The faith of F. Scott Fiztgerald

A century ago, we went all in. Finally called to action, U.S. forces came to the aid of struggling Allied forces who seemed able to do nothing more than make those muddy trenches into a vile and bloody board game. What dragged us in was Germany's unrelenting commitment to submarine warfare. Even neutral nations--President Wilson did not want us in--couldn't be safe.

And then there was that missive Germany sent to our southern neighbors, begging complicity. The Kaiser wanted Mexico to take out as many Yankees as they could. When President Wilson got wind of that sorcery, he pointed the military toward the killing fields of France. 

Who would have believed, a hundred years ago, that after November of 1918, that we would stumble into a decade of moral laxity like none other in this country's short history. What followed were "the Roaring Twenties," when, preachers in my people's history might well have said "all hell broke loose,"  had they dared to use the world hell that loosely. Decadence. Worldliness. Flappers. Speakeasys--an exuberant, flamboyant culture danced it way through America's middle-class, white culture. 

No single writer better captured that era than Minnesota's own F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose Great Gatsby is, right now, jammed somewhere in a ten million school backpacks, I'm sure. Fitzgerald knew very well what he might have considered decadence, was a part of it both here and in Europe. He partied hard, and the books he wrote captured what scores of cultural observers might have considered the end of American puritanism.

Mike St. Thomas, writing in Commonweal, reviews a new biography, David S. Brown's  Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and commends Brown for the angle he takes, a specific religious angle.  "A historian by trade, Brown argues for Fitzgerald’s status as a cultural critic who charted the decline of America from the high ideals of the nineteenth century to the “soulless materialism” of the twentieth." Borne along within that decline, Mr. St. Thomas would include the deterioration of the authority of the church during the era.

Fitzgerald dropped his boyhood Irish Catholicism in 1917, or so the story goes. But Mr. Brown insists that it never really left him, although he may well have left it. "The moral urgency found in [Fitzgerald's] writing," St. Thomas claims, "bears witness to the faith from which he could never quite escape."

People who love Flannery O'Connor often think of her and her world as being "God-haunted," and it is. Marvelous miracles arise from the mystic red soil of the American South. But if Mr. St. Thomas is right, then Brown would have us believe--and I have no trouble doing it--that Fitzgerald, despite his claims to have left the faith, was himself "God-haunted."

Somewhere in the book of Proverbs, the Bible makes a radical claim that will never disappear from wherever it's inscribed in the synapses of my brain: "Train up a child in the way he [or she] should go, and he [or she] will never depart from it." Some claim the Jesuit boast about children is a rehash: "Give me the child for his first seven years, and I’ll give you the man." That's what I read here.

And then there's this: "Believe the tale, not the teller," an old maxim of literary studies that wants readers to pay primary attention to what the story says about the writer, because the story she writes is always a more telling indicator of what she believes than what she might tell people she believes--the story's the thing in which to catch the conscience of the writer. 

Anyway, I found both Mr. St. James's review not only helpful but encouraging, taking to heart--as it does--old promises that I'll never forget--and perhaps more importantly, can't. Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald may well have thought he left the church in 1917, but the church--and all that that word entails--never left him.

I like that. Rings true.