Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.   

                        THE DEFINITIVE JUDGMENT ON F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

             

I have read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels and a great number of his short stories over the last four months, as well as examining other people’s writings about him  -  and I have diligently reported to you about it all. But now we come to the moment of truth - a reasonable judgement on all Fitzgerald’s work. It is not my business to examine his life, which has been done often enough, but certainly his growing alcoholism and the condition of his wife had a great influence on how he wrote. My suggestion is that alcohol not only slowed him down but eventually made it very difficult for him to write – those long gaps between writing The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night; and then another long gap before he got on with the unfinished The Last Tycoon. The busy young man of the early- and mid-1920s was a worn out man by 1940. But that’s enough of the biography and I’m not here concerned about which characters in his novels were based on which real people, even if many academics have spent much of their lives trying to work out who was whom. I’m concerned with what Fitzgerald actually wrote.

            Of his short-stories, I have read many of them but far from all of them. Those I would grade as his best stories are May Day, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, The Last of the Belles and Crazy Sunday, and inevitably they are often anthologised, especially The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, which is, when all is said and done, basically a simple fantasy-adventure story. But Fitzgerald often churned out pot-boiler stories to bring the money in. Read all of his story-collection Tales of the Jazz Age and, along side some of his best stories, there are sophomoric stories that come across as clumsy college humour. On the other hand, the Basil and Josephine Stories are much better than Fitzgerald himself thought they were  - they are not just about adolescents, but about young people growing up into young adulthood.

            But what of the novels? As I interpret it, Fitzgerald’s novels began with much vigour but ultimately faded into pretentious melodrama. His first novel This Side of Paradise (1920) is a stylistic mess, bumping carelessly from one episode to another, and often using over-blown imagery as had been used by other authors in the early 20^th century. But its very episodic nature and over-blown lush descriptions made it an immediate bestseller and set Fitzgerald up as the most popular American author of the early 1920s. His second novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) was also a big bestseller, but this time Fitzgerald drew back a little from the lush descriptions and he had a more coherent plot, making it far more readable than his first novel. That was the high tide of Fitzgerald’s popularity. When we get to The Great Gatsby (1925) we find Fitzgerald paring back the redundant descriptions and producing a novel that was leaner and shorter than his first two novels… and even though The Great Gatsby is now regarded as his masterpiece, at the time of its publication, it didn’t sell well. So far, so vigorous. But then we come to the arid years and the melodrama. Tender is the Night (1934) is over-long, pretentious, dull and again often falling back on the worst tropes that he had used in his earliest work. Perhaps because it is in part about psychiatry, some American pundits have taken it to be a serious book, even a masterpiece. It is no such thing. It is a dull traipse through Fitzgerald’s own insecurities and an account of his mentally-damaged wife, whom he exploited; all boosted by the glamour of France, Paris, the Riviera etc. As for the unfinished The Last Tycoon (published posthumously) it has often been suggested that it “could have been” a masterpiece, but we’ll never know because it was far from finished when Fitzgerald died – apparently he had written about half the length of what he intended to write. It is clear he had written at best a rough draft which he would have polished had he lived. However the notes he left behind show that he was going to write a real melodrama – a gangster story forsooth.

Believe it or not, though, it is not Fitzgerald’s style that most alienates me from much of his work. I have two major dissents.

First, and perhaps less important, there is the narrow perspective he gives of society. Okay, it is not obligatory for authors to delve into all social classes, and I’m not looking for some sort of literary socialist panorama. But Fitzgerald is mainly fixated upon parvenus, people who have money, people who want to have money and the flashy wealthy who, in some cases, have gangster connections. Rare exceptions where we meet the American proletariat are found in the short story May Day and the characters of George Wilson and his wife Myrtle in The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s characters in the 1920s are rich enough to booze, party, live off other people’s money, travel, have affairs; then later (Tender is the Night ) take up [expensive] psychiatry, lounge on the Riviera and gaze at their navels between having affairs… and of course in his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon he lands his characters in Hollywood. The hedonistic partying and boozing of the American 1920s was a reality - spurred on by defiance at Prohibition – but Fitzgerald seemed never to grow out of it. Even once the Depression rolled in, he hardly connected with it in his writing.

The more irksome thing alienating me, however, is Fitzgerald’s essentially adolescent attitude - bordering on the puerile - towards women. In This Side of Paradise, his protagonist is a college boy who falls in love with two or three young woman but gets nowhere with them. Of course he adores them and mentally puts them on a pedestal; and of course he is saturated with romantic poetry, especially John Keats. Now Keats was undoubtedly a great poet, but he is most loved by adolescents [ I admit to having been one – look up on this blog my take on Keats’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil] . That style of imagining women was appropriate for Fitzgerald’s callow young character, based on himself. But at a certain point one grows out of such romanticism. Fitzgerald almost breaks with such idealisation in The Beautiful and Damned which is mainly about a married couple [a thinly disguised version of Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda] entangled with alcohol. But in The Great Gatsby, we have the protagonist Gatsby trying to re-connect with the image he had of a woman [Daisy] from years previously. Ultimately he learns that his idealised woman was an illusion… but the tone is still essentially romantic. The woman is eventually unattainable. In Tender is the Night, Dick Diver defies real ethics and marries a woman who is psychologically damaged - again the unattainable woman, because the marriage finally doesn’t work. In the unfinished The Last Tycoon, the protagonist Monroe Stahr is stricken by Kathleen Moore because she is so like his deceased wife – again an attempt to catch the unattainable past in the form of the unattainable woman. This love-of-my-life romanticism either blocks out credible women or relegates credible women to smaller roles.

What is left? I could easily say that Fitzgerald’s novels are of their age, fixed at heart in the hedonistic part of the American 1920s – but then the fact is that all older novels are “of their age”. Even so, the mores of the 1920s are very different from the mores of today. If ever I were tempted to read any of Fitzgerald’s works again, I would read a few of his short-stories, The Great Gatsby and just possibly The Beautiful and Damned, which has at least has some sort of narrative coherence for all its faults . As for Fitzgerald’s other novels, I would pass them by or throw them out. In this way I would have exorcised them.