Paradise Lost: A Life of F Scott Fitzgerald

David S Brown

Belknap Harvard, £23.33

I’d Die For You: and Other Lost Stories

F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel

Simon & Schuster, £16.99

Review by Brian Morton

EVEN Scott Fitzgerald’s friends sold short his gifts. When Edmund Wilson, a Princeton contemporary, profiled the emerging novelist in a Bookman article, he hid behind a comment made by another writer to the effect that to meet F Scott Fitzgerald “is to think of a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond . . . everyone is surprised that such an ignorant old woman should possess so valuable a jewel”; needless to say, she doesn’t know what to do with this unexpected windfall and implicitly squanders it in meaningless display. Wilson goes on to point out that his friend is no old woman but “a very good-looking young man”, not in the least stupid, “but, on the contrary, exhilaratingly clever”. By now, though, the damage has been done and “good-looking”, “young” and “clever” are too slight in compliment to repair it.

Wilson had earlier agreed to cut a previous article, omitting a reference to alcohol in a list of the three things that had gone to the shaping of F Scott Fitzgerald. The others were his St Paul, Minnesota, upbringing, and Irish ancestry. Wilson might have replaced booze with Catholicism but that was a strain that has disappeared almost entirely from Fitzgerald criticism, as it did from the author’s life; besides, it might seem to be already covered by the Irish background. Fitzgerald drank because, as his secretary, lover and multiple biographer Sheilah Graham attested, he believed it fuelled his talent. His objection to the reference in the Wilson article was disingenuous, since Scott and his wife Zelda frequently made a parade of their drinking. By all accounts, she had a harder head than he. Scott repeatedly tried to go dry, in order to preserve his vision of a book, and he was mostly clear-headed when he worked on the draft of his unfinished The Last Tycoon, but, again, the damage was done. He told friends he didn’t expect to make 40. In the event, he didn’t make 45.

Almost everything non-factual you’ve ever read about F Scott Fitzgerald is wrong, or at best skewed. He comes down to us as the “chronicler of the Jazz Age”, the dreamer of a particularly glamorous iteration of the American Dream, something of a dandy, the anti-type to his friend Ernest Hemingway’s sleeves-up machismo and minimalism. Almost nothing could be further from the reality.

As David S Brown shows in this meticulously argued new biography, Fitzgerald’s whole career was steeped in regret rather than exhilaration. He inhabited a country that had abandoned the high, courteous ideals of an older America in return for a noisily huckstering culture of wealth and ostentation. Perhaps the strongest single representation of that mood in his work also, interestingly, involves a diamond, one as big as the Ritz. The story of that title is one of his strangest, not least because the title is literal, rather than metaphoric. It stands, along with Bernice Bobs Her Hair (which I find acutely painful to read) and May Day, among his most brilliant and savage critiques of the country posterity believes he was celebrating.

All that said, Fitzgerald often sold short his gifts. Permanently short of money, he had to peddle short stories to whomsoever would pay him a fee, and he often had to see his best work go for least. The Saturday Evening Post turned down several of his very best stories, leaving him to turn to HL Mencken’s Smart Set for less than a quarter of the fee. Small wonder, then, that there are stories that have hitherto avoided the net of collected editions. There are no substantial revelations in Anne Margaret Daniel’s edition of “lost” stories, but there are some good and typical reads. The title piece is another “crack-up” narrative, written while Scott and Zelda were trying to regain their health in upstate resorts. The other 17 mostly come from the 1930s when the bright shine of his early work had worn off and the darker brilliance of Tender Is The Night, his best book and his favourite, was only spottily acknowledged.

So far, and not a single reference to The Great Gatsby. It is, of course, a classic and would be even more of one if film-makers would leave it alone. Leonardo DiCaprio (and director Baz Luhrmann) rekindled a thousand thousand misreadings in their soppy 2013 screen version. Robert Redford, Mia Farrow and, critically, Sam Waterson as the book’s real central character Nick Carraway, did better with Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 script (Jack Clayton directed) and Alan Ladd, of all people, came closer to Fitzgerald’s Gatsby (“an elegant roughneck”) than anyone else. There is a lost silent version from 1926, which some people claim is in Vladimir Putin’s private video collection. If so, he probably watches it gleefully, knowing that the seeds of America’s destruction lie in the novel’s dramas of expenditure and waste, sexual obsession and racial division.

Brown wisely relocates Fitzgerald, not among the smart set, but in the company of the genuinely smart, commentators like Thorstein Veblen (who popularised the notion of conspicuous consumption), Charles Beard (who shared Fitzgerald’s elegiac vision of an older agrarian America lost under the concrete) and poor, crippled Randolph Bourne (who saw social justice mortgaged to wealth and war). Fitzgerald did not think in concepts but in images. The ash-pits through which Nick, Gatsby and Daisy drive to get to hotels the size of diamonds to drink cocktails the size of elephants seem to come straight from the visions of Ezekiel, but they are also pure observation, Fitzgerald’s recognition that for every ounce of glitter there is a ton of waste, which has to be pushed ever further to the edges. Likewise, society’s human waste and offcuts. One of the most telling of The Great Gatsby’s almost accidental sightings is the car that passes with African-American musicians inside. Fitzgerald knew that the Jazz Age wasn’t copyrighted to its real owners, but had been stolen, like everything else in America.

One story in I’d Die For You has the central female character “plagued” by her beauty, but even more strikingly, plagued by her “bright unused beauty”. Significantly, it’s a story with a college setting. As Brown wisely demonstrates, Fitzgerald, far from dismissing his abortive Princeton education as an irrelevance, increasingly recognised what he had lost by not listening or following the curriculum. Arguably a young man raised on Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning and Charles Dickens could not have written The Great Gatsby, but he might not have had to make the compromises that mar part III of Tender Is The Night. Alcohol, monetary fatigue and a simple lack of literary education imposed strains on what might, very plausibly, have been the Great American Novel.

Everyone loves to quote the famous Fitzgerald line about there being no second acts in American creative lives, despite the fact that in almost every respect it is thumpingly wrong. Part of the American myth is that there is always a second act: somewhere further out West, at the end of a dock under a green light, in another book, or comeback, or final shootout. The truth that emerges from Paradise Lost (such a perfect title for a Fitzgerald biography) is that the subject’s most quotable quote applies to no one better than himself. Nick Carraway starts off The Great Gatsby by quoting his father’s advice always to remember that not everyone has had the same advantages in life. As he aged and struggled, not just with booze and an enlarging heart, not just with the corrupt, divisive country that was his inheritance, but also with the limits of his own ability, Fitzgerald himself came to recognise that he had failed to appreciate his luck or to use his social and intellectual momentum to best advantage. An early story in I’d Die For You is about a publisher who “accept[s] long novels about young love written by old maids in South Dakota”, an almost perfect sentence and a great joke. Not as good, though, as his own about non-fiction being “a form of literature half-way between fiction and fact”. Most Fitzgerald biography up to now has been non-fiction of that sort. David S Brown gets closer to a real Fitzgerald than anyone else.