Fitzgerald and the American Dream

...It was fun to be alive then with Hoover just settled in the White House as we debated the revolution---"of the word" (a recent Paris import)--in the corridors of bohemia...

...It was Fitzgerald's bad luck not to have foreseen this "moralistic term" which meant, to later readers, that the only respectable literary relationship to the twenties would The Alternative February 1974 5 be an outward show of detachment...

...Fitzgerald wrote intensely about a single, peculiar decade, but he used those years to expand on the American Dream as an ongoing spectacle--in which, of course, he himself shared...

...Malcolm Cowley writes: "It was as if all his fiction described a big dance to which he had taken, as he once wrote, the prettiest girl.., and as if he had stood at the same time outside the ballroom, a little midwestern boy with his nose to the glass wondering how much the tickets cost and who paid for the music...

...She and the audacious readers of the twenties delighted in their fashionable nihilism and in what was thought to be their alienation from their native culture...

...I~t me tell you about the very rich," he wrote in the prologue to "The Rich Boy...

...Nowhere in the literary world, in fact, do we demand such intellectual discipline as in fiction about society...

...It's the inexorable working of the American Dream...

...half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tracters--these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole . . . . " Fitzgerald regarded the effect of beauty on man's imagination with a romantic mixture of fascination and fear that distinguishes him from just about any other American novelist...

...Most of us also go along with Cowley's observation that "the handle by which he took hold of the characters was their dreams...

...He became a reformer among reformers...

...From his mother's side came the subtle tutoring of one of the oldest and (formerly) richest families in St...

...His lyric panoramas are in the best tradition of whitman, as, for instance, his likening of the very rich and very beautiful Nicole Diver to a sort of majestic tugboat with millions of American Dreams in tow: "Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil...

...It was a wonderful year...

...But America had other things on its mind...

...He wrote about bobbed hair and debutantes while the poor got poorer, the rich got richer, and capitalism collapsed under its own surfeit...

...Today we have difficulty establishing sympathy with his protagonists' world simply because of its twentyishness...

...But the 1929 I remember is all mine for I lived it, grew up in it, and it probably helped fashion me as no other year of my life did...

...When Broadway ventured into high drama, however, it usually ended in a pratfall...

...He expressed vague intellectual disapproval of wars, of course, but he felt the nagging suspicion that men would continue to fight them, not for lofty moral reasons, but because men secretly enjoyed donning the trappings of rank and distinction and shining for their friends in heroic disregard for death...

...Dick Diver, guiding his entourage in 1920 around the scarred battlefields of France, exclaims, 'ZYhy, this was a love-battle-there was a century of middle-class love spent here . . . . You had to have the whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember...

...Gertrude Stein may finally have been a better judge of painters than she was of writers...

...During the ten subsequent boom years, he produced the bulk of what ensuing generations have remembered him by...

...They had all the advantages of a nineteenth-century upbringing---a civilizing education, an unambiguous moral code, a close neighborhood and family--and of a twentieth-century adulthood blessed by the new cosmopolitanism of America which gave their talents freedom to develop...

...Anthony Patch was the grandson of Adam J. Patch, Civil War cavalryman and robber baron, who at the age of fiftyseven "determined . . . to consecrate the remainder of his life to the moral regeneration of the world...

...I'm glad I wrote my plays before I saw Pennsylvania...

...Other hits of the year included a bit of Future Camp so that later generations could "tiptoe through the tulips" with Tiny Tim on late-night television...

...CGatsby turned out all right in the end," insists Nick Carraway...

...He had a double vision--a postwar vision that saw everything getting bigger and rosier, and a prewar vision that augured the awful collapse of the whole show...

...II Yet what were misfortunes to Fitzgerald's reputation were also responsible for the startling originality of his American Dream, for his exclusive emphasis on its guises, rather than its goals, on style rather than substance...

...He had nothing to do with '%vhat foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams . . . . ") As for Fitzgerald the man, there was too much enthusiasm for conscious irony to get even a foothold...

