From Fiction to Facts: Unraveling F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Arrest in Rome

Abstract This article examines previously unknown official reports from Italian police and diplomats of the U.S. Consulate in Rome and Copenhagen concerning the arrest and beating that F. Scott Fitzgerald fictionalized in his posthumously published essay “The High Cost of Macaroni” (written in 1925) and most famously in Tender Is the Night. Starting from Arthur Mizener’s 1951 biography, scholars have tended to read the story told in Tender Is the Night as a straight transcription of the incident. While the documents this article uncovers allow us to date definitively when the arrest occurred (the evening of 30 November–1 December 1924) and where—outside a different jazz club from the one mentioned in Tender—they also raise numerous complicating questions about the incident, many of which reflect the diplomatic dance between American and Italian officials. Uncovering eyewitness accounts, the article implicitly cautions against relying on fiction to re-create biographical scenes and against drawing conclusions based on cultural stereotypes. The details of this incident also cast significant new light on Fitzgerald’s strategies of composition and illuminate a reference to a pedophiliac murder mentioned in the text of Tender Is the Night that has been previously ignored. By putting Fitzgerald at the center of a busy urban world of political complexities, the article shows how aware Fitzgerald was of this milieu.