Writer: F. Scott Fitzgerald - Writer of Immaturity?

Although Fitzgerald’s Follies from Liberties is mostly hidden by a paywall, this was available and has some interesting points.

...Fitzgerald overdid something to which Erasmus’ Folly admits — that she had been raised up and nourished by Bacchus. Fitzgerald’s alcoholism constrained his literary output and led to his premature death at the age of forty-five. The adult Fitzgerald could not take care of himself. We do not associate Fitzgerald with anything like wisdom literature. He never wore a beard, that “ensign of wisdom,” according to Erasmus’ Folly. He could not be confused with Tolstoy, who did have a beard and who broached the biggest and the best questions, boldly titling a novel War and Peace. (Fitzgerald’s first novel was This Side of Paradise, in which this side of paradise — a phrase from a poem by Rupert Brooke — is more or less a brilliant undergraduate career at Princeton University.) Fitzgerald did not even write novels of ideas. He was no Thomas Mann, no communicant with the philosophical heavyweights, no worldly interpreter of high politics. Until his death, Fitzgerald agonized about not being sufficiently educated or well read. He never graduated from Princeton, and it bothered him.  In The Great Gatsby, the book that will always define him, Fitzgerald expends marvelous prose on a small and insignificant man. It is a perfect novella to depict the dreams, the extravagance, the alleged greatness of a bootlegger whose golden girl got away. Gatsby lacks any guiding wisdom. He lacks gravitas. The incognito protagonist, he lacks a real profile even in his eponymous novel. He is an empty vessel of social climbing and romantic longing who embraces the folly-filled tawdriness of his cultural moment. Gatsby is the boy who never outgrew high school, not to mention college (which he falsely claims to have attended). His shallowness and frivolity would have made him a bit player in War and Peace, a petty officer. Or Tolstoy would have chosen to transform Jay Gatsby, to reform him, leading him through a moral awakening. Tolstoy would not have left Gatsby’s folly intact, as Fitzgerald is very willing to do. According to Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald’s friend and later his literary executor, Edna St. Vincent Millay compared Fitzgerald to “a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond.” A similar image occurred to John Dos Passos: “when he talked about writing his mind, which seemed to be full of preposterous notions about most things, became clear and hard as diamond.” Fitzgerald fretted about wasting his diamond-like literary talent on the literature of immaturity, or he was sensitive to the accusation of doing this. In 1934, in an unpublished preface to Gatsby, he wrote of being “kidded half haywire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! It was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.” Without cultivating an aura of wisdom, however, the beardless Fitzgerald did write wisdom literature. He wrote it not by denigrating folly, not by dismissing it, and not by treating folly as peripheral to wisdom....

The counselor for my group sessions talked about how obvious and, therefore boring, were the themes of The Great Gatsby. Hard to disagree when I think Fitzgerald is a much better writer of short stories. (You can search this site for my other notes on Fitzgerald.) Impossible, however, to deny the quality of Fitzgerald's prose.

If there is any writer of ideas from amongst Fitzgerald's contemporaries, it has to be John Dos Passos and William Faulkner. I do not think either of them write as finely as Fitzgerald. Faulkner is a treasure trove of style without ever slipping into the noodling delicacies of Fitzgerald. Dos Passos has not the baroque sentences of Faulkner, nor is his prose stylish for the sake of style.

In his defense, I would say Gatsby persists by virtue of his vacuity. Being American, we are a country prone to vacuity. Perhaps the allure of reinvention - certainly its myth - gives us the ability to escape the wisdom possible from self-reflection. 

I recall reading somewhere that Fitzgerald was a favorite of The Beats, like Jack Kerouac. This makes sense if Fitzgerald is the scribe of immaturity.

I also had to remember that it was Fitzgerald who said there were no second acts in American lives. Self-fulfilling prophecy? Justification for his own way of life?

sch 8/10