346
PARTISAN REVIEW
thing else, the first requirement of the successful biographer: a deep
immersion in his subject. He has worked up all the materials, and
if
on some points we might like a little more information, we feel that this
must
be
withheld out of consideration for persons still living or that
if
Mizener doesn't know the facts, probably nobody else does either. We
might have had, for example, a little more about Fitzgerald's parents.
They were a curious, and in his case in many ways a decisive, heredity:
the father of genteel old American stock, quiet, honorable, and a failure;
the mother, offspring of the immigrant Irish, dominating and eccentric.
The desire for more analysis of this background can hardly
be
con–
sidered a gratuitous thirst for scandal when we are dealing with a
writer who worked, as Fitzgerald did, off and on for several years on a
novel about a matricide, and who, though he admired his father, was
always haunted by the sense that the latter had been a failure. More–
over, Mizener does not, it seems to me, deal adequately or even frankly
with one fact that stares out at us from Fitzgerald's life and printed
page: that he was never quite reconciled to being Irish, and never faced
up to that racial self-hatred which afflicts the Irishman in America as
powerfully as the Jew. (The figure of the Jew, by the way, seems to
have had a curious fascination for Fitzgerald's imagination.) Evidently,
Mizener wanted to refrain from risking anything that might look like
psychological hypothesis, his
aim
being to bring forward only the details
necessary to establish a portrait, so that this job of deeper interpretation
may be left to some subsequent work on Fitzgerald.
The book gets better as it goes on: Mizener is good on the Princeton
period, and best of all when he comes to the years as a successful author,
after the publication of
This Side of Paradise
in 1920, when Fitzgerald
and his wife yielded themselves to the giddy and ecstatic violence of
life in the twenties in New York, Paris, and on the Riviera. Here
Mizener has very carefully selected and placed his anecdotes so that a
real psychological portrait emerges, depicted with considerable economy
and skill: the reader is actually able to see the human continuity of
the person who was Scott Fitzgerald from his early school days to his
death: the spoiled boy, too impulsive and too eager to be liked and
therefore always offending
his
schoolmates, is the same Fitzgerald who
tries to attract attention at a Riviera party by throwing a fig at a
dowager's back, deliberately courts rebuff by Edith Wharton, wakes up
the producer Walter Wanger at five in the morning on a sudden im–
pulse to tell him about an idea for a script; and who finally, near the
end of his life and virtually at the end of his rope, inveighs in "The
Crack-up" against that lifelong reckless and lavish expenditure of emo-
