FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD – a presentation

Like so many modern American writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald created a

public image of himself as a representative figure of his times, which may have
been a part of the promotional campaign to sell his fiction. It worked for a while,
with such success that any effort to revoke the jazz Age or the roaring Twenties is
inevitably accompanied by a reference to or a photograph of Fitzgerald. But the
public memory is fickle, and after he and Zelda had left the big stage and the
gossip columnists no longer had their reckless antics to report, people forgot that
he was once considered a writer of great promise and talent, and few realized that
he had produced a body of work that bids well to bring him status as a writer for
all times.
When Fitzgerald appeared on the literary scene in 1920 with This Side of
Paradise, a semi-autobiographical guide to life at Princeton and the story of a
sensitive young man who is trying to find his place in society, the critics were
taken with his sophisticated style, its use of the social milieu, its honest treatment
of emotional experience, and its somewhat bold portrayal of the younger
generation. His readers, then, looked for even better writing in the following five
years, but few will agree that he fulfilled his promise. Neither of the two
collections of intriguing, skillful, but uneven short stories, Flappers and
Philosophers and tales of the jazz Age, nor the weak play The Vegetable seemed
to satisfy their expectations.
His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, was looked to more eagerly
and was more widely reviewed than any other work by the author. The hero,
Fitzgerald said in a letter to his publisher, was intended as “one of those many
with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative
inspiration,” and the novel related how he and his beautiful young wife were
“wrecked on the shoals of dissipation.” The use of autobiographical details again
occasioned some speculation and caused the book to sell well, but many critics
found it an unsuccessful effort at a somber tragedy of a typical American
sensibility and thought that it lacked organization or focus. Some recent critics,
however, have felt it to be a better novel than contemporary readers realized.
 Whatever faults one may find in Fitzgeralds’ early work, with the
publication of The Great Gatsby he fulfilled his highest promise and gave to
American literature one of its masterworks. On the surface, of course, The Great
Gatsby is much a part of its age as a brilliant dramatization of the social and
economic corruptions of the jazz age, marked by Prohibition, gangsterism, blasé
flappers, and uprootedness. American morality was marked by questionable
business ethics, commercial criteria for success, and ultraconservatism in social
and political thinking. Historians like Charles Beard were insisting that
materialistic and economic factors rather than idealistic motives had determined
the course of American history. Through character and theme, Fitzgerald dealt in
one way or another with all of these historic factors with such a sensitivity that
one can even intuit in the text slight prophetic reverberations of the stock market
crash of 1929 and the Great Depression in the offing.
Beyond these surface corners, the novel deals symbolically with the
failure of the American dream of success, which in Fitzgerald’s time was still
best-known through the Horatio Alger novels. Like Benjamin Franklin before
him, Horatio Alger expounded, by way of his dime novels, the possibility of
rising from rags to riches through industry, ambition, self-reliance, honesty, and
temperance. In this myth, and the frontier tradition of self-reliance, lies the
genesis of what impels Gatsby. Behind his simple and touching study and work
schedule in the copy of Hopalong Cassidy cherished by his father lies the
childhood Conwell or a dale Carnegie, the lessons on bodily development of a
Charles Atlas, and the tradition that every American boy could make a million
dollars or become President. But what an ironic reversal! By imitating the great
American moralists, Gatsby rises to be a rich and powerful criminal.
A second significant thematic concern of the novel relates to its symbolic
use of the Mid-West as a contrast with the East. In his nostalgic reverie on the
Mid-West near the end of the novel, Nick Carraway concludes, “I see now that
this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy, Jordan and I,
were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common
which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” This last line is ironic,
because Nick left his Minnesota home originally because “it seemed like the
ragged edge of the universe,” but by the end of the novel it is the place to which
he returns to regain a sense of balance and moral equilibrium. Fitzgerald is
playing with the traditional American dichotomy between the East as a model of
European sophistication and corruption and the West as repository of the
fundamental decencies and virtues derived from contact with the American soil,
the new Garden of Eden.
A figure who lurks in the background of the novel is Dan Cody, whose
name suggests the mythic traditions surrounding Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill
Cody. Cody had helped settle the nation and made a fortune besides, and
therefore he represents the energies that sparked the Western frontier movement.
But as Frederick Jackson Turner had reminded everyone in 1893, the frontier had
been closed and no longer carried the significance it once had as the source of
sudden wealth and the place of refuge for those seeking a second chance. By the
time Gatsby met him, Dan Cody had degenerated into a senile old man subject to
the advances of opportunists and gold-diggers. Gatsby takes him as his ideal,
nevertheless, and, like the romantic that he is, he refuses to let historic
circumstance stand in his way. Rather than wrest his fortune from the raw earth,
he pioneers eastward and conquers the urban wilderness through adapting its
devious means to the romantic end of recapturing the past. But history cannot be
repeated, and the historic promise that Gatsby learned from Cody was, Nick
notes, “already behind him, somewhere back in the vast obscurity beyond the
city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”
Jay Gatsby then, is the ultimate American arch-romantic. Because he
lacked the wealth and timing, he missed the girl on whom he had focused what
Nick calls his “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life”. After obtaining the
wealth through corrupt means, he returns five years later to fulfill his
“incorruptible dream” by attempting to repeat the one golden moment of his life
when he possessed that “elusive rhythm”, that “fragment of lost words” which
we all seek to recall in this mundane existence from a former life, time or world.
Not since Don Quixote’s pursuit of Dulcinea has literature seen such a noble,
heartbreaking, and impossible quest.
Adopting a modified first-person narrative form from Conrad, Fitzgerald
unfolds Gatsby’s tragedy for us through the eyes of the narrator, Nick Carraway.
What we learn through Nick is that pure will power divorced from rationality and
decency leads to destruction, and that a merely selfish dream or notion is
insufficient to justify the enormous amount of energy and life expended by
Gatsby. It is a lesson that this nation would not learn for almost another fifty
years, and a suggestion that Fitzgerald’s prophetic vision saw farther into the
future than the Depression years. When Gatsby is viewed against the moral
decadence and cowardly conduct of the Buchanans – “You’re worth the whole
damn bunch put together.” Nick tells him – his unassailable romanticism makes
him appear heroic. As an individual, then, who dreams higher than he can
achieve, whose reach exceeds his grasp, Gatsby is at the heart of the tragic
condition and thus shares certain characteristics with Oedipus, hamlet, and other
tragic heroes of Western literature. Unlike Arthur Miller’s modern tragic figure,
Willy Loman, Gatsby doesn’t evoke mere pity and disgust at the end, as he
faithfully waits for a phone call that will never come.
Aside from its concern with social and moral questions of continuing
consequence, The Great Gatsby is one of the most carefully constructed and
precisely written novels in American literature. The subtle complexity of the
language; the calculated use of colors, references, and connotations; the striking
configurations of verbal patterns and repetitions – all lead the reader to read and
reread sentences time and time again to catch the multi-level nuances of
meaning. The style is poetic and repays the application of the techniques of
studied explication.
Because of the disarray of his personal life, his dwindling financial
resources, and his increasing self-doubts as a writer, Fitzgerald was unable to
bring his artistry to such a perfect pitch again. His numerous short stories written
primarily for pay (some of which were collected in All the Sad Young Men and
Taps at Reveille and his indifferent work for Hollywood occasionally encouraged
his best talents. His next novel, Tender Is the Night, which came nine years after
Gatsby, used European locales and his experiences with his wife’s mental illness,
another foray into autobiographical materials. What some critics felt was an
unresolved problem in structure and a failure to provide clear character
motivation caused many to overlook its impressive sweep of characters and its
admirable effort to deal with significant psychological and social themes. After
his death, the fragments of a novel, The Last Tycoon, were found, many pages of
which suggest that Fitzgerald was regaining control of his creative skills at the
last. Despite his lapses and occasional self-indulgence, the high quality of his
best work, and most certainly the striking achievement in The Great Gatsby, has
brought his achievement the success which eluded his grasp during his own
lifetime.”
(M. Thomas Inge)

