Fitzgerald: the Tissue of Style
Printed as poetry this representative passage from Fitzgerald's first novel differs from the post-1915 debasement of Imagism (what Ezra Pound called ‘Amygism’) in only two significant aspects: it has a higher incidence of rhyme and is, if possible, even more devoid of content. Its voice defines the novel's protagonist, Amory Blaine, much more memorably than do his character and actions. Derived from the vaguely erotic style Pater developed in Marius the Epicurean (1885) and popularized by Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), this verbal swoon, made over into a Princeton accent, places Fitzgerald in the Romantic Decadence. Its derivative quality should not, however, blind us to the work it entailed for Fitzgerald, accumulating these inter-echoes during the re-writings of the novel.