The Maturing of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1997 by Alan Margolies

Yet these ideas represented only one aspect of Fitzgerald's feelings. In contrast, he soon was to indicate his opposition to Nordicism, a contemporaneous theory of racial superiority. In May 1921, soon after his unhappy first visit to Europe, he wrote to Edmund Wilson:

God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest. Rome is only a few years behind Tyre and Babylon. The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. Raise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons and Celts to enter. France made me sick. Its silly pose as the thing the world has to save. I think it's a shame that England and America didn't let Germany conquer Europe. It's the only thing that would have saved the fleet of tottering old wrecks. (Letters 326)

Fitzgerald recognized the racism implicit in these possibly jocular statements and seemed to abhor it. "My reactions," he wrote "were all philistine, anti-socialistic, provincial and racially snobbish." Yet he continued in the same vein as previously: "I believe at last in the white man's burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro. Even in art!" And so on (Letters 326). In The Beautiful and Damned, published the following year, Maury Noble in one section of a long, sarcastic, iconoclastic speech, expounds on these racist ideas:

Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature - nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident had brought us to where we could fly in her face. She had invented ways to rid the race of the inferior and thus give the remainder strength to fill her higher - or, let us say, her more amusing though still unconscious and accidental intentions. And, actuated by the highest gifts of the enlightenment, we were seeking to circumvent her. In this republic I saw the black beginning to mingle with the white - in Europe there was taking place an economic catastrophe to save three or four diseased and wretchedly governed races from the one mastery that might organize them for material prosperity.(1) (255)

But since Fitzgerald disparages all the major characters in this novel, Maury's speech is part of Fitzgerald's satire. In 1923, Fitzgerald clarified his beliefs: "No one has a greater contempt than I have for the recent hysteria about the Nordic theory," he wrote (In His Own Time 143). Further, he amplified on this in The Great Gatsby.

When Tom Buchanan talks about "The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard," he is referring to Nordicism. "It's a fine book and everybody ought to read it," he says. "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be - will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff," he says stupidly; "it's been proved" (14). Daisy Buchanan makes fun of him. More importantly, Fitzgerald's narrator Nick Carraway affirms the novelist's distaste when he tells us that "[t]here was something pathetic in [Tom's] concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more" (14). The topic recurs later in the Plaza Hotel. "I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife" says Tom, suspicious about Gatsby. "Well, if that's the idea you can count me out. . . . Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions and next they'll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white." Again Nick sneers at these ideas, referring to them as "impassioned gibberish" (101).