Harvard, Yale, or Princeton?

screwitlah
Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:31:37 +0000

[Benjamin Button and how F. Scott Fitzgerald decided where to send his characters to college. - By Juliet Lapidos - Slate Magazine](Benjamin Button and how F. Scott Fitzgerald decided where to send his characters to college.)



There’s a chapter in the life of nearly every major F. Scott Fitzgerald protagonist—after boarding school, before dissipation in New York—when he attends Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. The hero of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” Fitzgerald’s short, fantastical story about a man who ages backward, is no exception: Benjamin goes to Harvard. Sadly, this detail is absent from David Fincher’s new screen adaptation. Compared with other liberties the film takes with the story—Benjamin now has a black adoptive mother—this omission may seem inconsequential. But if you’re a Fitzgerald devotee, it’s a significant change. Cut out the Ivy League pride, and you might as well read Hemingway.

When Fitzgerald arrived at that crucial choose-an-alma-mater moment, did he just throw a dart at a crimson, orange, and blue board? Or did he have a more rigorous admissions process? A conversation between Amory and his mentor Monsignor Darcy in Fitzgerald’s most autobiographical work, This Side of Paradise, offers some insight into how the author perceived the three schools. “I want to go to Princeton,” says Amory, Fitzgerald’s stand-in. “I don’t know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes. … I think of Princeton as being lazy and good-looking and aristocratic—you know, like a spring day. Harvard seems sort of indoors—” Monsignor finishes his thought: “And Yale is November, crisp and energetic.” So, are Fitzgerald’s Harvard men effete? Are his Yalies autumnal? And are the Princetonians layabouts?



Where would Fitzgerald send YOU? H, Y, or P, or not HYP at all?