Duke University Press Twentieth Century Literature

F.
Scott Fitzgerald and Romantic Destiny

Author(s): Richard Lehan
Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2, F. Scott Fitzgerald Issue (Summer,
1980), pp. 137-156
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/441371
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F. Scott Fitzgerald and Romantic
Destiny
RICHARD LEHAN
In a letter to Maxwell Perkins, F. Scott Fitzgerald tells us of his

interest in Oswald Spengler. "I read [Spengler] the summer I was
writing The Great Gatsby, and I don't think I ever quite recovered from
him."' This passage has created some confusion, because Spengler's
The Decline of the West, originally published in 1918 (Volume I) and
1922 (Volume II), was not translated into English until 1926, and
Fitzgerald was unable to read German. As a result, some critics have
maintained that Fitzgerald could not have benefited from Spengler's
ideas when he was writing Gatsby.2 I find this notion disconcerting,
because it brings a literal-mindedness to literary and intellectual mat-
ters that distorts the way ideas unfold. When Spengler's ideas appeared
in Germany, they created a sensation, and his general theory of the
West was debated in intellectual circles in both America and Europe.
Spengler's books were reviewed widely with long summary statements,
and he was very much in the air, especially in Europe, that summer of
1924 when Fitzgerald, living in France, maintains that he read Spengler
while working on The Great Gatsby. For example, I have located nine
articles or review-essays in English on Spengler and The Decline of the
West, published between 1922 and the summer of 1924. One of the
most detailed is an 8,000 word essay by W. K. Stewart, entitled "The
Decline of Western Culture: Oswald Spengler's 'Downfall of Western
Civilization' Explained." This article appeared in the Century magazine
in the summer of 1924, exactly the time that Fitzgerald tells Perkins he
was reading Spengler. The Century was a magazine that Fitzgerald often
read (in Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver even buys it at a station quay,
among other reading material, when he leaves for a trip). That this and
137
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE
other essays made Spengler's basic ideas available to English reade

a fact that cannot be denied or dismissed.3 But this kind of discussion
can become a bit sterile. I think more than enough has been said about
why Fitzgerald could not have known Spengler in 1924. What I thin
more interesting is to see in what way The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald'
novels after that date contain a number of Spengler's ideas. Intern
evidence abounds and establishes a connection-an affinity of
mind-that is hard to deny.
Perhaps the first obstacle in reconstructing this connection involves
the idea of Fitzgerald reading or thinking about Spengler in the first
place. The Decline of the West-heavy, labored, repetitive, and often
over-detailed-is not an easy or readable text. Its argument is managed
and manuevered, and it comes to us coated in a heavy German
Romanticism that owes much to Goethe's theory of Urphiineomen-the
belief in cultural morphology, and Nietzsche's idea of "eternal recur-
rence." Like so many Romantics, Spengler was trying to overthrow the
influence of the Enlightenment, especially the Enlightenment insistence
upon mechanism and causality. In the place of mechanical and causal
connections, he substituted biological connections. Sometimes Spengler
compared the history of a culture to human growth and decay. "Every
culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has
its childhood, youth, manhood, and old age."4 More often, he found
the history of a culture analogous to the growth, maturity, decay, and
death of a plant. For Spengler, the process of maturity gives way to
decline when a Culture gives way to a Civilization. Each culture takes its
being from the land, from the countryside, from the village and town.
Like a plant, it takes its being from its roots-from the soil that
nourishes it. As it grows, it transforms and is transformed; the town
gives way to the city, a natural process to an artificial process. Spengler
emphasizes the difference between the city and the provinces, and sees
the rise of an urban center as marking the turning point for every
culture:
World-city and province-the two basic ideas of every
civilization-bring up a wholly new form-problem of History, the
very problem we are living through today ... In place of a
world, there is a city, a point, in which whole life of broad regions
is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true
people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a sort of nomad,
cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller,
traditionless . . . [Spengler's emphasis] (I, p. 32)
Elsewhere, Spengler intensifies this idea. "Beat and tension, blood and
138
F. S. FITZGERALD AND ROMANTIC DESTINY
intellect, Destiny and Causality are to one another as the country-side

