F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction: "An Almost Theatrical Innocence"

248 Pages·2014·1.41 MB·English

by  John T. Irwin

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction
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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Fiction
“An Almost Theatrical Innocence”
John T. Irwin
Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2014
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Irwin, John T.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction : “an almost theatrical innocence” / John T. Irwin.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-4214-1230-6 (hardcover : acid-free paper) — isbn 978-1-4214-1231-3
(electronic) — isbn 1-4214-1230-6 (hardcover : acid-free paper) —
isbn 1-4214-1231-4 (electronic) 1. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896–1940—
Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
ps3511.i9z668 2014
813'.52—dc23 2013018547
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected].
Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials,
including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent
post-consumer waste, whenever possible.
As always, for Meme, my beloved,
and for the twins Matthew and Sophia Saccone
in hopes that one day they may receive
as much enjoyment from reading Fitzgerald’s fiction
as their Nonno has
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contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
one
Compensating Visions in The Great Gatsby 1
two
Fitzgerald as a Southern Writer 10
three
The Importance of “Repose” 33
four
“An Almost Theatrical Innocence” 86
five
Fitzgerald and the Mythical Method 158
six
On the Son’s Own Terms 194
Works Cited 219
Index 223
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preface
The present book completes a trilogy examining the work of four writers, each
of whom, I contend, had been influenced in a special way by Platonic ideal-
ism. The first two volumes—The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the
Analytic Detective Story and Hart Crane’s Poetry: “Appollinaire lived in Paris,
I live in Cleveland, Ohio”—appeared in 1994 and 2011, respectively. This third
volume, while addressing the overall topic of the trilogy, is also the result of
a professional lifetime spent studying and teaching the works of my favorite
twentieth-century American fiction writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald. For a variety of
reasons, as I’ve tried to make clear in the following chapters, Fitzgerald’s work
has always deeply moved me. And this is as true now as it was fifty years ago
when I first picked up The Great Gatsby. I can still remember the occasions
when I first read each of his novels, remember the time, place, and mood of
those early readings, as well as the way each work seemed to speak to some-
thing going on in my life at that moment. Because the things that interested
Fitzgerald were the things that interested me and because there seemed to be
so many similarities in our backgrounds, his work always possessed for me
a special, personal authority; it became a form of wisdom, a way of knowing
the world, its types, its classes, its individuals.
One of the most powerful emotional effects of The Great Gatsby that has
grown with each passing year is that sudden swelling of the spirit its most po-
etic passages (the end of chapter 6 and the end of the last chapter) produce, an
effect resembling that created when the Andante theme in Gershwin’s Rhap-
sody in Blue (written during the same year Fitzgerald was finishing Gatsby)
suddenly emerges, its serene beauty set off by the more frenetic earlier part of
the work, a feeling of discovery and rediscovery: “So this is what it sounds like
to be an American”—this soaring ambition, this spaciousness, this hope of
an infinite second chance. Nick Carraway describes Gatsby’s imagination as
“gorgeous,” but I have always felt that that was Fitzgerald describing his own
prose. When Yeats edited The Oxford Book of Modern Verse in the late 1930s,