350
PARTISAN REVIEW
No doubt Fitzgerald, writing for
Esquire
magazine, felt he had to jazz
up his material, but, even with allowance made for this, these pieces
leave the impression that the author is still seeing life much too much
in literary and dramatic tenns. A man writing of his own human
defeat and failure ought to have passed beyond "literature" altogether,
even to the point of risking a matter-of-factness that might appear
prosy and plodding; at least, in
this
way we are more likely to
be
con–
vinced we are present at a real human breakdown and not at just
another spectacle or fantasy that the writer has to make as peppy as he
can. The sharp tooth of disillusion for Fitzgerald is not so much the
evil in existence as our necessary participation in it out of self-defense:
And a smile-ah, I would get me a smile. I'm still working on that
smile.
It
is to combine the best qualities of a hotel manager, an ex–
perienced social weasel, a headmaster on visitors' day, a colored elevator
man, a pansy pulling a profile, a producer getting stuff at half its
market value, a trained nurse coming on a job, a body-vendor in her first
rotogravure....
This is the howl of the offended innocent discovering the world is not the
great big beautiful ballroom he had dreamed. But why, one wonders,
should this recognition be so excessive or belated? Didn't Fitzgerald,
who had seen the shadowy underside of the world of Daisy and Tom
Buchanan, know all this years before? The truth is that he had known
this
in his fiction, in the lives that
his
imagination could project, but he
had not known it in his own life. This reaction to evil looks too excessive
to be convincingly mature: usually our first serious step toward self–
knowledge is the painful recognition that we ourselves are not very
different, and not really better, than the world or the people who have
wronged us. Moreover, the brutal requirements of self-preservation
may also be something bracing, without which life in the long run
would slop over into something less moral than it is. Morality, decency,
and good manners are not manifestations of an overflowing goodness of
heart (there would, in that case, be even fewer decent and well-behaved
people than there are), but the means whereby, in the midst of the
social jungle, we protect ourselves by clearing a little space of order
around us. This is the lesson that mature civilizations have always taught
us about morals. The rest is only the disappointed cry of Moliere's mis–
anthrope at the abomination that hearts are not worn on the sleeve–
and Moliere, we may note, diagnosed the misanthrope three centuries
before Fitzgerald repeated his cries.
Toward the end of the "The Crack-up" Fitzgerald makes the
snarling announcement that henceforth he is not going to be had by
