in his notebook-in which, to Fitzgerald's remark, "The very rich
beyond his own prudence or beyond his powers of dominance or of
are different from us," Hemingway replied, "Yes, they have more
self-protection, so that he is destroyed by the very thing that gives
money." It is usually supposed that Hemingway had the better of
him his spiritual status and stature. From Proust we learn about a
the encounter and quite settled the matter. But we ought not be too
love that is destructive by a kind of corrosiveness, but from Fitzsure. The novelist of a certain kind, if he is to write about social life, gerald's two mature novels, The Great Gatsby and Tender ls the
may not brush away the reality of the differences of class, even
Night, we learn about a love-perhaps it is peculiarly Americanthough to do so may have the momentary appearance of a virtuous that is destructive by reason of its very tenderness. It begins in rosocial avowal. The novel took its rise and its nature from the radical mance, sentiment, even "glamour"-no one, I think, has remarked
revision of the class structure in the eighteenth century, and the
how innocent of mere "sex," how charged with sentiment is Fitznovelist must still live by his sense of class differences, and must be gerald's description of love in the jazz age-and it takes upon itself
absorbed by them, as Fitzgerald was, even though he despise them,
reality, and permanence, and duty discharged with an almost masas Fitzgerald did.
ochistic scrupulousness of honor. In the bright dreams begins the
No doubt there was a certain ambiguity in Fitzgerald's attitude
responsibility which needs so much prudence and dominance to sustoward the "very rich"; no doubt they were for him something more tain; and Fit�gerald was anything but a prudent man and he tells
than the mere object of his social observation. They seem to have
us that at a certain point in his college career "some old desire for
been the nearest thing to an aristocracy that America could offer
personal dominance was broken and gone." He connects that loss of
him, and we cannot be too simple about what a critic has recently
desire for dominance with his ability to write; and he set down in
noted, the artist's frequent "taste for aristocracy, his need-often
his notebook the belief that "to record one must be unwary." Fitzquite open-of a superior social class with which he can make some gerald, we may say, seemed to feel that both love and art needed a
fraction of common cause-enough, at any rate, to account for his
sort of personal defenselessness.
own distinction." Every modern reader is by definition wholly im
The phrase from Yeats, the derivation of the "responsibility" from
mune from all ignoble social considerations, and, no matter what his
the "dreams," reminds us that we must guard against dismissing,
own social establishment or desire for it may be, he knows that in
with easy words about its immaturity, Fitzgerald's preoccupation
literature the interest in social position must never be taken seriously.
with the bright charm of his youth. Yeats himself, a wiser man and
But not all writers have been so simple and virtuous-what are we
wholly fulfilled in his art, kept to the last of his old age his conto make of those risen gentlemen, Shakespeare and Dickens, or those nection with his youthful vanity. A writer's days must be bound
fabricators of the honorific "de," Voltaire and Balzac? Yet their
each to each by his sense of his life, and Fitzgerald the undergradsnobbery-let us call it that-is of a large and generous kind and we uate was father of the best in the man and the novelist.
are not entirely wrong in connecting their peculiar energies of mind
His sojourn among the philistines is always much in the mind of
with whatever it was they wanted from gentility or aristocracy. It
everyone who thinks about Fitzgerald, and indeed it was always
is a common habit of writers to envision an actuality of personal life
much in his own mind. Everyone knows the famous exchange bewhich shall have the freedom and the richness of detail and the order tween Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway-Hemingway refers to it
of form that they desire in art. Yeats, to mention him again, spoke.
in his story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and Fitzgerald records it
of the falseness of the belief that the "inherited glory of the rich"
234
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
F. Scott Fitzgerald
235
I
II
··-·-·--..,_..._l_lt-1-lt-l-ll-1-ll-lt-ll-l-ll-ll-l-ll-.a1
_..,_...,_._,_._,,_.a-,-•-•---•-••-•-n-••-••-•-••-•-•-•-•-••
really holds richness of life. This, he said, was a mere dream; and
heroism, of life committed to, or thrown away for, some ideal of self.
yet, he goes on, it is a necessary illusion-
To us it will no doubt come more and more to seem a merely boyish
Yet Homer had not sung
dream; the nature of our society requires the young man to find his
Had he not found it certain beyond dreams
distinction through cooperation, subordination, and an expressed pi
That out of life's own self-delight had sprung
ety of social usefulness, and although a few young men have made
The abounding glittering jet ....
