Trails of the Jazz Age

Do we need another biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald? Since Arthur Mizener's inaugural one of 1951, there have been a number of successors including Andrew Turnbull's (1962) and, most commandingly, Matthew Bruccoli's "standard" one of 1981. This new one by David S. Brown concentrates, as the blurb tells us, on the "historical rather than the literary imagination of its subject." (Brown is a professor of history.)

If this strikes one as a curious approach—what do we care about in Fitzgerald except his literary imagination?—it may be justified if one believes, as Brown does, that Fitzgerald was an unusually perceptive social critic of American life between the world wars. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published in 1920; 20 years later he succumbed to a heart attack, leaving as his legacy four novels (a fifth incomplete) and scores of short stories. The most famous of his books, The Great Gatsby (1925), is now required reading for most college and pre-college courses in literature; the other works elicit a good deal less attention. Brown would have us measure Fitzgerald's importance not so much by aesthetic standards as by his "critical appraisal .  .  . of timeworn Victorian certainties," a sociological-cultural explanation.

The biographer takes us capably through well-worn territory, as the young subject, five-foot-six and 130 pounds, fresh from Minnesota, comes east to the Newman School in New Jersey, then to Princeton. Fitzgerald would speak to this moment in one of his most attractive early stories, "Winter Dreams," in which Dexter Green reaches out for "the precarious advantage of attending an older and more famous university in the East, where he was bothered by his scanty funds." Brown describes the reaching-out to Princeton on Fitzgerald's part as taking the school "only partly on its own terms the more self-conscious intellectual grind of a Harvard or Yale, romanticizing its gothic façade into a sentimental education distinct from the more intellectual Harvard and Yale." This Side of Paradise pays tribute to his Princeton experience in glowing, nostalgic terms a reader may have trouble rising to: " 'You know,' whispered Tom, 'what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years.'"

In the stories and novels to come, Fitzgerald, in Brown's terms, would divide the sexes into "female realism" and "male romance," as in his early love for the wealthy Ginevra King, and the less rich but more flirtatious southern woman he would (after some difficulty) marry, Zelda Sayre. One might wonder how any woman could begin to live up to the intensity of Fitzgerald's male romance: certainly not Judy Jones, who, in "Winter Dreams," is the dream that fades away from Dexter Green's eyes, as any woman character of Fitzgerald's must inevitably do. Rereading "Winter Dreams," a story that once meant a lot to this male reader, I encounter sentences that used to resonate to me:

There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the songs of last summer and of summers before that.