valor but also the moral courage implicit in honest, undeluded judgment and precise, undistorting language, that continues to dominate such later fiction as For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Hemingway's novel about the Spanish Civil War, and the haunting The Old Man and the Sea (1952) about an old fisherman's solitary struggle to bring in his greatest fish. But when Hemingway ventures into the realm of philosophical writing, as he does in his nonfiction works on bullfighting (Death in the Afternoon [1932]) and safari hunting (Green Hills of Africa [1935]), the hidden hypocrisies and perversities of his project are betrayed by his writing, as in life they were betrayed in the growing personality cult that made him a media celebrity and masculinist icon until his death by suicide in 1962. His Nietzschean individualism (although Hemingway seems to have read little Nietzsche beyond Thus Spake Zarathustra) can be seen to mask an egotism that escapes social responsibility in forms of adventurism such as war, bullfighting, and safari hunting. Its amoral anti-altruism further licenses a blatant array of oppressive discursive practices in Hemingway's writing: homophobia ('the nasty, sentimental pawing of humanity of a Whitman and all the mincing gentry,' he writes in indictment also of Gide, Wilde, and other 'fairies'); anti- Semitism ('it certainly improved his nose,' Jake Barnes says of Robert Cohn, the Jewish boxer in The Sun Also Rises); racism ('I had had no -321- chance to train them; no power to discipline,' of his black African guides. 'If there had been no law I would have shot Garrick'); his misogynistic portraits of women as 'bitches'; and a penchant for sadism found in his culturally rationalized love of cruelty, aggression, and violence that, in spite of his Loyalist sympathies during the Spanish Civil War, revealed some affinities shared with the violent futurist ideology. In pointed contrast to Stein's relatively benign memoir of Paris in the twenties, Hemingway's 1956 reminiscence, A Moveable Feast, seems an unworthy surrender to ingratitude and self- indulgent malice.
Against the background of the changing social and political developments of America in the twenties and the thirties, the exoticism of Hemingway's settings and the solipsism of his concerns gradually made his fiction seem escapist and relevant only on the level of a specific American mythology, his modern and cosmopolitan updating of the figure of the American Western hero, the pioneer, the gunslinger, the cowboy. The broader, extremely vital and complex, historical panorama of American life during these decades was left to other American novelists to express: William Faulkner, inventing highly experimental forms to articulate the moral conundrums of the emerging modern South; John Dos Passos, who expressed the urban American immigrant experience as a montage of vernacular speech and a collage panorama of struggling lives and historical events in Manhattan Transfer (1925) and his U.S.A. trilogy (collected 1938); the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, who incorporated the rich voices of African American dialect, old folkloric storytelling rhythms, and new blues sounds into poetry and prose; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the simultaneous lyricist and demystifier of the modern American dream. Dos Passos and Fitzgerald could well be paired to emblematize the fractured and schizophrenic nature of the American reality for the different American populations of the early decades of the twentieth century.
Rapid technological advances and the increasing urbanization of American labor by immigrants and Southern African Americans brought in their wake an era of great union and populist political activity, ideologically vitalized by the Russian Revolution of 1917 but increasingly resisted by a government alarmed by 'the Red scare' -322- into enacting such controversial paranoid gestures as the Sedition Act of 1918, the deportation of the anarchist Emma Goldman to Russia in 1919, and the 1920 trial and 1927 execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Dos Passos's novels allude to these events and fictionally elaborate both the emotional texture and the ideological grain of the historical milieu in which they were engendered. But the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most popular and financially successful of the American novelists of the modernist period, gazed over these churning classes and masses populating the American landscape, much as his own character Daisy Buchanan is described, as enjoying 'the mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes…gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.' Fitzgerald captures less the reality than the fantasy of another America that occupied the cultural horizon during the twenties: the 'Jazz Age' (he called two collections of short stories Flappers and Philosophers [1921] and Tales of the Jazz Age [1922]), the era of Prohibition and wild financial speculation, the jostling of Jamesian 'old money' with vulgar American arrivistes, the aesthetics of glamour produced by material and social extravagance — simulated and stimulated by the celluloid images of the burgeoning movie industry for which Fitzgerald intermittently wrote. Some would say he prostituted his talent writing for the screen, but he would also have demystified the film industry had he lived to complete his final novel, The Last Tycoon, a book edited by his friend Edmund Wilson and published in 1941.