...from his father came the embarrassment of failure...

...It was also a year in a decade given over to High Hyperbole, an affliction of poets and young people made noxious only when uttered by elder statesmen and other demagogues...

...it was clucking its collective tongue at the wonders exposed in Ripley's Believe It Or Not;, but it was also reading--at the very top of the best-seller fiction list--All Quiet on the Western Front, mass kitsch for a mass audience that had ignored such earlier literate World War I novels as Three Soldiers (by John .Dos Passos) and The Enormous Room (by e. e. cummings...

...But not only did we fail to ask whether such growth could be genuinely sustained, we also failed to question whether wealth brought happiness...

...But beyond this point, our view is muddled...

...He objectified her as the end of America's travail...

...He would sum up the American character in a single fact...

...The modern reader finds Nietzsche lurking in the dark corners of his fiction, alongside characters whose social or racial chauvinism lacks any irony whatsoever...

...Fitzgerald portrayed his era as one of unlimited possibilities...

...Heaven," said Mr...

...There was a reverse side to Fitzgerald's romantic enthrallment with mood and detail, and this was his terrible weakness in thinking out an intellectual problem...

...The ~successful" couples plunge into endless bickering and competition, become restless, give in to misunderstood passions, grow suicidal, and finally destroy either themselves or the illusion they once had of themselves...

...As late as 1959 Morison and Commager, summing up the concensus, remarked: ~ f we may use a moralistic term _9 . . the mark of failure is heavy on those years: failure in terms of responsibilities evaded, and of opportunities missed...

...and second, Fitzgerald may have overcome this deficiency in his best fiction, e.g., in The Great C, atsby...

...Almost by the week Fitzgerald measured the fads of America...

...You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancee, and little cafes in Valence . . . . All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a gust of highly explosive love...

...According to the rules of his world, everyone was drawn forward by visions of unutterable splendor---everyone, from God, who (explains Maury Noble in The Beautiful and the Damned) inspired the Bible so that millions might adore Him, to the illiterate soldiers of '2Vlay Day" returning from Europe imagining triumphal arches and garlanded virgins...

...Higher, ~ said Mr...

...As the beliefs of these writers were discovered and appreciated, the writers themselves came to be regarded as the clearest exponents of what that native, "patriate" culture is all about...

...That this was intended primarily as criticism rather than praise says something about the distinctly nonromantic standards by which Fitzgerald has been judged...

...Fitzgerald's first and best-selling novel, This S/de of Paradise, was accepted by Max Perkins at Scribners in September 1919...

...it's simply the way he sees Americans act...

...Fitzgerald understood something about Hemingway that perhaps Hemingway himself did not understand: that peculiar emotion that drove Fitzgerald and Hemingway and a whole generation willingly, even gladly, to suicide before the machinegun...

...Fitzgerald's first misfortune was that the most productive period of his life coincided --sympathetically, or so it seemed--with the 1920-19]0 decade...

...It was the spirit of Babylon, and Fitzgerald himself only half-doubted it...

...men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads...

...Amory Blaine, the Romantic Egotist (as Fitzgerald wanted to title his first novel) was a natural "pagan," to whom the American Dream was a million disconnected things, all of them surprises...

...From these fortuitous circumstances came not rebels, but artists who preserved the foundation of belief upon which twentieth-century America was built...

...But there was "serious" drama, too...

...He could easily slough off the instinct to make moral judgments (far too easily, many have said) in order to escape into glorified detail...

...He can live too many lives trying to find it and end up like Jay Gatsby, a phantom without a past, or to a lesser degree like Nick Carraway, "enchanted and repulsed by the inexhaustible variety of life...

...It was fun writing them, producing them, directing them...

...The Great War never had the same singular and profound impact on Fitzgerald as it had on so many other writers of the twenties...

...Fitzgerald's letters, reveals biographer Andrew Turnbull, overflow with systematic listings of his strengths and weaknesses as others saw them...

