Volume 5, Number 3 · September 16, 1965
Great Scott
By Marius Bewley
The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1909-1917
edited with an Introduction by John Kuehl
Rutgers, 184 pp., $5.00
The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald
by Sergio Perosa, translated by Charles Matz. the author
University of Michigan, 239 pp., $5.95
F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait
by Henry Dan Piper
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 334 pp., $9.50
Although nearly all critics, including those reviewed here, recognize today the quality and stature of Scott Fitzgerald's fiction, from time to time one still hears a violent dissenting opinion. The case against Fitzgerald was stated as succinctly as possible in a 1951 essay by Leslie Fiedler: 'And so a fictionist with a 'second-rate sensitive mind'…and a weak gift for construction is pushed into the very first rank of American novelists, where it becomes hard to tell his failures from his successes. Who cares as long as the confetti flies and the bands keep playing!' It is a little difficult in this context to know exactly what is meant by a second-rate mind. But a novelist who discovers and is obsessed by an important subject, one which is centrally significant in the experience of his country and time, and who gives that subject vivid expression, hardly deserves such an epithet, however interpreted. Mr. Fiedler knows perfectly well that Fitzgerald has a subject, but he doesn't like it. As he tells us in his book on the American novel, published in 1960: 'There is only one story that Fitzgerald knows how to tell…. The penniless knight…goes out to seek his fortune and unhappily finds it…. He finds in his bed not the white bride but the Dark Destroyer.' But this interpretation is likely to seem biased and partial to anyone who disagrees with Mr. Fiedler's bright but falsifying description of Fitzgerald as the 'laureate' of 'the American institution of coitus interruptus.'
Review, 2504 words
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