F. Scott Fitzgerald

...A darling of the gods, he seems also to have been the badly flawed offspring of their inscrutable and infinitely ironic will...

...Commenting on how Hemingway sought to renew his style in the 1930s in such minor works as Death in the Afternoon and The Green Hills of Africa, Le Vot notes, "It does seem that Hemingway was as helpless as Fitzgerald was then, even if he did express that impotence in aggressiveness rather than self-denigration," Helpless though he was to escape "the iron yoke of a style whose effectiveness grew as its scope narrowed," Hemingway nonetheless remained a favorite of average readers and reaped rewards that now seem outrageously inflated...

...In the posthumous A Moveable Feast, Hemingway left a scathing portrait of his former friend, one that certainly reflects the littleness of Hemingway better than it depicts Fitzgerald...

...by the end of that summer they would bring a burning love story to life...

...Whether Le Vot, his translator, William Byron, or the editors at Doubleday are to blame is a moot question, but in a book this good the blemishes stand out all the more...

...Moreover, no one was more conscious of his failure than Fitzgerald himself, who spent the last ten years of his short life celebrating, as it were, the causes of what he termed "The Crack-Up,'' the title of the first of three extraordinary articles on his artistic, and his mental and physical, deterioration that he wrote for Esquire magazine in the late autumn of 1935...

...the quotations, so far as I checked, are accurately transcribed, but they are not on the pages given in the notes...

...If Le Vot tells us little that we had not heard before, he nevertheless tells the tale with a pace and precision that keep the reader glued to the chair, waiting for the next (usually unsettling) scene to William H. Nolte is C. Wallace Martin Professor of English at the University of South Carolina...

...He also left as part of his legacy the cruel treatment of a man who was down...

...Time slowed for them and stopped...

...he was actually five years younger than Father Fay...

...Ah, sweet mystery of life and love and old etcetera...

...splendid work...

...For another, the footnotes referring to Edmund Wilson's The Twenties (at least in the American edition) are incorrect...

...He was twenty-two, she eighteen, and the love born that evening was to become legendary in American literary lore...

...For whatever reasons, Hemingway could never forgive Fitzgerald for having been so kind and considerate in helping him find a publisher for The Sun Also Rises and for having offered useful criticism of that novel...

...and many believed his renown depended as much on the spirit of the age which saw his star rise as upon his ability as a novelist...

...F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: A BIOGRAPHY Andre Le Vot / Doubleday / $19.95 William H. Nolte If anyone doubts the old axiom that nothing succeeds like failure, he need only look at the present Fitzgerald industry to have his doubts disappear like the morning mist before a bright sun...

...Indeed, had he been less flawed in personality he would not be so attractive to us today...

...unravel before the eyes...

...At times Le Vot's style smacks rather too much of the stately, as in this over-corseted account of Scott and Zelda's first meeting: "The game had already been going on for a year when a young staff officer, slim and proud in his Brooks Brothers uniform, blond and handsome as a summer deity and stepping lightly, as though on winged feet, approached Zelda at the country club...

...I had to read the following sentence twice before deciding that Le Vot was not pulling my leg-at least intentionally: "[Fitzgerald] tried to cut down on his beer intake-he had been swilling as many as thirty-seven bottles a daywhich kept him from eating properly and made him logy...

...No one with the least interest in FSF can fail to be enthralled by this splendid work...

...And then this: "At a time and place in which passions were brief and unions fleeting . . . Scott and Zelda would give the world of the Roaring Twenties, despite their incessant quarreling, a lesson in anachronistic constancy, of a love that was forever threatened, forever reborn...

...We are no sooner free from that syrupy passage than we find the couple spending long evenings on "the Sayres' clematis-shaded porch talking endlessly of love through the hot evenings, analyzing their feelings, tripping all the levers of charm and enticement...

...But these are minor distractions, which I remark only to forewarn the reader...

...The story of Fitzgerald's meteoric rise and his no less sudden fall is simply irresistible...

...Long before his death in 1940 his contemporaries had marked him off as a has-been, by no means an unfair assessment...

...Again, Mencken's famous essay on the cultural sterility of the South bears the title "The Sahara of the Bozart"-not "Sahara of Bo-zarts...

...Though I would hesitate to call Fitzgerald a tragic figure, since he was much too weak of will and too narcissistic to be considered an admirable person, I have never been so convinced by any of his biographers that he personified what Nietzsche called the all-too-human qualities or attributes...

...And yet no writer of his time and place has received more posthumous attention...

...After all, it is as much his life as his work that fetches modern readers...

...Incidentally, Le Vot is especially incisive in analyzing the Hemingway-Fitzgerald relationship...

...The adverb in that passage almost took my breath away, and the final clause left me in a swoon...

...In this latest biography Andre Le Vot, who has spent the last twenty years sifting through the enormous body of work directly or indirectly concerned with Fitzgerald, gives us the best account to date of the man and the artist...

...Since he was so often either above or below the norms of human behavior I wonder that the existentialists, when they were still whinnying with us, didn't embrace him as one of their own-but then on second thought I do know why they didn't: his best fiction is less concerned with the present moment than it is with the past, or, for that matter, with how the present is constantly being engulfed by the future...

...Nor was Mencken "sixteen years older than Sigourney Fay...

...For one thing, the poet Rupert Brooke was not "killed" in World War I; rather, he died of sunstroke...

...Fitzgerald's stories, unlike the best ones (that is, the early ones) of Hemingway, a favorite of the existentialists, are invariably tinged with nostalgia...

...Good as it is, Le Vot's study contains a number of factual errors along with some stylistic indulgences, particularly in the early parts, that must annoy careful readers...