ALFRED KAZIN
93
No writer born to New York's constant pressure can ever associate
so much beauty with it-can ever think of New York as the Plaza
Hotel. Fitzgerald felt about New York that it was a woman too exciting
to
be trusted. New York was the pleasure capital-and thus, to the
active American conscience, unreal, a mirage, surely treacherous . At
the end of
The Great Gatsby,
when the tale of Gatsby's foolish hopes
has all been told, Fitzgerald suddenly, piercingly, begins a great litany
over the Middle West as the source of American innocence and hope.
Nick Carraway the narrator is gripped by the realization that New
York-the East incarnate-has spoiled and ruined all his Midwestern
friends. "That's my Middle West-not the wheat or the prairies or the
lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and
the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of
holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow."
Of course Fitzgerald never wrote about St. Paul as
much,
or as
brilliantly, as he did about New York. He had the feeling for the
textures and lights of the great metropolitan glitter that the enraptured
guest gets-or used to get?-at the great New York feast. He wrote of
"the enchanted metropolitan twilight," of "forms leaning together in
taxis," of New York on summer afternoons as "overripe, as if all sorts
of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands," of Negroes "in
cream-colored limousines being driven by white chauffeurs across
Queensboro Bridge." For Fitzgerald all paradoxes then were spectacles.
The name of the American dream was still New York.
Fitzgerald's dream was not shared by the writer who admired him
so much that he was killed at thirty-seven rushing to Fitzgerald's
funeral-Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein-who became Nathaniel
West. Those immigrants of a century or so ago might see America as
promises, but certainly not as beauty. When their descendants became
the authors of
Miss Lonelyhearts, Jews Without Money, Gall It Sleep,
Awake and Sing, Franny and Zooey, Barbary Shore, An American
Dream, The Victim, Seize the Day, The Assistant, The Little Distur–
bances of Man,
books with which one must associate such testaments of
hard American experience by the descendants of slaves as
Native Son,
Notes of a Native Son, Invisible Man,
no one could miss a grimness
behind certain lives projected on the imperial city. This gave release to
a few, all too few , new imaginations. Despite the masses of Jews,
Italians, Blacks and Hispanics who have found opportunity in the big
cities if nothing else-and often not even that-it is chilling to
remember how few
lasting
works have come out of their lives, have
done justice to the mass experience in the big city.
Fitzgerald wrote proudly of " the stamp that goes 'into my books so
