Books

The Great Fitzgerald

Peter Quennell

F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography Andre Le Vot Translated by William Byron (Allen Lane £14.95)

Scott Fitzgerald died on the evening of 21 December 1940 — 'cause of death: cor- nnarY occlusion' — at the age of 44. Since ;1937, he had been a servant of the film „.`nd,ustrY, by Hollywood standards tolerably well-Paid though both the domestic burdens he carried and the after-effects of his own self-destructive alcoholism — he drank 'a little over a pint of gin a day' — left him constantly in debt. Producers often gave him work; but of all the many scripts he handled, only one had received a 'screen credits; and then it accompanied a film of which he did not much approve. Meanwhile, the high reputation he had earned in his youth was gradually fading nut. None of the local bookshops, he discovered, could produce a single copy of his novels; and, when he attended an amateur performance of a play based on a celebrated short story, the embarrassed Young actors, whom he hopefully inter- viewed behind the scenes, were obliged to admit that they had assumed the author ;Must long since be dead. At 44, he felt and looked decrepit. He had few mourners; but his old friend Dorothy Parker, having stood for a time beside his coffin, quoted the words that he himself had attributed to ,au unknown man at Jay Gatsby's wretched iuneral. °The poor son-of-a-bitch', she murmured.

Yet he had never entirely lost hope, and still believed that, during his heyday,

exerted he had Even a constructive literary influence. 14. -- now', he suggested at the end of his .Le, 'there is little published in American iietion that doesn't slightly bear my stamp ---- in a small way 1 was an original.' Fitz- gerald's claims, of course, were un- r&sarilY Ymodest. His contribution had been by no means small; and The Great QL3bY with Sad followed when he was 29, be "_ad followed his two resounding popular auccesses This Side of Paradise and The ,eauliful and the Damned, strikes me to- day as one of the most imaginative trans- atlantic novels written between the first and second world wars — a minor masterpiece, perhaps, but a book that stands up to ponder re-reading, now that the 11°)onderous sagas of Thomas Wolfe, John Passos and Theodore Dreiser seem More and

more impenetrable.

...When, in 1920, he began to make his te.tontheera, he wasthe literary spokesman of his , a chronicler of the American °In and the so-called Jazz Age, which

had revolutionised morals and manners, replaced the stately 'Gibson Girl' with the

reckless 20th-century 'Flapper', a headstrong demi-vierge, who dashed from party to party, and often conducted her wild romances in a Model T Ford; so that an indignant Middle-Western judge described the modern automobile as 'a house of prostitution on wheels'. The Great Gatsby, however, has a far more general and more deeply moving sub- ject. In Professor Le Vot's exhaustive new biography, though he mentions Fitzgerald's love of such French novelists as Flaubert, Proust and Radiguet, I can find no reference to Balzac. Yet his best book has a distinctly Balzacian turn; for Gatsby, like Lucien de Rubempre and other heroes of the Comedic Humaine, is a bold young op- portunist pitted against society, who goes wrong while struggling to make good, and whose chasse au bonheur lifts him to dizzy heights, once he has learned to exploit the social and financial conditions of his mercenary period. Gatsby too has had his Vautrin — the nefarious Meyer Wolfsheim, a realistic portrait, Professor Le Vot tells us, of Arnold Rothstein, a New York gangster and triumphant gambler, believed to have corrupted the sacred national game when he 'fixed the World Series back in 1919'.

It is as Wolfsheim's secret aide-de-camp that Gatsby has risen from the depths, become immensely rich and acquired the huge, gaudy seaside mansion that provides the fantastic setting of the story. Fitzgerald's masterpiece is an admirably

built novel and, beside being a brilliant social satire, a study of personal relation- ships in which each of the dramatis per- sonae cherishes a separate illusion, and is discovered to be carrying some kind of mask. Gatsby, for example, wishes to pre- sent himself as a magnificent host and a patrician man of pleasure; but under his mask he is a gangster's accomplice; and even his gangsterish aspect proves not to be completely genuine.

At heart, he is a simple-minded romantic, who has bought his ridiculous mansion because he hopes to lure his lost love, Daisy Buchanan, now the wife of a rich and stupid polo-player, across the gulf that divides them to one of his gigantic feasts, where night after night the riff-raff of New York assemble, drink and dance, and come and go, but do not always shake his hand.

Gatsby, despite his sinister antecedents, has a certain native goodness; Daisy and her husband, respectable inheritors of 'old money', display an armour-plated egotism; and faced with the hideous crisis caused by Gatsby's death — the murderer has chosen the wrong target; his real enemy is Tom Buchanan — immediately pack their bags and leave for Europe. Fitzgerald's attitude towards a section of society he admired at a distance, but to which he was conscious that he did not quite belong — he had been a poor boy educated at a rich school; a handsome young officer who had lost a good deal of his charm when he discarded his smart uniform — was curiously am- bivalent. His beginnings were almost as problematical as Gatsby's. 'The rich are different from us', he assured Hemingway. 'Yes, they have more money', his fellow novelist replied.

Scott Fitzgerald's life has already been described by a succession of diligent American biographers; but Andre Le Vot, Professor of American Literature at the Sorbonne, deals with it in greater detail - he has spent 20 years on the task, visiting most of the places where Fitzgerald lived and shows a wider knowledge of the story- teller's art than any previous authority.

What a sad yet fascinating tale it is! A keen satirist of his own age, Fitzgerald, as

soon as he achieved success, shared many of the period's silliest vices and, abetted by his ill-balanced wife Zelda, plunged into a round of drinking, party-giving and ar- rogantly showing off, Zelda dancing a bac- chic pas seul, her skirts tucked up around her waist, Fitzgerald entering the Casino at Monte Carlo on all fours underneath a carpet. Then Zelda slowly went mad; and

Fitzgerald passed the remainder of his life producing film-scripts and often mediocre short stories to pay her hospital expenses. 'I left my capacity for hoping', he wrote, 'on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanatorium.' Yet he remained throughout

an imaginative artist; and his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, his vision of

Hollywood at its worst and best, which ap- peared in 1941, a year after his death, surely indicates that, had the sick man himself sur- vived, the artist might very well have made a magnificent recovery.