The Great Fitzgerald
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING The Great Fitzgerald By Stanley Edgar Hyman IN 1922, after he had published This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and two volumes of short stories, all in two...
...In 1961, Tender Is the Night, alone, sold more than half a million copies, in four editions...
...Fitzgerald's early idolators adored him for the wrong reasons...
...Scene after scene in The Great Gatsby shows absolute mastery: Gatsby stretching out his arms to the green light at the end of Daisy's dock...
...It's a slam...
...perhaps now he is again being celebrated for the wrong reasons...
...Winter Dreams" becomes weak and evasive at the end, but it begins with absolute authority: "Some of the caddies were poor as sin and lived in one-room houses with a neurasthenic cow in the front yard, but Dexter Green's father owned the second best grocery-store in Black Bear-the best one was 'The Hub,' patronized by the wealthy people from Sherry Island-and Dexter caddied only for pocket-money...
...but The Great Gatsby disappointed Fitzgerald's jazz-age public, and his reputation began its slow decline...
...An otherwise good and effective story, "The Rich Boy," is fatally injured by the false and cowardly scene where Anson declines to ravish Dolly because a picture of his true love appears before his eyes...
...In 1939, The Great Gatsby was dropped from the Modern Library because it sold too slowly, leaving not one of Fitzgerald's books in print...
...I am his [Hemingway's] alcoholic just like Ring is mine," he writes to Perkins, and, later, "In a small way I was an original...
...Lunatic as this process sounds, it was necessary to enable Fitzgerald to write his finest work, and his finest work-'"Absolution," Gatsby, parts of Tender and Tycoon-is small in quantity but just as great as they say...
...In 1962, a letter from Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribners, sold at auction in London for 7,000 pounds, or almost $20,000...
...Fitzgerald writes to his daughter with great insight: "I am too much of a moralist at heart and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form rather than to entertain them...
...then turned into a girl because Scottie's father knows how she would see certain things...
...His next novel, Tender Is the Night, did not appear until nine years later...
...He has then presumptuously grouped his selections into four biographical sections, which are called "Winter Dreams," "The Crack-Up," "Pasting It Together," and "Handling It with Care," as though Fitzgerald's primary importance to literature were that he had had a breakdown...
...when he goes to Hollywood, his older heroes are "lucky in the market...
...Stahr and Kathleen, after their carnal congress, sitting with the soles of their shoes touching...
...Gatsby is Great because he transforms himself into a work of art, and Fitzgerald was great only when he was able to accomplish the same thing...
...You've been drinking, Gordon...
...There is one particularly revealing letter, written in 1920 to an aunt and uncle...
...When Fitzgerald died in December, 1940, his reputation was at its lowest point...
...By 1951, there was a Fitzgerald boom going, and that year there were four books: Budd Schulberg's "novel," Arthur Mizener's biography, a collection of essays on Fitzgerald edited by Alfred Kazin, and a collection of stories edited by Malcolm Cowley...
...Writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager," he writes to Scottie...
...The splitting and combinations of Fitzgerald in The Last Tycoon are even more astonishing...
...By 1958, when Sheilah Graham's Beloved Infidel revived Fitzgerald the legendary figure, all the novels were back in print...
...Gatsby is almost a perfect novel, but it has one scene as bad as anything Fitzgerald ever wrote (the drunks in the wrecked car) and it presents seriously one of his silliest aphorisms ("There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired...
...The later ones are contrived and gimmicky, like " ? Didn't Get Over,' " or self-pitying, like "The Lost Decade...
...and he was himself a legendary figure...
...In just the seven chapters of Tender Is the Night included in the Reader: Tommy Barban has Fitzgerald's good looks...
...turned into young Budd Schulberg to have a narrator who grew up in Hollywood...
...The effect of all his love and responsibility was to impose an identification on her ("because you are so much like me"), and to nag her cruelly ("you have spent two years doing no useful work at all, improving neither your body nor your mind...
...Rehabilitation was greatly accelerated in 1945, when Edmund Wilson edited a respectful miscellany, The Crack-Up...
...in the years of scorn he was neglected for the wrong reasons...
...Fitzgerald complains to Perkins in 1921 that his novel has not been advertised in Montgomery, Alabama, although Floyd Dell's was...
...The letters to Perkins and to Harold Ober, Fitzgerald's agent, show the dirty underbelly of the literary life...
...Abe North is a composite of Ring Lardner's wit and Fitzgerald's pranks and lack of productivity...
...He was accepted as the spokesman for a generation, the flappers and their hip-flask escorts...
...Fitzgerald was 26 years of age, and things would never again be as good...
...Intermixed with all the marks of weakness, marks of woe, are passages of profound self-understanding and truth...
