Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days by Scott Donaldson

Few scholars have been so lucky as to have the chance to have a retrospective collection of their best essays released for a general reading public. Scott Donaldson’s work, however, is on such touchstones of America literature—F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—that a general readership isn’t that far of a stretch. There is a lot promised in a book of critical essays about two authors nearly every American has read, and, happily, this collection lives up to that promise.

A few of the essays, “The Trouble with Nick,” for example, are good examples of what can be discovered by a close reading alone. Reading along with Scott Donaldson, who has taught the books for decades, reveals subtleties that a casual reader might have missed. After a few readings of The Great Gatsby, the only character that retains any sort of sympathy from the reader is Nick—even Gatsby loses his luster as all of his glorious spectacle crumbles into mere sentimentalism; Tom is revealed as a mere thug. Donaldson carefully reveals that Nick’s careful detachment, while it makes him the perfect lens to reveal their flaws, isn’t much better than those he observes.

Donaldson’s study of indirection in “The Averted Gaze in Hemingway’s Fiction” is a tour de force. Donaldson reveals what Hemingway doesn’t say by what his characters can’t say to each other.

“When the doctor escapes to take a walk, he inadvertently lets the screen door slam, producing a gasp from his wife from behind the window with the blinds drawn. Dr. Adams finds Nick in the woods, reading with his back against a hemlock tree. As he “look[s] down at his son,” he decides to assert himself to the extent of failing to tell the boy that his mother wants him to come home. Instead they head off together to hunt for black squirrels.

As revealing as these careful readings are, the most enlightening essays are the ones that use biographical detail to ground the criticism. Even as New Criticism has fallen out of favor, biographical criticism has remained out of vogue, but Donaldson is a master who never reduces the art to the life. Rather, he shows how the raw material of the authors lives gets turned into the works. For example, the long gestation of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night can certainly help to explain the transcontinental scope of the novel, but it doesn’t serve to explain the wide emotional scope. Tender is the Night is certainly no roman a clef, and Donaldson certainly doesn’t treat it as such. Great novels, unlike peace treaties and sausages, are better for knowing how they’re made.

For the most part, the essays keep their distance from contemporary literary theory, and for the better. There are cameo appearances by Marx and Veblen when discussing Fitzgerald on the corrupting influence of money. In “Fitzgerald’s Political Development,” Donaldson almost suggests that however much Fitzgerald sympathized with the poor, his art could never be conformable with Marxism.

He could not shake off his loyalty to his class. He was disturbed by the social stigma that fell on him as an incipient communist. Most important of all, he came to realize that politics and art made uncomfortable bedfellows.

Here, Donaldson mislays his emphasis on biography rather than on art. Fitzgerald may have been charmed by the idlers in his circle, but he certainly spares his idlers no quarter in his fiction. Marx’s notion of class don’t mesh with Fitzgerald’s, which hews closer to Proust or Nabokov. Moreover, as much venom as Fitzgerald could muster about the leisure classes, Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption doesn’t quite cover the way Baby Warren comes to own Dick Diver. If anything, Fitzgerald shows in his work that he remained bravely independent of loyalty to his class and of politics.

Hemingway, unlike Fitzgerald, did have a political cause—the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway, like Fitzgerald, claimed to put art above politics, and mostly kept a skeptical distance from his courtiers from the radical left. The signal exception was over Spain, and on that count politics trumped everything else. Admittedly, it took no little courage on Hemingway’s part to When even John Dos Passos (who had earlier tried to recruit Hemingway for the left) became disillusioned by the Loyalist cause, Hemingway continued to make excuses for them. While it may be true that Hemingway took to the loyalist cause before the Communists, during the war he continually withheld information about the extent of Soviet involvement while the war was ongoing. He made the one excuse for questionable political arrests and summary executions that can’t be made in a war of conscience—that there’s a war going on.

These essays are remarkable. Donaldson is a good writer, and did a solid job of recasting academic essays into something more palatable. They read like they were run in book reviews rather than academic journals, written for thinking people, and not necessarily scholars. What is best about the book is that they make the reader want to return to the authors, but return with a sharper eye for detail.

Reviewed by James Liu

Fitzgerald & Hemingway: Works and Days by Scott Donaldson
Columbia University Press, 2009
Cloth, 551 pp, $32.50
ISBN-10: 023114816X