Old and New Bonds_ (London, 1965). _Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States_ , ed. by FRUS (Washington DC, 1930–2), 11 vols., I have referred to these by date, with the volume number given parenthetically. On the other hand, there are occasions where it is a matter of personal preference which volume to use. Thus where Cancelled Bonds are mentioned, I refer to _FRUS_ , 1919–21. ## Introduction It is hard for us to imagine what life was like in the 1920s. Apart from a few elderly men sitting in their front parlours smoking pipes and dreaming nostalgically of the First World War, Britain and America were as different from what we think of as their 'real' selves as two people could be. Yet, the era's writers and producers of literature, popular songs, films and the theatre were obsessed with their own youth and its 'spirit'. In the spring of 1922, George Bernard Shaw suggested a radical new perspective on the world when he satirized society's new fashions in a play called _Everybody's Political What's What_ ( _EPWST_ ). In one memorable scene, a young man and young woman try to discover what they have in common by reciting their common experiences to one another. 'Have you ever been in love, Helen?' the man asks. 'No, not really,' she replies. 'Neither have I,' he replies. 'Not really?' she asks, 'Oh! Isn't that a little bit funny?' She then proceeds to recite her list of pastimes: 'I think we ought to have a lot of common experiences. We ought to have been in love – and out of love – and in love again – and in love with someone else – done things we don't want to tell our mothers about – and broken things and put things right. And we ought to be very, very tired of the whole thing, and be married and done with it all and bored to death with each other and our husbands, and be sick of the sight of men.' The couple's common bond was simply that they had 'never been anywhere' ('I think you are boring', comes the devastating reply).1 Shaw's point was that many of the experiences through which young people were expected to pass in order to 'fulfil their destiny' were meaningless. As he put it in a letter to his wife, Lady Gregory, the young man quoted above 'is still a child. And what is the aim of a man's life when he is a grown-up child? How can you tell if he is a man? He can't talk sensibly about anything that interests him.'2 While it is difficult to pinpoint just how many people subscribed to Shaw's rather nihilistic way of thinking, it is clear that he was tapping into a growing preoccupation with the question of identity. This was partly because Britain and the United States were recovering from the carnage of the First World War, partly because the economic conditions that had prevailed in the nineteenth century had been replaced by a new world of opportunity, partly because the war had opened people's eyes to a new world of political possibilities. There was the promise of a new world, but a multitude of people were in danger of growing 'unsettled' as they wondered how they should turn these promises into the reality of a new life. It was a matter of making sense of a world that appeared to be changing on an almost daily basis. The question, in short, was: who am I in this new world? No less concerned than Shaw was a young American, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Born in 1896 in St Paul, Minnesota, Fitzgerald graduated from Princeton with a degree in literature before embarking on a career as a writer. In 1919 he had won acclaim as the author of his first novel, _This Side of Paradise_ , which he had also adapted into a play. The following year he published his second novel, _The Beautiful and Damned_ , the story of a rich young man who is seduced by a wealthy married woman. Later Fitzgerald followed this with _The Great Gatsby_ , a novel about two people who share a romantic relationship but fail to bridge the gap between their different social classes. He was then commissioned to write a screenplay for a new film production. The result was his first great critical success and his only completely autobiographical work of literature, _The Beautiful and Damned_. For many, the popularity of _The Beautiful and Damned_ signalled the arrival of a new voice in American literature. Fitzgerald went on to produce two more well-received novels, _Tender is the Night_ (1934) and _The Last Tycoon_ (1941), but he died young, dying of a heart attack in 1940 at the age of 44.3 Fitzgerald's experience of the world was at once more restricted and more cosmopolitan than Shaw's. Although his family came from well-established business and political circles, they were by no means poor. Fitzgerald's father, Edward, a stockbroker, died in 1912, but his grandfather, a Wall Street bond trader, had made enough to allow him to send his sons to St Paul's School, an exclusive boarding school in New Hampshire. In 1917, two years after the end of the First World War, his mother had made a marriage of convenience with a wealthy widow, Dorothy ('Dottie') Smith Fitzgerald, by whom he had a half-brother named Fitzgerald whom he had never seen. But that was the extent of Fitzgerald's formal schooling. Following the death of his mother in 1922, he left Princeton and made his way to New York City in search of a career. He moved into a Greenwich Village apartment, and within a few months he had found a job as a reporter for the _New York Evening Post_. The following year Fitzgerald married Zelda Sayre, a beautiful daughter of an oil millionaire who liked to think of herself as a 'free spirit'. The couple set up house together, and Fitzgerald took his first steps on the road that led to the writing of _The Beautiful and Damned_. Fitzgerald's career as a writer had its ups and downs. Despite his marriage to Zelda, he was not ready to settle down and he continued to enjoy the lifestyle of an hedonistic young man. He also became involved in a bitter family dispute when he threatened to sue his sister-in-law, and eventually she did sue him for divorce. Zelda Fitzgerald's influence had always been problematic for him, however. In 1920, he described their relationship in a letter to his first wife, Sheila: 'It is a thing in which the right is always on one side. For six years – more or less – I have been fighting against a thing that was just a part of my own personality... As you know, it was not a "loving" marriage. We were two entirely different people with entirely different kinds of minds and there was never a point in which I wasn't fighting for my life – trying to keep from being dragged under by her will and my own feelings.'4 In 1921, having left _The New York Post_ , he had a series of romantic interludes with a number of young women, one of whom he described as 'a girl who is an actress by profession and a girl of the streets by night'.5 However, following the experience of the 1920s – that decade in which he had come to realize that his relationship with Zelda had become a life-or-death matter – Fitzgerald began to draw back from what he felt had been his over-ambitious plan to become the sort of writer that he admired in W. Somerset Maugham.6 Fitzgerald's life is portrayed in the novels _The Great Gatsby_ , _The Beautiful and Damned_ and _Tender is the Night_ ; his relationship with Zelda is the subject of his unfinished novel, _The Love of the Last Tycoon_. Fitzgerald himself saw himself primarily as an artist, but if his biographies are accurate, we should also see him as a man who was very much like the majority of his fellow countrymen, a man whose life and career was defined by the fact that he was not born wealthy, nor was he born into any kind of privileged social position. Born a very rich man, Fitzgerald came to experience America as a young writer and it was this that he attempted to articulate in the popular literary genre known as the 'flapper' novel. Like so many of those he described, he too felt frustrated and impotent; what should he do with his life? Although Fitzgerald was a writer, and therefore had no shortage of financial resources, his work was hampered by the knowledge that a large part of his earnings from his novels was never to be seen in the form of a fixed amount of money to which he could claim a tangible property right. What he described as the 'old man' kept claiming his own share. In _The Great Gatsby_ , a lawyer argues that the old man who is Fitzgerald's landlord is entitled to half of his income. Moreover, the money could be taken away in any number of ways: a court order, for example, or an unwritten understanding between the old man and the author. While Fitzgerald could be forced to pay tribute to his old man on occasion, he was also able to ignore him on occasions, particularly when it came to the making of films. He therefore felt that he was, and always had been, a man out of place and not in a position to control the circumstances of his own life. If Fitzgerald had wanted to