Pen of the Day: Montblanc Writers Edition F. Scott Fitzgerald

Montblanc Writers Edition F. Scott Fitzgerald with fine nib.  I do own pens with bling.  This one, for instance.  I occasionally think about selling it, to pay for some other pens I’ve bought.  But then I use it, and immediately think, no,  I love this pen.

The Fitzgerald is filled with a Montblanc limited edition ink from a few years ago, Montblanc Albert Einstein ink. This is a gray that is so dark it can almost look black.  I love this ink, too. Using it actually rekindled my interest in black inks.

The pen is more glamorous.  Its black, white and silver color scheme, its materials and its details pay homage to Art Deco style and to Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age.  It would look at home on the set of an Astaire and Rogers film.  And it’s a wonderful writer: the Fitzgerald is lightweight and comfortable, and mine has a superb, albeit wide, fine nib.

I really love it, though, because it is the F. Scott Fitzgerald pen. Fitzgerald is a favorite of mine. Sadly, he died relatively young, with his career in shambles and his body of work uneven.  In his twenties, he had written a great American novel.  In his forties he died in reduced circumstances, separated from his wife and estranged from many of his former friends, thinking himself a failure.

On his and Zelda’s tombstone is engraved his famous final sentence from The Great Gatsby:  “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  But in the novel, immediately before those words came these, of hope:  “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.  It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning —”

The dreamer’s eternal hope always was the other side of Fitzgerald’s vision. I think that’s the quality that endears him to us still, despite knowing that no matter how fast he himself ran, his talent could not outrun his demons.