Tuesday, November 14, 2006

January 2007: The Power of One

Bryce Courtenay

"Everything but Sex (Lack of Time)"
by Christopher Lehman-Haupt
New York Times Book Review
June 19, 1999

If a shrewdly programmed computer were to design the ultimate international best seller, it couldn't do much better than this first novel by Bryce Courtenay, an advertising man from Sydney, Australia.

On almost any scale of measurement, ''The Power of One'' has everything: suspense, the exotic, violence; snakes, bats and Nazis; mysticism, psychology and magic; schoolboy adventures, drama in the boxing ring and disasters in a copper mine. It's even got a Jewish joke: Why did the piece of bread dropped by the little cobbler in the shtetl fall with the honeyed side up? Because he had honeyed it on the wrong side.

In fact, the only thing missing in ''The Power of One'' is sex. And this lack can't be attributed to any modesty on the author's part. It's just that Mr. Courtenay's hero hasn't time for sex. He's too busy growing up and triumphing over the incredible odds against him.

Any summary of ''The Power of One'' is bound to make it sound unbelievable. Its 5-year-old hero, a South African boy of English descent known simply as Peekay, seems a little on the young side to be torn away from his Zulu nanny and sent to a boarding school where he is brutally persecuted by the older Afrikaners for the role of his presumed ancestors in the Boer War.

There's a comic-book quality to the way Peekay's scrawny pet chicken, Granpa Chook, tries to protect his master and to the violence with which Granpa Chook is killed by the Afrikaner known as the Judge, who has tattooed his arm with a swastika in anticipation of Adolf Hitler's arrival in South Africa.

And the prose can be irritatingly cute and sentimental. ''By bedtime Nanny was at my side as usual, arriving with a large sweet potato, its tummy open with a spoon sticking out of the middle, tiny wisps of steam curling upwards and condensing on the handle. There is something about a sweet potato that cheers you up when you are low and celebrates with you when you are happy. Sweet potatoes baked in their jackets have a very large comfort factor built into them.''

Still, Peekay's story races along. His family gets him released from the terrible school. On the train going home he meets a boxer who inspires him to become the welterweight champion of the world. At home, he is befriended by a botanist and musician named Karl von Vollensteen whom Peekay calls Doc and who tells Peekay to stand on one leg and say: ''No matter what has happened bad, today I'm finished being sad. Absoloodle!''

When World War II begins and Doc gets arrested for being a German alien, Peekay is allowed to pay regular visits to the prison, where he discovers a boxing team and a half-caste inmate named Geel Piet who is willing to train him in exchange for certain favors.

Despite your better instincts you get involved in ''The Power of One.'' You accept Mr. Courtenay as a natural if somewhat naive storyteller, and the incredibility of it all begins to dissolve. What did the trick for this reader happened to be Doc's speech to Peekay's born-again Christian mother on the subject of the cactus. ''God and I have no quarrels, madame,'' Doc says. ''The Almighty conceived the cactus plant. If God would choose a plant to represent him, I think he would choose of all plants the cactus. The cactus has all the blessings he tried, but mostly failed, to give to man. . . . It is the plant of patience and solitude, love and madness, ugliness and beauty, toughness and gentleness. Of all plants, surely God made the cactus in his own image? It has my enduring respect and is my passion.''

But for other readers the hook may be the moment when Peekay, as a 6-year-old, boxes his first three rounds and wins. Or when his coach, Geel Piet, is secretly beaten to death by a racist prison administrator. Or when Peekay first discovers the Power of One, ''that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out.''

Or when Doc von Vollensteen gives a piano concert for the prisoners and plays for them his newly composed ''Concerto for the Great Southland,'' which incorporates the melodies of the inmates' various tribal songs: ''Never had a composer's work had a stranger debut and never a greater one. Eventually the composition would be played by philharmonic and symphony orchestras around the world, accompanied by some of the world's most famous choirs, but it would never sound better than it did under the African moon in the prison yard when 350 black inmates lost themselves in their pride and love for their tribal lands.''

According to the novel's concluding biographical note, Mr. Courtenay was born in South Africa, was educated there and in England and, in 1958, immigrated to Australia, where he went into the advertising business. If the old cliche is true that copywriters are frustrated novelists, then Mr. Courtenay should be ''finished being sad,'' as Doc von Vollensteen would say.

Absoloodle!
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December 2006: Bel Canto

Ann Patchett

"Uninvited Guests Wearing You Down? Listen to Opera."
by Janet Maslin
New York Times Book Review
May 31, 2001

In a novel that begins with a kiss and absolutely deserves one, the most powerful electronics executive in Japan is invited to celebrate his birthday in a South American country. This place is unnamed and, as will be instantly demonstrated, unstable. Midway through the lavish party, terrorists appear and take the guests hostage, including the most celebrated person on the premises.

