The Maturing of F. Scott FitzgeraldAuthor(s): Alan MargoliesReviewed work(s):Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 75-93Published by: Hofstra UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441864 .Accessed: 09/04/2012 11:07

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The Maturing of F. Scott Fitzgerald

ALAN MARGOLIES

During the few past years, as our society has become even more conscious of the negative effects of ethnic stereotyping, there has been increased criticism of Fitzgerald's depiction of African Americans and

Jews in The Great Gatsby. Some question the portrayal of the African Americans who pass Gatsby and Nick Carraway on the Queensboro Bridge: "As we crossed Blackwell's Island," Nick says, "a limousine

passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry" (55). That physical descrip- tion as well as the use of the word bucks is disturbing. Others question the portrayal of Meyer Wolfshiem, suggesting that it reflects the opin- ions of those who believed that Jews were less than human, more like animals: "A small flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half darkness" (55).

An obvious response is not to excuse Fitzgerald but to suggest that the United States during the writer's lifetime was racist and anti-Semitic in many respects, and, further, that Fitzgerald was not the only major writer of the time to employ ethnic stereotypes (see, e.g., Fiedler 78-81, Gross and Hardy 1-104). In addition, one must note that his short stories appeared in some of the most popular magazines, and the editors of these publications, as well as his editors at Scribner's, the publishers of his books, while making certain not to include overtly sexual or blasphemous passages, did not seem to object to this ethnic stereotyping. But these explanations do not seem to satisfy everyone.

What is less obvious is that despite this stereotyping-and it was not restricted to African Americans and Jews-Fitzgerald felt differently

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about two vicious forms of racism that existed during his lifetime, Nordicism and lynching.

Criticism of Fitzgerald's attitude toward African Americans and Jews, of course, is not new. As early as 1947, Milton Hindus in Commentary concluded that "Fitzgerald does not allow a single redeeming charac- teristic to his Jewish gambler, not even so much redemption as Shakespeare allows to Shylock in his dominantly villainous portrait." Further, while allowing that the portrayal reflected "the fashionable anti- Semitism of the 1920's," Hindus stated that "anti-Semitism is a component part of the novel" (510; the italics are Hindus's). In 1967, Robert Forrey, in Phylon: The Atlantic University Review of Race and Culture, pointed to many examples of Fitzgerald's disparaging references to African Americans and concluded: "On the question of race, Fitzgerald does not belong in the liberal tradition in American letters" (295). Both Forrey and Hindus agreed, however, that Fitzgerald's later fiction, in particular The Last Tycoon, reflected a much more sympathetic outlook. In the years since these articles appeared, others have added their voices, most agreeing in general with these early opinions (see, e.g,. Donaldson 182-88).

The greatest amount of stereotyping in Fitzgerald's writing involves African Americans, who are portrayed mainly as servants and comic characters, and it began very early. In Coward (1913), an amateur play set in the South before the Civil War and written by Fitzgerald in St. Paul when he was 17, humor is achieved by having Jefferson, the butler, speak in malapropisms. "I renounce Mistah James Holworthy," he says when Holworthy enters (St. Paul Plays 64). Stereotyping is also used for humor in "The Camel's Back" (1920) when a waiter is called on to marry a couple at a dance; it is supposed to be a joke but turns out less than funny when we discover that he is also a Baptist minister. He is introduced as "Jumbo, obese negro" (Six Tales of the Jazz Age 54). Soon after, when he takes out a Bible, one white onlooker says, "Yea! Jumbo's got a Bible!" and a second then responds, "Razor, too, I'll bet!" (54). Another stereotype occurs in "Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar" (1923) when Jim Powell, a southern white, who gives guitar lessons to northern whites, says, "Why, when I've given 'em two lessons you'd think some of 'em was colored" (Short Stories 246). In "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" (1922), the wealthy Washington family is waited on by black slaves who are prevented from knowing that the Civil War freed them; one of them is named

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"Gygsum," presumably, suggests Forrey (295), a racist pun. Another stereotype is in "The Ice Palace" (1920) when Sally Carrol's northern fiancee complains that because of the influence of the southern blacks the southern whites also have become "lazy and shiftless" (Short Stories 63). Elsewhere we find other stereotypes as well as the use of words and phrases such as "darkies" and "noisy niggery street fairs" again in "The Ice Palace" (Short Stories 54, 50), "nigger songs" in "The Last of the Belles" (1929; Short Stories 451), and "niggerish feet" in "Crazy Sunday" (1932; Short Stories 704).

