Making It New: 1900–1945 407explanation, something to help him feel his life is not just decline and waste. What
he finds to help him explain things may be not only absurd but obscene, but it shows
that even he, in his own blundering way, is trying to make sense of things. Within the
confines of the story, though, the person who matters here, along with Gatsby, is the
teller of the tale. Nick is the crucial other member of the “we,” the company of those
driven by the desire to shape experience into some meaningful pattern, some radiant
revelation. All the while, the reader is reminded, it is Nick’s consciousness recalling
and rehearsing the past in The Great Gatsby; trying to understand it, to discover its
shape and meaning. Nick replicates in his telling of the tale what, fundamentally,
Gatsby is doing in the tale being told: there is a shared need for order here, a pursuit
of meaning that is definitively human. To that extent, Gatsby’s project is Nick’s; the
form of the book dramatizes its theme. And both form and theme point to a paradox
basic to Fitzgerald’s life and writing. As Fitzgerald saw it, “we” must try to pursue
the ideal; in this sense, “we” are and must be romantics, and on this capacity depends
our survival as moral beings. But “we” must always remember that the ideal
will remain ceaselessly beyond our reach; in this sense, “we” are and must be realists,
and on this capacity depends our simple continuation and our grasp on sense. No
matter how hard “we” try to reach out to the green light, it will continue to elude us,
but “we” must keep on trying. That is the paradox that fires Fitzgerald’s work into
life. Or, as Fitzgerald himself succinctly put it in “The Crack-Up”: “one should ... be
able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
The moral resilience which that remark discloses was to be sorely tested over the
remaining years of Fitzgerald’s life. In 1930 Zelda had the first of a series of nerv-
ous breakdowns; she was confined to a sanatorium periodically, both in Europe
and the United States, until she died in 1948. Pressed for money, suffering from
alcoholism, Fitzgerald worked in Hollywood on several occasions. He worked on
several screenplays, but only completed one, Three Comrades (1938), and he was even-
tually dismissed because of his drinking – a story that Budd Schulberg (1914– 2009)
tells, thinly disguised as fiction, in his novel The Disenchanted (1958). His fourth
novel, Tender is the Night, was well received by reviewers. The title is taken from
“Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats. It alerts the reader to the fact that a famil-
iar Romantic pattern is at work here in which someone, a poet or a lover perhaps,
tries to create an ideal world, immune to time and change, but, if he succeeds, only
does so for a brief enchanted moment. What it does not alert the reader to is
that this, a much more autobiographical novel, also represents an attempt at
social commentary. Fitzgerald is much more openly critical here, for instance, of the
lassitude and carelessness of the very rich, and the immense social and economic
machinery required to enable them to live their lives as conspicuous consumers.
Impressive as Tender is the Night is, though, it did not sell well when it was first
published. Neither did Taps at Reveille, a collection of short stories that appeared
in 1935. For a while, after his disastrous encounter with Hollywood, Fitzgerald
stopped writing. But then, helped by the columnist Sheila Graham with whom
he formed a new liaison, he returned to fiction, writing a series of tales about
a Hollywood scriptwriter, The Pat Hobby Stories, and a novel about anotherGGray_c04.indd 407ray_c 04 .indd 407 8 8/1/2011 7:53:55 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 55 AM