By Bergotte
F. Scott Fitzgerald understood enchantment better than any other American writer — understood it not as a pleasant illusion to be gently corrected but as a fundamental feature of human consciousness, the capacity to project onto the world a beauty and a meaning and a promise that the world does not independently possess, and to organise an entire life around the pursuit of that projection. His great subject is the person who knows the enchantment is an enchantment and is enchanted anyway, who sees the green light across the water for what it is and reaches for it regardless, who understands that the past cannot be recovered and tries to recover it with everything he has. This is not stupidity. It is, Fitzgerald insists with a precision that cost him everything, the most human thing there is.
The Boy from St. Paul
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in St. Paul, Minnesota, the son of a failed salesman and a socially ambitious mother whose collision of inadequacy and aspiration produced in their son a lifelong sensitivity to the exact gradations of social class — who had it, who was performing it, who was excluded from it, and what it cost each of them. He was educated at Princeton, which he loved, where he failed academically, and from which he left without graduating to join the army in 1917, convinced he would die in France before finishing anything. He did not go to France. He went to Camp Sheridan in Alabama, where he met Zelda Sayre, the golden girl of Montgomery society, and fell in love with a completeness that was also, from the beginning, an artistic act: he was not merely in love with Zelda but with what she represented — beauty, freedom, the South, the careless ease of money and youth and the specific American glamour of the very rich.
She would not marry him until he had money. He went to New York, wrote advertising copy, rewrote the novel he had begun at Princeton, and published This Side of Paradise in 1920, which made him famous at twenty-three. He and Zelda married, spent the money as fast as it came, went to Europe, came back, went to Long Island, drank too much, shone too brightly, and produced, between 1920 and 1934, the body of work on which his reputation rests: The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, two collections of stories that contain some of the finest short fiction in the American tradition, and the essays collected in The Crack-Up, written in the last decade of his life, which are the most honest account of artistic and personal disintegration that any major writer has left behind.
Zelda had a breakdown in 1930 and was institutionalised for much of the rest of her life. Fitzgerald’s drinking, which had always been heavy, became consuming. He went to Hollywood as a screenwriter, fell in love with the gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, and wrote the unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, which Edmund Wilson, editing it after Fitzgerald’s death, called the most mature of his works. He died of a heart attack in Graham’s apartment in December 1940, at forty-four, largely forgotten, his books out of print, his reputation in eclipse. The revival began almost immediately after his death and has not stopped. The Great Gatsby is now among the most read novels in the world, assigned in high schools across America to students who are given, with it, the impossible task of explaining what the green light means.
The Green Light
The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is the most perfectly constructed American novel — the one in which form and content are most completely unified, in which every detail is load-bearing, in which the prose style is itself an argument about what it is describing. It is one hundred and eighty pages long and it contains, in those pages, the whole of the American dream: its beauty, its fraudulence, its violence, its irreducible and fatal enchantment.
Jay Gatsby — James Gatz of North Dakota, self-invented, self-named, the son of shiftless farm people who had always known he was destined for something extraordinary — has organised his entire existence around a single object: the recovery of Daisy Buchanan, the golden girl he loved five years ago before the war, before she married Tom Buchanan, before the money and the social position closed around her and shut him out. He has made a fortune through means the novel is careful not to specify but clear to imply, bought a mansion across the bay from her, and thrown parties every weekend in the hope that she will wander in. He has been reaching for the green light at the end of her dock.
Nick Carraway, who narrates the novel and who is Gatsby’s neighbour and Daisy’s cousin, is the instrument through which the reader sees both the enchantment and its cost. He is simultaneously inside the world he describes — participant, confidant, witness — and outside it, the Midwesterner among the East Egg aristocracy, the honest man among the performers. He admires Gatsby unreservedly, and he is right to: Gatsby’s capacity for illusion, his extraordinary gift for hope, his willingness to believe that the past can be remade and the dream recovered, is presented as something genuinely rare and genuinely beautiful. You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together, Nick tells him, meaning the Buchanans and their world, and the novel supports the judgment even as it shows that judgment being insufficient to save him.
