by ARTHUR MIZENER
One of the most remarkable things about Scott Fitzgerald as a writer is the dual character of his self-knowledge, the curious way in which he combined the innocence of complete involvement with an almost scientific coolness of observation, so that he nearly always wrote about deeply felt personal experience, and nearly always as if the important use of personal experience was to illustrate general values. “Begin with an individual,” he once wrote, “and before you know it you find you have created a type.” As a general proposition, that may be exceedingly questionable, but as a comment on the character of Fitzgerald’s best work it is very shrewd. This curious sense of experience is everywhere in Fitzgerald’s work because it was the permanent foundation of his awareness of experience.
The special intensity of his work is, then, the product of an odd kind of irony. Even when we do not know the personal circumstances which lie behind a story like “One Trip Abroad,” or “ ‘I Didn’t Get Over,’ ” we experience their consequences as we read, feel all the force of the special case by participating in the story in the same way we participate in the recollection of an experience of our own which has meant a good deal to us. At the same time, we are always unusually aware with such stories that they are representative, that these people and their experiences are typical of a whole class and—often—typical of the crucial moments in their lives. However much he may be talking about himself, Fitzgerald is always talking also about a “young American couple,” about what life in Paris or on the Riviera was like that year, about the characteristic wearing away of innocence to the point where it takes several drinks to light up the face.
The effect of this double perspective on a single occasion is analogous—at least in one respect—to the effect Henry James found with such delight “in a palpable imaginable visitable past—in the nearer distances and clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our table…. That, to my imagination, is the past fragrant of all, or almost all, the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone, and yet in which the precious element of closeness, telling so of connexions but tasting so of differences, remains appreciable.” Fitzgerald often got his double perspective by making precisely this long arm down the table of the past—characteristically, however, it is down the table of his own past, a past he has experienced personally, not of the historical past of which James was thinking (James is speaking of The Aspern Papers). The sense of his past is very sharp in Fitzgerald: his memory for the precise feelings of a time and for the objects to which these feelings cling is remarkable, as if he lived—to borrow a fine phrase from Malcolm Cowley—in a room full of clocks and calendars—or perhaps in an author’s house like the one he describes in this book. The way Fitzgerald used this acute sense of the past is illustrated by “News of Paris—Fifteen Years Ago,” where the doubleness is even in the title, in the clash between “News” and “Fifteen Years Ago.”
But “News of Paris—Fifteen Years Ago” makes it quite clear that Fitzgerald is not aiming simply at creating for us a simultaneous sense of the pastness of the past and its presence, of its poetry and its closeness, any more than James was, for all his emphasis on these things, in The Aspern Papers or than Eliot usually is in his poetry. In all of them, the pastness of the past is really a clarity of vision about it, a power of making judgments of it of general moral significance. This is much easier to do with what is past. But the distancing of time is not necessary to such judgment, and sometimes Fitzgerald achieved it for events which were practically contemporary with his judgment of them. At his best, however, he could always give the events of his narrative “the precious element of closeness,” whether the events were lost and gone or a part of the immediate present.
There is something peculiarly American, I think, about the irony of this clash between judgment and intimacy; or perhaps it is only that with us the gap between our public and our private selves is so great that we can bridge it at all only with irony, and ordinarily cannot bridge it at all, so that a writer who can has a special appeal for us. He shows us that the society which has produced the inhuman monsters of Mr. Reisman’s Lonely Crowd, with their absurd concern with conformity to the moral standards set by their society, can also produce—frequently in the same person—its lonely men of conscience, its Strethers and Morris Gedges, its Gatsbys and Stahrs, with their deep concern for the moral imperatives of private, felt experience.
In any event, one of the consequences of the doubleness of Fitzgerald’s perception is that, by making everything he wrote at once personal and public, it draws his fiction and his non-fiction very close together. There is little point, for instance, in trying to say whether even so small a piece as “Ten Years in the Advertising Business” is one or the other. Both of its incidents actually happened to Fitzgerald, almost exactly as he sets them down, but both are written here, created for us as invented incidents are in a good story, and they are fitted together so that they embody a “moral” which is by no means simple. Indeed, they are made to blur together as do events in the carefully calculated confusion of the fictional sleeptalker like Lady Macbeth and Molly Bloom—and this too is part of their “moral.” This brief “essay” really works the way a skilfully constructed double metaphor works, and thus conforms to a design which Fitzgerald, with his acute feeling for the ironies of time, used with particular delight: this is the design of “The Lost Decade,” for example, and, in a slightly different way, of “News of Paris—Fifteen Years Ago.” Because the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not, in Fitzgerald’s case, of major significance, I have not tried to distinguish between the two in making the selections for this book.
