BY JOHN DOS PASSOS AND GLENWAY
WESCOTT
"In Memory of F. Scott
Fitzgerald"
February 17, 1941
F. Scott Fitzgerald died 72
years ago Saturday. Soon afterward, The New Republic, calling him a voice of
his post-World War I generation, began publishing tributes by writers of his
own generation and the generation younger than his. Two of them—by John Dos
Passos and Glenway Westcott—are published below.
"Fitzgerald and the
Press"
The notices in the press
referring to Scott Fitzgerald’s untimely death produce in the reader the same
strange feeling that you have, when after talking about some topic for an hour
with a man, it suddenly covers over you that neither you nor he has understood
a word of what the other was saying. The gentlemen who wrote these pieces
obviously know something about writing the English language, and it should
follow that they know how to read it. But shouldn’t the fact that they have set
themselves up to make their living as critics of the work of other men furnish
some assurance that they recognize the existence of certain standards in the
art of writing? If there are no permanent standards, there is no criticism
possible. Don’t these gentlemen know that all this gabble about the Younger
Generation, proletarian novelists and the twenties and the thirties is just
advertising man’s bilge?
A well-written book is a
well-written book whether it's written under Louis XIII or Joe Stalin or on the
wall of a tomb of ah Egyptian Pharaoh. It's the quality of detaching itself
from its period while embodying its period that marks a piece of work as good.
I would have no quarrel with any critic who examined Scott Fitzgerald's work
and declared that in his opinion it did not detach itself from its period. My
answer would be that my opinion was different. The strange thing about these
pieces that came out about Fitzgerald's death is that the writers seem to feel
that they don't need to read his books; all they need for a license to shovel
them into the ashcan is to label them as having been written in such and such a
period now past. This leads us to die inescapable conclusion that these
gentlemen have no other standards than the styles of window dressing on Fifth
Avenue. It means that when they write about literature all they are thinking of
is the present rating of a book on the exchange, a matter which has almost
nothing to do with its eventual value. For a man who is making his living as a
critic to write about Scott Fitzgerald without mentioning The Great Gatsby just
means that he doesn't know his business. Many people consider The Great Gatsby
one of the few classic American novels. I do myself. Obviously such a judgment
is debatable. But to write about the life of a man as important to American
letters as the author of The Great Gatsby in terms of last summer's styles in
ladies' hats, shows an incomprehension of what it is all about, that, to anyone
who cares for the art of writing, is absolutely appalling.
-John Dos Passos
"The Moral of Scott
Fitzgerald"
F. Scott Fitzgerald is dead,
aged forty-four. Requiescat in pace; ora pro nobis. In the twenties, his
heyday, he was a kind of king of our American youth; and as the news of his end
appeared in the papers there were strange coincidences along with it. A number
of others—a younger writer who was somewhat of his school and, like him, had
committed his talent unfortunately to Hollywood, and that writer's pretty,
whimsical wife, and another young woman who was a famous horse-trainer, and the
young leader of a popular jazz-band—also met sudden deaths that week. I was
reminded of the holocausts by which primitive rulers were provided with an
escort, servants, and pretty women and boon companions, for eternity. The
twenties were heaven, so to speak, often enough; might not heaven be like the
twenties? If it were, in one or two particulars, Scott Fitzgerald would be
sorry; sorry once more.
His health failed, and with a
peculiar darkness and deadweight in mind and heart, some five years ago. Then
in a wonderful essay entitled "The Crack Up" he took stock of
himself, looking twenty years back for what flaws were in him or in the day and
age, what early damage had been done, and how. Thanks to that, one can speak of
his weaknesses without benefit of gossip, without impertinence. And so I do,
asking for charity toward him and clarity about him; and a little on my own
mortal account; and for certain innocent immature American writers' benefit.
My theme is as usual
personality rather than esthetics; but my sentiment on this occasion is not
personal. Aside from our Midwestern birth and years of foreign residence, you
could scarcely find two men of the same generation less alike than we two.
Neither our virtues nor our vices appeared to overlap at all. I did not have
the honor of his particular friendship. I have only one vivid memory of
conversation with him, which was on a Mediterranean beach.
