A Most Successful Failure

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From The Wall Street Journal:

 ‘The true paradises,’ wrote Proust, “are the paradises that we have lost.” F. Scott Fitzgerald would have enthusiastically seconded the motion. In his short life (1896-1940), Fitzgerald had come rather to specialize in lost paradises. His first novel, published when he was 23, was “This Side of Paradise.” The first major biography of Fitzgerald, written by Arthur Mizener, was titled “The Far Side of Paradise.” Now David S. Brown, a historian by training and trade, has written “Paradise Lost,” an excellent study of Fitzgerald that summarizes past scholarship on the novelist and sets out the argument that, in his fiction, he was both a moralist and a social critic working the same vein as Thorstein Veblen, Randolph Bourne and H.L. Mencken —that he was, in other words, a chronicler of the depredations of capitalism gone haywire on American life. Mr. Brown argues that Fitzgerald also joined “Freud, Conrad, Adams, Spengler, [Frederick Jackson] Turner, and Eliot in trying to make sense of the modern age.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald is perhaps best known as the chief representative, if not the leading exemplar, of the Jazz Age, that period in American life between the end of World War I and the onset of the Depression in 1929. The tendency has been to think of him as a romantic, a bit of a snob, and a boozer. He was all three, of course, but he was also much more—a vastly talented writer with a gift for imbuing what he wrote with a charm that, when he was at his best, seemed quite magical. His specialty was endowing the wishes and dreams of his characters with an aura of poetry.

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Fitzgerald wrote about his own youthful triumph with his novel “This Side of Paradise” (1920) and about what a mixed blessing it was. “The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter,” he noted in “The Crack-Up” (1936), adding that in his case early success meant “the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment—when life was literally a dream.” Whatever its joys, an early success does not supply the best training for the harder days ahead in later life.

As for winning the Southern belle, Zelda Sayre, of Montgomery, Ala., she agreed to marry Fitzgerald only if he could make money from his writing; after his first novel was accepted and proved a commercial success, they married. A writer with more than a proclivity for dissipation and a strong case of Irish flu (also known as alcoholism), Fitzgerald could not have found a worse partner than Zelda. She suffered her first breakdown in 1930 and, though thought neurasthenic, was evidently what is now labeled bipolar.

Mr. Brown devotes several judicious pages to the toll that the Fitzgerald marriage, with its infidelities and rivalrousness, took on both parties. “What is our marriage anyway?” Zelda wrote to Scott. “It has been nothing but a long battle ever since I can remember.” Fitzgerald told a friend that “I don’t know whether Zelda and I are real or whether we are characters in one of my novels.” Poor Zelda, in and out of sanitariums, lived on eight years after her husband, only to die of asphyxiation in a fire.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire)