A Sociological turn, with Literary Vindication

Much has been made of F. Scott Fitzgerald's obsession with the self-touted Jazz Age. Yet perhaps no one has investigated the tumultuous 1920s with the kind of esoteric range Ronald Berman does here in F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American Scene. His interests lie in an "American Scene" without the presupposed glitz and glamour. Instead, he focuses on the great vacillation between the progressive push for hard sciences to explain human behavior and an overall suspicion toward any movement optimistic enough in its epistemology to advocate universals over pragmatics. Berman effectively sets H. L. Mencken and William James as the respective poles for these attitudes, so as to let Fitzgerald freely float between them. These slim five chapters prove to be, upon first and last impression, another living, breathing exemplar of Fitzgerald's "ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time," and to do so with great dexterity (MLC 137).

This situating of Fitzgerald as a major intellectual presence rather than just a cultural mascot should come as no surprise to regular readers of Berman. As in his 2012 book, Fitzgerald's Mentors: Edmund Wilson, H. L. Mencken, and Gerald Murphy, he relies on those title figures for influence and fodder concerning Fitzgerald's intellectual output, but with a necessarily more peripheral placement this time. Like his 2005 Modernity and Progress: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Orwell, Fitzgerald is left to juggle several lofty themes, with American Scene only replacing the disciplines (sociology for philosophy). Berman meanwhile plays virtuosic variations on a single theme, using a wide spectrum of Fitzgerald texts to make a fitting empirical case for the sort of profundity Fitzgerald was capable of outside merely literary matters.

The main theme played in American Scene is the supposition that any age, or "generation" for Fitzgerald, is reliant on the thought and transition between previous generations for its self-definition (4). To do the project right, Berman first recontextualizes the period so that it actually "covered more than the Jazz Age" (2) in the same broader way he believes Fitzgerald was picturing the times in his fiction writing. By drawing on the ideas dominant in Fitzgerald's youth, which were by the 1920s often passé, Berman hopes to sway his readers into believing that the influences Fitzgerald absorbed during various moments of his intellectual shaping were "not destinations in themselves but stations on the way to change," transitory and fluid in ways too ineffable for any science (3). In this way, all the sociological prisms that American Scene presents—class distinctions, the institutionalized dispersal of capital, and community psychology chief among them—are primarily used as historical window dressing for a championing of Fitzgerald as a lead thinker regarding the above concepts in his time.

The first chapter, "The Idea of Society," chooses to describe life not in the 1920s, when Fitzgerald's fiction was having a concrete impact on society, but in the 1910s, when key and abiding ideas had an impact on Fitzgerald's adolescence. Setting the scene in this way creates a sharp contrast with the ideology of the inner circle influencing Fitzgerald at the time of the Jazz Age proper, Mencken and Edmund Wilson standing out for Berman in particular. These two key figures were looking for literature that explicitly advocated the social sciences, a utopian vision conceived out of a general desire in the air better to "approximate truth" in the wake of a disillusioning World War I (16). Making literature more ideological and indebted to the sciences are quickly acknowledged as a true historical trend by Berman but just as quickly diagnosed as a heavy auto-correction in the face of "current novels [being] inferior to those of the nineteenth century" and out of fear that the reading public was being "victimized by fake ideas" (15). The foundations for this new scene in American prove to be an agenda to save literature; Berman believes Fitzgerald was already saving it, and on his own terms.

The reasoning behind this stance...