...In that last decade he wrote little first-rate fiction, except to finish Tender is the Night, which was based on his early European revelries...

...For decades America thought that Hemingway got the better in this exchange...

...Social distinction was and is the most important ingredient of the American Dream...

...They set before him a society untroubled by any grave moral decision-except how best to succeed...

...Surprisingly, time has not erased this animosity for the twenties as an historical idea...

...Possession of money, we have found, is the simplest and easiest part of being rich: it's no more difficult for us to reailocate wealth collectively than it was for Gatsby to amass it alone...

...In that "leftward" year the reading public was getting its belly laughs from Chic Sale's The Specialist, a hymn to the nation's vanishing outhouses...

...The relationship between the dreamer and the dream: all else is irrelevant in Fitzgerald's world...

...Cities grew, roads spread, and the price of stocks and land soared...

...History is bunk," declared Henry Ford in 1919--and so were Wilsonian notions of improving the rules of history...

...In the thirties, when America roared off to a New Deal and new dreams, which doubtless Fitzgerald understood less well, he was blamed for social blindness and thus for immaturity...

...I had never been farther away from New York than New Jersey, and the coal mines of the Keystone State were as far removed from me as was the Swanee River from Irving Caesar...

...Fitzgerald was not the leader of a "lost generation," writes Arthur Mizener, "except in the sense that explorers convinced that El Dorado is over the next mountain range may be said to be lost...

...To be rich, Fitzgerald stresses, is to possess a quality that allows one to create splendors rather than monstrosities...

...F...

...Twenty years later, facing the Arc de Triomphe, he told of his admiration for Napoleon...

...The temptation to draw parallels between the twenties and other eras of American growth was for him irresistible...

...The Great War may be an aberration, but surely war itself is as perennial as love...

...At Princeton (records Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise) this was the difference between "the Slicker" ("Dresses well...

...The twenties may now be buried under the black crepe of failure--and Fitzgerald with them---but while they lasted they provided Fitzgerald a temporarily fixed pattern of social and political mores and fantastic human energy yearning to excel...

...According to Malcolm Cowley, who formally dosed the circle on Miss Stein a couple of years ago, they weren't a "lost" but a "lucky" generalion...

...later he said that his political position was always "pretty left...

...Fitzgerald believed that the everlasting reality of American life is the American Dream, and no theme is so universal in his writing as the consequences of pursuing and enjoying that dream...

...it offers not a moral vision, but an aesthetic vision...

...Time and again Gatsby reveals a sort of infantile regression in search of what he calls "the past...

...To Hemingway, cummings, and Dos Passos, the war was a macro-symbol of disillusionment, an embodiment of what they had learned by painful rites de passage, that idealism in the abstract is death itself, and that the immediate, the particular, the experienced are all there is left and so must be trusted...

...In 1923 he wrote of upper-class scions dissipating in booze and brawls...

...Plummeting readership, emotional "exhaustion," his wife's insanity, and chronic drinking rushed him to an early death in 1940...

...At best this has yielded a classic subordination of character and plot to form...

...The popularity of Fitzgerald's preference, on the other hand, was doomed to die with the expiring of the decade...

...He likes to be popular, to be admired, to be magnanimous with some and cruel to others...

...Because of two grievous historical misfortunes, we still hesitate to consider Fitzgerald for what he is: the great, native expositor of our own collective fantasy...

...Two points might be made in Fitzgerald's defense...

...Caesar has recently divulged that he wrote the lyrics for Gershwin's "Swanee" years before he had ever been south of Fourteenth Street, adding: "I'm glad I wrote the words before I saw the river...

...the Jazz Age, he said, '%ore him up, flattered him, and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did...

...When not thus engaged--or in between--I was busy with productions, in my own little theatres variously situated on Charles Street, Washington Square, and East Ninth Street--writing one-act plays of miners in the soft (hard...