Possibly some of these may have been Fitzgerald's attempt to portray contemporary speech; this was the way some whites referred to blacks at the time. When Henry Clay Marston ("The Swimmers" [1929]), a Virginian whose grandfather freed his slaves in 1858, speaks about returning from France to the United States and says, "It's going to be pretty awful at first . . . but there are still a few good nigger cooks, and we'll probably have two bathrooms" (Short Stories 502), this probably was Fitzgerald's attempt to reflect how a southerner of Marston's back- ground might speak. Further, there are instances where the racial remarks seem purposeful for dramatic reasons. In Tender Is the Night (1934) various blacks are referred to by the narrator as a "colored man" (105), "Negro" (106, 109), "Afro-European," and "Afro-American" (106). A footman refers to "a colored fellow" (103). Dick Diver, on the other hand, says of the murdered Jules Peterson, "[I]t's only some nigger scrap" (110). In addition, he denigrates Nicotera, the actor with whom Rosemary may be having an affair, when he says, "He's a spic!" (218). And when he is beaten up and jailed in Rome, he yells, "You dirty Wops!" (228). Late in the novel the narrator tells us that Dick, when crit- icized, "would suddenly unroll a long scroll of contempt for some person, race, class, way of life, way of thinking" (267). Here, we are seeing the defects in Dick's not-so-perfect personality-he is extremely proud of his ability to control himself-and we are seeing his decline.

But not all of Fitzgerald's readers were satisfied with these racist concepts. In the July 21, 1934, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, in "No Flowers," Fitzgerald used the word buck once again, this time to refer to members of an orchestra: "Jim Europe and his bucks were enthroned at one end of the hall, and some Toscanini of Tangos at the other" (The Price Was High 531). This time he was taken to task, possibly directly for the first time. On July 23, 1934, just two days after the date of the issue, Earl W. Wilkins, an avid reader of Fitzgerald, wrote the novelist a three- page letter perceptively discussing the writer's work, but criticizing his choice of language. "Must all male Negroes in your books and stories

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be called 'bucks'?" Wilkins inquired (Donaldson 187). Fitzgerald replied two weeks later. Unfortunately, we do not have his answer, but he did save Wilkins's letter. It must have made an impression.

There are far fewer references to Jews in Fitzgerald's fiction, but the stereotypes are no less disturbing. In "May Day" (1920), a crowd beats up a socialist, a "God damn Bolshevski," delivering a speech. He is "a gesticulating little Jew with long black whiskers, who was waving his arms and delivering an excited but succinct harangue" (Short Stories 108). James W. Tuttleton is correct in suggesting that this description is "a rather confused and ambivalent affair." Whereas Fitzgerald is sympa- thetic to socialism here, says Tuttleton, the portrayal of the Jew, on the other hand, is an example of "Fitzgerald's own American nativism" (190), in other words, bigotry.

Then, in 1922, in The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald stereotyped the speech and gestures of two New Yorkers: "Two young Jewish men passed [Anthony Patch], talking in loud voices and craning their necks here and there in fatuous supercilious glances" (25). The physical description of Joseph Bloeckman, the moviemaker, also relies on ethnic stereotyping. Bloeckman is a "stoutening, ruddy Jew of about thirty-five, with an expressive face under smooth sandy hair" who introduces himself "with a little too evident assurance" and emits "two slender strings of smoke from nostrils overwide" (93-94). On the other hand, when the broke and drunk Anthony calls Bloeckman a "Goddam Jew" (437) at the end of the novel and is then beaten up, this may be dramatically acceptable since Fitzgerald is demonstrating how despi- cable Anthony has become.

This portrayal was followed by that of Wolfshiem in The Great Gatsby (1925), an evil man who wears human molars as cufflinks, possibly Gatsby's only friend, a man who offers Nick "a business gonnegtion" (56). Once again we see the ethnic stereotyping and again with its emphasis on noses. Not only is he a "flat-nosed Jew" with "two fine growths of hair" that "luxuriated in either nostril"; soon after we are told that he has an "expressive nose" (55). Then Nick tells us that "Mr. Wolfshiem's nose flashed at me indignantly" and "[h]is nostrils turned to me in an interested way" (56). Of course, one can argue that one of Fitzgerald's methods in the novel was to contrast various physical char- acteristics, but the description of Wolfshiem still seems to be an example of ethnic stereotyping.

