The death of eighty-one-year-old Caitlin Thomas this past summer dredged up, from forgotten depths of my memory, a good many images of the wild and drunken life of her husband, Dylan, whose rollicking verse and booming recitation so much enchanted my cloistered youth. They were an immensely flamboyant couple who lived with wild abandon, and their lunatic shenanigans mesmerized a great many aspiring poets and ambitious literary youth in those years. Hardly a week went by, it seemed, without a new account in Time of that couple’s gaudy and gross public naughtiness.

Less beguiling, though, was the melancholy public spectacle that Thomas began to make of himself in the early 1950s, during his several reading tours in America. Thomas on tour was all too often drunk on the platform, openly lewd at social events, and rude beyond belief to his disillusioned admirers. A number of the recent obituaries that undertook to account for the now mostly forgotten couple cited Caitlin’s confession that their story was “not a love story proper” but “more of a drink story,” since “without the first-aid of drink it could never have got onto its rocking feet”:

In those long-ago, wrongly romanticized, deliberately mad (they were deliberately mad), absolutely unpardonable days, our primary aim was to get ourselves noticed at any cost: to show off like crazies to gain attention. So we used shock tactics. We knew only too well that it is much easier and quicker to get oneself noticed in a bad light. It was essential to give people a legend.

What seems evident is that the Thomases had taken a leaf from the legend of the F. Scott Fitzgeralds. For Scott and Zelda were doubtless the first literary couple to realize that notoriety in America is merely a form of publicity, that publicity is indistinguishable from celebrity, and that even notoriety attained through scandal can still be instantly turned into wealth, fame, and power. “Hard Copy,” “A Current Affair,” and “Inside Edition” are three dismally popular television programs that—under the pretext of bringing us news that the network anchors simply don’t have time for—blur the distinction between “stunts” that merely call attention to the publicity-hungry egotists who perform them and true distinction worthy of public attention or admiration. And so long as the American public is avid for such sensationalism, there will always be a market for books about people like the Thomases and the Fitzgeralds. After all, don’t we think it’s daring, risqué, and wonderfully spontaneous and uninhibited when celebrity couples get drunk and dance on the restaurant table or plunge into the fountain at the Plaza Hotel?

What seems evident is that the Thomases had taken a leaf from the legend of the F. Scott Fitzgeralds

A century ago such escapades would have been silently omitted from our literary biographies. It was customary in the age of Mrs. Grundy to recognize that, while artists had “weaknesses,” these were best excluded from biography in the interest of public morals and the sensibilities of the children and surviving relatives. The older family-authorized two-volume Life and Letters of … (of the kind specialized in by the indefatigable M. A. DeWolfe Howe) rarely brought a blush to the cheek of the genteel reader. But the attack on Mrs. Grundy by the Shieks and Flappers of the 1920s—the assault on public morals as mere hypocrisy by Flaming Youth—was almost instantly signaled by a shift in biography-writing as well. The eminent Victorians (and our other predecessors) were now to be debunked, exposed as frauds, and shown up as hypocrites. Even writers who had apparently led exemplary lives were now to be stripped of their “transparent defense mechanisms” and, à la Freud, revealed to be repressed, frustrated, and neurotic. “Modern writers” who were not repressed, frustrated, and neurotic but who gave open expression to impulse and acted out their infantile desires in public were acclaimed as free, natural, and uninhibited, somehow psychologically “healthier” than their uptight elders. And the odd antics of les jeunes were regularly celebrated in the press. Indeed, the media even conspired to induce the craziness, to feed the frenzy for scandal, and to convince us, all the while, that mere audacity equals genius.

Nearly a decade ago, in taking up James R. Mellow’s Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (1985), Sonya Rudikoff, writing in these pages, expressed the fear that Mellow might offer us yet “another promotion, or another hagiography, another recital of the romanticizing litany which tries once again to proffer an image and enthrall us.” He did not. The dismal facts of the Fitzgeralds’ lives were already well known. Arthur Mizener’s biography, The Far Side of Paradise (1951), had not concealed at all the grimmer implications of Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and Zelda’s madness. In fact, Hemingway—protective in later life of Scott’s reputation and the feelings of his daughter, Scottie— was so incensed at Mizener’s revelations that he called Mizener a grave robber who deserved to be “hanged, head down, in front of any second-rate garage.” Hemingway told Malcolm Cowley that knocking off Mizener would be “a sound thing”: “I would like to kill him if it is O.K.

