Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald/Class: A Guide Through the American Status System
Donaldson, Scott & Fussel, Paul
P h i l l i p s does not find himself a happy man. He has been unable to embrace the neoconservatism that others who followed his honest, troubled route have arrived at. He is a man...
...President Kennedy and many a Saville Row tailor would have been startled to hear that...
...Professor Fussell asks, and proceeds to answer: "Probably not, since that town is the origin of Dr...
...According to him the richest and the best educated are the most likely to move from city to city...
...and the Cabot will go there, Professor Fussell to the contrary notwithstanding...
...Such moves must corrode the core of the traditional upper upper class, which Warner calls the "old family" class...
...He uses the fact that certain colleges have been associated with the traditions of the American upper class to drag in a diatribe of seven pages about the low standards of most American colleges and universities...
...She was "the golden girl," Fitzgerald's equivalent of the princess in the fairy tale, the center of his imagination...
...Here too, while Zelda's family had little money, Fitzgerald may have fallen in love in good part with the image of the Southern "belle of good family" who socially stood at the very top in Montgomery, Alabama...
...but it is no longer the case...
...Roses just might pass for "upper-middle-class f l o w e r s . . , except for bright red ones...
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...My check for $ is enclosed and I have provided my street address for UPS delivery...
...Warner demonstrated the existence in Yankee City of six highly differentiated social classes, ranging from an upper upper to a lower lower class...
...Painting and writing have made too many compromises with mass culture...
...In that context also Professor Fussell displays his ignorance of how things have changed since the fifties, by quoting an ironical passage from The Preppy Handbook apparently as evidence for the proposition that "a good prep school" is "an efficient 'feed' into the Ivy...
...It appears that once Professor FusseU sat down to throw together this book, he was not much bothered by what for more finicky authors would be the limits of a chosen subject matter...
...What you are, and how you should be judged, depends in large measure on how you've judged it...
...Please make check payable to The American Spectator...
...I n the absence of new research of the scope and depth of that of W. Lloyd Warner and his contemporaries we can only speculate on the reasons for these changes...
...the worldly failure of his father resulting in constant changes of the family domicile, and the social condescension of the Wasp establishment of that time to Irish Roman Catholics...
...but when he does so he simply paraphrases what others have said a long time ago, for instance that manner of speech and a shared understanding of allusions are criteria of class...
...One can rejoice in that liberation and yet be aware that like all great leaps forward it also had its negative effects...
...So long as the vast majority of students in those schools came from the same social class, the schools served as upper class melting pots, blending regional differences of speech and dress into a recognizable single type...
...It was best if they were rich as well, but money to Fitzgerald was a fitting attribute of the well-born, not a necessary condition...
...Just before Christmas these ears of mine heard at least five (5...
...Nora Flynn "was the youngest of the famous Langhorne sisters of Virginia," the most famous of whom was Lady Nancy Astor...
...Can a higher-class person live in Lynchburg, Virginia...
...but such ebb and flow is just one of the multitude of signs that the American class system has been and continues to be in revolutionary flux...
...Professor Fussell writes that a "virtually bottomless social gulf opens between those who when introduced say 'Pleased to meet you' and those who say 'How do you do?' " Such was undoubtedly the case in the Professor's and inmy day...
...Those from the West, the South, and the Middle West adjusted their ways to those of the Eastern seaboard...
...And you know these kids who never had to live through the depression: "The drift of young people today has an element of middleclass self-indulgence and antipathy to the idea of work, and is not without a measure of affluence...
...Paul...
...But with affirmative action the minimum of homogeneity necessary for such a blending may no longer have been present...
...Yet the sociologists then treated social class almost exclusively as a matter more or less of money, if they discussed it at all...
...mattered to him was love between man and woman, the pursuit of love, the survival of love, the changes of love, and the death of love...
...Those particular excesses of the sixties have been cured since...
...Is fife too short to keep track of all this...
...and in 1949 published a manual for the scientific 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 evaluation of status, Social Class in America...
...The two-button suit, the good professor tells us, "is more prole [FusseUspeak for lower class] than the three-button Eastern-establishment model...
...But as the unmentionable subject of sex in fact preoccupied the writers and painters in Vienna, so in this country class distinctions preoccupied the writers of plays and fiction ranging from critical successes to pulp magazines...
...In Class Paul Fussell seems either ignorant or disdainful of the enormous body of literature on class in America published by W. Lloyd Warner, his colleagues and students...
...And the women to be loved by Fitzgerald and by the heroes of his fiction were high-born and high-bred...
...And yet this great love cannot have been for someone of flesh and blood, for a particular soul and intellect...
...Phillips has come through these wars weary and disappointed, but still somehow believing "in the omnipotence of argument and reason...
...The meetings between Ginevra and Fitzgerald were few...
...Because all these fluctuations and personal complications have come about from attempts to deal with, yes, evil...
