THE WISDOM OF SCOTT FITZGERALD. I said in this post that: “One of the things that makes GATSBY a great book is the wisdom of the narrative.” So I was pleased to see Adam Gopnik in his article praising Fitzgerald’s intelligence (which I had called “wisdom”). Gopnik says that Fitzgerald portrayal of himself as “even a bit of a fool, and then as a failure and a drunk” had influence in shaping an image of him as “a naïf who occasionally stumbled on beauty.” However, Gopnik says: “The thing that escapes Fitzgerald’s myth is precisely his intelligence, the kind of generalizing intelligence instantly apparent in his notebooks….” Gopnik praises the sharpness of his eye and the shrewdness of his judgment.
I was also pleased to see Gopnik’s citing J D Salinger as saying that “he was drawn to Fitzgerald because of Fitzgerald’s ‘intellectual power.’â€
After Fitzgerald has written something, the sentence seems inevitable, as if
it could not not be.