The whole birthday event was contrived as a bribe in hope that a factory would be built by Mr. Hosokawa, the music-loving founder and chairman of the Nansei Corporation. And his precious birthday gift had arrived in the form of the world-renowned lyric soprano Roxane Coss. She is a great beauty, with a voice that makes listeners melt, and said to ''make Callas look like a spear carrier'' in the bargain.

''Italy, England and America,'' the astounded diva chants to herself as the terrorists take over, vowing never to take on lucrative but iffy singing jobs outside those three reliable nations again. As for the other guests, forced to the floor, they begin to talk and murmur ''until the room became a cocktail party in which everyone was lying prone.'' And somehow, what initially looked like a frightening situation becomes instead a peculiarly entrancing one, as it becomes clear that partygoers, generals and guerrillas will all be trapped for an indefinite period in the vice president's mansion. The president, whom the terrorists had hoped to capture, had been otherwise engaged because his favorite soap opera was on television.

Now it is real opera that becomes foremost in this elegantly alluring book, as the international group of detainees find that music has become their common language. The one thing they share is rapture at the beauty of Roxane's voice, and rest assured that she knows how to use it. When one of the generals in charge of the siege tries to deny Roxane a box of sheet music, she says to Mr. Hosokawa's translator (who is suddenly the most valuable person on the premises): ''Tell him that's it. Either he gives me that box right now or you will not hear another note out of me or that piano for the duration of this failed social experiment.''

''Really?'' the translator asks.

''I don't bluff,'' Roxane answers.

One of the delightful things about the way ''Bel Canto'' unfolds is the way Ann Patchett uses the ordeal of entrapment to locate unexpected resources in her characters, like Roxane's new leadership potential. Another surprising quality to emerge, in a book that works both as a paean to art and beauty and a subtly sly comedy of manners, is the flair that the host shows for running the household, once he realizes that being taken hostage has ruined his political career. ''With a dish towel knotted around his waist, he took on the qualities of a charming hotel concierge. He would ask, 'Would you like some tea?' He would ask, 'Would it be too much of an imposition to vacuum beneath the chair in which you were sitting?' Everyone was very fond of Ruben. Everyone had completely forgotten that he was the vice president of the country.''

As the book moves along and a new, impromptu civilization is born beneath the vice president's roof, Ms. Patchett, whose earlier books include ''The Patron Saint of Liars'' and ''The Magician's Assistant,'' lets her characters' new lives bloom like flowers. The quality of enchantment even goes so far as to let one of the soldiers, after all the female hostages except Roxane have been freed, turn out to be a beautiful young woman named Carmen. Fair enough, a book with opera in its soul needs a Carmen, even if this one has never heard such singing before. And even if she is here mostly to fall in love with the Japanese translator during 2 a.m. language lessons in the china closet. Although this novel is entirely housebound, at the vice presidential mansion, Ms. Patchett works wonders to avoid any sense of claustrophobia and keeps the place fresh at every turn.

''The soldiers spent most of their days exploring the house, eating the pistachio nuts they found in the pantry, sniffing the lavender hand lotion in the bathroom,'' she writes, while the library full of leather furniture and leather-bound books ''had the comforting and familiar smell of cows standing in the hot sun.'' For all the 58 people who are ultimately trapped here, this place comes to represent both an end and a beginning, a chance to experience the aesthetic and the sensual, to fall in love with music and experience, while their lives hang in the balance. Like Mr. Hosokawa, who once felt that ''the records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love,'' they spend every moment of this crisis in a state of being newly alive.

And what of the power of politics over art? Well, one of the more humorous moments in the novel concerns an effort to make the translator ask Roxane to help with the cooking, but she soon puts a stop to that. Then the three ruling generals have a conversation about perhaps forcing her to sing in Spanish instead of Italian, or trying to regulate the hours when she practices. ''If we put a gun to her head she would sing all day,'' suggests the most rigid of them. Replies the wisest general: ''Try it first with a bird.''
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Monday, October 02, 2006

October 2006: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn


A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith

I ran across an online course syllabus for a graduate-level English class at The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign called "20th Century American Bestsellers," and it has some interesting notes about the novel, submitted as part of a student's assignment, I believe. Here's the site if you're interested. I'll post some relevant text below:

Contemporary Reception:

While the majority of critics of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn indulgently praised Betty Smith's first novel, others expressed only reluctant approval or no approval at all. What little conflict existed among 1943 reviews primarily dealt with doubts about the book's literary value. Skepticism was partially founded on the fact that Smith, a novice novelist, had yet to be established as a writer or literary fiction. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn suffered from accusations of following a predictable pattern of events that were woven together in an overly sentimental fashion. The vague sexual incidents in the novel also stirred up mild controversy among the more conservative critical minds of mid-20th-century America.