...As such, he suggested that not only were these "lucky" times for writers, but lucky times for the Republic, which was then old enough to be affluent and young enough so that people could use affluence to ennoble or degrade themselves as they wished...

...And the Marx Brothers---all of them, in the life and in the flesh--were cavorting in Animal Crackers...

...Elmer Rice's Street Scene opened the year on Broadway, at the same time the Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street was presenting four maginficent one-act plays by Eugene O'Neill, and Eva I~ Gal]ienne's Civic Repertory Theatre on Fourteenth Street was presenting superb productions of Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Ibsen for two bits, the fourth part of a dollar...

...Unlike Dos Passos, Fitzgerald suffuses this quest for the American Dream with a childlike innocence which was also characteristic of the age...

...Beauty he personified as a beautiful woman...

...As Cowley remembers it, "his room was full of calendars and clocks...

...Man can pursue beauty too single-mindedly and be imprisoned by it, as John T. Unger is literally imprisoned by his sweetheart's father (in "Diamond as Big as the Ritz...

...He amasses great sums of money through questionable enterprises, but it causes him to have that visage that "looks as though he had just killed a man"--and so turns Daisy away...

...The parties were bigger . . . . The pace was f a s t e r . . . The shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper...

...Young people wore out early--they were hard and languid at twenty-one . . . . the city was bloated, glutted, stupid with cakes and circuses, and a new expression, ' 0 yeah?' summed up all the enthusiasm evoked by the announcement of the last super-skyscrapers...

...Middle-class Rosemary shopping in Paris cannot help but notice that Nicole, the descendant of a long line of American tycoons, '%ought all these things not a bit like a high-class courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional equipment and insurance--but with an entirely different point of view . . . . She illustrated very simple principles . . . so accurately that there was grace in the procedure...

...They were times when nearly everyone clung proudly to his step on the hierarchy, be it as provincial as the KKK, boorish as the Rotary, exclusive as the Boston Society, and when nearly everyone struggled madly to climb upwards...

...But how we spend it, alas, is what makes us unequal...

...Strip away that mystical pyramid-order from society, learned men of the thirties counseled, and the fundamental equality of men would manifest itself...

...Tyro Amory Blaine burns to grow up and be philosopher-tycoon-athlete-artist...

...The dream was distinct, the will was distinct, and as America began to overflow with affluence, Fitzgerald could record the weird romantic perversities that occur when the will, having achieved the dream, tries to escape inside it...

...Nor was it, as the later chroniclers called it, "the year of the great swing leftward...

...and without that sympathy we find their lives "doomed" (in the words of Midge Decter) "not so much because he dignified their illusions but because the illusions he dignified were so cheap...

...Maury Noble, reclining in his overstuffed divan, avers that he "wants to become immensely rich as quickly as possible...

...Nostalgia can be defined as pleasure derived from someone else's memories...

...This was also the difference between being condescendingly sociable (joining just the "right" clubs and not too many), and--poor wretch who tried!---"running it out," being too eagerly sociable...

...coal pits of Pennsylvania...

...Today, after repeated attempts to dissolve that pyramid, perhaps America has second thoughts...

...Like Nick Carraway and no doubt Fitzgerald, we sympathize with Gatsby: "You're better than all the rest of them put together...

...It is surprising that Fitzgerald is the only great novelist to have depicted this dream as distinctively romantic and distinctively American...

...His prison-door and the child Pearl coexist, irreconcilable bipoles of the Puritan "Utopia," just as West Egg's "valley of the ashes" and Gatsby's green light, the exhausted dream and the promised dream are inevitable extremes of the industrial Age...

...But we also have the realistic sense that much of his characters' discussion of "their own" ideas and feelings is all pretense-witty lines to make others think them intelligent or funny...

...asked if he has any plans about himself, Dick Diver answers, "I've only got one, Franz, and that's to be a good psychologist---maybe the greatest one that ever lived," to which Franz, befuddled, says, ~that's very good--and very American...

...What Fitzgerald gained in immediacy he lost in coherence for that staid tradition of Howells and James and Dreiser...

