Books in Brief

Scott Fitzgerald, by Andrew Turnbull (Scribner’s, $5.95). “That young man must be mad,” James Joyce said of Scott Fitzgerald in 1928, “I’m afraid he’ll do himself some injury”; a cancelled sentence in The Snows of Kilimanjaro once spoke of Fitzgerald as a “wrecked” personality. Narcissus at Princeton, a twenty-year binge, crack-up: these are the terms into which his life resolves. Clearly, some demon rode him. One wonders how at least one masterful book, Gatsby, and a half dozen fine stories emerged from the hangovers, and why this disordered life is so especially distasteful to read about. Drink and high jinks are fairly common to letters, and men who needed quiet hours have married wild drunken women before; but in Fitzgerald these horrors seem the clawing of the very Harpies. Mr. Turnbull, who knew him, gives us a clear record of the man, if a hazy one of the writer. To record so much of Fitzgerald is somehow unfair, for in an account of so much misbehavior the writer disappears completely, and miracles, one has to imagine, account for novels from all that squalor and childishness. By his thirteenth chapter Mr. Turnbull enters the narrative as a witness, giving an authenticity to Fitzgerald (and an unsuspected side to his character) which few accounts have achieved. The talent described here was a narrow, special, but strong one. Fitzgerald, like his antithesis, Thomas Wolfe, fed off his own experience (imagine Dickens or Tolstoi thus limited) so that it was his art, after all, that ruined his life, not the other way round. Mr. Turnbull’s treatment of Zelda is painfully honest and painful to read. We, children of the century’s belief that frankness is all, wonder why we should be told so many pointless intimacies until we realize that Mr.

Turnbull’s biography is the Fitzgerald novel that its protagonist acted rather than wrote, and that it is a fulfillment to have it written out in the style and compassion of its Subject. G. AVENPORT

Featured Tags

Scott Fitzgerald, by Andrew Turnbull (Scribner’s, $5.95). “That young man must be mad,” James Joyce said of Scott Fitzgerald in 1928, “I’m afraid he’ll do himself some injury”; a cancelled sentence in The Snows of Kilimanjaro once spoke of Fitzgerald as a “wrecked” personality. Narcissus at Princeton, a twenty-year binge, crack-up: these are the terms into which his life resolves. Clearly, some demon rode him. One wonders how at least one masterful book, Gatsby, and a half dozen fine stories emerged from the hangovers, and why this disordered life is so especially distasteful to read about. Drink and high jinks are fairly common to letters, and men who needed quiet hours have married wild drunken women before; but in Fitzgerald these horrors seem the clawing of the very Harpies. Mr. Turnbull, who knew him, gives us a clear record of the man, if a hazy one of the writer. To record so much of Fitzgerald is somehow unfair, for in an account of so much misbehavior the writer disappears completely, and miracles, one has to imagine, account for novels from all that squalor and childishness. By his thirteenth chapter Mr. Turnbull enters the narrative as a witness, giving an authenticity to Fitzgerald (and an unsuspected side to his character) which few accounts have achieved. The talent described here was a narrow, special, but strong one. Fitzgerald, like his antithesis, Thomas Wolfe, fed off his own experience (imagine Dickens or Tolstoi thus limited) so that it was his art, after all, that ruined his life, not the other way round. Mr. Turnbull’s treatment of Zelda is painfully honest and painful to read. We, children of the century’s belief that frankness is all, wonder why we should be told so many pointless intimacies until we realize that Mr.

Turnbull’s biography is the Fitzgerald novel that its protagonist acted rather than wrote, and that it is a fulfillment to have it written out in the style and compassion of its Subject. G. AVENPORT