It is sad that so much disappoints on a rereading of Wolfe, sad that the “magic and the singing and the gold” which he celebrated so passionately seem now, within his multitudinous pages, to possess a lackluster quality to which the middle-aging heart can no longer respond. It is especially sad because we can now see (possibly because of the very contrast with all that is so prolix and adolescent and unfelt and labored) that at his best Wolfe was capable of those epiphanies that only writers of a very high order have ever achieved. I am thinking particularly of the death of W. O. Gant, in Of Time and the River, where the cancer-ridden old man lies in bed, falling in and out of a coma as he drowses over the landscape of his youth in Pennsylvania.
Towards one o'clock that night Gant fell asleep and dreamed that he was walking down the road that led to Spangler's Run….
It was a fine morning in early May and everything was sweet and green and as familiar as it had always been. The graveyard was carpeted with thick green grass, and all around the graveyard and the church there was the incomparable green velvet of young wheat. And the thought came back to Gant, as it had come to him a thousand times, that the wheat around the graveyard looked greener and richer than any other wheat he had ever seen. And beside him on his right were the great fields of the Schaefer farm, some richly carpeted with young wheat, and some ploughed, showing great bronze-red strips of fertile nobly swelling earth. And behind him on the great swell of the land, and commanding that sweet and casual scene with the majesty of its incomparable day was Jacob Schaefer's great red barn and to the right the neat brick house with the white trimming of its windows, the white picket fence, the green yard with its rich tapestry of flowers and lilac bushes and the massed leafy spread of its big maple trees. And behind the house the hill rose, and all its woods were just greening into May, still smoky, tender and unfledged, gold-yellow with the magic of young green. And before the woods began there was the apple orchard halfway up the hill; the trees were heavy with the blossoms and stood there in all their dense still bloom incredible.
And from the greening trees the bird-song rose, the grass was thick with the dense gold glory of the dandelions, and all about him were a thousand magic things that came and went and never could be captured.
At this point Gant in his dream encounters one of the neighbors, a half-wit named Willy Spangler, and he stops and they chat together for a moment. Gant gives Willy a plug of chewing tobacco, then he turns to continue his walk when Willy says anxiously:
“Are ye comin’ back, Oll? Will ye be comin’ back real soon?”
And Gant, feeling a strange and nameless sorrow, answered:
“I don't know, Willy”—for suddenly he saw that he might never come this way again.
But Willy, still happy, foolish, and contented, had turned and galloped away toward the house, flinging his arms out and shouting as he went:
“I'll be waitin’ fer ye. I’ll be waitin’ fer ye, Oll.”
And Gant went on then, down the road, and there was a nameless sorrow in him that he could not understand, and some of the brightness had gone out of the day.
When he got to the mill, he turned left along the road that went down by Spangler's Run, crossed by the bridge below, and turned from the road into the woodpath on the other side. A child was standing in the path, and turned and went on ahead of him. In the wood the sunlight made swarming moths of light across the path, and through the leafy tangle of the trees: the sunlight kept shifting and swarming on the child's gold hair, and all around him were the sudden noises of the wood, the stir, the rustle, and the bullet thrum of wings, the cool broken sound of hidden water.
The wood got denser, darker as he went on and coming to a place where the path split away into two forks, Gant stopped, and turning to the child said, “Which one shall I take?” And the child did not answer him.
But someone was there in the wood before him. He heard footsteps on the path, and saw a footprint in the earth, and turning took the path where the footprint was, and where it seemed he could hear someone walking.
And then, with the bridgeless instancy of dreams it seemed to him that all of the bright green-gold around him in the wood grew dark and somber, the path grew darker, and suddenly he was walking in a strange and gloomy forest, haunted by the brown and tragic light of dreams. The forest shapes of great trees rose around him, he could hear no bird-song now, even his own feet on the path were soundless, but he always thought he heard the sound of someone walking in the wood before him. He stopped and listened: the steps were muffled, softly thunderous, they seemed so near that he thought that he must catch up with the one he followed in another second, and then they seemed immensely far away, receding in the dark mystery of that gloomy wood. And again he stopped and listened, the footsteps faded, vanished, he shouted, no one answered. And suddenly he knew that he had taken the wrong path, that he was lost. And in his heart there was an immense and quiet sadness, and the dark light of the enormous wood was all around him; no birds sang.
