in Fay, as in Gatsby, to "the faith shining through all the versatility and intellect" (Bruccoli 40-41). "There's that gift of faith that we have, you and I," Fay had told him, "that carries us past the hard spots" (quoted in Allen 44). Like the young Gatsby in "Absolution," Fitzgerald outgrew Catholicism but not his sense of the ideal, which he relocated in the City of the World: in a mysterious "something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God" (Fitzgerald, "Absolution" 150). It was, one might comment, a worthy translation, for the great city, at least in one of its aspects, summons the immense poetry of the possibilities of the future, imaging transformation, joy, prosperity and beauty. Musing on the great towering cities, Raymond Williams reflects, "This is what men have built, so often magnificently, and is not everything then possible?" (6). It is precisely as a kind of dislocated mystic, surveying North America with the paradoxical eyes of an atheist thirsty for a visio dei, that Fitzgerald becomes, as it were, sub specie aeternitatis, acutely sensitized to what, in his period and ours, replaces the traditional teleological sublime: the allure but also the fraudulence, the "spectroscopic gaiety" and "foul dust" (Gatsby 45, 2), of capitalism's transaction with the ideal. Transposed into more sociological terms, I hope to demonstrate that Fitzgerald's deracinated, incorrigible, vocational aestheticism positioned him, in a secular age, as a superlative critic of capitalism's appropriation and concentration of beauty in a new and historically unique institution: glamour, which Fitzgerald knows as thoroughly as a martyr his Bible. Fitzgerald's more-than-aestheticism makes possible, in a dialectic of addiction and contempt, a searching demystification of capitalist society and its debased teleology of glamour — which, by the same token, he can never quite renounce. Anti-capitalistic, yet ultimately reaction...
