“Fitzgerald’s High IQ: An Interview with Colonel Benjamin W. Venable, 45th Regiment, U.S. Army.”
By Elmore, A. E. (1938–2016)
The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, vol. 17, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1–17.
Abstract
This interview was conducted in 1973 with Colonel Benjamin Wilson Venable (1894–1980), who served as a captain in the same 45th Regiment in which F. Scott Fitzgerald was a lieutenant. Venable's lively recollections of Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre in Camp Sheridan outside Montgomery, Alabama, offer insight into daily life and military protocol at the time; his claim that Fitzgerald ranked highest in IQ in the regiment helps substantiate the belief that Fitzgerald's intelligence has been highly underrated—something as true today as it was during the years Elmore spent working on his book-length study of The Great Gatsby from which this is an excerpt. It is published with the permission of both the Elmore and Venable families. We also thank John Kuhnle for his work on the manuscript.
Extracts focusing on biographical details for Venable.
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Early in my academic career I taught for nine years at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. Founded in January of 1776 by freedom-loving Presbyterians, it boasted Patrick Henry and James Madison on its original board of trustees. As time approached to celebrate the college's bicentennial, which fell the same year as the nation's own, I was appointed Bicentennial Director. This reduced my teaching duties as an associate professor of English by half so that I could invite speakers and organize events. In August of 1973, I spoke to the Charleston, West Virginia, alumni association about plans for the college's four-year celebration. The person who introduced me said that I had written a 1968 Vanderbilt University dissertation on The Great Gatsby before publishing a couple of articles on the same subject. In my talk, I said a bit more about Fitzgerald and how one day I hoped to finish a book about him. Afterward, a tall, handsome gentleman came forward. He was in his late seventies, with an erect carriage, a quick smile, and clear blue eyes that seemed perpetually amused.
“Interested in what you had to say about Scott Fitzgerald,” he said, shaking my hand. “I knew Scott. We served together at three different camps in World War I.”
Colonel Benjamin Wilson Venable of Charleston, West Virginia, was, I quickly learned, a retired career officer in the U. S. Army. He had retired in 1946, after thirty-one years of service that included two world wars. For the next fifteen minutes or so—it may have been half an hour or even longer because I literally lost track of time—I listened with fascination to one anecdote after another about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
“Tell you an interesting story about Scott,” I heard the colonel say at some point. “He made the highest IQ score in our—”
I was immediately interested, of course, even though I had failed to hear, or at least to file into memory, the military unit that Colonel Venable was talking about. A high IQ score was the last thing I was expecting to hear after having been inundated as a graduate student by the early Fitzgerald scholarship plus a great deal more in the intervening years, almost all of it asserting that Fitzgerald was a man of weak intellect and limited education. Nevertheless, this was delightful to hear because what Venable was saying was very much in keeping with my own long-held belief that to have written The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald simply had to have been smarter than most critics had previously assumed.
Venable went on to say that another officer who had seen the IQ files before he did had mistakenly thought it was Venable himself who had earned the top score. Having at long last a chance to see the files himself, he saw that one of the junior officers had bested him. This was First Lieutenant F. Scott Fitzgerald, with Venable coming in second in their unit.
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I asked Colonel Venable if I might call him later and tape record his recollections. “Sure!” he said, giving me his home number just before we parted for the evening. A few days later, I called him from the Hampden-Sydney alumni office. One of the chief items of my interest was that Lt. Fitzgerald had served in a machine-gun company. This must have been covered in some of the biographies I had read, but never had it dawned on me that here was the origin of Jay Gatsby's taking “two machine-gun detachments” (GG 53) so far forward in the Argonne Forest that he was promoted from first lieutenant to major and decorated by every Allied government. I saw for the first time why Fitzgerald's fictionalized dreams of glory had included “machine-gun detachments.” I was also interested that Colonel Venable, who had grown up in an old-line Southern family like Zelda's, attended an old-line Southern college, had chosen a military career over a medical one, and scored almost as well on the Army IQ test as Fitzgerald himself, had regarded the Fitzgeralds as “interesting characters” but laughingly admitted in the next breath that he had not been “greatly impressed” by either one.
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Colonel Venable enjoyed a successful business career in his retirement and continued a long, happy marriage. He was a plain-spoken, unpretentious man whose laughter softened all his judgments, which were usually gentle. When he died at 85 in 1980, he left behind his wife, Augusta, their daughter, Carter Venable Blundon, and two granddaughters, Augusta and Helen Blundon.
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In 1973, Elmore called Venable and recorded the interview, which included the following snippet.
Venable: "And later in 1939, when I came back from Hawaii and went to Cornell to teach ROTC, hadn't been there very long when I went down the reception line for new professors. Here's this professor of psychology there standing that had given us those tests."