BOOKS
Trust the Tale
BY DAVID REES WHEN he died in December, 1940, Scott Fitzgerald was convinced that his entire career had been a failure. Moreover, in recent years, thanks perhaps to Sheilah Graham's memoir, Schulberg's The Disen- chanted, and Fitzgerald's own notebooks in The Crack-Up, much attention has been given to his last years of illness and decline, that phase of his life during which he wrote Tender is the Night and The Last Tycoon. Yet for many of his readers Fitzgerald is still above all the chronicler of the Boom, and years after the Crash of 1929 Fitzgerald would remark, writing in the third person, that he continued to feel grateful to the Jazz Age because 'It bore him up, flattered him and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did.' Fitzgerald's own life during the 1920s was, of course, as complex as the emotions which are best crystallised in Gatsby; from the great days at Great Neck he moved on to the Riviera—St. Raphael, Juan-les-Pins, Antibes—but although he returned to the States during 1926-27 he was back in France for the last years of the decade.
With Morley Callaghan's memoir* of the last year of the Jazz Age in Paris, we have a splendid piece of autobiography which will be read and re-read not only for its description of the phenomenon of America in Paris during the 1920s, but for its insight into the character of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Dazzled by The Sun Also Rises and This Side of Paradise Callaghan fled from Toronto to the city of light, and, al- though his Murger-like vignettes of Joyce and Ford Madox Ford are interesting enough, the heart of the book is his 'tangled 'friendship' with Fitzgerald and Hemingway, 'these two great actors of the 1920s,' as Mr. Edmund Wilson has described them. But Callaghan's memoir is about the breaking as well as the making of the friend- ship. Fitzgerald was the inefficient timekeeper at the famous boxing match in which Callaghan floored Hemingway; and the resulting tragi- comedy of misunderstandings led to the first serious rift between the two novelists. More important than Callaghan's story of the fisticuffs 's his account of the growing tension between his two friends with its thickening miasma of suspicion, resentment and above all, rivalry: 'in Paris, I'm convinced, Ernest and Scott had never really got together even in the heyday of their relationship.' After the summer of '29 this Trelawny to the two great writers never saw Fitzgerald again; and it was thirty years before
Was glad to hear that in the last year of his life out in Sun Valley [Hemingway] talked . . . affectionately about those days in Paris with Scott and me and sent me at last his warm regards. .
Even more than most novelists, as Callaghan brings out in several anecdotes, Fitzgerald wrote Particularly close to experience; and nowhere is this more true than with his stories, written nearer to the setting and to the emotion than his carefully composed novels. During his lifetime tie published about 160 stories and in 1951 Scribner's published an American edition of twenty-eight of these pieces. The Bodley Head have now issued their own collection in their uniform edition of Fitzgerald's work,t a collec- tion which adds twelve stories to the 1951 edition while retaining Mr. Malcolm Cowley's introduction, one of the best essays ever written on Fitzgerald. Yet this must be one of the most haphazardly compiled editions of a major novelist ever issued. Ten stories here have already appeared in the previous Bodley Head volumes, and a further six in the collection Afternoon of an Author (1958). But whatever the reasons for this editorial dereliction, we must at any rate be grateful for these two volumes, for there can be little doubt that here is the best collection of Fitzgerald's stories which will be available for the foreseeable future.
Quite rightly in view of the autobiographical nature of Fitzgerald's writing, Mr. Cowley has divided the stories into four sections correspond- ing to Fitzgerald's astonishing rise and fall. But while of course the real dividing, line in Fitz- gerald's work comes at the end of the 1920s, we must still bear in mind D. H. Lawrence's advice to biographically-minded critics: don't trust the artist, trust the tale. Thus in such stories as 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair' and 'The Jelly Bean' we can see easily how the writer has infused the ordinary formulas of popular fiction with his romanticism, his great intuitive understanding of women, and the extraordinary sense of time and place he possessed. And in 'The Ice Palace' and especially in the 'Basil and Josephine' stories, of which seven are printed here, there is a characteristic concern with a struggle which those who grew up in the Jazz Age saw as their own— the war between the young and the old. Above all there is in these early stories an obsessive sense of an ecstatic moment that has vanished for ever; all of Fitzgerald's early fictional heroes were like Tom Buchanan, who 'would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable foot- ball game.'
Yet in two of these stories of the early 1920s, 'May Day' and 'The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,' Fitzgerald would explore with a master's assurance themes which would concern him for the rest of his life. 'May Day'—the day in 1919 which, according to Fitzgerald, marked the precise beginning of the Jazz Age—has three interlocking plots as it sweeps from the Yale fraternity men in Delmonico's to the rioting veterans and Bolshevik agitators outside to the suicide of Gordon Sterret, broke and drunk. 'You seem to be sort of bankrupt—morally as well as financially,' a classmate tells Sterret. 'Don't they usually go together?' The story is a parable of the collapse and disintegration which lie under the surface of 'the great city of the conquering people,' a theme which Fitzgerald was to return to again and again in the later stories. Closely related to 'May Day' is the fantasy of 'Diamond,' with its rich madman who believes he can bribe God with his wealth, and the middle-class boy
who falls in love with the rich heiress, and who, after the diamond mountain blows up, has to return to an intolerable bourgeois life. Not only are the rich different from us, but involvement with them can sometimes be disastrous—for just as Gatsby is indirectly destroyed by Daisy Buchanan, so Dick Diver is contemptuously dis- missed by the Warrens once Nicole is cured. . . .
