The Great Fitzgerald

...The milestones of his progress were the publication of The Crack-Up in 1945 and the appearance of Arthur Mizener's biography in 1951...

...By the standards of lesser men then...

...The former two, unlike the latter, won none of the great literary prizes (neither Nobel nor even Pulitzer awards were theirs...

...To many at the time, he seemed a popular writer with important claims to serious attention—a kind of literary Gershwin...

...Fitzgerald is the master of what he called "the novel of selected incident...

...The best piece in the book to my way of thinking is an essay of literary criticism entitled "How to Waste Material...

...A contemporary critic has indicated his belief that the fascination of Fitzgerald's literary accomplishment is inseparably connected with the legend of his life—Princeton, Zelda, the Riviera, Hollywood...

...What brings Fitzgerald and Dreiser together, in spite of the surface distinctions (or even those which go deeper), is that each has succeeded in catching a more representative image of American life in our time than any others I can think of...

...Anyone who has read fairly widely in Fitzgerald stories as well as novels will find such a demonstration unnecessary...

...He was a "natural" writer who, even at his third-best, could not help being better than most other writers at the top of their form...

...It is an incidental intention of this book to suggest the quantity of good work Fitzgerald did, and it therefore includes nothing of his which has appeared in book form before...

...There was brilliance and solidity about even his slightest efforts...

...None of them compares in quality with the stories in Fitzgerald's four books of previously published stories —Flappers and Philosophers, Tales of the Jazz Age, All the Sad Young Men, and Taps at Reveille...

...Technical differences first of all...

...I mean pieces like "How To Live on $36,000 a Year" and its sequel "How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year," both of which, like so much of Fitzgerald's work, appeared first in the Saturday Evening Post...

...Fitzgerald was one of those rare writers, as the saying has it, whose laundry slips should have made interesting reading...

...Our greatest losses are the ones which we hardly realize at the moment they occur...

...He becomes just another American millionaire and gangster...

...And just as certain English critics, like Arnold, unduly awed by Byron's European success with men like Goethe and Taine, were inclined to overestimate him in spite of the warnings of their native taste, so in our time Hemingway and Faulkner, patronized by Gide and other influential Europeans, may have been overestimated a little in literary circles as compared with Fitzgerald...

...The legend of his life is an obscuring mist between the reader and everything that is most pure and delicate in the writer's work...

...The three Basil stories in this book and the three Pat Hobby stories were worth reprinting, even though they strike me as somewhat tired and mediocre examples of Fitzgerald...

...And this in spite of the world of differences between them...

...This may account for the underestimation of Dreiser and Fitzgerald by Europeans, as compared with some of their contemporaries such as Hemingway and Faulkner...

...Yet this not unflattering estimate has been revised upward with the passing years...

...Fitzgerald, who was born in St...

...author, "The Proustian Vision," "The Crippled Giwit" "Time that is intolerant Of the brave and innocent Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives...

...Dreiser descends (in more senses than one perhaps) from Whitman...

...Perhaps literary criticism is too high a name for it...

...What characters in American fiction can be said even remotely to be as central as they are...

...Fitzgerald is one of the great rhetoricians in the history of English literature, and Dreiser is the creator of some of the most awkward, lumbering, ungraceful sentences in our language...

...Mizener, the editor, as he states them in his introduction : "For all the notorious irregularity of his life [a notoriety, incidentally, which the writer of these words had some part in establishing], he produced in his short career a remarkable quantity of work, nearly all of it professional in quality and a surprising amount of it of very high quality indeed...

...The review records the shock of recognition by one fine writer of another...

...But the difficulty of communicating the virtues of some literature, such as lyric poetry, to one who does not immediately feel them in the language in which they were written does not mean that these virtues do not exist...

...In this sense, it is going to disappoint the expectations of Mr...

...Clyde Griffiths and Jay Gatsby seem to divide the empire of our tragic ambitions and accomplishments between them...

...Speaking for myself, whereas increasing age has ruthlessly criticized my youthful taste for such writers as Thomas Wolfe and Romain Rolland, it has built up Fitzgerald even as it has left Dreiser largely intact...

...These two—Dreiser and Fitzgerald—increasingly detach themselves as the most significant American writers of the first half of the century...

...And he never failed to be entertaining...

...Fitzgerald takes up the story (as T. S. Eliot was the first to point out) where James left off, and through James he is related to earlier European masters like Turgenev and Flaubert...

...The comparison which the aforesaid critic made between Fitzgerald and Byron is deceptive, because there is, in spite of the poet's greatness, something coarse in Byron's language (as Matthew Arnold complained) as well as about his conceptions, which we do not find in Fitzgerald...

...That is the real justification of the present book...

...Good work"—but by what standards...

...H. Auden on W B. Yeats Time, the great winnower, breaks down pretensions, vanity and guile...

...I have read Fitzgerald in the French version (Edouard Rotidi's translation, Gatsby le Magnifique) and am aware of how much of him disappears in that language...

...Mizener does not mean to suggest by the high standards created by Fitzgerald himself...

...More intriguing in this latest volume are some of the essays, the very titles of which have excited curiosity among readers of Fitzgerald and have not hitherto been easily available...

...This volume, a selection of uncollected stories and essays, is not likely to add very much to Fitzgerald's reputation as a writer (except possibly as a critic of other men's work...

...Hemingway's exotic variety of romanticism found an even readier access to the popular heart of America than Fitzgerald's domestic variety, and the energy which Fitzgerald expended to assure that triumph may be part of the same impulse to self-destruction which manifested itself in so many other ways in the course of his life...

...I myself should say exactly the opposite...

...His best work is absolutely astounding in its quality of slim efficiency...

...it is largely propaganda in favor of Ernest Hemingway, masquerading as a review of his volume of stories In Our Time...

...Surely Mr...

...W...

...The series of minute, almost incommunicable excellences which mark his style in the original is gone, and the unique fitness of the hero to represent life in America in his time is lost sight of...

...Dreiser, though he did not merit the indignity of that paper-covered edition of An American Tragedy which digests it to a third of its original size, undoubtedly suffers from a verbal excess which invites such treatment...

...Though they are finely drawn, they are hopelessly eccentric in comparison with the creations of Dreiser and Fitzgerald...

...They are part of widely separated streams of literary tradition...

...There is something so tremulously and autochthonously poetic about Fitzgerald, as about Keats, that it must apparently forever escape the notice of even the most sensitive observer who does not happen to be American...

...Ironically enough, Fitzgerald's worry about the lack of popularity of Hemingway's work was so misplaced that the sales of the subject of the essay soon far surpassed those of the writer of it...

...Paul, Minnesota, in 1896 and died in Hollywood, California, in 1940, did not loom so large on the horizon of American letters at the moment of his departure as he does now...

...The structural distinctions between their work correspond to stylistic ones as well...

...If comparisons are in order at all, a comparison with Keats would be more apt...

...The centrality of an image of a given society is difficult, if not impossible, to feel for those who have not been born and bred in it...

...Jake Barnes or Popeye...

...But Time shores up as well...