Margaret Winning in Commonwealth summed up popular opinion of the book by describing it as "Beauty, wholesome philosophy, and honesty intermingled with stark realism, poverty, and continued struggle." Favorable, almost doting descriptions such as these were nearly ubiquitous. Meyer Berger in New Republic called the book "a faithful picture of a part of Brooklyn that was mostly slums and misery. The picture is softened by almost poetic handling." The manner in which Smith gently yet truthfully exposed the poverty of her characters won her acclaim from the political arena as well. An anonymously authored excerpt from The New York Times called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn "a remarkably good first novel," and inferred that it was a revolutionary advance in the literary world. "The author sees the misery, squalor, and cruelty of slum life but sees them with understanding, pity, and sometimes with hilarious humor. A welcome relief from the latter-day fashion of writing about slum folk as if they were all brutalized morons."

Interspersed with this positive feedback were statements of doubt concerning the morality and literary merit of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Some reviewers such as Margaret Winning in Commonwealth worried that the novel's "stark realism" was perhaps too stark, meaning that Smith's "wholesome philosophy" was accompanied by rather unwholesome sexual "incidents" that "may be too realistic for some readers." In critique of the novel's literary qualities, an anonymous article in Booklist reluctantly conceded that "as literary genre the book is interesting" but went on to say "the progress of the family from rags to riches could stand considerable blue pencilling." Rosemary Dawson in The New Yorker offered considerable praise of the beginning part of the novel, going so far as to call it "a beautiful and moving piece of work." Her disappointment with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a work of literature was found in the end of the novel, where she accused it of taking on "more the mechanics of the usual popular piece of fiction." The most scathing criticism by far came from Diana Trilling in Library Journal:

"I am a little bewildered by so much response to so conventional a little book… I have seen 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' compared to the novels of James Farrell, and all to the credit of Miss Smith's novel. This makes me very sad both for the condition of fiction reviewing and for Mr. Farrell, whatever his faults as a novelist of stature. Of course Francie Nolan's story is more cheerful than Danny O'Neill's and a more popular commodity, but surely popular taste should be allowed to find its emotional level without being encouraged to believe that a 'heart-warming' experience is a serious literary experience."

Cumulative Reviews:
Diana Trilling, Library Journal, May 1, 1943
New York Times, August 22, 1943
Book Week, August 22, 1943
Weekly Book Review, August 22, 1943
Rosemary Dawson, New Yorker, August 24, 1943
Springfield Republican, August 29, 1943
F.H. Bullock, Time, September 6, 1943
Meyer Berger, New Republic, September 6, 1943
Katharine Jocher, Saturday Review of Literature, September 11, 1943
Booklist, September 1943
Margaret Winning, Commonwealth, September 17, 1943
America Chapel, Atlantic, October 1943
New Yorker, October 9, 1943
Saturday Review of Literature, October 16, 1943
E.M.B., Social Forces, December 1943
Orville Prescott, Wisconsin Library Bulletin, October 1943
Yale Review, Autumn 1943
New York Times Magazine, December 12, 1943
New York Times Magazine, October 1, 1944
New York Times Magazine, May 28, 1944
New York Times Magazine, July 9, 1944
Publishers Weekly, May 27, 1944
Collier's, March 10, 1945

Sources:
Book Review Digest. 39th Annual Cumulation. The H.W. Wilson Company: New York, 1944.
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Vol. 14. The H.W. Wilson Company: New York, 1945.
Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. Vol. 15. The H.W. Wilson Company: New York, 1947.

Biography

Betty Smith was born as Elizabeth Wehner near the turn of the century in Brooklyn, New York. There is a discrepancy concerning the exact date of her birth. According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, she was born on December 15th, 1896. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, she was born 4 days later on December 19th. According to the Library of Congress' records, Betty was born 8 years later in 1904, although her daughters claim the earlier year, which is inscribed on her tombstone, is the correct one.

Betty was the oldest child of German immigrants John and Catherine Hummel Wehner. Her father died when she was twelve, and her mother later married an Irish immigrant named Michael Keogh. Desperate household economic conditions forced Betty to quit school and join the work force shortly after her father's death. As a fourteen-year-old with merely an eighth grade education, she found herself working at factory, office, and retail jobs in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In addition to learning to cook, sew, and dance at the Jackson Street settlement house, Betty developed an avid interest in the theater. In her spare time, she acted in several plays at the Williamsburg YMCA and she composed about seventy short dramatic plays.