...Hawthorne, Fitzgerald's closest romantic and American counterpart, would have understood...

...Everyone concedes that Fitzgerald is distinctively "American" in the sense that foreign readers rate him far lower relative to, say, Faulkner than do American readers...

...Thus, William Carlos Williams was convinced (in 1925) that America was "the most lawless nation on earth," and Dos Passos demanded that the Widener Library 8 The Alternative February 1974...

...Buchanan has but one attribute, and with it he keeps Daisy--this is what Fitzgerald describes as a "vast carelessness" that comes only with growing up rich, with not being an arriviste like Gatsby...

...And Fitzgerald learned early the cruel law of charisma: the more you sweat and work to achieve social heights, the phonier you seem...

...Returning from Europe to New York in 1926, he could sense ominous changes though he had been away only two years: "The restlessness . . . approached hysteria...

...The twenties suggested to Fitzgerald such grand and whimsical ambitions that his characters seem one-dimensional yet alive by today's standards...

...First, when it came to writing about young people, the "ideas" of his time were not very informed, and certainly not exciting...

...Fitzgerald's second misfortune was a matter of literary temperament: Fitzgerald was a romantic writer of what was known as the "social novel" or the "novel of manners,"--genres which in this country have been requisitioned by naturalists and realists ever since the Civil War...

...Fitzgerald would begin with the concrete bits of his era----songs, car grills, street lamps, skyscrapers, dance steps---and then infuse them with the passions that adhere to them, that attract or repel, that make them beautiful or ugly...

...Critics have rarely admitted the ideological undertow of this judgment, though they have complained that Fitzgerald was an accomplice to what "went wrong" in the twenties...

...Thus it was easy for antagonistic critics to argue---and this argument stuck - - t h a t Fitzgerald said nothing essential about the American character, least of all the American Dream, but that he merely glorified the vulgarity of a peculiar era in American history and then was gone...

...From early childhood, his intelligence expressed itself not in analysis but in wit, not in explanation but in poetic compression...

...chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories...

...Fitzgerald shared this preoccupation with the immediate, which is (as John Aldridge has pointed out) the business of youth...

...Paul...

...Pretends that dress is superficial--but knows it isn't . . . . Goes into activities he can shine in . . . Hair slicked") and '~the Big Man" ( ' . . . thinks dress is superficial, and is inclined to be careless about i t . . . Goes out for everything from a sense of d u t y . . . Hair not slicked...

...Personal embarrassments such as The Crack-Up further fueled hostile fires...

...Gertrude Stein, that crusty Victorian, called them a "lost" generation...

...An essential ingredient of the American Dream, of course, is wealth, and in the manner of his age, Fitzgerald profoundly understood the effects of wealth...

...Yet Fitzgerald knew that the American Dream has one consolation: only by pursuing it can any of us achieve that "heightened sensitivity to life...

...In setting forth the American Dream, Fitzgerald does not---as some have suggested transform it via critique into the American Failure...

...We can expect that Fitzgerald will benefit most from this shift in critical perspective...

...Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes, sought a "Platonic conception of himself," and Platonic forms, of course, can draw man inward as well as outward...

...Whey are different from you and me . . . . "To which Hemingway scornfully answered, "Sure, they have more money...

...What sober reflection do we expect from a man who summed up the twenties as "the greatest, gaudiest spree in history," whose wife compares their first trip to New York to "small children in a great bright unexplored barn," who saw their life together "just like blowing bubbles--they burst, but more bubbles just as beautiful can be blown--and burst--till the soap and water are gone--and that's the way we'll be, I guess 'o...

...I have said that This S/de of Parad/se commits almost every sin that a novel can commit," wrote Edmund Wilson reviewing his friend's novel, '~but it does not commit the unpardonable sin: it does not fail to live...

...but all these did not really minister to much delight...

...And Gatsby is brought side by side with James J. Hill for their likeness...

...Thus, there are...