...The conventional wisdom as taught in schools and reported by foreign observers was that there were no social class distinctions in America...
...ORDER YOUR BINDERS TODAY . . . . . . . . . . . . I want to order__ American Spectator binders at $12.95 each (plus $2.00 for postage and handling...
...Donaldson writes: "The hurt of losing her never left him, and thinking about it invariably brought tears to his e y e s . . , his rejection by Ginevra motivated much of his f i c t i o n . . , the wound would not heal, no matter how often he cauterized it...
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...Strawberry and other fruit flavors are near the bottom...
...Like Jay Gatsby "he had reached beyond his grasp, for she came from a different social world," writes Donaldson...
...The modernism that Partisan Review championed is now something classical, the dignified and appalled parent of a lot of subgeneric bastards: "The more recent 'conceptual' and 'realistic' schools strike me as popular and perverse exploitations of the interest aroused by the abstract expressionists...
...This is not to say that Fussell never gives us an accurate observation...
...One may be the explosive geographic mobility of Americans since 1945, described in Vance Packard's A Nation o f Strangers...
...Today a universe dominated by romantic love and social hierarchy and the interaction between them has become almost incomprehensible...
...FOOL FOR LOVE: F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Scott Donaldson/Congdon & Weed/S16.95 CLASS: A GUIDE THROUGH THE AMERICAN STATUS SYSTEM Paul Fussell/Summit Books/S13.95 Franz M. Oppenheimer L i k e sex in Freud's Vienna, social class was a taboo subject in the United States of the 1930s...
...Elisabeth Lemmon was "beautiful, cultivated and well-bred...
...Indeed, it is difficult to believe that these two books were written by the same author...
...He is a man left with more regrets than shibboleths...
...And however much opportunism and accident have blended into the response, mostly what Phillips and the writers he edited have tried to do is respond to the dark star (read "evil empire") in whose shadow we fight for our lives, and against which most of our social changes and liberation movements, however admirable they may be, constitute a kind of luxurious fine-tuning...
...She was well-born, she was rich, she was beautiful, and she came from the place that Fitzgerald saw as the Eden of all those qualities: "Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world," he wrote his daughter Scottie in July 1940...
...God help him...
...Generally, Fussell observes the decline of proper English usage only in the middle class...
...These biographers fail to see that such hostile projections were no haore realistic than the glamorization of d~butantes: Both attitudes were the result of Fitzgerald's intense social insecurities rooted in the ambiguous social station of his family at the edge of the social establishment of St...
...On the other hand, the middle class "is the natural audience for the unreadable second-rate pretentious, books by James Gould Cozzens, John Steinbeck, Pearl Buck, Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, the mass merchandise of Herman Wouk, John Hersey, and Irwin S h a w . . . " On the usage of words, Professor Fussell is equally provocative...
...it seems that he had fallen in love with her image before he had met her in person...
...So much of Phillips's memoir concerns the shiftings and modulations from Left to Right and back and back again that all the calibrations may seem comic...
...Maybe it was...
...But neither is it amusing...
...Probably, but one should fight the inclination to say so...
...Vanilla is at the top, with chocolate considerably below...
...President should ffse that adjective, much less put "empire" after it), and much of his and others' intellectual lives have been spent positioning themselves against it as usefully and honestly as conviction would allow...
...Thank you...
...Midge even became momentarily sympathetic to me, although I was further from her views than Diana and Lionel were...
...The great helmsman of this moveme~ was W. Lloyd Warner of the University of Chicago...
...They knew, and we know, that during the sixties preppies were discriminated against by admissions officers of the Ivy League colleges, as were the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of alumni...
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...Nor was there ever any doubt in Fitzgerald's mind about why he had lost "his" golden girl...
...The young no longer know what is taboo...
...Those two omissions alone make it inevitable that Fussell's book, unlike his previous writing, is not serious...
...In the time of Fitzgerald and O'Hara the great prep schools and universities like the upper upper core of American cities were not only citadels of snobbery, and they were that, but also the stewards of a continuous cultural tradition...
...At that time, unlike today, centers of power such as the large banks, industry, the leading law firms, and the Foreign Service were largely in the hands of a Waspish and predominantly Eastern seaboard upper class...
...and instead of imposing some upper class common denominator of speech, the slang and idioms of blacks, the flower children, and the drug culture were the only influences that now affected the speech of all...
...Indeed the justification for adding another biographical study to the excellent four previous full-length biographies (those of Mizener, Turnbull, Bruc~oli, and Le Vot, the last two published within the last three years) and quite a few others is Donaldson's thesis "that F. Scott Fitzgerald was driven to please other people, especially rich and prominent people" and that this drive took the form of seeking romantic love...
...The first volume of his magnum opus, the Yankee City Series, The Social Life o f a Modern Community, was published in 1941, and analyzed the social status system of Newburyport, Massachusetts, the same town that inspired some of Marquand's best fiction...