Fitzgerald into a hero of art, it is likely that even to these admirers
And Henry James, at the threshold of his career, allegorized in his
the whole nature of his personal fantasy is not comprehensible, for
story "Benvolio" the interplay that is necessary for some artists beyoung men find it harder and harder to understand the youthful tween their creative asceticism and the bright, free, gay life of worldheroes of Balzac and Stendhal, they increasingly find reason to blame liness, noting at the same time the desire of worldliness to destroy
the boy whose generosity is bound up with his will and finds its
the asceticism.1
expression in a large, strict, personal demand upon life.
With a man like Goethe the balance between the world and his
I am aware that I have involved Fitzgerald with a great many
asceticism is maintained, and so we forgive him his often absurd
great names and that it might be felt by some that this can do him
feelings-but perhaps absurd as well as forgivable only in the light
no service, the disproportion being so large. But the disproportion
of our present opinion of his assured genius-about aristocracy. Fitzwill seem large only to those who think of Fitzgerald chiefly through getald could not always keep the balance true; he was not, as we
his early public legend of heedlessness. Those who have a clear recolknow, a prudent man. And no doubt he deceived himself a good lection of the mature work or who have read The Crack-Up will at
deal in his youth, but certainly his self-deception was not in the inleast not think of the disproportion as one of kind. Fitzgerald himterests of vulgarity, for aristocracy meant to him a kind of disciplined self did not, and it is by a man's estimate of himself that we must
distinction of personal existence which, presumably, he was so humbegin to estimate him. For all the engaging self-depreciation which ble as not to expect from his art. What was involved in that notion
was part of his peculiarly American charm, he put himself, in all
of distinction can be learned from the use which Fitzgerald makes
modesty, in the line of greatness, he judged himself in a large way.
<
br /> of the word "aristocracy" in one of those serious moments which
When he writes of his depression, of his "dark night of the soul"
occur in his most frivolous Saturday Evening Post stories; he says
where "it is always three o'clock in the morning," he not only deof the life of the young man of the story, who during the war was rives the phrase from St. John of the Cross but adduces the analoon duty behind the lines, that "it was not so bad-except that when gous black despairs of Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. A novel with
the infantry came limping back from the trenches he wanted to be
Ernest Hemingway as the model of its hero suggests to him Stendhal
one of them. The sweat and mud they wore seemed only one of
portraying the Byronic man, and he defends The Great Gatsby from
those ineffable symbols of aristocracy that were forever eluding him."
some critical remark of Edmund Wilson's by comparing it with The
Fitzgerald was perhaps the last notable writer to affirm the Romantic
Brothers Karamazov. Or again, here is the stuff of his intellectual
fantasy, descended from the Renaissance, of personal ambition and
pride at the very moment that he speaks of giving it up, as years
before he had given up the undergraduate fantasies of valor: "The
1 George Moore's comment on £'s having spoken in reproof of Yeats's pride in
a quite factitious family line is apposite; "£, who is usually quick-witted, should
old dream of being an entire man in the Goethe-Byron-Shaw tradi
have guessed that Yeats's belief in his lineal descent from the great Duke of
tion ... has been relegated to the junk heap of the shoulder pads
Ormonde was part of his poetic equipment."
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
--··--·---"---·-· .. -·-·----·-·---·-·-·-·-11-••-·-·-··
F. Scott Fitzgerald
237
..----.-..-··-··-··-·-·-··-··-·-··-··-··-··-··-·-·-·-··-··-·-·-··
worn for one day on the Princeton freshman football field and the
of the nineteenth century, seize the given moment as a moral fact.
overseas cap never worn overseas." And was it, that old dream, un
The same boldness of intellectual grasp accounts for the success of
i ustified ? To take but one great name, the one that on first thought
the conception of its hero-Gatsby is said by some to be not quite
seems the least relevant of all-between Goethe at twenty-four the
credible, but the question of any literal credibility he may or may not
author of Werther, and Fitzgerald, at twenty-four the author of This
have becomes trivial before the large significance he implies. For
Side of Paradise, there is not really so entire a difference as piety and
Gatsby, divided between power and dream, comes inevitably to stand
textbooks might make us think; both the young men so handsome,
for America itself. Ours is the only nation that prides itself upon a
both winning immediate and notorious success, both rather more
dream and gives its name to one, "the American dream." We are
interested in life than in art, each the spokesman and symbol of his
told that "the truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island,
own restless generation.
sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of
It is hard to overestimate the benefit which came to Fitzgerald
God-a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that-and he
from his having consciously placed himself in the line of the great.