Across the Bay of Angels and
over the big good-for-nothing city of Nice, some of the Alps hung in the air as
pearly as onions; and that air and that sea, which has only delicate tides,
quivered with warm weather. It was before the publication of The Sun Also
Rises, the summer of 1925 or 1926, and Hemingway was what he wanted to talk to
me about. He came abruptly and drew me a little apart from our friends and
relations, into the shade of a rock.
Hemingway had published some
short stories in the dinky de-luxe way in Paris; and I along with all the
literary set had discovered him, which was fun; and when we returned to New
York we preached the new style and peculiar feeling of his fiction as if it
were evangel. Still, that was too slow a start of a great career to suit
Fitzgerald. Obviously Ernest was the one true genius of our decade, he said;
and yet he was neglected and misunderstood and, above all, insufficiently
remunerated. He thought I would agree that The Apple of the Eye and The Great
Gatsby were rather inflated market values just then. What could I do to help
launch Hemingway? Why didn't I write a laudatory essay on him? With this
questioning, Fitzgerald now and then impatiently grasped and shook my elbow.
There was something more than
ordinary art-admiration about it, but on the other hand it was no mere matter
of affection for Hemingway; it was so bold, unabashed, lacking in sense of
humor. I have a sharp tongue and my acquaintances often underestimate my good
nature; so I was touched and flattered by Fitzgerald's taking so much for
granted. It simply had not occurred to him that unfriendliness or pettiness on
my part might inhibit my enthusiasm about the art of a new colleague and rival.
As a matter of fact, my enthusiasm was not on a par with his; and looking back
now, I am glad for my sake that it was not. He not only said but, I believe,
honestly felt that Hemingway was inimitably, essentially superior. From the
moment Hemingway began to appear in print, perhaps it did not matter what he
himself produced or failed to produce. He felt free to write just for profit,
and to live for fun, if possible. Hemingway could be entrusted with the graver
responsibilities and higher rewards such as glory, immortality. This extreme of
admiration—this excuse for a morbid belittlement and abandonment of himself—was
bad for Fitzgerald, I imagine. At all events he soon began to waste his energy
in various hack-writing.
I was told last year that
another talented contemporary of ours had grown so modest in the wage-earning
way, fallen so far from his youthful triumph, that he would sign a friend's
stories and split the payment. Under the friend's name it would have been
hundreds of dollars, and under his, a thousand or thousands. Perhaps this was
not true gossip, but it is a good little exemplary tale, and of general
application. It gives me goose-flesh. A signature which has been so humiliated
is apt never to be the same again, in the signer's own estimation. As a rule
the delicate literary brain, the aching creative heart, cannot stand that sort
of thing. It is better for a writer even to fancy himself a Messiah, against
the day when writing or life goes badly. And there is more to this than the
matter of esthetic integrity. For if his opinion of himself is divided by
disrespect—sheepish, shameful, cynical—he usually finds his earning capacity as
well as his satisfaction falling off. The vast public, which appears to have no
taste, somehow senses when it is being scornfully talked down to. The great
hacks are innocent, and serenely class themselves with Tolstoy and Dickens.
Their getting good enough to compare with P. G. Wodehouse or Zane Grey may
depend upon that benign misapprehension.
Probably Fitzgerald never fell
into any abuse of his reputation as unwise and unwholesome as the
above-mentioned confrères. His standard of living did seem to the rest of us
high. Publishers in the twenties made immense advances to novelists who had and
could lend prestige; and when in the thirties Fitzgerald's popularity lapsed,
movies had begun to be talkies, which opened up a new lucrative field of
literary operation. Certainly he did write too much in recent years with his
tongue in his cheek; his heart in his boots if not in his pocket. And it was
his opinion in 1936 that the competition and popular appeal of the
films—"a more glittering, a grosser power," as he put it—had made the
God-given form of the novel archaic; a wrong thought indeed for a novelist.
