Fitzgerald's Historical Sensibility

David S. Brown's excellent biography presents F. Scott Fitzgerald as more than an accurate chronicler of his own times: a world full of clocks and calendars that characterize his writings. For Brown, Fitzgerald was also an interpreter of those times, armed like many cultural and intellectual historians with a distinct point of view. As he observes in his introduction, "the shiny surfaces of [Fitzgerald's] writings—the pitch-perfect cadences, the knowing eye for contemporary color, and the discerning ear for 'current' dialogue—are put in the service of a deeper and seemingly timeless historical vision. Fitzgerald's penetrating descriptions of the Western world's leap from feudalism to capitalism, from faith to secularism, and from the tradition oriented to the flux oriented make him one of the more important cultural commentators America has produced" (5).

Fitzgerald's great subject was loss: loss of the illusions that made life resonate, loss of the golden girl, loss of idealism, loss of success, even loss of life. He couched his portrayals of that subject in a pattern of yearning for what might have been, and lamentation for the way it was turning out. "My generation of radicals and breakers-down," he wrote his daughter Scottie in 1938, "never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old values of courtesy and politeness" he inherited from his father (Letters 36). Instead, the "stunning power" of money and corporate goals had taken over, devaluing the individual seeking to create or invent himself (Brown 2).

Brown rightly criticizes Fitzgerald's early friends and mentors who acknowledged his talent but failed to appreciate his "keen historical sensitivity"—among them John Peale Bishop, Shane Leslie, and above all Edmund Wilson, whose patronizing attitude toward his former Princeton friend continued throughout his life and even into the 1940s when Wilson was instrumental in making The Last Tycoon and The Crack-Up available to readers in book form.

By the time he arrived in Hollywood in 1937, Fitzgerald's work had almost entirely faded from public consciousness. He was generally regarded as a back number, a Jazz Age writer who had outlived his popularity. Budd Schulberg, assigned to accompany him to the Dartmouth Winter Carnival, was surprised to learn Fitzgerald was still alive (342). Not only did his final royalty check from Scribner's come to a meager $13.13 (a fact noted by several other biographers), but as Brown also points out The Great Gatsby sold fewer than 500 copies during the entire decade of the 1930s (101).

In his effort to establish Fitzgerald as a writer with a strong awareness of what intellectual historians call the prevailing climate of opinion, Brown argues that his fiction reflects the ideas of the most influential thinkers and theoreticians. Hence the Fitzgerald of This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned belongs in the company of such Progressive era intellectuals as the radical economist Thorstein Veblen, the left-leaning social critic Randolph Bourne, and the right-leaning cultural critic H. L. Mencken. And the most important influence of all came from Oswald Spengler, whose two-volume Decline of the West served as a guidebook for the moral and emotional collapse depicted in Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.

Brown brings other commentators to bear as well, showing how Frederick Jackson Turner, Henry Adams, T. S. Eliot, and Sigmund Freud helped to shape Fitzgerald's fiction. Oddly, though, he does rather less with Karl Marx, despite Fitzgerald's fascination with the Communist movement during the early and middle 1930s—mostly in Baltimore—and his even-handed treatment of the topic in The Last Tycoon.

Paradise Lost convincingly demonstrates that Fitzgerald was far from an intellectual naif focused on the Roaring Twenties, as too many scholars and interpreters have believed. He was not that kind of writer at all, but in fact a self-taught social historian whose greatest work told the nation's story of "the April-to-autumn...