Scott Fitzgerald (Jeffrey Meyers), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed.), Hemingway (James R. Mellow)
Lyons, Donald
T he 1920s will stand as the century's best decade for American prose, but the time was its own worst enemy. Edmund Wilson casually posed the problem when he wrote, "I find I am a man of the...
...We can see where Meyers found his insight...
...He makes a partial exception for The Great Gatsby (1925), where the author "uses fiction to tell his own story—reflecting on the superior Donald Lyons is the author of the new book, Independent Visions: A Critical Introduction to Recent Independent American Film (Ballantine...
...Here is the novel's narrator, Nick Carraway: I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives...
...and brutal qualities of the rich and on the impossibility of becoming one of them—but it is now truly invented fiction, not something carelessly cobbled together from diaries and letters and clever remarks...
...That eager and joyous faith and anticipation of surprise which the yet unmarred sheets beneath my hand held inviolate and unfailing—will not return...
...His June 1926 letter to his new friend Ernest Hemingway about an early version of The Sun Also Rises spots weaknesses that were to manifest themselves in every Hemingway opus: he points to Hemingway's "tendency to envelope [sic throughout Scott's poorly spelled letters] or (as it usually turns out) to embalm in mere wordiness an anecdote or joke thats casually appealed to you," to his "condescending casuallness," to his "24 sneers, superiorities, and nose-thumbings-atnothing," to his "elephantine facetiousSCOTT FITZGERALD: A BIOGRAPHY Jeffrey Meyers HarperCollins / 400 pages / $27.50 F. SCOTT FITZGERALD: A LIFE IN LETTERS Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli Charles Scribner's Sons/503 pages /$30 HEMINGWAY: A LIFE WITHOUT CONSEQUENCES James R. Mellow Addison-Wesley / 704 pages /$15 paper reviewed by DONALD LYONS 72 The American Spectator October 1994 ness...
...Mellow's snooty-sounding subtitle in fact comes from "Soldier's Home," a story about a Great War veteran finding life back with his parents difficult...
...It is one of the finest stories in Hemingway's first—and likely his best—book, the 1925 collection In Our Time...
...with a minimum of ingenuity, a reader can construct his own interactive Fitzgerald biography, and he can do so while keeping company solely with the lovely language of Fitzgerald...
...The decade's most characteristic writers metastasized much messy drinking and living into art...
...And how much of later (and poorer) Hemingway is about writers and writing...
...The hero of The Sun Also Rises is a writer, if a journalist (as was Hemingway, of course...
...0 f course, intelligent biographies, books that know what art is and what life is, are possible...
...The fruit had been picked and the fall wind blew through the bare trees...
...He reminds us, for instance, that literary epiphanies "have their origins in the mundane world, in the banalities of dusty journeys, cheap hotels, sweltering nights, noise, crowds, personal animosities...
...whatever the justice of that charge, it is clear that Fitzgerald the critic looked at Hemingway the writer without blinders...
...Mellow sees that fiction is a "complex weave of life circumstances, stray knowledge, unbidden psychological motivations, old hurts, new fears, grievances real or imagined, mere coincidences, suppressed rivalries, the constructive urge...
...This book will be a consciously artistic achievement...
...In Paris in the early twenties—Paris was for Hemingway what New York was for Fitzgerald, a guiltless escape from the Middle West—Hemingway was looking back to his familial experiences in Illinois and to his wartime experiences in Italy and was chiseling them into art...
...But this remarkably copious and brilliantly edited collection, which includes letters to Fitzgerald, too, establishes something else: Fitzgerald was his own best chronicler...
...I have read nothing since...
...At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes...
...This was Hemingway's modernism, but it was a modernism of the sketch...
...N ineteen-twenty-five was a good year for American writers other than these flamboyant presences...
...Gertrude Stein rang in with the huge The Making of Americans, but she had done her foundation-of-modernism work long ago in 1909 with Three Lives...
...Fitzgerald is frequently accused of blindly hero-worshipping Hemingway's virile self-confidence...
...He is thinking of the differences between Hemingway's real discovery of bullfighting and that discovery as rendered in Sun Also Rises, but his generalization is richly useful...
...From Turgenev and Joyce and Stein and Cezanne and from his own gift Hemingway found a way to make the crystalline words do the emotional work of the story...
...He put the apple in the pocket of his Mackinaw coat...
...Willa Cather published a masterwork, The Professor's House, not only a great book but a great modernist book, for it tells its tale through discontinuity and juxtaposition...
...I felt a sinking in my heart...
...Reading Mellow is like reading a Victorian sage, like reading Elizabeth Gaskell on Charlotte Brontë or reading George Eliot on anything...