After this passage Gant awakes suddenly to find himself gazing into the eyes of his wife, Eliza, who is maintaining vigil at his bedside. There follows then a long colloquy between the dying man and the woman (who has never called him anything but “Mr. Gant”)—a disconnected, faltering, fragmented murmuration of words, profoundly moving, in which they reexperience all the old sorrows and failures of the tormented, bitter, yet somehow triumphant life they have lived together for forty years. At last—
He was silent again, and presently, his breath coming somewhat hoarse and labored, he cleared his throat, and put one hand up to his throat, as if to relieve himself of some impediment.
Eliza looked at him with troubled eyes and said:
“What's the matter, Mr. Gant? There's nothing hurtin’ you?”
“No,” he said. “Just something in my throat. Could I have some water?”
“Why, yes, sir! That's the very thing!” She got up hastily, and looking about in a somewhat confused manner, saw behind her a pitcher of water and a glass upon his old walnut bureau, and saying, “This very minute, sir!” started across the room.
And at the same moment, Gant was aware that someone had entered the house, was coming towards him through the hall, would soon be with him. Turning his head towards the door he was conscious of something approaching with the speed of light, the instancy of thought, and at that moment he was filled with a sense of inexpressible joy, a feeling of triumph and security he had never known. Something immensely bright and beautiful was converging in a flare of light, and at that instant, the whole room blurred around him, his sight was fixed upon that focal image in the door, and suddenly the child was standing there and looking towards him.
And even as he started from his pillows, and tried to call his wife he felt something thick and heavy in his throat that would not let him speak.
He tried to call to her again but no sound came, then something wet and warm began to flow out of his mouth and nostrils, he lifted his hands up to his throat, the warm wet blood came pouring out across his fingers; he saw it and felt joy.
For now the child—or someone in the house—was speaking, calling to him; he heard great footsteps, soft but thunderous, imminent, yet immensely far, a voice well-known, never heard before. He called to it, and then it seemed to answer him; he called to it with faith and joy to give him rescue, strength and life, and it answered him and told him that all the error, old age, pain, and grief of life was nothing but an evil dream; that he who had been lost was found again, that his youth would be restored to him and that he would never die, and that he would find again the path he had not taken long ago in a dark wood.
And the child still smiled at him from the dark door; the great steps, soft and powerful, came ever closer, and as the instant imminent approach of the last meeting came intolerably near, he cried out through the lake of jetting blood, “Here, Father, here!” and a strong voice answered him, “My son!”
At that instant he was torn by a rendi
ng cough, something was wrenched loose in him, the death gasp rattled through his blood, and a mass of greenish matter foamed out through his lips. Then the world was blotted out, a blind black fog swam up and closed above his head, someone seized him, he was held, supported in two arms, he heard someone's voice saying in a low tone of terror and pity, “Mr. Gant! Mr. Gant! Oh, poor man, poor man! He's gone!” And his brain faded into night. Even before she lowered him back upon the pillows, she knew that he was dead.
Wolfe would have to be cherished if only for the power he exerted upon a whole generation. But even if this were not enough, the clear glimpses he had at certain moments of man as a strange, suffering animal alone beneath the blazing and indifferent stars would suffice to earn him honor, and a flawed but undeniable greatness.
[Harper’s, April 1968.]
An Elegy for F. Scott Fitzgerald
It is perhaps inevitable that nearly all very good writers seem to be able to inspire the most vehement personal reactions. They might be quite dead but their spirits remain somehow immortally fleshed, and we are capable of talking about them as we talk about devoted friends, or about a despised neighbor who has just passed out of earshot. In certain cases it amounts to a type of bewitchment. Thus I heard only a short time ago a conservative, poetasting lawyer say that as much as he admired the work of Dylan Thomas, he would never allow the philandering rascal in his house.
