Scott Fitzgerald and Lewis

Faith and Doubt

Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940) had grown up in St. Paul, Minnesota, enveloped in poverty. His novels and short stories subsequent to 1920, “Flappers and Philosophers” (1920), “The Beautiful and the Damned” (1922) and “Tale of the Jazz Age” (1922), all made him a spokesman of the Jazz generation. “The Great Gatsby” and “Tender is the Night” (1934) had brought the American Character, of the striving after money, springing from a strongly innocent desire to live fully and passionately. This striving is tragic and doomed because the attainments of their material ambition had led to the corruption of his character, a decline in moral and spiritual values and thus to the betrayal of themselves and others. The great excitement and the loneliness of which a young man from the Middle West was exposed, was beautifully shown in the section “The Young Man in New York” in his “The Great Gatsby”.

The hero was a clerk in New York hailing from the Middle West. After a gruesome day, he would spend his evening in Lower New York, walking up to Probity Trust. He had lunch in the most crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes, and loaded in the company of other clerks. He supped at the York club, which usually was quite gloomy in itself. He went upstairs into the library to study investments and securities for a conscientious hour. It was a good place to work, though it was infested with rioters who never entered the library. During the mellow evenings, he would stroll down Madison Avenue, past the Old Mary Hill Hotel and over the 33rd street to the Pennsylvania Station.

The city was quite to his liking, adventurous to the last dreg. A constant flicker of men and women and machines gave the eye a treat. He would visit the Fifth Avenue romantic women and fancy himself to be part and parcel of their lives and follow them to their apartments. This was the practice of young clerks to waste their lives over there, when the dark homes of the Forties were busy with shady traffic, the clerk’s heart grew heavy. To be deprived of this gaiety was a vague desire in him that stung him deep, but yet as a good and moderate youngster, he wished them well.

Again, Sinclair Harry Lewis through his preface to “Main Street” (1920), the Nobel Prize winner, conveyed the passionate belief that American was the heir of all ages. It was as well his terrified conviction that the American dream had somehow been cheapened and was in danger of being destroyed.

Like the preceding authors, Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters, and Scott Fitzgerald too had striven to work in a general atmosphere of doubt and faith hovering over life in small towns and towns in the early 20th Century. The doubt was in the minds of men who had no well directed approach to life in general. Yet there was faith in the inherent virtue of a Mid Westerner, of being basically good and to wish for the best of all in this world. The men had been in the habit of looping in cities’ busy streets and their voice-ridden atmosphere of the nocturnal late hours.

The individual was at the lowest rung of the social ladder, dreaming and fancying out-of--reach comforts and the luxuries, enjoyed by the rich. Similar was the attitude of Sinclair Lewis with the expanding glitter and glamor of almost all towns in America. And this spirit of Lewis was well represented in his short preface to “Main Street”.