The legend of F. Scott Fitzgerald has flourished for so long that we forget how much of it was the creation of Fitzgerald himself, with help from some of the highest cultural priests of midcentury America. Foremost among them was Edmund Wilson, a friend since their Princeton years, who shepherded Fitzgerald’s final, uncompleted novel, The Last Tycoon, into publication in 1941, and then assembled the pieces of The Crack-Up, which included the classic title essay on Fitzgerald’s nervous breakdown in the mid-’30s. Its reviewers included another eminence, a plainly infatuated Lionel Trilling, who compared early Fitzgerald to the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, “both the young men so handsome, both winning immediate and notorious success, both rather more interested in life than in art, each the spokesman and symbol of his own restless generation.”



PARADISE LOST: A LIFE OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD by David S. Brown Belknap Press, 424pp., $29.95

Wilson admired Fitzgerald, and worked to revive his reputation, which had sunk low at his death in 1940. But even he was startled to see Fitzgerald, in all his liveliness, humor, and wit, as well as his ruinous alcoholism, resurrected within a few years as “a martyr, a sacrificial victim, a semi-divine personage.” As early as 1951, Fitzgerald had assumed “a national or American significance as well as a literary one,” wrote Delmore Schwartz, himself an expert in the wages of misspent talent. “He can be regarded as a toy, puppet, and victim of the zeitgeist [and] will certainly be invoked as a witness of how America destroys its men of genius by giving them a false and impossible idea of success.” Neither Wilson nor Schwartz foresaw—but then who could have?—how far it would all go: the Scott-and-Zelda Amazon serial Z: The Beginning of Everything, with a miscast Christina Ricci clad in a Gorgon’s-head merkin; or the “Great Gatsby Package”—$14,999 for three nights in a hotel suite ornamented with a magnum of Champagne and a “personal note” from the hotelier’s daughter—yes, Ivanka Trump.

David S. Brown, in his biography Paradise Lost, is the latest Fitzgerald admirer to seek a larger national significance in his myth. Brown’s field is American history, not literature (he is the author of the intelligent Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography), and in his view Fitzgerald was a historian, too. The laureate of the Jazz Age was also, he proposes, a prophet of economic and political transformation. Even as Fitzgerald partied with snobs in Princeton eating clubs and got smashed with plutocrats in swanky Manhattan hotels, he stood apart, Brown tells us, and should be seen “ideologically as a man of an older, precapitalist Right.” This put him in august intellectual company. Like the declinists Henry Adams and Oswald Spengler, Fitzgerald “doubted whether older pre-Enlightenment notions of art, creativity, paternalism, and worship would survive the onset of what we have since come to call ‘modernity.’ ” With Frederick Jackson Turner, he explored “the meaning of a frontierless America”; with Charles Beard and Thorstein Veblen, he “interpreted” the excesses of the boom years; and with John Maynard Keynes, he intuited the collapse of the global economic order.

But these mighty guns, once wheeled out, fall more or less silent, and that’s a good thing, because when Brown does deploy them we get misfires like this: “Only the fact that Fitzgerald almost certainly never read Veblen prohibits us from seeing the novel”—The Great Gatsby—“as a parody of Veblen’s ideas.” Or: “Beard, of course, was a trained historian who visited archives, sampled secondary materials, and appealed to his profession by putting forth hypotheses backed by evidence and footnotes. Fitzgerald in his own way did much the same. His archives were any number of bars, newspapers, beaches, and cities.” It begins to feel not so much wrong as beside the point.

In truth, while Fitzgerald read a bit in the major theorists of his time, including the fashionable prophets of doom, he was “extraordinarily little occupied with the general affairs of the world,” as Wilson reported in 1922. His thinking went chiefly into his craft; he prided himself on being “a worker in the arts.” Brown’s depiction of Fitzgerald as stern defender of a vanished age and grim diagnostician of “a larger cultural illness corrupting the West” encumbers a writer whose power of enchantment begins in swift movement and lightning observation, irradiated by delicious humor and also the dreamy moonglow of his charming, musical prose.