BOOKS
FITZGERALD AND AMERI CA
The Fitzgerald legend threatens to become something of a
bore. For some time now the vogue of the twenties has been booming
in all branches of our papular entertainment, as
if
all America were
sighing with nostalgia for its lost youth; and recently when
Life
maga–
zine got around to doing a spread on his life, it was to be expected that
this would be announced on the cover, and not altogether unexpected
that he should be called the "fabulous" Scott Fitzgerald. Unfortunately,
as this popular image becomes more "fabulous," Fitzgerald begins to
repose in the bier of the popular imagination alongside of some other
stricken youthful hero like Rudolph Valentino. Budd Schulberg's novel,
The Disenchanted,
was not at all as bad as some critics made out, and
it did have many sharp and observing moments, but still there were
times when the young hero-worshiping protagonist seemed to be gazing
at Manley Halliday (the fictional counterpart of Fitzgerald) with the
trembling wide-eyed stare that an American youth usually reserves for
his private athletic hero, or a bobby-soxer for her favorite male movie
star. My imagination begins to be haunted by the next possible step: a
song-and-dance representing Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald whirling through
the twenties, to be added as another skit to the current musical comedy
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
The legend, in short, threatens to fasten
upon those things in Fitzgerald's life and writings that are most perish–
able; and before it does, we ought to put ourselves at a little distance
from it, and ask why this legend itself should become so urgent for us
now, and whether it does not conceal a meaning a little more damaging
than we had thought to our own American self-esteem.
We are helped toward this by the appearance of Arthur Mizener's
solid, scholarly, and altogether admirable biography/ which, among
other merits, never allows us to forget that Fitzgerald was first of all an
author, devoted to his
metier
and capable of working, in the face of
various personal disasters, with prodigious and feverish energy as long
as his daemon and physical resources permitted him. Mizener does not
try to jazz up his material; he has balance, sobriety, and, above every-
1. THE FAR SIDE OF PARADISE.
By
Arthur Mizener. Houghton Mifflin. $4.00.