This is not the ideal moment to
reread and appraise his collectable works. With the mind sit at a loss, muffled
like a drum—the ego a little inflamed as it always is by presentness of
death—we may exaggerate their merit or their shortcomings. I remember thinking,
when the early best sellers were publishers, that his style was a little too
free and easy; but I was a fussy stylist in those days. His phrasing was almost
always animated and charming; his diction excellent. He wrote very little in
slang or what I call baby talk: the pitfall of many who specialized in American
contemporaneity after him. But for other reasons—obscurity of sentiment,
facetiousness—a large part of his work may not endure, as readable reading
matter for art's sake. It "will be precious as documentary evidence,
instructive examine. That is not, in the way of immortality, what the writer
hopes; but it is much more than most writers of fiction achieve.
This Side of Paradise haunted
the decade like a song, popular but perfect. It hung over an entire
youth-movement like a banner, somewhat discolored and wind-worn now; the wind
has lapsed out of it. But a book which college boys really read is a rare
thing, not to be dismissed idly or in a moment of severe sophistication. Then
there were dozens of stories, some delicate and some slap-dash; one very odd,
entitled "Head and Shoulders." I love The Great Gatsby. Its very
timeliness, as of 1925, gave it a touch of the old-fashioned a few years later;
but I have reread it this week and found it all right; pleasure and compassion
on every page. A masterpiece often seems a period-piece for a while; then comes
down out of the attic, to function anew and to last. There is a great deal to
be said for and against his final novel, Tender Is the Night. On the whole I am
warmly for it. To be sane or insane is a noble issue, and very few novels take
what might be called an intelligent interest in it; this does, and gives a fair
picture of the entertaining expatriate habit of life besides.
In 1936 in three issues of
Esquire he published the autobiographical essay, "The Crack Up," as
it were swan-song. I first read it at my barber's, which, I suppose, is
according to the editorial devices of that magazine, a medium of advertising
for men's ready-made clothing. There is very little in world literature like
this piece: Max Jacob's "Défense de Tartufe"; the confidential
chapter of "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom," perhaps; Sir Walter
Raleigh's verse-epistle before his beheading, in a way. Fitzgerald’s theme
seems more dreadful, plain petty stroke by stroke; and of course his treatment
lacks the good grace and firmness of the old and old-style authors. Indeed it
is cheap here and there, but in embarrassment rather than in crudity or lack of
courage. Or perhaps Fitzgerald as he wrote was too sensitive to what was to
appear along with it in the magazine: the jokes, the Petty girls, the
haberdashery. He always suffered from an extreme environmental sense. Still it
is fine prose and naturally his timeliest piece today: self-autopsy and funeral
sermon. It also, with an innocent air, gravely indicts our native idealism in
some respects, our common code, our college education. And in general—for
ailing civilization as well as one dead Fitzgerald—this is a day of wrath.
He had made a great recovery
from a seemingly mortal physical illness; then found everything dead or deadish
in his psyche, his thought all broken, and no appetite for anything on earth.
It was not from alcohol, he said, evidently proud of the fact that he had not had
any for six months, not even beer. We may be a little doubtful of this
protestation; for protestation indeed is a kind of sub-habit of the alcoholic.
Six months is not time at all, in terms of the things that kill us. Alcohol in
fact never exclusively cases anything. On, just as it will enlighten a happy
experience, it will deepen a rut or a pit, in the way of fatigue chiefly. Who
cares, when a dear one is dying oaf a chest-cold or an embolism, whether he is
a drunkard or a reformed ex-drunkard?—Yes, I know, the dying one himself cares!
But when Fitzgerald wrote his essay he still had five years to live, quite a
long time. It was not about ill health, and of course he was as sane as an
angel. His trouble just then and his subject was only his lassitude of imagination;
his nauseated spirit; that self-hypnotic state of not having any will-power;
and nothing left of the intellect but inward observation and dislike. Why, he
cried, why was I "identified with the objects of my horror and
compassion"? He said it was the result of "too much anger and too
many tears.” That was his snap-judgment; blunt sentimentality of a boy or
ex-boy. But since he was a storyteller above all, he did not stop at that; he
proceeded to tell things about the past in which the mystery showed
extraordinarily.