The date of Betty's first marriage is also uncertain. In either 1913 or 1914, she married her childhood friend George H. E. Smith. The couple moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where George studied law at the University of Michigan. Permission was granted for Betty to enroll in the University as a special student between 1921 and 1922, and also between 1927 and 1931. During this time, Betty gave birth to two daughters named Nancy and Mary. She took every writing course offered at the University, but never earned a degree. In either 1930 or 1931 (the date is once again uncertain), Betty won the University's first annual Avery Hopwood Award and received $1000 for her play "Francie Nolan."

Shortly thereafter, the four members of the Smith family moved to New Haven, Connecticut. Betty continued to study playwriting at the Yale School of Drama, where for three years she studied under George P. Baker, Walter P. Eaton, and John Mason Brown and participated in Federal Theater projects. In 1934, the family moved to Detroit where Betty wrote features for the Detroit Free Press. After divorce ended her marriage in 1938, Betty and her daughters moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. While studying at the University of North Carolina, she earned a meager income by writing and acting for small local plays.

In her spare time, Betty wrote an autobiographical manuscript roughly based on her own childhood experiences. She entered this 1000-page manuscript in a Harper and Brothers writing contest. The publishing company coerced Betty to condense the manuscript into a 400-page novel that she decided to title A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Published in 1943, the novel sold 300,000 copies in its first six weeks and immediately found itself at the top of bestseller lists everywhere. During the first month of publication, Betty married the assistant editor of the Chapel Hill Weekly, Joseph Piper Jones.

Betty wrote three other novels, none of which achieved similar success to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, though her second novel, Tomorrow Will Be Better, was a bestseller for 1948. Her third novel, Maggie-Now was published in 1958, seven years after she divorced her second husband, and one year after she married her third and final husband, Robert Finch, an old friend. Her last novel, Joy in the Morning, was written in 1963, two years after Finch's death.

Secluded from the public, Betty passed away on January 17th, 1972 in Shelton, Connecticut. She left behind an unfinished autobiography that was never published. These and other manuscripts remain at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Sunday, October 01, 2006

"The Tree Still Grows in Brooklyn"

The New York Times Book Review
January 3, 1999

By Robert Cornfield

Betty Smith was five years older than her creation, Francie Nolan, who was born in 1901. Francie was the tree that grew in Brooklyn, the one that blossomed out of the pavements, whose strength was not recognized because the breed was so common. ''It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement.'' ''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,'' published in 1943, was an immediate best seller, and since then has become for its devoted readers a treasured rite of passage. A friend told me it was where she first learned at 12 about sex. Another reader was dismayed to realize that her mother had purloined incidents from Francie's childhood and made them her own, telling her daughter tales from the book as if she had lived them herself. The novelist Helen Schulman would read the book again and again, never finishing, each time starting from the beginning so that for her the book never ended.

Francie is the tree, and so is the book itself. It is, tested by time, one of the most cherished of American novels, recording in its powerful fashion the first years of this century in a breeding place of American genius, Brooklyn's Williamsburg and Greenpoint. In the novel's period these neighborhoods were mostly populated by a poverty-level mix of the two great waves of immigrants, the Irish and the Germans of the mid-19th century and the East European Jews and Italians who followed. In another novel, ''Maggie-Now,'' Smith names the whole neighborhood: ''There were so many races; so many creeds and sects all huddled together in an area not more than a mile square. The people called each other names: Mick, Heinie, Guinea, Hunky, Polack, Wop, Sheeny, Squarehead, Bohunk, Chick and Greaseball. They called the few Indians, who they believed were really Gypsies, niggers.''

Francie is second-generation American. Her father, Johnny Nolan, has an Irish background, while that of her mother, Katie Rommely, is Austrian. Yet the streets, the food, the jobs, the morals, loose and strict (a mother and her illegitimate child are stoned), the apartments are common memories. And the veracity of the tale was remarked on by reviewers right away: it is in Smith's sharp memory for detail -- for the size and weight of tin cans, for the differences in butcher shops, for the shoes of the aged. Today, Williamsburg is a mostly Hispanic and Italian neighborhood. The tenements have been replaced with housing developments, but its main thoroughfares, if you look above the storefronts, are much the same as they were for Francie. The public and parochial schools, the churches, the library, the synagogues (some of them converted to other uses) are there still. A local library has a banner proclaiming Brooklyn's finest writers: Walt Whitman, Maurice Sendak, Marianne Moore, Richard Wright and Betty Smith. Siegel Street, where Smith tells us ''Jewtown'' began, now has an alternate name -- Via San Vicente Pallotti -- and nearby Graham Avenue (Smith described it as Ghetto Street, filled with pushcarts) is also known as Via Vespucci. Life, if not swell, is better there now -- neighboring Bedford Stuyvesant or Bushwick might tell another tale, one closer to that of Smith's novel.

