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Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes: EssaysRace, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic HistoryWriting Gatsby : The Real Story of the Writing of the Greatest American NovelThe Beautiful and Damned

2022; Penn State University Press; Volume: 20; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.20.0235

1755-6333

Kirk Curnutt,

Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

Scott Donaldson, writes James L. W. West III in his short but precise preface to Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes, a posthumous collection of essays by the late literary biographer (1928–2020) who was a mainstay of Fitzgerald studies for a half-century, “was an excellent scholar and a good man, generous with his time and knowledge. . . . He brought a newspaperman’s curiosity to his work and an open, accessible style to his writing” (West, “Preface” viii). From the beginning of his career, the prolific Donaldson was also a master of repurposing his wide-ranging contributions to American literary history and its development. Whereas most scholars are content to see an essay or chapter into print in one venue and move on, the author, perhaps most notably of The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (2015), found inventive ways of repackaging and reconfiguring entries on his vita, sometimes decades after the fact. Twenty years ago, just before the dawn of the e-reader era, such long-out-of-print early efforts as his The Suburban Myth (1968) and Poet in America: Winfield Townley Scott (1972) reappeared under the aegis of the print-on-demand publisher iUniverse, making available in affordable softcover editions valuable studies that remained sequestered in university stacks, unavailable to most readers. This foray into self-(re)publishing soon led to a valuable relationship with Open Road Media, which produced digital versions of his controversy-scarred John Cheever: A Biography (1988) and the unjustly overlooked Archibald MacLeish: An American Life (1992).1 Thanks to the encouragement of the Minnesota Historical Society, the University of Minnesota Press also brought his much-admired Fitzgerald biography, Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald (1983), back to life for a new generation of scholars and fans.Perhaps most impressively, Donaldson himself rewrote nearly two dozen previously published journal articles to create the essential collection Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days (2009). It is hard to think of another omnibus of a commentator’s lifework whose contents fit together so seamlessly. By updating each essay’s secondary sources and revising for overall unity and cohesion of voice, Donaldson pulled off the rare feat of compiling a “greatest hits” collection that never sounds dated, whose analyses feel fresh and insightful rather than like time capsules from, say, 1973 (when the well-known essay “Scott Fitzgerald’s Romance with the South” first appeared in the Southern Literary Journal) or 1982 (when the oft-republished “Money and Marriage in Fitzgerald’s Stories” was featured in Jackson R. Bryer’s collection The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Approaches in Criticism).Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes is not, as its title may imply, a focused dissection of a specific theme across an array of Fitzgerald efforts. Rather, it is a gathering of five late efforts either unpublished or uncollected at the time of their author’s death. One main selling point of the book is its compact size and affordability: at a brisk 132 pages and a $15.95 paperback list price, the collection represents an initiative on the part of West and Penn State University Press to produce critical studies of Fitzgerald for the general reader. (West’s own Business Is Good: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Professional Writer, coming in 2023, will be the second book in the series.) The centerpiece here is a sixty-three-page excursion into the gender dynamics of Tender Is the Night, “Tender Is the Night: The War Between the Sexes” (1–63), which West calls “the best close reading of the novel that I have seen” (“Preface” vii). I would agree with this assessment; its core appeal is its neutrality. Ever the journalist, Donaldson declines to take a position on the contentious gender politics in the novel that can make Fitzgerald seem at best an essentialist when it comes to sexual difference and at worst a misogynist in his insistence that modernity eroded the fundamental strengths of manhood.Another of the great pleasures that accounts for the essay’s readability is that Donaldson does not harp on his thesis. Rather, he lets his discussions of key moments in Fitzgerald’s fourth novel flow with a spontaneity that arises in part from his nonchronological analysis. His discussion begins in media res, focusing on the moment in book 2, chapter 14, when Dick Diver treats (not very effectively or with much sympathy) the eczemic “woman in room twenty.” As Donaldson argues, the patient’s