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PARTISAN REVIEW
theme of American innocence, and Henry James, for one, has given
the subject much more explicit and mature treatment in his fiction.
But Fitzgerald lived this subject matter, at once wide-awake and violent,
with a completeness that leaves us unable to face the stark and unpleasant
truth of our innocence from the rather shielded and sometimes even self–
indulgent point of view provided by the fictions of James.
In many ways, to be sure, Fitzgerald's was hardly a typical Amer–
ican story. Beyond a certain point, in the story of his life, the tragedy
ceases and the accumulating details become so numbing that we no
longer respond to the pathos of a human defeat but merely feel that
our nerves are being rubbed raw. Alcoholism, a crazy wife, debts, declin–
ing popularity as an author, the drying up of the creative wells, physical
and emotional exhaustion-after a while the tragic hero fades into the
gray and grisly hollow shell of a human being represented by a
photograph, which the publishers with a rather delicate sense Qf the
macabre have selected for the book-jacket, showing Fitzgerald in 1937
with an old man's twisted hands, the racked uneven gaze of a reformed
alcoholic, and a smile like a toothache. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald's life
does not fall outside of tragedy, for at least he shares with the classical
tragic hero that central fatal flaw: that he himself willed his own de–
struction. He did have some very bad strokes of luck which he could
hardly have foreseen and for which he was not all responsible, like
his wife's going mad; but even here in this most sickening and ar–
bitrary blow dealt him Fitzgerald managed to conspire self-destructively
with fate, for one thing this biography shows very well is that he had so
built himself into his relation with his wife, and her into himself, that
her ruin was bound to drag him down. Character is fate, and Fitzgerald
'v."illed his own destruction; observing this, we are not likely to say
Fitzgerald was done in by America, the boom and the bust, his wife, the
shifting literary climate of the thirties, or any other such external
cause; but, having granted all that, we are not altogether exonerated
thereby from the question that would relate his self-destruction to the
peculiarly destructive and unstable character of so much of American
life: Might not a reckless and gifted individual like this have found in
another culture some stable way of life, some support outside himself
which he might have hung on to, which could not indeed have pre–
vented him from doing himself harm but might at least have preserved
him a little better and a little longer from his own nemesis?
It is customary now to speak of Fitzgerald as a double man, and
the split in his character Mizener describes as the opposition between
"the romantic" and "the spoiled priest." The romanticism is visible