PUBLICATIONS

Collections
The Bodley Head Fitzgerald, edited by Malcolm Cowley and J. B.
Priestley, 6 vols. (1958-63)
The Fitzgerald Reader, edited by Arthur Mizener (1963)
Letters, edited by Andrew Turnbull (1963; excerpts, as Letters to His
Daughter, 1965)

Fiction
This Side of Paradise (1920)
Flappers and Philosophers (stories, 1920)
The Beautiful and Damned (1922)
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
John Jackson’s Arcady, edited by Lillian Holmes Stack (1924)
 The Great Gatsby (1925; A Facsimile of the Manuscript edited by
Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1973; Apparatus edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1974)
All the Sad Young Men (stories, 1926)
Tender Is the Night: A Romance (1934; revised edition, 1951)
Taps at reveille (stories, 1935)
The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel, Together with THe Great gatsby
and Selected Writings (1941)
The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage (story, 1960)
The Pat Hobby Stories (1962)
The Apprentice Fiction of Fitzgerald, edited by John Kuehl (1965)
Dearly Beloved (1969)
Bits of Paradise: 21 Uncollected Stories, with Zelda Fitzgerald, edited by
Matthew J. Bruccoli and Scottie Fitzgerald Smith (1973)
The Basil and Josephine Stories, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and John
Kuehl (1973)

Plays
Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi! (plot and lyrics only; book by Walker M. Elli, music by D.
D. Griffin, A. L. Booth, and P. B. Dickey, produced 1914; 1914)
The Evil Eye (lyrics only; book by Edmund Wilson, music by P. B. Dickey
and F. Warburton Guilbert, produced 1915; 1915)
Safety First (lyrics only; book by J. F. Bohmfalk and J. Biggs, Jr., music
by P. B. Dickey, F. Warburton Guilbert, and E. Harris, produced 1916; 1916)
The Vegetable; or, From President to Postman, produced 1923; 1923)
Screnplay for Three Comrades, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1978)

Screenplays: A Yank at Oxford with others (1938)

Three Comrades with Edward E. Paramore (1938)
Radio Play: Let’s Go Out and Play (1935)
 Other
The Crack-Up, with Other Uncollected Pieces, Note-Books, and
Unpublished Letters, edited by Edmund Wilson (1945)
Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and essays,
edited by Arthur Mizener (1957)
Thoughtbook, edited by John Kuehl (1965)
Fitzgerald in His Own Time: A Miscellany, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli
and Jackson R. Bryer (1971)
Dear Scott/Dear max: The Fitzgerald-Perkins Correspondence, edited by
John Kuehl and Jackson R. Bryer (1971)
As Ever, Scott Fitz -:Letters Between and His Literary Agent Howard
Ober 1919-1940, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1972)
Ledger (1972)
The Cruise of the Rolling Junk (travel, 1976)
The Notebooks, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1978)