BOOKS
303
Augie March,
but that novel is closer in spirit to
The Victim
and
Seize
the Day
than to
Henderson the Rain King.
This last novel is an in–
credibly secure piece of composition- profuse, splashy, relaxed. It is large
and Bellow seems to want largeness, as though he felt his own position
as an important American novelist imposed the responsibility for a large
effort. He will not, knowing our artistic retreats, be guilty of "the refusal
of greatness." But he may, eager courtier, travel too far in pursuit.
Elizabeth Hardwick
FITZGERALD AT THE END
BELOVED INFIDEL. By Sheileh Grllhllm lind Gerold Frllnk. Henry Holt
lind Co. $3.95.
"Yes," objected Amory, "but isn't it lack of will-power to let
my imagination shinny on the wrong
side?"-This Side of
Paradise.
In 1938, so the story is often told, when Walter Wanger
as–
signed the young Budd Shulberg
to
collaborate with F. Scott Fitzgerald
on a script for a movie about Dartmouth, Shulberg said, "Fitzgerald–
I thought he was dead." So too, apparently, had the group of drama
students who produced "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" in a small
room above the Pasadena Playhouse in 1939 and who were nonplussed
and embarrassed to receive a backstage visit from Fitzgerald-in full
evening dress-on opening night. It was not so much that Fitzgerald
had disappeared-he was publishing a little in those days, though by
his
former standards very little; and after all
T ender is the Night
had come
out only in 1934.
It
was that by some kind of unspoken consensus Fitz–
gerald was labeled "Finished" and put away. Perhaps at the time there
was a deep public courtesy involved in thinking
him
dead, for
his
life,
which neither he nor anyone else had ever succeeded in separating from
his
work, had become an ugly spectacle, marked by illness and Zelda's
insanity and alcohol and failure. The man-like the "Age" he had
been
saddled with representing, like the American Dream itself-had finally
collapsed. He was violently and often viciously drunk much of the time.
He was in debt, apparently unable to work. And in 1936, when to do
such a thing was taken to be a clear sign of "selling out," he went off
to Hollywood to make some money and learn how to write successful