...Phillips says that "Communists represented an evil cause" (Heaven forfend a U.S...
...Fitzgerald never reached the detachment to see that the good people of Lake Forest and similar places may have been collectively neither unduly glamorous nor unusually wicked, but just folks, i, I t was only in the decade after Fitzgerald's death in 1940 that American sociologists discovered the social class system of their country...
...Not much less surprising is Fussell's apparent belief that nothing has changed since the heyday of John O'Hara, Fitzgerald, and other writers and scholars of the thirties, forties, and fifties whom he refers to indiscriminately in support of his own obiter dicta on the American class system of today...
...Name (Please Print) Street address City I State Zip X4AC |The American Spectator, P.O...
...We know far more about class in America until, say, the sixties than Fussell appears to know...
...What Franz M. Oppenheimer is a Washington lawyer...
...What happened at the prep schools was only one symptom of the country's general liberation from prejudice...
...Yet today a corporation will think nothing about transferring a Cabot from Boston to Lynchburg, Virginia...
...according to him, well-bred people would write "No's Only...
...Box 1969, Bloomington, Indiana 47402 . . . . . . . . ,,= THE AMEI~CAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 39...
...Many a Paulie who failed to get into Yale under Kingman Brewster's glorious reign must have read the passage with more than mixed feelings...
...he must have been wearing earmuffs when he mixed with the other classes...
...According to him, upper class Americans do refer to some kinds of parties as "affairs...
...When I was a b o y . . . What Phillips's life most convinces one of is that Communism was, and remains, the great Breathalyzer test of the twentieth century...
...and it is more upper to say "black-tie" than "dinner jacket...
...Donaldson gives far more attention to Ginevra and to the loves of Fitzgerald other than his wife Zelda and his last love Sheilah Graham than do other biographers...
...Yet such was Fitzgerald's universe...
...We have yet to discover whether a culture and a communicable language can survive without any such custodians...
...He fell in love while at Princeton with Ginevra King from Lake Forest, Illinois...
...Anyone who admired Paul Fusselrs well-researched and original A broad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980), in which there are perceptive observations about class, must be surprised by Fussell's new book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System...
...I was so taken aback by Diana's sudden shift in my direction that I hardly knew what to say...
...And the very kind of ice cream you like has class meaning...
...The arts he loved are in a tacky muddle...
...If you find yourself in any of these predicaments, then you need one of these attractive new binders...
...Wanted to photocopy an article for a friend from an issue three months ago, but now can't find the issue...
...All biographers of Fitzgerald, however, do write about his critical views of the uRper class, expressed in stories such as "'A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and in the harsh portrayal of such as Tom Buchanan and Daisy in The Great Gatsby and of Nicole's family in Tender is the Night and in his occasional flirtations with left-wing political ideas...
...Covered with a simulated, dark green leather with The American Spectator logo stamped in gold on the front and spine, each binder contains twelve removable steel rods for easy replacement of your valued Spectator...
...He believes it to be hopelessly middle class "to inscribe 'Regrets Only' " on social invitations...
...Many books of John P. Marquand, John O'Hara, Philip Barry, and Christopher Morley are about little else...
...pleased to meet you's" at a small cocktail party, rare nowadays, where everybody present was an alumnus or alumna of the right Eastern schools and colleges...
...Another reason for the changes in the American class system may well have been the "affirmative" recruiting policies of the leading prep schools during the sixties...
...Beatrice Dance, "the first woman to make him forget Zelda," had a father "who had made a great deal of money, [and] was "somebody'in Texas . . . . " Indeed they all were "somebodys" in the social sense, or, as the French would put it, they were all women of whom "one knew whence they came...
...But those rare finds are drowned in a chaotic and undocumented potpourri of personal prejudices that make one wonder whether Class was not written as a spoof...
...A black raincoat fares no better: "a highly trustworthy prole sign...
...There were Elisabeth Lemmon, Nora Flynn, Beatrice Dance, Margaret Case, Emily Vanderbilt, and others...
...Recalling an argument between the Lionel Trillings and the Norman Podhoretzes, Phillips writes: I stayed out of the cross-fire, but I was pulled in when Diana suddenly switched to me and said the criticism of Commentary was not to be taken as a political approval of PR...
...Even the central love of Fitzgerald's life, that for his wife Zelda, according to Donaldson "hardly began as a romantic idyll...
...It is one of the merits of Scott Donaldson's new "biographical portrait" of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fool f o r Love, to develop the critical significance of social class in the life and work of Fitzgerald...
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...However, I assumed that Diana was trying, by turning on me too, to lessen the assault on Norman and to indicate she had not suddenly swung way over to the left...
...In Social Class in America he wrote that the families who belong to that class have been in the community for "at least three generations and preferably more," and that " 'old family' means not only old in the community but old to the class...
Vol. 17 • April 1984 • No. 4
