Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/02/08/a_capacity_for_wonder.php
Friday, February 8, 2008
By Jeff Hart
If you can spare $65 you might pick up a copy of the Cambridge edition of The Great Gatsby, published with complete scholarly apparatus. The Cambridge University Press is publishing the complete works of Scott Fitzgerald. He would not have been surprised. He aspired to be among the great novelists and now he is in the American canon. Even his first novel This Side of Paradise (1920), about young love and Princeton stands up today. Lionel Trilling remarked that when he first read it he thought, “That’s the way to go to college.” And compared it with Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel about the special poignancy and pain of young love. In 1920 This Side of Paradise was read as revealing the breakdown of Victorian morals, as in the famous chapter “Petting.” When I first read This Side of Paradise in 1947 as a freshman at Dartmouth what struck me was its prose, the voice of love without softness, as Trilling called it, and also a sense of beauty that is always shadowed by its transitoriness.
Fitzgerald’s sensibility was related to the great Romantic poets, early Rupert Brooke but Keats especially, and also Wordsworth, in his ability to respond to and express the fleeting wonder of the moment, the transitory nature of beauty. As Wordsworth wrote in his “Immortality Ode”: “But yet I know, where’er I go,/ That there hath passed away a beauty from the earth,” and Keats, in “Ode to a Nightingale: “Was it a vision or a waking dream?/ Fled is that music: do I wake or sleep?”
We find exactly that sense of wonder in the famous passage at the end of Gatsby about those old Dutch sailors gazing at the New World, recalling man “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” Jay Gatsby is great because he shares that “capacity for wonder.” Fitzgerald once defined America as “a willingness of the heart.”
His 1924 story “Winter Dreams,” which is related to Gatsby (1925), is one of my favorites. This shining moment is central to the story as Dexter Green listens to music playing across the lake:
There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the songs of last summer and the summer before that—songs from Chin-Chin” and “The Chocolate Soldier”... The sound of the tune precipitated in him a sort of ecstasy... It was a mood of intense appreciation, a sense that, for once, he was magnificently attune to life and that everything about him was radiating a brightness and a glamour he might never know again [italics added].
There is, the dying fall, “never know again,” the signature of the transitoriness of beauty, the golden moment always passing.
In 1940, the year of his death, Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter, “Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.” Ginevra King, Scott’s early love, who inhabits much of his fiction, came from a very rich family in Chicago and Lake Forest. He never forgot this early love.
Tender Is The Night (1934) is one of the best novels of the 1930s. A novel of decline and fall, it reflects the mood of a decade of calamitous Depression. Its final paragraph constitutes a dying fall to the entire novel. The capacity for wonder has diminished to the vanishing point. By then Fitzgerald, influenced by Spengler and the Great Depression, had moved left, as had much of the country, especially writers and intellectuals. He supported the New Deal, but he also warned his daughter, then in college, to be wary of the cultural power of the Communists, who remained a tiny minority.
Notably, the hero of his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, Monroe Stahr, based on the great director Irving Thalberg, is a Jew—but named after James Monroe, whose Monroe Doctrine warned Europe away from America and whose “Stahr” suggests a star in the American flag. With his Jewish, emphatically American hero Fitzgerald defied the Nazis.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald, named after the author of “The Star Spangled Banner,” and whose Maryland ancestor Mary Suratt had been hanged for complicity in the murder of Lincoln, identified himself closely with the history of his country and was inspired by it. n