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Tolkien Oscar Wilde William Shakespeare’s Leo Tolstoy Tennessee Williams Romances Ivan Turgenev Tom Wolfe George Bernard Shaw Mark Twain Virginia Woolf Mary Wollstonecraft John Updike William Wordsworth Shelley Kurt Vonnegut Jay Wright Alexander Solzhenitsyn Derek Walcott Richard Wright John Steinbeck Alice Walker William Butler Yeats Jonathan Swift Robert Penn Warren Emile Zola Amy Tan H.G. Wells Alfred, Lord Tennyson Edith Wharton Bloom’s Modern Critical Views F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Updated Edition Copyright © 2006 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2006 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data F. Scott Fitzgerald / Harold Bloom, editor.— Updated ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views) Updated ed. of same title published 1985, in series: Modern critical views. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-8570-8 I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series. PS3511.I9Z6137 2006 813’.52—dc22 2006001775 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Allison Stielau Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi Cover Photo: F. Scott Fitzgerald © CORBIS Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom F. Scott Fitzgerald 7 Paul Rosenfeld The Moral of F. Scott Fitzgerald 13 Glenway Wescott F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Authority of Failure 25 William Troy Theme and Texture in The Great Gatsby 31 W.J. Harvey The Life of Gatsby 43 John W. Aldridge Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” 61 Seymour L. Gross The Beautiful and Damned: Fitzgerald’s Test of Youth 73 Leonard A. Podis The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s Crack-Up 81 Scott Donaldson vi Contents Who Killed Dick Diver?: The Sexual Politics of Tender is the Night 99 Judith Fetterley The Last Tycoon: Fitzgerald as Projectionist 121 Robert Giddings F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Evolving American Dream: The “Pursuit of Happiness” in Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon 141 John F. Callahan Princeton as Modernist’s Hermeneutics: Rereading This Side of Paradise 163 Nancy P. Van Arsdale White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The Great Gatsby 177 Meredith Goldsmith History and Masculinity in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise 203 Pearl James Afterthought 233 Harold Bloom Chronology 239 Contributors 241 Bibliography 245 Acknowledgments 249 Index 253 Editor’s Note My Introduction comments upon the two major influences that Fitzgerald sustained in his vocation as a writer: John Keats and Joseph Conrad. But I also note the rhetorical influence of T. S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land (1922) reverberates in The Great Gatsby (1925). The 1920’s critic Paul Rosenfeld shrewdly prophesies what Fitzgerald was about to do in Gatsby: which was to see his material simultaneously from the inside and the outside. Glenway Wescott, an admirable novelist, laments the early death of Fitzgerald, in 1941, aged just forty-four, while the critic William Troy analyzes the sense of failure that the author of Gatsby and the greater short stories nevertheless felt in himself. The richness and depth of Gatsby are emphasized by W.J. Harvey, after which John W. Aldridge grants Gatsby himself legendary status. “Babylon Revisited,” to me Fitzgerald’s best story, is found by Seymour L. Gross to be a farewell to hope, while Leonard A. Podis meditates upon Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned, and uncovers in it a prophetic lament for lost youth. The Crack-Up articles are chronicled by Scott Donaldson as instances of self-alienation, after which Judith Fetterley interprets Tender is the Night as a manifestation of “sexual politics,” in which both genders at last are victimized. The Last Tycoon, unfinished at Fitzgerald’s death, is judged by Robert Giddings as almost a great novel, while John F. Callahan explores the American Dream throughout the novelist’s major works. Nancy P. Van Arsdale rereads Fitzgerald’s first book, This Side of Paradise, as a vision of Princeton University rather than of Fitzgerald, after vii viii Editor’s Note which Meredith Goldsmith studies Gatsby as performance art, and Pearl James changes our perception of This Side of Paradise to the intersection of war and masculinity. My Afterthought argues that Gatsby is the major literary character of twentieth century America. HAROLD BLOOM Introduction It is difficult to imagine John Keats writing the fictions of Joseph Conrad, since there is nothing in common between the Great Odes and The Secret Sharer or Heart of Darkness. But such an imagining is not useless, since in some sense that was Scott Fitzgerald’s accomplishment. The Great Gatsby does combine the lyrical sensibility of Keats and the fictive mode of Conrad, and makes of so odd a blending a uniquely American story, certainly a candidate for the American story of its time (1925). Gatsby has more in common with T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” also published in 1925, than it does with such contemporary novels as the Arrowsmith of Sinclair Lewis or the Manhattan Transfer of John Dos Passos. Eliot’s admiration for The Great Gatsby is understandable; the book, like the visionary lyric of Hart Crane, struggles against Eliot’s conclusions while being compelled to appropriate Eliot’s language and procedures. Fitzgerald, the American Keats, and Crane, even more the American Shelley, both sought to affirm a High Romanticism in the accents of a belated counter-tradition. The Keatsian belief in the holiness of the heart’s affections is central to Fitzgerald, and Tender Is the Night owes more than its title to the naturalistic humanism of the Great Odes. Fitzgerald’s canonical status is founded more upon Gatsby and his best short stories, such as “Babylon Revisited,” than it is upon the seriously flawed Tender Is the Night, let alone upon the unfinished The Last Tycoon. Oddly praised as “the best Hollywood novel” despite its manifest inferiority to Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, The Last Tycoon is more an embryo than it is a torso. Edmund Wilson’s affectionate overestimation of this fragment has been influential, but will fade away each time the book is actually read. Tender Is the Night demonstrates that Fitzgerald, unlike Conrad 1 2 Harold Bloom and Lawrence, cannot sustain too long a narrative. The book, though coming relatively late in his career, is Fitzgerald’s Endymion, while Gatsby is, as it were, his Fall of Hyperion. Keats desired to write epic, but was more attuned to romance and to lyric. Fitzgerald desired to write novels on the scale of Thackeray and of Conrad, but his genius was more fitted to Gatsby as his mode of romance, and to “Babylon Revisited” as his version of the ode or of the reflective lyric. The aesthetic of Scott Fitzgerald is quite specifically a personal revision of Keats’s hope for Negative Capability, which Fitzgerald called “a romantic readiness” and attributed to his Gatsby. It is certainly part of the achievement of Fitzgerald’s best novel that its hero possesses an authentic aesthetic dignity.