But this stereotyping was not confined just to African Americans and Jews. In "The Girl from Lazy J" (1911), for example, that brief amateur play that Fitzgerald wrote when he was not yet 15, the villain,

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a Mexican, is referred to as a "lazy greaser" (St. Paul Plays 15). Later, the

young hero, Jack, tells his uncle: "I don't like the looks of that fellow and

you'd better be careful with these Mexicans, Uncle. They'd as soon knife a man as they would a dog." (16). Three years later in the 1914 play "Assorted Spirits," the young Fitzgerald, who was living in Minnesota, a state with a large Scandinavian population, assigned the role of a stupid servant to a Swede named Hulda-"that damned Swede girl" (94) a character says-and Fitzgerald used Hulda's accent to get laughs. Six

years later, in the short story "The Cut Glass Bowl" (1920), another Swedish servant appears replete with accent. This time her name is Hilda, and once again Swedes are criticized: "Careless! Servants all that

way nowadays. If [Evylyn] could get a good Irishwoman-but you couldn't any more-and these Swedes-" (Flappers and Philosophers 102).

Elsewhere, Fitzgerald used other ethnic stereotypes. In This Side of Paradise (1920), Amory Blaine is repelled in a railroad car by "stinking aliens-Greeks, he guessed, or Russians" (139). In "The Pusher in the Face" (1925), one of two men who intend to hold up a restaurant is described as a "swarthy Greek with sour eyes" (The Price Was High 106). In "The Jelly Bean" (1920), it is suggested that Nancy Lamar's wildness

may be at least partly because her mother was born in Budapest; in other words, it's a trait to be expected from Hungarians or possibly Gypsies. In other fiction, Italians, Spanish, Poles, Arabs, Chinese, even Irish, also did not escape Fitzgerald's stereotyping. And sometimes it

appears where one least expects it. In "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" (1920), Fitzgerald suggests that there is something intrinsically surreptitious about Native Americans. At the beginning of the story, Marjorie complains that her cousin Bernice is far from vivacious, that it may be because of "that crazy Indian blood in Bernice," and that Bernice's quiet nature is "a reversion to type." "Indian women," she believes, "all

just sat around and never said anything" (Short Stories 31). Marjorie's mother thinks this is silly. But at the end of the story Fitzgerald reverts back to this idea of ethnic stereotyping when Bernice moves "stealthily" to her bureau, takes her shears, "softly" enters Marjorie's room, and

"deftly" cuts off her cousin's braids: "'Huh!' [Bernice] giggled wildly. 'Scalp the selfish thing!"' (46-47).

Yet these ideas represented only one aspect of Fitzgerald's feelings. In contrast, he soon was to indicate his opposition to Nordicism, a contemporaneous theory of racial superiority. In May 1921, soon after his unhappy first visit to Europe, he wrote to Edmund Wilson:

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God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest. Rome is only a few years behind Tyre and Babylon. The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. Raise the bars of immi- gration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons and Celts to enter. France made me sick. Its silly pose as the thing the world has to save. I think it's a shame that England and America didn't let Germany conquer Europe. It's the only thing that would have saved the fleet of tottering old wrecks. (Letters 326)

Fitzgerald recognized the racism implicit in these possibly jocular statements and seemed to abhor it. "My reactions," he wrote "were all philistine, anti-socialistic, provincial and racially snobbish." Yet he continued in the same vein as previously: "I believe at last in the white man's burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro. Even in art!" And so on (Letters 326). In The Beautiful and Damned, published the following year, Maury Noble in one section of a long, sarcastic, iconoclastic speech, expounds on these racist ideas:

Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature-nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident had brought us to where we could fly in her face. She had invented ways to rid the race of the inferior and thus give the remainder strength to fill her higher-or, let us say, her more amusing- though still unconscious and accidental intentions. And, actuated by the highest gifts of the enlightenment, we were seeking to circumvent her. In this republic I saw the black beginning to mingle with the white-in Europe there was taking place an economic catastrophe to save three or four diseased and wretchedly governed races from the one mastery that might orga- nize them for material prosperity.' (255)

But since Fitzgerald disparages all the major characters in this novel, Maury's speech is part of Fitzgerald's satire. In 1923, Fitzgerald clarified his beliefs: "No one has a greater contempt than I have for the recent hysteria about the Nordic theory," he wrote (In His Own Time 143). Further, he amplified on this in The Great Gatsby.

When Tom Buchanan talks about "'The Rise of the Coloured Empires' by this man Goddard," he is referring to Nordicism. "It's a fine book and everybody ought to read it," he says. "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be-will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff," he says stupidly; "it's been proved" (14). Daisy Buchanan makes fun of him. More importantly, Fitzgerald's narrator Nick Carraway affirms the novelist's distaste when he tells us that

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"[t]here was something pathetic in [Tom's] concentration as if his

complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more" (14). The topic recurs later in the Plaza Hotel. "I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife" says Tom, suspicious about Gatsby. "Well, if that's the idea

you can count me out. . . . Nowadays people begin by sneering at

family life and family institutions and next they'll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white." Again Nick sneers at these ideas, referring to them as "impassioned gibberish" (101).

