DYING OF THE GREEN LIGHT

GERTRUDE STEIN's famous Lost Generation were a tribe of American writers and artists living in Paris in the 1920s, all deliberately and determinedly cynical, and so intent on outdoing each other in world weary knowing and quasi sophistication that they ultimately showed themselves to be naively vulnerable. Central to the transplanted misfit idealists of the Jazz Age was F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), a dreamer, a romantic and a seer, with a genius for exploring human nature but no understanding of his own complex misery. September 24th marks the centenary of his birth into a wealthy Minnesota family and the beginning of a seemingly gilded passage into a privileged life, inaugurated when he joined his pampered peers at Princeton University.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Fitzgerald's gift as a writer is that the tragedy of his life never overshadowed the work. After leaving Princeton without a degree, he joined the American army, though he did not serve in the first World War. His glamorous marriage to Zelda Sayre brought them both to Europe, where they set up court. Gradually the romance died, and as Zelda disappeared into madness, Fitzgerald went to Hollywood to try to make it as a screen writer, and failed. He suffered from chronic alcoholism, and died in 1940, a broken, forgotten man.

In the continuing search for the Great American Novel, strong claims have been made for Hermann Melville's Moby Dick (1851) and Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953). However, Melville's singular Victorian novel eludes classification by nationality, and belongs more to a European than an American tradition. As to Bellow's exuberant odyssey, perhaps Fitzgerald got there first. The Great Gatsby (1925) is a seminal blending of realism and symbolism which exposes the corruption at the heart of New World romanticism, and chronicles the collapse of the American Dream.

So nearly perfect is Gatsby Fitzgerald's "freak" performance, that it not only dwarfs the rest of his work, but continues to dominate American fiction. It was the harshest of tests for Fitzgerald's graceful, rhythmic prose, and particularly for his gift for imagery. He was never, before or after, to achieve again the beauty and exactness of The Great Gatsby, though he wrote four other novels, This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and the Dammed (1922), Tender is the Night (1934, with subsequent revised editions) and The Last Tycoon (1941, unfinished), as well as the superb autobiographical pieces in The Crack Up, and four volumes of stories, some of them excellent, such as "The Lost Decade" and "A Diamond as Big As The Ritz".

FIRST published on April 10th, 1925, Gatsby was a commercial failure. An initial printing of 20,870 copies was followed by a modest additional 3,000 copy print run four months later. At the time of Fitzgerald's death in 1940, unsold copies of The Great Gatsby remained in his publisher's warehouse. Aside from noting that it was his best book, most obituary writers were of the opinion that F. Scott Fitzgerald had failed to fulfil his promise as a writer. Within a year of his death, however, another American novelist, John Dos Passos, forced a critical rethink by acknowledging The Great Gatsby as "one of the few classic American novels". Between 1941 and 1949, seventeen new editions or reprints appeared, and the book was on the way not only to acquiring as complex a textual history as Ulysses, which had been published only three years before, but also to achieving as enduring a literary reputation.

Central to Fitzgerald's masterpiece is the wayward heroism of Gatsby himself, a self invented dreamer from the American Midwest with "an extraordinary gift for hope" and "a romantic readiness". By the end of his story, told by the sympathetic Nick Carraway, an other Midwesterner, Gatsby's doomed but magnificently gaudy and naive attempt to consolidate a love built on dreams and a shallow girl is as dead as he is only his "capacity for wonder" remains intact, at least in the eyes of Carraway.

It is true that this novel may be and has been read as a metaphor for the American dream, but more important is Fitzgerald's awareness that in Gatsby, a ruthless liar as well as beguiling fantasist, he is exploring the self delusion of the dreamer. Carraway is the realist, rooted to the ground. His dreams are smaller than Gatsby's but his intelligence is sharper, and his moral indignation is righteous and noble. It is he who recalls his father's comment that "a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth".

THROUGHOUT a narrative of often surreal beauty, Fitzgerald shows himself as both poet and acute social observer. Carraway witnesses Gatsby's night long vigil outside Daisy's house, recalling "So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight watching over nothing."

Carraway mourns Gatsby's belief "in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us". Acting as a moral filter, he articulates a half admiring, half disapproving fascination with the wanton. Shocked and mesmerised by the behaviour of Gatsby's love object, Daisy Buchanan, and her husband Tom, he notes "they were careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together . .

Abide from the glittering intelligence and social observation they display there is little in either This Side of Paradise or The Beautiful and the Dammed to prepare the reader for the lyric pathos of The Great Gatsby. Yet while the hauntingly beautiful Tender is the Night, nine years in the writing, Fitzgerald's own favourite work and his most autobiographical's formless and flawed, it nonetheless conveys the same poignant perceptions of life and human behaviour.

Of Nicole, the damaged, dangerous beauty at the heart of Tender Is the Night, he writes "The people she liked, rebels mostly, disturbed her and were bad for her she sought in them the vitality that had made them independent or creative or rugged, sought in vain for their secrets were buried deep in childhood struggles they had forgotten. They were more interested in Nicole's exterior harmony and charm, the other face of her illness. She led a lonely life owning Dick [the book's hero], who did not want to be owned.

"Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.

Near the close of Tender is the Night, Nicole in one of her most lucid moments remarks to Dick "Some of the time I think it's my fault I've ruined you." Dick's response is pleasantly guarded. "So I'm ruined, am I?" Nicole echoing Carraway's perceptive comment about Tom and Daisy replies to Dick "I didn't mean that. But you used to want to create things now you seem to want to smash them up."

The book is a devastating, limpidly tragic account of the gradual destruction of Dick Diver, the charming psychiatrist, by the wealthy Nicole Warren. In her weakness lies her strength, just as his strength is his ruination. Perhaps the controlled beauty of Gatsby and the random but powerfully evoked sense of regret running through Tender is the Night together testify to the wonder of Fitzgerald's artistic achievement. Of the almost silent Diver children, we are told "They had that wistful charm, almost sadness, peculiar to children who have learned early not to cry or laugh with abandon they were apparently moved to no extremes of emotion

Fitzgerald could almost have been writing about the fragile relationship of Dick and Nicole, and probably was recalling the shining hell he and Zelda quickly descended into.

Either way, The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night preview the master work that could have been, The Last Tycoon, his unfinished farewell in which a visionary film producer, Munroe Stahr, another Fitzgerald alter ego, reiterates the final defeat signalled in Dick Diver's fall from grace, more tragic even than Gatsby's failure.

American writers have dominated 20th century fiction, and the work off. Scott Fitzgerald helps explain that artistic supremacy, shaped by romantic realism and the knowledge of the consequences of shattered dreams.