Something New

PLASTIC by Stacey Teague (Te Herenga Waka University Press, NZ$30); DETRITUS OF EMPIRE – feather / grass / rock by Robin Peace (Cuba Press, $NZ25); 100 YEARS OF DARKNESS by Bill Direen (published in a limited edition, Grapefruit  Press NZ$30) ;  FLEUR ADCOCK : COLLECTED POEMS, [Expanded edition], (Te Herenga Waka University Press, NZ$50)

Stacey Teague’s Plastic is a quest for identity. Brought up in an Auckland suburb, her family did not speak Maori and did not participate in Maori life - yet their forbears were Maori. (There seems to have been some Pakeha forebears as well, but this is not spelled out.) Plastic opens with a 12-page-long prose introduction called “Hoki” concerning the poet’s young life in Auckland. She examines the depth of her Maoritanga. Why is she  not more immersed in it? Of one of her aunties she says “ She’s one of the only people in my whanau who knows about our history and whakapapa, so I listen patiently. She always refers to Mum as ‘Ngati Plastic’ and giggles about it. A plastic Maori refers to Maori who do not know te reo, tikanga or their whakapapa.” In contrast her mother says to survive you have to assimilate. Teague later says “It’s easy, when the messages you receive are that it is not a good thing to be Maori. You hide away, you pretend to be something else. It was easy to cosplay as Pakeha. I didn’t have a Maori name; I had red curly hair and freckles; I didn’t know my whakapapa. Somewhere in the back of my mind though, I felt proud to be Maori. I just couldn’t show it.” And “Here are the ancestors, here are the people. But I am both colonised and coloniser.”

So having set up her situation, Teague launches into many and varied free-verse poems under the heading PLASTIC. “Dreamworld” charts childhood nightmares. “Ipu whenua” deals with the essential traditional role rituals in Maoritanga of giving birth.  In “Blue hours” the poet speaks of many things, but in part about maturing where “I felt language rearrange me /  then leave me behind / on the hot driveway of my youth / I saw my own future / and left it behind” - and this probably involves perhaps casting off some Pakeha ways. There is a shape poem called “Beat” in the shape of a paddle. “Ode to Sappho” seems to be identifying her sexuality and “no one taught me a way / in which love was the most possible / I had to learn it in the darkness of rooms”. “Family name” written, a little eccentrically with each line ending with a full stop regardless of grammar. It appears to be about the colour of the skin. Not so cryptic is “Toitu te whenua, toit te tangata” where it is hard to miss the commentary about the loss of Maori land to colonisers. And finally in this section is “Love language” which presents a scene about awaiting a tryst.

Another section headed PARATIKI [meaning plastic] is less diverse in its focus. This time Stacey Teague sets her sight on traditional Maori customs and beliefs and how she is drawn into them. One poem deals with the death of a Maori schoolgirl whom she knew at school – the event staying with her mind. Other poems deal with a goddess who watches over women working at traditional crafts; a still-born child; a traditional violent story in which a male figure finally kills a female figure; and the goddess who rules the heavens but also crushes a man who violates her. These tales are all part of Maoritanga. But most impressive are the two poems that end this section. “Tupuna Wahine” traces the lives and legacy of three Maori women (presumably forebears of the poet) and how they fared between 1830 and 1939 – in effect giving a history of how Maori women both endured but also faced different challenges. And then there is a poem that expresses heartfelt distress at the death of Teague’s much-loved grandmother.

TOKIKAPU, the final section, reverts to prose. It underlines the poet’s determination to identify with Maoritanga. Part of her ancestry is Ngati Maniapoto. With her family – recalling her childhood – she visits the Ngati Maniapoto Marae near Waitomo. She also writes “I grew up in the Pakeha world, nobody taught me how to be Maori. This is not unusual, but no one talks about it. We are all learning. I want to learn. Here I am, in the body of my ancestor, but I feel distracted by my own doubts. I want to be in the present, so I try to imagine that I am a mountain…”.  “It’s not that visiting my marae finally validates me as a Maori person, it’s not some great spiritual experience, it can’t undo a lifetime of disconnection, but it is a step towards understanding, towards becoming….” And that is where she now stands.

