The Far Side of Paradise

"You’re right, there are many biographies of Fitzgerald and this might not be the easiest one to get hold of but I am interested in it because Mizener was Fitzgerald’s first biographer. It came out in 1951, when many of the people who knew Fitzgerald were still alive. For the most part, they liked it and spoke well of it. Of course they had some criticisms and objections – nothing is ever going to be perfect or universally loved. But given how many people knew Fitzgerald and were fond of him and protective of his memory, I think it is remarkable that, for the most part, they thought Mizener was fair-minded and accurate. “One of the things that I think people sometimes miss about Gatsby is its sense of humour” I also think Mizener is one of the best writers among his biographers. Mizener cared about the writing of his book. Moreover, as a thinker and biographer, Mizener brings subtlety and nuance to his approach. The other biographies often fall into the trap of cruder, flat assertions, that he was like this and he wasn’t like that, or Zelda was like this or wasn’t like that. And, of course, you can’t make those kinds of flat assertions about people – we all change and evolve and not just over long periods of time. We can change our minds from one day to the next. That’s not particularly hard to get your head around, but it is a difficult problem for the biographer to deal with and I think Mizener does a good job of finding a recognisable Fitzgerald and suggesting his intelligence, his subtlety and complexity, but also, of course, the darker side that drove him into his terribly destructive drinking and eventually killed him at just 44. Mizener also has a sense of humour and, as I say, I think humour is very important in understanding Fitzgerald. I distrust any biographer who doesn’t show much evidence of humour when writing about him. I came to Mizener fairly late, so I had read the more recent biographies first, as well as his letters. So rather than giving me fresh insights, his book gave me a Fitzgerald that I recognised from the novels and letters and the writings of others about him, but it completed the picture and gave me the best sense of the whole person."