"The Crack Up" has
never been issued in book form; and perhaps because the pretty pictures in
Esquire are so exciting to thumb-tack up on die wall, back numbers of it are
not easy to come by. So I am tempted to try to summarize it all; but no, it
must be published. Especially the first half is written without a fault: brief
easy fiery phrases—the thinking that he compared to a "moving about of
great secret trunks," and "the heady villainous feeling"—one
quick and thorough paragraph after another, with so little shame and so little
emphasis that I have wondered if he himself knew how much he was confessing.
He still regretted his bad luck
in not getting abroad into the trenches as an army officer in 1918, and even
his failure at football in 1913 or 1914. On certain of those unlucky days of
his youth he felt as badly as in 1936, and badly in the same way; he makes a
point of the similarity. Perhaps the worst of the early crises came in his
junior year, when he lost the presidency of one of the Princeton clubs.
Immediately afterward, as an act of desperation and consolation, he made love
for the first time; and also that year,
not until then, he turned to literary art, as the best of a bad bargain.
Ominous! Fantastic, too, that a man who is dying or at least done with
living—one who has had practically all that the world affords, fame and
prosperity, work and play, love and friendship, and lost practically all—should
still think seriously of so much fiddledeedee of boyhood! Very noble convictions
underlay Fitzgerald's entire life, and he explains them nobly. But when he
comes to the disillusionment, that too is couched in alumnal imagery; it is
along with "the shoulder-pads worn for one day on the Princeton freshman
football field and the overseas cap never worn overseas" that his ideals
are relegated to the junk-heap, he says. It is strange and baroque; like those
large bunches of battle-trappings which appear decoratively in seventeenth
century architecture, empty helmets and empty cuirasses and firearms laid
crossways, sculptured up on the lintels of barracks and on the lids of tombs.
Those condemned old European societies which have been too much militarized,
too concerned with glory and glorious death, scarcely seem more bizarre than
this: a kind of national consciousness revolving to the bitter end around
college; and the latter also seems a precarious basis for a nation.
Aside from his literary
talent—literary genius, self-taught—I think Fitzgerald must have been the worst
educated man in the world. He never knew his own strength; therefore nothing
inspired him very definitely to conserve or budget it. When he was a freshman,
did the seniors teach him a manly technique of drinking, with the price and
penalty of the several degrees of excess of it? If they had, it might never
have excited him as a vague, fatal moral issue. The rest of us, his writing
friends and rivals, thought that he had the best narrative gift of the century.
Did the English department at Princeton try to develop his admiration of that
fact about himself, and make him feel the burden and the pleasure of it?
Apparently they taught him rather to appreciate this or that other writer, to
his own disfavor. Did any worldly-wise critic ever remind him that beyond a
certain point, writing for profit becomes unprofitable; bad business as well as
bad art? Another thing: My impression is that only as he wrote, or just before
writing, Tender Is the Night, did he discover certain causes and gradation of
mental illness which, nowadays, every boy ought to be taught as soon as he has
mastered the other facts of life.
Even the army failed to
inculcate upon Lieutenant Fitzgerald one principle that a good army man must
accept heroism is a secondary virtue in an army. Lieutenant Fitzgerald had no
business pining for the front-line trenches in advance of his superior
officers' decision that it was that place for him. The point of soldiering is
to kill; not a mere willingness to be killed. This seems important today, as we
prepare again for perhaps necessary war, and again too much is made of the
spirit of self-sacrifice and embattlement of ideals; and not enough of the mere
means of victory. And with reference to literature, too, as Fitzgerald drops
out of our insufficient little regiment, we writers particularly blame him for
that all-out idealism of his. No matter what he died for—if he died for
anything—it was in too great a hurry; it was not worth it at his age.
In several of the obituary
notices of Fitzgerald I detect one little line of mistaken moralizing, which I
think is not uncommon; and his example and his fiction may have done something
to propagate it. They seem to associate all rebellious morality somehow with a
state of poor health. This an unfair attack, and on the other hand a too easy
alibi. Bad behavior is not always a feeble, pitiful, fateful thing. Malice of
mind, strange style, offensive subject matter, do not always derive from morbid
psyche or delicate physique. Wickedness
is not necessarily weakness; and vice versa.