inflamed skin is Fitzgerald’s most autobiographical nod to the torments suffered by his wife during the initial months of her protracted hospitalization at Dr. Oscar Forel’s Les Rives de Prangins Clinic in Nyon, Switzerland, a connection that has overshadowed the female character’s defiant declaration to the patronizing Dick that she is “sharing the fate of the women of my time who challenged men to battle” (TITN 210). That is, the power and authority that Fitzgerald wielded over his spouse and her treatment—culminating in the infamous confrontation over her novel Save Me the Waltz (Collected Writings 1–196) and her desire to express herself artistically and autonomously in 1932–33—somewhat obscures the fact that even if this patient is as “wrecked and ruined” as she claims (TITN 210), she nevertheless augers the advantage that modern women possess over men in twentieth-century gender transformations: “It is highly significant,” Donaldson notes, “that [this] is the only woman who loses the modern war between the sexes delineated throughout Tender Is the Night. Otherwise, the women win” (3). From there, the essay concentrates on the various ways in which female cast members “triumph” over the ravages of “the postwar collapse of values bequeathed to Dick Diver by previous generations” (33). The female characters discussed range from the plot’s obvious central players, Nicole Warren Diver and Rosemary Hoyt, to a complicated supporting cast that includes Nicole’s sister, Baby Warren; Rosemary’s mother, Elsie Speers; and Mary North Minghetti, the wife and eventual widow of composer Abe North, who reinvents herself as a countess by marrying a wealthy Hindu prince and whose gender-bending friendship with Lady Caroline Sibly Biers dramatizes Fitzgerald’s fraught ambivalence toward same-sex relations.Along the way to proving his extended point, Donaldson pauses for some lovely digressions. A section on “music and romance” (22–24) demonstrates how essential popular 1910s and 1920s ballads were to Fitzgerald’s dramatic technique. Book 2, chapter 5, alone references a half-dozen titles that Nicole promises to play on her phonograph in 1919 (TITN 154–57), the titles establishing the bittersweet atmosphere of Dick and Nicole’s unstable love even as they pine for the amorous reciprocity that they later strain to project by referring to themselves as “Dicole” (TITN 120). Noting the use of Alfred Williams’s “A Man without a Woman” (also known as “Silver Dollar”), which Nicole actually sings to Dick to seduce him (TITN 156), Donaldson explores how verses not transcribed in the scene could have warned the future doctor-husband of his imminent role as a Warren family pawn while summing up for his patient-wife her own incestuous attraction to father figures. Lines such as “So listen, my honey, listen to me / I want you to understand / That as a silver dollar goes from hand to hand / So a woman goes from man to man” convey more of the Divers’ destructive codependency than any fraught conversation the couple has during their marriage. “Fitzgerald’s songs do more than revisit a period in American culture,” Donaldson rightly concludes. “They function as part of his storytelling artistry” (14).Among many other symbolic patterns, the essay also capably explores the motif of vampirism, which likewise underscores Dick and Nicole’s power imbalance. As Donaldson keenly observes, Fitzgerald’s awareness of the risk of transference in the relationship between psychiatrist and patient may have given some scientific basis to understanding the couple’s attraction. Nevertheless, despite the recommendation of the Journal of Medical and Nervous Disease in 1935 that Tender Is the Night could be useful for professionals in understanding the “dynamic interlockings” of the psychoanalytic situation (Bruccoli and Bryer 390), the study of human behavior still remained a rather dry exercise for the writer. Far more compelling was the poetic trope of a “faery child enchant[ing a man] into a living death,” a subject Fitzgerald knew best through his passion for Romantic poetry, in particular Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (Selected Poems 360–62), which he had previously cited in his first two novels, This Side of Paradise (TSOP [1995] 65) and The Beautiful and Damned (B&D [2008] 274). As Donaldson argues, the writer’s fondness for images of men whose “thrall” for women leaves them “weak and bloodless” conveniently excuses both character and narrator from weighing the role of countertransference (in which the therapist projects desires upon the patient) in Dick’s decision to succumb to both Nicole and later Rosemary. Literary tradition thus obscures the doctor’s own culpability in his “loss of vitality, his lesion of energy and enthusiasm,” allowing both the doctor and his creator to blame women for his fall from grace (41).In some cases, the digressions can step outside the novel and the historical frame of the Jazz Age to draw some surprising contemporary analogies. A passage on Dick’s finesse of his charm, “the source of his extraordinary appeal, and his greatest weakness” (18), suddenly