in bloom is to the city of stone, as something existing per se to some-
thing existing dependently" (II, p. 102). These polarities-blood and
intellect, Destiny and Causality, countryside and city-are at the very
heart of Spengler's theory. As man moves away from the natural
rhythms of the land, his sense of instinct is replaced by reason, intelli-
gence, and consciousness; his sense of nature and myth replaced by
scientific theory; his sense of a natural market-place (barter and ex-
change) replaced by abstract theories of money. As Spengler put it,
"Intelligence is the replacement of unconscious living by exercise in
thought, masterly, but bloodless and jejune.... Hence ... the substitu-
tion of scientific theory, the causal myth, for the religious. Hence, too,
money-in-the-abstract as the pure causality of economic life, in contrast
to rustic barter, which is the pulsation and not a system of tensions" (II,
p. 103). Spengler ends this discussion by talking about "the sterility of
civilized man."
In The Decline of the West, Spengler discusses three cultures that
have experienced this process of growth and decay: the classical o
Apollonian, the Mediterranean-Middle East or the Magian, and th
Medieval or the Faustian. Each of these cultures is independent of the
other; their Destiny is inborn; the similarity of their history reveals a
common process at work and not a causal connection between and
among them. Apollonian man finds himself generally self-satisfied;
conceives of himself as living in a local, finite space, a tangible present;
lives on the human scale as expressed by the life-sized nude statue and
the small-columned temple; limits his political life to the city-state; and
burns rather than buries his dead so as not to confront the idea of
eternity. Magian or Arabian man is torn between forces of good and
evil; views the world mysteriously, as a cave in which "light ... battles
against the darkness"; and expresses himself with interior-oriented
architecture and a religion that is magical and dualistic. Faustian man
finds himself longing for the unattainable; has no sense of his limits;
his imagination soars like his Gothic cathedrals to encompass the idea
of infinity; his painting makes use of distant perspectives, his music the
expansive form of the fugue; his adventurers are long-distant sailors
and explorers; and his modern heirs try to conquer space or create vast
empires in the tradition of Cecil Rhodes for whom "expansion is ev-
erything." While Faustian man lingers into the modern, he is trans-
formed by the Enlightenment, which brings with it a sense of the
empirical (in which reason is limited to the range of the senses and to
random data they can collect) and the need for quantitative measure-
139
ment. Under such influence, the sense of the infinite gives way
reason, science, and technology. Man no longer feels at one w
land, moves to the new city, which has become a money-cen
rise of a new breed of money brokers turns the old world upsid
Spengler believed the movement from country to city involv
structive process. In historical terms, Culture gives way to Civi
in human terms, Faustian man gives way to Enlightenment m
priest-king is replaced by the new Caesar, the man of mone
power. When this happens, a primitive sense of race is lost,
decay embodied in the idea of Civilization begins.
All of these Spenglerian elements infuse The Great Gatsby. W
Fitzgerald does not labor the point, he clearly shows in what
artificial, urban world has replaced a natural landscape. In his de
tion of the Valley of Ashes, for example, we find that a "fantast
brings forth ashes which "grow like wheat into ridges and hills
has given way to "grotesque gardens, where ashes take the f
houses and chimneys,"5 as if the process of nature has been inv
bringing forth a distortion of itself, as Spengler maintained
when the countryside is transformed by the city. Beneath t
streets lies a lost world, implied by Fitzgerald's description
Avenue as "so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer S
afternoon that I wouldn't have been surprised to see a great
white sheep turn the corner" (p. 18).
That the city takes its being from money is one of the main
of the novel and ultimately differentiates the meaning of T
chanan and Gatsby as characters, and explains why Nick Carraw
scribes New York as "the city rising up across the river in whit
and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory mon
45). Gatsby never comes to understand the meaning of Nick's ob
tion; never comes to realize that there are different kinds of m
for example, East Egg money or the money of the establishe
opposed to West Egg money or the money of the new rich;
comes to see in what way his connection with the crooked buck
contrasts with Tom Buchanan's world of established brokerage h
never understands why Meyer Wolfsheim's world of Broadway
poolhalls can never lead permanently to the Long Island world of
polo-ponies and private clubs. All along, the novel moves us to the
moment when these truths will unfold-moves us to the scene in the
Plaza Hotel that horribly hot Sunday afternoon when Tom plays
trump card and reveals to Daisy that Gatsby's money comes from
bootlegging and crooked stock deals. At that moment, Daisy, who on
140
now understands the nature of Gatsby's credentials, turns b

security of the Buchanan world-and Gatsby's dream is lo
To be sure, Gatsby had come a long way-this man wh
himself out of an adolescent imagination, out of the springt
youth, as Spengler would put it. But what he created was ne
tent within its own terms-nor was it consistent with the m
America that was being transformed by the new city. Gatsb
New York out of the West, modelled himself on Dan Cody (B
Cody?) and James J. Hill, and brought a kind of pioneer spi
that no longer functioned within pioneer terms. In a pre-ma
omy, money follows power; in a market economy, power
money; and in the world-market economy of New York, the
money of a Tom Buchanan, with his Yale and high-society co
separates a Tom from a Gatsby, with his Meyer Wolfshei
tions," just as physically as the bay separates Gatsby's West
sion from Tom's East Egg mansion. Nick understands this, se
ways Gatsby's imagination failed him when he entered an ur
that he never understood. Gatsby's Oxford background rema
sistent with his pink suits and silver ties, just as the story o
ground remains inconsistent. Nick smiles inwardly when he
Gatsby comes from a wealthy Middle West family that l
Francisco, and that Gatsby lived "like a rajah in all the c
Europe-Paris, Venice, Rome-collecting jewels, chiefly rub
hunting big game" (p. 43). Even in his imagination, Gat
reconcile the new city with its more primitive beginnin
exactly this failure of imagination which is the source of Gat
failure. What Gatsby creates of himself belongs to a lost ord
of the past that will never come again. Like Spengler's Fa
with whom he shares so much, Gatsby's fate is connected
Spengler called Destiny-that historical process that affect
within a culture as the culture itself is transformed.
Once we see that Gatsby and Tom are playing two different hi
torical roles-both of which are part of the Spenglerian paradigm-t
novel takes on a new and added dimension of meaning. If Gatsby play
out the fate of Faustian man, Tom Buchanan embodies the fate of the
new-moneyed Caesar who has come to power after Enlightenment
science has transformed the mind. As Spengler put it, "Race, Time,
and Destiny belong together. But the moment scientific thought ap-
proaches them, the word 'Time' acquires the significance of a dimen-
sion, the word 'Destiny' that of causal connection, while Race . . .
becomes an incomprehensible chaos of unconnected and heteroge-
141
neous characters that ... interpenetrate without end and with

