Book Review: Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes, Essays by Scott Donaldson (2022)

Paperback cover of Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes, essays by Scott Donaldson, 2022. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Scott Donaldson was a literary biographer, and one of the most astute biographers of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Donaldson wrote an excellent biography of Fitzgerald, Fool for Love, a book about the contentious relationship between Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald, and Donaldson’s additional essays about those two authors were collected in Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days.  

Donaldson passed away in 2020, at the age of 92, and his final book was published in 2022, Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes. A collection of essays, the book stands as a tribute to Donaldson’s probing intelligence, and his lifelong study of Fitzgerald.  

The key essay, comprising almost half of the book, is a close reading of Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender Is the Night. It’s a marvelous essay, and Donaldson makes a powerful argument for the novel standing aside The Great Gatsby as Fitzgerald’s twin achievements.  

Donaldson writes of Dick Diver, the protagonist of Tender, “He needs the admiration—the love—of others to validate his existence, and he exerts his charm in order to earn it. It is the source of his extraordinary appeal, and his greatest weakness.” (p.18) Donaldson might well be writing about Fitzgerald himself.  

Class and status were always important themes in Fitzgerald’s writing, and as Donaldson writes, “Fitzgerald was convinced that something was terribly wrong at the very heart of Western civilization.” Fitzgerald was influenced by the German author Oswald Spengler’s book Decline of the West, and Donaldson writes, “we should think as well of the statement Fitzgerald is making in this novel, as in The Great Gatsby, about a culture in which the very rich are empowered to buy and discard other people at will.” (p.47)  

In closing, Donaldson writes about Tender Is the Night, “Rereading the novel recently for perhaps the tenth time...I was carried away by sorrow and sympathy for Fitzgerald’s leading character.” (p.61)  

There’s a brief essay on “Gatsby and the American Dream,” a beautifully constructed piece that illuminates Fitzgerald’s masterful novel. Donaldson makes connections that hadn’t occurred to me. Gatsby has the famous line “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can.” Donaldson writes, “Gatsby will discover that he cannot, while it is Tom who manages to turn back the pages of the calendar. ‘I’ve heard of making a garage out of a stable,’ Tom tells Gatsby, ‘but I’m the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage.’” (p.71) I had never thought of this as being a victory for Tom, and a contrast with Gatsby, who cannot quite manage to perfectly recapture the glory of his romance with Daisy. 

There’s another small connection that I never made until I read this essay on Gatsby. Donaldson quotes Gatsby saying to Nick, “My house looks well, doesn’t it?” Then a page later, Donaldson reminds us that Henry Gatz brings out a battered photograph of his son’s mansion and shows it to Nick. The old man says to Nick, “It’s a very pretty picture. It shows up well.” Both father and son use the same word “well” when speaking of the house. Maybe it’s meaningless, but maybe Fitzgerald deliberately used “well” in order to show a connection between the way both father and son talk about the house.  

The chapter “Summer of ‘24: Zelda’s Affair,” was previously published in Donaldson’s excellent 2015 book The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography. It’s a treatment of how 14 different biographers, Donaldson included, treated the relationship between Zelda Fitzgerald and Edouard Jozan, a French aviator with whom she had a flirtation during the summer of 1924. Was this merely a flirtation, or was it something more serious? Well, there are 14 different answers to that question. Donaldson points out some interesting differences: “A majority of the female biographers...tend to deny that the affair actually took place and assume that the crisis it generated was more or less fabricated by the Fitzgeralds. Most of the male biographers...follow the lead of Mizener and Turnbull in believing that Zelda and Jozan’s relationship was indeed adulterous.” (p.78)  

Donaldson astutely writes of the differing accounts of the relationship, “It can safely be said that the single trait all biographers share is a certain arrogance as they undertake to understand how it must have been, say, for Zelda and Scott and Edouard a long time ago...This illustrates what has often been remarked: that every biography conceals within itself the autobiography of its author.” (p.91) 

Donaldson doesn’t let himself off the hook, as he writes: “Let my own case serve as an example. In writing Fool for Love, I emphasized an angle that others tended to ignore: the way in which not knowing what his wife had done exacerbated Fitzgerald’s feelings of jealousy...you might well conclude that at least as much as F. Scott Fitzgerald, I was somewhat troubled by epistemological uncertainties in these our lives and shared his tendency to harbor and cultivate jealousy. You might even be right.” (p.91-2)  

In the essay “Scott and Dottie” Donaldson examines the rumor that Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker may have had a relationship. The claim comes from Lillian Hellman’s memoir, written after both Fitzgerald and Parker were dead. And Lillian Hellman is someone who would fall under the category of an “unreliable narrator” to put it lightly. As Donaldson writes, “A biographer wants to come as close as possible to the truth, and that depends in good part on whether one can trust Hellman as a source. The quick and easy answer to that question is no.” (p.108)  

Donaldson does an excellent job of detailing Fitzgerald and Parker’s friendship. One of the tidbits I gleaned from this essay was the role that Fitzgerald played in offering encouragement to the author John O’Hara. Fitzgerald spent an evening with Parker and O’Hara in New York City in early 1934, and O’Hara was ready to throw in the towel on his first novel, but Fitzgerald told him to stick with it. The novel was Appointment in Samarra, a superb novel that launched O’Hara’s career. At his finest, Fitzgerald had a gift for inspiring other authors, and he had a knack for treating younger authors with respect, even if they weren’t established yet. The connection with O’Hara intrigued me because of the similarities in O’Hara’s style and subject matter to Fitzgerald’s own writing.  

Donaldson mentions Fitzgerald’s flirtation with communism during the 1930’s and gives us the fascinating detail that “Fitzgerald briefly considered founding a radical magazine of his own.” (p.107) I love thinking about what that magazine would have been like. “The sunset over Antibes exploded into a rich fury of crimson and purple. Gerald and Sara were serving smart after-dinner drinks of port and sherry. I put down my copy of Spengler, turned to Ernest and said, ‘Do you think the inevitable collapse of the morally bankrupt capitalist system will lead us towards socialism or communism?’ Ernest grunted, took a drink, and replied, ‘It doesn’t matter much one way or the other.’”  

Fitzgerald compared communism to church, writing of Parker in a 1940 letter “Dotty has embraced {that} church and reads her office faithfully every day.” (p.110) This was exactly part of why communism was unappealing to Fitzgerald. He had rejected the Catholic faith he was raised in by his early 20’s, and he remained a skeptic and a firm individualist, never one to join the crowd in politics or religion.  

Discussing his friend Edmund Wilson’s attachment to Communism, Fitzgerald wrote: “A decision to adopt Communism definitely, no matter how good for the soul, must of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.” (January 19, 1933, letter to Maxwell Perkins. Dear Scott/Dear Max, p.177) Fitzgerald had tasted the “intellectual pleasures of the world” and he had no room for bland Communism on his plate.  

The final essay in the book focuses on Fitzgerald’s autobiographical writings, and is a fitting finale to Donaldson’s fine career, much of it focused on illuminating the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald.