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CHAPTER 1
THE IDEA OF SOCIETY
Many of F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories, especially those about Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry, retain historical value because of their "remembered details." Yet interpretation of time, place, and our social arrangements was uncertain when they were written (1928–31). Edith Wharton's autobiography (A Backward Glance, 1934) begins by stating that the American milieu had only recently become decipherable through the work of European sociologists. In her opinion, the way we lived had never been convincingly explained. That view was widely shared. Edmund Wilson and H. L. Mencken, both mentors of Fitzgerald, often stated that literary descriptions of fact were not enough. Writers needed to know how human relations had been reconceived by social science.
Wharton knew about the effects of Darwinism on social thought and was aware of the role Spencer played. Such social theories were on the grand and Hegelian scale, as were those of Marx, Spengler, and Durkheim who wrote predictive analyses of an entire civilization. However, her statement implies more than a panoramic view of systems. Max Weber's studies of institutions had appeared before the 1930s began. Bronislaw Malinowski and his followers had made social anthropology familiar to a large audience. In fact, one of the great sociological works of the 1920s, Middletown (1929), was conspicuously about locality in America; it relied on interviews, surveys, and daily observation of work and leisure. In Public Opinion (1922), Walter Lippmann had already stated that "the formal political structure exists in a social environment, where there are innumerable large and small corporations and institutions, voluntary and semi-voluntary associations, national, provincial, urban and neighborhood groupings which often as not make the decision that the political body registers." According to Lippmann, knowing how local social systems worked made us revise and even devalue theories of determinism. The details of daily life needed to be explored, not cycles and gyres of history.
How did theories of social life reach Fitzgerald? Certainly through his own reading and observations, and also through the influence of friends and mentors. Late in life, according to his secretary, Frances Kroll Ring, he recalled that Edmund Wilson had "most strongly influenced his political thinking and reading." Fitzgerald's intellectual education began at Princeton in his freshman year when he met Wilson, who was already editing campus publications, doing his own critical writing — and rethinking American literature. The relationship lasted and, as Wilson noted in "A Weekend at Ellerslie" (1952), Scott "had come to regard himself as somehow accountable to me for his literary career." What divided them was the issue of literature and politics. Wilson wanted Fitzgerald to write about American social problems; Fitzgerald did not believe that fiction was a political instrument. Wilson wanted Fitzgerald to support causes like the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti; Fitzgerald had no interest in activism. He did follow Wilson's advice to describe the American scene in detail. According to Wilson, all writers needed to study specific events and conditions in order to demonstrate local, "organic" knowledge of their subject. In a prospectus for Axel's Castle (1929) sent to Max Perkins, he stated that he himself would investigate detailed "social questions" about the war's effect. This was consistent; a decade earlier, in 1919, Wilson had given Fitzgerald a reading list in order to prepare himself for life as a writer in New York. He urged Fitzgerald to copy "realistic" writers like Zola and to produce a war story that was not about the front but instead about military management, the effects of war on civilians, and "the stagnation of the troops behind the lines."
Wilson also — decidedly — recommended theories. He wanted Fitzgerald to drop his Saturday Evening Post mentality and his remaining attachment to "the decaying Church of Rome." Wilson thought that Scott's Catholicism (and his own Protestantism) had lost explanatory powers to science and to the secular systems of Marx and Freud. In this case, Fitzgerald agreed, later telling a Saint Paul friend that his own heroes were now secular. In fact, "the Rosseaus [sic], Marxes, Tolstois" did more good for the world than believers in "the silly and cruel old God" of our imaginings. In a 1923 interview, he stated that Freud "has had the widest influence on the younger generation. You cannot begin to conceive how far his theories have spread in America. ... Why, Freud at third-hand ran over this country like wildfire." In the 1930s, he wrote to his daughter, Scottie, to "read the terrible chapter in Das Kapital on The Working Day, and see if you are ever quite the same."
Both Wilson and Fitzgerald knew the big systems. Both knew that social facts did not speak for themselves. There was a key difference: Fitzgerald alluded to Freud, Marx, and others but did not rely on their theories to explain his own work. When he talks about the "world" he describes experienced events and states of mind. Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night (1934) describes his "beautiful lovely safe world" before the Great War in terms of "human relations." The great monologue at Beaumont Hamel is about "the exact relation that existed between the classes." Few writers have been more explicit about the components of memory. His characters live in families and endure the institutions of middle-class life. The stories record their education in and out of school. The novels cover books and ideas in more detail, and they trace the development of personal associations. The essays review (and construct) much information about work and marriage. Fitzgerald's description of social relations led the New York Times to describe This Side of Paradise as a nearly perfect study of "the daily existence" of college men. It was his attitude that caused a different reaction. In his work, leisure is organized around occasions. That necessarily involves the display of privilege. A Fitzgerald story is about a group of individuals connected by — as Edmund Wilson put it in 1922 — "exhilarating social activities." Wilson admired such coverage, singling out "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" for its replication of "the organism of St. Paul." Such stories had documentary and also satirical value; he recommended that Fitzgerald do for Summit Avenue what Sinclair Lewis had done for Main Street.
At some point, however, sociology collided with social ideology: Wilson thought that Fitzgerald confined himself to a narrow sector of the middle class, the part with money and without culture. He did not in that same assessment of 1922 believe that Fitzgerald could write a convincing novel about Eastern society because of his disturbing willingness to accept the way things were. In his essay "The Critic Who Does Not Exist," Wilson recommended Hippolyte Taine, Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve, and Leslie Stephen to American writers who needed "ideas" as well as "experience." As the 1920s became the 1930s, he became more political and also more dependent on the language of sociology. He wrote of The 42nd Parallel in 1930: "Dos Passos seems the only one of the novelists of this generation who is concerned with the large questions of politics and society; and he has succeeded in this book in bridging the gap, which is wider in America than anywhere else and which constitutes a perpetual problem in American literature and thought, between the special concerns of the intellectual and the general pursuits and ideas of the people." Wilson's essay on George Washington Cable ("Citizen of the Union") became a manifesto for literary knowledge of social politics; in "Dos Passos and the Social Revolution" he reminded critics to "take the social organism seriously." Eventually, Wilson urged writers to do more than know about society and politics. The equanimity he saw in Cable would no longer be enough, nor would the studied political indifference of Scott Fitzgerald. Yet it is worth remembering that Wilson's criticism incorporated the various kinds of social science. He was a Marxist who thought that Strachey should be read against Michelet and that Gertrude Stein is best understood as part of the movement begun by Apollinaire that had "collided with historical events." In short, Wilson wanted accurate details in order to combine them into workable theory.
H. L. Mencken, both mentor and benefactor, found a home in the Smart Set for those stories of Fitzgerald such as "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (1922) that the Post and other mass magazines, in Matthew J. Bruccoli's words, considered "baffling, blasphemous, or objectionably satiric about wealth." But more was involved than editorial kindness. Mencken was an evangelist for literature who gave Fitzgerald a new understanding of writers like Conrad and Dreiser. He developed Fitzgerald's native interest in philosophy, and he knew more about the American scene than any other writer. He was our leading analyst of what came to be known as the American Language. However, Mencken was profoundly biased toward satire and realism — and he disliked modernists, particularly Hemingway. Fitzgerald required more of a subject than the follies of the booboisie. He did not judge the middle class by Mencken's standards but by his own experience. His essays are a mine of information on that life — and one of its great defenses. Even in the early 1920s Fitzgerald became convinced that Mencken's determinism could never explain the complexity of human relationships, and he became deeply hostile to Mencken's valuation of literature as a commentary about democratic life.
Like Wilson, Mencken was devoted to social theory. His book column in the American Mercury was filled "with science, sociology, and politics." In fact, the magazine was launched with the claim that it would chiefly cover American ideas and problems as well as the usual "eminentoes" he tarred and feathered. In My Life as Author and Editor, Mencken explained why. To begin, he had lost faith in literature by 1920. Current novels were inferior to those of the nineteenth century, while their teaching was in the hands of a priesthood of the written word born to be victimized by fake ideas. Literature, he thought, had failed to describe its great subject — the life of democracy — as well as science. Here is his footnote to history: "I made no attempt, in those days, to formulate a literary theory. ... No reasonably attentive reader of my monthly discourses, by the beginning of 1917, could be in any doubt about my fundamental ideas, which were, in the main, scientific rather than moral or aesthetic. I was in favor of the true long before I was in favor of either the good or the beautiful."