But, somehow, the squalor of the Fitzgeralds’ lives does not seem to remain in the mind as clearly as the transcendental romanticism of their lyrical courtship and the uninhibited gaiety of their notorious but loving marriage. Then too, affecting our perception, there are those gaudy, beguiling movies—like The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford or Alan Ladd—where Tom and Daisy and Gatsby step down from the slick stylish pages of the old Vanity Fair and ride about in a colorful old Rolls-Royce convertible. It hardly mattered that the movies were trash and sunk in a false nostalgia. Still we are left with the recurrent image of enchantment—as in the biographies of Andrew Turnbull and Sheilah Graham): The Glamour of the Spontaneous Talented Beautiful People—Scott and Zelda.

It is my impression that—in the decade or so since Ms. Rudikoff expressed this concern over the romantic falsification of the Fitzgeralds’ life—the literary situation has changed. Lately we have been getting not the good, the bad, and the ugly, but just the ugly. So many recent literary biographies have turned out to be hatchet jobs that Joyce Carol Oates has reproachfully coined the term “pathography”: the life that emphasizes the vice, evil, or illnesses of the author. Readers are thought nowadays to want only stories of the writer’s drink and dissipation, the sexual hang-ups, the domestic meanness and madness. At least that is what we seem to be mostly getting now.

These reflections are partly spurred by a number of recent books about Scott, Zelda, and their fiction,1 books that raise anew the question of how we are meant to understand the public and private lives of writers in America and the relationship between biography and the fiction that grows out of it.

Certainly with Jeffrey Meyers’s Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, Sonya Rudikoff’s fear need no longer be entertained. There is nothing hagiographic or promotional whatsoever about this life. It is a pathography of character flaws and debilitating vices so detailed and appalling that we wonder how Fitzgerald still manages to interest us a half-century after his death. It can in all fairness be said that Jeffrey Meyers is a practiced hand at discovering the imperfection of his subjects. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has already written lives of Katherine Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Lowell and his circle (the suicidal poets Plath, Jarrell, Berryman, et al.). For Meyers there is a talent which it were death to hide—and worse, damnation to destroy. And if Providence doesn’t damn quickly enough, Meyers is ready to step in and announce the execration of the writer. He is appalled at genius shattered by its own hand and literary brilliance brought low by its own connivances. He is ruthless in his portrait of the writer’s slide from inebriated high spirits into the vomit of drink, by the spectacle of drug- or self-induced mental derangement, by the cost to the literary life of true madness unrecognized by critics and friends. It is fair to say that he loves literature but hates the self-destructive or lunatic behavior of writers that is so much celebrated and solicited by a literary public ravenous for scandal.

Meyers quotes, with surprising complacency, the novelist Jay McInerney’s view that Matthew “Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Mellow’s peevish, sordid Invented Lives, as well as Scott Donaldson’s folksy psychoanalysis in A Fool for Love, … Arthur Mizener’s excellent and grim The Far Side of Paradise, Andrew Turnbull’s biographical memoir Scott Fitzgerald and Nancy Milford’s feminist revisionist Zelda,” fail to give “the sense of a coherent personality.” Meyers thinks that he has the key and sees his own work as “more analytic and interpretive” than the work of his predecessors and more elucidative of “the recurrent patterns that reveal [Fitzgerald’s] inner self.” But mostly what he presents to us is the clinical evidence for Fitzgerald’s manifest inferiority complex, his drunken binges, his nocturnal sweats, his sleeping pills, the couple’s sexual dysfunction, their mutual infidelities, Zelda’s growing madness and confinement in mental hospitals, the delirium produced by the daily quart of gin (or the thirty-seven bottles of beer a day when he wanted to “cut down”), his chronic money problems, and his well-publicized alcoholic crack-up. In reducing Fitzgerald’s life to this litany of disasters, Meyers does paraphrase, along the way, the writer’s major novels and stories, linking them to the personal drama of these two collapsing individuals. A kind of coherence is certainly attained by this method, but it leaves the reader who is appreciative of Fitzgerald’s fiction in a state of moral dismay.

At the age of fifteen, at the Newman Academy, Scott Fitzgerald composed this self-description:

First: Physically—I marked myself handsome; of great athletic possibilities, and an extremely good dancer. . . . Second: Socially . . . I was convinced that I had personality, charm, magnetism, poise, and the ability to dominate others. Also I was sure that I exercised a subtle fascination over women. Third: Mentally . . . I was vain of having so much, of being so talented ingenious and quick to learn. . . . Generally—I knew that at bottom I lacked the essentials. At the last crisis, I knew I had no real courage, perseverance or self-respect.