segues into the realm of 1990s politics by quoting a New York Review of Books assessment of former secretary of labor Robert B. Reich’s memoir of his tenure in the Clinton administration, Locked in the Cabinet (1997). Louis Menand’s dissection of the “power of charm or social facility” is certainly enlightening in illustrating what Donaldson calls the “debilitating and disillusioning effects” that charisma can have on recipients of its attention like Reich, who may in the end feel themselves cozened up to by the glib, fast-talking William Jefferson Clintons of the world (Menand). Yet perhaps because post-Trump the value of charm seems to have depreciated faster than cryptocurrency, replaced as the coin of social interchange by Neanderthal insults and illiterate vituperation, drawing parallels “between the fictional Diver and the real-life Clinton” feels similar to the unsettling nostalgia for the 1990s that grips popular culture nowadays, one that tends to overlook the very real cultural traumas that roiled that decade. At the very least, Clinton’s purported charm, as his “Slick Willie” nickname suggests, was always transparent in a way that Dick Diver’s magnetism is not; in the novel, only the omniscient narrator and occasionally Nicole are privy to the calculation that goes into its deployment. It may be that the implied correlation between a young Rosemary and Monica Lewinsky is too obvious to resist the comparison, but Donaldson’s aside on “another Rhodes Scholar from Yale” famous for “the reckless exercise of his appeal” still feels gratuitous and unnecessary (18).Far more interesting and enlightening are occasional interpolations juxtaposed against the main text as block paragraphs set in a slightly smaller typeface. A discussion of book 1, chapter 19’s shooting at the Gare St. Lazare that the Divers witness (TITN 96–97) leads to an informative aside (11) on the incident that inspired Maria Wallis’s attempted murder of her English lover in the busy Metro. As Donaldson reports, on 26 March 1927, Countess Alice de Janzé (aka Alice Silverthorne, a Chicago socialite [1899–1941]) fired a pearl-handled .38 Colt at her inconstant lover, Raymund de Trafford, in the Gare du Nord, “in an attempted murder-suicide.” Both survived despite their debilitating wounds and subsequently and improbably married. A decade and a half later, after their inevitable divorce, de Janzé was a chief suspect in a second killing when her next philandering lover, Josslyn Hay, the Earl of Erroll, was shot to death at a Nairobi intersection. De Janzé committed suicide shortly afterward and later became the subject of several gossipy investigative studies that explored the murder in the context of British colonialism.2 While the story’s connection to Tender is not new—Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman cite de Janzé in their explanatory notes to the novel (Reader’s Companion 91)—it is not widely remembered. A second similar aside (17) links Abe North’s brutal demise to the 4 May 1928 speakeasy brawl that killed a Princeton classmate of Fitzgerald’s, Cornelius R. Winant, a death possibly alluded to in “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931; MLC 136). Both stories provide fascinating context to the expatriate instability of the late 1920s, revealing how the undercurrent of psychological disturbance and violence in Tender was far from a fictional conceit.Donaldson also fleshes out the animosity and distrust between the Fitzgeralds during the final two years in which the writer was able to complete his long-delayed tale of dissolution. Especially chilling is the little-known memorandum he quotes that is housed among Fitzgerald’s papers at Princeton. Better than any other document, it demonstrates his “desperate conviction” in 1933–34 “that he and Zelda were engaged in a battle for survival that only one of them could win.” On this paper scrap, the writer devised what Donaldson describes as “a diabolical plan to drive [his wife] around the bend”:While “there is no evidence that Fitzgerald carried out this scheme,” Donaldson concludes, “the mere fact that [Fitzgerald] was capable of putting it down on paper” testifies to how “adversarial” his marriage had become (53). The very words “to attack on all grounds” suggest the depths to which the language of battle and warfare saturated Fitzgerald’s thinking about domestic relations—a major reason, as the essay proves, that Tender Is the Night is a novel that does not have to take place in an actual combat zone to dramatize the mercenary hostilities riving modern life.