(II, p. 131). This passage explains much that otherwise appe
dental and gratuitous in Tom's character. What is important
that Tom has need for "scientific" explanations of his world
us, for example, that "I read somewhere that the sun's getting
every year. ... It seems that pretty soon the earth's going to
the sun-or wait a minute-it's just the opposite-the sun's ge
colder every year " (p. 78). That Tom's remarks are abstract, un
garbled, and contradictory is to the point, and reveal a quality
in keeping with Spengler's description of modern man who
separated from the rhythms of nature by scientific systems of
And not only is Tom unable to relate directly to the world of na
is also unable to relate directly to others outside his class and
fact, Tom feels so threatened by the blacks that he has bo
"scientific" theory of race:
"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom, viole
"I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Ha
read 'The Rise of the Colored Empires' by this man God
"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone
"Well, it's a fine book, and everybody ought to read it.
idea is if we don't look out the white race will be-will be u
submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy, with an exp
sion of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books wit
words in them. What was that word we ...."
"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glanci
at her impatiently. (p. 9)
There is no book to my knowledge, entitled The Rise of the Co
Empires. There is, however, a book entitled Civilisation and Civilis
An Essay on the Spenglerian Philosophy of History by E. H. Goddard
A. Gibbons. Fitzgerald, however, could not have had this book in m
because it was not published by Boni and Liveright until 1926,
after the publication of The Great Gatsby. Ernest Hope Go
(1879-1939) was an assistant editor for the Illustrated London New
The Sketch. The News contained many articles on anthropolog
archaeology and was interested in the history of past civilizations,
in Spenglerian terms. I have not, however, been able to link Fitzge
directly with this source, but the similarity of name and subj
indeed a coincidence. The book that Tom is more likely referring t
Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color, published by Ch
Scribner's Sons (Fitzgerald's own publisher) in 1920. Stoddard be
that the colored races would eventually control the world. "Some f
142
fifths of the entire white race," he argued, "is concentrated on