This is a shrewd piece of self-analysis, especially in regard to his defects. But, unfortunately, nearly all the virtues that he claimed for himself are exaggerations. The fact is that while Fitzgerald was a talented, charming, handsome young man, he was—more important to his sense of himself—a poor, provincial, deeply insecure, intellectually inferior, and socially outmatched boy and man at the St. Paul and Newman academies, at Princeton, and afterward.

At Princeton he felt himself to be a Midwestern nobody in the expensive company of rich Easterners.

At Princeton he felt himself to be a Midwestern nobody in the expensive company of rich Easterners. He did not have the intellectual drive to master his studies, and tried to make it on talent alone, writing and acting for the Triangle and soliciting the literary life in New York. But he was dropped for poor scholarship, and ever afterward his classmate Edmund Wilson was, to him, the intellectual he could never be; John Peale Bishop was the poet he never could become; and Hemingway was the successful writer he should like to have been. Matthew Arnold had said that the English Romantic poets were long on feeling and short on knowledge: they didn’t know enough. Something like that has often been said of Fitzgerald. In fact he said it of himself: “If I knew anything I’d be the best writer in America.” Even so, much of the time, he knew just enough about the worlds of his stories to make them come alive.

Was he fascinating to women? A number of women were drawn to Fitzgerald, but he was full of class anxieties and sexual dread. He had early on been summarily rejected by both Ginevra King and Zelda Sayre, the two golden girls in his personal mythology of unattainable love, largely because of his poverty and marginal prospects. The moral of the Ginevra King episode, as her father taught him, was that “poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls.” And only after the success of This Side of Paradise did Zelda consent, finally, to marry him. The whole experience of social marginality and romantic rejection, if it did not traumatize him for life, became the master theme of his fiction.

Yet, for all of Fitzgerald’s enchanting love stories in which the handsome and talented outsider longs for the beautiful golden girl, the wild and self-destructive Fitzgerald in fact exhibits a twisted suspicion of women, especially of beautiful women, and a deep hostility to the lure of the beautiful and to aesthetics itself. This is most evident in This Side of Paradise (1920), where Amory Blaine, a transparent self-portrait, reflects on the various young women to whom he has given himself away—Rosalind, Isabelle, and Eleanor Savage:

The problem of evil had solidified for Amory into the problem of sex. . . . Inseparably linked with evil was beauty—beauty, still a constant rising tumult; soft in Eleanor’s voice, in an old song at night, rioting deliriously through life like superimposed waterfalls, half rhythm, half darkness. Amory knew that every time he had reached toward it longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of evil. Beauty of great art, beauty of all joy, most of all the beauty of women.

Fitzgerald’s anxiety about the evil somehow hidden in the web that entangles women, beauty, and sex is played out in story after story, and in the major novels The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), and Tender Is the Night (1934). In these novels Fitzgerald’s heroines invariably decline from belle to flirt to vamp to the lamia or vampire herself. From Gloria Gilbert and Daisy Fay to Nicole Diver, as Matthew J. Bruccoli’s huge but unreadable Some Sort of Epic Grandeur shows, Fitzgerald’s fiction continually rewrites the story of the sad young man who is drained and depleted of his very energy and vitality by a destructive belle dame sans merci.

Bruccoli has the instinct of a collector but no literary taste and seems to publish two or three books a year on Fitzgerald, and to him we owe every last laundry list of the novelist that has found its way into print. Examining his two latest productions, one feels a dismal sense of déjà vu and a deep suspicion that Bruccoli’s principal vocation is pasting together, out of various materials, titles that will simply make money. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters and Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship both feature recycled material from Bruccoli’s own previous books or those of his betters. Virtually all of Fitzgerald’s important letters were long ago published by biographers like Andrew Turnbull or critics like John Kuehl and Jackson Bryer, the editors of the excellent Dear Scott/Dear Max: The Fitzgerald–Perkins Correspondence. But although these editions were handy enough, Bruccoli and Margaret M. Duggan assembled the huge Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1980, which included letters to Fitzgerald, as well as his own doodling, drawings, and other trivia. I do not know why, after the Correspondence, Bruccoli and Charles Scribner III felt that we needed another major edition of the letters, but in his introduction to this new volume he claims that the “abundance of evidence” already available “in the published collections of Fitzgerald’s letters” is “inconvenient for general readers” and so warrants a new collection. But we are not told whether there are any new letters here not already in print, and readers should be aware that the slant in this current volume is entirely autobiographical (hence the subtitle “A Life in Letters”), a limitation, if that’s what it is, that Bruccoli seems to lay at the feet of Scribner.

In Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship, Bruccoli expands his Scott and Ernest: The Authority of Failure and the Authority of Success of 1978. That was a book about the writers’ friendship that Bruccoli prematurely rushed into print before Hemingway’s letters had been edited or published, before they could even be quoted. Moreover, he writes, “At that time I conceived the bad idea of writing the book without footnotes. This experiment in ‘reader-friendly’ scholarship did not result in a best seller, but it did result in a book with limited usefulness. Biography without documentation is a species of fiction.” Few will disagree that the first book was of limited usefulness. About this current one all that can be said is that, in the intervening seventeen years, the news has become stale. We have here an account of a friendship mainly illuminated by quoting letters that, in the interim, have become readily available elsewhere, a friendship rather exhaustively treated, moreover, in biographies of Hemingway by Kenneth Lynn, Peter Griffith, Michael Reynolds, and others. Bruccoli calls the friendship “dangerous.” And, in the sense that Fitzgerald shamefully abased himself before a writer he considered his superior (provoking Hemingway’s contempt for this unmanly weakness), the friendship did cost Fitzgerald a great deal of pain. But was Hemingway, ipso facto, a dangerous friend? James R. Mellow’s splendid Hemingway: A Life without Consequences (1992) gives us a wealth of testimony from Hemingway’s male friends to suggest otherwise. In any case, I doubt whether this book will be the best seller Bruccoli seems annually in search of, for even this new account of the friendship must be called premature and, by his own standards, fictional.

Of course Zelda was utterly mad when she made this claim, for which there is no evidence whatsoever.

In explaining why Bruccoli’s new book will not be the definitive account of this friendship, I must turn to the sexuality of both writers and therefore open up a matter that would have been unmentionable material to biographers a century ago—or even perhaps seventeen years ago. How can I put this? A number of critics nowadays claim that the friendship of Hemingway and Fitzgerald cannot be understood apart from Zelda’s claim that Scott had a minuscule penis, that his friend Hemingway was “a pansy with hair on his chest,” and that the two of them were in fact homosexual lovers. Of course Zelda was utterly mad when she made this claim, for which there is no evidence whatsoever. But Hemingway reported in A Moveable Feast that Fitzgerald asked him for reassurance about the size of his equipment, which was said to endure Hemingway’s ocular examination in the men’s room of a bar in Paris. Hemingway said that Scott was perfectly normal and that the “castrating” Zelda had said it merely to put him out of business. Bruccoli remarks that this episode is unprecedented in American literary history, as indeed it is. But Jeffrey Meyers is not content simply to question its veracity. (Eighteen times in the text Hemingway calls A Moveable Feast “fiction.”) Meyers pursues the matter to grotesque lengths, adducing Sheilah Graham’s own measurement and confirmation: Fitz was large enough for all practical female purposes and pleasurable enough in the sack. I submit that we have come to a freakish point in American biography, in the development of American culture itself, when arguments are conducted in public by supposedly serious biographers, scholars even, about the size and satisfactoriness of a writer’s penis.

Whatever we may think about this academic bobbitry, however, Bruccoli has not really given us the definitive account of the Hemingway–Fitzgerald relationship. Why? Because the manuscript of A Moveable Feast has three canceled sections with Fitzgerald material, chapters that cannot be reprinted, reproduced, or even quoted. Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin tried to reprint them in her excellent study Ernest Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast”: The Making of Myth (1991), but Hemingway’s literary estate refused permission. Bruccoli did not get permission either. And we will just have to wait until some future scholar can reprint what exactly Hemingway wrote about this friend that he subsequently canceled. In the meantime, it is doubtful that Bruccoli, the stylist who committed the following sentences to public inspection, will ever write anything definitive or produce a best seller:

The most important thing about Fitzgerald—about any writer—is his writing. The playboy image that has attached itself like fungus to Fitzgerald’s reputation obscures the proper assessment of his genius. Because Fitzgerald is regarded as “a natural”—a misleading claim made by civilians—his literary intelligence has been impugned. These letters amply demonstrate that when Fitzgerald wrote about liter ature, even informally, he wrote with the authority of a professional who had mastered his craft.

