ENVOI:
THE ORGASTIC FUTURE

After Scott Fitzgerald’s sudden death, Edmund Wilson, who by 1940 had become one of America’s most influential literary critics, decided that although Fitzgerald had not lived long enough to finish The Last Tycoon, it merited publication, and took on the task of editing it. To add length and gravitas to his 1941 volume, he included The Great Gatsby, and a reassessment began.

Four years later, Wilson published The Crack-Up and Other Essays, a collection of Fitzgerald’s essays, letters, and selections from his notebooks. Other eminent critics began arguing for Fitzgerald’s significance. The Great Gatsby, declared the critic Lionel Trilling, remained “as fresh as when it first appeared; it has even gained in weight and relevance, which can be said of very few American books of its time.” Although it was a “record of contemporary manners,” this had not dated the novel, thanks to the “specifically intellectual courage” that Fitzgerald brought to it. Trilling compared Fitzgerald to the French novelists of the nineteenth century, to the English Romantic poets, and to Goethe, comparisons he insisted were legitimate, although he knew they would surprise his readers. Most important was Fitzgerald’s voice, in which could be heard, said Trilling, “the tenderness toward human desire that modifies a true firmness of moral judgment. It is,” he added, the “ideal voice of the novelist.”

In 1945 Malcolm Cowley wrote, “Fitzgerald had the sense of living in history,” trying to “catch the color of every passing year”; he cultivated a “double vision,” that let him simultaneously celebrate glamor and view it from the outside, a “little Midwestern boy with his nose to the glass.” “It is a difficult technical problem to tell the truth in fiction,” Cowley added, but Fitzgerald “had both the technique and the need for being honest.” A year later John Berryman called Gatsby a masterpiece, and Trilling published his introduction to a new edition of Gatsby, declaring, “Fitzgerald is now beginning to take his place in our literary tradition.” A renaissance had begun.

“I always feel that Daddy was the key-note and prophet of his generation and deserves remembrance as such,” Zelda told Scottie. In 1941 she published a formal tribute to Scott, lamenting that their era had been “lost in its platonic sources.” Scott had bestowed upon their years a dignity and grace that rescued it from gaudiness and imprudence, and when life became more desperate he uplifted them all with his instinctive gift for appreciation. As always, her memories were awash in music: life now seemed orchestrated in “waltz time,” as people sought the consolation of fairy tales. Looking back, she thought that perhaps their gleaming youth had not been dominated by the waltz after all, but rather by “march time,” a martial beat that produced something more tragic, more vital, and more spiritual than the sentimental, nostalgic sounds she now heard. Fitzgerald’s writing had wistfully registered the loss of their golden aspirations, the hopes of an age more valiant and more defiant than the one she now saw.

“In retrospect,” she wrote to Harold Ober, “it seems as if he was always planning happinesses for Scottie, and for me. Books to read—places to go. Life seemed so promissory when he was around.” Over the years after Scott’s death, Zelda continued to move in and out of Highland Hospital, trying to live at home with her mother in Montgomery and then returning to the medical support of the hospital. She worked intermittently on an autobiographical novel she never finished, Caesar’s Things, and painted. Her religious zeal intensified, and she wrote letters to old friends hoping for their salvation.

In March 1948 Zelda was in her room on the top floor of Highland Hospital, locked in at night with the other patients. A fire began in the kitchen below, and blazed through the whole building, killing nine women who could not be rescued in time. Zelda’s body was burned beyond recognition, identified only by a slipper that survived the flames. She was forty-seven years old.

Over the years several “true crime” books about the murders of Hall and Mills were published. One book argued that the Ku Klux Klan committed the murders; another that the culprit was Willie Stevens, protecting the honor of his family, and that his sister was covering up for him. A former judge told a New York Times reporter in 1992 that he was “confident that the Stevens family were responsible for the murders” of Hall and Mills. “The reason the prosecution couldn’t win the trial was because the case wasn’t well tried. They had lousy witnesses and the defense was excellent.” The New Brunswick district attorney’s office continues to give talks about the case, suggesting that the Stevens family committed the crimes. But no new evidence has ever come to light and the mystery of who murdered Eleanor Mills and Edward Hall was never solved.

