They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and
when Amory
crept shivering into bed it was with his mind aglow…
(Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise)
Readers familiar with F. Scott Fitzgerald's early work might recall
that in
those years just before the Scopes trial he wrote of Victorians who
“shuddered when they found what Mr. Darwin was about”; or that
he
joined in the fashionable comic attacks on people who could not accept
their “most animal existence,” describing one such character
as “a
hairless ape with two dozen tricks.” But few would guess the extent
to
which his interest in evolutionary biology shaped his work. He was
particularly concerned with three interrelated biological problems: (1)
the
question of eugenics as a possible solution to civilization's many
ills, (2)
the linked principles of accident and heredity (as he understood these
through the lens of Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law), and (3) the
revolutionary theory of sexual selection that Darwin had presented in The
Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). As I hope
to show in
the following pages, his concern with these issues underlies such well-known
features in the Fitzgerald landscape as his insecurity in the “social
hierarchy” (his sense of its “terrifying fluidity”),
his emphasis on the
element of time, his interest in “the musk of money,” his interest
in
Spengler and the naturalists, and his negative portraiture of male
violence. The principles of eugenics, accidental heredity, and sexual
selection flow together as the prevailing undercurrent in most of
Fitzgerald's work before and after The Great Gatsby, producing
more
anxiety than love from the tangled courtships of characters he deemed
both beautiful and damned.