I don’t know who these “civilians” are, but I am sure that Fitzgerald would have been appalled at the fungus simile and is turning over in his grave because his letters have been reproduced here with all of their many, many, many illiterate spelling errors intact.

The collapse of the Stock Market in 1929, initiating the Depression, sensitized virtually every American writer to new disparities between wealth and poverty. And a great many of the merely sentimental authors were radicalized as well. Meyers, however, treats Fitzgerald as if he had virtually no political convictions. He cites with evident admiration Budd Schulberg’s comment that, toward the end, Fitzgerald sat in the Hollywood sunshine reading Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire “like an eager sociology student bucking for an A in Bunny Wilson’s class in social consciousness.” And he remarks:

Despite his apparent political naïveté, Fitzgerald resisted the Zeitgeist. He never swallowed, as did the more sophisticated Wilson, the illusory bait of Communism. As he shrewdly told Perkins, while attempting to explain Wilson’s gloom: “A decision to adopt Communism definitely, no matter how good for the soul, must of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.”

But in fact—while Fitzgerald was dazzled by the high style, mobility, and grace of the very rich, whose life he tried vainly to emulate —he was nevertheless full of leftist political sympathies from his earliest youth. The tension between capital and labor in his short story “May Day” (set on the red holiday in 1919) is neither merely historical nor incidental. And Fitzgerald’s sympathy with the socialists is not shallow. At Princeton, Fitzgerald had fallen under the sway of Shaw, Wells, and the English Fabians. This Side of Paradise (1920) ends with Amory Blaine’s defense of socialism to the capitalist father of one of his Princeton classmates. “This is the first time in my life I’ve argued Socialism,” Amory declares. “It’s the only panacea I know. I’m restless. I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer.” And he tells Jesse Ferrenby’s father that he has “every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals.” Of course his reasons for preferring socialism here may be romantic twaddle; but the socialist Upton Sinclair—Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins in 1922—had led him (illogically) to conclude that “freedom has produced the greatest tyranny under the sun” in America. “I’m still a socialist,” he wrote; but he said that he dreaded that “things will grow worse and worse the more the people nominally rule. The strong are too strong for us and the weak too weak.”

The Great Gatsby is pervaded with, if not revolutionary fervor, at least deep-seated resentment of the rich, the careless and irresponsible class produced by “capitalist avarice.” Tender Is the Night, moreover, in its outline form, identifies Dick Diver as a Communist who intends to send his son to Russia for the right kind of education. Between 1932 and 1934, in fact, Fitzgerald even allowed La Paix, his house in Baltimore, to be used for meetings organized by local Maryland Communists. He had great trouble, he told Ceci Taylor at this time, in reconciling his “double allegiance to the class I am part of, and the Great Change I believe in.” He broke with the Communists in 1934 but only because of their meddlesomeness in his art and their reprehensible position on the Negro question.

Yet, toward the end of his life, he reaffirmed his left-wing political convictions in saying to his daughter, Scottie, that he did not believe that “the system that produced Barbara Hutton [a millionaire playgirl] could survive more than ten years, any more than the French monarchy could survive 1789.” He said that “most questions in life” had an “Economic basis (at least according to us Marxians),” and he told Scottie that if she read “the terrible chapter in Das Kapital on ‘The Working Day’” she would never be “quite the same.” For him, as he told Perkins just before his death, Spengler and Marx were “the only modern philosophers that still manage to make sense in this horrible mess.”

Luckily for us Fitzgerald did not hector us with these views in his fiction or he might have turned out to be another hack like Upton Sinclair. But these political and social attitudes do find their way into the fiction in dozens of subtle ways. Meyers, however, is not interested in them. Nor does he care to explore Fitzgerald’s deeper attitude toward transcendental idealism, institutional religion, or American history. His preoccupation is always Zelda’s madness and Fitzgerald’s self-destruction.

