Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Solomon continues his series of reviews of classic novels, the most recent of which was his take on The Outsider.

by Solomon Wakeling

Before World War II, before the Holocaust, before racism became a fatal flaw in an author, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote an unflattering portrait of Jewish New Yorkers, in his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned , first published in 1922. "Two young Jewish men passed him, talking in loud voices and craning their necks here and there in fatuous supercilious glances." writes Fitzgerald, "They were dressed in suits of the exaggerated tightness then semi-fashionable; their turned over collars were notched at the Adam's apple; they wore gray spats and carried gray gloves on their cane handles." Not to mention the negative portrayal of Jewish film vice-president, Joseph Bloeckman. Who would dare to write with such casual disregard to the sensitivities of Jewish people now? Sheila Graham, in The Real F.Scott Fitzgerald is careful about how she describes Scott's alleged anti-semitism. She says he was no anti-semite but that to him they were not the "beautiful people".

Well before the civil rights movement in America, Fitzgerald wrote, with complete lack of self-consciousness, a fantasy of a life of luxury, including the ownership of Negro slaves, in his short story The Diamond as big as the Ritz , 1922. Whilst Fitzgerald is billed as the voice of the "Jazz age", black musicians scarcely figure in any serious way in his work. A group of black jazz musicians in his short story The Offshore Pirate , 1920, are painted with an almost comic effect in mind. They are a novelty, part of the gallery, not centre-stage. Fitzgerald is less consciously racist than subconsciously so, accepting the conventions of his time uncritically.

Something happened to him between The Beautiful and Damned and his final novel The Last Tycoon which profoundly altered his consciousness. His two transition novels are The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night . Gatsby features a racist character, Tom Buchanan, sketched in an unsympathetic light. He tells the narrator, Nick Carraway, about a book he is reading, The Rise of the Colored Empires and about his belief that the white race needed to dominate the other races or be "utterly submerged". Rather than showing moral horror at this revelation, Carraway seems bored by it, as he is bored by many things. "There was something pathetic in his concentration," narrates Carraway,"as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more." He is saved from having to make a moral comment on Tom's statements by a ringing telephone; A convenient distraction. Gatsby is not totally free of racism, however, with constant references to the "nostrils" and "tiny eyes" of Jewish character, Mr. Wolfshiem. Fitzgerald also ridicules Wolfshiem for pronouncing "connection" as "gonnegtion".

In the 1934 novel, Tender is the Night , Fitzgerald wrote in all seriousness "No mature Aryan is able to profit from an humiliation; when he forgives it has become part of his life, he has identified himself with the thing which has humiliated him - an upshot that in this case was impossible." Aryan? What on earth is he doing with such a phrase? Constant references to race are made in the novel, not all of it negative. Negro characters have a special place in the novel. Marital usurper Tommy Barban is described as being tanned without achieving the "blue beauty" of Negroes. Alcoholic Abe North, is described as starting a "race riot" in Montmarte. Later on, a dead Negro is found in actress Rosemary Hoyt's bed. The protagonist, Dick Diver, vulgarly describes the dead body as "nigger scrap", when trying to calm his sensitive wife. He sees black people as of less worth than other people but there is every reason to believe Fitzgerald took a more sensitive view. He is conscious of racial segregation, noting that a black character is denied entrance to a bar, with the desolate phrase "I'm sorry. I can't allow it."

Then this, in 1940, from his short story Dearly Beloved : "O my Beauty Boy - reading Plato so do divine! O dark, oh fair, colored golf champion of Chicago..'" Fitzgerald wrote a short lullaby for a Negro golf champion, written prose that is more like poetry. By 1940 Scott was writing lovingly about black characters and Jews. Whilst Dearly Beloved uses the offensive phrase "boy" in regards to a black character, it comes across like a poetic refrain. In his last unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon , 1941, he paints a sympathetic portrait of Jews in Hollywood. The novel features an educated black character that the protagonist, Monroe Stahr, meets on the beach and who tells him that he doesn't see hollywood films because they are beneath him. Monroe is described at one point as having "worked so long with Jews so as not to believe legends that they were tight with money".

In judging Fitzgerald, it is necessary to look at his work in its entirety, acknowledging that his later virtues for the most part make up for his earlier vices. Racism may be wrong but racists are still people, complex and changeable. Some prejudices may be unclear to the casual observer, forming part of the common ethos of the time. Fitzgerald's work shows a late-blooming but rising awareness of race issues and the injustice perpetrated by racial stereotypes. If we are not judged by our most mature moments, by what should we be judged?