Nov 2, 2009
Lionel Trilling’s Fitzgerald
In this 1951 New Yorker article, Lionel Trilling insists that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s supposed snobbery must be seen in the context of his singular form of existential instability. Fitzgerald’s ingrained mode of being was an exaltation of aristocratic order. His perverse adherence to problematic ideals must be understood as a desperate clinging to the sole ostensible stability he saw as offering any solace. Uncompromising investment in and love for the high life was his way to get his life to hang together. Snobbishness is the unsightly byproduct of a true and genuine man rubbing up against a deeply flawed system that forms the sinews of his psychology. To be anything other than “snobbish” would be to lose what precarious little sense of self he had. To Trilling, this is the fundamental fact of Fitzgerald’s life: “He exaggerated the idea of society and his dependence upon it in order, we may say, to provide a field for the activity of his conscience, for the trial of his self.” This pretension was his backstop against decomposition; without it, he would have ceased to exist to himself. At the site of friction between subject and system, hovering stupefied and exultant at the point of disintegration, is where Trilling finds Fitzgerald, ignorant, cowering, afraid, constituted by the fire that consumes him. In order to live, Fitzgerald feeds his fire with himself. This absurdity, this paradox, does not call Fitzgerald into question. It makes him human. – Kevin Hilke