![]() ![]() Scott Fitzgerald (Penguin, 1984), is archetypal Fitzgerald behaviour, at once poignant and self-savouringly sentimental. This story, found in Andre Le Vot's superb F. Then, bafflingly, he began to cry - because "life would never be so sweet again". It was a warm, still night, and he was in a heightened state of drunken exhilaration. More than a decade earlier, high on the thin air of his own celebrity after the triumphant publication of his debut, This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald was travelling along Broadway in an open-top car. "All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them," he reflected in the autobiographical essay "Early Success", written in 1937 when he had already entered the long twilight of his short career. It is not difficult to understand what he meant: a sense of lost time and the irretrievability of the past gave much of his work - indeed, his life - an ineradicable undertone of mourning. He felt powerfully that something important was missing from his life, and spoke repeatedly of the "hauntedness" of The Great Gatsby. ![]() As a young man, when the writing life stretched before him like an ocean of discovery and he was experiencing the first flush of early success, Fitzgerald remained oppressed by feelings of inauthenticity. No one has written more elegiacally about America than F. ![]()
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