Most critics believe that in mentioning "'The Rise of the Coloured

Empires' by this man Goddard," Fitzgerald was thinking of Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color (1920). (See, e.g., Lehan 86-88 and The Great Gatsby 183, note.) Stoddard had suggested that the population of the world was changing, and that the white world was becoming outnumbered. "There can be no doubt that at present the colored races are increasing very much faster than the white," Stoddard had written (7). Stoddard believed in white solidarity and restricting the

immigration of nonwhites. He also believed that of three racial

groups-Alpines, Mediterraneans, and Nordics-the last were superior. Thus he also advocated restricting the immigration into the United States of people from Southeastern and Eastern Europe. In 1922, in The Revolt Against Civilization, Stoddard argued that inborn degeneracy threatened civilization; it resulted in "inefficiency, stupidity, pauperism, crime and other forms of antisocial conduct" (100). Of course, there were others at the time who were pushing similar ideas. One was Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916), another work advocating Nordicism, whose introduction in The Rising Tide of Color supported Stoddard. "The backbone of Western civilization is racially Nordic," Grant wrote (xxix). (See, e.g., Gidley 173.)

Nordicism was related in a number of ways but not wholly to the theory of eugenics, which had transformed Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest into the idea that various traits are inherited, that the human race can be improved by controlled selective breeding, and the corollary idea that the breeding of those least fit should be discour- aged. One of these eugenicists was Henry Herbert Goddard, and this is presumably the Goddard to whom Tom Buchanan in part is referring. In 1912 in his The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble- Mindedness, Goddard had studied a family of undesirables-prostitutes, alcoholics, criminals, and paupers-and concluded that feebleminded- ness, not environment, was responsible for these social ills and was

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hereditary and transmitted. In 1922, Lathrop Stoddard wrote that this

study of the Kallikak family was "a striking illustration of how superi- ority and degeneracy are alike rigidly determined by heredity" (The Revolt Against Civilization 96).

In 1919, in a series of four lectures at Princeton, published the following year as Human Efficiency and Levels of Intelligence, Henry Herbert Goddard had also discussed the effect of varying intelligence in the population on democracy. In particular, he was apprehensive of those of lower intelligence. "It would seem a self-evident fact," he wrote, "that the feeble-minded should not be allowed to take part in civic affairs; should not be allowed to vote" (99). "Obviously," he said, "there are enough people of high intelligence to guide the Ship of State, if they are put in command.... The disturbing fear is that the masses- the seventy million or even the eighty-six million-will take matters into their own hands" (97). The result of the work of Henry Herbert Goddard and others was the harsher Immigration Act of 1924 (Shipman 127-28).

It is not known when Fitzgerald first knew of these theories and how much, if any, of Stoddard and Goddard he read. But sometime between 1921 and 1931 (when Zelda Fitzgerald's father, Judge A. D. Sayre, died), he became aware of a volume that included a discussion of Goddard's work with the Kallikak family (30-33) and Samuel J. Holmes's survey of contemporaneous theories of eugenics, The Trend of the Race. "This is too long for a mouthful but the most interesting to me," Fitzgerald wrote in an undated inscription on the front free endpaper of a copy that he gave to Judge Sayre.2

One can only guess whether Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, purposely combined Goddard's name with the title of a book that sounded like one by Stoddard or whether he confused the two names. Associating Tom Buchanan's dullness with someone who has studied the Kallikuk family and the feebleminded, however, is very funny and may have been intentional on Fitzgerald's part, just as it was his inten- tion to contrast Tom Buchanan with Wolfshiem. Tom is obviously a Nordic, especially with his straw-colored hair. He has two truly American names, combining possibly the first names of Thomas Jefferson or Tom Paine and the last name of President Buchanan. (Naming characters after American heroes was not new in Fitzgerald's work.) Tom has "a gruff husky tenor" voice, "a rather hard mouth," "two shining, arrogant eyes," and a body with "enormous power" (9). Wolfshiem, the Jew, on the other hand, has tiny ratlike eyes that glance furtively around the room and seem to stand out in the darkness. He

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eats "with ferocious delicacy" (57), like an animal. Even his name

suggests something subhuman. Yet, there are similarities between Wolfshiem and Buchanan. Tom is involved in a murder; Wolfshiem is presumably a bootlegger and a counterfeiter, and, above all, the man who fixed the 1919 World Series.

Wolfshiem's hypocrisy is illustrated in a number of ways. He is

portrayed in a humorous way as being false to his religion and, in addi- tion, lacking taste. At the end of the novel when Nick visits Wolfshiem to convince him to attend Gatsby's funeral, Wolfshiem is whistling "The Rosary," one of the most popular songs of the early part of the century. Despite its close to 2.4 million copies of sheet music sold through 1924, it was a sentimental, maudlin religious song that disparaged a serious subject (Sullivan 424).

