THE FITZGERALD REVIVAL

...But there was a more profoundly and ineluct-ably tragic aspect of it: Fitzgerald's way of life was an ingredient of his art...

...His father was a well-bred, ineffectual Southerner who lost his job and his sense of purpose when Fitzgerald was ten or eleven...

...For this he paid dearly...

...He started out as one man I knew," Fitzgerald explained, "and then changed into myself...

...On one side this continuous process of self-punishment through extravagance stemmed from the personal wounds of his childhood and youth...

...He was identified too closely with a puerile and insignificant rebellion whose primary weapons were liquor and sex, and whose primary strategy was attack by shock...

...They had themselves spent their maturity with the Progressive optimism and naivete and had lost their convictions...

...The boom was on, there was money to burn, and what was it good for if not to indulge one's children and compensate, as it were, in advance for the feeling of emptiness and failure that would in all probability come to them sooner or later...

...The war, the moral collapse of domestic politics, the farce of Prohibition, opened their eyes to the weak spots in American life which they construed as failures of their elders...

...The most exciting consummations of life seemed to be located not in the area of production, but in the area of consumption...

...his social values were seriously misread amid the literary fashions of the thirties, and his reputation went info temporary eclipse...

...A subtle transition had been taking place...

...He was fascinated by the startling convergence, occasionally possible in the United States, of youth and great success or wealth and could always remember, from the days of his own success at 23, "riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky...

...While he was in the Army Fitzgerald met and fell in love with Zelda Sayre, an Alabama girl who shared his "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life...

...It may be significant that in his best and most perfected work, The Great Gatsby, he was furthest away from autobiography...

...II Then he wrote This Side of Paradise, which sold 20,000 copies in its first year and gave him easy and fatal access to the slick magazines...

...When Zelda at first rejected marriage on the simple and candid ground that she did not look forward to sharing a life of poverty, Fitzgerald wholeheartedly acquiesced in her attitude —"No sir," says one of the characters in his first book, "the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody"—which suggests at once how well mated they were and yet how devastatingly symptomatic was his choice of a girl...

...It seemed on one March afternoon that I had lost every single thing I wanted...

...So the Jazz Age, as Fitzgerald acutely remarked, "became less and less an affair of youth" and took on the aspect of "a children's party taken over by the elders...

...In his junior year, when it seemed probable that he would be president of the Triangle, editor of The Tiger, and perhaps a member of the Senior Council, he became ill and was compelled to withdraw...

...During the twenties the youth of the wealthy and middle classes in the United States were in a position to make strenuous demands...

...They are coming back in a flood now—The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night are in pocket books, This Side of Paradise can be had in another cheap edition, the materials gathered a few years ago in The Crack-Up have recently been reprinted, and Malcolm Cowley's collection of his best short stories has just appeared...

...The old notion of a purposeful education and career in the pursuit of industrial and commercial eminence now seemed far less meaningful...

...The rich and distinctive vein in his art was his ability to give dignity and poignance to what he wrote about the trappings of life at the top among those who, as he put it, "possess and enjoy early"—the life of the prep schools, swank colleges, night clubs, and grand tours...

...About this he was quite self-conscious...

...For many years he could not disabuse himself of the notion that youth is a tremendously limited thing that begins to slip away at, perhaps, 21 and is completely gone by 25...

...He went to Newman Academy ("one of the poorest boys in a rich boys' school"), where a certain candid egotism made him persistently unpopular with his classmates, and from Newman to Princeton, where he took the game of social competition with a deadly earnestness that, as a midwestern Irish Catholic of marginal means, he could ill afford...

...The tycoon dropped out of the picture of American hero-worship to be replaced by the entertainer...

...and the American talent for grandiosity was shifting its focus to new realms in which Fitzgerald's kind of aspiration and perception was very much at home...

...thus Fitzgerald's central figures in The Great Gatsby and The Last Tycoon were a bootlegger and a film producer...

...It is easier now to see him in his full tragic dimensions and to appreciate the scope of his powers...

...For Fitzgerald this life had profound significance...

...It was of the essence of Fitzgerald that he was glamour-struck...

...He could see, because he felt it so keenly, what was human and wistful beneath the surface of competitive snobbery and extravagance...

...During his early childhood his family moved so often that he never lived long enough in any neighborhood to become part of it...

...His characters only kissed, and kissing was not a prelude to further activity but some very special kind of consummation, the distillation of a vast and ineffable romantic game...

...The fantasies became reality, and death overtook Fitzgerald while he was heroically trying to rehabilitate himself and restore his talent...

...the overseas cap and the shoulder-pads merely point to his essential theme, which is aspiration...

...A close reading of even his earliest work shows that this stereotype was no more accurate than most...

...but even in Gatsby the element of autobiography is clear...

