Fitzgerald Revisited

FITZGERALD REVISITED' Henry Dan Piper, dean of Liberal Arts and Science at Southern Illinois University , was one of the first scholars to take a serious interest in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Because Piper is known as one of the earliest and most diligent workers in the field, his F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait has long been awaited as a work likely to supersede all previous commentaries on Fitzgerald's fiction. Indeed, this study has many virtues. Piper is particularly good on the writers who influenced Fitzgerald, on the line of heroes from whom Gatsby descends, and on the actual people and settings that Fitzgerald transformed into the characters and milieu of The Last Tycoon. But once that has been said, I must add immediately that Piper's work is badly flawed: it is a study in which there are significant errors of fact as well as dubious judgments. For all its weaknesses, Sergio Perosa's The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald (first published in Italian in 1961 and now translated into English) is in some respects a better guide through the Fitzgerald canon. Perosa's book also contains many errors, but he is, on the whole, a more imaginative and sensitive critic than Piper. One of Piper's greatest weaknesses is his tendency to misinterpret or misrepresent Fitzgerald'sshort stories. On three pages (66-8) he summarizes seven stories, and there are errors ( both trivial and major) in his discussions of four of them. Here is one example: Piper says that" 'Myra Meets His Family' told how a poor but honest chorus girl took revenge on her lover's rich, snobbish family-only to find out at the end that their snobbery had just been a way of testing her." This story is actually about a debutante who tracks down a fine marital prospect; he finally decides she simply wants a rich husband and hires actors to impersonate members of his family; they enact wildly eccentric roles in an effort to scare her away; she discovers the plot and gains revenge by inveigling him into a fake wedding ceremony. There is hardly any resemblance between Piper's version of the story and what Fitzgerald actually published. Mistakes of this kind are especially damaging because they often appear in discussions of magazine stories that have not been collected in book form and are thus not readily accessible to most readers. Frequently these errors give a misleading impression not only of what Fitzgerald wrote but of his general attitude toward society. Thus, Piper comments (176) on Fitzgerald's resentment of "the unbridled license of moneyed people." Yet, he says, Fitzgerald did not resent "classical capitalism," and, indeed, "no one believed more whole-hearted1y in the virtues of individual initiative and free enter- "Henry Dan Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1965. Pp. xi, 334. $10.95. Sergio Perosa, The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. 1965. Pr.- viii, 239. $5.95. The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. John Kueh . New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 1965. Pp. viii, 184. $5.00. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Letters to His Daughter. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1965. Pp. xvii, 172. $5.25. Volume XXXVI, Number 1, October, 1966 FITZGERALD REVISITED 93 prise." Piper seeks to prove his point by referring to a story published in 1932 called "The Rubber Check." This story, in Piper's summary, Ifis a vigorous defense of a poor but capable young man who has been cruelly humiliated by some rich boys because he inadvertently cashed a bad check." To begin with, Piper says nothing here of Fitzgerald's early claim that he was a socialist ( whatever that term may have meant to him); nor does he give sufficient weight in this passage to Fitzgerald's interest in Communism in the thirties. Finally, he badly misrepresents the plot of the story. In fact, the leading character in "The Rubber Check" is a brazen social climber who is anything but "capable" in his brokerage job; he draws the crucial check on a bank where his mother has an account, hoping that she...