Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1956 The evelopmeD nt of the Fitzgerald Hero. Harry Payne Heseltine Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Heseltine, Harry Payne, "The eD velopment of the Fitzgerald Hero." (1956). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 171. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/171 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FITZGERALD HERO A .Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Harry Payne Heseltine A. (Hons), University of Western Australia, 1950 M. A., Louisiana State University, 1954 August, 1956 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Mr. D. E. Stanford, under whose guidance this study was started, and Mr. L. P. Simpson, who directed the later chapters and supervised the completion of the whole work. I am also grateful to Messrs. E. L. Marilla, J. J. Guilbeau, W. F. McNeir, and J. E. Uhler for their valuable comment and assistance in the writing of this dissertation. Finally, my thanks are due to Messrs. M. M. Reynolds and R. C. Woodward of the Library staff for prompt aid in obtaining microfilm necessary for basic research. 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENT ii TABLE OF CONTENTS iii . ABSTRACT i▼ CHAPTER I Introduction 1 CHAPTER II This Side of Paradise 32 CHAPTER III The Discovery of El Dorado 68 CHAPTER IV The Great Gatsby 120 CHAPTER V A Willingness of the Heart 153 CHAPTER VI The New Dispensation 198 CHAPTER VII Conclusion 231 BIBLIOGRAPHY 249 VITA 258 iii ABSTRACT Since Fitzgerald's death in 1940> a considerable interest in his life and work has been exhibited by critics, both academic and otherwise, and many valuable attempts have been made to define the nature of his achievement. But, in spite of the mass of periodical literature devoted to Fitzgerald, there has emerged only a single full- length study of the "Laureate of the Jazz Age." This is Arthur Mizener's The Far Side of Paradise. Its subtitle, "A Critical Biography," ac­ curately suggests the orientation of most Fitzgerald criticism. Aware of the almost too perfectly symbolic pattern of Fitzgerald's life, commentators have frequently sought to transfer that pattern to his work. The result has been a one-sided assessment of his performance. The inadequacies of his personal career are made the bases of certain literary and imaginative inadequacies; if his work is conceded any sort of authority, it is usually felt to be, in Fitzgerald's own phrase, "the authority of failure." The present study questions neither the peculiarly intimate relationship between Fitzgerald and his writing nor its effect on his artistic procedures. It does maintain that prior knowledge of Fitz­ gerald' s life has too often coloured critics' judgments of his purely literary stature. The positive aim of this dissertation is, then, to use the relation of the man and his work as the basis for arriving at an accurate account of Fitzgerald's artistic achievement. To accomplish this task, attention has been centred in his fictional heroes, who, as iv is demonstrated in the introductory chapter, provide the proper clue to understanding his specifically literary merit. In detail, three lines of investigation have been undertaken. First, there is an analysis of the various techniques by which Fitz­ gerald transposed his own experience into the record of meaningful literary personalities. Second, his heroes are examined as the embodi­ ments of a consistent set of ideas concerning the nature of Romantic individualism and its operations in the twentieth century. Third, the environments in which his central characters work out their destinies are the subject of some scrutiny. If Fitzgerald1s career is the story of his search for a good man, it is equally that of hiB search for fitting environments wherein'his modem morality might be put into effect. As a result of these enquiries, followed through Fitzgerald's novels and short stories, it becomes evident that one of the major pat­ terns of Fitzgerald's literary career was the progressive coalescence of his mature vision of Romantic individualism with one of his funda­ mental creative mechanisns*— his sense of disaster. Endowed from the first with the ability to create an atmosphere of impending doom, Fitz­ gerald, as he progressed beyond This Side of Paradise, was forced to find adequate imaginative motivations which might give that sense of disaster a tragic validity. In the end, then, Fitzgerald can be viewed as the writer of modern tragedy rather than the frivolous representative of an era best forgotten. This study does not insist on Fitzgerald's complete success in this role. It does insist on a fresh adjustment in evaluating his literary worth. Such an adjustment must be based on the v realization that the basic condition of Fitzgerald* s writing is its quality as a sustained effort to plot the course of modem individual­ ism in a series of tragic situations; the method adopted in this study for understanding that condition is the examination of the moral ordeals sustained by his fictional heroes# v i CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Books are like brothers* I am an only child. Gatsby my imaginary eldest brother, Amory my younger, Anthony m y worry, Dick my comparatively good brother, but all of them far from home. When I have the courage to put the old white light on the home of my heart, then....•*• I The publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920 provided a spectacular start to the writing career of F. Scott Fitzgerald and set a trend in the critical estimate of his art which has never completely disappeared. Yet since the reception of that first novel, many other elements have been added to Fitzgerald's literary reputation, elements which can be organized, both historically and thematically, into mean­ ingful patterns. Therefore some account of the critical response to Fitzgerald since 1920 will here be useful as a means of, first, demon­ strating what has already been accomplished in the understanding of the writer and, second, pointing the direction towards the principal concerns of the present study. Inevitably the enormous success of This Side of Paradise brought its author considerable fame, if of a very special kind. Fitzgerald immediately became known as the flouter of established convention, the spokesman for the young men of the post-Y/ar generation and, after a few short stories, for the flappers as well. All the circumstances of the ^F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack=Up. ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945)* P* 176. Hereafter, the title of this work will be abbreviated in footnotes to C-U. 1 2 appearance of his first book conspired to push hijn in the direction of personal notoriety rather than of literary prominence; and this trend, at least in the first years of the 1920's, was aided and abetted by the behavior of Fitzgerald himself. With the help of his much publicized antics, such as riding down Fifth Avenue on the top of a taxi or jump­ ing into the Plaza fountain, he was soon well on the way to becoming a legend in his own lifetime. It was Fitzgerald’s lot to be cast in the role, as Lloyd Morris has written, of "the brilliant, unfortunate symbol of the Jazz Age."2 If, in this earliest phase of his career, Fitzgerald suffered from a dearth of intellectual criticism aimed at his work rather than the popular image of the man, such comment was not entirely lacking. It was supplied mainly by his Princeton friends — T. K. Whipple, John Peale Bishop, Edmund Wilson. Wilson’s portrait in The Bookman for March, 1922,^is of particular importance; in demonstrating the defi­ ciencies of This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, Fitz­ gerald' 8 lack of intellectual control, the importance of his cultural %JLoyd Morris, Postscript to Yesterday: America — the Last Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1947), p. 55. Wilson’s article has been reprinted in the following places: John Farrar, The Literary Spotlight (New York: George H. Doran, 1924), pp. 125-134. Alfred Kazin, F. Scott Fitzgerald: the Man and his Work (New York: the World Publishing Company, 1951), pp. 77-83. Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Young, Inc., 1952),' pp. 27- 33. When this article is quoted, the page reference given is to Kazin, F. Scott Fitzgerald. 3 background, and certain elements in his personal psychology the article still remains basic to an understanding of Fitzgerald at this stage in his development. Paul Rocenfeld was similarly perceptive in. Men Seen,^ contriving, in his discussion of the writer’s relation to his characters, to define what has since come to be regarded as a major problem in Fitz­ gerald criticism. From 1920 to 1925 — while Ernest Boyd spoke of his "smile so winning that only the cliches of romantic fiction can describe it" and "his sense of reverence... that must endear him to people of taste"^— in these years Fitzgerald wrote short stories, another novel, and a play, made money, spent it successively in New York, Long Island, and Europe, and finally published The Great Gatsby.