One recent reader of Fitzgerald who does insist on seeing the writer in a socio-political context is Ronald Berman in The Great Gatsby and Modern Times. Berman, sometime chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1971–77), is the author of A Reader’s Guide to Shakespeare’s Plays and How Television Sees Its Audience. In this book he turns to the impact on Fitzgerald’s imagination of various strands of popular culture, elements in the text that produce an “intricate statement of time and place.” The time and place of The Great Gatsby is of course a fictionalized Long Island and New York City in the 1920s, and Berman immerses us in the commercial advertisements, the newspapers, the popular novels, magazines, and movies of the day. I confess to an admiration for criticism that historicizes the work of art, that brings back to recollection—or, for a new generation, introduces into consciousness for the first time—the context in which a novel was written. Of course there are many contexts that might be adduced and described by a biographer or critic. I have already indicated that I would have selected elements composing one different from that of Meyers. But in historicizing Fitzgerald’s novel, Berman is right to point out that the novelist was more interested in the popcult forms of his time than in the timeless treasures of the cultural past (perhaps Keats excepted). Nobody made more expert use in his fiction of popular songs, the starlets of the silver screen, and well-known public settings (the Plaza, Delmonico’s, Madison Square Garden). Berman throws a wide net over these cultural phenomena and brings up, from time to time, some wonderfully lively glittering fish.

But the historicizing of a work of art presents peculiar complications, especially when it involves an attack on one set of values (said to be outdated) in favor of another (said to be right for “modern times”). Berman shares the view that ideas and values—no less than brands of deodorant or popular songs—have a provenance and a life-span, and he is keen to expose ideas and values in the novel that not only have no utility now but had none for the American culture of the 1920s. Notions of success and of race, multicultural social attitudes, ideas about what it means to be chivalric, a hero, and a gentleman are all subjected here to the test of some contemporaneous utility. James Gatz re-created himself all right, but he used, for Berman, defunct and outdated cultural material. Berman looks at the Horatio Alger novels of the fin de siècle, the rise of the Boy Scouts, Teddy Roosevelt’s call for the strenuous life, the Vanity Fair images of style and distinction, and he pronounces them passé: “I am not sure that Gatsby has invented himself—it looks much more likely that he has assembled himself; and that he has used texts and ideas so firmly rooted in the past that they cannot make the transition to modern times.” The presumption seems to be that if Jimmy Gatz had modeled himself on the snappy, up-to-date ideals of Modernity in the Jazz Age, Daisy Fay would have swooned into his arms and Gatsby would not have been shot.

Gatsby’s gaudy silk shirts and pink suits may make us cringe, as they did Fitzgerald.

But in fact the power of The Great Gatsby derives in part from Fitzgerald’s wise understanding that every ideal exists outside of history and that the attempt to actualize or incarnate an ideal invariably degrades it. Except for the slob, we all, like Gatsby, would like to look good. But how can we look good when the only clothes available to us descend, in a manner of speaking, from flaky designers, Seventh Avenue hustlers, and the vacuous but trendy sales staff at Bloomingdale’s or K. Mart? Gatsby’s gaudy silk shirts and pink suits may make us cringe, as they did Fitzgerald. We may think we always look better, especially if we shop (as the novelist did) at Brooks Brothers. But a photograph of us in 1960s bell-bottom slacks and a Nehru jacket will show how ridiculous all styles are, how pathetic is the degradation of the sartorial ideal of looking good when it is translated into actual fabrics and designs. To contemplate a major man—say, Plato—in a toga is to have him degraded by images of John Belushi in Animal House. Who can bear to see Abraham Lincoln in that stovepipe hat, and who wishes to think of Shakespeare in a doublet, hose, and codpiece? Style, it may be said, is the joke time plays on us.

In any case, Fitzgerald created in Gatsby a romantic platonist whose ideal for himself is more exalted than he can conceivably attain. His ideal of a beloved is likewise nobler than any actual woman, much less Daisy Fay, could possibly ever be. Gatsby’s (and Fitzgerald’s) fix on the relation between the ideal and the actual might as well be called a permanent feature of human perception and cognition. To dismiss as outdated in the modern world the actualities that Gatsby finds available to reshape himself with is to miss a perennial form of aspiration itself, a recurrent mode taken by our striving for the perfection of form, the eternal longing for an ideal that will transcend the paltriness of time’s styles and the insubstantiality of the merely actual. For the romantic sensibility like Gatsby’s the ideal is an illusion but it is not any less real. And as Fitzgerald told Ludlow Fowler in 1924, “That’s the whole burden of this novel—the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”

Notes
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  1.   The books under consideration is this review include Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography, by Jeffrey Meyers (HarperCollins, 400 pages, $27.50); F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli with the assistance of Judith S. Baughman (Scribner’s, 503 pages, $30); Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship, by Matthew J. Bruccoli (Carroll & Graf, 236 pages, $21.95); and The Great Gatsby and Modern Times, by Ronald Berman (University of Illinois Press, 197 pages, $24.95). Go back to the text.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 13 Number 3, on page 24
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