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PARTISAN REVIEW
movies. He himself had publicly announced his collapse in three articles
in
Esquire
("The Crack-Up," "Handle With Care," "Pasting It To–
gether" ). The articles were of course in their very nature a lie: true, they
were the exploration of their author's feeling of personal ruin, his
"spiritual bankruptcy," but they were also among the strongest and
most trenchant products of a writer still capable of first-rate work.
When in 1940 Fitzgerald did die he left behind six chapters of a
novel and voluminous notes for its completion. He left behind, too, a
feeling, and one that has persisted through the last eighteen years of
posthumous publication and reams of serious criticism and acclaim, that
some special redress of a wrong is due him. Or if "redress" and "wrong"
are too emphatic, that some kind of subtle imbalance in the world's view
of Fitzgerald must be set right. At the end of his biography Arthur
Mizener says "Like Gatsby . . . Fitzgerald loved reputation, the public
acknowledgement of genuine achievement, with the impersonal magna–
nimity of a Renaissance prince. He lived, finally, to give that chaos in
his head shape in his books and to see the knowledge that he had done so
reflected back to him from the world. He died believing he had failed.
Now we know better, and it is one of the final ironies of Fitzgerald's
career that he did not live to enjoy our knowledge." That "now we
know better," written ten years after Fitzgerald's death and at the end
of a painstaking biography, strikes the curious personal note of apology–
not so much for Fitzgerald as
to
him-that sounds so often in the writing
about him.
Now Sheilah Graham, who lived with Fitzgerald during his last
four years, has written her autobiography and the section about their
life together is also a moving personal defense of him.
Sheilah Graham was sent to Hollywood by the North American
Newspaper Alliance to take over its syndicated movie gossip column.
Before coming to America from London, she had held many posts in
a rather stunning career of imposture and social climbing: born Lily
Sheil in London's East End and raised in an orphanage, with no educa–
tion, no experience and a bad accent, by her late 'twenties she had man–
aged to marry respectably, to make something of a success on the musical
comedy stage, to be presented at court, to crash the society of the English
country aristocracy, and finally to get in some semi-professional experi–
ence as a newspaper feature-writer.
Beloved Infidel
is unfortunately one
of those autobiographical memoirs written in collaboration with Gerold
Frank, in which all the author's real feelings, ideas, and responses to