The main purpose of these selections is to illustrate both the persistence of Fitzgerald’s fundamental sense of experience and the way his uses of it varied as he matured in feeling and as his circumstances changed in time. For, though the fundamental perception remained constant from the beginning to the end of his career, he did mature; his ideas became more penetrating, his feelings more considered and less conventional, his craftsmanship more precise. Apart from the steady development of his craftsmanship, this maturing was overwhelmingly a matter of personal experience rather than of literary development in the narrow sense, and, given Fitzgerald’s precision of recall, it is almost as important to notice the time about which he is writing in a given piece as it is to notice when he was writing about it if we wish to trace his development. Fortunately, he usually wrote close enough to the time of the events he is describing so that, with one major exception, it is possible to arrange these pieces according to the chronology of their writing and also to keep them in the chronological order of the events they describe.
The one considerable exception to this generalization is the first Part of this collection, the pieces Fitzgerald wrote about his young manhood and about Princeton. These were written ten or fifteen years after the events they describe; in feeling and technique they belong at the end of Part II or the beginning of Part III of this book. But since all of them are saturated with the feelings of the times recalled and only occasionally give us a glimpse of the special, personal Fitzgerald feelings of the time they were written (the quality of the judgment in them is another thing), they are, I believe, more valuable if they are read as a kind of prologue to this collection, an account of how Basil Duke Lee, “like Grant, lolling in his general store in Galena,” prepared for the “intricate destiny” that awaited Fitzgerald when, in 1920 (the year he wrote “Who’s Who—and Why”), he became a public figure not merely in his imagination (where he had always been conscious of the actions that a man might play) but in incredible fact. The only other exceptions to a chronological arrangement in this book are minor ones made for reasons which are self-evident.
I have tried to include in this book only pieces which will serve its main purpose, to show the character of Fitzgerald’s fundamental perception. Some of them are more obviously personal than others, but all of them derive their energy from some actual experience in which Fitzgerald was deeply involved. This is not least so of them when their superficial details are not, as they are not in beautiful late stories like “Design in Plaster” and “News of Paris—Fifteen Years Ago,” literally biographical. All of them, too, were written, not simply because they were personal experiences, but because these experiences seemed to Fitzgerald fabulous. This is not least so of them when they are, as are “How to Live on $36,000 a Year” and “Afternoon of an Author,” ostensibly autobiographical.
I have also tried to distribute these selections evenly over the twenty years of Fitzgerald’s career as a writer so that they will demonstrate the typical uses he made of his perception in each period of his career. The selections in Part II belong to the period of This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby; the selections in Part III to the period which reached its climax in Tender Is the Night (for which “One Trip Abroad” is clearly a preliminary study); the selections in Part IV to the period which reached its climax in The Last Tycoon. I have also tried, incidentally, to fulfill another purpose.
One of the neglected aspects of Fitzgerald’s achievement is that aspect he himself took such pride in (he mentions it several times here), the fact that he was a professional writer, that, for all the notorious irregularity of his life, he produced in his short career a remarkable quantity of work, nearly all of it professional in quality (“You do not,” he once said in understandable irritation with some of his critics, “produce a short story for the Saturday Evening Post on a bottle”), and a surprising amount of it of very high quality indeed. It is an incidental intention of this book to suggest the quantity of good work Fitzgerald did, and it therefore includes nothing of his which has appeared in book form before.