one-fifth of the white world's territorial area (Europe), whi
maining one-fifth of the race (some 110,000,000 souls), scattere
end of the earth, must protect four-fifths of the white territor
tage against the pressure of colored races eleven times its n
strength" (p. 6). Later in The Great Gatsby (p. 30), the owl-e
picks from Gatsby's library shelf Volume One of Stoddard's Le
Fitzgerald could not have found a better source than Stod
reveal the Spenglerian belief in what happens to a race whe
removed from its own soil and transplanted in another cult
embodies the sense of racial disharmony at work in Americ
Stoddard expressed in hysterical terms. "A race does not m
Spengler tells us. "Men migrate, and their successive genera
born in ever-changing landscapes" (II, p. 119). Eventually the
transform the uprooted into a new culture, but this has not ha
in post-Enlightenment America where race has become "an
prehensible chaos of unconnected and heterogeneous charac
... interpenetrate without end and without law" (II, p. 131). The
promise of the new world has given way to such disharmony, and
Fitzgerald not only links this sense of the lost promise with racial
disharmony, but he links both with the phenomenon of a Gatsby in a
passage that almost bursts with implied and double meaning:
The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen
for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and
the beauty in the world.
A dead man [the juxtaposition of "wild promise" and death
can hardly be accidental here, given the fate that awaits Gatsby]
passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two
carriages with drawn blinds, and by more cheerful carriages for
friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and
short upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the
sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber
holiday. As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us,
driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes,
two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their
eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.
"Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge"
[that is, into the city], I thought: "anything at all. ..."
Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.
(p. 45)
In the climax of the novel-the scene in which Tom confronts and
143
defeats Gatsby in the Plaza Hotel-Tom will once again come bac
the subject of race, this time to the threat of racial intermarriage,
he attacks with an "impassioned gibberish," as if "he saw him
standing alone on the last barrier of civilization" (p. 86). Even t
wording and terminology here is consistent with Spengler's vie
disharmony that appears when a culture gives way to civilization
once again the conflict between Gatsby, Tom, and a culture rac
divergent is absorbed by Spengler's ideas. Tom takes great pri
modern science and Progress, can never understand the state of
that this kind of mentality has replaced, is scornful of the distant
and cancels all other cultures in the name of Nordic civilization: "'This
idea is that we're Nordics. ... And we've produced all the things that
go to make civilization-oh, science and art, and-all that. Do you see?'"
(P. 9).
When Enlightenment-man substituted empirical for intuitive rea-
soning, the Faustian sense of mystery gave way to the modern sense of
science-and the handmaiden of science is technology and the ma-
chine, another Spenglerian theme Fitzgerald introduces into the novel.
Over and over, the characters talk about the automobile and careless
driving until it becomes one of the novel's major refrains. The owl-eyed
man is in the car that wrecks its wheel leaving Gatsby's party: Tom
Buchanan is involved in an automobile accident with another woman in
his car on his honeymoon (his unfaithfulness obviously began earl
and, of course, Myrtle Wilson is run over by Daisy who is driving
Gatsby's chrome-swollen car. Nick tells Jordan Baker that "'Either yo
ought to be more careful, or you oughtn't to drive at all'" (p. 39). Late
Jordan will use these words to rebuke Nick for his own moral careles
ness in thinking that he could encourage her with moral impunity (p.
119).
In this context, it is interesting that Spengler concludes his discus-
sion of the fate of the West with a chapter entitled "The Machine"
(Volume II, Chapter 14). Spengler points out that the rise of the
machine is accompanied by the demise of Faustian man. In the Middle
Ages, book-printing appeared, followed by the invention of the tele-
scope, microscope, and chemical analysis. "Then followed ... simulta-
neously with Rationalism, the discovery of the steam engine, which
upset everything and transformed economic life from the foundations
up. Till then nature rendered services, but now she was tied to the yoke
as a slave. ... And these machines become in their forms less and ever
less human" [Spengler's emphasis] (II, pp. 502-03). The machine n
only separated man from nature, it transformed the landscape, m
144
possible the rise of the new city, and enlarged the scale on which m
lived until life became "less and ever less human." This explains
great part why Nick can feel so lonely in the city, dwarfed by gig
buildings that overwhelm at the same time as they evoke a sens
new and mysterious power at work. Fitzgerald brilliantly work
mood into his novel when Nick tells us, "At the enchanted metropo
twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in ot
poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it
time for a solitary restaurant dinner-young clerks in the dusk, wa
the most poignant moments of night and life" (p. 38). The new
brings with it a new state of mind, lures the ambitious and the
restless-the Gatsbys and the Nick Carraways-to its heart, and instills
in them a sense of the mysterious. Some, like Nick, intuit a destructive
process at work and leave the city in search of a past that can never be
recovered. Others, like Gatsby, never understand the way the city
works and are destroyed. As a novel, The Great Gatsby is in the Young-
Man-from-the-Provinces tradition, which links it with works like Bal-
zac's Pere Goriot and Dreiser's Sister Carrie, novels that conclude with a
cemetery scene when the drive to conquer the city brings a fatal de-
feat.
In this context, it seems totally appropriate that Fitzgerald should
end The Great Gatsby with reference to the city. In referring to Gatsby's
dream, Nick tells us that Gatsby "did not know that it was already
behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city,
where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night" (p.
121). And the reference to the "republic" here seems equally pointed,
suggesting the ideas of Jefferson, the last of the agrarians, whose
anti-city vision of a yeoman society is defeated by the Hamiltonian
notion of finance-capitalism and a new industrial-urbanized land. Both
Fitzgerald and Spengler seem to feel that this process will never be
reversed, that modern man is playing out the last stage of a sealed fate,
a cruel destiny. Gatsby comes close to realizing the great expectations
he brought to the city. In another time and another place, he might
have succeeded. Little does he know that his sense of the possible has
long been exhausted. That is why the past continues to have such an
appeal for Nick at the end of the novel, and his nostalgia for his own
childhood cannot be separated from a nostalgia for the old, untainted
America. Like Fitzgerald, Spengler maintained that these feelings
characterized the modern state of mind. To understand the present is
to long for what has been lost in the past. This is why "we beat on, boats
against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" (p. 121).
145
II
While The Great Gatsby is set against a frame of history, the sto
that Fitzgerald told in that novel was deeply personal. As I have d
cussed elsewhere, the novel is really a roman-a-clef with Fitzgerald wr
ing deeply out of his own unhappy experience with Ginevra King and
the world of Chicago money.6 Part of Fitzgerald's genius as a nove
stemmed from his ability to move from the personal to the historica
intensifying the individual story by the use of history. Fitzgera
imagination worked in similar fashion in his next novel, Tender Is th
Night. The principal events of this novel came directly from his o
personal experience. In the summer of 1924, the Fitzgeralds stayed
Cap d'Antibes with Gerald and Sara Murphy in their home, the V
American, which Murphy built in a garden surrounded by oran
lemon, and cedar trees high on a hill overlooking the Mediterrane
In the winter of 1924, Fitzgerald, like Dick Diver, fought with a grou
of taxi drivers, punched a policeman in the fracas, and was sever
beaten. Late one night on the Riviera, Fitzgerald, like Abe North
threatened to saw a waiter in half. And like Abe North, Fitzgerald ha
his wallet stolen in a Paris nightclub, accused the wrong Negro, a
created an unpleasant scene.7 Even more important, Fitzgerald wr
this novel after Zelda's own mental breakdown and his unsuccessful
attempt to find a medical solution for her condition.
It was not difficult for Fitzgerald to move from a personal to a
general sense of decline in Tender Is the Night, and he documented his
own feelings about the truths of Spengler's historical paradigm in an
interview he gave the New York World, April 23, 1927. The sense of a
culture that has played out an essential element of history on the
battlefield of World War One, and of an economy on the verge of
economic depression, reinforced his own personal sense of mental and
physical instability, of dissipation and weariness. All of these feelings
come together in Tender Is the Night. The novel makes conscious use of
its European setting, located as it is in Switzerland ("the true center of
the Western World"),8 on the Riviera, in Paris, and in Rome. We see
the breakup of the European aristocracy following the First World
War, at the same time as we see the way the Warren (war end?) money
gives them control over others and makes them into the grand con-
sumers. We are told that trains criss-cross the country carrying goods to
satisfy Nicole's wants (p. 113). All of these elements have Spenglerian
reference. In terms of ancient man, Greek culture gave way to Roman
civilization. If Pericles marks a beginning point, Alexander was a turn-
146
ing point, and the rise of Julius Caesar and his followers
point. The modern world was playing itself out in a para
Charlemagne marks a beginning point, Napoleon was a tu
in western culture, and his passing anticipates the coming of
Caesars. The turning point of each culture marks the passing
from the landed-aristocracy to an urban money-center. In t
the details of Fitzgerald's novels take on added significan
accident that Dick's final decline takes place in Rome, against a
backdrop of decadence and brutality (cf. Baby Warren's experience at
the embassy with the ambassador who comes down the stairs with pink
cold cream on his face, as well as Dick's treatment in the hands of the
police, and his argument with the taxi drivers, appropriately enough,
over money).
When Dick leaves Rome, he is a defeated man, and it is also no
accident that Tommy Barban again enters the novel at this point. When
Tommy, the new "barbarian," finally takes Nicole from Dick, Fitzgerald
writes that "symbolically she lay across his saddle-bow as surely as if he
had wolfed her away from Damascus and they had come out upon the
Mongolian plain" (p. 316). We have a kind of literary archaeology
going on here. In Spenglerian terms, the end of the Apollonian and
Magian cycle offers numerous parallels; the new barbarian comes with
the end of every civilization-Roman or Arabian-and conquers the
Mediterranean, where, after all, the scene takes place. At this point,
Nicole abandons herself to Tommy and reverts to a kind of feminine
principle, passive in the face of his dominant male energy that turns
the past order into a kind of anarchy. These details are embedded in
Fitzgerald's descriptive prose: "Moment by moment all that Dick has
taught [Nicole] fell away and she was ever nearer to what she had been
in the beginning, prototype of that obscure yielding up of swords that
was going on in the world about her. Tangled with love in the moon-
light she welcomed the anarchy of her lover" (p. 316).
The decline of Dick, coming as it does in Rome, involves a super-
imposition of one period of time upon another-the modern upon the
ancient. To be sure, the modern culture still has a way to go. The end
of the First World War marks the beginning of the rise of the new-
Caesars in the money-markets of Berlin, Paris, London, and New York.
That is why the battle of the Somme is "a love battle" for Dick, because
here the aristocracies of Europe went to war with themselves; the
helplessness of their postwar condition is documented by the novel
itself in the sanatorium at Switzerland and on the shores of the
Mediterranean, where they most clearly reveal their mental an
147
racinated condition. The power of Europe is passing to a new-mon