But Wolfshiem's cover for his illicit business, "The Swastika Holding Company," is not so funny. The swastika, an ancient sign as well as sacred symbol, had appeared early in Christian art and was associated early with the Christian cross (see, e.g., Ross). Fitzgerald had even mentioned a swastika in "Absolution," that 1924 story that had probably been part of an early version of Gatsby and had associated this swastika in the story with Christianity. In "Absolution," Father Schwartz, the crazed priest whose faith is vacillating, first listens to young Rudolph's confession of sin and then stares at a pattern in the carpet in his office in the church, at "the swastikas and the flat bloomless vines and the pale echoes of flowers" (Short Stories 269). It is a decoration, of course, but it also symbolizes Father Schwartz's conflict: the swastika suggesting his faith, the flat bloomless vines and the pale echoes of the flowers suggesting the fading of his faith. This association of the swastika with Christianity in "Absolution" may have some relationship with Wolfshiem's whistling of "The Rosary" and his "Swastika Holding Company." Of course, the swastika was also a symbol used by Native Americans. In Gatsby, according to some, it "evokes the 'old warm world' of the Great West in the immemorial sign of American Indians" (Stern 261).

But Fitzgerald most likely also was thinking of what was happening in Austria and Germany at the time, when Jews were beginning to be persecuted under this Nazi symbol. By 1924 and 1925, when Fitzgerald was writing and revising Gatsby, the swastika was relatively widespread in these countries as an anti-Semitic symbol, despite what some have said. (See, e.g., Stern 261 and The Great Gatsby 203, note.) In fact, it had been associated with anti-Semitism in Europe even before 1919, when the Nationalist Socialist party was formed and soon after adopted it as a symbol (see, e.g., Waite 207, note).

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In Mein Kampf, Hitler discussed the design of the Nazi flag with its swastika and then the display of half a dozen flags in Munich in 1920 (735-37). Journalist William L. Shirer states that the Nazis were

displaying the swastika openly during this period (43-44). Photographs taken in 1923 show members of the Nationalist Socialist German Worker's Party in Bavaria wearing the swastika armband and carrying the Nazi flag during the struggle for power (Gordon, versos 199, 200, 333).

Newspapers of the time, too, connected the swastika with anti- Semitic activities in Europe. A two-column article headlined "New

Popular Idol Rises in Bavaria," in the New York Times, November 21, 1922, tells of Hitler's "30,000 organized followers in Munich alone." Of them correspondent Cyril Brown wrote:

The new converts made at these rallies, those who absolutely and unconditionally pledge themselves to Hitler and the cause, are carefuly [sic] sifted through and the pick of them who pass the standard military muster are organized into 'storm troops' with gray shirts, brassards in the old imperial colors, black and an anti- Semitic Swastika cross in a white circular field on read [sic]; armed also with blackjacks and it is popularly whizpered [sic], revolvers. (21)

Other briefer articles from Austria in the Times in 1923 and 1924 tell of a riot between Social Democrats and "the Austrian Branch of the German anti-Semitic 'Swastika Brigade"' (April 4, 1923) and of a National Socialist Swastika detachment referred to as "Monarchist Anti- Semites" attacking a Social Democratic function (July 8, 1924). Wolfshiem was using the swastika, the symbol that even then was being used to kill his relatives and friends in Europe, as a front for his crim- inal activities.

When Nick confronts Tom on Fifth Avenue and Tom denies his part in Gatsby's murder, Fitzgerald joins Buchanan at the wrist to Wolfshiem, the man who owned those cuff buttons made of human molars. Fitzgerald makes the connection when he refers to Tom and Daisy "smash[ing] up things and creatures and then retreat[ing] back into their money or their vast carelessness" (139). Then Nick speaks about another pair of cuff buttons, those that Tom may purchase:

I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace-or perhaps only a pair of cuff links-rid of my provincial squeamishness forever. (139-40)

In 1939 or 1940, Fitzgerald denied that the portrayal of Wolfshiem was anti-Semitic. Frances Kroll Ring, his secretary at the time, writes:

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He said he had, on occasion, been rebuked for his portrait of the "small, fat and disloyal" Meyer Wolfsheim [sic] in Gatsby. Scott was stung by the criticism which he considered unfair. Wolfsheim was a character whose behavior fulfilled a function in the story and had nothing to do with race or religion. He was a gangster who happened to be Jewish. (49)

Maybe Fitzgerald was protesting a little too much, especially since Ring herself was Jewish. But one aspect of Wolfshiem's function in Gatsby is to expose the hypocrisy of Nordicism, a theory that Fitzgerald despised: Buchanan, the Nordic, the man of privilege who comes from an old respected American family, is no less evil than Wolfshiem, the Jew, one of those that Goddard and Stoddard and their ilk wanted to keep out of this country.

