By Cosmo Adair.
“All romantics meet the same fate
Some day, cynical and drunk and boring
Someone in some dark cafe.”
Joni Mitchell, “The Last Time I Saw Richard”
Hollywood Boulevard, 1940. Two lovers, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham, are strolling along as the blue sky fades to pearly darkness. He recites a poem. They notice an advertisement outside of a record store which reads: “Make your own records — Hear yourself speak.” They enter, and he begins to speak into the microphone, reciting John Masefield’s “On Growing Old”, before reaching its final couplet:
“Only stay quiet while my mind remembers
The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers.”
That second “beauty” gets caught in his throat. He reads on, now his favourite poem, the one whose words have found their modern reimaginings in so many of his works, John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”. He dwells, quite lovingly, on each delicate syllable, before tailing off at the close of the third stanza, where he misquotes and says: “And new love cannot live beyond tomorrow … Or beauty cannot live.”
Herein lies both the biographer and the critic’s dream — a moment of recognition, as a percussive sadness sets in, one which turns back with vague glimpses of the past, and looks forwards, ‘beyond tomorrow,’ and sees the exit-lights dully flashing. As Jonathan Bate questions in Bright Star, Green Light was Fitzgerald, here, moved by a sense that Keats was not only writing of his own fears of mortality, but with an “uncanny anticipation” of Fitzgerald’s own fears that his twilight relationship with Sheilah Graham would soon end, and that the beauty he had sought in his novels would not survive? After so many miserable years of alcoholism and depression, of “the process of breaking down” as he calls it in The Crack-Up, had he now found an aesthetic close, an ending befitting his characters — those great Romantic heroes, all of whom are cut-down or beaten or embittered by the realities of an unforgiving world, but who receive some restitution of dignity in the recognition of the beauty of their dream.
Throughout his life, Fitzgerald suffered from prolonged bouts of depression and from an indefatigable alcoholism. An early literary career, imbibed with phenomenal talent, which had promised so much — with This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby, all published within five years of each other — tailed off into alcoholic black-out, with only one more novel, Tender is the Night, published in the next fifteen years. There is, throughout his life and works, a sense that the impossibility of squaring his romantic pursuits and ideals — of beauty, of love, of Art — with the real world condemned him to sadness and a presiding sense of failure.
In The Crack-Up, a candid sequence of three essays dealing with his depression, he writes that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and yet still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” This seems a fitting guide to both his life and to his characters: that despite the hopelessness and futility of life, you need to keep the dream alive — of Daisy, in Gatsby’s case, or else of Beauty in Fitzgerald’s — so that life might remain bearable.
That’s at the heart of The Great Gatsby’s famous conclusion: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further … And one fine morning — So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Had Gatsby not been killed, he would have navigated a disillusioned 1930s in much the same way as Fitzgerald did: as soon as the ideal of Daisy has been shattered that elusive green light loses its meaning. Gatsby, like Fitzgerald, would have adhered to Joni Mitchell’s words in the above quote: “All romantics … [become] cynical and drunk and boring.” The child whose sandcastle has collapsed becomes an advocate for the futility of sandcastles. So it is with our dreams and ideals — but ours tend to be smaller than Gatsby’s, smaller than Fitzgerald’s, and we must ‘run faster, stretch out our arms further’, even if all we meet is failure and futility.
For Fitzgerald, the dream’s death was like the death of the sun; after it, he could only declare, “I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempt to be a person — to be kind, just, or generous.” But in that recording of 1940, as he stutters over ‘Beauty’ and misquotes Keats’ “Nightingale”, there is a sense that — somewhere, between the mists of depression and booze, under the influence of a beautiful but fleeting love with Sheilah Graham — he recalls that dream which once so enthused and justified him and his life’s work, and that there is a sadness, an inenarrable sadness, in the recognition that he so easily relinquished his dreams and that so much beauty was wasted. And so, that year, as the bombs began to fall in London and Europe shrunk to the size of a map, Fitzgerald drank himself to death at the age of only forty-four, taking him with him a little bit of the Beauty and the Romance so needed in a world which, day-by-day, was self-flagellating into ugly and brutal deformity.