2014/10/01 by Ronald Berman · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · #American and British Literature Analysis #American Literature and Culture #American Sports and Literature #Environmental ethics #Sociology #Political science #History #Philosophy
paper · doi:10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.12.1.0032
openalex publication_date 2014/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/05
Many of F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories, especially those about Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry, retain historical value because of their “remembered details” (Basil and Josephine xxv). Yet interpretation of time, place, and our social arrangements was uncertain when they were written between 1928 and 1931. Edith Wharton's 1934 autobiography, A Backward Glance, begins by stating that the American milieu had only recently become decipherable through the work of European sociologists (780). 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 played by Spencer.1 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 twenties, Middletown (1929), was conspicuously about locality in America; it relied on interviews, surveys, and daily observation of work and leisure. Walter Lippmann had already stated in Public Opinion (1922) 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” (14). According to Lippmann, knowing how local social systems worked made us revise and even devalue theories of determinism (119). 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. According to his secretary, Frances Kroll Ring, late in life he recalled that Edmund Wilson had “most strongly influenced his political thinking and reading” (65). 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” (Literary Essays and Reviews 307). What divided the pair 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 Maxwell Perkins, he stated that he himself would investigate detailed “social questions” about the war's effect (Letters on Literature 149–51). 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” (Letters on Literature 44).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” (Letters on Literature 44). 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 St. 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 (Life in Letters 45). 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” (On Authorship 57). 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” (Life in Letters 436).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 describes his “beautiful lovely safe world” before the Great War in terms of “human relations” (57, 75). The great monologue at Beaumont Hamel is about “the exact relation that existed between the classes” (57). 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 (qtd. in Beuka 8). 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 Wilson put it in 1922—“exhilarating social activities.” Wilson admired such coverage, singling out “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920) in his 1922 Bookman essay “F. Scott Fitzgerald” for its replication of “the organism of St. Paul” (Literary Essays and Reviews 32). 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. In that same 1922 assessment he did not believe that Fitzgerald could write a convincing novel about Eastern society because of his disturbing willingness to accept the way things were (Literary Essays and Reviews 32). In the same era, in his essay “The Critic Who Does Not Exist,” he recommended Taine, Saint-Beuve, and Leslie Stephen to American writers who needed “ideas” as well as “experience” (Literary Essays and Reviews 305). 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” (Literary Essays and Reviews 366).2 Wilson's 1929 essay on George Washington Cable, “Citizen of the Union,” became a manifesto for literary knowledge of social politics (Literary Essays and Reviews 343–44); a previous Dos Passos piece from that same year, “Dos Passos and the Social Revolution,” reminded critics to “take the social organism seriously” (Literary Essays and Reviews 354). 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.3 Yet it is worth remembering that Wilson's criticism incorporated different kinds of social science. He was a Marxist who thought that Strachey should be read against Michelet and that Gertrude Stein was best understood as part of the movement begun by Apollinaire that had “collided with historical events” (Literary Essays and Reviews 468).4 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 stories of Fitzgerald's such as “A 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” (Fitzgerald, Short Stories 182). 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” (Teachout 238).5 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 deeply 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” (My Life 239–40).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” (“Psychologists in a Fog” 317–18). 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” (“How People” 506–7). 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” (“How People” 506). That was a less innocent occupation than it 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 (Lynd and Lynd vi). 