546
PARTISAN REYIEW
How did a man so sensitive as Fitzgerald come by what is almost
a worship of money? First of all, I suppose, because nobody taught him
anything else, and he was not an original thinker. He remembered of his
college life most specifically that he was too light to play college football
and that an attack of tuberculosis had cost him the presidency of the
Triangle Club. He seems never to have got over the pang of these early
failures to qualify as "the man most likely to succeed." Certainly he
never learned in college that there was any form of success, even literary,
not to be commercially or at least tangibly calculated.
But this, which is perfectly normal, does not quite explain the inten–
sity of his feeling. The articles in
The Crack-up
suggest the explanation:
at twenty-two he endured the trauma of being poor-or at least genteel
poor. After a "haughty career as the army's worst aide-de-camp" he
got in an advertising agency. Here he lived a life curiously suspended
between the rich friendships of Princeton and the painful reality of his
salary. Poverty meant to him no actual privation; what it meant was
the realization that others were much richer than he, and that it mattered.
His autobiographical articles come back again and again to the portrait
of his double life at this time: · walking in now and then from his cheap
bleak flat to the big parties, the handsome mansions, "ghost-like in the
Plaza Red Room of a Saturday afternoon"; walking quickly "from cer–
tain places-from the pawn shop where one left the field glasses, from
prosperous friends whom one met when wearing the suit from before the
war." There was certainly a painful sense of insecurity and inferiority.
Anyway, his New York adventure ended when the golden girl threw him
over "on the basis of common sense." He must have had a partial
breakdown; at any rate he went back home to St. Paul, convinced that
he was a failure-there to hit the jackpot with
This Side of Paradise
and
incidentally win back the golden girl.
After that, according to Fitzgerald, he was never "able to stop
wondering where my friends' money came from, nor to stop thinking
that at one time a sort of
droit de seigneur
might have been exercised
to give one of them my girl." He describes himself as having a smoulder–
ing hatred for the leisure class, but its practical results seem to have
been an envy and an admiration for the possibly not unattainable. The
articles and notes in
The Crack-up
are full of an acute sense of the
gradations of class. He is always concerned as to whether he and Zelda
were staying at the best, or the second best, or the bad hotel; with the ·
relative fashion among relative groups of the watering places they fre–
quented; with the social moving-up or moving down of the people he
knew-and described. Even in the article the implicit snobbery has an
almost sociological tone; in his creative work it' is of course less blunt.
But all this is only the half of it, and it is the tension between this
and the other half that makes, I think, the peculiar distinction of Fitz–
gerald both as stylist and as commentator. Behind the devotion to glitter
