F. Scott Fitzgerald
Romantic Modernist
Brilliant Writer or Haunted Man?
We know F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) as the author of The Great Gatsby (1925), arguably the finest American novel of the 20th century. But who else was he — intelligent chronicler of the Jazz Age, master of the short story, tragic hero, romantic modernist? All those things — and more. Today, we recognize him above all as a brilliant writer — indeed, one of the greatest authors that America has ever produced. But it was not always so.
Fitzgerald himself feared, towards the end of his life, that ultimately he was a failure. This judgment became popular in the 1950s and later; maybe, after the horrors of World War Two, it sounded reassuring to some. In 1958, for instance, Brooks Atkinson called him a writer “haunted by the past, possessed by the demons of the present, weary, disillusioned, overwhelmed on every side…” (qtd. in Prigozy, 18). Reminiscent of our conflicted view of his contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, it now seems very hard to separate Fitzgerald the writer from the legend of Scott and Zelda — American celebrities. So, we are left with excess followed by failure: an easy judgment.
Writing the American Dream
Yet, this is a judgment too superficial. What he wrote of his greatest creation — Jay Gatsby — was true also of Fitzgerald, Jay’s creator, that he had “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person” (The Great Gatsby 2). As both romantic and modernist, Fitzgerald understood America only too well, first as the Nation embraced wealth and modernity in the 1920s, and then as Dream collided with Depression in the 1930s. The hopes, tragedies, and ironies of the United States are encapsulated in Fitzgerald’s life and work, as he himself was able to recognize. That evaluation is true of the 1920s: it remains valid today. To put it simply, Fitzgerald lived and wrote the American Dream — and he paid the price for so doing.
His coming-of-age novel, the work that launched his career, was This Side of Paradise (1920). Fitzgerald accepted, as an older generation could not, that America and Europe were experiencing a major shift in consciousness. We can call this shift modernity. It is exemplified in the impact of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein: it was birthed through the traumas of the Great War. The young protagonist of Paradise, Amory Blaine, is part of a new generation, one that had grown up “to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” (Scribner ed. 260). The book asks, what is to become of Amory’s generation in this brave new world? An older generation of conservatives still cannot accept Amory’s conclusion about “dead” Gods, nor appreciate the pathos of Fitzgerald’s question. We may realize that the roots of contemporary culture wars lie less in present political demographics than in deep contradictions long found within the American psyche—and in the American experience.
The Landscape of Loss
Along with his first novel, Fitzgerald is writing the earliest of his short stories, some among his best. What themes do we find in these stories? Roxanna Robinson helpfully asks, “What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heart-breaking, more haunting, more romantic?” (Best Early Stories xi). Certainly, Fitzgerald portrayed the excitement of the new Jazz Age — flappers, cocktails, and automobiles — natural reactions after after the horrific losses of the 1914-1918 War. Yet in these stories, and throughout his career, Fitzgerald also wrote — so poignantly — of this “landscape of loss.” Indeed, this may be crucial to his abiding significance as a writer. Loss is not merely generational or transitory: it is human and eternal. That is a truth that in his heart Fitzgerald knew. Even in the richest nation on earth.
Two years after This Side of Paradise, his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), appeared. With its autobiographical allusions to the excesses of Scott and Zelda, this seemed an obvious morality tale. It contributed to the writer’s reputation, but more to the popular legend. In both This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, James L. W. West III sees the question of vocation: “Without a calling, Fitzgerald tells us, we risk deterioration and ruin. Alcohol and idle pleasure cannot sustain us, nor can wealth. We must have purpose and vocation to give direction and consequence to what we do” (Prigozy, 56). But, what was true of Scott and Zelda was true also of America, if anyone was listening.
The Great Gatsby (1925) — Quest or Elegy?