When I was young I avoided the book, though I always liked the 1945 film adaptation, directed by Elia Kazan, its plot reworked intelligently by the novelist and screenwriter Tess Slesinger and her husband, Frank Davis, who sharpened the character of the mother and shortened the time frame. It was a girl's book, and I preferred the swashbuckling novels of Rafael Sabatini and books about collies or German shepherds. From them I moved on to ''Look Homeward, Angel'' and never returned to ''adolescent'' literature. I've come late to ''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,'' and though its intense study of a mother-daughter relationship still categorizes it as a ''girl's book,'' I was wrong to hold out. But then again maybe the book has grown better since its first appearance. Some books do. Certainly, the novel has grand ambitions. It is nothing less than a portrait of the artist as a young girl, and Smith set out not only to record a young life but to show where a writer's ambition and will come from. It is a story of triumph over adversity. Francie, spat upon, ridiculed, molested, betrayed by her first love, trusts her imagination to save her. Of her education, Smith says, ''Brutalizing is the only adjective for the public schools of that district.'' The librarian, who ''hated children,'' notices nothing about the girl working her way down the shelves from A to Z. Just before her graduation, Francie's teacher advises her to burn her essays about her father and ''poverty, starvation and drunkenness'' and instead to write of ''the true nobility of man.'' ''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn'' is Francie's revenge. Yet the mean social existence she dramatizes is countered by Francie's family inheritance: Johnny Nolan's romantic spirit and Katie's refusal to be beaten. Francie's illiterate maternal grandmother instructs Katie in what will make for success in America: the children must know how to read and write, and they must believe in heaven so they will have something to hope for; every day read them one page of the Bible and Shakespeare, and put money in a tin can nailed to the floor so that one day you will own some property (the property turns out to be Johnny Nolan's cemetery plot).

The book is a social document with the power of Jacob Riis's photographs. It gives the detail that illuminates the past -- the coffee pot, the air shaft, the barber's cup, chalking strangers on Halloween. But it is the book's emotional life that has kept it in print. Though the recording angel, its center of consciousness, is Francie, the dramatic center is her mother, Katie, filled with ambivalences that will determine the lives of her children. The study of Katie is bold, deadly, without sentiment: a disenchanted mother who without hatred wishes the alcoholic husband dead (''He's worthless, worthless. And God forgive me for ever finding it out''), and who coolly plots her future once he is out of the way. The mother who acknowledges her preference for her son over her daughter -- she loves him more -- but who depends on her daughter's salary and who asks her forgiveness. It is the mother who says of the daughter: ''She does not love me the way the boy loves me. . . . She does not understand me.'' Smith's achievement is to make this woman's steely resolve, her fierce sense of reality, her struggle with her own character, not only comprehensible but admirable. The novel's famous set pieces are Katie's labor pains, the attempted rape of Francie, Francie's graduation flowers from her dead father, and Aunt Sissy, who works in a condom factory (a 1950 Broadway musical version made her the protagonist), faking pregnancy: she claimed the reason she wasn't ''showing'' in front was that the baby she was carrying was in the back.

The book's determination to fill in all the details, to get everyone and everything in, and to follow its heroine through adolescence, leaves it shaggy -- the movie does a firm editing job on its dutifulness. But Smith has a treasure lode and she knows it -- and in this one book she gives all of it away. The intensity of her recall provides the book with its graceless but sincere sentiment and style. Smith's three subsequent novels do not repeat the material or power of her first. ''Tomorrow Will Be Better'' (1948), set in the 20's, tells of a young marriage; its bold conclusion is the wife's realization that her husband is a repressed homosexual. ''Joy in the Morning'' (1963), now back in print, is a cheery campus marriage tale. And the more ambitious ''Maggie-Now'' (1958) is a study of the Irish in America. The books are plodding and intelligent, oddly melancholy, but they lack the neurotic impulses and driven recall of her first. Smith wrote that one book we each have in us, and hers remains the most telling Brooklyn novel, our best depiction of this city's poor at the turn of the century. It is the Dickensian novel of New York that we didn't think we had.

''Brooklyn,'' Francie tells her brother at the end of the novel. ''It's a magic city and it isn't real. . . . It's like -- yes -- a dream. . . . But it's like a dream of being poor and fighting.'' The civilization of Smith's Williamsburg exists in very few living memories -- it will be soon a century away. In that stretch of Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side, you still find Francie's streets and tenements. And when even these isolated signposts are gone, the spirit of the book, the lives and struggles it celebrates, will be with us, reminding us of who we were and who we still are.