Of course, the passions such writers arouse are especially strong when the writer—unlike, say, William Faulkner, who sedulously cultivated the private life—is F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose life has fallen so under the dominion of the legend that this occasionally tends to obscure the fact that he possessed, at his best, an original and beautiful talent. Nonetheless, it is the mythic aspects of a writer's life that generate all the gossip, the ugly resentment along with the tender sentiments, and Fitzgerald has by now had a disproportionate share of both. Here, for instance, is Katherine Anne Porter, in a recent Paris Review interview: “Even now when I think of the twenties and the legend that has grown up about them, I think it was a horrible time: shallow and trivial….The remarkable thing is that anybody survived in such an atmosphere—in the place where they could call F. Scott Fitzgerald a great writer!…I couldn't read him then and I can't read him now….Not only didn't I like his writing, but I didn't like the people he wrote about. I thought they weren't worth thinking about.” One senses a sort of gratuitous outrage here which has less to do with Fitzgerald's talent than with the Fitzgerald myth. It is hard to believe that Miss Porter, who is such an estimable writer herself, is really so down on Fitzgerald's “writing”; one feels rather that she simply doesn't want him in her house. But if the Fitzgerald myth can elicit calumny, it can also inspire quivering obeisance, such as this from Professor Arthur Mizener, a professional Fitzgeraldian, who is reduced to a kind of stammer: “Fitzgerald's greatest value for us is his almost eponymous character, the way his life and his work taken together represent what in the very depths of our nature we are—we Americans, anyhow, and—with some variations—perhaps most men of the western world.” Spoken like a born undertaker.
Yet, since in Fitzgerald's case the myth and the work are indissolubly mingled, what is so fascinating about this large collection of letters, edited by Andrew Turnbull, is that in a sense it allows the writer to explicate his own legend. So revealing are these letters—to Zelda and his daughter, Scottie, to Edmund Wilson and Hemingway and Maxwell Perkins and his friends Gerald and Sara Murphy, among others—that one might feel that nothing further needs to be said about the writer's life. As for the book itself, one could question, as Malcolm Cowley has already done, Mr. Turnbull's arrangement—grouping the letters according to the person they are written to rather than running them chronologically and thus allowing them to tell their own story—but this is a small matter. The book remains a fascinating one.
From the very beginning there is a pervasive feeling of honesty in Fitzgerald's letters, and though some of the earliest correspondence contains a touch of collegiate fakery, of the innocuous kind, there is very little posturing. Unlike the letters of those writers who have written with a sense of posterity mooning at their elbow (Thomas Wolfe is a good example), Fitzgerald's were composed with a spontaneity that must have been one of the most fetching aspects of his charm as a person. In fact, a writer with less spontaneity and more guile would never have written words like these, in a letter of 1920, to his agent, Harold Ober: “Enclosed isa new version of ‘Barbara,’ called ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair,’ to distinguish it from Mary Rinehart's ‘Bab’ stories in the Post. I think I've managed to inject a snappy climax into it.” Such an utterance I think helps explain why these early letters are the least satisfying and least interesting of the collection. For though, to be sure, this was the decade of the matchless Gatsby and several of the finest stories—“Absolution,” “The Rich Boy,” “The Baby Party”—it was also the time of an astonishing amount of pure waste, when the hectic, frazzled, and, above all, expensive life the Fitzgeralds were leading resulted in the production of a great deal of sloppy and hastily written fiction. As a result, these early letters, strewn with such complaints as “If I don't in some way get $650.00 in the bank by Wednesday morning I'll have to pawn the furniture” are often tedious; we are, after all, witnessing not the struggle of a desperate pauper, a Mozart or a Franz Schubert, but that of a spoiled young writer living far beyond his means, and much of Fitzgerald's bellyaching is cause for legitimate exasperation. Even so, even when Fitzgerald has put us out of sorts with his clamorous preoccupation with his “standard of living,” when his silly conceit and his youthful pomposity about his not-very-good early work has begun to aggravate us the most, the artist in Fitzgerald, the conscientious and coolly disciplined craftsman suddenly comes through, and we find him writing to Perkins in 1924 about the nearly finished Gatsby: “In my new novel I'm thrown directly on purely creative work—not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere yet radiant world. So I tread slowly and carefully and at times in considerable distress. This book will be a consciously artistic achievement.” Oppressively superficial as he may have appeared during the twenties—and may have been in important respects—he never abandoned, even then, this stony, saving honesty and self-awareness.