During the years that followed Gatsby, Fitzgerald's portrayal of Jews became sympathetic. "The Hotel Child," published in 1931, is a

delightful portrayal of an 18-year-old American adolescent with her wealthy mother and brother in Europe, a family that contrasts with too- proud society Europeans. The youngster, who reminds us in some ways of another of Fitzgerald's teenagers, Josephine Perry, is attracted to an older man, an adventurer, Count Borowki. It is a humorous tale, espe- cially with its happy surprise ending when we discover that she hasn't given in to the count's wiles but instead is the means to his downfall. What is different about this Jamesian-type story-contrasting Americans and Europeans-is that this American family is Jewish and the young woman's name is Fifi Schwartz. She is criticized for her "ghastly taste" (Short Stories 599), but this is because she is an American and dresses for beauty and dresses older than she is, like many teenagers. Her mother ignores these negative comments: "[S]he had been a Jewess a long time, and it was a matter of effortless indifference to her what was said by the groups around the room" (599). Later, when Fifi's brother misbehaves and Mrs. Schwartz suggests they return to the United States, Fifi does not want to go, partly because of the anti- Semitism. "We can always meet people," her mother says; "We always have." That's not enough for Fifi. "But you know it's different," she says; "everybody is so bigoted there" (605).

Fitzgerald once again had used his stereotype of the large Jewish nose. But here it is humorous and sympathetic. The adventurous Count Borowki, who is trying to make a play for Fifi and her money, praises her beauty. "There is no flaw or fault in you," he says. "'Oh, Yes' said Fifi modestly. 'I got a sort of big nose. Would you know I was Jewish?"' Soon after she adds, "Besides, my forehead is too high" (608).

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The following year, in "Crazy Sunday," Fitzgerald continued this theme when he wrote about screenwriter Joel Coles who attends a Hollywood party, makes fun of a Jew, an independent producer, a Sam Goldwyn type, and is booed. He denigrates not only the producer's malapropisms but also his dialect. "His burlesque," says the narrator, "was based upon the cultural limitations of Mr. Dave Silverstein, an independent producer." Silverstein is outlining a film treatment. It will be, he says, "a story of divorce, the younger generators and the Foreign Legion." Of the heroine he continues: "-then she says she feels this sex appil for him and he burns out and says 'Oh go on destroy your- self-." Isn't this the way Wolfshiem talked? But here Coles has made a fool of himself. For the most part there is silence, people are leaving, and then he hears "the Great Lover"-a character based on actor John Gilbert-, "his eye hard and empty as the eye of a needle," booing. "It was the resentment of the professional toward the amateur, of the community toward the stranger, the thumbs-down of the clan" (Short Stories 702).

The portrayal of Jews in The Last Tycoon is also largely positive. Stahr, the hero, is Jewish; his nemesis, Brady, is Irish. Fitzgerald, we are told, did this purposely. "It was a time when Hitler dominated the news and Scott avoided making the villain Jewish," writes Frances Kroll Ring (49). Apparently, he was changing. To Tony Buttitta in 1935 he had said of his new friend's name: "Sounds Italian. I hated Italians once. Jews too. Most foreigners. Mostly my fault like everything else. Now I only hate myself' (5). In what appears to be a very prescient remark, he wrote in his Notebooks, presumably just before or just at the beginning of World War II: "[W]e and the Jews are going to be butchered[.] We the liberals because we were too kind, the Jews because they were too wise" (321).

But Fitzgerald's attitude towardJews was not consistent. In 1931, at about the same time as he was composing "The Hotel Child," he wrote in "Echoes of the Jazz Age" of the Americans of the time wandering through Europe that they "had the human value of Pekinese, bivalves, cretins, goats." He referred to them as "neanderthals." Among others he was critical of "a fat Jewess, inlaid with diamonds" (The Crack-Up 21, 20). In his notes to his final novel he wrote:

Hell, the best friend I have.in Hollywood is a Jew-another of my best dozen friends is a Jew. Two of the half dozen men I admire most in America are Jews and two of my half dozen best men in History are Jews. But why do they have to be so damned conceited. (Notebooks 333)

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Alcohol apparently also caused the bigotry to surface. Frances Kroll

Ring writes:

