Fitzgerald and the Idea of Society

Many of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories, especially those about Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry, retain historical value because of their “remembered details” (Basil and Josephine xxv). Yet interpretation of time, place, and our social arrangements was uncertain when they were written between 1928 and 1931. Edith Wharton’s 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, begins by stating that the American milieu had only recently become decipherable through the work of European sociologists (780). In her opinion, the way we lived had never been convincingly explained. That view was widely shared. Edmund Wilson and H. L. Mencken, both mentors of Fitzgerald, often stated that literary descriptions of fact were not enough. Writers needed to know how human relations had been reconceived by social science.

Wharton knew about the effects of Darwinism on social thought and was aware of the role played by Spencer.¹ Such social theories were on the grand and Hegelian scale, as were those of Marx, Spengler, and Durkheim, who wrote predictive analyses of an entire civilization. However, her statement implies more than a panoramic view of systems. Max Weber’s studies of institutions had appeared before the 1930s began. Bronislaw Malinowski and his followers had made social anthropology familiar to a large audience. In fact, one of the great sociological works of the twenties, Middletown (1929), was conspicuously about locality in America; it relied on interviews, surveys, and daily observation of work and leisure. Walter Lippmann had already stated in Public Opinion (1922) that “the formal political structure exists in a social environment, where there are innumerable large and small corporations and institutions, voluntary and semi-voluntary associations, national, provincial, urban and neighborhood groupings which often as not make the decision that the political body registers” (14). According to Lippmann, knowing how local social systems worked made us revise and even devalue theories of determinism (119). The details of daily life needed to be explored, not cycles and gyres of history.

How did theories of social life reach Fitzgerald? Certainly through his own reading and observations; and also through the influence of friends and mentors. According to his secretary, Frances Kroll Ring, late in life he recalled that Edmund Wilson had “most strongly influenced his political thinking and reading” (65). Fitzgerald’s intellectual education began at Princeton in his freshman year when he met Wilson, who was already editing campus publications, doing his own critical writing, and rethinking American literature. The relationship lasted and, as Wilson noted in “A Weekend at Ellerslie” (1952), Scott “had come to regard himself as somehow accountable to me for his literary career” (Literary Essays and Reviews 307). What divided the pair was the issue of literature and politics. Wilson wanted Fitzgerald to write about American social problems; Fitzgerald did not believe that fiction was a political instrument. Wilson wanted Fitzgerald to support causes like the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti; Fitzgerald had no interest in activism. He did follow Wilson’s advice to describe the American scene in detail. According to Wilson, all writers needed to study specific events and conditions in order to demonstrate local, “organic” knowledge of their subject. In a prospectus for Axel’s Castle (1929) sent to Maxwell Perkins, he stated that he himself would investigate detailed “social questions” about the war’s effect (Letters on Literature 149–51). This was consistent: a decade earlier, in 1919, Wilson had given Fitzgerald a reading list in order to prepare himself for life as a writer in New York. He urged Fitzgerald to copy “realistic” writers like Zola and to produce a war story that was not about the front but instead about military management, the effects of war on civilians, and “the stagnation of the troops behind the lines” (Letters on Literature 44).

Wilson also—decidedly—recommended theories. He wanted Fitzgerald to drop his “Saturday Evening Post” mentality and his remaining attachment to “the decaying Church of Rome” (Letters on Literature 44). Wilson thought that Scott’s Catholicism (and his own Protestantism) had lost explanatory powers to science and to the secular systems of Marx and Freud. In this case, Fitzgerald agreed, later telling a...