Abstract
F. Scott Fitzgerald has left neither an essay on critical theory nor any significant amount of criticism from which his literary theories may be ascertained. Some critics, impressed by this lack and by the great amount of mediocre fiction which Fitzgerald turned out for the popular magazines, have assumed that the undeniable artistry of The Great Gatsby was some kind of accident, produced by a “natural” (or instinctive) but erratic talent. Fitzgerald’s biographer, Arthur Mizener, stressed what he called Fitzgerald’s “intuitive way of working.”1 One critic, noting that The Great Gatsby was “out of line” with Fitzgerald’s other fiction, concluded that it was “important for the author’s reputation to know that it was consciously different and not merely accidentally so.”2 Although the premise of this statement is doubtful in itself, it can be shown that Fitzgerald was far more conscious of what he was doing in his work than is commonly supposed. But as a basis for exploring Fitzgerald’s literary consciousness, it is useful first to relate him to one of the most significant literary events of his time.
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References
Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1951), p. 170.
Oscar Cargill, Intellectual America: Ideas on the March (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941), p. 344.
H. G. Wells, “The Contemporary Novel,” Fortnightly Review, XCVI (November, 1911), 862–63.
Ibid., p. 863.
Ibid., p. 864.
Joseph Warren Beach, op. cit., p. 14.
Wells, “The Contemporary Novel,” op. cit., pp. 864–65.
Ibid., p. 869.
Ibid., pp. 872–73.
Henry James, “The New Novel,” Notes on Novelists (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), pp. 319–25.
Ibid., p. 326.
Ibid. p. 342.
Ibid., pp. 357–61.
Ibid., pp. 345–54.
Ibid., p. 347.
H. G. Wells. Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1915), pp. 105–07.
Ibid., pp. 106–07.
James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), pp. 87–88.
Henry James, Letters, ed. by Percy Lubbock (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1920), II, 505.
Ibid., pp. 505–508.
Ibid.
Archibald Marshall, “A Browse Among the Best Sellers.” The Bookman, LIV (September, 1921), 8–12.
Mary Austin, “The American Form of the Novel,” The New Republic, XXX (April 12, 1922), 4.
Theodore Dreiser, “The Scope of Fiction,” ibid., p. 9.
Floyd Dell, “The Difference Between Life and Fiction,” ibid., p. 7.
Philip Littell, “The Graft of Fiction,” ibid., p. 2.
Zona Gale, “The Novel of Tomorrow,” ibid., p. 12.
Willa Gather, “The Novel Démeublé,” ibid., p. 6.
Edmund Wilson, in an article published in 1922 called “The Rag-Bag of the Soul” (The Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, November 25, 1922, p. 238), attempted to describe “the type towards which modern expression seems to tend.” He devoted much of his article to showing that “all the works [which form the type he was describing] ... do not ... completely lack structure.” He was particularly interested in pointing out the “precise technical plan” of Ulysses.
Joseph Warren Beach, American Fiction: 1920–1940 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1942), p. 8.
Walter Blair, Theodore Hornberger, and Randall Stewart, The Literature of the United States (Chicago: Scott Foresman and Co., 1947), II, 870.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Letters to Friends,” The Crack-Up, p. 247.
Ibid., p. 248.
Ibid. Mrs. Katherine Fullerton Gerould’s “British Novelists, Ltd.” first appeared in the Tale Review (VII [October, 1917]). Mrs. Gerould discussed two groups of novelists: Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy as the “elder brothers” of the “younger fry,” Hugh Walpole, J. D. Beresford, Gompton Mackenzie, Gilbert Cannan, Oliver Onions, and W. L. George. Mrs. Gerould was not particularly hard on Wells, and thought The Research Magnificent a particularly outstanding work. Fitzgerald’s opinion that she underestimated Wells is testimony to the intensity of his early enthusiasm for the author. Mrs. Gerould’s objection to the “younger fry” as a whole was not the lack of form in their novels, but rather the lack of morals in their heroes (pp. 179–80): “They are guilty of a lot of very ignoble impulses, and proceed often to gratify them... What these young men and young women do is to call anything virtuous that they happen to want to do.” It is surprising that this attitude did not draw comment from Fitzgerald. Mrs. Gerould’s conclusion showed that she was definitely of the saturation temperament (p. 185): “The time is ripe, once more, I believe, for a few big picaresque novels.”
Ibid., p. 252.
It is a debatable point whether the reading lists — that is, the lists of books which are given at different stages of Amory’s development to indicate his reading habits in This Side of Paradise (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920) are actually reliable as indications of what Fitzgerald had read. But there appears the title of A Portrait of the Artist as a Toung Man (p. 224), which James surely would have classified as a novel of selection, and there appears once the name of Conrad (p. 233).
Location of quotations from This Side of Paradise will be identified in the text by page number in parentheses.
Robert Hugh Benson, None Other Gods (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1911). Robert Hugh Benson is a now forgotten novelist and this novel is practically unobtainable. But Fitzgerald must have found Benson an interesting and somehow important novelist, for he mentions him at least two other times in Amory Blaine’s reading lists in This Side of Paradise (pp. 57 and 285). None Other Gods is, by any standards. a very poor novel and deserves to be forgotten.