Mencken turned to the social sciences in order to approximate truth. He understood their faults, belaboring psychology for its failure to develop a unified theory of human behavior. His own solution was "to examine the phenomena of the mind objectively, and with some approach to a scientific method." And for that, the best resource was descriptive science. Mencken praised Malinowski and Hortense Powdermaker for attaining objective descriptions of social behavior. He added that "it is strange and lamentable that so many anthropologists seek their laboratory animals in the far places of the earth. ... I was in hopes, after 'Middletown' came out, that it would be followed by studies of other American towns." Mencken had set his own example when in Waycross, Georgia, finding "it very interesting to rove about the place and observe the inhabitants at their concerns." That was a less innocent occupation than appeared because Mencken was firmly convinced that American behavior was intentionally disguised by local institutions. The opening pages of Middletown, asserting that we must study ourselves "as through the eye of an outsider," must have responded to his suspicions. On that subject, Mencken writes, "I guess without knowing that young blood bubbles in Waycross as elsewhere, and that the local pastors visualize a state of chastity appreciably above that which they actually observe." Sociology, as he saw it, exposed subjects distorted not only by the pulpit but also by business, by newspapers, and certainly by education.
Actual sociology was not entirely a matter of observation. It aimed to be comparative. Middletown began with the statement that generational chronology was part of its investigative method: "the year 1890 was selected as the base-line against which to project the culture of today because of greater availability of data from that year onward ... and the boom begun which was to transform the placid county-seat during the nineties into a manufacturing city. This narrow strip of thirty-five years comprehends for hundreds of American communities the industrial revolution that has descended upon villages and towns, metamorphosing them into a thing of Rotary Clubs, central trade councils, and Chamber of Commerce contests for 'bigger and better' cities ... the procedure followed enables us to view the city of today against the background of the city of a generation ago out of which it has grown and by which it is conditioned, to see the present situation as the most recent point in a moving trend." The tactic of measuring the present against "a generation ago" allows Middletown to impose a narrative. That narrative is not what we expect. One of the major points of the study is that educational values have not changed in the slightest: "it is almost impossible simply by reading a history examination to tell whether it is of 1890 or 1924 vintage." That statement may be even more important than it looks. Middletown cites a specific examination in which two out of three students agreed that "the white race is the best race on earth." The percentage was higher for agreeing that "the United States is unquestionably the best country in the world." The conclusion may or may not be debatable but it matters less than the qualifier. Middletown concludes that it is normative — at least in the Midwest — to find individual identity not only grounded in the generational past but also tied to it by a Gordian knot.
What Middletown takes for background is much closer to the foreground of Fitzgerald's fiction. It is part of the conscious self and determines decisions in the present. In Fitzgerald, those who think about the past are not old; they do not have a reflective but an experiential consciousness. Even use of the past tense in his prose (think of the plangent repetitions of the word "gone" in "Babylon Revisited" [1931]) conveys something determinant. Images from the past and statements about it affect consciousness and character. "The Ice Palace" (1920) reminds us that before our own lives "there was something, there was something! I couldn't ever make you understand, but it was there." In "Dice, Brassknuckles, and Guitar" (1923), the spirit of place demonstrates that "thank God this age is joined on to some thing." In "Babylon Revisited" (1931), Charlie Wales wants "to jump back a whole generation" to make sense of his life. The world of the past had its imperatives — Fitzgerald often calls them "Victorian" to let us know that they have been outmoded, replaced by new intellectual and moral authority. Yet he often tells us how much they are missed. Dick Diver's lost world is more than conceptual; it appears in disguised ways, through images of unvisited graves in "The Ice Palace" and reminders of forgotten liturgies in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz."
No matter how lyrical, Fitzgerald's narratives take place within the hard lines of a social economy. In his conversation, "Scott paid great attention to the resources of society: social position, the effectiveness and the force of money." And in his stories, status and money govern choice. They are the subject of dialogues, editorial comments by the narrator, and narrative mechanisms that suddenly illuminate the exigencies of jobs, money, and class. In "The Freshest Boy" (1928), Basil Duke Lee overhears Ted Fay's girl reminding him that time is money and that life isn't a musical comedy. He sees Mr. Rooney's dive into downward social mobility. In "Forging Ahead" (1929), he meets Mr. Utsonomia, a Japanese exchange student who happens to be an amateur anthropologist. That will be an important point for Basil and even more so for Fitzgerald. The idea of critical objectivity has been planted in his story not to define Mr. Utsonomia's character — he has none — but in order to state his author's position on writing. Mr. Utsonomia has his own parallel narrative, reversing Basil's plan to pick Yale over the state university:
"They give me choice back in my country — I choose here."
"You did?" said Basil, almost indignantly.
"Sure, more strong here. More peasants come, with strength and odor of ground."
Basil stared at him. "You like that?" he asked incredulously.
Utsonomia nodded. "Here I get to know real American peoples."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "F. Scott Fitzgerald and the American Scene"
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