...He compared the Midwesterner arriving in New York City to "Dutch sailors" who first set eyes on "a fresh, green breast of a new world...

...It also meant no other great writer in this century would attempt his theme: the American Dream as a value-free contrast between a linear, ebullient idealism---lovely to contemplate, attracting to itself every romantic metaphor ever written---and a vulgar, pragmatic, unselfmnscious manner of Americans pursuing chat dream...

...Yet our emerging appreciation of this theme is largely a matter of hindsight...

...Withal, it was a glorious year because I was so much involved in it, acting (as a peon) in b~sta (uptown at the Garrick), and when that folded (which it soon mercifully did) I managed things backstage on lower Seventh Avenue for the Irish Theatre's productions of O'Casey's Silver Tassie and Synge's Playboy...

...Fitzgerald understood that motion depends upon beauty, and that ambitious persons-not successful or happy persons---have the clearest appreciation for her...

...Invariably, they overrate Fitzgerald's gift of prophecy, his moral vision of the times, and they exaggerate the somber and the tragic when it is precisely the tragic moments, as Fitzgerald himself admits in The Beautiful and the Damned, which he had a tendency to mishandle...

...Again and again the fairy-tale ending explodes...

...Wqith Americans ordering suits by the gross in Imndon," he writes in passing, "the Bond Street tailors perforce agreed to moderate their cut to the American longwaisted figure and loose-fitting taste, something subtle passed to America, the style of man...

...girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Fiveand-Tens on Christmas Eve...

...His diary shows that as a boy he dedicated an hour a day to "lifting weights," but he just can't achieve that '2x)dy capable of enormous leverage" of Tom Buchanan (Daisy's husband...

...The rules were arbitrary, but no matter...

...Yet when it came time to decide what new elemental standards were to be chosen, most of Fitzgerald's contemporaries opted for private, personal codes that would later gain respectability in the existentialist flowering in Europe, which would in fact grow in popularity throughout this centms...

...Later, opinions would change...

...The twenties freed Fitzgerald entirely from the task of judging the worth of the American Dream (a task at which he would surely have failed...

...Fitzgerald's refreshing honesty in portraying man-in-society was responsible for the smashing initial success of his novels, and it reflected a new drift in those postwar years--away from notions of individual duty and social fairness (Woodrow Wilson, in advocating that ivy league colleges disband the clubs' cruel initiation ceremonies, was fighting a losing battle), and toward a frank awareness of our multifarious, half-conscious ties to social vanity...

...Turnbull writes that Fitzgerald, %o his everlasting regret," just missed serving action as an officer (the war ended as his regiment was boarding ship...

...We are the only people who talk fondly about a national dream...

...Scott Fitzgerald '~ay Day" (1922) We have come nearly full circle in our reexamination of America's most celebrated fraternity of writers, that scattering of prodigies--Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald among them born between 1894 and 1900...

...By 1930, the same could be written about him...

...In an essay entitled "You Can't Duck a Hurricane under a Beach Umbrella," Philip Rahv wrote in 1934 that Fitzgerald himself "was swept away by the waste and extravagence of the people he described, and he identified with them . . . . In these days . . . Fitzgerald cannot escape realizing how near the collapse of his class really is...

...Walking with Daisy, "Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place among the trees---he could climb it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder...

...His sensibilities, like those of most romantics, were divided into seemingly disconnected realms...

...HI In the early twenties, Fitzgerald was an aristocratic--romantic island in a literary world still awash with ZoIa, Spencer, and Progressivism...

...A 1929 production of Thackeray's "Becky Sharp" with a cast of 100 lasted for one whole week...

...At worst it has swamped us with cheap naturalism, where social theory is forced onto plot, and where genuine emotion is extinguished...

...His personal dissolution became a sort of exemplum of the woes of the higher-thanproletarian classes...

...Fitzgerald's viewpoint may have been the most realistic after all...

...Late in life he admitted that he had always found thinking itself "incredibly difficult," like "the moving of great secret trunks...