Robert Cornfield is the author of a book about the Brooklyn restaurant Lundy's, and recently edited the writings of Edwin Denby.
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Monday, August 28, 2006

September 2006: The Great Gatsby


New York Times Book Review
April 19, 1925

Scott Fitzgerald Looks Into Middle Age
By EDWIN CLARK

Of the many new writers that sprang into notice with the advent of the post-war period, Scott Fitzgerald has remained the steadiest performer and the most entertaining. Short stories, novels and a play have followed with consistent regularity since he became the philosopher of the flapper with "This Side of Paradise." With shrewd observation and humor he reflected the Jazz Age. Now he has said farewell to his flappers-perhaps because they have grown up-and is writing of the older sisters that have married. But marriage has not changed their world, only the locale of their parties. To use a phrase of Burton Rascoe's-his hurt romantics are still seeking that other side of paradise. And it might almost be said that "The Great Gatsby" is the last stage of illusion in this absurd chase. For middle age is certainly creeping up on Mr. Fitzgerald's flappers.

In all great arid spots nature provides an oasis. So when the Atlantic seaboard was hermetically sealed by law, nature provided an outlet, or inlet rather, in Long Island. A place of innate natural charm, it became lush and luxurious under the stress of this excessive attention, a seat of festive activities. It expresses one phase of the great grotesque spectacle of our American scene. It is humor, irony, ribaldry, pathos and loveliness. Out of this grotesque fusion of incongruities has slowly become conscious a new humor-a strictly American product. It is not sensibility, as witness the writings of Don Marquis, Robert Benchley and Ring Lardner. It is the spirit of "Processional" and Donald Douglas's "The Grand Inquisitor": a conflict of spirituality set against the web of our commercial life. Both boisterous and tragic, it animates this new novel by Mr. Fitzgerald with whimsical magic and simple pathos that is realized with economy and restraint.

The story of Jay Gatsby of West Egg is told by Nick Caraway, who is one of the legion from the Middle West who have moved on to New York to win from its restless indifference-well, the aspiration that arises in the Middle West-and finds in Long Island a fascinating but dangerous playground. In the method of telling, "The Great Gatsby" is reminiscent of Henry James's "Turn of the Screw." You will recall that the evil of that mysterious tale which so endangered the two children was never exactly stated beyond suggested generalization. Gatsby's fortune, business, even his connection with underworld figures, remain vague generalizations. He is wealthy, powerful, a man who knows how to get things done. He has no friends, only business associates, and the throngs who come to his Saturday night parties. Of his uncompromising love-his love for Daisy Buchanan-his effort to recapture the past romance-we are explicitly informed. This patient romantic hopefulness against existing conditions symbolizes Gatsby. And like the "Turn of the Screw," "The Great Gatsby" is more a long short story than a novel.

Nick Carraway had known Tom Buchanan at New Haven. Daisy, his wife, was a distant cousin. When he came East Nick was asked to call at their place at East Egg. The post-war reactions were at their height-every one was restless-every one was looking for a substitute for the excitement of the war years. Buchanan had acquired another woman. Daisy was bored, broken in spirit and neglected. Gatsby, his parties and his mysterious wealth were the gossip of the hour. At the Buchanans Nick met Jordan Baker; through them both Daisy again meets Gatsby, to whom she had been engaged before she married Buchanan. The inevitable consequence that follows, in which violence takes its toll, is almost incidental, for in the overtones-and this is a book of potent overtones-the decay of souls is more tragic. With sensitive insight and keen psychological observation, Fitzgerald discloses in these people a meanness of spirit, carelessness and absence of loyalties. He cannot hate them, for they are dumb in their insensate selfishness, and only to be pitied. The philosopher of the flapper has escaped the mordant, but he has turned grave. A curious book, a mystical, glamourous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been enjoyed by Mr. Fitzgerald. He writes well - he always has - for he writes naturally, and his sense of form is becoming perfected.

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Scott Fitzgerald Was Different

NYT Book Review
December 24, 2000
By CALEB CRAIN

The Library of America has released F. Scott Fitzgerald's early novels and stories at a fitting moment. In the Internet Age, as in the Jazz Age, money grew so fast that the fig leaf of culture sometimes failed to cover it. Money showed, the way the legs and arms of adolescents exceed their cuffs. In Yorkville, where I lived until September, 20-somethings just out of college wore baseball caps and T-shirts with the names of investment banks and mutual funds, nakedly, as if the emblems of culture that should have been blazoned there -- art, political slogans, rock bands -- had not been manufactured quickly enough to meet the new purchasing power. Culture lagged, and youth wore its money on its sleeve.