To be sure, this is not the best way to do justice to this aspect of his achievement; the best way to do that would be to publish all Fitzgerald’s good work in chronological order. But practically speaking, this way may be the only one available to us, for by a series of accidents for which everyone, including Fitzgerald himself, is to some extent to blame, it has become nearly impossible to make an orderly presentation of all his good work. One example of the way the career of his work has been bedevilled will illustrate the difficulties. Any number of people tried to get him to make the nine Basil Duke Lee stories into a book so that they would be permanently available to readers and so that their continuity and cumulative effect could be seen. But some queer anxiety about becoming like Booth Tarkington, a fear of “going into a personal debauch and coming out of it devitalized with no interest except an acute observation of the behavior of colored people, children and dogs,” led Fitzgerald to refuse to put the stories together in a book. He always argued that he wanted to revise them before doing so, though when he finally did put five of them into Taps at Reveille, he made only very minor verbal revisions in them. The end result of this attitude on Fitzgerald’s part is that only two of the nine stories are now in print at all. But since they are in print in the standard collection of his short stories edited by Malcolm Cowley, it would be difficult to print the whole series in another book. A seemingly endless series of similar accidents makes it probable that a representative selection of the forty-nine stories Fitzgerald wrote between his last collection of stories in 1935 and his death in 1940 will never be made into a book and that a fully representative selection of the one hundred and sixty stories he wrote over the twenty years of his career will not be made in the foreseeable future. The stories and essays which Mr. Cowley had necessarily to exclude from a volume which would simply not hold more than twenty-eight stories will get into print, if at all, helter-skelter, in books like this one which have some other purpose.
Only someone who has collected all of Fitzgerald’s stories and essays—and I do not know anyone who has—or has had available to him the Princeton Library’s wonderful collection of them and has thus been able to read his work straight through can have any idea of the professional care with which he wrote and rewrote even the least important thing he did. Only such a reader can fully understand the persistence of Fitzgerald’s remarkable sense of experience, the variety and fullness with which he used it in his work, and the way in which his use of it improved as he matured. But the hope of this book is that something of all these purposes can be served by these selections. Some of the things they make clearer for us are, I think, fairly obvious when they are thus brought together.
The early Fitzgerald, who is directly represented here by “Who’s Who—and Why” and indirectly represented by the Basil Duke Lee stories, believed very deeply not only in the ecstasy of happiness, which he knew by direct experience, but in the possibility of making it a habit and the object of one’s life. His early stories are attempts to show what happiness, or at worst gaiety, is, even when they are implicit in the most evanescent or trivial experiences, as they are in early stories like “The Camel’s Back” (1920) or “The Offshore Pirate” (1920) or “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920). There was only a moment after he had achieved the heights where he thought happiness was to be found during which he could deceive himself into believing it was there. It always turns out, as Basil discovers in “The Captured Shadow,” that you can share your ecstasy with no one; and it always turns out that you cannot sustain it yourself, as the Fitzgerald of “My Lost City” realized in 1920 almost as soon as he got to New York and felt he “had everything [he] wanted and knew [he] would never be so happy again.”
But so intense was his delight in life and so powerful his conviction that you could dominate it if you only tried hard enough that he kept on for some years trying to absorb into his feelings about experience these new discoveries without surrendering his old convictions about the infinite possibilities of life. He kept dealing with the complications—the decline of ecstasy into habit, of spontaneity into the disorder of too many parties and too many “world-weary New Yorkers [who chose] to spend their week-ends at the Fitzgerald house in the country”—by making jokes of them, as if they were merely temporary distortions of the normal order of things. It was only very slowly and reluctantly that he began to see the possibility that habit was the usual state of things and ecstasy by its very nature temporary and almost always disappointed by its objects.
To reach this point was not, however, to reconcile himself to the life of habit or to believe it good. I am very far from wishing to suggest that Fitzgerald was able to state discursively all that is implied by The Great Gatsby; it is nonetheless revealing that he thought at the time he was writing it that “the whole burden of this novel” was “the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.” It is precisely this loss which allows Gatsby to discover “what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.” “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.” This is the attitude which dominates the second period of Fitzgerald’s work and dictates the technique of the stories he wrote at this time: they are, as “Winter Dreams” is, characteristically committed to the pathos of the loss of illusion and they tend toward climaxes of rhetoric in which Fitzgerald tries to convey the horror of the loss and—sometimes—the hopelessness of it. This rhetoric has remarkable qualities; it is frequently dialogue or the kind of summary of a character’s thoughts which is, rhetorically, very close to dialogue; and it exploits the characteristic qualities of American speech, especially the rhythms of American speech, very beautifully. (“I believe we could try. I’d try so hard.”) Obvious examples of this kind of rhetorical climax are the conclusions of “Winter Dreams” (1922), of “ ‘The Sensible Thing’ ” (1924), of “The Rich Boy” (1926). There is a good illustration of it in Nicole’s closing words in “One Trip Abroad”:
“It’s just that we don’t understand what’s the matter,” she said. “Why did we lose peace and love and health, one after the other? If we knew, if there was anybody to tell us, I believe we could try. I’d try so hard.”
