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

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2003 by Michael Hollington

Of course she is afraid of falling because she is pregnant, a condition suggesting the very opposite of decline and degradation. Yet the paradigmatic Fitzgerald narrative is an obsessive modernist working out of that naturalist preoccupation--originally French--with decline and degeneracy, or more literally with falling and downward motion, as announced on the first page of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, where Tony remembers her catechism: "When you were once fairly started, she thought, it was very like going down 'Mount Jerusalem' with your brothers on the little sled: you had no time to think, and you couldn't stop even if you wanted to" (19). The motif was mediated for Fitzgerald through Eliot's The Waste Land:

   And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
   My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
   And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
   Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. (37)

This modulates to Dick the Diver (a descendant perhaps of Dexter in "Winter Dreams" "who gave an exhibition of fancy diving from the springboard of the club raft" [Collected Stories 365]), whose fall necessarily takes place in a liquid element. And one marker of Dick's slow descent through an alcoholic wasteland toward death is the dissolution of glamorous items of French lexis into fragmentary heaps of heterogeneous signifiers--as in Paris, where, on the way to the Par Excellence Studio in Passy,

   on either side he read :"Papeterie," "Patisserie" "Solde"
   "Reclame"--and Constance Talmadge in "Dejeuner de Soleil"
   and farther away there were more sombre announcements:
   "Vetements Ecclesiastiques," "Declarations de Deces" and
   "Pompes Funebres," (Tender 103)

That experience of dissolution, I suggest, is mapped out in Fitzgerald's handling of the French in this novel. In it we find expressed the fullest range of associations that the language held for him.

Works cited

Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998.

Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Margaret M. Duggan, eds. The Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Random, 1980.

Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-50. New York: Harcourt, 1962.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Beautiful and Damned. Ed. Alan Margolies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

--. The Collected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.

--. The Crack-up with Other Pieces and Stories. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.

--. Flappers and Philosophers. Ed. James L. W. West III. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000.

--. Jazz Age Stories. Ed. Patrick O'Donnell. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998.

--. Tender Is the Night. Ed. Arnold Goldman. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998.

--. This Side of Paradise. New York: Scribner's, 1960.

Le Vot, Andre F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. NewY ork: Doubleday, 1983. Mann, Thomas. Buddenbrooks. Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter. London: Folio, 1989. Meyers, Jeffrey. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. London: Macmillan, 1994.

Michael Hollington has taught at the University of New South Wales and the Universite de Toulouse--Mirail. He has written books on Dickens and Gunter Grass, as well as numerous articles on literature from Shakespeare through the twentieth century.