It was Fitzgerald's genius to make this predicament into a subject of art. When Gatsby exclaims that Daisy Buchanan's voice is ''full of money,'' the sharp edge on the pathos is that he hears it undisguised. When money goes naked, it is easier to see what it does to people. And what flowers were to Keats, the leisure of the upper classes was to Fitzgerald -- lush, sensuous and real, a symbol of the ideal that was also a fragile thing, as ephemeral as pleasure. Keats couldn't have been so poetic without bowers of dittany and sweetbriar; Fitzgerald required Delmonico's, bespoke shirts and the south of France. It wasn't necessarily fair that the rich had more leisure -- or more flowers -- than other people, but since they did, Fitzgerald wrote about them.

Hemingway famously teased him for it. To judge from the number of aggrieved letters Fitzgerald wrote about the taunt, he hit a nerve. But as Lionel Trilling once commented, Fitzgerald probably deserves to get into novelist's heaven for insisting that the rich are different. To be precise (Hemingway was misquoting for effect), Fitzgerald wrote that the rich are ''soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful.'' He noticed that money spoiled people. That is, it ripened them, to the point of damage.

Ripeness is sexy. And in literature if not in life, overripeness is even sexier. Balanced between not yet and too late, ripeness is also the sort of narrative effect that prose fiction can really deliver. From the beginning, Fitzgerald both worried and hoped that money would spoil him. Thanks to his mother's inheritance and extravagance, he was given an aristocrat's education and a taste for fine things. He couldn't decide: had this unfitted him for the life of an artist, or was it the making of him?


The Associated Press
F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife, Zelda, and daughter, Scotty, in their Paris apartment in 1926.
The unspoken question unifies Fitzgerald's first novel, ''This Side of Paradise,'' the autobiographical Bildungsroman of a ''romantic egotist'' named Amory Blaine. An aura invests Amory. He is indulged first by his grandiose mother and then by her former lover, an intellectual priest named Monsignor Darcy, whose interest is somewhat more than avuncular. Under their encouragement, and abetted by his own ''penetrating green eyes, fringed with long dark eyelashes,'' Amory sees himself as special. He develops charm. This is artistically and personally useful. As Fitzgerald constructs a novel out of a series of undergraduate poses, pranks and flirtations, he discovers that the power to attract helps to transform otherwise banal details of life into art. And as Amory navigates the ''vast juvenile intrigue'' between New York and Chicago, he discovers that charm also makes it criminally easy to kiss girls.

But not to win them. Just when ''This Side of Paradise'' has become almost hopelessly fusty with male narcissism (ambition, wistfulness, fretting about original sin), in rushes a bracing, chilly breeze of female vanity. Amory may be charming, but the debutante Rosalind already has charming covered. She needs rich. ''Darling, I don't even do my own hair, usually,'' she explains when she rejects him as too poor.

Amory thus learns another way that money spoils people: it makes them too expensive to love. Though he can't afford Rosalind, he persists in being heartbroken by her -- a sign that his larger ambition is unsurrendered. ''The girl really worth having won't wait for anybody,'' he sighs. In fact, Fitzgerald's first love, Ginevra King, didn't wait, but his second love, Zelda Sayre, did. In the novel Amory Blaine loses the girl. In life Fitzgerald was able to win Zelda, because the novel he wrote about losing her brought him success and money almost overnight. The triumph ruined him. ''When I was your age I lived with a great dream,'' Fitzgerald explained to his daughter years later. ''Then the dream divided one day when I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me.''

The novel's role in Fitzgerald's fate is ironic, because the book ends with Amory delivering a socialist-Thoreauvian discourse on the advantage to an intellectual of being ''spiritually unmarried.'' The success of ''This Side of Paradise'' permanently attached Fitzgerald to someone as spoiled and improvident as he was, but with a less focused talent. The consequences were financial as well as spiritual. When the hero of Fitzgerald's second novel marries, he reflects that it ''seemed absurd that from now on he would pay for all her meals.'' No doubt the thought first occurred to Fitzgerald on his own wedding day. All his adult life Fitzgerald struggled to make enough money -- first to win Zelda, then to keep her. Short stories turned out to be his most reliable means of turning literature into cash. He came to scorn them, perhaps because they bankrolled his novel-writing so well he feared they would supplant it. Yet as he once confided to H. L. Mencken, ''Strange to say my whole heart was in my first trash.''

In the two collections reprinted here -- Flappers and Philosophers'' and ''Tales of the Jazz Age'' -- the stories with the most heart are probably the ones Fitzgerald considered the most trashy. A teenage girl is tutored by her cousin in mercilessness, strategic flattery and how to crib epigrams from Oscar Wilde. (Fitzgerald was more adept than even Amy Heckerling at entering the high-school mind.) A nerdy boy-philosopher marries a shimmying chorus girl, and circumstances force them to more or less swap vocations. Somewhere in Montana, an American dynasty defends a secret diamond mine, where slavery endures unabolished, by shooting down airplanes and poisoning guests. The stories aim to please, because Fitzgerald was aiming to make money. As the flapper in ''The Offshore Pirate'' says of the prospect of being bribed with a platinum watch, ''That sounds so nice and vulgar -- and fun, doesn't it?'' (Conversely, the self-consciously untrashy stories here -- an adulterous woman rebuked by fate, a young wife nursing her paralyzed husband -- probably weren't worth the trouble of salvaging.)

