September 24, 2007
F. Scott Fitzgerald interview
I share a birthday with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was born on this day in 1896. He happens to be among my favorite writers—I have read The Great Gatsby four times and This Side of Paradise twice (so far), and keep The Crack-Up at hand for regular browsing. Last week The Guardian published an excerpt of the author’s interview with Michel Mok, conducted on his fortieth birthday, September 24, 1936.
"A writer like me," he said, "must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothingcan- happen-to-me, nothing-can-harm-me, nothing-can-touch-me.
"Thomas Wolfe has it. Ernest Hemingway has it. I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip."
Morris Dickstein includes an essay on Fitzgerald, titled "The Authority of Failure," in his book A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World. In it he describes the interview quoted above:
Into this picture [a time when Fitzgerald was publishing poignantly self-searching articles about his failure to take care of his talent] came a reporter for the New York Post, perhaps not so different from the Murdoch-driven paper it is today, a reporter with the ominous name of Michel Mok, to interview Scott for his fortieth birthday. There was a scent of blood in the water. Fitzgerald was under a nurse's care at an inn in Asheville, North Carolina, but he was still drinking, and the reporter described in wretched detail how he kept popping up for a thimbleful of gin from the makeshift bar, how his face twitched and hands shook as he described his life and made the usual drunkard's rationalizations.
The front page of the Post the next day told the whole story: "The Other Side of Paradise / F. Scott Fitzgerald, 40 / Engulfed in Despair / Broken in Health He Spends Birthday Re- / gretting That He Has Lost Faith in His Star." What had been eloquent if not wholly frank in Fitzgerald's own articles became pathetic in the tabloid version. Time picked up the story and gave it much wider currency. The effect on Fitzgerald was catastrophic. He thought he was ruined and took an overdose of morphine, but luckily vomited it up. He felt his credibility as a writer and a serious man was gone. The Post interview was perhaps the lowest point he reached in the decade, but it fixed his image as a washed-up, self-pitying writer, a miserable caretaker of his talent, the relic of a distant and unlamented era. (Even a decade later, when reviewers like Lionel Trilling wrote about The Crack-Up, Edmund Wilson's collection of his late friend's articles and letters, they would still point to the effects of the Post story on Fitzgerald's waning reputation.)
In a limited sense this image endures even today.
I agree with Dickstein that Fitzgerald's late writings are beautifully haunted by his "crack-up," and likewise hold up his 1932 essay "My Lost City" as an "emblem for this last phase of Fitzgerald's work." Its passage describing Fitzgerald's first ascent to the top of the then newly built Empire State Building is one of my favorites from his entire corpus:
Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground.
Dickstein digs deep into this passage, but I'll let it stand. This will be today’s only post.