class such as the Warrens, who have come out of the industrialized
West, and a new breed of exploiters, who have come out of the back-
ward countries of the East. The fact that Tommy Barban has become a
stockbroker is to the point here, as is the fact that Mary North marries
an Asian, rich with new manganese money; the description of the
Shah of Persia's (Iran's) car (p. 138) also seems to reinforce this theme.
As the West (Europe and later America) loses its vitality, a new threat to
its barricades will come from the East: it happened with the fall of
Rome and it would happen again with the fall of London, Paris, and
eventually New York. The Paris scenes in the novel reveal the de-
cadence that abounds in that city; the Anglophile Baby Warren testifies
to the growing sterility of modern London (pp. 233-34); and Abe
North's brutal death in New York seems equally pointed.
The fate of both Abe North and Dick Diver indicates that
Fitzgerald did not limit his sense of decline to Europe, and he
America into his paradigm. In an earlier version of the n
North was named Abe Grant, and the links to (Abraham)
General Grant, and the North are obvious enough. When A
arrives in America, he is killed in a speakeasy brawl on the ev
Depression. Abe embodies the fate of the industrialized-c
North after the Civil War. The seed of its own destruction is at work in
this region, just as the seed of Abe's destruction is at work within him, a
theme that Fitzgerald documented in many other works.9 It is for
this reason that the Civil War was not a love battle but involved "mass
butchery." Two different cultures try to destroy each other because
they are mutually threatening and contradictory. A landed, aristocratic
South can never accommodate the industrialized, money-oriented
North. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain has
contrasted the technology of modern man with the feudalism of
medieval man; this contrast between the nineteenth and sixth centuries
in Europe was a contrast in time; in America the contrast is in space
and brings the North and South into inevitable conflict. While Spengler
had understandably less to say about America than Europe in his
discussion of western decline, Fitzgerald seems to have filled in the
pieces for himself. Grant looms large in Fitzgerald's imagination, and
parallels in historical function that of Napoleon. Certainly after the
passing of Napoleon in 1815 and Grant in 1865, Europe and America
would never be the same again. Their passing marks the rise of
finance-capitalism and the new technology, which transformed the
landscape. Grant was called to his destiny from Galena, Illinois, where
148
he had retired to run a country store before the Civil War. A

of the novel, Dick Diver has also retreated to the provinces, in
upstate New York, where "'he became entangled with a girl who
worked in a grocery store" (p. 334). Nicole loses trace of him in that
region, but "she liked to think his career was biding its time, again like
Grant's in Galena" (p. 334). The irony here is abundant. Grant was
called by destiny to a battle that would end with his own pathetic
demise during the scandals of his presidential administration that saw
the rise of an unscrupulous new money-class. Dick Diver was also called
to do battle for the Warrens, the embodiment of this new class, and he
experiences a similar demise. His call will never come again, because he
is no longer needed. Throughout the novel, he felt a desire to be
needed, and the need to be used. Romantic by nature, he anticipated a
higher destiny; the nature of the times diminished this calling. The
meaning of the novel cannot be divorced from this contrast between his
sense of expectation and his sense of fate.
III
Throughout Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver is referred to as a

spoiled-priest. The term is an interesting one, because the priest w
the original tribal leader, privy to the secrets of the universe, the ris
and flow of the life-giving rivers, and the nature of the gods tha
controlled man's destiny. The priest's function eventually gave way to
that of the king, the sanctuary taken over by the fort-palace. The batt
between kings and popes after the fall of Rome carried on this strugg
After the Renaissance, the kings themselves lost much of their power
to the landed aristocracy, which in turn was replaced by the bourgeois
in the eighteenth century. The triumph of the middle class was coinci
dental with the Enlightenment, which brought with it a new kind
reason (empiricism), an emphasis upon science, a new system of money
(capitalism), and finally a new way of controlling nature and its r
sources (technology). That Dick is both spoiled-priest and scientist (tha
is, psychiatrist) takes on special meaning in this context. The nove
opens on a "tan prayer rug" of a beach and closes with Dick standin
over the beach, making the sign of the cross. In between, Dick's attem
to minister to the souls of these deracinated people has been undercut
by their very secularity. Like Henry Adams, he should have been born
before and not after the eighteenth century; like T. S. Eliot, he senses
that man's mind has been transformed (Eliot's "Dissociation of Sensi-
bility") by Enlightenment values. Dick is too good for the world o
149
which he is a part at the same time as he allows himself to be u

