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Fitzgerald: the Tissue of Style

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Donald Monk
Donald Monk
Affiliation:
Lecturer in American Literature in the Department of American Studies of the University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
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Extract

Printed as poetry this representative passage from Fitzgerald's first novel differs from the post-1915 debasement of Imagism (what Ezra Pound called ‘Amygism’) in only two significant aspects: it has a higher incidence of rhyme and is, if possible, even more devoid of content. Its voice defines the novel's protagonist, Amory Blaine, much more memorably than do his character and actions. Derived from the vaguely erotic style Pater developed in Marius the Epicurean (1885) and popularized by Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), this verbal swoon, made over into a Princeton accent, places Fitzgerald in the Romantic Decadence. Its derivative quality should not, however, blind us to the work it entailed for Fitzgerald, accumulating these inter-echoes during the re-writings of the novel.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , April 1983 , pp. 77 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

1 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, This Side of Paradise (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 144Google Scholar.

2 The idea of printing the passage from Fitzgerald as poetry was suggested of course by Yeats' printing the Mona Lisa section of Pater's The Renaissance (1873) as the first ‘poem’ in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936).

3 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, ‘How to Waste Material’, The Bookman, 05 1926, p. 263Google Scholar.

4 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, ‘One Hundred False Starts’, The Saturday Evening Post, 4 03 1933, p. 65Google Scholar.

5 Letter to Margaret Case Harriman, August 1935, The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Turnbull, Andrew (London: The Bodley Head, 1963), p. 527Google Scholar.

6 Piper, Henry Dan, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), pp. 139, 259Google Scholar.

7 Ibid. p. 171.

8 Letter to Scottie, 20 October 1936; Letters, p. 11.

9 Letter to Scottie, 3 August 1940; Letters, p. 88.

10 Letter to Max Perkins, c. 15 July 1928; Letters, p. 211.

11 Perhaps the best examples are the letter to Hemingway, June 1934; Letters, p. 309; and to John Peale Bishop, 2 April 1934; Letters, p. 362. But see also Fitzgerald's Preface to the 1934 Modern Library Edition of The Great Gatsby.

12 Letter to Hemingway, June 1934; Letters, p. 309.

13 Letter to John Peale Bishop, May 1935; Letters, p. 368.

14 Letter to Sara Murphy, 15 August 1935; Letters, p. 423.

15 Letter to John Peale Bishop, 9 August 1925; Letters, p. 358.

16 Letter to Cary Ford, early July 1937; Letters, p. 551.

17 This and subsequent references are to Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925)Google Scholar.

18 This and subsequent references are to Fitzgerald, F. Scott, Tender Is the Night, ed. Goldman, Arnold (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982)Google Scholar.

19 This and subsequent references are to Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1956)Google Scholar.

20 Perosa, Sergio, The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Ann Arbor: Michigan U.P., 1965), pp. 140–1Google Scholar.

21 Ibid. p. 138.

22 In F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Art of Social Fiction (London: Edward Arnold, 1980)Google Scholar, Brian Way sees the late style deriving from the short stories and Tender Is the Night rather than from The Crack-Up. I am not persuaded. The excellent case for Tender is made at the cost of overall perspective.

23 This and subsequent references are to Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Last Tycoon (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941)Google Scholar.

24 Letter to Scottie, Spring 1938; Letters, p. 29.

25 Letter to John Peale Bishop, May 1935; Letters, p. 368.

26 Her jaundiced view of Hollywood creates a tone of voice which J. D. Salinger used as a model for the narrator of Catcher in the Rye, a novel entirely dependent on voice.

27 Wilson, Edmund, ‘On Editing Scott Fitzgerald's Papers’, Wilson's Night Thoughts (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), p. 121Google Scholar.