[September 24th is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 125th birthday! So in honor of that quintessential Modernist author, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other exemplary such writers. Share your thoughts on any of them, and any other Modernist authors and texts you’d highlight, for an experimental crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On a short story
that can help us revisit and revise our overly familiar narratives of a famous
Modernist author.
I tried in
this post to make the case for why, to my mind, The Great Gatsby is overrated—not bad by any means, but not
anywhere close to the Great American Novel either. That might seem like a funny
present with which to begin a happy 125th birthday post, but I would
actually argue the opposite: that it’s to Fitzgerald’s disadvantage that he’s
become so closely associated with this one novel and character. I mean, not in
every way; obviously no author would pass up having a book ranked as the 2nd
greatest novel of the 20th century, for example. But beyond the
ways in which such close associations of an author with one work always limit
our narratives and images of that author (and they really
always do), in this particular case I think the problem is exacerbated by
the not insignificant fact that Gatsby is the superficial asshole, obsessed
with another superficial asshole, about whom I wrote in that hyperlinked post. Fitzgerald
and his novelist-narrator
Nick do an excellent job beautifying that dude and that obsession, to be
sure, but at the end of the day I’m really not convinced that Gatsby was worth
the whole damn bunch of
them together—and I’m definitely convinced that linking F. Scott Fitzgerald
too fully to this one novel does him no favors.
Luckily, there’s
a very easy answer to that problem, which is to read one (or ideally all, but
one’s a good start) of the many other complicated and compelling books and
stories that Fitzgerald wrote across his 15-year
publishing career. My personal favorite is probably the short story that I highlighted
briefly in this post, “Babylon Revisited” (1931). For one thing, the six
years between Gatsby and “Babylon”
are so important to the depth and success of the latter story—not just because
it’s written and set during the Great Depression, and so can flashback
self-reflectively and thoughtfully to the Roaring ‘20s rather than being so
consumed by the superficial excesses of that moment (as at times Gatsby certainly is, such as the
multi-paragraph descriptions of Gatsby’s utterly meaningless parties); but also
because for this reader at least Fitzgerald’s style had grown and deepened substantially
over those six years, with the result being that “Babylon” complements the
unquestionable beauty of Gatsby’s
prose with many more layers of complex human identity than Nick can give his
focal characters in that novel. (Another reason why the association of
Fitzgerald with Gatsby is problematic—it
was a pretty early text! Give the man space to grow!)
Perhaps the most
telling such human layer to “Babylon” and its protagonist Charlie Wales is an
emotion that is undoubtedly a factor of that time shift but also seems largely absent
from most of Gatsby’s characters:
regret. Toward the end of the novel Nick critiques Tom and Daisy Buchanan as
people who cause messes and then leave others to deal with the consequences,
but I’d say the same for pretty much all of the novel’s characters—I’m not sure
any of the main characters spare a second thought for example for Myrtle
Wilson, the most direct casualty (among a few!) of Gatsby’s and Daisy’s and Tom’s
(and Nick’s) actions. Charlie, on the other hand, is consumed by regret, forced
to deal day in and day out with the consequences of his actions during that decade
of Roaring 20s excesses and errors—consequences that have most fully affected
and limited his relationship to his daughter (which we might compare for
example to Daisy and her young daughter, whom we see and hear about precisely
once in the entirety of Gatsby). That
emotion, those struggles, that relationship are all more profound and more powerfully
human than any of the superficial games played by the novel’s characters, and
they remind us of just what this Modernist author was capable of. For his 125th,
let’s agree to start reading him beyond that most famous book, okay?
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Thoughts on these authors and texts, or any other
Modernist ones, for the weekend post?
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