For there is will-power in humanity. Its genuine manifestation is only
in the long run; but, with knowledge, it can have the last word. Modern
psychology does not deny it. Whether one is a moralist or an immoralist—a
vengeful daily preacher like Mr. Westbrook Pegler, or an occasional devil's
advocate like myself, or the quietest citizen—these little distinctions ought
to be kept clear.
Fitzgerald was weak; we have
the proof of it now in his demise. Fitzgerald, the outstanding aggressor in the
little warfare which divided our middle classes in the twenties—warfare of
moral emancipation against moral conceit, flaming youth against old
guard—definitely has let his side down. The champion is as dead as a doornail.
Self-congratulatory moral persons may crow over him if they wish.
There is bound to be a slight
anger at his graveside; curse-words amid our written or spoken obsequies. The
whole school of writers who went to France has been a bit maligned while the
proletarian novelists and the politico-critics have enjoyed the general
applause. Some of us are reckless talkers, and no doubt we have maligned each
other and each himself, as well. It was the beautiful, talented Miss Stein in
her Paris salon who first called us "the lost generation.” It was
Hemingway who took up the theme and made it a popular refrain. The twenties
were in fact a time of great prosperity and liberty, a spendthrift and
footloose time; and especially in France you got your American money's worth of
everything if you were clever. Still I doubt whether, in dissipation and unruly
emotion, we strayed much farther out of the way than young Americans ordinarily
do, at home as abroad. I think we were somewhat extraordinarily inclined to
make youthful rebelliousness, imprudent pursuit of pleasure or ambition, a
little easier for our young brothers. Heaven knows how it will be for our sons.
In any case, time is the real
moralist; and a great many of the so-called lost are still at hand, active and
indeed conspicuous: Bishop and Hemingway and Bromfield and Cummings and V.
Thomson and Tate, Gordon and Porter and Flanner and others, the U. S. A.'s odd
foreign legion. We were a band of toughs in fact, indestructible, which perhaps
is the best thing to be said for us at this
point. For the next step is to age well. Relatively speaking, I think we
are aging well; giving evidence of toughness in the favorable sense as well:
tenacity and hardiness, and a kind of worldly wisdom that does not have to
change its platform very often, and skepticism mixed in with our courage to
temper it and make it last. Sometimes we are still spoken of as the young or
youngish or "younger" writers, but there can be no sense in that,
except by lack of competition; every last one of us is forty. That is the right
age to give advice to the immature and potential literary generation. For their
sake, lest they feel unable to take our word for things, it seems worthwhile to
protest against the strange bad name we have had.
In any case we are the ones who
know about Fitzgerald. He was our darling, our genius, our fool. Let the young
people consider his untypical case with admiration but great caution; with
qualms and a respect for fate, without fatalism. He was young to the bitter
end. He lived and he wrote at last like a scapegoat, and now has departed like
one. As you might say, he was Gatsby, a greater Gatsby. Why not? Flaubert said,
"Madame Bovary, c'est moi!" On
the day before Christmas, in a sensible bitter obituary, The New York Times
quoted a paragraph from "The Crack Up" in which the deceased likened
himself to a plate. "Sometimes, though, the cracked plate has to be kept
in service as a household necessity. It can never be warmed up on the stove nor
shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for
company but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice-box
with the left-overs." A deadly little prose-poem! No doubt the ideals
Fitzgerald acquired in college and in the army—and put to the test on Long
Island and in the Alpes Maritimes and in Hollywood—always were a bit
second-hand, fissured, cracked if you like. But how faithfully he reported both
idealization and ordeal; and how his light smooth earthenware style dignifies
it!
The style in which others have
written of him is different. On the day after Christmas, in his popular column
in The New York World-Telegram, Mr. Westbrook Pegler remarked that his death
"recalls memories of a queer bunch of undisciplined and self-indulgent
brats who were determined not to pull
their weight in the boat and wanted the world to drop everything and sit down
and hawl with them. A kick in the pants and a clout over the scalp were more
like their needing. . ." With a kind of expert politeness throughout this
in memoriam, Mr. Pegler avoids commenting upon the dead man himself exactly.