Interspersed in this collection are three times shorter sections called SPELLS, free-verse poems encouraging the poet herself in different moods and situations.

Clear and straightforward in [most of] its meaning, Plastic has one great merit which is too often ignored by many poets – it is accessible for a wide readership.

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            Robin Peace is a retired geographer, teacher and academic with a deep interest in ecology. Detritus of Empire is her second collection of poetry, embracing 55 poems. Her poetic agenda is declared early in the very first poem of this collection called “All flesh is grass”. It reads in full thus: “Why grass, you ask, / why write about grass / as if it were a thing /  to do with feeling, /  with feathered griefs,  / or the suffering wells / where human thinking / flows and ebbs / through the stories / of its empires, / when all it is / is the green beside the patio / or a paddock for cows? / Ah, like stars, grass / holds the secrets / of our selves. It speaks of multitudes / and shines.” We at once are introduced to her view that nature itself is colonised with the different plants, trees and animals that have been introduced. In her poem “Small ecologies”, the loss of a bird’s feather diminishes nature as a rooster gets buried.   In  “We are as grasshoppers” [a quotation from the Bible] the grasshopper eats the world – just as we do. Grass, rooster, grasshopper – like us, they have colonised this part of the world. The title poem of this collection “Detritus of Empire” concerns seeds brought back from India by colonialists and becoming invasive lawn weeds in New Zealand. Likewise “Cinnamon songs” concerns those imported destructive pests, possums.

            Many New Zealand poets are now focussing on the iniquities of colonialism – the confiscation of Maori lands, racial prejudice, former suppression of the Maori language etc. Robin Peace sometimes addresses these matters, but her technique is original. She sees the degradation of this country’s ecology as a major result of colonialism in the form of misused land and forestry. So misused nature is her focus, rather than wars and human conflicts. A clutch of poems deal with rocks, sand and erosion (“Land that falls into the sea is not lost” ; “Hill song” ; “A basement gives no shelter”; “Fourteen quarried away” )

Most of Peace’s poems are lean and brief; but there are also a number of substantial prose poems like “Rocky shores” which directly addresses colonials thus: “We were given no cause to make sense of bigger things to be unpicked and put to rights. Land theft, confiscation, annexation for trade: things that fell to the floor like clods of mud off boots. Empires of satisfaction in the crush of homesickness. Collateral ignorance blooming while domestic life unravelled from back pockets of entitlement and hope.” The following prose  poem “Other rocky shores” appears to be chastising a forebear who was an industrial chemist, and therefore part of the process of degrading nature. The prose poem “Islands” focuses on the unimaginative way British settlers usurped the Maori names of islands with dull English ones. “So decidedly Cookian: North. South. Stewart. Chatham. Poor Knights. Barrier. Mayor. It’s like we were all nonplussed by the simplicity of the steal and scribbled whatever came first to our heads: directions, famous chaps, weak concepts.”

Yet while there is a strong strain of protest in Robin Peace’s poetry, this is not the only string she plucks. Some of her poems are simply detailed observations of how creatures function, as in her eloquent “Grace notes” describing ducks descending; or “American flamingo” about those exotic birds as they behave trapped in a zoo; there are a number of poems about the shades of green – not limited to the green of grass – simply given as clear description; and “Lawn daisy” which is given a precise description of the small flower, but which also anthropomorphises it. “Swamp witness” recalls a child’s wonder and delight in first seeing an estuary and swamp and all their colour and fullness.

Some of Peace’s poems seem double-edged, as in “Stitching it”. It concerns her British forebears. She says she has visited their bleak British places, but while there, she pines for New Zealand birdsongs – after all, is she not a colonial herself? As are most people who will read this review.