Robert Hugh Benson, None Other Gods, pp. 61–271.
H. G. Wells, The Research Magnificent (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915), p. 9.
James, “The New Novel,” op. cit., p. 361.
James, Letters, II, 365.
James, “The New Novel,” op. cit., p. 361.
Compton Mackenzie, Sinister Street (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1919), pp. 655–57.
Edmund Wilson, “The Literary Spotlight: F. Scott Fitzgerald,” The Bookman, LV (March, 1922), 21.
R. V. A. S., “This Side of Paradise,” The New Republic, XXII (May 12, 1920), 362.
Frances Newman, Letters, ed. by Hansell Baugh (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), pp. 40–42.
Fitzgerald, “Letters to Friends,” The Crack-Up, p. 252.
R. S. S., “Ernest Poole and Tarkington at their best,” The Publisher’s Weekly XCVII (April 17, 1920), 1289.
Lubbock, op. cit., p. 41.
Wells, Boon, p. 109.
Wilson, “The Literary Spotlight: F. Scott Fitzgerald,” op. cit., pp. 21–22.
Fitzgerald, “Letters to Friends,” The Crack-Up, p. 252.
Paul Rosenfeld, “F. Scott Fitzgerald,” The Crack-Up, p. 319.
Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942), p. 316.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941), p. 163.
“Reforms and Beginnings,” The Nation, LX (April 24, 1920), 558.
R. V. A. S., “This Side of Paradise,” op. cit., p. 362.
Harlan Hatcher, Creating the Modern American Novel (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935), p. 80.
Cargill, op. cit., p. 349. Mr. Cargill implies that Joyce’s early novel was the model for This Side of Paradise. He states flatly (p. 349): “One might not suspect this from reading This Side of Paradise, which seems more of a travesty than a serious effort, yet such is the case.” There is indication in This Side of Paradise that Fitzgerald had read Joyce’s novel. He says at one point of Amory (This Side of Paradise, p. 224): “He was puzzled and depressed by ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’...” And there are certain lines of action in the two books which are similar: the detailed account of unhappy school life, the growing interest in literature, and the rejection of religion — in both cases, Catholicism. There is even an echo of Joyce’s famous phrase (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [“The Modern Library”; New York: Random House, 1928], p. 299), “... to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” in Fitzgerald’s novel. Amory tells Tom DTnvilliers (This Side of Paradise, p. 230) that he “represent[s] the critical consciousness of the race,” and he refers to himself, near the end of the book (p. 285), as “preserved to help in building up the living consciousness of the race.” The phrases are different, of course, but there is enough similarity to suggest unconscious borrowing. However, there is no indication that Fitzgerald was consciously imitating Joyce’s book; A Portrait was too much a novel of selection for Fitzgerald’s taste at the time. He was, like Amory, probably “puzzled” by it.
“With College Men,” The New York Times Book Review, May 9, 1920, p. 240.
R. V. A. S., “This Side of Paradise,” op. cit., p. 362.
“Babes in the Woods” (beginning on p. 73) was published as a short story in The Smart Set, September, 1919. “The Debutante” (beginning on p. 179) was published as a one-act play in The Smart Set, November, 1919. The poem, set in prose, beginning (p. 253) “When Vanity kissed Vanity...” appeared in a slightly different form in a letter to Edmund Wilson on September 26th, 1917 (“To Cecilia” in The Crack-Up, p. 246). The poem at the beginning of Book Two, Chapter V, appeared under the title, “The Way of Purgation,” in a letter to Edmund Wilson dated Autumn of 1917 (The Crack-Up, p. 249).
Mr. Cargill, in Intellectual America (p. 349), stated that Fitzgerald’s method of “writing... dialogue as in a drama” was “suggested by the work of Joyce.” This is unlikely, for Fitzgerald first used the method in “The Debutante,” published in The Smart Set in September, 1919, and later incorporated in This Side of Paradise (pp. 179 ff.). Ulysses, in which Joyce first used the method, was published as a book in 1922. Although it was serialized before 1922, it seems improbable that Fitzgerald had seen it before then, especially in view of his statement in a letter to Edmund Wilson dated June 29, 1922 (The Crack-Up, p. 26): “I have Ullysses [sic] from the Brick Row Bookshop & am starting it.” This statement implies that Fitzgerald had not seen Joyce’s novel before. Probably the method is a carry-over for Fitzgerald from the writing of dialogue and lyrics for musical comedies at Princeton.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Notebooks,” The Crack-Up, p. 176.
Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, pp. 18, 36, 57, 116, and 224.
Wilson, “The Literary Spotlight: F. Scott Fitzgerald,” op. cit., p. 22.
John O’Hara, “Introduction,” The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: The Viking Press, 1945), p. vii.
Alan Ross, “Rumble Among the Drums,” Horizon, XVIII (December, 1948), 427.
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Miller, J.E. (1957). This Side of Paradise. In: The Fictional Technique of Scott Fitzgerald. International Scholars Forum. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-6621-0_1
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