308
PARTISAN REVIEW
pathy, to find Fitzgerald's life doomed as are the lives of
his
characters,
and for something like the same reason: not because he seemed so much
to dignify their illusions but because the illusions he dignified were so
cheap.
Like Sheilah Graham, Fitzgerald had done a great deal of traveling
to get to the Hollywood where they met.
If
her journey can be described
as one straight up, then his was one down through the bottom and out
the other side. Both of them had displayed great courage, but hers, of
the nervy kind, risked only not succeeding; he had risked failure. In
order to be something it was impossible for him to be-what he called
"an entire man in the Goethe-Byron-Shaw tradition, with an opulent
American touch"-he had handicapped himself and his thick, easy,
generous talent at every tum, and in the end probably only left one
book and a few stories that will outlast the radical social changes of the
next few decades. The "entire man" he dreamed of was a man always
to be remembered as much for what he was as for what he did, in whom
it would be impossible to distinguish the boundary between personality
and achievement, a "figure." But Fitzgerald was born into a world in
which everyone
begins
as a figure. In St. Paul the confusion between
personality and achievement, though on another level, comes easy. You
do not attain it, you fall victim to it. In a place like the snowy, red–
cheeked, robust, self-made world of "The Ice Palace" and "Winter
Dreams" what you do is the public definition of what you are, the ex–
clusive and exhaustive one. And the problem, if you do something so
indefinable and subversive of order as write, is not to impose a public
image but precisely to protect your private personality from the exactions
of an image foisted on you, as it were, almost at birth. Under the circum–
stances, Fitzgerald did not have to become the embodiment of the Jazz
Age, or anything else-without some great effort he could not have
avoided it. In seeking the old unity of life and art, what he achieved
was an immensely fertile but almost fatally costly confusion of experi–
ence with the meaning of experience, of identification with empathy.
He became someone for whom there was neither escape from innocence
nor retreat from consciousness.
That he kept the cost from being fatal, that he made his self-con–
scious innocence work for him, is after all only an ambiguous victory.
Nevertheless, it is a victory, and one to which we owe a unique, irreplace–
able record of what Americans come from and what they must all get
through in order to grow up. In some ways the purest product of Fitz–
gerald's special gift for tossing experience at you still raw and just un-