...Fitzgerald sees himself rich and "black with tan" in "'The Sensible Thing,' " or quarterbacking the freshman team to victory in "Basil and Cleopatra," or giving up the bottle to care for the little girl in "Family in the Wind...
...This year there have been at least six books on Fitzgerald, and he has visibly become an industry...
...Nick's final thoughts...
...The Letters, which includes the more interesting half of all of Fitzgerald's surviving letters, gives us rather a blurred image...
...The narrator, Cecilia Brady, is Fitzgerald himself, all swoony at the thought of Irving Thalberg...
...And so on...
...Absolution," which I think the one completely successful short story, in its beginning and ending rises to an intensity of vision almost Blakean...
...The best of Fitzgerald is matchless...
...The letters to Ober progress from boasting to begging to abusing...
...Daisy and Tom sitting over cold fried chicken and ale after Daisy has killed Tom's mistress...
...WRITERS & WRITING The Great Fitzgerald By Stanley Edgar Hyman IN 1922, after he had published This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and two volumes of short stories, all in two years, F. Scott Fitzgerald was in something like the position of J. D. Salinger today...
...Most of the stories in The Fitzgerald Reader are terrible...
...Fitzgerald was a writer with only one story to tell: the story of his life...
...Everything that Fitzgerald wrote was autobiographical, surely, but Mizener, whose interest in Fitzgerald seems largely biographical, has chosen the most self-revealing stories and articles...
...Gatsby was based on a man Fitzgerald knew, combined with the romantic half of Fitzgerald (the realist half became Nick Carroway, the narrator...
...Diver himself combines Murphy's strengths and Fitzgerald's weaknesses...
...the Emersonian Negro on the beach...
...Rosemary awed and gushy at Dick Diver is Fitzgerald awed and gushy at Gerald Murphy...
...Even his poor stories show flashes of brilliance...
...The earlier ones are mainly wishful fantasies...
...the wry failed writer part becomes Wylie White...
...Where we can see Fitzgerald most clearly, the image is still blurred, because he was blurred...
...In his inferior work he told it transparently, with gossamer disguises...
...If only Fitzgerald could have lived to see it-how he might have laughed...
...By 1925, Fitzgerald was writing to a friend, "I want to be extravagantly admired again...
...I'll roll them joy pills (the literary habit) till doomsday...
...What was he really like, this fallen and risen idol, and how good was he really...
...The Last Tycoon has such miracles too: Kathleen's first appearance floating on a head of Siva...
...To his wife Zelda, varying the metaphor: "I'm digging it out of myself like uranium-one ounce to the cubic ton of rejected ideas...
...The Fitzgerald Reader seeks "to give the reader a representative selection" of Fitzgerald's work, by which Mizener means a selection of the best, as the jacket more accurately acknowledges...
...A very funny self-mockery, "Financing Finnegan," goes suddenly flat at the end...
...The part of himself that was involved with Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald blends with Thalberg to make Monroe Stahr...
...Included are the whole of The Great Gatsby, the first seven chapters of Tender Is the Night, three chapters from The Last Tycoon, 15 stories, and four articles...
...he had a vast personal following that would buy anything he wrote...
...Fitzgerald's primary importance to literature is that at his best he was a marvelous writer...
...the telephone call from the orang-outang...
...in 1933 he sends Perkins a snapshot "which enlarges to a nice 6 X 10 glossy suitable for rotogravures...
...The slow recovery began in 1941, with the posthumous publication of the unfinished The Last Tycoon...
...As nothing in Fitzgerald is hopeless, so nothing is quite flawless either...
...The letters to his daughter Scottie are warm, moving, and-really-those of a terrible father...
...Two of this year's books, Andrew Turnbull's editing of The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribners, 615 pp., $10.00) and Arthur Mizener's editing of The Fitzgerald Reader (Scribners, 509 pp., $7.50), give us a look at quite a lot of the evidence...
...the reunion of Gatsby and Daisy, with Daisy crying into the heap of his beautiful shirts...
...A preposterous story called "May Day" has one fine moment, when Edith says: "I think it's a perfect insult to call anyone a good woman in that way...
...In his superior work, on the other hand, Fitzgerald managed to get some aesthetic distance from himself as subject by feats of splitting, dissociation and combination...
...his forgotten celebrity who has been on a 10-year binge was once a famous architect...
...Fitzgerald writes: "I'd rather live on less and preserve the one duty of a sincere writerto set down life as he sees it...
...A few paragraphs later he adds, with no sense of contradiction: "But I am not averse to taking all the shekels I can garner from the movies...
...It was neither a critical nor a popular success, and the decline became precipitous...
...His young heroes get rich and win their Zeldas, not by writing, but by engineering in Peru...
Vol. 46 • December 1963 • No. 25