In his biography of Fitzgerald, Turnbull quotes Rebecca West as saying: “I knew Zelda was very clever but from the first moment I saw her I knew she was mad.” She was speaking of the year 1923, three years after Zelda married Fitzgerald. By 1930, when Zelda was a patient in a Swiss sanitarium, the “gay parade,” as Fitzgerald called the decade, was over, and the allegro vivace which had dominated the mood of his life dwindled and died, replaced by something at first only elusively somber, then steeped in an unutterable melancholy: it was a tone which from then on never disappeared. By 1932, living in Baltimore and slipping slowly into alcoholism (though still toiling away at Tender Is the Night), Fitzgerald is writing to Perkins: “Five years have rolled away from me and I can't decide exactly who I am, if anyone.” Throughout these letters of the early and mid-thirties there are marvelous flashes of wit and warmth, his intense concern for books, for literature, never flags—he seems to have read everything; no writer ever had such appreciative and generous interest in his contemporaries, such an acute, unjealous response to excellence, along with a fine nose for a fraud—but the sense of melancholy, of encroaching danger, shadows over these pages like a bleak, wintry afternoon. (Again to Perkins, 1934: “The mood of terrible depression and despair is not going to become a characteristic and I am ashamed and felt very yellow about it afterward. But to deny that such moods come increasingly would be futile.”) Since her apparent recovery in Switzerland, Zelda has had two breakdowns. Tender Is the Night appears and is a critical and financial failure. Hemingway, whom he admires almost to the point of worship, turns on him, cruelly lampooning him in The Snows of Kilimanjaro with the famous episode about “the very rich,” calling him “poor Scott Fitzg
erald.” (“Dear Ernest,” he replies in a letter, “please lay off me in print.” Then he adds: “It's a fine story—one of your best.” Fitzgerald's magnanimity was truly incalculable. Although much later, to Perkins, he writes bitterly of this betrayal, saying: “Once I believed in friendship, believed I could make people happy and it was more fun than anything. Now even that seems like a vaudevillian's cheap dream of heaven, a vast minstrel show in which one is the perpetual Bones.”) And as Fitzgerald fights against his drinking, and frets and broods, the sense of oncoming doom grows and grows. One is reminded of the harrowing lines from Job: I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.
And so it comes. In Turnbull's biography there is a terrible chapter describing those months that must have been the abyss of Fitzgerald's career. The time is 1936 and the place is Asheville, where Fitzgerald—now nearly broke and in debt, ill of tuberculosis, a frail alcoholic masochist smothering in the warm love of his own failure—has setup residence in order to be near the sanitarium to which Zelda has been committed. Zelda is at this point desperately off; she has taken to carrying a Bible, and occasionally, garbed in the superannuated flapper's clothing of the twenties, she kneels in public to pray. When the haggard couple arrives one evening to call on neighbors, Zelda is bearing with her a bunch of water lilies she has gathered on the way, and she reminds one guest of Ophelia; later, on the terrace, Fitzgerald leads her to a stone wall and proclaims, “You're the fairy princess and I'm the prince,” and for several minutes they ring changes on this sentiment—Zelda wide-eyed, still lovely, and utterly mad, Fitzgerald gazing at her transfigured with sorrow. The entire desolating passage—perhaps because of its semipublic nature (to the very end, the Fitzgeralds were always being observed)—reads like nothing so much as a travesty, a reverse image of one of those elaborate gay pranks of a decade or so before, when they would go to a party in a taxi, he on the roof, she on the hood, or when at the theater they would sit together silent during the funny parts and then laugh uproariously when the house was still. Yet sad as this vignette is, an incident soon occurs which drives Fitzgerald even further away from himself and reality—to the black edge of death and madness. Ever generous and trusting, he also possesses the true writer's immense vanity, and mistakenly grants an interview to the New York Post, whose editor sees in Fitzgerald's fortieth birthday an opportunity to make hay with the myth of the twenties and its most distinguished surviving symbol, and dispatches to Asheville an expertly ingratiating reporter named, rather aptly, Michael Mok. Taken off guard, Fitzgerald is polite and as garrulous as his combination of illnesses will allow, and Mok's front-page article—certainly as grimy a claim to immortality as ever fell to any newspaperman—begins as follows:
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