Fitzgerald's French - F. Scott Fitzgerald - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2003 by Michael Hollington

In fact, with Severance's exemplary severance from life, we broach some of the most essential aspects of Fitzgerald's fascination with French. What seems to have happened is that the France that suffered so much in the First World War became for him the theater of male heroism, and French (hitherto associated with lesser fantasies) the authoritative language of these particular dreams. "War purifies and regenerates" writes Pat Hobby (in "Teamed with Genius" [Collected Stories 254]) in the first revise of his screenplay for Ballet Shoes, which he hopes to collaborate on with an English playwright with a symbolic French first name, Rene Wilcox. Pat is comically but pathetically obsessed with sending the heroine to war: "have the dancer go as a Red Cross nurse and then she could get regenerated" but of course his ideas are irrelevant: he is duped by Rene and left with "a certain dreariness, a grey malaise" (258-59).

That malaise began for Fitzgerald before the war, stemming initially perhaps from the consciousness of belonging to a post-Civil War generation. He missed out on that chance of glory, obviously, and then again on the Napoleonic fantasy conjured up by his Catholic mentor, Sigourney Fay, after the fall of the Russian Tsar--the fantasy of the riconquista of the Orthodox Church. "We may play a part in the restoration of Russia to Catholic unity" he told Fitzgerald, though laughably, the role assigned to Scott was that of expert interpreter and translator: "we shall have to work very hard going over your French. Get a Rosenthal method at once and go right through with it" (Bruccoli and Duggan 20).

Fitzgerald develops a jocoserious heroic myth out of these disappointments. In "The Rough Crossing," the band of men who carry on partying during bad weather at sea "were samurai chosen from several hundred for their triumphant resistance to the storm" (Collected Stories 475). In "The Baby Party," fighting is regarded as a primitive Darwinian male urge, again in the ludicrous context of a punch-up at a children's party. At the end, as he lovingly caresses his daughter, the badly bruised "John Andros knew ... what it was he had fought for so savagely that evening" (Collected Stories 423). And in Tender Is the Night, there are the dueling males who elicit Abe North's ironic comment about the link between fisticuffs and war: "this fight's between two men--what Tommy needs is a good war" (54).

French here is the language of Tommy Barban, the "real" dueler--the language of heroism, according to Nicole, who hears him pronounce on heroic deeds in French ("nous ne pouvons pas faire de petits exercices d'heroisme--il faut faire les grands compositions") and comments that "in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity" (Tender 290). Leaving aside the complex ironies here, it might be suggested that not to have gone right through with the Rosenthal method, so to speak, became for Fitzgerald a sign of failure and decline. "All in all, everything has never gone better," says Nicole of her life at Gausse's hotel on the Riviera, "I am among friends who like me. I am here on this tranquil beach with my husband and two children. Everything is all right--if I can finish translating this damn recipe for chicken a la Maryland into French" (Tender 179). It seems that to be "all right" in Nicole's domestic sphere is to move easily from one language to another; to be "not all right," as earlier, is to be incapable of this transference: "I was to do the French translation but I'm tired these days--I am afraid of falling, I'm so heavy and clumsy" (176).