310
PARTISAN REVIEW
wrapped from the nerves is
This Side of Paradise.
Certainly the book
is a chaos, an adolescent riot of literary mismatched limbs, changing
voice and sexual incompetence. However, it is wild and profuse not
only because Fitzgerald was then a totally undisciplined writer but also
because the novel itself so perfectly achieves an identification with the
disorganizing and unmanageable
p~dicament
of Amory Blaine. Amory's
predicament often seems like child's-play, but Fitzgerald's keen inside
sense of it, his respect for its urgency cuts through the triviality of its
specific content and makes us see it for what it really is: an expression
of the great American conflict between a meanness of culture and a
grandeur of pretension-the struggle between the coarseness of attitude
that gives Americans so much will to deal with the world and the faint,
delicate image of beauty that is to be the object of that will.
This Side of Paradise
lacks even the pretense of a plot, and the fact
that it is not plotted derives from a conscious refusal on Fitzgerald's part
to have it so. He does not know what must become of Amory and there–
fore cannot make what happens to him fit into some pattern of becom–
ing. "I know myself-but that is all!" is Amory's last cry-and it is Fitz–
gerald's cry too. Nor does he really plot the later novels (of course, and
always, excepting
Gatsby).
Anthony Patch and Dick Diver get older;
their lives themselves have taken on more form, and therefore the books
do. Fitzgerald is able to take these characters farther-he takes them,
in fact, up to the point of dissolution. But he does not really either get
beyond them in time and look back nor outside them and look in. He
is never recreating life but only making a progress report on it.
With
Gatsby
something different happened. Gatsby is not a char–
acter in Fitzgerald's sense, not a life in the process of unfolding. Gatsby
is an idea. In writing the book Fitzgerald was clearly seized by a vision,
a pure distillation of his relation to something large and abstract-to
America-and at the end of this vision there was Gatsby's corpse float–
ing in the pool. The corpse, the abstraction, gave him the freedom he
never sought or took elsewhere to direct all the movement that led to it.
Tender is the Night,
then, is Fitzgerald's last progress report on his
odyssey into figuredom. The report is a bad one. Dick Diver is finished,
and finished in a way seemingly prophetic for Fitzgerald: he
is
no longer
useful to those it had become the meaning of his life to serve. The year
Tender is the Night
came out Fitzgerald and Zelda published a little
piece ("Auction-Model 1934") taking inventory of the acquisitions of
their life together. They unpack their household goods and find them–
selves left with a heap of attic-bound junk, the bric-a-brac of former
