Book Review: Taking Things Hard: The Trials of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Robert R. Garnett (2023)

Taking Things Hard: The Trials of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Robert R. Garnett, 2023

Robert R. Garnett’s 2023 biography Taking Things Hard: The Trials of F. Scott Fitzgerald begins with the oft-repeated Edmund Wilson line that Fitzgerald had “a gift for expression without many ideas to express.” Garnett seems to agree with Wilson, as he writes “For Fitzgerald, the emotions of love and loss were far more compelling than any idea.” (p.vii) This is an auspicious beginning to the book for those of us who believe that Fitzgerald had, in fact, numerous ideas to express in his writings.  

As brilliant as Edmund Wilson may have been, his insight into his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald was limited at best. Wilson thought Fitzgerald’s play The Vegetable was “no doubt, the best American comedy ever written.” (p.75) I have a soft spot for The Vegetable, but I wouldn’t even agree with Wilson. Wilson always underestimated Fitzgerald’s intelligence. After Fitzgerald’s death, Wilson changed “orgastic” on the last page of The Great Gatsby to “orgiastic” because he thought Fitzgerald had the wrong word. Fitzgerald didn’t.  

I’m always going to stick up for Fitzgerald’s intelligence in part because after I read “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” in an American Literature class, the professor said, “Fitzgerald writes like an angel, but he’s not writing about anything, is he?” I disagreed and said I thought Fitzgerald understood class in a way few other American writers did.  

Garnett’s thesis is that Fitzgerald’s fiction sprang from his own feelings and emotions, rather than intellectualized ideas about class, status, etc. I’d generally agree with this, and I would suspect that most authors of fiction operate in a similar way. But I’d also argue that Fitzgerald’s writings have a lot to tell us about class, status, money, love, and other topics as well.  

In Taking Things Hard, Garnett offers a not-quite cradle-to-grave biography of Fitzgerald (he skips over Fitzgerald’s childhood, starting the narrative when Scott is at Princeton) focusing on interpretations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and how these stories intersected with Fitzgerald’s personal life.  

Garnett focuses most of his attention on The Great Gatsby but doesn’t offer much commentary on Fitzgerald’s other novels, which seems like a missed opportunity. Garnett mixes interpretations of famous short stories like “The Ice Palace” with more obscure stories like “O Russet Witch!” and “The Bowl.” Garnett ably demonstrates how Fitzgerald used his real-life experiences as jumping off points for his fiction. Of particular note is the short story “’The Sensible Thing,’” which parallels Scott and Zelda’s engagement, break-up, and then re-engagement. Garnett offers an excellent interpretation of “’The Sensible Thing’” but he doesn’t quote the closing line, which has always felt to me like a preview of Jay Gatsby: “There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.”  

Of Fitzgerald as a father, Garnett writes “...not until ‘Babylon Revisited,’ written later that year, {1930} does a sentiment of parental love or responsibility for a child appear with any force in his fiction.” (p.196) I’d argue that “Outside the Cabinet-Maker's” from 1928 might be Fitzgerald’s first short story about parental love and responsibility. It’s a charming little story of a father making up a fairy tale to entertain his daughter while the mother runs an errand. The story also fits in with Garnett’s idea that it became harder and harder for Fitzgerald to regain an intensity of feeling as his life went on. Towards the end of the story, the narration informs us: “The man was old enough to know that he would look back to that time—the tranquil street and the pleasant weather and the mystery playing before the child’s eyes, mystery which he had created, but whose luster and texture he could never see or touch any more himself.” (Afternoon of an Author, p.140) Fitzgerald was only 32 years old when “Outside the Cabinet-Maker's” was published, and it’s sad to think of him as already being past the age at which he could access the magic and mystery of fiction.  

Garnett focuses a lot on 1935, one of the very worst years of Fitzgerald’s life. Fitzgerald spent much of the year in North Carolina, and at the beginning of the year, Fitzgerald’s drinking was under control, for once. “Everything seemed so strange, that month, because I drank nothing and saw everything and everybody with such clarity...The entire soberness was something new for me.” (p.221) Like so much about Fitzgerald’s life, that quote is so beautiful and sad and heart-wrenching. That quote comes from Laura Guthrie’s journal, written during the summer of 1935, when she worked as Fitzgerald’s secretary and companion.  

Guthrie’s journal is a fascinating document, and it resides among the Fitzgerald Collection at Princeton University. Several scholars have utilized Guthrie’s journal, including Scott Donaldson for his excellent Fitzgerald biography Fool for Love, but Garnett has made the most use of the journal as he takes us through Fitzgerald’s chaotic, alcohol-drenched summer of 1935. Garnett doesn’t seem to know that Laura Guthrie’s journal was previously published, in an edited form, as “Tales Beyond the Jazz Age: A Summer with F. Scott Fitzgerald” in the December 1964 issue of Esquire magazine.  

Garnett doesn’t care for Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” essays, finding them “littered with the cliches and tired metaphors of slipshod writing.” He also complains “Some facts are simply falsified.” (p.256-7) Well, yes, Fitzgerald was not 100 percent honest in the “Crack-Up” essays. What’s so remarkable about the “Crack-Up” essays is how big a stir they caused in 1936, and how relatively little they reveal. In the essays, Fitzgerald doesn’t mention what we now know were the two most difficult things in his private life: his own alcoholism and his wife Zelda’s mental illness.  

Garnett has a soft spot for Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby stories, short comic sketches that he wrote for Esquire during the last year of his life. The Pat Hobby stories are not Fitzgerald’s finest work, but they kept him afloat financially and kept his name in print. The Pat Hobby stories are undervalued in part because of their broad humor, and because they are so clearly not “serious” literature. But the Pat Hobby stories make no claim to be “serious literature,” and they can be enjoyed for what they are, a writer simply having fun and exercising his muscles while he trains for a larger competition.  

Fitzgerald fans will no doubt come away from reading Taking Things Hard with a renewed appreciation for Fitzgerald’s skill with language and emotion, which he combined so movingly in his finest work.