FOOLS GOLD

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald is most well known for his third novel The Great Gatsby published in 1925. This book has been described as a "pitch-perfect portrayal of the Jazz Age" and "the definitive portrait of the Roaring Twenties".

With such high praise it is important that readers understand the limits of the author's gaze. If The Great Gatsby is definitive of anything, it is not the experience of the vast majority of Americans during this period. Fitzgerald is concerned only with a privileged minority. His first and second novels are clear examples of this bias. This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922) are all about the gilded offspring of the very rich.

This Side of Paradise begins with a breath-taking display of arrogance, the sort that  eye-wateringly large amounts of money can bring. As a boy, Amory Blaine is to be taken on his first Grand Tour of Europe by his mother.

      "However, four hours out from land, Italy bound with Beatrice, his appendix burst, probably from too many meals in bed, and after a series of frantic telegrams to Europe and America, to the amazement of the passengers the great vessel slowly wheeled around and returned to New York to deposit Amory at the pier.

      You will admit that if it wasn't life, it was magnificent."

Young Master Blaine is smothered by his mother and emerges from childhood both spoilt and weak. On finally reaching the semi-independence of Princeton University it is not surprising that he languishes. He has enough intelligence to be there but the energy and courage to make full use of his advantage is lacking.

      "...through the shell of his undergraduate consciousness had broken a deep and reverent devotion to the grey walls and gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages...The silent stretches of green, the quiet halls with an occasional late-burning scholastic light held his imagination in a strong grasp...

       'Damn it all', he whispered aloud...'Next year I work!'...

       Yet he knew that where now the spires and towers made him dreamily acquiescent, it would then over-awe him. Where now he realized his own inconsequence, effort would make him aware of his own impotency and insufficiency." 

Amory's lethargy is an inversion of the American Dream. He is afraid to risk the comfortable insulated life he believes he is entitled to; he avoids exposure to competition and the possibility of failing. This passive attitude stays with him after Princeton. If he belongs to a 'lost generation', he is determined to remain so. 

      "'I'm tres old and tres bored', said Amory one day...

       Existence had settled back into an ambitionless normality...

       This particular day on which he announced his ennui had been quite typical...

       'Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger...'

       'How'll I fit in?' he demanded. 'What am I for?'

        'I believe too much in the responsibilities of authorship to write just now; and business, well business speaks for itself. It has no connection with anything in the world I've ever been interested in, except a slim, ulitarian connection with economics. What I'd seen of it, lost in a clerkship, for the next and best ten years of my life, would have the intellectual content of an industrial movie.'"

When, at the end of his story, Amory proclaims "I know myself...but that is all", readers are not sure he has learnt even that much. For conventional Americans in the 1920's, the main character's apparent waste of his many opportunities must have seemed irresponsible, and perhaps the loss of the family fortune by his parents fulfilled their sense of natural justice. But it is a stretch to conclude that such a flimsy moral message justified reading this novel, then or now. 

Fitzgerald's second novel The Beautiful and Damned repeats the themes of the first, but extends them to include the experience of "married twenty-somethings". Once again, the invisibility of everyone other than the pampered offspring of the mega-rich is rarely troubled.

The character who glitters most golden in Anthony Patch's world is Gloria Gilbert the "susciety girl" ― "a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz-baby".

      "Gloria goes, goes, goes...She dances all afternoon and all night..."

      "Gloria has a very young soul...She has no sense of responsibility."

      "She's sparkling...A sense of responsibility would spoil her...She's too pretty."

Anthony's prospect of inheriting his grandfather's wealth underwrites the young couples hectic partying, until it doesn't. No matter. Dedication to themselves outlasts setbacks.

      "Blowing bubbles ― that's what we're doing, Anthony and me. And we blew such beautiful ones today, and they'll explode and then we'll blow more and more, I guess ― bubbles just as big and just as beautiful, until all the soap and water is used up."

Anthony "the ineffectual idler" believing "nothing much was worth doing" and "Gloria the idler, caresser of her own dreams" are united their "magnificent attitude of not giving a damn".

       "No one cares about us but ourselves, Anthony", she said one day.

       "It'd be ridiculous for me to go about pretending I felt any obligation toward the world, and as for worrying about what people think of me, I simply don't, that's all."

Descent into alcoholism and poverty is no less painful for being inevitable. Their awkward final reprieve (the settlement of their claims on the old man's will) comes too late. The irony of enjoying "some thirty millions" from an invalid's bath-chair deals a powerful counter-punch on the last page.

The impression of a neat moral ending is misleading here too. The last thing Fitzgerald's two novels are about is some sort of vindication of American society. His books are not in any way endorsing capitalism. These are essentially undermining works, written to unsettle the smug certainties of laissez-faire economics.