[W]hen he was in a devilishly alcoholic state, he was quick to tell me that Sheilah [Graham] was "part"Jewish, thatJean, the nurse, was "part" Indian, as if it were some secret that would bring me over to his side against them. He knew that I was Jewish, but I was his secretary and confidente and had given him no cause for name-calling. (49)

And while many Jews are portrayed favorably in The Last Tycoon, the portrayal of Schwartze, a formerly successful moviemaker who commits suicide, may not satisfy everyone. Again Fitzgerald was portraying a Jew as animal-like. Schwartze is "a middle-aged Jew who alternately talked with nervous excitement or else crouched as if ready to spring" (4). Further, once again Fitzgerald dwelled on the Jew's nose, although again some may feel Fitzgerald is merely contrasting features of different individuals: "[T]he exaggerated Persian nose and oblique eye-shadow were as congenital as the tip-tilted Irish redness around my father's nostrils," says Cecilia Brady, the narrator (7).

This same erratic pattern is evident in Fitzgerald's changing attitude toward African Americans. The disturbing portrayal in The Great Gatsby of the African Americans on the Queensboro Bridge serves a satirical function. Gatsby has taken Nick for a ride, and they pass people from Southeastern Europe, possibly Greeks, possibly Italians, all Stoddard's Mediterraneans. Nick says, using what some may feel are ethnic stereotypes:

A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europeans and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber holiday. (55)

The mourners are in cheerful carriages-this is meant to be ironic- and Nick is happy that Gatsby's expensive, garish car that catches their attention will take their mind off death. This is meant to be funny. Next comes the passage with the limousine with its white chauffeur and the African Americans in the back, another group of those about whom Goddard and Stoddard had warned us.

What Goddard and Stoddard and others were afraid of-the arrival in this country of huge numbers of blacks and Jews and

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Mediterraneans-was happening. Further, while some in Gatsby are not successful, and while those from East Egg, like Tom and Daisy, won't admit those from West Egg into their society, others, like many at

Gatsby's party and these African Americans on the Queensboro Bridge, are achieving economic success. The country was changing and

Fitzgerald was noting this. And similar to his treatment of Jews, as he grew older, Fitzgerald's

treatment of African Americans became more sympathetic. In The Last

Tycoon, a man with three cows appears near the Hermitage. The

description is more realistic than in early Fitzgerald:

They were real cows with warm flesh, silky flanks and the Negro grew gradually real out of the darkness with his big brown eyes staring close to the car, as Wylie gave him a quarter. He said "Thank you-thank you" and stood there and the cows mooed again into the night as we drove off. (9)

Later, producer Stahr confronts another African American collecting grunion. He is an intellectual; he reads Emerson. He complains about the quality of moving pictures and tells Stahr he never lets his children attend them. Later Stahr thinks about this conversation and is suffi- ciently influenced to want to make better-quality pictures. For many, too, the portrayal of the African American couple in "Dearly Beloved," written at about the same time but unpublished until after Fitzgerald's death, is endearing.

But similar to his feelings about other groups, Fitzgerald was not consistent during this later period in his attitude toward African Americans. To Tony Buttitta in the summer of 1935, he referred to "Negro rights and equality" as "gibberish" (164). A year later, in "Handle With Care," he used another ethnic stereotype to refer to his changing psychological makeup: "I have now at last become a writer only. The man I had persistently tried to be became such a burden that I have 'cut him loose' with as little compunction as a Negro lady cuts loose a rival on Saturday night." Yet, a page later, he not only refers to but also identifies with the plight of the African American:

I shall manage to live with the new dispensation, though it has taken some months to be certain of the fact. And just as the laughing stoicism which has enabled the American Negro to endure the intolerable conditions of his existence has cost him his sense of the truth-so in my case there is a price to pay. (The

Crack-Up 83-84)

These contradictions would continue until the end of Fitzgerald's life. But just as he had had strong feelings about Nordicism very early,

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he had strong feelings very early too about the many lynchings in this

country of African Americans. In 1922, in "Two for a Cent," Fitzgerald had written about a white man, a traveler, who returns south after 25 years and talks about "those two or three dozen loafers standing in front of the stores on Jackson Street-in thatched straw hats .... Do you know the ones I mean?" "Jelly-beans," his listener replies, "We call them Jelly-beans. No-account lot of boys all right. They got signs up in front of most of the stores asking 'em not to stand there." "They ought to!" the first responds. And he continues: "That's my picture of the South now, you know-a skinny, dark-haired young man with a gun on his hip and a stomach full of corn liquor or Dope Dola, leaning up against a drug store waiting for the next lynching" (Price, 38).