The human condition according to The Great Gatsby is the condition of the person who reaches for the green light — who has constructed a vision of what life could be, what love could be, what the world would look like if the best moments of the past could be made permanent — and who discovers that the light recedes as you approach it, that Daisy is not equal to the idea of Daisy, that the dream is more real than the reality it was supposed to represent and that this is its tragedy rather than its flaw. Gatsby’s error is not that he dreamed. It is that he confused the dream with its object. Daisy is not the green light. She is a careless woman who lets other people take the consequences of her carelessness. But the green light — the quality of hope, the specific American capacity for reinvention and desire — is real, and it is not nothing, and Nick Carraway driving back to the Midwest at the end of the novel, watching the lights of the party recede, understands that something irreplaceable has been lost even if it was never quite there.
The famous closing lines are worth the decade of high school annotation they have received: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. They are not simply beautiful. They are a precise description of the structure of desire — the reaching forward that is always also a reaching backward, the future that is always shaped by the past that cannot be recovered, the current that is both time and everything time takes from us. Fitzgerald wrote them at twenty-eight. He had already understood everything the rest of his life would demonstrate.
Tender is the Night and the Long Fall
Tender is the Night, published in 1934, is the novel Fitzgerald spent nine years writing and that he considered, despite its mixed reception, his finest work. It is certainly his most personal — the story of Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist who marries his patient Nicole Warren, a beautiful and wealthy woman whose mental illness he has helped to treat, and who over the course of the novel is gradually drained of his gifts and his vitality and his capacity for the work that defined him, ending in obscure general practice in upstate New York, having given everything he had to a world that consumed it without noticing.
The Divers’ life on the Riviera — the villa, the beach, the parties, the constellation of glamorous expatriates orbiting Dick’s charm and Nicole’s money — is rendered with such extraordinary seductive power that the reader, like the characters, is caught in the enchantment before the unravelling begins. This is deliberate and it is Fitzgerald’s most technically demanding achievement in the novel: the beauty must be real before its cost can register, the parties must genuinely dazzle before the morning-after emptiness can devastate. He understood, from inside, that the glamour of the very rich is not simply a performance — it is an environment, a climate, a medium in which certain things grow and certain things die, and the things that die are precisely the things that make the people who enter it most interesting.
Dick Diver fails because he is constitutionally incapable of protecting himself from the people who need him. His gifts — his charm, his empathy, his capacity to make everyone in his presence feel uniquely seen and valued — are the same gifts that make him a great psychiatrist and the same gifts that destroy him as a man, because they cannot be selectively deployed. He gives them to Nicole and to the beach community and to the golden children of the expatriate world and the giving is not strategic and it is not compensated and eventually there is nothing left. Nicole recovers, grows strong, leaves him for another man. The transaction is not malicious. It is simply what happened: one person’s healing required another person’s diminishment, and the novel does not pretend the exchange was avoidable.
The autobiographical dimension is unmistakable and was acknowledged by Fitzgerald himself: Dick Diver is what he feared he was becoming, the gifted man being consumed by a beautiful woman’s need and a glamorous world’s appetite, the artist whose art was being spent on life rather than expressed through it. Tender is the Night is the most self-aware and most unsparing of self-portraits, written in the middle of the crisis it describes, which may be why it cost so much to write and why it is, finally, so much harder to read than Gatsby — harder and, in its way, truer.
The Crack-Up
The Crack-Up, the series of essays Fitzgerald published in Esquire in 1936, is one of the most extraordinary documents in American literature: a public confession of total breakdown, written with a clarity and a formal control that make the content — the collapse of a self, the exhaustion of everything that had made him who he was — all the more devastating for being so precisely rendered.
He describes the process in geological terms: not a sudden fracture but a long, slow cracking that had been happening for years before he noticed it, the way a plate will crack silently under pressure for months before the break becomes visible. He had been drawing on reserves he did not know were finite, spending the emotional capital of his youth and his talent on the performance of a life rather than on the living of it, and one day he reached for the reserves and they were not there. He was thirty-nine. He had nothing left.