His complaint is of anonymous persons: the company Fitzgerald kept, readers who
let themselves be influenced by him, and
his heroes and heroines: "Sensitive young things about whom he wrote and
with whom he ran to fires not only because he could exploit them for profit in
print but because he found them
congenial. . ." I suppose Mr. Pegler's column is profitable too; and if I
were doing it I should feel easier in my mind, surer of my aim, if I knew and
liked my exploitees. Joking aside, certainly this opinion of his does not
correspond in the least to my memory of the gay twenties. Certainly if
sensitive young men and women of the thirties believe Pegler, they will not
admire Fitzgerald or like the rest of us much.
Too bad; there should be peace
between the generations now, at least among the literary. Popularity or no
popularity, we have none too many helpful friends; and in a time of world war
there may be panic and conservatism and absent-mindedness and neglect of
literature in general, and those slight acts of obscure vengeance so easy to
commit when fellow citizens have begun to fear and imagine and act as a mass.
There should not be any quarrel between literature and journalism either.
Modernly conceived and well-done literary men sticking to the truth and
newspapermen using imagination—they relate to each other very closely, and may
sustain and inspire each other back and forth. In a time of solemn subject
matter it is more and more needful that they should.
In any case Mr. Pegler's decade
is out as well as ours; the rude hard-working thirties as well as the wild
twenties. The forties have come. Those of us who have been youthful too
long—which, I suppose, is the real point of his criticism—now certainly realize
our middle age; no more time to make ready or dawdle, nor energy to waste. That
is one universal effect of war on the imagination: time, as a moral factor,
instantly changes expression and changes pace. Everyman suddenly has a vision
of sudden death.
What is the difference, from
the universal angle? Everyone has to die once; no one has to die twice. But now
that mortality has become the world's worst worry once more, there is less
sophistication of it. Plain as day we see that the bull in the arena is no more
fated than the steer in the slaughterhouse. The glamorous gangster's cadaver
with bellyful of bullets is no deader than the commonplace little chap overcome
by pernicious anemia. Napoleon III at the battle of Sedan, the other battle of
Sedan, rouged his cheeks in order not to communicate his illness and fright to
his desperate army. An unemployed young actor, a friend of a friend of mine,
lately earned a living for a while by rouging cheeks of well-off corpses at a
smart mortician's. All this equally—and infinitude of other things under the
sun—is jurisdiction of death. The difference between a beautiful death and an
ugly death is in the eye of the beholder, the heart of the mourner, the brain
of the survivor.
The fact of Scott Fitzgerald's
end is as bad and deplorable as could be; but the moral of it is good enough,
and warlike. It is to enliven the rest of the regiment. Mere tightening the
belt, stiffening the upper lip, is not all I mean; nor the simple delight of
being alive still, the dance on the grave, the dance between holocausts. As we
have it—documented and prophesied by his best work, commented upon in the
newspaper with other news of the day—it is a deep breath of knowledge, fresh
air, and an incitement to particular literary virtues.
For the private life and the public
life, literary life and real life, if you view them in this light of death—and
now we have it also boding on all the horizon, like fire—are one and the same.
Which brings up another point of literary criticism; then I have done. The
great thing about Fitzgerald was his candor; verbal courage; simplicity. One
little man with eyes really witnessing; objective in all he uttered, even about
himself in a subjective slump; arrogant in just one connection, for one purpose
only, to make his meaning clear. The thing, I think, that a number of recent
critics have most disliked about him is his confessional way, the personal
tone, the tête-à -tête or man-to-man style, first person singular. He remarked
it himself in "The Crack Up": "There are always those to whom all
self-revelation is contemptible.” I on the other hand feel a real approval and
emulation of just that; and I recommend that all our writers give it serious
consideration. It might be the next esthetic issue and new mode of American
letters. It is American enough; our greatest fellows, such as Franklin and
Audubon and Thoreau and Whitman, were self-expressers in so far as they knew
themselves. This is a time of greater knowledge, otherwise worse; an era which
has as many evil earmarks as, for example, the Renaissance: awful political
genius running amok and clashing, migrations, races whipped together as it were
by a titanic egg-beater, impatient sexuality and love of stimulants and
cruelty, sacks, burnings and plagues. Fine things eventually may be achieved
amid all this, as in that other century. I suggest revelation of man as he
appears to himself in his mirror—not as he poses or wishes or idealizes—as one
thing to try a revival of, this time. Naked truth about man's nature in
unmistakable English.
