Monday, August 28, 2006

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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