Fitzgerald and the Idea of Society

Abstract

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 project the culture of today because of greater availability of data from that year onward … and the boom begun which was to transform the placid county-seat during the nineties into a manufacturing city. This narrow strip of thirty-five years comprehends for hundreds of American communities the industrial revolution that has descended upon villages and towns, metamorphosing them into a thing of Rotary Clubs, central trade councils, and Chamber of Commerce contests for “bigger and better” cities…. [T]he procedure followed enables us to view the city of today against the background of the city of a generation ago out of which it has grown and by which it is conditioned, to see the present situation as the most recent point in a moving trend. (Lynd and Lynd 5–6) The tactic of measuring the present against “a generation ago” allows Middletown to impose a narrative. That narrative is not what we expect. One of the major points of the study is that educational values have not changed in the slightest: “[I]t is almost impossible simply by reading a history examination to tell whether it is of 1890 or 1924 vintage” (Lynd and Lynd 199). That statement may be even more important than it looks. Middletown cites a specific examination in which two out of three students agreed that “the white race is the best race on earth.” The percentage was higher for agreeing that “the United States is unquestionably the best country in the world” (Lynd and Lynd 199–200). The conclusion may or may not be debatable but it matters less than the qualifier. Middletown concludes that it is normative—at least in the Midwest—to find individual identity not only grounded in the generational past but tied to it by a Gordian knot.What Middletown takes for background is much closer to the foreground of Fitzgerald's fiction. It is part of the conscious self and determines decisions in the present. In Fitzgerald, those who think about the past are not old; they do not have a reflective but an experiential consciousness. Even the use of the past tense in his prose (think of the plangent repetitions of the word “gone” in “Babylon Revisited” [1931]) conveys something determinant. Images from the past and statements about it affect consciousness and character. “The Ice Palace” (1920) reminds us that before our own lives “there was something, there was something! I couldn't ever make you understand, but it was there” (Short Stories 54). In “Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar” (1923), the spirit of place demonstrates that “thank God this age is joined on to something” (Short Stories 237). In “Babylon Revisited,” Charlie Wales wants “to jump back a whole generation” to make sense of his life (Short Stories 619). The world of the past had its imperatives—Fitzgerald often calls them “Victorian” to let us know that they have been outmoded, replaced by new intellectual and moral authority. Yet he often tells us how much they are missed. Dick Diver's lost world is more than conceptual: it appears in disguised ways, through images of unvisited graves in “The Ice Palace” and reminders of forgotten liturgies in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922).No matter how lyrical, Fitzgerald's narratives take place within the hard lines of a social economy. In his conversation, according to Edouard Jozan, “Scott paid great attention to the resources of society: social position, the effectiveness and the force of money” (qtd. in Milford 108–9). And in his stories, status and money govern choice. They are the subject of dialogues, editorial comments by the narrator, and narrative mechanisms that suddenly illuminate the exigencies of jobs, money, and class. In “The Freshest Boy” (1928), Basil Duke Lee overhears Ted Fay's girl reminding him that time is money and that life is not a musical comedy (Basil, Josephine, and Gwen 74); and he sees Mr. Rooney's dive into downward social mobility (72). In “Forging Ahead” (1929), he meets Mr. Utsonomia, a Japanese exchange student who happens to be an amateur anthropologist. That will be an important point for Basil and even more so for Fitzgerald. The idea of critical objectivity has been planted in his story not to define Mr. Utsonomia's character—he has none—but in order to state his author's position on writing. Mr. Utsonomia has his own parallel narrative, reversing Basil's plan to pick Yale over the state university: “They give me choice back in my country—I choose here.”“You did?” said Basil, almost indignantly.“Sure, more strong here. More peasants come, with strength and odor of ground.”Basil stared at him. “You like that?” he asked incredulously.Utsonomia nodded. “Here I get to know real American peoples.”(Basil, Josephine, and Gwen 157) Does Mr. Utsonomia's decision to trade elites for masses bring moral clarity to “Forging Ahead”? The will to know peasants “with strength and odor of ground” implies that caricature is the right mode for such a choice. Utsonomiya University was in the early 1920s a normal school and agricultural college. But the language, wonderfully befuddled, is also familiar. Not only does it echo valedictory sincerities; it echoes reviewers who resented Fitzgerald's own choice (in Robert Beuka's phrase) to live among and write about flappers and philosophers. Terminology repeats itself: Marya Mannes had written to Fitzgerald in 1925 with an intellectual complacency that enraged him: she wanted him to write about the youthful masses who represented “the fresh, strong river of America.” It might, he replied, be even more fresh and strong to reject fake ideas of class virtue (Life in Letters 129–30). In 1926, Fitzgerald's essay on “How to Waste Material: A Note on My Generation” returned to the novelistic “compulsion to write ‘significantly’ about America.” He thought that the subjects of rural integrity and youth at “the American universities” had become over-used in fiction and were by then intellectual jokes (On Authorship 105–6).Mencken recommended anthropology and Edmund Wilson prescribed sociology, but Fitzgerald understood how difficult it was to translate facts. Mr. Utsonomia appears once more, studying interactions at a party and confusing objectivity with reality: Mr. Utsonomia was enjoying himself. In the whole six months in America he had never felt so caught up in its inner life before. At first it had been a little hard to make plain to the lady just whose place it was he was taking, but Eddie Parmelee had assured him that such substitutions were an American custom, and he was spending the evening collecting as much data upon American customs as possible. (Basil, Josephine, and Gwen 163) Mr. Utsonomia is concerned with the collection of data because “the concept of culture was substantially an importation from American ethnology (or cultural anthropology, as it came to be more usually known)…. [C]ulture as a concept was introduced to sociologists as they were induced, following World War I, to examine the critical works of American anthropologists,” especially those of Boas and his students (Hinkle 173–74). He is part of a large, visible, and increasingly published movement. But Mr. Utsonomia is going to have some difficulty because of his intellectual limits—and those of the social sciences. No one really knew the effect of ideas like evolution, heredity, and instinct; and it was widely recognized that phenomena were all too easily absorbed into “the fallacy of explanation” (Hinkle 151–52). Basil is a skeptic but not entirely because of self-interest.I do not think that the issue is Fitzgerald's indifference to anthropology, or to extracting ideas from observations. In 1929, while he was writing the Basil stories, he sent a letter to Sinclair Lewis congratulating him on the appearance of Dodsworth. Lewis's novel examined the way that the upper middle-class lived—and Fitzgerald praised it precisely because it had revealed the “verity” of its coverage. In fact, he compared its characters to “dozens of people” he knew who were exactly like those in the novel (Bruccoli and Duggan 224–25). So there was nothing intrinsically wrong in trying to discover “real American peoples.” But there was a great deal wrong about critical conceptions. Fitzgerald's Mr. Utsonomia is flawless in one respect: he is scrupulously objective in his documentation of reality. Although he has the perfect critical mentality, reality evades him.The last word is left to the narrator who states that data needs interpretation. That is a motif in Fitzgerald who in “How to Waste Material” had argued that Mencken's disciples—“insensitive, suspicious of glamour, preoccupied exclusively with the external, the contemptible, the ‘national’ and the drab”—wanted novels to be containers of “raw data” about American life. And novelists were only too glad to trade style for truism, “never sufficiently aware that material, however closely observed, is as elusive as the moment in which it has an existence” (On Authorship 106). The Basil stories (and many others in which Fitzgerald recalls the past) reconstruct historical moments. But they have in them important reflections on the use of data and conceptions; and especially of the methods of arriving at “verity.” In Fitzgerald, “material” means immensely more than subject.The stories show how personality conflicts with community, an important topic in the 1920s and 1930s. A contemporary of Fitzgerald, Henry A. Murray, who directed the Harvard Psychological Clinic at the same time that Fitzgerald began his Basil Duke Lee stories, spent much of his professional life working with fiction. In particular, he is known for his work on Herman Melville. Murray thought that evidence for American character should be sought in novels as well as in clinical studies. In the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote about identity as it was definitively formed by its social environment. Like Alfred North Whitehead, he was convinced that strictly scientific description would not reveal the true character of the experienced world. For Murray, individual relationships were driven by the unconscious as it had been described by Freud and Jung—and by the novels of Melville (Robinson 140). In short, the mind was formed by its social experience while it agonistically resisted that experience. Murray turned to William James to explain the dynamics of the connection: “individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen” (qtd. in Robinson 375).Was Fitzgerald aware of contemporary social theory? When Basil's headmaster tries to explain groups and individuals he uses the language of diagnosis: Among boys and masters there seemed to exist an extraordinary hostility toward him, and though Doctor Bacon had dealt with many sorts of schoolboy crimes, he had neither by himself nor with the aid of trusted sixth-formers been able to lay his hands on its underlying cause. It was probably no single thing, but a combination of things; it was most probably one of those intangible questions of personality. (Basil, Josephine, and Gwen 60) Fitzgerald's passage indicates that this miniature social system has its own structure and rules. But there is more to the passage than the dynamics of intolerance. In the late 1920s “personality” was itself an embattled term. Psychologists like Edwin G. Boring wanted the discipline to have the hard scientific style (and the infallibility) of physics. For behaviorists, nothing about the mind was intangible. On the other hand, adversaries of the older system like Henry Murray thought that insights came from outside the laboratory. He hoped to work with “intellectuals at large” who had a “burning interest in human beings” (Robinson 149). As Murray and newer minds looked at the issue, they accepted uncertainty. The concept of the indefinable separates Fitzgerald from the devotion of his mentors and directs us toward the theme of contradiction found often in his text.Dr. Bacon is as hard-edged as any of Fitzgerald's characters who are governed by money and class. But he is having a representative moment. Fitzgerald's characters often address social ideas, state their views on social order, even identify what they have been reading. Dr. Bacon is more intellectually careful than most: Amory Blaine takes seriously the diagnostic value of physiognomy, a pseudo-science invalidated even as he ponders it (Paradise 122–23); Mr. Utsonomia, who has modeled himself on social anthropology, takes sides in the current debate about corrupt cities versus noble provinces; in a time of racial troubles, Tom Buchanan imagines himself to be an arbiter of social conscience; Baby Warren (who needs a good deal of analysis) embodies the concept of class warfare in her human relations. And Dr. Bacon reminds us that social questions will not generate the answers we expect. Is that a surrender to indifference? A very few years earlier, in that other great book of 1925, Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead had stated that explanation is useless when most arbitrarily sure of observable fact. Ideas “may be expected to refer to depths beyond anything which we can grasp with a clear apprehension” (92). In short, he was deeply suspicious of explanation based on supposedly objective evidence. Such references do more than clarify Fitzgerald's use of social science. They suggest his skepticism about ideas in a particular way. Even while his characters argue their social beliefs, they are governed by what James called the blind strata of their character. They often mention what is on Fitzgerald's mind as well as theirs. While we think of his stories imaging social history they may also be defining society itself.