that world, cooperates with his fate, and betrays his sacred,
commitment. Fitzgerald connected this theme with others
novel-for example, the theme of the father. When Dick Diver's
dies, he abandons his last sense of self-discipline and seduce
mary, whom he has looked upon as a kind of daughter (her firs
was entitled Daddy's Girl). This act-metaphorically a kind of
links him with Devereux Warren, who seduced Nicole and b
about her insanity. Dick betrays the idea of his father, who is a
and in Dick's mind the last of the Southern aristocrats-the last of a
now transformed order. Thus Dick betrays both his priestly-fa
functions as well as the order of the land that made those functions
sacred.
What Fitzgerald handled indirectly in Tender Is the Night, he han-
dled directly in Philippe, Count of Darkness, an unfinished novel that he
began writing after Tender, and which appeared in four installments of
Redbook magazine (October, 1934; June and August, 1935; and post-
humously, November, 1941). That Fitzgerald carried this novel in his
head for a long time is proved by two letters he wrote to Maxwell
Perkins in which he discusses the novel at length-the first dated in
April, 1935; the second, almost four years later, in January, 1939. In
the second letter, he wrote, "You will remember that the plan in the
beginning was tremendously ambitious-there was to have been Philippe
as a young man founding his fortunes-Philippe as a middle-aged man
participating in the Capetian founding of France as a nation-Philippe
as an old man and the consolidation of the feudal system. It was to have
covered a span of about sixty [sic] years from 880 A.D. to 950." What
we have here is Fitzgerald's attempt to describe Spengler's Faustian
man at the very beginning of his historical cycle, and in terms of the
birth, life, and death of one man, which was in keeping with Spengler's
idea of the organic, living nature of history.
When Philippe was a baby, his father, Count Charles, was killed by
a Northman, named Vizier, who took Philippe and his mother to Spain,
controlled by the Moors. This time and these events put Philippe at the
crossroads of history, after the fall of Rome but before the triumph of
Faustian man, who must take into consideration competing forces: the
Moors (and the suggestion of the Magian cycle), the marauding Huns
and Northmen, the Saracens, and the farmers or men of the land who
are now leaderless. Philippe's mother eventually falls in love with Vizier
and is content to stay in Spain (cf. Nicole and Tommy Barban at the
end of Tender); but Philippe returns to France, to the Valley of the
150
Loire, "at a point fifty miles west of the city of Tours," and c
land in the name of his father. Philippe consolidates the f
around him, establishes a primitive estate, and overcomes in tu
fiercest hordes from the north and the east," as well as the chur
the king. In the fourth installment, Philippe stumbles into
religious meeting-"the weekly Esbot of the Witch Cult"-an
finds the Duke of Maine, his current enemy, along with th
forces. Here Philippe realizes that religion is a more powerf
than the military, and is astounded to find that a high pri
Griselda, has power over life and death. Suddenly aware tha
tap evil power for his own uses, Philippe makes a pact with
"'All right-I'll use this cult-and maybe burn in hell forever
says Philippe, in a scene that has obvious parallels to Faust s
soul to the devil.10 Here Fitzgerald depicts the origin of Fausti
with his desire for infinite power and a sense of unlimited ma
Fitzgerald never completed his story of Philippe. When R
failed to pay him $3,000 per installment, he lost interest in th
and abandoned six other projected stories. What he turned t
was his Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon, a project that portr
tian man at the end of his historical cycle rather than (as in th
Philippe) at the beginning.
The opening of The Last Tycoon sets the meaning and tone
novel. Stahr has taken to the air, flying star-high, but on
wings. Stahr is depicted as the last of the modern princes
realm is not that of the landed estates but a Hollywood movie
the plane lands in Nashville, Tennessee, Manny Schwartz, on
lywood czar himself, commits suicide at the "shrine" of the He
His note to Stahr establishes a prophetic contrast between
romantic expectations and his final defeat. Andrew Jackson's H
age is described as a "shrine," because it was Jackson who fo
rise of the National Bank in the name of the common man. That
Manny Schwartz lays down his life at this "shrine" is appropriate,
it embodies the hopes, now dying or dead, of the million Man
Schwartzes who brought their dreams to America. (That Schwar
death reveals the power of blackness that haunts Faustian man
suggested by his name, which means "black." That his companio
this trip is named Wylie (wily?) White suggests a realm in wh
subterfuge and the lure of magic have a place-themes Fitzgera
created, if inchoately, in Count of Darkness.) As they drive through
countryside in a machine, Cecilia Brady reveals that she is totally cut
from the land, from the roots of her culture, and thinks back on
151
first sheep I ever remember seeing-hundreds of them, a