...The revival of his popularity in 1951, spurred by Budd Schulberg's fictional version in The Disenchanted, which seems hardly worthy of its subject, and by Arthur Mizener's considerably more satisfying biography,* loses none of its ironical edge because it is something that has occurred so often in our literary history—a posthumous vogue of a writer who in his lifetime was neglected, underappreciated, or misunderstood...

...he was feeding his talent with the story of his own self-destruction...

...The economy was maturing, its emphasis turning from the virtues and expectations that belonged to an age when the essential industrial plant was being built to the virtues and vices of an age of satiation and consumption—the consumers' world of the telephone, the refrigerator, the radio, the two-car garage...

...And with good reason: for Fitzgerald was an intensely personal writer who took his themes with exceptional directness out of his life...

...But his mother's family—she was "potato famine Irish"—had some money, on the strength of which Fitzgerald spent the later years of his boyhood skirting on the edges of wealth...

...In Fitzgerald such tokens of boyhood are always clothed with the reality of despair...

...In the years just before the war they had had a taste of the moral overstrain, the inflated rhetoric, the false hopes of the Progressive era...

...Struck by the parity of our common helplessness before the orgiastic expectations of American life, he had the courage, as well as the art, to build one of its major commentaries around the story of a wistful bootlegger...

...those days, and nights, were undeniably interesting, and insofar as one can overlook the profound undercurrent of desperation that existed in them for Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, they have an appealing aura of careless extravagance completely impossible for any generation since theirs...

...Behind his books the personality of the author is singularly vivid...

...but when he died in Hollywood of a heart attack his books were almost all out of print...

...When Fitzgerald writes nostalgically about "the shoulder-pads worn for one day on the Princeton freshman football field and the overseas cap never worn overseas," one cannot agree that he is concerned with nothing more than what Glen-way Westcott impatiently dismissed as "the fiddledeedee of boyhood...

...IV Fitzgerald saw the pathos of the situation and its continuity with the American past...

...I am not a great man," he wrote his daughter toward the end of his life, "but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur...

...but it was more true that Fitzgerald's early work, as compared with either the party life of the twenties or with that of some other writers, was actually characterized by sexual conservatism...

...The Fitzgerald Revival By RICHARD HOFSTADTER THE death of F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1940 was felt by many of his contemporaries to have a vaguely articulated but nonetheless intense moral significance...

...They married and began the life of personal and financial extravagance, pursued from Central Park South and Great Neck to Antibes, which led Zelda to several breakdowns and final institutionalization and Fitzgerald to his imperfect but immensely moving novel of personal deterioration, Tender Is the Night...

...Their elders responded feebly to the challenge...

...His work and his self-esteem suffered terribly from the reams of bad fiction he wrote for the paying magazines to maintain a fantastic scale of life...

...and snob though he was in a certain sense, he would not indulge himself in the ultimate snobbery of imagining that while there was something "real" in the attempt to build an industrial fortune or a political career, there was nothing real enough for a writer's attention in the attempt to build a social reputation or to follow a personal dream that had somewhere been crystallized in a girl's voice...

...When Fitzgerald was six he had a party to which nobody came...

...III For a long time Fitzgerald's reputation suffered from his having been stereotyped as the spokesman of the flapper and the historian of the Jazz Age...

...By 1923 their elders, tired of watching the carnival with ill-concealed envy, had discovered that young liquor will take the place of young blood, and with a whoop the orgy began...

...The wild abandon of these scenes from their life in the twenties must be one secret of the popular success of Arthur Mizener's careful biography...

...Because no writer could have perceived and written as Fitzgerald did fee/ ore the twenties, it was falsely assumed that he belonged to the twenties alone...

...There followed the series of telegrams in which he wooed Zelda by giving a blow-by-blow report of his literary success and which usually ended on the note, BOOK SELLING ALL MY LOVE...

...In this sphere parents, unhinged by their own uncertainties, instead of attempting to dictate to youth, interpret life to it, and hold it in line, were much more content to watch youth for clues to life, to accept it and even imitate its behavior...

...and when his lustrous prose caught some shimmering event in a shimmering phrase, one could see themes and characters that ordinarily do not rise above claptrap being endowed with a sweeping symbolic importance...

...Fitzgerald, of course, had known his moment: success came to him early and seemingly with ease...

...He waited all afternoon and then sadly consumed his entire birthday cake alone...

...Fitzgerald's most important relationship to the twenties lay in his half-conscious concern with a palpable transition in the moral place of youth in a country where youth had always been at a considerable premium...

...It was true that the girls in This Side of Paradise shocked their mothers...

...The younger generation was starred no longer...

...I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again...

...Anyhow after hours I nurse myself with delusions of that sort...

...one of his favorite devices was to model characters on his conception of what he and Zelda would be like if their worst tendencies were fully realized...