This is a note about a footnote. If John Biggs, Jr. is mentioned today, it’s inevitably as a supporting player in the life of his much more famous Princeton roommate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and if either of his novels enters the discussion, it’s probably in a footnote. This is not entirely unjust.
Biggs (Princeton ’18), Fitzgerald (’17), and Edmund Wilson (’16) became friends through their passion for writing and editing Princeton’s two literary magazines, The Tiger and The Nassau Literary Magazine. Biggs would serve as managing editor for both, though he quickly realized that Fitzgerald was the better (and more prolific) writer. He and Fitzgerald shared a room during FSF’s last term at Princeton before entering the Army in late 1917.
Biggs later admitted that while he was “a literary snob, Fitz was a snob’s snob.” Despite the fact that Biggs came from a far wealthier family, Fitzgerald somehow managed to dress in the best clothing available from Brooks Brothers and Jacob Reed. When Fitzgerald needed someone to get him out of jail after a bender, though, it was Biggs who inevitably provided the bail.
Both men enlisted in the Army after American entered the First World War. Neither made it overseas. While Fitzgerald married and moved to New York after his discharge, Biggs returned to Princeton to graduate and went on to earn his law degree at Harvard. Biggs and his wife traveled to Paris for their honeymoon but then headed back to Delaware, where Biggs followed in his father’s footsteps and established a successful law practice.
Although he was not even a year older than Fitzgerald, Biggs became something of an older brother figure for the writer. Biggs arranged for a house in Delaware when Fitzgerald needed to dry out and he took an increasingly active role in handling Fitzgerald’s legal matters. In return, Fitzgerald introduced Biggs to Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s.
Biggs wrote a long untitled novel while at Harvard that Fitzgerald shopped to Scribner’s, Putnam, and eventually, H. L. Mencken. “To my mind it has the most beautiful writing — and I don’t mean “fine” writing — that I’ve seen in a ‘coon’s age,” he told Mencken. “I don’t believe anyone in America can write like this — and the novel is also remarkable in the objectivity of its realism….” Mencken did not agree. Not only did the book never get published but Mencken, who crossed paths with Biggs socially from time to time, considered him dull and officious.
Scribner’s accepted Biggs’ next novel, Demi-Gods (1926), which reviewers found an awkward mix of American eccentric religious mysticism (there are two attempts to found a cult in the book) and Gilded Age tycoonism. Perkins accepted the book for Scribner’s but was measured in his feedback to Fitzgerald.
Perkins’ opinion of Biggs’ third novel, Seven Days Whipping, was much higher. Scribner’s publicized the book in all the major reviews. A shorter version was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine and prefaced with this potpourri-like teaser:
In describing the book, one is at a loss for comparatives. One thinks of James Joyce, of Edgar Allen Poe, even of that fantastic play, “Beggar on Horseback.” None of them fits, although all of them suggest something of the truth. Seven Days Whipping has certain qualities of Joycean introspection, the fascination of Poe’s stories, an atmosphere of fantastic mystery, a revelation of forces hidden deep in the primitive in all of us.
Fitzgerald was delighted at its apparent success. “I loved John’s book,” he wrote Perkins after receiving a copy. “It’s his best thing and the most likely to go. It’s really thought out — oddly enough its least effective moments are the traces of his old manner.” He did acknowledge, though, that “From the first draft, which was the one I saw, I thought he could have cut 2000 or 3000 words that was mere Conradian stalling around. Whether he did or not I don’t know.”
The book did not sell well, however, despite generally favorable reviews and Scribner’s support. And almost two years after his initial enthusiasm for the book, Fitzgerald — who was likely off on Biggs and all stable people in general, given his own troubles at the time — confided, “Seven Days Whipping was respectable but colorless. Demigods was simply oratorical twirp.”
I have to agree with Fitzgerald on Seven Days Whipping. That odd title, by the way, is the name of a Delaware tribesman whose sudden and dramatic appearance — with the aid of a tremendous hurricane-like storm — provides the climax of the book. In contrast, Bigg’s protagonist, Stawell — a Puritan throwback, perhaps (Stay Well)? — Ball La Place, is the opposite of dramatic. He is sober as a judge, which is fitting, since he is a judge (as Biggs himself would later become).
As dark clouds mass to the east, Judge La Place travels from his court in Wilmington to his family estate on the banks of the Red clay River. There, his wife awaits, expecting to deliver their first child at any moment. She is a late mother and La Place frets about her health and the birth. As they sit down for supper, the storm breaks with a violent fury. The telephone goes out and he decides to drive to fetch the doctor.
With sheets of rain and earth-shaking bursts of thunder battering him, La Place is startled to meet with a tall Indian, half-naked and carrying the body of a dead deer. What happens next is neither respectable nor colorless, but it is largely unbelievable unless you’re willing to accept that the mixture of an expectant wife and a melodramatic encounter in the rain would be enough to send a middle-aged judge into a murderous hysteria. A hysteria which evaporates as soon as the sun rises, the baby howls, and Seven Days Whipping manages to come back to life.
John Biggs, Jr. was not unfamiliar with hysteria and other forms of mental illness. He dealt with numerous cases involving commitment to mental asylums at a time when the power in such cases lay heavy against the individual and in the 1940s, he became the chair of the American Bar Association’s committee on the rights of the mentally ill.
He may not, however, have had the temperament to put himself fully into the mind of a man who goes mad, even if just briefly. Reading Seven Days Whipping, I was reminded of something James Baldwin once said in an interview: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” Whatever that something is, John Biggs, Jr. resisted it. If he wanted his readers to believe that Judge La Place becomes mad, he only succeeds in convincing us that he becomes histrionic.
Fortunately for Fitzgerald, Biggs was a far better lawyer and friend than he was a novelist. As Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and money problems grew worse, Biggs staunchly defended his interests and protected the writer against bankruptcy. Before his death, with Zelda in and out of institutions, Fitzgerald named Biggs executor and guardian of their daughter Scottie, and proximity to Biggs was one of the reasons that she settled in Washington, D.C. after leaving college.
I have to admit that I knew nothing about Seven Day’s Whipping when I started it. I was merely intrigued by the title and happy to give it a try when I spotted a cheap copy. In the end, it was more interesting as an entree to the story of John Biggs, Jr. — a good man, a good lawyer, a good judge, but a merely adequate novelist — than on its own merits. But such is the nature of reading forgotten old books: they’re not all masterpieces.