The Joys Rediscovery

Robert M Ritter

The Joys Rediscovery

Robert M Ritter

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7 December 2009, Issue 10.5 The Joys Rediscovery Scott Donaldson, Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) Published August 2009 Cloth, 520 pages ISBN: 978-0-231-14816-0 £22.50 / $32.50 What we know about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway is almost as deceptive as what we think we know. Owing to the men’s status as two of America’s most famous writers, their lives and works have developed a unique iconography that is often simplified to the level of parody in the public consciousness. (With generations of American students raised on a steady diet of The Great Gatsby and The Old Man and the Sea, caricature is, inevitably, never far away.) This iconography is exacerbated by the fact that Fitzgerald and Hemingway took pains to perpetuate their own very different personae, with such success that their confected reputations overshadowed them long after their deaths. The result is, paradoxically, that it is still possible to reveal surprising truths concerning two of the most studied and writtenabout authors by digging deep beneath their legacies. Someone who has proved himself capable of just that is the literary biographer Scott Donaldson. Over the course of a forty-year career, he has written and edited awardwinning works on a wide range of twentieth-century American writers, including such lesser-known authors and poets as Winfield Townley Scott, Archibald MacLeish, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and John Cheever (the last of whom especially is due for reappraisal). But it is his work on Fitzgerald and Hemingway for which Donaldson is best known––including By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway (1977), Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1983), Hemingway versus Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship (1999), and the edited collections Critical Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald's ‘The Great Gatsby’ (1984), New Essays on ‘A Farewell to Arms’ (1990), and the Cambridge Companion to Hemingway (1996). After completing a PhD in American Studies at the University of Minnesota in 1966, Donaldson took up a position at William and Mary in Virginia, where he spent his entire teaching career until retiring in 1992 as Louise G. T. Cooley Professor of English, Emeritus. Yet he was not always an academic: after serving in the Korean War Donaldson spent ten years as a reporter, mostly at the Minneapolis Star. This training, coupled with a Midwestern perspective similar to Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s, has enabled him to write lucidly and with telling empathy about his two subjects. Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days presents two dozen of Donaldson’s most important pieces: eleven on Fitzgerald, thirteen on Hemingway. Culled from the forty-plus articles Donaldson has written on them, most appearing in scholarly journals over the course of five decades, they constitute an impressive compilation of research across a broad spectrum of topics. While the Internet makes it far easier to track down a scholar’s disjecta membra than it once was, there is still much to be said for an anthology assembled by the scholar himself. ‘I am not through writing about these writers and their stories and novels,’ says Donaldson in the volume’s introduction. ‘But in my eightieth year and with the encouragement of many colleagues, it is time to collect the best of what I’ve so far set down on paper about them.’ The book itself is handsomely produced: the choice of binding, typeface, and paper serve to make it look like a novel itself, an effect boosted by the absence of footnotes. In the volume’s introduction Donaldson explains that he normalized the disparate house styles in which the works were first published—always the bugbear of collected works—adding that he ‘solved the problem of footnotes by doing away with them (there weren’t many), either through outright omission or including them in the body of the article.’ The collection is clearly targeted at that publishing chimera, the ‘educated general reader’ sufficiently engaged with literature to buy secondary texts. Whether there exists a sizeable market peopled by those inclined merely to inform their own readings is unknown—though it is, as Hemingway might say, pretty to think so. Yet Donaldson’s editor at Columbia University Press has told me that the collection is one of their most popular titles: proof of the American public’s enduring curiosity about Fitzgerald and Hemingway, and validation for rejigging the references. (Publishers are adamant that footnotes cause even the doughtiest general reader to take flight.) Those of us wishing to make use of Donaldson’s imposing and often innovative scholarship in our own research, however, are at a disadvantage. The in-text shorttitle notation that replaces the footnotes works fairly well, linked to a bibliography brimming with evidence of Donaldson’s decades of exhaustive research among archives and private papers. While some of the original essays had little or no notes, most had quite a few, and while Donaldson has obligingly updated the surviving references to current sources (no mean feat), there is no substitute for the culled references. Further, Donaldson states that while readying the collection for press, he ‘substantially revised everything’. This places academic-minded readers in a quandary: drawing on this collection potentially demands recourse to the originals— and where the two diverge, which to cite? (Unhelpfully, the book includes no acknowledgements for original publication, further hampering ready comparison.) But these are minor concerns when measured against the collection itself. Donaldson describes the book as ‘biographical criticism’, and the most successful essays are those that employ biographical detail to shed light on the texts, offering compelling evidence that both authors ‘wrote fiction out of their experience, rather than merely about it’. In doing so Donaldson never topples into intentional fallacy, and many of his readings are master classes in what insights can be gained through enlightened close-reading in the wake of New Criticism’s decline. As he plainly states, ‘The more we know about them as people, the better we will be able to understand their work.’ The twenty-four papers are collected under ten part-headings: for Fitzgerald, ‘The Search for Home’, ‘Love, Money, and Class’, ‘Fitzgerald and His Times’, and ‘Requiem’; for Hemingway, ‘Getting Started’, ‘The Craftsman at Work’, ‘The Two Great Novels’, ‘Censorship’, ‘Literature and Politics’, and ‘Last Things’. By providing balanced coverage of Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s lives and writing across distinct essays, Donaldson steers clear of generalization. (For much this reason Michiko Kakutani accused his Hemingway versus Fitzgerald a decade ago of being ‘yet another cheesy chronicle of calamity and waste’—perhaps a function of what John Updike once gently termed her ‘censorious streak’.) Among the collection’s rich pickings we have an examination of how Fitzgerald’s early life in St Paul continued to resonate in his work, and how his father’s Southern background engendered in Fitzgerald both a diffident patricianism and a romantic devotion to lost causes, culminating with that most compelling lost cause, the American Dream. In addition to an excellent character analysis of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby there are surprising insights into Fitzgerald’s ambivalent but nevertheless fervent political beliefs, and an examination of the reception of Fitzgerald’s cathartic ‘The Crack-Up’. Highlights for Hemingway include ‘The Averted Gaze in Hemingway’s Fiction’, which inspects minutely the surprisingly eloquent ‘scopophobia’ among his characters, and his Spanish Civil War writing, which provides a useful counterpoint to Fitzgerald’s political beliefs. ‘A Death in Hollywood: F. Scott Fitzgerald Remembered’ and ‘Hemingway and Suicide’ examine each writer’s end, at opposite extremes of fame. Nevertheless one continues to be struck by the unexpected parallels in their deaths, as in their lives and works. Thus the book’s great strength lies in its encouraging fresh connections between and among the authors and their works. Although one suspects Donaldson chose and ordered the collection with precisely that in mind, no links are made explicit, thus giving readers both the material and the latitude to form their own conclusions. In considering anew aspects of seemingly familiar material, beneath what Donaldson calls ‘the persistent stereotyping of celebrity’, we are left with something like the joy of discovery. R. M. Ritter

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