"F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Short Autobiography" edited by James L. W. West III: Book Review

"F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Short Autobiography"
edited by James L. W. West III
Scribner, 204 pp., $15 (paperback original)
Reviewed by David Marshall James

F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary career took off like a barnstorming biplane in 1920, with the publication of his novel "This Side of Paradise."

There would be three more novels, plus the unfinished "The Last Tycoon," before his death in 1940, at age 44.

If novels were for art, short stories were for bread and butter (and champagne and foie gras), and Fitzgerald commanded $3,000 to $6,000 for each, depending on the magazine or journal.

That, at a time when a decent-enough house could be had for $5,000, at least in Podunk, Indiana, to reference a fictitious Fitzgeraldian locale.

The author also received sizable sums for his nonfiction pieces, nineteen of them collected herein, and all of which demonstrate a plush talent for adaptation to the respective styles of, and appealing to the particular audiences of, the assortment of periodicals in which they were first printed.

For instance, the author addresses issues of motherhood in "Imagination-- and a Few Mothers" (1923) for the Ladies' Home Journal, then flows into an effervescent listing of libations and name-dropping in "A Short Autobiography (with acknowledgements to Nathan)" (1929) for The New Yorker.

Aside from such protean proficiency, Fitzgerald coats several of these pieces with multiple layers of Twain-like humor, particularly in "How to Live on $36,000 a Year" (1924)-- in Great Neck, Long Island, that is, an investment that resulted in material for his masterpiece, "The Great Gatsby" (1925). He composed the novel in France, where the cost of living was then considerably lower than stateside.

"How to Live on Practically Nothing a Year" (1924) supplies a hyperbolically amusing account of life on the Riviera.

Indeed, elements of humor exist in all these selections, even if that humor extends to the bitter and the bittersweet. Nevertheless, the author exhibits significant levels of seriousness when he is expounding on his generation; or on his alma mater, Princeton; or on the Great War (World War I).

"One Hundred False Starts" (1933) gives a fascinating glimpse into his writer's blocks. This article and the four that follow it cast the author in an ever-approaching twilight, yet the writing proves more enticingly filled with emotion than ever.

Although many of the nineteen selections largely offer opinions, or satirically veiled accounts of biographical incidents, "Afternoon of an Author" (first published in Esquire magazine, 1936) provides a "day-in-the-life-of" glance at Fitzgerald's thoughts and actions that no biographer could possibly portray with such haunting melancholy, including the line:

"He loved life terribly for a minute, not wanting to give it up at all."


* * *