548
PARTISAN REVIEW
particularly in his earlier stuff, of his sense of the enormous beauty of
which life, suitably ornamented, is capable; and at the ·same time of his
judgment as· to worthlessness of the ornament and the corruptibility of
the beauty. This irony of regret lies deep in the individual contour of
phrase and assortment of words; if the felicity of its expression is no
doubt not to be explained, it is still, it seems to me, the key to the con–
sistency of the peculiar Fitzgerald tone.
You see it continually in the notebooks printed in this collection,
where it emerges with the sharpness given to the focus of fragments.
But the notebooks as a whole are a little disappointing; if the wise-cracks
seem sometimes pretty thin and the descriptions have often the wilfulness
and brittleness of visible tricks, it is probably because the irony is not
sustained by a context, by the consistent congruity of an attitude. They
remind you, in short, of how much the style in the novels interprets the
essential subject matter.
The Great Gatsby
is Fitzgerald's best novel because here the con–
gruity of story and style and attitude is closest and most meaningful.
Here he had a story whose central character not only symbolized his own
conflicts and confusions, but made a moving commentary on a period
and a country a5 well. The grandeur and pathos of Gatsby are that his
enormous vitality, ambition and power of creation are all lavished on a
"vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty" unworthy of the emotion that
cannot discover a worthier ideal. It is notable that the auditors clearly,
and even Gatsby dimly, are aware of the corruption "concealing his in–
corruptible dream." The clearsightedness is Fitzgerald's commentary on
himself: he wrote to John Peale Bishop at the time that Gatsby "started
out as one man I knew and then changed into myself." Hence, I suspect,
both the warmth and the compassion of the portrait of Gatsby. But if
the feeling of the novel owes a good deal to its author's identity with his
subject, its impact owes a lot too to its range; to the fact that Gatsby is
not merely a disguise for Fitzgerald. Not only Gatsby and Fitzgerald
have dreams nobler and finer than any tangible forms that are given
them, or that they can find for them; more charged with emotion than
the tangible forms justify. The tragedy of Gatsby was a fable for his
America; it is not, I should say, by any means dead yet.
2.
The price of writing within a generally realistic convention, particu–
larly of the more personal sort, is that the writer's art must live on his
own experiences and emotions while the business of writing interferes
with his acquiring any more. Hence the reveries over childhood and
youth so common in modern fiction. Reading over both
The Crack-up
and the output it footnotes, one is struck again and again by how hard
Fitzgerald worked whatever lodes were to be found in what was, after