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” (“How People” 507). Sociology, as he saw it, exposed subjects distorted not only by the pulpit but by business, 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: [T]he year 1890 was selected as the base-line against which to the of because of of from that year and the begun which was to the the into a This narrow of for of American the that has and them into a of and of for and [T]he followed us to view the of against the of the of a generation out of which it has and by which it is to see the as the in a (Lynd and Lynd The of the against generation Middletown to a That is not what we of the of the study is that have not in the is by reading a to it is of 1890 or (Lynd and Lynd That statement be even more than it Middletown a specific in which out of that “the is the best on The was for that “the is the best country in the world” (Lynd and Lynd The or not be but it less than the Middletown that it is in the not only in the generational but to it by a Middletown for is much to the of Fitzgerald's It is part of the and in the In Fitzgerald, those who about the are not they do not have a but an Even the of the in his of the of the word in from the and about it and “The (1920) us that before our own was there was I ever make you but it was Stories In the of place that this is on to Stories In “to a to make of his life Stories The world of the had its often them to us know that they have been by new intellectual and moral Yet he often us how much they are Dick lost world is more than it in disguised through of in “The and of in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” matter how Fitzgerald's place the of a social In his to great to the of social the and the of (qtd. in And in his stories, and money are the subject of editorial by the and that the of and In “The Basil Duke Lee that is money and that life is not a and and he into social In (1929), he a who to be an That be an for Basil and even more so for The of critical has been in his story not to has in order to state his on has his own to over the state me in my more with and of at like he I to know American and Does decision to for moral to The to know “with and of implies that is the for such a was in the early 1920s a and But the is also Not only it it who Fitzgerald's own to live and write about and had written to Fitzgerald in with an intellectual that wanted to write about the who “the of It he be even more and to fake ideas of class (Life in Letters In Fitzgerald's essay on to A on My to the to write about He thought that the subjects of and at “the American had become in fiction and were by intellectual (On Authorship recommended anthropology and Edmund Wilson sociology, but Fitzgerald understood how it was to at a and with was In the in America he had never so in its life it had been a to make to the place it was he was but had that such were an American and he was the as much American as and is concerned with the of because “the of was an from American as it came to be more as a was to sociologists as they were War to examine the critical works of American especially those of and his He is part of a and But is to have some because of his intellectual those of the social No one knew the effect of ideas like and and it was widely that phenomena were all into “the of Basil is a but not entirely because of do not that the issue is Fitzgerald's indifference to or to ideas from In while he was the Basil stories, he sent a to Sinclair Lewis on the of novel the way that the middle-class Fitzgerald praised it because it had the of its In fact, he its characters to of people” he knew who were like those in the novel and there was in to American But there was a great about critical Fitzgerald's is in one he is objective in his of he has the perfect critical word is to the who states that That is a in Fitzgerald who in to had that Mencken's of with the the the and the novels to be of about American life. And novelists were only to for aware that is as as the in which it has an existence” (On Authorship The Basil stories (and many others in which Fitzgerald the historical But they have in them on the of and and especially of the of at In Fitzgerald, more than stories how with an in the 1920s and A of Fitzgerald, who the at the same that Fitzgerald began his Basil Duke Lee stories, much of his life with In he is known for his work on thought that for American should be in novels as well as in In the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote about as it was by its social he was convinced that scientific description would not the true of the experienced were by the as it had been by Freud and by the novels of In short, the mind was by its social while it that experience. turned to to explain the of the is in and the of the of are the only places in the world in which we fact in the and how events (qtd. in Fitzgerald aware of social When to explain and individuals he the language of and there to an toward and had with many of he had by himself nor with the of been to his hands on its It was no but a of it was one of those questions of and Fitzgerald's that this social has its own structure and But there is more to the than the of In the late 1920s was an like wanted the to have the scientific (and the of about the mind was On the other of the like thought that came from the He to work with at who had a interest in human As and at the they The of the Fitzgerald from the of his mentors and us toward the of found often in his is as as any of Fitzgerald's characters who are by money and But he is a Fitzgerald's characters often social ideas, state their on social even what they have been is more than the value of a even as he it who has himself on social in the about in a of himself to be an of social a good of the of class in her human And us that social questions not the we Is that a to A very earlier, in that other great book of and the had stated that is when of be to to which we with a In short, he was deeply of on objective Such do more than Fitzgerald's of social science. his about ideas in a Even while his characters their social they are by what the of their often what is on Fitzgerald's mind as well as we of his stories social they also be society