...Of course, no one "runs it out" on such a grandiose scale as Gatsby--that grown-up Oxford college boy who never could learn how to say "old chap" with the right inflection...

...They were times of confidence and enthusiasm when men and women, if they weren't capable of the loftiest ideals, made cruder pursuits seem just as lovely with occasionally tragic results...

...To Fitzgerald, man was drawn forward and sometimes seduced by beauty, not, as the naturalists would have it, pushed forward and sometimes crushed by conditioning, education, and habit...

...Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and dates"--this, in Hemingway's words, became the theme of a whole new genre, the disillusionment-war novel...

...With the Great Crash, Fitzgerald's career and his life began to fall apart...

...It's unfair...

...Fitzgerald echoed with the rest in This Side of Paradise that his generation "awoke to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...

...The secret is to be casual, to pay assiduous attention to your mannerisms without seeming to pay attention at all...

...He had a politician's faculty for measuring nuances of character-of the way people dressed, talked, emoted --and he had an electric sympathy for the causes of their restlessness...

...It meant he stood little chance of being welcomed by critics in his lifetime...

...For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California...

...Fitzgerald was acutely aware of our tendency to worship heroes, to be infatuated with men who hold sway over others by some nameless quality in their demeanor...

...Fitzgerald, it is said, helped fool America...

...Gatsby holds enormous, raucous parties but can't attract the "right" people (Daisy's friends...

...When Maury Noble (modeled on George Jean Nathan) rambles on about metaphysics behind a train depot at 3:00 A. M., no one listening cares about Pythagoras, though they bathe gloriously in his charm...

...The Alternative February 1974 7 Said Wilson of Fitzgerald: "He has been given imagination without intellectual control of it . . . and he has been given a gift for expression without many ideas to express...

...no Arrowsmiths in Fitzgerald's fiction--no principled individuals taking stands against society--and had Fitzgerald written a novel about war, there would have been no Frederic Henrys...

...Since our first serious reexamination of Fitzgerald in the early fifties, critics seeking to raise his reputation have committed enormous mistakes by ignoring this essential romanticism...

...What links them is beauty, the contemplation of some "orgiastic future"--as concrete and fleeting as dawn in New York City which turns momentarily the heads of all-night gamblers, or as abstract and fulsome as the "promise" of Daisy Buchanan, a word which always enters Nick Garraway's description of her...

...Man is a social animal--or so Fitzgerald believed...

...The songs we sang (or whistled) were by Gershwin and Porter, the former represented by Porgy and Bess (which had opened the year before) while Cole Porter's Fifty Million b-~renchmen was the smash musical of the year, and the hit song of 1929, "You Do Something To Me," came from the show...

...Romanticism does not destroy illusion, it exploits illusion...

...Fitzgerald's method was utterly different, so different that few readers or critics in his time understood it...

...l"his is the top floor," said the elevator m a r s . "Have another floor put in, " said Mr...

...When he wrote that "the twenties" were themselves an era, ~'lasting almost exactly ten years," beginning with the May Day riots of 1919 and "leaping to a spectacular death in October 1929," he might just as well have been describing his own career...

...In this respect they were all extensions of Fitzgerald himself, who once told Wilson: "I want to be the greatest writer ever, don't you...

...We bathe in warm fellowship as we join in singing "After the Ball" (which even grandpa might have difficulty recalling) or "Shine On Harvest Moon" (which may be grandma's moonshine, not the astronauts...

...tzgerald doesn't condemn it...

...Outlandish fantasies, lopsided plots, and pretentious dialogue dissuaded most attempts to take Fitzgerald seriously as an artist...

...When Fitzgerald was nine, he records that he "fell 6 The Alternative February 1974 madly into admiration for a boy who played basketball with melancholy defiance...

...We know that Fitzgerald's personal life was marked by an extraordinary attention to social status...

...Fitzgerald possessed perhaps the purest aesthetic intuition of any American writer...

...The western world did have more wars to fight...