“The War Between the Sexes” is such a tour de force that one can finish it doubting whether the three essays that follow can possibly equal it, but they do. Despite its rather unimaginative title, “Gatsby and the American Dream” (65–74) is a casual study of Fitzgerald’s most famous novel that transcends its more general observations. Originally delivered as the keynote address at the 2008 Words and Music Literary Festival in New Orleans in an era when that creative-writing competition/symposium was among the premier gatherings for book lovers in the United States, the essay walks a fine line between broad appreciation and specific analysis, inviting readers who may not have read Gatsby since college or high school to reexplore its value and pleasures beyond the more hackneyed observations it can inspire as a Great American Novel. Via T. S. Eliot’s praise of the novel as “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James” (qtd. in Wilson 310), Donaldson links Fitzgerald to James as a social novelist who tests the boundaries between innocence and experience, “between the individual yearning for independence and the society forever reining [the individual] in” (66). As such, he draws in-depth correspondences between Jay Gatsby and Myrtle Wilson, lending more empathy to the latter than do most critics, who are turned off by her tacky love nest and nagging demands that Tom Buchanan leave his wife. Donaldson deftly weaves together a number of familiar topics—clocks and time, parties, possessions, and “pecuniary emulation” (70), even photography—into an eloquent repudiation of both materialism and nostalgia. Particularly effective is his discussion of houses as monuments to delusional self-making, those “magical place[s] where nature is harnessed for the pleasure of [their] inhabitants” (71). As he demonstrates, homes are at once shelters and burdens: no matter how opulently we light them up like the World’s Fair (GGVar 98), they anchor us in a way that exposes the ultimately “earthbound” nature of social aspiration (71).Among the pieces gathered here, “Summer of ’24: Zelda’s Affair” (75–92) is the one with which readers are likely already familiar. This overview of biographical depictions of the solstitial flirtation between the twenty-three/four-year-old wife–muse of a literary celebrity and her French aviator previously appeared as a core chapter in The Impossible Craft (173–87). Given that that hardback memoir/meditation on literary biography still lists for $39.95 (and $31.99 for an e-book) after nearly eight years since it was first published, I suspect West chose to include it to make it more conveniently available. This is a good idea, for the key portion of it, “Sources and Interpretation” (82–90), is a master class in deconstructing the methods and motives that go into structuring literary biographies. From Arthur Mizener’s The Far Side of Paradise (1951) through Linda Wagner-Martin’s Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman’s Life (2004), Donaldson meticulously catalogues how biographers have added certain details and reshaped others to enhance their depictions of Edouard Jozan as they decide the age-old question of whether the Riviera flirtation with Zelda was consummated. The only drawback to reprinting the essay is the lingering wish that the author had lived long enough to revise into his account some consideration of Kendall Taylor’s The Gatsby Affair: Scott, Zelda, and the Betrayal that Shaped an American Classic. That 2018 biography significantly expands the portrayal of Jozan found in Taylor’s earlier Sometimes Madness is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, A Marriage (2002) by drawing upon interviews with the French war hero’s daughter, Martine Jozan Work, and her brother, Pierre Jozan. Still, even in unrevised form, “Summer of ’24” is so convincing in its surgical examination of biographical method that one wishes more scholars would pursue its approach on equally ambiguous relationships, such as, say, Fitzgerald’s 1927 flirtation with Lois Moran.The final selection, “A Fitzgerald Autobiography” (113–26), is a concise survey of the writer’s mid-1930s experiments in the confessional essay, including not just his “Crack-Up” trilogy (1936; MLC 139–55) but less examined efforts such as “One Hundred False Starts” and his Ring Lardner eulogy “Ring” (both 1933; MLC 82–90, 91–96). The piece originally appeared in the inaugural issue of The Fitzgerald Review in 2002 and served as the germinal seed for not one but two chapters in Works and Days, “Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction” and “The Crisis of The Crack-Up” (149–74, 175–88). The piece might have benefitted from some tweaking; one feels a little temporally displaced skidding into the concluding observation that “it is a . . . misfortune that these articles have been scattered among several posthumously published collections—an unhappy situation that will be remedied in a forthcoming book edited by James L. W. West III,” only to realize that that volume, My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920–1940 (2005), has been in print now for nearly eighteen years.Nonetheless, “A Fitzgerald Autobiography” is really a coda that should send readers back to what is the effort here most deserving of rediscovery. “Scott and Dottie” (93–112) was originally delivered at the 2015 Fitzgerald Society International Conference in Dublin and Waterford, Ireland, and appeared the next year in the Sewanee Review. We at The Fitzgerald Review begged to publish the piece, but Donaldson preferred to place it with the storied Tennessee literary quarterly where