Our cultural traditions demark one hundred years as a test of a certain validity, as an initiation into inclusion in the pantheon of the highest achievements of our species. Oftentimes, a delightful retrospective of detail can be found in work that celebrates such an anniversary, but what if the culture changes? If an author uses a term that has fallen into disfavor, into taboo language or thought, does the entirety of the work become void of value?
While F. Scott Fitzgerald has long been celebrated through inclusion in classroom anthologies, with one novel in contemporary Hollywood, other aspects of the author’s work, other titles, might not be as generally well known. Fitzgerald himself has the dedication of an institution to collect critiques, there is a biography of his later years by S. Graham, and, in the kind of hall of mirrors of academic publishing, there’s a critique of critiques by C. Jackson as early as 1951. These are academic readings; however, not all who read are institutionalized, and should Fitzgerald still be read out in the wild, in a culture so different from ours now, another wad of print among the plethora is available.
The cultural differences in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work to our times now are not just of the classist concerns most overt in the work, but of more nuanced concerns as well. In looking at both a collection of his short stories, Flappers and Philosophers (1920), and the novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922), certain sensitivities might find pause at Fitzgerald’s use of racial descriptions. As an overt component of characterization, the most prevalent usage is “Negro”, with “The Offshore Pirate” introducing such characterizations as “great hulking” and “miniature mulatto”. The reader is called to their conscience with subtlety here by later being confronted with a characterization condensed by dialogue:
If he’d been white he’d have been king of South America long ago […] He’s got the guile of every race and nationality whose blood is in his veins, and that’s a half a dozen or I’m a liar […] We used to sit together on the wharfs […] and we’d blend minor keys in African harmonics a thousand years old…
The reader discovers that it is their own prejudice which sees the characters as threatening, for their lives are that of musicians. A cynical reader might meditate how this prejudice is unchanging in the century since, although in terms of racial language, it is easy to see how this short story might cause some editorial consternation. In a personal conversation of this language use with Coleman, who self-describes as “having lived through Jim Crow”, the usage of various adjectives for people we now call by more circumspect genetic descriptors was “of the culture then”.
The cultural setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work is often mistaken for our modern one because so much of it is easily recognizable; however, this might be an erroneous perception. In “The Four Fists”, written in sections, Fitzgerald characterizes the protagonist as “Samuel became the sort of college student who in the early nineties drove tandems and coaches and tallyhos between Princeton and Yale and New York City”. While the reader might gloss past this reference, observation is owed; the driving of a tandem means putting one horse directly in front of the other and requires a level of experience on the box that comes of long dedication to that craft. Additionally, a coach is itself an expensive vehicle, requiring multiple persons to operate, and not commonly owned privately. Carriage driving is an anachronistic skill now, on view as a romantic tourist activity in some parts of our culture, and only as a way of life among niche communities. In comparing this culture to the contemporary one, Fitzgerald’s characters operate from cultural perceptions that are almost sesquicentennial to us now.
Perhaps the most overt cultural change that can be remarked in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work overall are the characterizations of women. Among the short stories, a marked characterization of a woman’s life occurs in “The Cut-Glass Bowl”, where the cultural importance of cut glass is attributed to a time past, but becomes a symbol of the protagonist for being “as hard as you are and as beautiful and as empty and as easy to see through”. However, the characterization includes a certain chatty rhythm that could be perceived as interior to the character:
There was the problem of Julie—Julie was thirteen, and lately she was growing more and more sensitive about her deformity and preferred to stay always in her room reading. A few years before, she had been frightened at the idea of going to school, and Evelyn could not bring herself to send her, so she grew up in her mother’s shadow, a pitiful little figure with the artificial hand that she made no attempt to use kept forlornly in her pocket.
In the story’s compression of an American family, Fitzgerald’s themes of women’s lives as following the arc of disappointment and eroded appearance are overt. The arrival of a disabled character is brief, and the modern reader might consider contemporary culture by comparison here as well.
More obvious in determining an author’s picadilloes for characterization is, of course, a novel. The protagonist of The Beautiful and Damned, Anthony Patch, experiences women as a ritual among his male school friends (“He had known her a month, a girl of nondescript and nomadic habits. Someone had casually passed her on to Anthony, who considered her amusing and rather liked the chaste and fairylike kisses she had given him on the third night of their acquaintance” [21]) until he meets the novel’s other protagonist, Gloria:
She was silent. She turned her face up to him, pale under the wisps and patches of light that trailed in like moonshine through foliage. Her eyes were gleaming ripples in the white lake of her face; the shadows of her hair bordered the brow with a persuasive unintimate dusk. No love there, surely; nor the imprint of any love. Her beauty was cool as this deep breeze, as the moist softness of her own lips. (48)
And while this imagery of the character is overtly romantic writing, F. Scott Fitzgerald makes the summarization of his character’s view:
Beside her the two dozen schoolgirls and debutantes, young married women and waifs and strays whom he had known were so many females, in the world’s most contemptuous sense, breeders and bearers, exuding still that faintly odorous atmosphere of the cave and the nursery. (50)
There’s a social hierarchy of women in the work as seen through the novel’s protagonist and as a tacit element in the short stories. Despite some of these views being clearly of the culture of the author’s work, many aspects of this rather hegemonical view are still subject to volatile conversation in modern culture.
If F. Scott Fitzgerald’s own definition of a classic work, as defined by the protagonist, Anthony, can be of service as a work “that has survived the next period or generation” (21), then Fitzgerald himself is a classic author of the American canon. Of interest is Fitzgerald’s use of “on a party”, as a way of life, as “the entire solace and justification for what they chose to do” (108) and a phrase used in the novel with some repetition. That a later author, Tennessee Williams, also used this phrase, is testament to Fitzgerald’s influence upon subsequent literature. That the novel follows the characters from their late teens until their early thirties, in a culture both recognizable to our own and also anachronistic, makes the work a provocative read for an academic setting; that the young people contemporary now to the protagonists especially in the novel might see reflected echoes of their own lives makes the work valuable a century later.
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