Book Review: The Far Side of Paradise, a Biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Arthur Mizener (1951, updated edition 1965)

The dust jacket of The Far Side of Paradise, by Arthur Mizener, 1951.

F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940. He feared that he was a forgotten writer, and in many respects he was. He hadn’t published a novel since 1934. The New York Times obituary of Fitzgerald said “Roughly, his own career began and ended with the 1920’s.” By the time the first biography of Fitzgerald appeared in 1951, The Far Side of Paradise, by Arthur Mizener, Fitzgerald was on his way to the pantheon of literary greats. The Armed Services edition of The Great Gatsby, distributed to soldiers in World War II, greatly increased the readership of Fitzgerald’s classic novel. The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Crack-Up, both published in 1945, increased interest in Fitzgerald as well.  

The Far Side of Paradise is a superb book, and I was impressed by Mizener’s handling of the material. As I was reading The Far Side of Paradise, I would think to myself “Oh, yes, I know that quote from his letters.” But it’s easy for me to know all of this, all these many years later, as I sit in my office among my shelves of many books by and about F. Scott Fitzgerald. But Mizener was the first person putting this material together, an impressive feat. Almost 75 years after it was first published, The Far Side of Paradise is an intelligent, penetrating look at Fitzgerald’s life. 

Mizener was a perceptive critic of Fitzgerald’s writing. He writes in the Introduction “Fitzgerald’s work is full of precisely observed external detail, for which he had a formidable memory, and it is this gift of observation which has led to the superficial opinion that he was nothing but a chronicler of the social surface, particularly of the twenties. Yet, for all its concrete external detail, his work is very personal.” (p.xiii) I think this is why Fitzgerald’s work has been so durable. He was capturing his own times as they happened, and yet he was also able to make his writing timeless, so it speaks to us, more than a century later.  

Mizener also does an excellent job of detailing Fitzgerald’s personality. His writing about Fitzgerald’s life still feels fresh. Mizener threads the needle of treating Fitzgerald sympathetically, but still detailing Fitzgerald’s behavior, which could be reckless and destructive when he was drunk.  

Because Fitzgerald died so young, there were still plenty of his contemporaries around when Mizener was doing his research and writing. Henry Dan Piper was also researching Fitzgerald at this same time, and Piper graciously shared his papers with Mizener. (Piper’s own book F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Guide, was published in 1965.) One of the best two-sentence summaries of Fitzgerald’s complicated personality came from a man who was at Officer’s Training School with Fitzgerald. He said of Fitzgerald, “he was eager to be liked by his companions and almost vain in seeking praise. At the same time he was unwilling to conform to the various patterns of dullness and majority opinion which would insure popularity.” (p.23) This captures Fitzgerald so well—he wanted to be liked, but he was far too intelligent to be a conformist.  

Mizener perfectly describes the duality of Fitzgerald’s nature: “He writes like some kind of impassioned and naive anthropologist, recording with minuteness and affection and at the same time with an alien’s remoteness and astonishment.” (p.99) As Nick Carraway tells us in The Great Gatsby, “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.” (p.40) I suspect that was often how Fitzgerald himself felt.  

Scott and Zelda moved to France in 1924, hoping to escape their chaotic life in Great Neck, Long Island. Instead, they merely found more chaos and disorder. One night, the Fitzgeralds ran into Isadora Duncan, the ballerina. Isadora was flirting too much with Scott, so Zelda wordlessly threw herself down a flight of stone steps. She was unhurt. The Fitzgeralds then drove off, but they turned onto railroad tracks. They slept in their car and were saved from injury the next morning when a farmer woke them up, shortly before the trolley came along and destroyed their car. (p.188) What can you do with two people who were so bent on self-destruction?  

Mizener gives the reader glimpses of the charm and charisma that Scott exerted in person. He entertained people with card tricks; he created fun and intricate games for children. Robert Benchley wrote to Scott: “Anyone who gets down on his stomach and crawls all afternoon around a yard playing tin-soldiers with a lot of kids, shouldn’t be made unhappy. I cry a little every time I think of you that afternoon in Antibes.” (p.186) What a beautiful and touching letter.  

The Fitzgeralds were living outside of Baltimore in June 1933 when Zelda accidentally started a fire on the top floor of the house they were renting. No one was hurt, and the damage was contained to the top floor. Mizener writes of Scott: “He would never have the house repaired because, he said, he could not endure the noise, and the macabre disorder of the place with its burnt-out and blackened upper story was a kind of symbol of the increased disarray of his own life.” (p.230)  

Zelda’s mental breakdowns in 1930, 1932, and 1934 strained their marriage and their finances. After her third breakdown, Scott had to come to the realization that Zelda would never be cured. They saw each other occasionally, but they never lived together again. Scott’s sense of duty meant that he would not divorce Zelda. Nora Flynn observed Scott and Zelda at a party in the mid 1930’s. “They had loved each other. Now it was dead. But he still loved that love and hated to give it up—that was what he continued to nurse and cherish.” (p.264) Flynn’s observation reminds me of the end of Fitzgerald’s 1922 short story “Winter Dreams,” where Dexter Green says “Long ago...long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.” 

Scott went to Hollywood in 1937, to work for MGM as a screenwriter. Mizener writes of the short stories Fitzgerald wrote in Hollywood, “These stories, in spite of their brevity—perhaps even because of it—are purer in motive and more directly and delicately written than any of Fitzgerald’s earlier stories.” (p.286)  

There are shortcomings of the 1951 text of The Far Side of Paradise. Mizener doesn’t cover Zelda’s death—even in the updated 1965 edition, Mizener gets the year of her death wrong—it was 1948, not 1947. In the Foreword to the updated 1965 edition of The Far Side of Paradise, Mizener explains that friends of Sheilah Graham had told him that she did not want to discuss her relationship with Fitzgerald, so he tactfully omitted her name from the original text. Mizener did give the reader hints that Scott had a significant relationship in Hollywood at the end of his life. After Graham published her 1958 memoir Beloved Infidel, which discussed her relationship with Fitzgerald, Mizener re-wrote the last two chapters of The Far Side of Paradise to include Graham’s relationship with Fitzgerald.  

There are many excellent biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, including Scott Donaldson’s Fool for Love, and Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. The Far Side of Paradise remains a key biography of Fitzgerald, and anyone who writes about Fitzgerald’s life owes Arthur Mizener a debt of gratitude.  

The Far Side of Paradise ends beautifully. “He died believing he had failed. Now we know better, and it is one of the final ironies of Fitzgerald’s career that he did not live to enjoy our knowledge...now, a decade after Fitzgerald’s death, more of his work is in print than at any time during his life, and his reputation as a serious novelist is secure.” (p.300) Mizener’s ending needs no revision—the only change would be to update that it has now been almost 85 years since Fitzgerald’s death.