Even in his lighter mode, Fitzgerald is fascinated by what marriage and money do to art. It isn't altogether comic for a philosopher to find that a willingness to bear his portion of the burden of marriage has turned him into a trapeze artist. ''Free and poor! What fun!'' the heiress of the fantastic diamond mine exclaims in anticipation of its demise and her escape. Her beau from the outside world corrects her, deadpan: ''It's impossible to be both together. People have found that out.''

Unleavened by humor, the same lesson is taught in ''The Beautiful and Damned.'' The novel is a study of a marriage -- a brown study, in an unpleasant shade of brown. Anthony and Gloria Patch are both selfish and promising: His mind is literary, her face is cinematic. They have charm. Each has an aura, and together they radiate a veritable nimbus. But neither of them has a spark, and so the aura they share thickens, darkens, sets. Perhaps Fitzgerald had learned from Zelda that an artist's aura becomes poisonous if it does not lead to art. The novel's plot is a slow alcoholic souring, marked by small events, such as when Anthony pretends to have kicked a kitten in the rain, and Gloria believes him.

Fitzgerald worried that money had spoiled Zelda when young, by strengthening her sense of potential while depriving her of any sharp need to realize it. Toward the end of his life, he described her to his daughter with words that echo his description of the rich generally: ''soft when she should have been hard, and hard when she should have been yielding.'' As Elizabeth Hardwick has noted, the Fitzgeralds sometimes seem ''like incestuous brother and sister.'' Zelda was the person Scott might have been, if the Zelda in him had proved a little stronger. ''You make leisure so subtly attractive,'' Anthony accuses Gloria. As grimly as Fitzgerald paints Zelda in ''The Beautiful and Damned,'' it is clear he had to marry her. In his eyes she incarnated the broken promise of wealth that inspired his art.

Zelda struggled not to be this symbol -- to write symbols of her own. (Much later, Fitzgerald reassured his daughter that ''Gloria was a much more trivial and vulgar person than your mother.'') Fitzgerald too worked to shed his aura. At the end of his life, as he was writing the spare, beautiful scenes in ''The Last Tycoon,'' he seems to have succeeded. In refashioning himself as an artist with no aristocratic airs and no illusions about the significance of money, he made a choice of hero unlikely for a former celebrant of the East Coast Protestant elite: a hard-working Jewish film producer. Under a different name, the same figure was around much earlier. In ''The Beautiful and Damned,'' he knocks out one of Anthony Patch's teeth.

But it was while Fitzgerald was still bewitched by his aura and angry about his bewitchment that he wrote his masterpiece. In a letter, Fitzgerald wrote that the burden of ''The Great Gatsby'' was ''the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world that you don't care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.'' The sorceress, again, is a rich young woman; this time she casts her spell on a bootlegger. The bootlegger's achievement, however, is not unlike a novelist's: a go-for-broke grandeur founded on illusion, a house open for the pleasure of strangers, a gift that wins the girl by bankrupting the giver.

It turns out that the girl, when Gatsby finally does win her, doesn't even want the gift. ''I've gotten these things for her, and now she wants to run away,'' Gatsby complains in an early draft, published this year under the title ''Trimalchio: An Early Version of 'The Great Gatsby' ''(Cambridge University Press, $39.95). The editor of this text, James L. W. West III, considers it ''a separate and distinct work of art.'' It isn't, but ''The Great Gatsby'' is one of the few American novels so fiercely loved that even its rough draft will find readers, who will marvel at how near perfect it was, and at how deftly and subtly Fitzgerald improved it, with strategic additions (Gatsby's smile, the story of the stranger who crashed Tom and Daisy's wedding) and cuts. In this passage from ''Trimalchio,'' for instance, Gatsby continues to spell out what Daisy has cost him: '' 'My career has got to be like this --'He drew a slanting line from the lawn to the stars. 'It's got to keep going up.' ''It's a detail rightly cut from ''Gatsby'' proper, along with details of the subterfuges and small frustrations of Daisy and Gatsby's affair. It's a wrong note for Gatsby to think about costs, large or small. His greatness, like Fitzgerald's, consists in not thinking about them until it's too late.

Caleb Crain is a contributing writer for Lingua Franca. His book, ''American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation,'' will be published in April.
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