...Another epic drinker, William Faulkner, achieved the decade's last great piece of American prose in The Sound and the Fury in 1929, and in talking about how he did it he summed up the flavor of a lot of the time's accomplishment: The writing of it as it now stands taught me both how to write and how to read, and even more: It taught me what I had already read, because on completing it I discovered, in a series of repercussions like summer thunder, the Flauberts and Conrads and Turgenevs which as much as ten years before I had consumed whole and without assimilating at all, as a moth or a goat might...
...It is no news that Fitzgerald wrote eloquent and beautiful letters...
...And he was, through his knowledge, a superb critic, as the Bruccoli collection of letters shows...
...Tellingly, he put the drinking before the writing...
...He was an extremely conscious artist, a young writer in whom the Parisian weather and the lessons of Gertrude Stein about verbal spareness and emotional indirection and the lessons of Cezanne about spatial geometries were fusing with his memories at an intense heat...
...For Whom the Bell Tolls has a writer for hero, and so forth...
...I have not had to...
...Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness...
...Green Hills of Africa discourses at great length on the subject...
...However he went on to play life's hand, this writer knew a great deal in 1925...
...He finds heroine Brett Ashley bookishly unreal and hero Jake Barnes less "like an impotent man" than "like a man in a sort of moral chastity belt...
...Language like this comprehends not just the flush of romanticism, but a grownup awareness of romanticism's limits...
...I am still expecting something exciting: drinks, animated conversation, gaiety, brilliant writing, uninhibited exchange of ideas...
...I shall never know it again...
...his late letters to his daughter are famous...
...His is a wise, sane voice unwilling to reduce art to gossip, insisting that "it is in the distinctions between the life and work that one is more likely to find those clues that suggest a writer's motivations, the exercise of the creative mind...
...When the book was done, he wrote to John Peale Bishop, about a certain vagueness in Jay Gatsby, "You are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy...
...it begins: The rain stopped as Nick turned into the road that went up through the orchard...
...he had no architectonic knack and the traditional structures of his later novels rather imprison than enable his talent...
...But finally writers' biographies are a drug, the detoxifying antidote to which is to go back and read the writers themselves...
...After these patronizing bromides, Meyers turns happily to Fitzgerald's sins, his "worship of youth, his sexual naïveté, attraction to money, alcoholism, self-pity and lack of dedication to his art...
...After such lame praise and facile blame, it is well to summon up the sound of Gatsby to remind ourselves of the art of it, the joy of it...
...Writers were fusing at intense heat their living and their reading...
...But Fitzgerald has learned from Joyce's Portrait how to blend the two tones...
...Amid today's welter of tabloid biographies he offers a high pleasure...
...Edmund Wilson casually posed the problem when he wrote, "I find I am a man of the twenties...
...But the special oxygen in American prose in those years was that of modernism...
...Mellow reminds us that Nick, the fisherman hero of "Big Two-Hearted River," the elusively beautiful story that concludes In Our Time, is not just a man escaping some unspecifiedawful past and healing some unspoken wound, but is a writer...
...He gives the names of some "real-life models" for the characters but allows that the novel "transcends Fitzgerald's personal life and brilliantly expresses some of the dominant themes in American literature...
...it is the third in a trilogy of books about twenties modernists, the previous two centering on Gertrude Stein and on Fitzgerald...
...The whole sad picture is miraculously in that second sentence...
...He knew what he was doing...
...What is surprising about Hemingway is how much of his writing is about writing...
...it is one of Hemingway's characteristically elliptical pieces about tensions between the sexes...
...some recent writing about the period de-metastasizes the art back into booze...
...As he wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins in 1924 about Gatsby, "In my new novel I'm thrown on purely creative work—not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world...
...John Dos Passos published his New York City novel, Manhattan Transfer...
...Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well...
...With noises of disapproval, the rest of this dismal book chronicles every last erotic fumble and drunken nastiness of poor Fitzgerald, who died in 1940 at the age of 44 in the Hollywood he was in the act of capturing so well in the unfinished Last Tycoon...
...Literally, all one needs to know is here...
...71 The American Spectator October 1994 73...
...I never at any one time saw him clear myself—for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind...
...James R. Mellow's book on Hemingway is such a book...
...more covertly, all the analysis of bullfighting is a metaphorical analysis of writing...
...In "The Three-Day Blow," one of the stories in In Our Time, Nick talks with his pal Bill about the edgy breakup he's had with his girl...
...And there was a towering masterwork in a pre-modernist, full-throated, massive mode: Theodore Dreiser' s An American Tragedy...
...Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes made unintelligible circles inside...
...Nick stopped and picked up a Wagner apple from beside the road, shiny in the brown grass from the rain...
...A case in point is Jeffey Meyers, a prolific biographer who treats Scott Fitzgerald's writing as the excrescence of a misspent life...
Vol. 27 • October 1994 • No. 10
