The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald by Ruth Prigozy

Author:Ruth Prigozy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2002-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Yesterday he had been sure of these two, holding them in the hollow of his hand. As he dressed for dinner he realized that he wanted them both. It was an outrage that he couldn’t have them both. Wouldn’t a girl rather have half of him than all of Harry Whitby, or a whole Spic with a jar of pomade thrown in? Life was so badly arranged – better no women at all than only one woman. (300)

This interior monologue makes plain the pathetic immaturity and ultimate fear of emotional commitment that generate McLane’s romantic “indecision,” as well as suggesting that his virulent racism operates, like his blatant sexism, to prop up a fragile ego haunted by justifiable worries about his own vacuity. As an expatriate banker and bon vivant, McLane epitomizes a crass, American insensitivity to cultural and ethnic otherness; from the moment he arrives among the “alien mountains” at the “Dent de Something,” attired in a “convictlike uniform” and confused by words uttered “in some strange language,” we see him as a prisoner of his own ignorance and narcissism (292–3). Among the thoughtless Americans who flaunt their wealth, bigotry, and insouciance in Fitzgerald’s short fiction, Tommy McLane is in a class by himself. As one of the last stories written before the Fitzgeralds’ somber return from Europe in September 1931, “Indecision” reveals, in its ironic treatment of the protagonist, the author’s development of a critical perspective on the politics and ethics of transculturation. Juxtaposed against the crudities of “How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year,” the story reveals just how much Fitzgerald had matured as a cultural observer since 1924.

Two late expatriate pieces, composed in the United States long after the author’s return, add little to the critique of cultural difference but place his years abroad in a poignant personal perspective. Already estranged by mental illness, the Fitzgeralds had lived apart in 1930–1 while Zelda’s protracted hospitalization at Nyon and Scott’s rootless existence in Swiss hotels enforced a physical separation. Matthew J. Bruccoli notes that during this epoch Fitzgerald “began sleeping with other women,” possibly to refute Zelda’s imputation of homosexuality (Bruccoli, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, 311). When the couple returned to the United States, they tried to resume a semblance of marriage while both translated their wild, ultimately woeful expatriate years into novels. During her second collapse, Zelda completed Save Me the Waltz in early 1932 at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of the Johns Hopkins University, and Fitzgerald – complaining of stolen material and indiscreet disclosures – warily supervised her revisions as he toiled to complete Tender is the Night. Yet after a precarious reconciliation, they drifted further apart, Zelda into suicidal derangement (and hospitalization at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital) and Scott into alcoholic escapism.

By the time he wrote “The Intimate Strangers” (February-March 1935), Fitzgerald was rusticating in North Carolina, seeking a respite from symptoms of tuberculosis. Based ostensibly on the unconventional marriage of his friends Nora and Lefty Flynn, the story nevertheless incorporates thematic vestiges of Fitzgerald’s years in Europe.

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