Three years after his previous novel Damned, Fitzgerald published his masterpieceThe Great Gatsby (1925) — the flawless novel of his generation. The Great Gatsby was a retelling of America’ story from the point of view of modernity, an ironic reinterpretation of the American Dream. As is well known, the 17th century Dream goes back John Smith in Jamestown (1607), William Bradford on Plymouth Rock (1620), and John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629). Whatever our evaluation of those first settlers may be, their versions of the American Dream were clearly articulated — varieties of a quest for God, Gold, and Glory. But how do we work out that Dream in the 20th century? That was the question posed by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
By 1900, the United States was the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Apart from the Fundamentalists (taking their name from a series of ninety essays, The Fundamentals, published 1910-1915), most Americans could no longer identify easily with the Puritans in Massachusetts or John Smith in Jamestown. What then was to become of the Dream—their dream? Was it now—in the twentieth century—merely a selfish quest for wealth and power, or is there still some vocation and vision? In other words, is The Great Gatsby a quest for a living albeit changing Dream or is it an elegy for a Dream that is no more?
The Wisdom of Irony
The title of The Great Gatsby presents us immediately with irony. How great, in reality, is this fellow Jay Gatsby, this self-made American hero? How noble is his poignant, doomed quest for Daisy — his legend of the Holy Grail? Matthew Bruccoli argues that Fitzgerald’s novel is “time-haunted,” dealing with time, loss, and memory (10-12). Using a Shakespearean phrase, the time is “out of joint” (Hamlet I, 5, 188). The Great Gatsby appeared just six years after the dramatic 1919 corroboration of Einstein’s new space-time paradigm. Time and space indeed had changed — with a vengeance. Within this context, as I have argued in “The Great Gatsby & Transformations of Space-Time” (2006), small wonder if the novel be “time-haunted.” We are still trying to understand Einstein’s radical transformations of traditional ideas of space and time. Futhermore, we still argue about the American Dream. For those with ears to hear, Fitzgerald’s profound ironic reinterpretation still speaks to us. Here, for instance, is the justly famous ending to The Great Gatsby,
And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder (180)
For some time now, the USA has seemed to be locked in political stalemate and cultural warfare—in part, this is a continuing argument about the American Dream. Can we hear again Fitzgerald’s wise and wistful final words of the novel, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past (The Great Gatsby 180)?
Tender is the Night (1934) — the soul of Fitzgerald?
Fitzgerald was disappointed with the sales of The Great Gatsby. America was reluctant to listen to his voice. He continued to write short stories, while he and Zelda enjoyed the hospitality of Sara and Gerald Murphy on the French Riviera. But Zelda’s metal state was becoming dire: in 1930 she was hospitalized, first in France and then in a sanatorium on Lake Geneva, being diagnosed as schizophrenic. The Crash of October 1929 had precipitated the Great Depression — for America and also for the Fitzgeralds. Yet, since 1925, Scott Fitzgerald had been working on and off on his next novel. In 1934, Tender is the Night finally appeared. Less accessible than The Great Gatsby, it remains difficult and controversial. Yet a case can be made that this novel reveals the soul of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The title, taken from John Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” evokes what Charles Scribner III has called the “transient, bittersweet, and ultimately tragic nature of Fitzgerald’s ‘Romance’” (Tender is the Night ix). The central characters, Dick and Nicole Diver, portray both the magic of their friends the Murphys and also the tragic failure of Scott and Zelda’s marriage. A product of the 1930s Depression, the novel may yet speak to us. Placed amid the idyllic warmth of the Riviera, the novel shows us the birth of modern psychiatry, the illusions of Hollywood, the anomie of the rich, the “landscape of loss,” and the traumas of shell-shock and the Great War (1914-1918).
War and the Lost Generation
Tender is the Night bears comparison with another tragic story of war and love — published just five years earlier — Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms(1929). I would argue that Fitzgerald’s tale is as much a witness to the post-war “lost generation” as anything that Hemingway had written. For example, here in an early scene fromTender is the Night, Dr. Dick Diver explains to the young Hollywood starlet Rosemary the significance of the 1916 Battle of the Somme, as they visit the site.
