Both Sides of Paradise

SCOTT FITZGERALD (364 pp.)--Andrew Turnbull--Scribner ($5.95).

For 1939, Scott Fitzgerald's royalties amounted to just $33. Not until after World War II did readers and critics finally give lasting recognition to the man who gave the jazz age its name. Since 1950, annual sales of his books have climbed 400%; his novels have been converted to movies as fast as Hollywood could find stars to play them (most recently, Tender Is the Night); his life has been fictionalized (by Budd Schulberg in The Disenchanted); his last mistress (Hollywood Columnist Sheilah Graham) has issued her memoirs; his notebooks and diaries have been edited by Edmund Wilson (The Crack-Up); and he has become a popular target for Ph.D. theses and those solemn essays in amateur psychoanalysis that often pass for criticism.

Historian Andrew Turnbull begins his biography with his childhood acquaintance with Fitzgerald; he got to know Scott, his wife Zelda and Daughter Scottie when they rented an old house on the Turnbull estate in Maryland in the early '30s.

With the industry of a researcher and the dedication of a disciple, Turnbull has apparently sought out every friend and enemy Fitzgerald ever had. Turnbull is neither stylist nor phrasemaker, but his - zealous reportage has produced a portrait that makes vividly comprehensible both Fitzgerald's failure as a man and his success as a writer.

The Greater Love. Fitzgerald, according to Turnbull, loved his malingering father (who stopped earning paychecks when Scott was eleven) but did not respect him; he respected his domineering mother but found her difficult to love. At prep school he had an inordinate vanity, was given to boasting about his nonexistent athletic prowess. At Princeton, where he was remembered for his "arrow-collar head on a longshoreman's body," he was no scholar but he enjoyed the big-time competition for campus prestige, certain that his talents would be recognized. But throughout his life, there was always a Hobey Baker (Princeton's famed halfback and hockey star) or a Hemingway to overshadow him. In his own mind, life became a struggle for recognition. It was a struggle that he largely lost.

Only his first novel. This Side of Paradise, published in 1920, gave Fitzgerald a heady feeling of something well accomplished and recognized. The Beautiful and Damned pleased the critics more than the reading public, and The Great Gatsby was a financial disappointment. His most ambitious novel. Tender Is the Night, was not finished and published until 1934; by then, other authors were writing novels of social protest and Fitzgerald seemed like the last member of a generation that had not grown up.

Lost Capacity. Fitzgerald was bent and almost broken with disappointment. His wife Zelda was slowly sinking into madness, and Turnbull does a moving and convincing reporter's job on tracing Zelda's decline from the brittlely gay young madcap who could bathe in the Plaza fountain at midnight to the hopeless schizophrenic that she became. As Fitzgerald put it in his notebook: "I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanitarium." By the '30s, Fitzgerald had lost his early conviction that "life was something you dominated if you were any good." He drowned himself in gin, lamenting "I haven't been able to enjoy myself. I would like a blank period.

I have suffered too much and too long. I would like not to feel for a while." Fitzgerald died in 1940 of a heart attack, at the age of 44. Of his last years, Turnbull says: "Fitzgerald seemed like some mild-mannered clerk--sweet, gentle, amiable, but devoid of temperament or bite, as if he had been erased."

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