must be about His Father's business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and
He was a "natural," but he did not have the contemporary Amerimeretricious beauty." Clearly it is Fitzgerald's intention that our can novelist's belief that if he compares himself with the past masmind should turn to the thought of the nation that has sprung from ters, or if he takes thought-which, for a writer, means really knowits "Platonic conception" of itself. To the world it is anomalous in ing what his predecessors have done-he will endanger the integrity
America, just as in the novel it is anomalous in Gatsby, that so much
of his natural gifts. To read Fitzgerald's letters to his daughterraw power should be haunted by envisioned romance. Yet in that they are among the best and most affecting letters I know-and to
anomaly lies, for good or bad, much of the truth of our national life,
catch the tone in which he speaks about the literature of the past,
as, at the present moment, we think about it.
or to read the notebooks he faithfully kept, indexing them as Samuel
Then, if the book grows in weight of significance with the years,
Butler had done, and to perceive how continuously he thought about
we can be sure that this could not have happened had its form and
literature, is to have some clue to the secret of the continuing power
style not been as right as they are. Its form is ingenious-with the
of Fitzgerald's work.
ingenuity, however, not of craft but of intellectual intensity. The
The Great Gatsby, for example, after a quarter-century is still as
form, that is, is not the result of careful "plotting"-the form of a
fresh as when it first appeared; it has even gained in weight and
good novel never is-but is rather the result of the necessities of the
relevance, which can be said of very few American books of its time.
story's informing idea, which require the sharpness of radical fore
This, I think, is to be attributed to the specifically intellectual courshortening. Thus, it will be observed, the characters are not "develage with which it was conceived and executed, a courage which imoped": the wealthy and brutal Tom Buchanan, haunted by his plies Fitzgerald's grasp-both in the sense of awareness and of ap
"scientific" vision of the doom of civilization, the vaguely guilty,
propriation-of the traditional resources available to him. Thus, The
vaguely homosexual Jordan Baker, the dim Wolfsheim, who fixed
Great Gatsby has its interest as a record of contemporary manners,
the World Series of 1919, are treated, we might say, as if they were
but this might only have served to date it, did not Fitzgerald take
ideographs, a method of economy that is reinforced by the ideothe given moment of history as something more than a mere cirgraphic use that is made of the Washington Heights flat, the tercumstance, did he not, in the manner of the great French novelists rible "valley of ashes" seen from the Long Island Railroad, Gatsby's
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
·-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-··-·-·-··-··
F. Scott Fitzgerald
239
-·-·-··-··-··-··-·-··-·-·-··-·-··-·-·-··-··-··-··-··-·-··-·-·-
incoherent parties, and the huge sordid eyes of the oculist's adverthis continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither tising sign. (It is a technique which gives the novel an affinity with
understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with
The Waste Land, between whose author and Fitzgerald there existed
something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." Here, in the
a reciprocal admiration.) Gatsby himself, once stated, grows only in
well-known passage, the voice is a little dramatic, a little intentional,
the understanding of the narrator. He is allowed to say very little
which is not improper to a passage
in climax and conclusion, but it
in his own person. Indeed, apart from the famous "Her voice is full
will the better suggest in brief compass the habitual music of Fitzof money," he says only one memorable thing, but that remark is gerald's seriousness.
overwhelming in its intellectual audacity: when he is forced to admit
Fitzgerald lacked prudence, as his heroes did, Jacked that blind
that his lost Daisy did perhaps love her husband, he says, "In any
instinct of self-protection which the writer needs and the American
case it was just personal." With that sentence he achieves an insane
writer needs in double measure. But that is all he lacked-and it is
greatness, convincing us that he really is a Platonic conception of
the generous fault, even the heroic fault. He said of his Gatsby, "If
himself, really some sort of Son of God.
personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, there was
What underlies all success in poetry, what is even more important
something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the
than the shape of the poem or its wit of metaphor, is the poet's voice.
promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate ma
It either gives us confidence in what is being said or it tells us that
chines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This rewe do not need to listen; and it carries both the modulation and the sponsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability
living form of what is being said. In the novel no less than in the
which is dignified under the name of 'the creative temperament'-it
poem, the voice of the author is the decisive factor. We are less conwas an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I sciously aware of it in the novel, and, in speaking of the elements
have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I
of a novel's art, it cannot properly be exemplified by quotation beshall ever find again." And it is so that we are drawn to see Fitzcause it is continuous and cumulative. In Fitzgerald's work the voice gerald himself as he stands in his exemplary role.
of his prose is of the essence of his success. We hear in it at once the
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