F. Scott Fitzgerald came from a financially insecure
middle-class family that ended up in Minnesota, but he went to an
upper-class Catholic prep-school in the east and from there to Princeton.
And, yes, he was clearly dazzled by the rich youngsters he saw around him.
He was also an Irish Catholic – a complicated fact sometimes omitted in
discussion of his work – and to look at life as a moral drama was a lesson
he never forgot.
In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby’s bogus name, lower
class origins and his connection to gangsters are social and moral flaws,
but he's redeemable because he’s a romantic with an absolutely incorruptible
heart. The real villains in the story are the authentically rich who
“smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or
their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let
other people clean up the mess they had made.” Both The Great Gatsby
and Tender is the Night are moral dramas which show us beautiful
rich people who, as we get to know them, turn out to be vain, egocentric and
careless of everyone else. They are corrupted by their own riches.
The articles in The Crack-Up, written when Fitzgerald’s
works were going out of style, are a kind of autobiography of a man on the
losing end of things. The views and values that suffuse his novels reappear
in discursive form, along with the style and the vocabulary of the novels.
They are moral essays that see the Great Depression of the 1930s as old
fashioned punishment for wrong doing, punishment not simply for financial
excess, but for too much boozing and too much sex. “Somebody had blundered
and the most expensive orgy in history was over.”
The hangover theory of economics is lousy economics, though some
Congressmen relish the opportunity to talk it up on the floor of the House.
On the other hand, it did inspire a series of remarkable articles by F.
Scott Fitzgerald. If you get a chance, take a look at The Crack-Up,
it contains some of the best essays written in English.
—Gene Mirabelli