A Painful Story
THERE was a time when biographies were wfltten piously to com- memorate the lives of great and worthy men, or men believed to be great and worthy. Today they are sometimes written profanely to gratify inquisitiveness for the sensational details of the private lives of notorious characters. A Curious and incongruous feature of the present book, with its seductive but meaningless title, is that it is a work entirely of the temper of the first sort, concerned with a subjeot wholly of the second. F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved notoriety very early In life,l-with the publication in 1920 of This Side of Paradise, a novel which caused . him to be acclaimed as spokesman for the Young America of the Jazz Age. (His second book bore the title Flappers and Philo- sophers.) A decade of wild living and frantic writing for money to pay expenses accentuated an already marked predisposition to psychological regression, and not only made of him a confirmed dipsomaniac but brought his wife Zelda to the brink of the insanity which finally destroyed her. The remaining ten years until. his death in 1940 as a script-writer in Hollywood was a harrowing time of deepening misery, chaos and despair, out of which he emerged to write two remarkable novels, Tender is the Night (1934) and the unfinished posthumous The Last Tycoon (1941). His most notable book, however, remains The Great Gatsby, written at the peak and possibly the turning-point of his career, in 1925. Fitzgerald was, at his best, a very fine writer, although,'as. his biographer points out, " his mind moved with great subtlety among the concrete experiences he had known well and felt deeply, but he had almost no capacity for abstract ideas or arguments and could enter into other people's attitudes only when he had known them in his own experience." Mr. Mizener distinguishes two prin- cipal components in his character—" the romantic young man " and the " spoiled priest." To say that it was the former who lived Fitzgerald's life for him, and the latter who transcended and evalu-. ated it through his art, is to come near to apprehending the extra- ordinarily wide division in him between the dissolute, uncontrolled man and the disciplined writer. It is, of course, the former rather than the latter with which Mr. Mizener is concerned. The trouble is that he has not penetrated beyond the external pattern of his subject's life to the essential man, and so is overwhelmed by accidental details. It is the .grave, scrupulous, factual manner in which he pursues the vagaries and follies of Fitzgerald's existence which gives the book its incongruous aspect:
"The journey to and from Great Neck was always an rdventure,
for a car was not a safe instrument in the hands of either of them. Once Fitzgerald drove Max Perkins straight into a pond instead of following the curve of the road ' because it seemed more fun ' ; Zelda got herself arrested as 'the Bob-haired Bandit,' and once she drove slowly out of a side road in front of a car which missed her only by a heroic effort. When her passenger asked breathlessly if she had not seen it. she said, Oh yes, that she had."
The truth is that Fitzgerald the man was not so much a person as a " case "—a sufficiently dramatic and pathetic specimen of the American man of the inter-war years driven by an obscure but irrevocable impulse to self-destruction, the springs and workings of which are revealed in his writings so much more sharply and poignantly than in this conscientious but fumbling biography. As such he cries aloud for understanding and interpretation, whether in terms of literature, psychology or sociology, or a combination of all three. Mr. Mizener has not responded to this cry. He has not interpreted Fitzgerald ; he has merely presented him, in a compe- tent, doubtless trustworthy, but fundamentally insensitive and inadequate way. But he has all the same written the standard biography, of which the real interpreter of Fitzgerald, if he ever comes, will have to take account for its painstaking documentation of the bare facts of the novelist's painful and distressing career.
D. S. SAVAGE.
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