BOOKS AND WRITERS I N his notes bearing upon the unwritten
part of The Last Tycoon, the novel interrupted by his death, Francis Scott Fitzgerald wrote : "Actidn is Character." And, indeed, portrayal of character wholly through behaviour sets Fitzgerald unmistakably in the moment-by-moment school of writing. He worked by scene and by conversation. There is almost no commentary ; even Nick Carraway, who tells the story of Jay Gatsby, merely records the findings he has assembled by means of the momentary impression, the intuitive flash prompted by some happening in the immediate present. Of the half-dozen finest American novelists, Dreisei, Lewis and Wolfe are writers of straight narrative in the classic novel tradition. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway (for the most part) and
Faulkner are moment-by-moment writers of the school founded in England by Dorothy Richardson and exten4cd, by way of Virginia Woolf, to Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green and (if we accept dialogue as a kind of " scene "j I. Compton-Burnett. This aesthetic technique has many disadvantages—disadvantages which are more apparent now that it seems to be coming to the end of its run—and is always liable to make experience more brittle than it is in fact. With Scott Fitzgerald, however, the technique never for a moment obscures the serious and tragic feeling at the core.
He was a moralist ; the moral being that if money is not the root of all evil, it is the best soil for the tree to grow in. He wrote the sorrowful poetry of wealth and alcohol, and gave it a rainbow beauty of his own. Gatsby, the racketeer bearing within his own corruption his own innocent, incorruptible love, stands out upon the lawns of his ridiculous, bogus château : " The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neigh- bour's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars."
Gatsby, like Dick Diver of the later work, Tender Is the Night,
is an innocent man ; and Fitzgerald's poetry derives from the lone- liness of this inward innocence and the futility of his wealth. He is childish enough to try to charm a rich woman by the display of a greater wealth than her own. He is so obsessed by love as to believe that he must try to awaken it by any means on earth. And he does for a while awaken it—not by his contrived circuses, his social acrobatics, but by loving so mesmerically himself. The Scott Fitz- gerald hero consistently handles life in the wrong way. Dick Diver, by being a faithful nurse to the mentally unbalanced Nicole, loses her ; and has nothing left for himself, when the long beach- party is done, but a plunge back into obscurity and the embracing of a failure which, as Fitzgerald seems to suggest, may symbolise the rejection of the dream for the inevitable reality—the Return of the Native.
The Jazz Age, for Fitzgerald, was not hopeful, not happy ; he
saw it as a corruption, but he made the phosphorescence of that corruption beautiful. Tender is the Night begins with the intro- duction of a young girl to a set of elegant persons engaged in " gracious living " ; to her they are the height of breeding, beauty and nobility of spirit. Then Fitzgerald shows them for what they are —a crowd of rich wasters, drunkards, neurotics, perverts. Still they remain beautiful, and the radiance about them is, perhaps, the more entrancing because we know that it is ephemeral. The light comes not from the moon, but from rotten fish ; it is none the less silvery.
In a new collection of Fitzgerald's short stories,* the reader will
find his astonishing and conclusive satire upon the true end of riches, The Diamond as Big arthe Ritz. The tale sums up everything he had to say upon this particular subject ; which is to the effect that wealth, if blown up like a balloon to the limits of man's imagination, could only end in one thing—a bang, and nothing. Braddock Washington has built his home upon a diamond mountain. He has
• Borrowed Time. By F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Grey Walls Press, 12s. 6d.) bribed governments to keep their hands off his land. He has murdered or imprisoned any guest who might give the game away, any aviator who has inadvertently discovered his empire. In his last hour, with no man left to bribe, he tries to bribe God ; and he and his world are blown to bits. It is as fantastic a story, in its " seeing right through to the end," as one might expect from some writer who had decided to describe what life would be like when the State had withered away Fitzgerald really did claim to know all the answers—end wrote down a row of noughts.
May Day, the longest story in Borrowed Time, is Fitzgerald's attempt to capture the entire feeling of a nation and an age, to curl his hand around the whole social cosmos, compress it and squeeze out of it the hitter juice of failure and defeat. " There had been a war fought and won.. . All through the long spring days the returning soldiers marched up the chief highway behind the strump of drums. . ." The Yale men in the clubs discuss the best types of collar. Edith is-dressing with narcissistic delight for the Gamma Psi dance. On Sixth Avenue a little Jew orator is crying, " What have you got outa the war ? Look arounja, look arounja ! Are you rich ? . . . No ; you're lucky if you're alive and got both your legs. . . ." This feverish story, gay, rowdy, infinitely miserable, is wider in vision than anything Fitzgerald had attempted before. " It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art," he wrote later ; " New York .. . had all the iridescence of the beginning of the world." May Day is the story of a world at its beginning, marked down by its end.
Yet Fitzgerald was not entirely a writer of despair. Utter despair is not compassionate : and his work is full of compassion. Utter despair is not to be distracted from greyness and dust and the shadow under the red rock : his work is full of apprehensions of joy in the natural world and of the glitter of silver and gold from the tarnished tinsel, the rusting fairy-lamps, strung across it by sad, hysterical Man. The Great Gatsby, his masterpiece—a small masterpiece but it is one, none the less—is full of love and gentleness. As Alan Ross remarks in his preface to Borrowed Time, he " wrote very close to experience and the themes of his work reflect, intensely but rarely bitterly, personal problems." This is a good point. The Beautiful and the Damned. though more tawdry in its surface-shine than the novels that followed it, is still full of an intense personal feeling and involvement with its characters. The unfinished work, The Last Tycoon, is extremely moving because Fitzgerald has used every element of personal longing, desire and sorrow, to force his imagination into comprehension of a man who was not himself.
His least effective work is his most obviously "clever." The short story, The Cut-Glass Bowl, is really no more than an accomplished, elaborate " Tale of the Uncanny " ; Alan and Jennifer Ross, in their selection, might have dispensed with it. The Camel Back is grotesque comedy by a writer who was not strongly gifted with the comic sense. The writes of successful comedy, if he treats a ridiculous theme, must have a sense of the ridiculous ; and Fitz- gerald was entirely devoid of this. A satire like The Diamond as Big as the Ritz comes off because it is based on something serious. Fitzgerald was a serious man, at his best only when making his own peculiar synthesis of excitement and grief.
In all the stories, Fitzgerald's dialogue is superb. He had a fine ear and a wonderfully developed selective sense. One of the faults of run:of-the-mill writing is the recording, in tedious speech that adds nothing to character, of matter that should have been passed over in narrative. Fitzgerald's people hardly make a single casual remark which could be deleted without loss to character. His repetitions, his quick, incisive responses, all build up into the essential portrait. and though he never enriched his work with com- mentary, he never thinned it out by the inclusion of the non-essential. He is easy enough to place instantly in a " school," or even, with some precision, in a hierarchy ; but, more than any other American writer, he grows beneath the backward glance, and through re-reading, or the deliberate act of memory, gains in lustre and in
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