car drove suddenly into them on the back lot of the old
studio").11 Not only has she lost contact with the vitality of
the reality of nature has been replaced by what Hollywood
its back lots. The struggle for the control of such power ov
and the imagination will take the lives of both Stahr and hi
Pat Brady, Cecilia's father (once again Fitzgerald planned to
his novel the theme of the father).
Fitzgerald frames this power struggle against the global
the late thirties, and introduces a number of political types
that we have passed through the era of the landed estate to
the world city and the national state. At one point, a Da
named Agge is described as a proto-fascist (p. 43); later
reference to a Russian prince who has turned Red (p. 57)
the motion pictures that Stahr is producing involves the Ru
lution (p. 60). In the scene that Fitzgerald wrote before
Stahr, the last of the medieval princes, confronts Brimmer
munist labor organizer. During this confrontation, Stah
"exhausted" (p. 126), drinks too much, makes a fool of h
ends up shooting ping-pong balls at Brimmer, as if they
falling from the sky. Brimmer is surprised to see a giant of
so obviously ill, hoping the "system [will] last out his time"
this all? [Brimmer wonders.] This frail half-sick person hold
whole thing" (p. 127). This scene is the turning point in t
to this time, Stahr had been shown momentarily ill, but he
in control of himself and others. Here, for the first time, he loses
control of himself, and Brimmer triumphs over him. Power shifts from
the last of the princes to the modern totalitarian. Stahr's death in a
plane crash comes when he, like Dick Diver, is defeated, ill of soul and
corrupted in character, having contracted for Brady's murder. The
plane that crashes to earth at the end contrasts with the plane at the
beginning that carries Stahr through the heavens. When Stahr falls
from orbit, there passes what Fitzgerald called "a lavish, romantic past
that perhaps will not come again into our time" (p. 141). Monroe Stahr
was the end product of the Faustian state of mind, that romantic
disposition that refused to admit limits, that soared into the stars with
the splendor of Gothic cathedrals. Like a Jay Gatsby, Stahr had come a
long way: he had "managed to climb out of a thousand years of Jewry
into the late eighteenth century. He could not bear to see it melt
away-he cherished the parvenu's passionate loyalty to an imaginary
past" (p. 118). The key words here are "eighteenth century"-that
152
moment when medieval man gave way to modern, when

tryside gave way to the city, the prince to the banker (cf.
use of Jackson and his attack on the bank), and feudalis
industrialism (cf. the references of Lincoln who, like Abe N
bodies the Civil War as a watershed of history). The Last Ty
pates destruction throughout (in one scene grunion rush
where they are put in a pail by a black beachcomber wh
Emerson). Much in Fitzgerald's draft of this novel lies u
including the point of view, which involves seeing Stah
romantically impressionistic view of Cecilia Brady, just
was seen from Rosemary's point of view. It is appropriate t
writing to us from a TB sanatorium, just as much of th
Tender Is the Night involved a mental asylum in Switzerland
of both novels suggest a novel like Mann's The Magic M
sanatorium itself embodying the meaning of the culture in
novel takes place. In this contetxt, it also seems most appro
one of the books Kathleen Moore was reading in this no
ler's Decline of the West (p. 91).
IV
I began this essay with an argument that placed Fitzgerald's later

fiction, including The Great Gatsby, in a context that profits from an
understanding of Spengler's Decline of the West. I should like to con-
clude this essay with a warning about the dangers of over-emphasizing
such a context. Spengler provided Fitzgerald with a convenient frame
of historical reference, a frame that seemed to coincide with
Fitzgerald's own sense of personal experience. I do not believe that
Fitzgerald wrote these novels primarily to document Spengler's thesis,
that Fitzgerald was writing novels of ideas. He began his stories with a
sense of self rather than a sense of history, and from his earliest to his
last work Fitzgerald was obsessed with the idea of self, especially th
need to create oneself in the light of romantic possibility. In his earlies
work, he distinguished between the "egoist" and the "personage." The
egoist relies on personality, which depends on appearance, groom-
ing, gesture-the surface aspects of self. Personage moves be-
yond personality to a more essential form of self-self as process, an
accumulated sense of what one can become. Over and over,
Ftitzgerald's characters experience a conflict between their sen
and historical possibility; what they try to create is often frus
the cruel reality of an unaccommodating age.
153
What Amory Blaine of This Side of Paradise created was too go

for his times, and he closes the novel with a cry of despair: "'I kn
myself,' he cried, 'but that is all.' "12 Anthony Patch finds it imposs
to create the romantic self in the face of our Puritan legacy (Ad
Patch, his grandfather, is the embodiment of Puritanism, that religi
philosophy that controlled the land and its wealth in the name of Go
and Work, and then turned back upon itself and controlled the ap
tites and passions with the same severity. Like most of Fitzgeral
money lords, he made his fortune after the Civil War, after which h
encouraged Prohibition, even naming his grandson after the re-
former, Anthony Comstock). Jay Gatsby "sprang from his Plato
conception of himself' (p. 65) and creates himself on two levels-t
of personality, which Nick defines as "an unbroken series of successf
gestures" (p. 1), and of personage, which involves his sense of a futur
that includes being like a Dan Cody and of having Daisy Fay. Wh
Gatsby creates on the level of personality (the pink suits, the gold shi
the silver ties, the chrome-swollen car, the clipped speech, the form
intensity of manner, the gracefulness of the ballroom floor) contras
violently with what he creates on the level of personage (the Oxf
claim, the ignorance that locates San Francisco in the Midwest, t
claim to big game hunting in Paris, Venice, and Rome, and the im
of the established New York money-man). Gatsby never understan
why Daisy is both attracted and repulsed by his personality; why she
offended from the beginning by his parties ("The rest offended h
and inarguably, because it wasn't a gesture but an emotion. She w
appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented 'place' that Broadway h
begotten upon a Long Island fishing village," p. 71). Only Gatsby
intensity of purpose holds together the contradictions in his creation
of self-holds them together, that is, until Tom reveals to Daisy t
source of Gatsby's money. Gatsby brings a frontier paradigm to
urban world and never reconciles the different demands on the self.
Dick Diver also has an intense sense of self, which gives him
"presence" in a crowd, attracts people to him, and fulfills his desire to
be needed. And Monroe Stahr has similar qualities: is a "force" in any
group, has intelligence which goes to the heart of problems, and is
decisive and courageous.
All of Fitzgerald's characters start off with romantic expectations,
with a heightened sense of self that eventually comes into conflict with
the outside world. Amory Blaine gives way to postwar cynicism; An-
thony Patch to a sense of drift in a work-a-day world; Jay Gatsby to a
world of established money that he never understands; Dick Diver to
154
an emotionally sick and sterile society; and Monroe Stahr to a m

