A History of American Literature

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Making It New: 1900–1945 403

of night, war, and contemporary culture whose alcoholic, melancholic, and
apocalyptic meditations help give Nightwood its unique, modernist shape. Barnes
was inclined to see her century as a carnival or circus; she was absorbed in figures
of the night, shadowy exiles and grotesques; and she depicted characters crippled by
weaknesses of the body and the spirit, struggling to redeem themselves from an
intense sense of doom. The final scene clearly reflects her dark vision and the
wordplay she used to communicate it. Robin lies on the floor of a chapel in the
woods, a dog beside her; and “dog,” we are invited to recall, is the inverse of “god.”
Unlike Roberts’s heroines, she has not found redemption or peace; she remains, as
she was, a creature of the night.
Of all American writers concerned with the inventions of modernism, F. Scott
Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was the most autobiographical. Finding in the compulsions
of his life the contours of his fiction, he sustained for his generation the great
American romance of the self. It was a romance, however, that was alive to the
dissonances and disjunctions of the modern age and that was refracted through
Fitzgerald’s own sense of the porous, plural nature of his personality. “Sometimes,”
Fitzgerald once said, “I don’t know whether I’m real or whether I’m a character in
one of my own novels.” And there is no doubt that the protagonists of books like
This Side of Paradise (1920), The Great Gatsby (1926), Tender is the Night (1934),
and The Last Tycoon (1941) bear an extraordinary resemblance to their creator. In
each case, there is the same commitment to flamboyant excess, combined with a
very personal kind of idealism; in each case, too, there is a testing, a trying out taking
place – of the dreams of power, possibility, and wealth that have fueled America
and individual Americans and of how those dreams can be negotiated in a world
dedicated to consumption, a surfeit of commodities. “There never was a good
biography of a good novelist,” Fitzgerald observed in his notebooks. “There couldn’t
be. He is too many people.” And, as usual, when he was being most perceptive, that
comment sprang from observation of himself. Fitzgerald was, as he once put it,
“a cynical idealist.” He could maneuver his way through the dreams and realities that
captivated him and his fellow Americans and moderns: he could measure both
the necessity and impossibility of idealism, the “green light” in the distance that
heroes like Jay Gatsby stretch out toward and never quite reach. Easily as much as
any American writer, and more than most, Fitzgerald demonstrates the paradox that
to talk of oneself may also be to talk of one’s times, the character of a culture – and
that self-revelation, ultimately, can be a revelation of humanity.
Born in Minnesota, Fitzgerald entered the army in 1917; and it was while stationed
in Alabama that he met Zelda Sayre, an aspiring writer like him and a woman
renowned for her daring, gaiety, and beauty. “I fell in love with her on September 7th,”
Fitzgerald recorded, with characteristic precision of sentiment. And they were
eventually married in 1920, the year his first collection of stories, Flappers and
Philosophers, and his first novel, This Side of Paradise, were published. Both were an
immediate success. America was going on what Fitzgerald later called “the greatest,
gaudiest spree in history” with “a new generation dedicated more than the last to
the fear of poverty and the worship of success.” It was Fitzgerald who christened it

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