “fundamental,” said Patricia Hampl, professor emerita in the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts. And it was reflected in his most enduring work, “The Great Gatsby,” published 100 years ago this year.

The relevance and resonance of “Gatsby” a century later is “uncanny,” Hampl said. Fitzgerald “really nailed what it was to be an American at the beginning of the ‘American Century.’ ”

The novel’s narrator can be construed to be from St. Paul, said Bryer, who added that while the action happens in New York and Long Island, it’s “about Midwesterners who come east” and “how the East corrupts the Midwest.”

That corruption is captured in many passages, including this seminal sentence: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Stories about Fitzgerald’s statue and stature might have surprised him, Bryer said. Because toward the end of his brief life, he “really thought he’d been forgotten.”

Not in St. Paul. Or anywhere, for that matter.