550
PARTISAN REVIEW
willy-nilly dragging their way in. On any other basis the projected pat–
tern is baffling. The serious theme of the novel, as evidenced first of all
by the title, appears to be the modern conflict between the original
craftsman of the whole and the mass-production assembly line. Why
then did Fitzgerald choose to undercut his whole drama by letting us
know that Stahr is a dying man? Why did he attach an apparently un–
related love affair which he regarded as "the meat of the book"? The
love affair, no doubt, illuminates the last feverish gasping for life of a
man with a "definite urge toward total exhaustion." But why have a
hero so defeated in advance if you mean to deal evenly with a general
theme? Unless Fitzgerald was again unwittingly projecting himself, I do
not know the answer.
What seems particularly to have worried Fitzgerald about the book
was the loss of the oid emotion and sparkle; where the radiance and
disillusion had balanced before, now the radiance was fading. "Where
will the warmth come from in this?" he wrote of one of the scenes be–
tween Stahr and Kathleen. "My girls were all so warm and full of pro–
mise." The self-criticism was accurate; perhaps that is why after three
years, even three years filled with sickness and pot-boiling, the novel was
~till
only half-finished. It must have cost him an heroic effort to accom–
pli~h
as much as he did. That effort was one of the two things that give
to his last years a great dignity, if not the epic grandeur which he himself
~pck("
of as a delusion. The other was his absorbing interest in his daugh–
ter.
The Crack-up
reprints some of his wise and moving letters to he:,
particularly moving in the dedicated earnestness with which he strove by
exposing his own failures to spare her his miseries.
It was, in any case, a sad life after the excitement of the first glory.
Whether the outcome would have been any different if Fitzgerald had
been working within a tradition less exacting of personal experience--–
one, for instance, where you could get along with a little reading for ma–
terial provided you had human insight and imagination-can only be a
matter of speculation. There were plenty of personal tensions in Fitz–
gerald's life beside those imposed by his writing. Still, it is worth re–
marking that other contemporaries have resorted to new participations
in order to get at something other than "a purely social life." Dos Passos
has been a periodic reporter between novels; and Hemingway the adven–
turer and political poseur may well be necessary to Hemingway the
artist. Both, it may also be noted, have developed away from the novel
of strictly individual dilemmas to some variety of the novel of social
involvement.
My tentative point is that it is hard for a realistic writer to stay
111
business if he does not. All writing is of course to some extent a batten–
ing on one's self; and for all writers there must be a fear of repetition.
But the demand that one make literature out of what one has actually
lived is more exhausting than others; and modern American fiction, from