But the finest illustration of all is of course the last-page of The Great Gatsby.
The stories which lead up to these climaxes are usually fairly long and their scenes fairly fully developed (Fitzgerald’s first mature stories were designed for the Post). They are carefully plotted, but their essential object is to realize the qualities of a set of occasions and to show how these occasions modified—usually without his knowing when or how—the vital feelings of a central character. Thus, by the end of the story, the enchantment has gone for Dexter Green and George O’Kelly, responsibility and pride have become sterile for Anson Hunter, the discipline of what they believed was seriousness has lost its hold for Nicole and Nelson. Like Gatsby, they become sensible by somehow losing all they really care about, the “illusion” of a value felt.
In “One Hundred False Starts” Fitzgerald makes it clear that the essential thing for him as a writer was “an emotion—one that’s close to me and that I can understand.” He was always conscientious about realizing the emotion as action, and seems to have had a healthy instinctive distrust of the impulse to try to make fiction out of confession. But in the stories of this period the personally experienced emotion is the essential thing and is anterior to the plot. He loved good stories, but he lived, very deep in his sensibility, what he called emotions. His characteristic failures were “plots without emotions, emotions without plots,” his characteristic successes the inventions of stories which would carry the emotion he cared about.
Very gradually, under the pressure of great personal suffering, out of the toughness of his Irish determination not to be beaten, with the help of the New England conscience he had developed in Minnesota, Fitzgerald achieved a kind of acceptance of this state of “lost illusion.” It is impossible to say that he ever accepted it as necessary: he seems always to have felt that unnecessary personal failures were really responsible for it. But at least he learned how to live with it. Out of this attitude came the themes of his last stories with their marvelous and subtle balance between an unquestioned acceptance of what he and his world are and an acute awareness of what they might be and, indeed, in some respects at least once were.
Sometimes this balance expressed itself as comedy, a triumph of understanding which is genuinely amused over grim personal suffering, as it does in “Financing Finnegan” (1938), that generous and deserved tribute to Maxwell Perkins and Harold Ober. Occasionally Fitzgerald invented a plot, in the old way, to embody this balance of feelings, or an aspect of it, as he does in “ ‘I Didn’t Get Over’ ” (1936), or in “The Long Way Out” (1937), or in “Design in Plaster” (1939). But most characteristically he reduced plot in the usual sense to a minimum and made the tension of his feelings themselves the action. Something like this happens in “Afternoon of an Author”(1936), “The Lost Decade” (1939), and “News of Paris—Fifteen Years Ago” (1940). It is this balance of feelings also which gives the special quality they have to both the “Crack-Up” essays and The Last Tycoon.
In this way the lifelong character of his sensibility was able to realize itself fully again after the collapse of his health and his capacity to create in the mid-thirties, once more to find a place for the cool, detached observer in him and a place for the completely involved sufferer and to hold these two aspects of his understanding in a tension which is all the more alive because it is so quiet in tone and so casual, almost offhand, about its ironies.
It is possible to think of “Afternoon of an Author” as our final glimpse of the boy we first meet in “A Night at the Fair,” and in a very real sense it is. But I think it is much more important to recognize that the complicated set of feelings embodied in “Afternoon of an Author” is the wisdom at which the gay and somewhat confused young man of “Who’s Who—and Why” arrived, and that the power he can generate with a carefully placed noun and an adjective (“struck blind for a moment with the glow of his two thousand books”) is the final refinement of style of the writer who had begun twenty-five years before with a lively but scattered account of the exact number of rejection slips that “were pinned in a frieze about my room.”
It is possible, too, to think of “News of Paris—Fifteen Years Ago” as a kind of final vision of what the indirect knowledge of European culture and the direct experience of Europe itself had meant to Fitzgerald’s generation and—since all generations of Americans must come to terms with these things—may in part mean to all Americans. It thus constitutes the final—and I think subtlest—version of what Fitzgerald had tried to grasp with his imagination in “Princeton,” in “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year,” in “One Trip Abroad.” The remarkable thing about “News of Paris—Fifteen Years Ago” is the way it communicates, for all its clear and disenchanted judgment of its Americans in Paris, the enchantment of life which Fitzgerald could always understand and love, even if, like the hero of “Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s,” “he could never see or touch [it] any more himself.”