This Side of Paradise: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Living well is the best revenge…”
Introduction
Of course, all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work — the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside — the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once…
Calvin Tomkins superb book about Gerald and Sara Murphy, Living Well is the Best Revenge, kicks off thus:
A writer like F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose life has always attracted more attention than his work, may have to wait a long time before his literary reputation finds its true level. The legendary quality of the Fitzgerald saga still dazzles and intrudes; we search the novels for clues to the celebrated life that has become, through various tellings and retellings, a kind of nineteen-twenties morality drama, a tragedy of squandered talent. The novel in which Fitzgerald attempted to deal more or less directly with his own tragedy, ‘Tender Is the Night’, has nevertheless been assuming over the years something like the status of an American classic. The Book, which was generally considered a failure when it first appeared (even by Fitzgerald, who tried to improve its standing by writing a revised version that…