alistic world that cannot accommodate the fated idealist and
exhausts him. Like Monroe Stahr, Fitzgerald's characters create
of the lavish and heighten it further through the vitality of im
tion. But it is imagination that is severed from everything but
vision. Alone, detached, aloof, their dreams are exhaustible because
they feed on themselves and are cut off from the resources of a vital
culture. In Fitzgerald's fiction, a sense of romantic possibility plays itself
out in a cultural wasteland. Fitzgerald's sense of opportunity warred
with a Spenglerian sense of destiny; and if Fitzgerald found in Speng-
ler a historian whose idea of the modern augmented his own, as I
believe he did, he also brought to Spengler a sense of romantic
possibility that challenged these historical assumptions at the outset.
1 The Letters ofF. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1963), p. 289.
2 See, for example, Robert Sklar, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocobn (New
York, 1967), p. 135. The first critic to call attention to Fitzgerald's debt to
Spengler was R. W. Stallman, "Gatsby and the Hole in Time," Modern Fiction
Studies, I (November, 1955), pp. 2-16. In my F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of
Fiction (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1966), I discuss
Spenglerian motifs in Fitzgerald's fiction from The Great Gatsby on; see pp.
30-36, 137, 146, 152, and 163.
3 For the nine articles on Spengler between 1922 and 1924 see the Interna-
tional Index to Periodicals and Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. The Stewart
essay appeared in Volume 108 of the Century magazine Uuly, 1924), 589-98.
Dick Diver's interest in the Century can be found in Tender Is the Night (Scribner
Library edition, p. 211). That The Decline of the West was of general interest in
the twenties is proved by Kenneth Burke's translation of the Introduction in
three installments in Dial (November, 1924 to June, 1925). It would also be
hard to believe that Fitzgerald did not pick up a good deal about Spengler from
his discussions with Americans like Edmund Wilson and from his contact with
European intellectuals while he was on the Continent writing The Great Gatsby.
In any event, if Fitzgerald did not get his introduction to Spengler firsthand, he
had ample opportunity to get it secondhand, and it is Fitzgerald himself who
connects Gatsby with Spengler.
4 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles F. Atkins, Volume
1 (New York, 1926), Volume II (New York, 1928). The present quote is from I,
107.
The Great Gatsby (New York, 1925), p. 15. Page references are to the
Scribner Library edition.
6F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction, pp. 91-96.
7 Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris (New York: Coward-McCann,
1963), p. 191.
8 Tender Is the Night (New York, 1934), p. 40. Page references are to the
155
9Fitzgerald documented his belief in an America doomed by a

materialism even in his early works, especially in such short stories as "
Day" (1920), "The Ice Palace" (1920), and "The Diamond as Big as th
(1922). In "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," for example, the Washi
family (the significance of the name is obvious) enter into a "long epic
from 1870 to 1900. By the end of the story, they have betrayed their leg
turned their world into "a black waste."
"0 In F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Craft of Fiction (1966), I discuss the influence
of Spengler on these stories (see especially p. 152). There I indicate that
Fitzgerald might have intended these stories to point also to modern history,
particularly the rise of the national states of Germany and Russia, and the need
to respond to power with power. In "Fitzgerald's Two Unfinished Novels: The
Count and the Tycoon in Spenglerian Perspective," Contemporary Literature, 15
(Spring, 1974), 238-56, Kermit W. Moyer fails to acknowledge my discussion
of Spengler at the same time as he challenges my attempt to link these stories
with modern politics. I have no desire to insist on my political argument,
prompted in part by the editors of Redbook, who pointed the stories in exactly
that direction through the captions used in both 1935 and 1941 installments.
Certainly Fitzgerald could not have foreseen the need of Russia and America to
join in overcoming Hitler, as I stated, since the last story was written long
before its publication in 1941. But I still cannot help thinking that Fitzgerald
would have been fascinated by the rise of the national state which had replaced
the landed estate and given birth to a new source of totalitarian power. After
all, Spengler had anticipated such a phenomenon and, as we shall see,
Fitzgerald was toying with these ideas in The Last Tycoon. In this context, it is
curious that Fitzgerald once thought of sending Dick Diver to Russia instead of
America at the end of Tender Is the Night. That Faustian man was born in the
dawn of feudal power and died in the sunset of totalitarian power is a political
idea that was not beyond Fitzgerald's understanding.
I" The Last Tycoon (New York, 1941), p. 9. Page references are to the
12 This Side of Paradise (New York, 1920), p. 288. Page references are to the
156

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F.

Scott Fitzgerald and Romantic Destiny

In a letter to Maxwell Perkins, F. Scott Fitzgerald tells us of his

other essays made Spengler's basic ideas available to English reade

intellect, Destiny and Causality are to one another as the country-side

now understands the nature of Gatsby's credentials, turns b

neous characters that ... interpenetrate without end and with

fifths of the entire white race," he argued, "is concentrated on

In the climax of the novel-the scene in which Tom confronts and

racinated condition. The power of Europe is passing to a new-mon

he had retired to run a country store before the Civil War. A

Throughout Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver is referred to as a

which he is a part at the same time as he allows himself to be u

first sheep I ever remember seeing-hundreds of them, a

moment when medieval man gave way to modern, when

I began this essay with an argument that placed Fitzgerald's later

What Amory Blaine of This Side of Paradise created was too go

an emotionally sick and sterile society; and Monroe Stahr to a m

9Fitzgerald documented his belief in an America doomed by a

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