F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'Fatal Submission to the Sanctions of Social Prestige'

Lionel Trilling wrote a piece on Arthur Mizener's The Far Side of Paradise for the Feb. 3, 1951 issue of The New Yorker. According to his biographer, Daniel T. O'Hara, (pg. 150 ) "Fitzgerald Plain" recalls Trilling's "earlier, similarily sympathetic treatment of Fitzgerald in The Liberal Imagination.

O'Hara analyzes Trillings argument: "Although Mizener betrays Fitzgerald's "fatal submission to the sanctions of social prestige," this submission marks the novelist as a hero in Trilling's eyes. For Fitzgerald's life and work, the career of his spirit, however tragic, disclose a useful moral for naive liberals concerning the rigorousness of "the systems of prestige that lie beneath the American social fluidity" (SLS, p. 258). Fitzgerald's snobbery, perhaps like Trilling's own, recalls the "magical importance" that children playing among themselves innocently invest in questions of status and priority. In any event, such "social submissiveness" is not really snobbery or submissiveness at all, for the social image in Fitzgerald, Trilling claims, actually stands for an utopian ideal of the self (SLS, p. 258)" (pg. 150).

In "Fitzgerald Plain" Trilling compares Mizener's biography of Fitzgerald to Bud Schulberg's novel, The Disenchanted, which is thought to be based on Fitzgerald:

"Because he knows how much there was to be destroyed, his account of Fitzgerald's long self-destruction is deeply tragic, where The Disenchanted is only sad and depressing, for Mr. Schulberg can attribute to his doomed novelist nothing more than a happy prose style and a knack of observing the manners of the middle class. Fitzgerald had these gifts pre-eminently, but he did not write The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night by means of style and observation alone; he wrote them, as Mr. Mizener knows, out of an unflagging moral energy, of which one aspect was his fatal submission to the sanctions of social prestige.

"This submission is an essential part of the Fitzgerald legend and we have to come to terms with it. It is likely to have the appearance of snobbery, and in some large part it is snobbery; Fitzgerald, it is true, could never represent the rich and powerful without the bitterest reprobation, yet at the same time he needed to be at one with them. Taking it as snobbery, we can find reasons to forgive or extenuate it. We can say of it that by means of it Fitzgerald, more than anyone else of his time, realized the rigorousness of the systems of prestige that lie beneath the American social fluidity. Then, too, as snobbery, it had a kind of innocence, something of the solemnity of childhood, when systems of prestige have a magical importance, and this, for Fitzgerald, must have been much intensified by the social ambiguity of his parents. Yet in an important sense Fitzgerald's social submissiveness is not snobbery at all, for its reference is not to a real society but to an idea of society, ultimately to an ideal of himself. "I would be capable," he said in a letter to John_O'Hara, "of going to Podunk on a visit and being absolutely booed and overawed by its social system, not from timidity but because of some inner necessity of starting my life and my self-justification over again at scratch in whatever environment I may be thrown." He exaggerated the idea of society and his dependence upon it in order, we may say, to provide a field for the activity of his conscience, for the trial of his self."

At the 1996 F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary Celebration, James Dickey commented upon Fitzgerald's apparent ambivalence to money and prestige. "Replying to a question about whether Fitzgerald was disillusioned with America, Dickey said that problems with money and prestige clearly bothered and fascinated the author of The Great Gatsby..."

In The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kirk Curnutt notes the difficulty in teaching Fitzgerald to his working- and lower-middle-class students:

"As for my students, I find the reasons why they are not predisposed to share my passion for Fitzgerald both revelatory and instructive. For starters, for a working- and lower-middle-class population, the elite world of country clubs, debutante parties, and mansions in which the majority of his work is set can seem dubiously snobbish, preppy, and even effete. His haut bourgeois fixation with prestige and social distinction strikes them as aristocratic rather than democratic, which offends their proletarian sympathies."

Values of the Inventive Type

Origin of the Desire for Social Recognition

Kirk Curnutt (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Daniel T. O'Hara (1988). Lionel Trilling: The Work of LIberation. Madison: University of Wisconsin.

Lionel Trilling (1980). Speaking of Literature and Society . New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

This article by Dave Kelly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. (See Copyrights for details.)