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A few years back, I reviewed on this blog Bill Direen’s collection Seasons  which chronicled a year in the Otago where he lives. It was a very vivid version of the seasons, sometimes lyrical about nature but often realistic about the hardships of Otago winters.

            One Hundred Years of Darkness has a very different focus. The “darkness” is the darkness of sitting in cinemas watching movies. Three tightly-printed pages at the end of this collection list all the films (about a hundred of them) that are referenced in these poems. The great majority of these films are not in the English language or are what might be classed as “art” films, with only a few mainstream films being involved. Having been a long-term film-reviewer and cineaste, I have to admit that I have seen only about half of the films Direen references. Further, many of these poems do not refer directly to what “happens” in the selected films. They do not offer synopsises. Rather they reflect moods or trains of thought that are triggered by a film. Some of the poems are easy to decode. Others remain somewhat cryptic. For example, the opening poem “Zero for Conduct” is a very straightforward reaction to Jean Vigo’s film of that title, about schoolboys reacting anarchically to their teachers. But reading about the [East European] film “Jabberwocky” [it originally had a different title], one either knows what the contents of the film are or they remain a puzzle.

            I cannot comment on all hundred-odd films that are treated here, but I will pick out a few that caught my interest. “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” poem, without giving a synopsis of the oft-told tale of the mysterious inarticulate boy, does catch its essential theme about communication and speech. Kenneth Anger’s notorious “Scorpio Rising” is represented by a visual puzzle – a shape poem; but the words used could suggest a sense of disgust at Anger’s perverse preoccupations… or maybe not. Jules Dassin’s “The Naked City” (Phew! A mainstream movie) gives us a good lesson in looking at the engaging incidental things in a movie – the small things in the background that give a film authenticity. The Italian Rosi’s “Illustrious Corpses” [here rendered as “Exquisite Corpses”], about political chicanery, presents clearly what the film’s theme was – corruption and misuse of power. Fritz Lang’s early silent movie “Der Mude Tod” [ “Tired Death”, but presented in English as “Destiny”] deals with the mental growth of Fritz Lang himself and his growth into a certain mood of detachment in his films. Kirsten Johnson’s experimental “Cameraperson” is treated as the film itself was presented – as a bricolage of disparate images.

            And so I could go on, but I will not. One Hundred Years of Darkness is an esoteric collection – you are either tuned into high cinema culture or you are not. This could be a barrier for many poetry-readers, but for the initiated it is a feast.

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In 2019, what was then called Victoria University Press published Fleur Adcock :

Collected Poems, gathering together all the poet’s work from the 1960s to 2019, with the exception of some early poems that Adcock had discarded. It was a bulky hardback, with 534 large pages of poetry before the index pages. Now, in 2024, Fleur Adcock is 90 years old. To celebrate this milestone the same publishers, now called Te Herenga Waka University Press, have produced an updated edition of Fleur Adcock: Collected Poems [Expanded Edition]. Paperback but otherwise same format, same cover image, catching up with Adcock’s output since 2019. The new Collected Poems adds 61 more pages of poetry.  Most of the addition is taken up with Adcock’s 2021 collection The Mermaid’s Purse, but there are also twenty never-before-published “New Poems 2024”.

            On this blog you can find my review of the original Fleur Adcock: CollectedPoems (2019) as well as my review of The Mermaid’s Purse (2021). For the record you can also find here reviews of two earlier collections by Adcock Hoard and The Land Ballot (2014.

The Mermaid’s Purse included “Poems for Roy” about the late English poet Roy Fisher, and Adcock was also interested in the daunting sea, literary people, travel and children. Many of her poems had explicitly English settings. As I said after my first reading of The Mermaid’s Purse “It is a pleasure to read somebody who writes so forthrightly, who has a sense of appropriate form for each poem, who lays her heart on her sleeve without forgetting her functioning, rational brain – in short, somebody who writes like a modernist rather than a post-modernist.” As for my reading of the first version of Fleur Adcock: Collected Poems, I noticed how Adcock’s preoccupations changed gradually from the 1960s to the 2010s, but with her always showing a poet who was “observant, unsentimental, witty, well-read, a little acidic and presenting her own view of the world.”