“Fitzgerald was a better just plain writer than all of us put together. Just words writing,” John O’Hara told John Steinbeck. The first biography of Fitzgerald, Arthur Mizener’s The Far Side of Paradise, appeared in the same year as the first full-length critical study, Alfred Kazin’s F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, and just after Budd Schulberg’s roman à clef about his time with Fitzgerald in Hollywood at the end of his life, The Disenchanted (1950). In 1949 Hollywood released a film version of Gatsby starring Alan Ladd, a film noir in which Jordan Baker reforms and marries Nick, Tom Buchanan has a change of heart and tries to warn Gatsby that Wilson is on his way to shoot him, and Gatsby delivers a remarkably incoherent speech before he is shot, saying that he’s going to turn himself in as a moral exemplum for lost young men: “What’s going to happen to kids like Jimmy Gatz if guys like me don’t tell them we’re wrong?”

Scottie Fitzgerald donated all of her parents’ papers in her possession, which she had steadfastly refused to sell or scatter, to Princeton University in 1950. The following year Malcolm Cowley edited a revised Tender Is the Night, rearranging the novel’s three sections into chronological order, a decision prompted by some tinkering Fitzgerald had been doing with the novel before he died, trying to account for its critical failure. Cowley also published a new edition of Fitzgerald’s stories, including some that had never been collected before. The Great Gatsby had by now become required reading in many American schools, and the subject of theses, dissertations, and journal articles; as early as 1952, readers were seeing in Gatsby a study of carelessness. The legend of Scott Fitzgerald continued to grow, entangling itself with ideas about Gatsby and with another idea that was taking root over the same period, called the American Dream, an idea that America grabbed hold of in 1931, the same year that it named “The Star-Spangled Banner” its national anthem.

Before 1931, the phrase “American Dream” as we know it did not exist, but that year a popular historian named James Truslow Adams wrote a book called The Epic of America, which spoke of “the American dream of a better, richer and happier life for all our citizens of every rank, which is the greatest contribution we have made to the thought and welfare of the world. That dream or hope has been present from the start. Ever since we became an independent nation, each generation has seen an uprising of ordinary Americans to save that dream from the forces that appear to be overwhelming it.” Adams’s book sparked a great national debate in the early years of the Great Depression about the promise of America, and the idea of the American Dream has become as familiar as the novel that is held to exemplify it, but actually helped prophesy it into existence.

It is not a coincidence that The Great Gatsby began to be widely hailed as a masterpiece in America during the 1950s, as the American dream took hold once more, and the nation was once again absorbed in chasing the green light of economic and material success.

The Great Gatsby is a stranger novel than some of the bromides about it admit. Dig deep and you will not find the perfection that some sigh about—but you will find a nearly incorruptible style purifying and controlling the incoherence of Fitzgerald’s raw material. The novel’s small imperfections do not disappoint for long: it is so rich and unexpected, so slight and so unfathomable, so much a story of its moment and yet so much a story of ours.

It is a reckoning of the nation’s hopes and its failures, and Scott Fitzgerald has long been hailed as one of America’s most important, and best-loved, writers. In addition to that remarkable voice, his uncanny prescience has been recognized and celebrated. But there are still aspects of his faculty for guessing right that we have yet to see, such as that in his 1929 story “The Swimmers,” Fitzgerald predicted the metaphor of the “99 percent” that has so dominated recent conversations about economic inequality. Two years earlier Fitzgerald told a World reporter that America would face a great “national testing” in the near future: “The idea that we’re the greatest people in the world because we have the most money in the world is ridiculous. Wait until this wave of prosperity is over! Wait ten or fifteen years! Wait until the next war on the Pacific, or against some European combination! . . . The next fifteen years will show how much resistance there is in the American race.” It was 1927, and he was right again. “There has never been an American tragedy,” Fitzgerald ended. “There have only been great failures.”

What Fitzgerald once called “the opportunistic memory” of Americans abounds in popular readings of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s first readers could see only one half of the meaning of the book, its entanglement with the facts and contexts of the day, and were blind to its transcendent meanings. We tend now to focus on those universal meanings, letting our myths and misapprehensions about the 1920s take the place of facts about Fitzgerald’s world. Each moment mistakes the part for the whole, seeing only one side of his book, the other side obscured by the darkness of the era’s own blind spots, the luster of the moon half-hidden by the shadows of the earth.

But Fitzgerald’s genius was in seeing it whole, in having it both ways, which is what fiction is for: the eternal as if, the world suspended in a conditional mood, awaiting its intricate and indeterminate destiny.