he was also a frequent contributor. The Review likes to think that is why “Scott and Dottie” is not as familiar to Fitzgerald scholars as it should be, something its inclusion here is designed to remedy. Beginning with the unverifiable rumor that Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) may have shared a bed as well as a vocation, Donaldson draws an extended comparison of their respective careers. Both alcoholics, they ran in the same social circles, sharing a friendship with Gerald and Sara Murphy. They were both fascinated by the theater and earned and squandered cash by the barrel. Both eventually felt relegated to Hollywood and complained loudly about the creative indignities of writing for the silver screen. Most importantly, Fitzgerald and Parker were their generation’s keenest observers of class divisions in American society, which helps explain why “both turned sharply left in their politics in the 1930s” (95).But did they have sex? Donaldson returns repeatedly to this question as a way of tweaking our prurient desire to gossip about the private lives of public figures. He traces the rumor to Lillian Hellman, whose 1969 memoir, An Unfinished Woman, includes a scene set at a Hollywood party on 12 July 1937 (such precision!) in which Parker admits to “a one or two night affair” with Fitzgerald (Hellman 57). Given Hellman’s prodigious reputation for gilding the lily in her reminiscences—she was tarred, after all, with arguably the greatest put down in American literary history when Mary McCarthy claimed on the Dick Cavett Show in 1979 that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’” (qtd. in Cavett)—Donaldson correctly labels the anecdote “extremely unreliable” (94). That explains why most Fitzgerald biographers completely ignore the tale. Yet Parker’s most authoritative biographer, Marion Meade, in her Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (1989), chose to minimize it in a different way: she “apparently accepted Hellman’s account as accurate but of minimal importance” (94). In the words of Parker’s famous (if itself flawed) 1956 recollection of viewing Fitzgerald at the California mortuary that prepared his body for his funeral, “Poor son of a bitch!” (qtd. in Capron 15). Being deemed “of minimal importance” as a romantic conquest seems a worse fate than no sex at all.For the record, Donaldson does decide that the pair did share a dalliance “briefly . . . in May 1934, but no, there is no ‘firm evidence’ about that” (112). What there is proof of, however, is a literary friendship that should benefit the reputation of both writers. For Fitzgerald, Parker was a contemporary whose consanguinities had the potential to free him from his constant conjoining with Ernest Hemingway, the chief “rival” whose affinity with him seems more a product of time and place than style and subject matter, no matter how joined at the hip the pair remain in popular culture. (As Donaldson often pointed out during his last two decades, the bestselling book of his career by far was his Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship [1999].) As an example of how Fitzgerald studies could use a little more Parker, when Donaldson notes that neither writer ever realized their Broadway ambitions, the Fitzgerald Review editor in me cannot help but imagine a future submission comparing his notorious flop The Vegetable (1923; LK 35–124) to her equally short-lived play Close Harmony (produced in late 1924, but not published until 1929). At least then the long-running dream of The Review to feature an essay on The Vegetable might be realized.As for Parker scholarship, Fitzgerald studies could provide an opportunity to boost her profile among academics. While she remains a subject of popular appreciation (her life is fictionalized almost as often as Fitzgerald’s), she is still better known as a wit or caustic epigrammatist than as an author. Nevertheless, her short stories engage the requisites of 1920s and 1930s popular fiction in ways every bit as inventive as Fitzgerald’s. While Donaldson is more interested in their professional and personal intersections, “Scott and Dottie” ideally should spark more interest in their artistic overlapping. Little do we remember that the same Best Short Stories compilation of 1931 that commended his “Babylon Revisited” also featured one of her most famous tales, “Here We Are” (O’Brien 148–70, 279–88). This is probably the best compliment we can give Fitzgerald and the War Between the Sexes: Donaldson’s essays open a wide range of potential topics that future scholars should pursue.If the enjoyment of Donaldson’s posthumous book comes from the way he breathes new meaning into scenes and topics that we may assume we know like the back of our hand, Mary M. Burke’s Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History cracks open a subject that receives relatively little attention in Fitzgerald studies. Because Fitzgerald’s name does not appear either in her title or subtitle, it may not immediately jump to readers’ attention, but it should. Heretofore, studies of the writer’s Irish heritage have