FITZGERALD AND AMERICA
349
in its most naive and adolescent form in
This Side of Paradise,
and
though it was refined and developed as he went on, it is always there in
all his writings, and, whatever its deficiencies, it does account for one
of his best qualities: that marvelous readiness toward emotion and
atmosphere. The "spoiled priest" is Fitzgerald's own description of
Dick Diver, hero of
T ender is the Night,
but as applied to the author
himself it describes that form of genteel Catholicism (of the lace-curtain
Irish) that infected him all his life. This side of Fitzgerald makes a
strange irony of the fact that he should
be
connected so essentially with
the Jazz Age, since so deep a part of himself stood outside it: his own
moral code had been formed on an earlier one, and he did not
really participate in the new code that was born in the twenties.
Sexually, he remained a puritan by the standard of the twenties; and
perhaps only because so much of the inner man stood apart from it,
was he able to be so sensitive an observer of the decade of flaming
youth and flappers. The amazing thing, however, is that the romanticism,
which developed and matured in the writing, did not do so in Fitz–
gerald's life, or not in equal measure; and here, I think, we come
upon the real division within his character : the split between the writer
and the man. When we read now about the horse-play and collegiate
antics of Scott, Zelda, and their cronies, our first reaction is to wonder
how these people could have gone on so long pretending they were
undergraduates without getting very very bored, and particularly how
this masquerade was possible for a writer who had already managed the
maturity of
Gatsby
and was at work on
Tender Is the Night.
Then
one remembers that America is the country where nobody wishes to
lose his youth, and where Sinclair Lewis' Babbitts, meeting at their
clubs, behave like college boys. The American, in the face of and in
spite of everything in life, wishes to persist in believing in his own
innocence. When Fitzgerald's innocence could no longer maintain itself
against the facts of his own life, there followed the breakdown, the des–
pair,
and the howl of disappointment of "The Crack-up."
"The Crack,up"
is
commonly thought to show us the mature
Fitzgerald, who, having survived his ordeals, had at last arrived at a
naked and disillusioned view of life. This judgment
is
true in part, but I
am sorry I cannot agree with it entirely, for while "The Crack-up"
does show us a Fitzgerald who has learned much, he seems not to have
learned enough, or at least not to have passed far enough beyond the
attitudes that had dominated him earlier.
It
is a frightening thing to
read: rapid, brilliant, but also jerky and almost metallically tense in
tone, as if still vibrating with the receding hysteria of the breakdown.
