In a Workmanlike Manner

In the history of prose fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald has a place of his own. He wrote as many first-rate short stories as Kipling, two fine novels, and a powerful personal document about a time of troubles which he regarded as a crack-up or nervous breakdown. At first glance this may look like too small an amount of serious work to justify putting Fitzgerald into the front rank or near it. But Emily Brontë achieved enduring status with one terrific novel, and what remains of Mark Twain is only the superb first half of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is surely worth two or three tons of Thomas Wolfe. All things considered, after a professional life of little more than twenty years, Fitzgerald comes out well both as to quality and quantity.

Like his hero, Fitzgerald had to deal with an insoluble problem: his wife was slowly going to pieces emotionally and mentally. The brilliant and charming Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald began to lose touch with reality in the late 1920’s. After that, until her death in a hospital fire in 1948, Mrs. Fitzgerald was most often “an empty shell,” as she herself put it. On his part, Fitzgerald developed a variety of ailments, including tuberculosis, which had him in and out of hospitals all the rest of his life. But he held on to his sanity, and unlike Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night, never quite surrendered to despair.

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Finis Farr

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In the history of prose fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald has a place of his own. He wrote as many first-rate short stories as Kipling, two fine novels, and a powerful personal document about a time of troubles which he regarded as a crack-up or nervous breakdown. At first glance this may look like too small an amount of serious work to justify putting Fitzgerald into the front rank or near it. But Emily Brontë achieved enduring status with one terrific novel, and what remains of Mark Twain is only the superb first half of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is surely worth two or three tons of Thomas Wolfe. All things considered, after a professional life of little more than twenty years, Fitzgerald comes out well both as to quality and quantity.

Like his hero, Fitzgerald had to deal with an insoluble problem: his wife was slowly going to pieces emotionally and mentally. The brilliant and charming Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald began to lose touch with reality in the late 1920’s. After that, until her death in a hospital fire in 1948, Mrs. Fitzgerald was most often “an empty shell,” as she herself put it. On his part, Fitzgerald developed a variety of ailments, including tuberculosis, which had him in and out of hospitals all the rest of his life. But he held on to his sanity, and unlike Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night, never quite surrendered to despair.