In 1926, Fitzgerald returned to this theme when he tried his hand at writing a mystery, "The Dance," published in The Red Book Magazine. It was "the first detective story I've ever tried," he wrote his agent Harold Ober. "I'm afraid its no good" (As Ever 85). The plot was too convoluted and too obvious. A woman kills her lover, but the shot is heard while she is standing on a bandstand in view of many people. The mystery is solved when we discover that the shot heard was fired out of the window by an accomplice, that the lover had been killed earlier, shot while the band was playing, the music covering the sound of the earlier gunshot.

Yet within was an unforgettable snapshot of the mistreatment of African Americans. The narrator, a New York woman who visits a southern town, tells of her "rather curious horror of small towns":

In the cities [she says], everything good or bad eventually comes out, comes out of people's hearts, I mean. Life moves about, moves on, vanishes. In the small towns-those of between five and twenty-five thousand people-old hatreds, old and unforgotten affairs, ghostly scandals and tragedies, seem unable to die, but live on all tangled up with the natural ebb and flow of outward life.

Nowhere has this sensation come over me more insistently than in the South. Once out of Atlanta and Birmingham and New Orleans, I often have the feeling that I can no longer communi- cate with the people around me. The men and the girls speak a language wherein courtesy is combined with violence, fanatic morality with corn-drinking recklessness, in a fashion which I can't understand. In "Huckleberry Finn" Mark Twain described some of those towns perched along the Mississippi River, with their fierce feuds and their equally fierce revivals-and some of them haven't fundamentally changed beneath their new surface of flivers and radios. They are deeply uncivilized to this day.

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I speak of the South because it was in a small Southern city of this type that I once saw the surface crack for a minute and some- thing savage, uncanny and frightening rear its head. (39)

Fitzgerald describes the setting for the dance and then suddenly shifts gears. For a moment, we are back again to something that Mark Twain might have written:

An enormous red-faced man in muddy knee boots and with a revolver strapped around his waist, clumped in and paused for a moment at our table before going upstairs to the locker-room. It was Bill Abercrombie, the Sheriff, the son of Congressman Abercrombie. Some of the boys asked him half-whispered ques- tions, and he replied in an attempt at an undertone.

"Yes. ... He's in the swamp all right; farmer saw him near the crossroads store ... Like to have a shot at him myself."

I asked the boy next to me what was the matter. "Nigger case," he said, "over in Kisko, about two miles from

here. He's hiding in the swamp, and they're going in after him tomorrow."

"What'll they do to him?" "Hang him, I guess." The notion of the forlorn darky crouching dismally in a deso-

late bog waiting for dawn and death depressed me for a moment. Then the feeling passed and was forgotten. (41)

But it's not forgotten, as the narrator then encounters another situ- ation, the mystery of the murdered lover, and ends with the following:

We live in New York. Small towns make us both uncomfort- able. Every day we read about the crime-waves in the big cities, but at least a wave is something tangible that you can provide against. What I dread above all things is the unknown depths, the incalcu- lable ebb and flow, the secret shapes of things that drift through opaque darkness under the surface of the sea. (138)

How could Fitzgerald have written with such passion against lynching, openly opposed Nordicism too, and yet used ethnic stereotypes in his writing elsewhere and inveighed at times in his personal life at various minority groups? Nordicism and lynching represented the extremes that many in this country were opposed to. Fitzgerald's ethnic stereo- typing, on the other hand, while deplorable, reflected the thinking of many in this country during this period. As the country began to change, especially with its awareness of what was happening in Nazi Germany, Fitzgerald changed too. But even in his last years he retained a residue of these prejudices.3

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NOTES

'The last sentence was omitted in the first English printing (London: Collins, 1922). Although Fitzgerald said that he was sending a list of corrections to his English publisher, the list is not known to be extant. Thus it cannot be determined if Fitzgerald was responsible for the omission.

2The copy with its inscription is in the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum, Montgomery, Alabama. There are no other notes or markings in the book. Stoddard cites Holmes as his source for his discussion of the Kallikak family. Late in life, Fitzgerald was given a copy of Earnest A. Hooten's Apes, Men, and Morons (1937), now at Princeton University Library, a work with eugenics beliefs similar in some ways to Goddard's. Hooten was vehemently opposed to "vicious racial propaganda, especially the nonsense of Nordicism" (230), but he did state: "Our real purpose should be to segregate and to eliminate the unfit, worthless, degenerate and antisocial portion of each racial and ethnic strain in our population, so that we may utilize the substantial merits of its sound majority, and the special and diversified gifts of its superior members" (210). There are no notes or markings in Fitzgerald's copy.

sFor a recent discussion of this topic, with emphasis on "The Hotel Child," see the essay "What Fitzgerald Thought of the Jews: Resisting Type in 'The Hotel Child'" by Barry Gross and Eric Fretz.

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