BOOKS
307
ble instinct must have seized on what even by the time she sat down to
do this book she could only express indirectly and cumulatively: that
with Fitzgerald she had come to the
very
best.
Fitzgerald educated her. He would prepare detailed reading lists
for her, discuss her assignments when she had read them; they listened
to music, read criticism, and they called it the F. Scott Fitzgerald College
of One.
If
there is something embarrassing and pathetic in the way she
talks about her studies ("I thought, suddenly, I will not be in this posi–
tion again. They discuss Franz Kafka and T.S. Eliot and Wallenstein
and Richelieu and the Thirty Years' War and I sit on the outside,
looking in.") and about the reading lists themselves, there is also some–
thing new and striking in such a picture of Fitzgerald: the man who
with Edmund Wilson and other friends seemed humbly to accept his
role as intellectual inferior, whose spelling was a public joke, had with
delight and great energy taken on the role of "intellectual conscience"
to someone else. And so much of what Miss Graham presents of Fitz–
gerald comes at us this way. She found him all by herself. She hadn't
known who he was; she hadn't read his books. For her there were no
staled or hackneyed public images, no old history, coming between them.
This is why she can make us
see
the things his friends and Mr. Mizener
could only refer to in writing about him: his wit, his charm, his astonish–
ing profligacy of spirit, and his self-hatred. Even his drunks, which had
until this book become distant and legendary-one of them already the
subject of a famous novel and play-are made real; meaner, nastier,
more shocking, perhaps, than it had become necessary to think-but
for the first time the real behavior of a real man. The F. Scott Fitz–
gerald Miss Graham found because she looked for herself and because
she had the proper need of him was a strong man. He educated her;
he gave her values.
The final twist about the Fitzgerald we see through Sheilah Gra–
ham's eyes is that for her he had become the exponent of the values he
embodied as a creative artist-he who had seemed so helpleas to come
to terms with them himself.
Perhaps nobody's values have been subjected to the kind of critical
scrutiny Fitzgerald's have. Virtually everything he wrote raises in the
minds of his readers the question of his own relation to the moral and
spiritual emptiness of the ethos he so poignantly chronicles. Does he
stand inside or outside the terms by which his characters judge the world
and on account of which they are doomed? It would take only a small
failure of imagination, only a minute but essential shutting off of
sym-