Fitzgerald's more privileged milieu — his attendance at Princeton, which lent him the material for his first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), which in turn brought him the fame and money to court successfully a beautiful, highstrung woman from Alabama, Zelda Sayre — generated more specifically social and ideological concerns voiced in a more symbolistic style than that of the other modernists. Fitzgerald arrived in Europe later than Hemingway, in 1924, and it was during this Continental sojourn, when, like Hemingway, he too fell under the tutelage of Pound and Stein, that he published The Great Gatsby (1925), a work still frequently nominated as 'the great American novel.' But although Gatsby bears the modernistic hallmark of a clean, hard prose, its craft is less foregrounded and selfdisplaying, less the logopoetic focus of its own fiction than is the -323- work of Hemingway and Stein. Hemingway and Fitzgerald seem also to have been influenced differently by their literary traditions, with Hemingway choosing Huckleberry Finn as his American gospel, while Fitzgerald grounded himself in the late nineteenth-century architects of the American moral imagination, Henry James and Theodore Dreiser. From the Continental tradition, too, Fitzgerald seemed to derive a larger share of irony, not just le mot juste of Flaubertian fiction, but Flaubert's curious logocentric modernization of the Continental adultery novel that allows him to determine the function of romances, books, and magazines in shaping the dreams and desires of, say, an Emma Bovary. Jay Gatsby outlines his Horatio Alger program on the flyleaf of Hopalong Cassidy, and Jordan Baker's beauty reminds Nick Carraway that 'she looked like a good illustration.' This stylistic and philosophical divergence in the strategies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald was already etched in their different secular 'occupations' before coming to Europe: Hemingway's stints as a reporter and journalist against Fitzgerald's work for an advertisement agency and as a contributor to H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan's Smart Set. In a Gatsby vignette that updates the adultery novel, Fitzgerald represents Myrtle Wilson, the lower-class mistress of wealthy Tom Buchanan's slumming, reclining with her nose broken by her lover 'on the couch, bleeding fluently, and trying to spread a copy of Town Tattle over the tapestry scenes of Versailles.' Versailles, the emblem of monarchical glamour whose nineteenthcentury dregs Emma Bovary tries to recapture in her 'aristocratic' adulteries (as well as site of the disastrous treaty that marked the closure of World War I), has become commodified as pretentious home and hotel decor of the American rich, while the society gossip rag is used to mop up the blood that will be spilled far more copiously by the socialite Buchanans before the ends of their double affairs.
Fitzgerald also read and admired the work of Joseph Conrad, and although he is known to have read Conrad's preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus just before writing Gatsby, it is Conrad's Heart of Darkness that leaves the clearest imprint on that text. They would seem to have little in common — Heart of Darkness, Conrad's dark tale of the European rape of Africa, and The Great Gatsby, Fitzger-324- Fitzger-'s tale of a single, hot Long Island summer in 1922, when Jay Gatsby, the fabulously wealthy and glamorous tycoon is unmasked and destroyed in his attempts to realize the American dream by recapturing his lost and now married sweetheart, Daisy Buchanan. But Fitzgerald keeps his focus on the same issue as Conrad — the disastrous moral cost in hypocrisy and destructiveness that civilization at its most opulent and attractive entails: 'They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — 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, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.' The novel's polemical task is the seduction and disillusionment of the reader, and to this end Fitzgerald borrows Conrad's narrative device of adopting the impressionable and corruptible vision of an implicated naif, Nick Carraway, the nice Midwestern boy who, like Conrad's Marlow, must disentangle the moral enigma of a charismatic man whose immense idealism — 'he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail' — becomes too large, and, passing beyond good and evil, betrays itself. Instead of the suborning of justice in the Sacco- Vanzetti case that so obsessed Dos Passos and the American writers of the Left, Nick Carraway's great moral shock comes from Gatsby's implication in the betrayal of
