(2 of 3)
He wrote stories for Esquire, worked on scenarios for the movies. He needed the money to keep his daughter Frances Scott ("Scottie") at Vassar, where she is now a junior. But when Zanuck asked him to do some work on his forthcoming Brooklyn Bridge, Fitzgerald rebelled. Said he: "You've already made that picture ten times, I can't add anything to it."
He kept in touch with many young writers whose work he patiently encouraged. Though they were separated by a continent in space, almost as far in time, he kept in touch with his daughter, who also writes. At twelve she had told a newshawk that Father knew only old-fashioned things like the jazz age. Last year Scottie read The Beautiful and Damned, wrote her father that she could never be such a good writer. There is nothing lost about daughter Scottie. If anything, she is old for her years (19).
The generation which Fitzgerald celebrated managed to prolong its mental childhood to the age of 21. Really violent adolescence set in at 25. By 30 the physical survivors flickered into a relatively tranquil senescence. But they had been deeply seared by a blinding flash of revelation that life is at bottom brutal, and most of them clung to their cushioning cynicism years after the psychic shock had passed. They had to. Cynicism was the lost generation's only morale.
Before the last cocktail had been downed and the last dance danced this generation had lived through: 1) World War I, which for the first time brought out into the open the crisis in western civilization of which the lost generation was also a symptom ; 2) the beginnings of a social revolution which came to be called Communism and Fascism; 3) the abdication of an older generation almost as lost as the younger.
How much of this Fitzgerald understood is clear from the somewhat sophomoric conversation on Socialism that closes This Side of Paradise. In fiction he never got beyond this. He consciously limited his literary field to what he could see with his own eyes—the campus, the undergraduate clubhouse, the resorts, the hotels, the boudoirs, the country clubs, the North Shore of Long Island. Then, as he and the lost generation ran down together, he tried and almost succeeded in recapturing its final psychopathic spasms in Europe (Tender Is the Night).
To write down what he saw he developed a brilliant, surfacy prose, an ability to strike off a scene or a portrait in a dozen visual words whose cadence is a part of the mood; the power to evoke lyrically (with occasional lapses into tremolo) a moonlight night at Princeton, a summer dawn, reaches of land and water; a vest-pocket Proust's preoccupation with houses, furniture, streets. He had a masculine power to recreate the sensuous opulence of young women; a curiously feminine habit of seeing at a glance not only the color of people's hair and the shape of their chins, but of seeing at the same glance what color their hair would be, how many chins they would have ten years hence. Nobody else set down so accurately the syncopated mood of a generation that was at best pathetic, at worst self-pathetic. Fitzgerald shared his generation's faults. The farther he could stand off from his generation, the better he wrote (The Great Gatsby). The more he was like his generation, the better they liked him (This Side of Paradise).