Fitzgerald at Firsthand

...But his failure to supply a satisfactory interpretation of his own is...

...We have, in short, the stereotype of the quivering sensibility, the artist as high priest of a cult of insense living: "He had an instinct for quickening life" and was a "spirit" of the sort "whose intensity erodes the flesh," and so on...

...Turnbull has failed to do so, and he is left without any real perspective...

...Fitzgerald idolized him and believed he himself had had some part in bringing about Hemingway's initial popularity...

...Still, the portrait of Fitzgerald which emerges from the book's accumulation of details is a moving one...

...The biographer must succeed in getting outside, as well as inside his subject...

...Mizener's tough-mindedness is missing in Turnbull's treatment of Fitzgerald's emotional malady...

...elsewhere, "he seethed with poetic invention" and "creative fire...

...As for Hemingway, the glimpses we get of him in Turnbull's book are curiously sinister...

...That Turnbull should choose not to adopt the interpretation of his predecessor is, of course, no fault in itself...

...According to Mizener, however, Fitzgerald also possessed a judicious and critical streak...

...At any rate, his alcoholic dissipation appears all the more appalling because of the semi-deliberateness with which he went at it...

...Turnbull seems only dimly aware that there might be some fundamental inadequacy of attitude in Fitzgerald's naive pursuit of "life...

...In The Far Side of Paradise, published in 1949, Arthur Mizener made an ambitious attempt to isolate the chief problems of Fitzgerald's character in terms relevant to a conception of his work...

...But his life-long sense of social and economic inferiority, his distrust of his own skill following the dwindling of his popularity in the 1930s— manifested in his feeling of competing with other writers, notably Hemingway—and his conflicts with his unstable wife Zelda were probably the chief anxieties which prompted him to drink...

...Turnbull follows Mizener in locating the essential Fitzgerald, writer and man, in his tendency to headlong emotional commitment and identification, his Gatsby-like "romantic readiness" for experience at all costs...

...There is no sentimental indulgence in the malady, no pleasures of melancholy...

...Driving along the Grande Corniche [on the Riviera] one evening, she said to her companion, 'I think I'll turn off here,' and had to be physically restrained from veering over a cliff...

...and, finally, his sudden death at 45...

...The account of the shocking dissipation and dissolution of the man "in a haze of alcohol" (Fitzgerald's phrase) has its effect even though we may have heard the story before...

...But Mizener was able to do a good deal more with this formulation than Turnbull...

...the portrait is quite terrifying...

...He succeeds in impressing us with Fitzgerald's great playful charm and attractiveness, an impression which makes the writer's "crack-up" seem all the more pathetic...

...Nor is the fact that Fitzgerald tended, on occasion, to conceive of himself in these same romantic terms any justification...

...Another time she lay down in front of a parked car and said, 'Scott, drive over me.' " Fitzgerald's own behavior when he was drinking could be no less terrifying, and for long periods he was almost always drinking...

...Despite serious shortcomings, Scott Fitzgerald offers much interesting material...

...Tragic" is the word usually reserved for Fitzgerald's career...

...Fitzgerald had great personal charm and his difficulties were real...

...When he is not seething or trembling to all his surroundings, Turnbull's Fitzgerald is drinking a good part of the time...

...Turnbull's accounts of Zelda's erratic behavior, apparently largely motivated by jealousy of her husband and his career, are particularly harrowing...

...his unsuccessful efforts to manufacture dialogue for trivial Hollywood films, his irritation at the stupidity of studio executives with whom he quarreled...

...Mizener's close analysis and straightforward reasoning led him to conclude that Fitzgerald's fiction, for all its charm and its other virtues, was weakened by the author's habit of naively and sentimentally idealizing the romantic "capacity for wonder" and the "heightened sensitivity to the promises of fife" of characters like Gatsby and Amory Blaine...

...It is moving in the same way and for the same reasons that The Far Side of Paradise, Sheilah Graham's Beloved Infidel, and The Disenchanted, Budd Schulberg's fictionalized version of Fitzgerald's story, were moving...

...In his later years, he deeply resented Hemingway's open reference to him as "wrecked" in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and Hemingway's half-condescending tone in fancying him as a washed-up "rummy...

...Yet this does not excuse his inability to get beyond these stereotypes in the considerable portion of the book devoted to Fitzgerald's personality as an artist...

...Turnbull knew his subject first-hand and admired him...

...The story itself has a natural fascination and, wherever he is not concerned with Fitzgerald as literary man, Turnbull tells it without melodrama or sensationalism...

...Too often we get instead a collection of romantic stereotypes which Turnbull has uncritically swallowed...

...Turnbull's account of Fitzgerald's last years is effectively done: his struggle to pull himself together in order to complete The Last Tycoon, which he believed would be the finest of his novels...

...Turnbull's picture of that charm and of the consequences of those difficulties in human disaster is worth our attention...

...and, again, "inspiration drove him on he knew not how...

...His destructiveness was usually restricted to pranks, insults or breakage of property, however...

...in another, "sensitive as a young leaf, he trembled to all his surroundings...

...In at least one novel—Tender is the Night—he was able to see clearly, though perhaps not fully, the disastrous consequences of his "romantic readiness," and to exhibit its effects in human disintegration with a great deal of force...

...Dick Diver's self-destroying ennui is Fitzgerald's own...

...In fairness to Turnbull, his focus is, as he says, his subject's personality rather than his writing...

...But Fitzgerald's difficulties were not really of tragic quality or magnitude, and Turnbull admirably refrains from melodrama in dealing with the man...

...The reasons for Fitzgerald's alcoholism have never been completely clear (they seem to have been at least partly physiological...

...Reviewed by GERALD GRAFF Department of English, Stanford University Andrew Turnbull's book, the second full-length biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, is something of a disappointment...

...In one place, Fitzgerald is "the sensitive soul...