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Title: F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters
Author(s): Joseph Epstein
Source: Commentary. 98.5 (Nov. 1994): p52.
Document Type: Book review
Copyright : COPYRIGHT 1994 American Jewish Committee http://www.commentarymagazine.com Full Text:
Michel de Montaigne's dread has been F. Scott Fitzgerald's fate. As his reputation has filtered down through biography, memoirs of contemporaries, and posthumous publications of various sorts, Fitzgerald has been judged something like a lucky genius as a writer and an almost pure disaster as a man.
Officially, this unenviable reputation began with a remark by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay which was picked up by Edmund Wilson, with whom Fitzgerald had gone to Princeton. In an essay of 1922, when Fitzgerald was himself only twenty-six and had just published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, Wilson, already an important critic, wrote:
It has been said by a celebrated person that to meet F. Scott Fitzgerald is to think of a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond; she is extremely proud of the diamond and shows it to everyone who comes by, and everyone is surprised that such an ignorant old woman should possess so valuable a jewel; for in nothing does she appear so inept as in the remarks she makes about the diamond.
Wilson went on to say that Fitzgerald was a clever enough fellow, but, nonetheless, "there is a symbolic truth in the description quoted above."
After this essay, Fitzgerald's reputation as the artistic equivalent of an idiot savant was firmly locked in place, so that Glenway Westscott, a much inferior novelist, could later call him "the worst-educated man in the world" and the poet John Peale Bishop, another Princeton contemporary, could remark that Fitzgerald had "left Princeton
Save this document
Results for Basic Search Keyword (f scott fitzgerald's biography) LIMITS: With Full Text
ReadSpeaker:
Listen
Title: F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters
Author(s): Joseph Epstein
Source: Commentary. 98.5 (Nov. 1994): p52.
Document Type: Book review
Copyright : COPYRIGHT 1994 American Jewish Committee http://www.commentarymagazine.com Full Text:
Michel de Montaigne's dread has been F. Scott Fitzgerald's fate. As his reputation has filtered down through biography, memoirs of contemporaries, and posthumous publications of various sorts, Fitzgerald has been judged something like a lucky genius as a writer and an almost pure disaster as a man.
Officially, this unenviable reputation began with a remark by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay which was picked up by Edmund Wilson, with whom Fitzgerald had gone to Princeton. In an essay of 1922, when Fitzgerald was himself only twenty-six and had just published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, Wilson, already an important critic, wrote:
It has been said by a celebrated person that to meet F. Scott Fitzgerald is to think of a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond; she is extremely proud of the diamond and shows it to everyone who comes by, and everyone is surprised that such an ignorant old woman should possess so valuable a jewel; for in nothing does she appear so inept as in the remarks she makes about the diamond.
Wilson went on to say that Fitzgerald was a clever enough fellow, but, nonetheless, "there is a symbolic truth in the description quoted above."
After this essay, Fitzgerald's reputation as the artistic equivalent of an idiot savant was firmly locked in place, so that Glenway Westscott, a much inferior novelist, could later call him "the worst-educated man in the world" and the poet John Peale Bishop, another Princeton contemporary, could remark that Fitzgerald had "left Princeton