Scott Fitzgerald [antikvár]

Introduction Scott Fitzgerald wrote in one of his notebooks: 'There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He's too many people if he's any good.' (But he himself came out better than most. His biography by Arthur Mizener, called The Far Side of Paradise, is not only an excellent record of his life and work but also a book that can be enjoyed for its own sake.) Certainly Fitzgerald was anything but an integrated personality. His was a richly confused character, in which, as I shall try to show, at least two sharply contrasting and opposed strains can be discovered. Everything about his character and career, his name and fame, tends to be odd and unexpected, paradoxical, bizarre. He was thought to be the trumpeter of the Jazz Age and yet in fact never identified himself with it and was deeply hostile to many of its manifestations. At the very time when he was accepted as a symbol of youthful sophistication, he was essentially unsophisticated, naive and romantic, a provincial newly arrived in New York. He was big hot news in his and the century's early 'twenties, and was largely forgotten, often thought to be dead, by the middle 'thirties. By the time he had been dismissed as a drunken playboy, the worst type of irresponsible expatriate, he was in fact bringing to his work an unusually pure and single-minded devotion and shouldering appalling burdens. He was considered an alcoholic hack by writers who never possessed and could hardly begin to understand his fine artistic conscience, his sense of obligation to his talent. He was a wild drunk who yet never ceased to regard himself and his doings with astonishing detachment and truthfulness. He never learnt to spell properly yet achieved what is perhaps the best prose style of any American novelist of his generation. When he died in 1940 all his books were out 7