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is also the sense of the illusion of the felicity which it represents..."All
the stories that came into my head," he observed quite accurately, "had
a touch of disaster in them-the lovely young creatures in my novels
went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew up, my
millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy's peasants.
In life these things hadn't happened yet, but I was pretty sure living
wasn't the reckless, careless business these people thought." He put it
another way in a letter to his daughter. "Sometimes I wish I had gone
along with that gang [Cole Porter and Rogers and Hart], but I guess
I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach to people
in some acceptable form, rather than to entertain them."
The notion of Fitzgerald as a moralist is at first sight sufficiently
astonishing. Certainly he was not an articulate moralist, with any con–
scious thought-out morality. He was not, as I said before, a thinker. In
one of his later articles he confesses, a little pathetically, that other men
were · his intellectual, ethical and artistic consciences, and that "my
political conscience had scarcely existed save as an element of irony in
my stuff." He was, in short, a moralist by feeling and intuition; he had
what I once heard described as a sense of smell. One of his values, he
wrote in
The Crack-up,
had been "a disregard of motives or consequences
in favor of guess-work and prophecy."
As applied to the life of the rich, the sense of smell may have ger–
minated in the smouldering resentment against the leisure class which he
described and in the feeling of insecurity which dependence upon money
had given him. But it made him, in any case, a fatalist as well as a
mor<dist. One part of his nature told him that only the rich could be
happy and gracious; but he knew by observation, experience and his
peculiar intuition that even the rich were not. At the end of his life he
wrote to his daughter, in about as explicit a moral concept as he ever
expressed, the formulation he finally arrived at: the wise and tragic
sense of life sees that "life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are
those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not 'happiness and
pleasure' but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle." But that
was long after the time of his first novels. In the twenties it is easier to
recognize in his characters the attitude of Maury Nol5le, who wondered
"at the unreality of ideas and at the fading radiance of existence."
Thinking of the tragic sense of life, Fitzgerald wrote in the account
of his crack-up that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to
hold two opposed ideas in his mind at the same time, and still retain
the ability to function." But this is also, not accidentally, a definition of
irony: the sense of something simultaneously affirmed and denied woven
into the web of the style. With Fitzgerald the mark of his style is more
specifically a nostalgic irony, and this is as much as anything the expres–
sion of the need to hold in the mind at once the two deeply ingrained
but opposed ideas I have been describing. His style keeps reminding you,