In the Renaissance they had
anatomy: Vesalius in Paris at midnight under the gallows-tree, bitten by the
dogs as he disputed with them the hanged cadavers which they wanted to eat and
he wanted to cut up. They had anatomy and we have psychology. The throws of dice
in our world—at least the several dead-weights with which, the dice appear to
be loaded against us—are moral matters; and no one ever learns much about all
that except in his own person, at any rate in private. In public, in the nation
and the inter-nation and the anti-nation, one just suffers the weight of the
morality of others like a dumb brute. This has been a dishonest century above
all: literature lagging as far behind, modern habits as behind modern history;
democratic statesmanship all vitiated by good form, understatement, optimism;
and the nations which could not afford democracy, finally developing their
supremacy all on a basis of the deliberate lie. And now is the end, or another
beginning.
Writers in this country still
can give their little examples of truth-telling; little exercise of their
fellow citizens, to develop their ability to distinguish truth from untruth in
other connections when it really is important. The importance arises as
desperately in the public interest as in private life. Even light fiction can
help a society get together and agree upon its vocabulary; little strokes of
the tuning-fork, for harmony’s sake. And for clarity's sake, let us often use,
and sanction the use of, words of one syllable. The shortest and most potent is
the personal pronoun: I. The sanctified priest knows that, he says credo; and the trustworthy physician only gives his
opinion, not a panacea. The witness in the courtroom does not indulge in the
editorial we; the judge and the lawyers will not allow it; and indeed, if the
case is important, if there is life or liberty or even a large amount of money
at stake, not even supposition or hearsay is admitted as evidence. Our
worldwide case is important.
Not only is Anglo-Saxondom all
at war with the rest of the world in defense of its accustomed power and
prosperity, and of the luxuries of the spirit such as free speech, free
publication, free faith—for the time being, the United States is the likeliest
place for the preservation of the Mediterranean and French ideal of fine art
and writing: which puts a new, peculiar obligation upon us ex-expatriates. The
land of the free should become and is becoming a city of refuge; but there is
cultural peril even in that. France has merely committed her tradition to our
keeping, by default; whereas Germany has exiled to us her most important
professors and brilliant writers. Perhaps the latter are bound to introduce
into our current literature a little of that mystically philosophic, obscurely
scientific mode which somewhat misled or betrayed them as a nation. Therefore
we must keep up more strictly and energetically than ever, our native specific
skeptical habit of mind; our plainer and therefore safer style.
In any consideration of the
gravity of the work of art and letters—and upon any solemn occasion such as the
death of a good writer like Scott Fitzgerald—I think of Faust, and that labor
he dreamed of when he was blind and dying, keeping the devil waiting. It was
the drainage of a stinking sea-marsh and the construction of a strong dyke.
Fresh fields amid the eternally besieging sea: room for a million men to live,
not in security—Goethe expressly ruled out that hope of which we moderns have
been too fond—but free to do the best they could for themselves. Does it seem
absurd to compare a deceased best seller with that mythic man: former wholesome
Germany's demigod? There must always be some pretentiousness about literature
or else no one would take its pains or endure its disappointments. Throughout
this article I have mixed bathos with pathos, joking with tenderness, in order
to venture here and there a higher claim for literary art than is customary
now. I am in dead earnest. Bad writing is in fact a rank feverish unnecessary
slough. Good writing is a dyke, in which there is a leak for every one of our
weary hands. And honestly I do see the very devil standing worldwide in the
decade to come, bound to get some of us. I realize that I have given an
exaggerated impression of Fitzgerald's tragedy in recent years: all the above
is based on his confession of 1936, and he was not so nearly finished as he
thought. But fear of death is one prophecy that never fails; and now his
strength is only in print, and his weakness of no account, accept for our
instruction.
-Glenway Westcott
