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Very shortly after the golden age of the Modernist City Novel – Petersburg (1913), Ulysses (1922), Manhattan Transfer and Mrs Dalloway (1925), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) – a work of comparable stylistic brilliance and originality was published by an Australian writing about an Australian city. Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney was in fact finished as early as 1930, but the London publisher who accepted it early in 1931 insisted that she write a more conventional book before he would finally risk publication in 1934 (Rowley 137ff).

For John Callahan Everyone knows that F. Scott Fitzgerald came from St. Paul, Minnesota, but fewer are aware that the city was originally French-Canadian. Before 1841 it was just a hamlet called L'Oeil du Cochon (Pig's Eye) after a tavern established by trapper Pierre Parrant. In 1841 the first Catholic missionary resident in Minnesota, Father Lucien Galtier from the Ardeche, raised the tone of the place by giving it a more respectable name. His colleague Joseph Cretin, the first bishop of St. Paul, went on to establish the city's cathedral and contribute toward making the town the "middle-class, dull, unpoetical and fettering" center of Midwestern Catholicism that Shane Leslie felt it had become by the early twentieth century (qtd. in Meyers 11). Many of its established inhabitants were thus of French origin, and they tended to look down on later settlers and coreligionists, in particular the Irish. The fact that the St. Paul Fitzgeralds had their own patrician pretensions no doubt complicated their relation to these French top dogs. Scott's parents Edward and Mary had spent their honeymoon in 1890 on the French Riviera, of which, according to LeVot, "Mary retained an enchanted memory" (10). Judging by a letter of 1909, Edward seems to have spelled his daughter's name the French way ("Mother and Annabelle are very well and enjoying Duluth" (Bruccoli and Duggan 5), and perhaps the family may have meditated more generally on the name Fitzgerald in the Franco-Irish context of the city. Irish fitz is of course French fils, and some of these Midwestern "Sons of Gerald" may have felt that the name they bore had a sufficiently aristocratic ring to entitle them to look the city's French Catholic nabobs in the eye. At any rate, Fitzgerald would later satirically encode aristocratic pretension in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" by providing the founder of the Montana Washington dynasty with the sonorous Anglo-Franco-Irish Christian name Fitz-Norman Culpeper (Jazz Age 291). In the St. Paul years of his childhood, Fitzgerald grew up surrounded by French names, with whose sounds, I shall suggest, he became fascinated, which had significant consequences for his writing. French, I want to show, became for him a language of dreams expressing fantasies of glamour, elegance, sexual conquest, and upward social mobility--even if all these were equally understood by his daytime consciousness as pretensions offering apt targets for social satire. I shall also examine how failing to speak French well becomes a symptom, in Tender Is the Night in particular, of a cardinal Fitzgerald preoccupation with failure tout court, and perhaps of a more general modernist preoccupation with decline and dissolution. Minnesota is full of French names, and so is Fitzgerald's fiction. In This Side of Paradise, where Amory Blaine and Froggy Parker are given to strolling through Minneapolis "in the balmy air of August night, dreaming along Hennepin and Nicollet Avenues" (17), wandering down streets named after seventeenth-century French explorers. Fitzgerald himself spent his 1909 summer holiday at Frontenac, named after the governor general of New France, and commemorates this fact in the story "Three Hours between Planes," where Nancy Gifford attempts to recall "unspeakable" holiday sexual exploration there: "It was at Frontenac--the summer we--we used to go to the cave" (Collected Stories 577). Frontenac, Hennepin, Nicollet: the names clearly resonate, and later perhaps generate, inter alia, Nicole, the daughter of Devereux Warren. On the basis of such evidence, it would be profitable to take a new look at Fitzgerald's French. His daughter Scottie certainly agreed with the judgment upon his "horrendous French" (qtd. in Meyers 110) and "atrocious accent" by all those who heard him speak the language. He was thoroughly aware of his drastic linguistic limitations, mocking his habit of Franglais on several occasions in his letters: "'Je suis a stranger here,' I said in flawless French. …

‘October 4, 185-. No. 9. A male child; newly born; weakly and very small; ticket round the neck with the name of Gustave; coarse linen; red stain on the left shoulder; no other mark.’ This is how Dudley Costello, at the end of his impressive Household Words article ‘Blank Babies in Paris’ (HW, VIII, 379–82; 17 December 1853), translates the registry entry for a new arrival at the Foundling Hospital in Paris in the Rue d’Enfer. Costello, responding to Dickens’s editorial policy of ‘dwelling on the romantic side of familiar things’, is able to wring metaphor and symbol from his subject. He starts by interrogating the etymology of that street name: it comes from Via Inferior, but ‘a poetical imagination soon made the corruption’ that ensures that infant orphans in Paris are brought up in the street of hell. The building on that street may be strikingly plain and anonymous (‘it lay before us, grey, blank, and dreary, with nothing to relieve the monotony of its general aspect…’), but the writer is able to imagine its very absence of significant features as pregnant with significance, for it is a place ‘where no witness might see the trembling mother deposit her new-born child.’

In this paper, my starting point will be Philip Roth’s famous essay “Writing American Fiction,” in which he complains about the difficulty of writing novels in a country “where the actuality is constantly outdoing our talents.” I shall contend that this perception is not a new one, nor does it apply to American reality alone, and trace it back through a series of writers commenting on the difficulty of writing novels in the face of contemporary reality to its origins in Byron’s Don Juan: “For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.” I shall argue that the aesthetics of “romantic realism,” as Donald Fanger labels it—the writing of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Gogol, etc—directly addresses this paradox, and that this partly accounts for the differences between it and “classic realism.” My contention is that we mistake the nature of such writing if we judge it by the criteria of “classic realism”—and find it wanting, as is often the case.