What he does with this material is, characteristically, to turn it into something. The essays are not self-pity — or rather, they are self-pity observed from the outside with the same precision he brought to Gatsby and Diver, which transforms it into something more useful. He is studying his own breakdown as a case, bringing to the examination of himself the same quality of attention that his fiction brought to his characters, and the result is a document that every person who has experienced the specific exhaustion of having given too much of themselves to the wrong things will recognise with a shock of painful accuracy.
The question the essays raise and do not answer — cannot answer — is whether the crack-up was the cost of being Fitzgerald or the cost of how he chose to be Fitzgerald: whether the sensitivity that made him the writer he was necessarily entailed the fragility that destroyed him, or whether different choices, different discipline, different resistance to the enchantments of money and beauty and the Buchanans of the world might have preserved the gifts while protecting the man. He does not know. We do not know. The question is the point.
The Short Stories
The stories — Babylon Revisited, Winter Dreams, The Rich Boy, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Absolution — are where Fitzgerald’s argument about enchantment finds its most concentrated expression, freed from the structural obligations of the novel and able to focus on the single moment, the single perception, the single instant of understanding or its failure.
Babylon Revisited, published in 1931, is the finest of them and one of the finest American stories ever written. Charlie Wales returns to Paris, sober now, to reclaim his daughter Honoria from the sister-in-law who has been raising her since his wife’s death — a death for which his drinking and his carelessness of the Paris years are, obliquely, responsible. He has changed. He is sober, employed, genuinely reformed. And the past comes back, in the form of two friends from the old days who arrive drunk at the wrong moment, and the sister-in-law, whose grief and suspicion are entirely justified, refuses to release Honoria.
The story’s closing paragraph is among the most quietly devastating Fitzgerald ever wrote: Charlie sitting alone in the bar where he used to drink, thinking that he has lost the thing he most wanted because of things he did before he was the person he now is, and understanding that this is simply the structure of consequence — that the past does not recede just because you have. He is paying, with compound interest, for a self that no longer exists. This is the human condition according to Fitzgerald at its starkest: the present self held responsible for the past self’s debts, the reformed man discovering that the reformation is insufficient collateral against what was spent before.
What Fitzgerald Knew
What Fitzgerald knew — what all the novels and stories and essays add up to — is that beauty is not a decoration on life but one of its organising principles, and that the human capacity to be enchanted by beauty, to reach toward it, to sacrifice ordinary prudence and ordinary happiness in its pursuit, is neither a weakness nor an illusion but a form of knowledge: the knowledge that the world contains more than the merely functional, that there is something in the green light that is worth reaching for even knowing it will recede, that the boats beating against the current are not fools but pilgrims, devoted to something the current cannot invalidate even as it carries them back.
He paid for this knowledge in the most literal way — with his health, his marriage, his talent in its final years, his life. The payment does not make the knowledge less true. It makes it more expensive, which is not the same thing.
The Great Gatsby is taught in every high school in America, and the students who read it are given the green light and asked what it means, and the best answer is still the one the novel gives: it means everything you have ever wanted that you could not quite reach, and the wanting is the most human thing about you, and the not-reaching is not failure but the condition of the desire, and the desire is worth everything it costs.
He died at forty-four with the last novel unfinished, the green light still out there, the boats still moving.
Sources and Further Reading
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Scribner, 1925.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. Scribner, 1934.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Beautiful and Damned. Scribner, 1922.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. This Side of Paradise. Scribner, 1920.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Scribner, 1989.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Crack-Up. Edited by Edmund Wilson. New Directions, 1945.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Last Tycoon. Edited by Edmund Wilson. Scribner, 1941.
Bruccoli, Matthew J. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. 2nd ed. University of South Carolina Press, 2002.
Milford, Nancy. Zelda: A Biography. Harper and Row, 1970.
Turnbull, Andrew. Scott Fitzgerald. Scribner, 1962.
Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise: A Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Houghton Mifflin, 1951.
Donaldson, Scott. Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald. Congdon and Weed, 1983.
Wilson, Edmund. “F. Scott Fitzgerald.” In The Shores of Light. Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952.
Trilling, Lionel. “F. Scott Fitzgerald.” In The Liberal Imagination. Viking, 1950.
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