primarily focused on its depiction in his writings, on cultural attitudes toward Irish Americans during his lifetime, or on his somewhat underacknowledged appreciation of Ireland’s literary traditions. Owen Dudley Edwards’s “The Lost Teigueen: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Ethics and Ethnicity” (1989) is a good example of the former, exploring how the author transmuted his Irish-Catholic background into his first three novels. Deborah Davis Schlacks’s “F. Scott Fitzgerald, Trickster: Images of Irishness in Edmund Wilson’s Bookman Essay” (2016) and Martina Mastandrea’s wonderful chapter on how Hollywood transformed “The Camel’s Back” (1920; TJA 33–60) into an unexpected treatment of Irish assimilation in the 1924 movie Conductor 1492 in her recent F. Scott Fitzgerald and Silent Film (174–191) illustrate the second tendency with aplomb. And Robert C. Utrep’s 2018 essay, “Yeatsian Modernism: Romantic Nationalism, Hero Worship, and the ‘Celtic Element’ in Tender Is the Night and The Love of the Last Tycoon,” discerningly demonstrates the transatlantic connections available through the third.Burke’s study fuses all three approaches in a chapter that places Fitzgerald alongside Eugene O’Neill, who, like Dorothy Parker, is not a contemporary with whom he is often paired (63–102). And while the Gothic genre noted in her subtitle may not immediately jibe with our sense of Fitzgerald as a social novelist (no matter how many ghost-tinged stories like “A Short Trip Home” he wrote [1927; TAR 107–28]), the introduction clarifies that the mode in this context refers to the grotesque racial disfigurations that occur from the “Irish pursuit of a whiteness perceived to be the secure social and cultural possession of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ America.” This pursuit, Burke argues, has been simultaneously “critiqued and condoned” by generations of “writers of Irish descent” from Poe through James and on to Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell, among many others (2). The influence of nonartistic public figures with Irish affiliations on these authors, whether Andrew Jackson or John F. Kennedy, also receives major attention.Burke’s chapter on Fitzgerald and O’Neill is provocatively titled “How the Irish Became Red,” a reference to the sensitivity of the palest versions of Irish skin to sunlight. Because “what beauty magazines call ‘Celtic skin’ burns easily in the sun or more visibly reddens with inflammatory conditions (such as the ‘curse of the Celts’, rosacea),” the “dermal whiteness” of people with Irish lineage has been stereotyped as “‘flawed’ due to being too white” (64). The propensity for blemish likewise extends beyond the cutaneous to connote social imperfection, with Irish whiteness evoking a “defective” ethnic identity that in Fitzgerald’s case fed his already inveterate sense of class exclusion as a “poor boy” instructed not to think of marrying a “rich girl” (Ledger 170).While he compensated for his insufficiently upper-class WASP background by “over-identif[ying] with the one non-Irish branch of his family that exemplified uncontestable whiteness” (his father’s maternal Scottish colonial ancestors), O’Neill was more inclined to “critique the Irish presence in the Americas . . . as one long failure to create solidarity with their fellow oppressed, especially peoples of color” (63). That stance would lead the playwright in both Desire Under the Elms (first staged in 1924) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (posthumously published in 1956) to depict the Irish immigrant urge to assimilate into mainstream America as a neurosis as O’Neill rooted his own sense of self in his ethnic pride. “The one thing that explains more than anything about me is the fact that I’m Irish,” Burke quotes O’Neill as telling his son. “And strangely enough, it is something that all the writers who have attempted to explain me and my work have overlooked” (qtd. in Estrin 204).Fitzgerald, in contrast, was prone to categorize his Irish ancestry racially and denigrate himself as a kind of miscegenated mongrel. In his most famous statement on the tangle he saw in his family lines, he wrote John O’Hara:As Burke demonstrates, the term “black Irish” (or “half black Irish”) is “unknown in Ireland in that iteration.” Like the more ameliorative designation “Scots-Irish,” which became commonplace in U.S. usage “to describe those of Ulster Presbyterian origin” who could claim “white” as opposed to “Gaelic heritage”—as Burke notes, the former term appears in the Thomas Dixon, Jr. novel The Clansman (1905) “that inspired the touchstone [Ku Klux] Klan film, The Birth of a Nation (1915),” where it defines “the true American nation as Scotch-Irish in descent and inspiration”— “black Irish” as an identity is formulated specifically “in response to America’s ethno-racial politics” (63).The section of “How the Irish Became Red” devoted to Fitzgerald is headlined “The Curious Case of Great-Grandfather Fitzgerald,” which reveals Burke’s revisionary impetus. Rather than focus on the Irish immigrant experience of the author’