FITZGERALD AND AMERICA
347
tion that has reduced
him
at last to a condition of "emotional bank–
ruptcy."
Mizener moves back and forth smoothly from the life to
the
writings, tying them together neatly. His criticism of Fitzgerald's work is
on the whole sound and just, though not particularly inspired, which
perhaps it need not be in a biography whose main intention is to por–
tray a life. The biographer, however, can hardly tell his story without
some idea of its ultimate importance, and so we find Mizener, in his
introduction, staking a critical claim on Fitzgerald's place beside Heming–
way and Faulkner as the three most gifted novelists of their generation.
So far as talent and native powers go, we can hardly question this
ranking: indeed, in certain particular gifts of the novelist--of social
observation and social wit, the beautiful ability to vibrate with atmos–
phere and emotion, and in the gift of language, especially one that has
not been noticed enough, of quick, easy and natural metaphor, like a
sudden thrust of summer lightning-Fitzgerald had no peer among the
writers of his time. Whether or not in final accomplishment he stands
beside Faulkner and Hemingway, is another question, which we may
leave to other critics, having here chiefly to meditate upon the signifi–
cance of the life.
Fitzgerald was, to put it quite simply, a genius-the term cannot
now be denied him-but he did not become a great writer, if we use this
adjective with a sober consciousness of literary history that in his best
moments he would have wanted us to invoke. At 29 he had written
The Great Gatsby,
and at the time one could very well have said that
the writer who had done
Gatsby
at 29 should be able to go on to almost
anything. Fitzgerald did go on but he did not measure up to this
promise, and this failure is usually taken as the real meaning of his
life, and, currently, of the legend: a failure of the American myth of
the Success Story, which he himself seems to have summed up as the
meaning of his career in the now famous statement: "In American lives
there are no second acts." All this is very true, but I think we can go
deeper. The last pages of
Gatsby
remind us that Fitzgerald's imagina–
tion sought for its furthest meanings in the total image of America it–
self, a reference that takes us well beyond the "fabulous" twenties or
the Success Story that still echoes like a tinny tune of that decade;
and if we are to find any meaning to his career, it ought to be one
commensurate in scope with this total image of America on which, as
his notebooks show, he brooded all
his
life. I suggest that the real
drama of Fitzgerald's life is as part of the general drama of the Amer–
ican's emotional innocence before life. Other writers have treated the