But if the lost decade began on May Day, 1919, it just as surely ended on Black Thursday of October, 1929. Six months later Zelda under- went a psychotic breakdown and what Fitz- gerald was to call 'an age of miracles, an age of art, an age of excess, and an age of satire' was succeeded for him by an age of suffering, alco- holism, illness and insolvency. Yet it is as if all the appalling chaos of his life could not reduce his talent; he never lost his habit of self-criticism and from these years emerges the great theme of Fitzgerald, the loss of love and happiness, the conflict in those who begin life infatuated with the world and then come to see it as it really is. Thus in the stories written after 1929 we have the hero of 'The Lost Decade,' drunk for ten years, 'every-which-way drunk,' or Martin in 'Design in Plaster,' driven to the borders of insanity by an irrational jealousy. Then there is the subtle and terrible marital disintegration of 'One Trip Abroad': 'It's just that we don't understand what's the matter,' she said. 'Why did we lose peace and love, and health, one after the other? If we knew, if there was anybody to tell us, I believe we could try. I'd try so hard. . .
Perhaps the three most characteristic •of all these stories of the 1930s are 'Two Wrongs,' where husband and wife pitilessly equal the score against each other, 'Crazy Sunday' in which a self-obsessed Hollywood writer is brought to a moment of self-revelation and, above all, 'Babylon Revisited.' Here, where moral insight and construction are perfectly fused, and which bears the same relation to the later stories as 'May Day' and 'Diamond' do to the earlier pieces, Charlie Wales, one of the walking wounded of the Boom, returns to Paris in the early 1930s. Wales has already lost his money and his wife during the big spree; now as a result of a disastrous encounter with some former cronies of the Ritz bar, his daughter is also lost to him, probably for ever. As the full meaning of the Crash becomes apparent, 'he suddenly realised the meaning of the word "dissipate"—to dissipate into thin air; to make something into nothing':
Again the memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare—the people they had met travelling; then people who couldn't add a row of figures or speak a coherent sentence. The little man Helen had consented to dance with at the ship's party, who had insulted her ten feet from the table; the women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs out of public places—.
—The men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the snow of twenty-nine wasn't real snow, If you didn't want it to be snow. you just paid some money. . . .
Understandably, not all of Fitzgerald's later work reached this level. But during the last year of his life in Hollywood he wrote for Esquire seventeen sardonic stories about a studio heel
* THAT SUMMER IN PARIS. B'y Morley Callaghan. (MacGibbon and Kee, 25s.) t THE BODLEY HEAD SCOTT FITZGERALD. Vols. V and VI. (25s. each.) SHORT STORIES. Selected and introduced by Malcolm Cowley. '41: THE PAT HOBBY STORIES. By F. Scott Fitz- gerald. With an introduction by Arnold Gingrich. (Scribner's, $3.50.) and a hack, Pat Hobby, which have now at last been collected into a single volumel Hobby, once a big-time writer in the filth city during 'the mosaic swimming-pool era—just before the era when they had to have a shinbone of St. Sebastian for a clutch lever,' is by the end of the 1930s reduced to a seedy apartment above a delicatessen on Wilshire Boulevard surrounded 'by his books--`the Motion Picture Almanac of 1928 and Barton's Track Guide, 1939.' Pat's creator once called him 'a complete rat,' for Fitzgerald feared Hobby's fate was his own, but what one is aware of in these stories is Fitz- gerald's ability to stand apart from his material, making fun as he does of his own weaknesses. This collection was well worth publishing, but no need to take seriously Mr. Gingrich's claim in his interesting introduction that Pat Hobby's place, if not between Gatsby and Diver, is 'at least between Monroe Stahr and Amory Blaine.' Hobby's place, on the contrary, is firmly between Royal Dumphrey and Wylie White--even the thought of Hobby and Stahr in the same sentence is faintly embarrassing.
Yet even in Pat Hobby's humiliating adventures there is discernible the intelligence, humour and skill of Fitzgerald's major work. Whatever the personal shambles of the last years, here in these later stories and in his unfinished novel with its meaningful interpretation of Stahr's downward flight is the evidence for trusting the tale; little wonder that in his last years Fitzgerald read his own books for advice. Easy to see now that Fitzgerald's career was not a story of early success and later failure, but rather the final triumph of a great talent against equally great odds. 'He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. .
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