F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction This page intentionally left blank F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction “An Almost Theatrical Innocence” John T. Irwin Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2014 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Irwin, John T. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction : “an almost theatrical innocence” / John T. Irwin. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-4214-1230-6 (hardcover : acid-free paper) — isbn 978-1-4214-1231-3 (electronic) — isbn 1-4214-1230-6 (hardcover : acid-free paper) — isbn 1-4214-1231-4 (electronic) 1. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896–1940— Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. ps3511.i9z668 2014 813'.52—dc23 2013018547 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected]. Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible. As always, for Meme, my beloved, and for the twins Matthew and Sophia Saccone in hopes that one day they may receive as much enjoyment from reading Fitzgerald’s fiction as their Nonno has This page intentionally left blank contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xi one Compensating Visions in The Great Gatsby 1 two Fitzgerald as a Southern Writer 10 three The Importance of “Repose” 33 four “An Almost Theatrical Innocence” 86 five Fitzgerald and the Mythical Method 158 six On the Son’s Own Terms 194 Works Cited 219 Index 223 This page intentionally left blank preface The present book completes a trilogy examining the work of four writers, each of whom, I contend, had been influenced in a special way by Platonic ideal- ism. The first two volumes—The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story and Hart Crane’s Poetry: “Appollinaire lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio”—appeared in 1994 and 2011, respectively. This third volume, while addressing the overall topic of the trilogy, is also the result of a professional lifetime spent studying and teaching the works of my favorite twentieth-century American fiction writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald. For a variety of reasons, as I’ve tried to make clear in the following chapters, Fitzgerald’s work has always deeply moved me. And this is as true now as it was fifty years ago when I first picked upThe Great Gatsby. I can still remember the occasions when I first read each of his novels, remember the time, place, and mood of those early readings, as well as the way each work seemed to speak to some- thing going on in my life at that moment. Because the things that interested Fitzgerald were the things that interested me and because there seemed to be so many similarities in our backgrounds, his work always possessed for me a special, personal authority; it became a form of wisdom, a way of knowing the world, its types, its classes, its individuals. One of the most powerful emotional effects ofThe Great Gatsby that has grown with each passing year is that sudden swelling of the spirit its most po- etic passages (the end of chapter 6 and the end of the last chapter) produce, an effect resembling that created when the Andante theme in Gershwin’sRhap- sody in Blue (written during the same year Fitzgerald was finishingGatsby ) suddenly emerges, its serene beauty set off by the more frenetic earlier part of the work, a feeling of discovery and rediscovery: “So this is what it sounds like to be an American”—this soaring ambition, this spaciousness, this hope of an infinite second chance. Nick Carraway describes Gatsby’s imagination as “gorgeous,” but I have always felt that that was Fitzgerald describing his own prose. When Yeats edited The Oxford Book of Modern Verse in the late 1930s, x Preface he included as the first modern poem Walter Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa from The Renaissance, which he re-lineated as if it were verse; and what Yeats found in Pater’s prose, I find in Fitzgerald’s. At one time, when I was writing my first critical book, I thought that Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! was the greatest American novel of the twentieth century, but now (and for a couple of decades past), I’ve thought this honor belonged to Tender Is the Night. I was delighted to rediscover recently that Weldon Kees, to my mind the most interesting poet of his generation, seemed to share this opinion. In a May 1951 letter to a friend, the novelist Anton Myrer, Kees, disparaging “Fitzgerald’s more thick-headed detractors,” wrote, “I have always been enormously moved by the last pages of Tender in their compression and as a triumph of dealing with years that are too sad to insist upon. The boys who see this book as a ‘parable of the artist being de- stroyed’ by the haute bourgeoisie leave me limp. It is queer how people with- out the remotest understanding of the tragic sense of life react to a book that is soaked in it” (153). And given that one of the criteria I use to judge greatness in literary art is a work’s power to break one’s heart, then by that standard I know of no work I would place above Tender. All of which ultimately goes to say, as you no doubt suspect, that what follows is a labor of love. acknowledgments I want to thank my friend and colleague Professor Howard Egeth of the Psy- chology Department at the Johns Hopkins University for originally suggest- ing to me during lunch one day at the Hopkins Club that, given my interest in the social theatricality of interpersonal relationships in Fitzgerald’s fiction, my discussion of these might well benefit from taking a look at Erving Goff- man’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. I also want to express my ap- preciation to Professors Jackson R. Bryer, Ruth Prigozy, Scott Donaldson, and James L. West, whose work on Fitzgerald over the years has set the standard of scholarship and criticism at a high level and kept it there. I also wish to thank the editor of the Southwest Review, where chapter 1 of the present book originally appeared as an essay entitled “Compensating Vi- sions: The Great Gatsby,” and the editor of Raritan, where chapter 2 originally appeared as an essay entitled “Is Fitzgerald a Southern Writer?,” for permis- sion to use them here. This page intentionally left blank F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction This page intentionally left blank chapter one Compensating Visions in The Great Gatsby ike many readers of my generation, I first became a fan of Fitzger- ald’s fiction when I read The Great Gatsby in college. At the time I Lthought it was the best book I had ever read, and indeed at the time it probably was. Some fifty years later, it is still one of my favorite American novels and Fitzgerald my favorite American fiction writer. Before reading Gatsby the first time, I had only been as deeply moved by a work of fiction once before in my life. In my senior year of high school, when I should have been studying for midterm exams, I stayed up three nights in a row reading Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. What has remained with me from my first ex- perience of these two books is the uncanny equivalence of their heroes—the high romantic Sydney Carton and the late romantic Jay Gatsby. In each case the attempt to preserve a self-sustaining image of desire, the category of De- sire per se, turns out to be a matter of greater importance in the characters’ respective stories than their attempt to possess the object of their desire. Syd- ney Carton renounces the possible possession of Lucie that might result from Darnay’s death in order to keep his desire intact as desire, even if that means dying to save Darnay’s life. Perhaps he suspected, being a good romantic, that the object of desire, even if wholly possessed, could never be as personally, as privately, his own as his self-created image of that object. Death protects Carton not only from the disillusion of possession but also from the wandering or waning of desire through prolonged nonpossession, a simultaneous foreclosure of the object of desire and of Desire itself. But that foreclosure involves a characteristic foreshadowing. Dickens says that at the moment of his death Carton “looked sublime and prophetic” (357), and the subsequent description of his prophetic vision centers on Carton’s survival in the memories of Lucie, Darnay, and their descendants, a mnemic survival embodied in Lucie and Darnay’s child, a son named Sydney: 2 F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him, foremost of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name, with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place—then fair to look upon, with not a trace of this day’s disfigure- ment—and I hear him tell the child my story, with a tender and faltering voice.

Load more