“The land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer,” he said to Rosemary…. All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,” Dick mourned persistently” (56-57).
At over a million casualties, the Somme remains one of the bloodiest battles ever recorded in human history. This passage from Fitzgerald might usefully be put alongside Hemingway’s bitter words from A Farewell to Arms about the wartime manipulation of language, “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene…” (185). If the Great War marks the birth-pangs of our modern age, then the literature of modernism is the chronicle of that painful birth.
The Crack-Up (1945)
In the 1930s, Fitzgerald was known also as a writer of perceptive essays, such as his “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931) and “My Lost City” (1932). His observations and epigrams still sound sharp and to-the-point, as in this gem,
It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire…. We were the most powerful nation. Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun? (“Echoes of the Jazz Age,” The Crack-Up 13-14).
However, in 1936, during a time of personal breakdown, Fitzgerald published three essays under the title of “The Crack-Up.” At the time, they were not well-received: Hemingway, for instance, found them embarrassing whining. On the other hand, to me Fitzgerald poignantly brings together the national crack-up that we know as the Great Depression and the personal and psychological traumas that human beings experience. Life is not always neatly divisible into the social and the individual.
On 21 December 1940 in Hollywood, CA, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a massive heart attack. In 1948, his widow Zelda died, in a fire at Highland Mental Hospital in Ashville, NC. After Scott’s death, his friend Edmund Wilson began to edit the three 1936 essays, other essays, some letters, and Fitzgerald’s notebooks. Later, he published them all under the title of The Crack-Up (1945). Today, many find this posthumous work a compelling psychological and intellectual picture of Fitzgerald. Indeed, The Crack-Up may be the nearest we can get to an autobiography: it presents the back-story to his creative genius. For example, in this quotation, he takes his own psychological breakdown and extrapolates it to a more general human experience,
Of course all life is a process of breaking down… the test of a first-class intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function…. I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle…. The contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future (“The Crack-Up,” The Crack-Up 69-70)
The Legacy of Fitzgerald
Has anybody given a better definition of modernism or modernity, and of the conflict between the conservative and progressive psyches? Conservative skeptics may discount Fitzgerald’s words as the product of an unbalanced and dangerous mind: similar judgments have been made against the gloomy but perceptive Dane, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Yet, in both men’s work, there is an unfailing commitment to truth-telling that is painful in its honesty yet timeless in significance. As Fitzgerald famously wrote, “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy” (“Notebooks,” The Crack-Up 122). His reputation, revised upwards from the 1970s onwards, now rests securely on The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and a brilliant collection of short stories. However, to these undoubted masterpieces The Crack-Up adds a poignant account of the tensions of Fitzgerald’s thinking and feeling. It shows us the inner life of a man. It reveals a Romantic Modernist.
© Raymond M. Vince / 17 March 2014
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For Further Reading
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s two great works are The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night (1934). I wrote about Fitzgerald and Einstein in my “The Great Gatsby & Transformations of Space-Time: Fitzgerald’s Modernist Narrative & the New Physics of Einstein” in The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 5 (2006): 86-108. Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920) is not his greatest writing, but I have found that students often enjoy it — perhaps because they find themselves in a similar Sitz im Leben to its protagonist, Amory Blaine. The tales of Fitzgerald have been edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli in a comprehensive collection, The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scriber 1989), and there is also an interesting collection edited by Bryant Mangum, The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Modern Library, 2005), from which the Roxana Robinson quotation above is taken. Fitzgerald’s posthumousThe Crack-Up (1945) is an illuminating portrait of creator and man. A good introduction to the voluminous literature on Fitzgerald is The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Ruth Prigozy (Cambridge, 2002). Indispensable for deeper research is The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (Managing Editor, Kirk Curnutt).
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An earlier version of this essay was published on 25 February 2012 in my blog: http://rayvince.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/f-scott-fitzgerald-romantic-modernist/
