Irwin on Fitzgerald

This new book by John Irwin brings to completion a trilogy in which he examines the work of four writers—Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges; Hart Crane; and now F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the writings of each, Irwin recognizes a deep engagement with Platonic idealism. Certainly this is correct for Fitzgerald, a romantic whose fiction is marked throughout by a fondness for Keats, Shelley, and Swinburne—and by an obsession with the “golden moment” of fulfillment that most of his protagonists are pursuing. Some of them achieve such a moment, but it is evanescent, vanishing when they attempt to arrest and preserve it.

This is a personal book for Irwin, growing out of a fascination with Fitzgerald that began over fifty years ago when he first read The Great Gatsby. Irwin’s tone is agreeably self-revelatory—about his own life, his previous writings, and his long experience in reading and teaching Fitzgerald. It is a great pleasure to make one’s way through his extended analysis of the Fitzgerald oeuvre. He possesses a fluent style and a well-furnished mind; he deploys quotations from Fitzgerald’s fiction and letters with great skill. The discussion ranges widely, from the songs of Cole Porter to the myths of Pygmalion and Galatea, and Orpheus and Eurydice. Asides about Freud, Veblen, Eliot, and Sartre are on the mark.

One of the works that Irwin explores for supporting ideas is Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), a seminal work of sociology that helps to open up new interpretations of some of Fitzgerald’s best-known characters—Amory Blaine from This Side of Paradise, Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, Dick Diver from Tender Is the Night, and Basil Duke Lee, the autobiographical hero of a series of superb stories about adolescence that Fitzgerald published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1928 and 1929. All of these characters are playacting, inventing social roles for themselves that, they imagine, will allow them to achieve their dreams of status and fulfillment.

One of the great mysteries about Fitzgerald’s career is that he did not put such characters on the stage. He spent much of his apprenticeship scribbling plays for an amateur theater group in his native St. Paul, Minnesota; he also wrote some unusually good lyrics for the Triangle Club productions at Princeton between 1915 and 1917. But his one professional stab at Broadway, a satirical play called The Vegetable, flopped in tryouts in Atlantic City, sending Fitzgerald scurrying back to the mass-circulation “slicks”—the Post, Liberty, Metropolitan, Redbook, et al.—for which he had learned to manufacture top-drawer short stories. And he met with only limited success when he tried to write for the movies near the end of his career. What Irwin discerns, however, is that a marked theatricality shows itself in the fiction from beginning to end, in the portrayal of personality and above all in the handling of dialogue. Irwin’s analysis of these elements in The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night is fresh and engaging; his interpretation of The Last Tycoon, the Hollywood novel that Fitzgerald left unfinished at his death, is as good as any I have read.

By taking an approach other than the chronological, by organizing his analysis around themes and narrative approaches, Irwin fleshes out some new insights. I was taken by his identification of contrasts between the South and the North, not only in the three stories that Fitzgerald sets in the fictional town of Tarleton, Georgia, but also in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “The Swimmers,” two works of short fiction in which I had never thought to look for a southern element. Fitzgerald romanticizes the South in all of these stories, playing its slow eroticism against the frigidity of the North, showing his sympathy for the southern concern for manners, family, and the past.

Almost the only thing I would disagree about...