All of which leaves me with those twenty, never-before-published “New Poems 2024”. Of course they are filled with old age. These last poems begin with “Stint”, about the thousand-year-old sybil who wants to die. They end with the almost-jaunty poem “Being Ninety” which counts off three other literary figures of her age with death drawing nearer. And in between? Well, aged infirmity comes into “Optimistic Poem”, but there is also a poem about chasing destructive foxes away (Adcock’s English side); and “Goliath” which becomes a lesson in aestheticism; and a wry anecdote called “The Lift Shaft”; and “In the Desert” about sorrow surrounding a young man killed in war… and other poems. 90-years-old or not, Fleur Adcock is still an acute observer of human foibles and at once wry and serious. Still excellent to read.

 

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.    

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD – PART THREE, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

            Continuing my analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s works, I plunge into the Fitzgerald novel that is now regarded as a classic.

 

                                      F.Scott Fitzgerald in the mid 1920s

            Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is far and away F. Scott Fitzgerald’s best-known novel, regarded as his masterpiece and – in all probability – now read more often than all his other novels put together, especially as it is often required reading in high-schools and university courses in American literature. Curiously, when it was first published it gained applause from many critics but sold poorly. It took a couple of decades before it was accepted as an essential text.  So far, it has four times been turned into movies (most of them pretty dreadful) and a number of times dramatized for television. It is often regarded as the novel of the American “Roaring Twenties”, but it is not the wallow in hedonism that it is often taken to be by those who have only seen movie versions and not read the novel itself. Quite the opposite. It is essentially a dour and depressing story. It is also notably quite different in style from Fitzgerald’s first two novels This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. It is pared back, indulges in less romantic description, and is relatively short, being less than half the length of The Beautiful and Damned. It is also written in the first-person by a narrator who is not witness to some of the plot’s crucial events, allowing us to entertain the idea of an “unreliable narrator”.

            I’ll struggle to produce a very compressed synopsis. The first-person narrator Nick Carraway, small-time trader in bonds, happens to occupy a modest bungalow on fashionable Long Island, next-door to the mansion of the mysterious and apparently very rich Jay Gatsby. Gatsby often throws lavish parties for hangers-on who flock in from New York. The parties are described in detail and Gatsby is feted. How Gatsby earned his millions is not clear and is the subject of much speculation and gossip. Gatsby learns that Nick Carraway is a distant cousin of Daisy, the young woman he says he loved but lost years earlier. Gatsby cultivates Nick, wanting to woo Daisy back to him. As it happens, Daisy is married to a brutish man, Tom Buchanan, who frequently cheats on Daisy and has various mistresses, one being Myrtle Wilson, the very working-class wife of working-class George Wilson, a mechanic who runs a dilapidated garage and who hopes to make money by deals with Buchanan. Wilson is at first apparently too naïve to understand  that Tom Buchanan is cuckolding him. Gatsby gets his rendezvous with Daisy in Nick Carraway’s house and their love is almost re-kindled, although Daisy (who has an infant child) has her misgivings. Gatsby also dazzles Daisy by showing her all his wealth in his mansion and estate. But Tom Buchanan gets wind of their trysts. Despite his own infidelities, Tom is very possessive of Daisy. He is also prone to violence. There is one episode, early in the novel, in which he breaks Myrtle Wilson’s nose when she dares to mention Daisy’s name. There is now a struggle between Gatsby and Tom over Daisy. In a major row each claims to be the only one who really loves Daisy, with Daisy almost helpless between the two of them. Tom Buchanan has done research and is able to reveal the shady deals, bootlegging [this being the age of Prohibition]  and consorting with gangsters that have made Gatsby rich. Gatsby did not come from a refined home. The outcome is much shouting in an environment of booze and anger. Tom Buchanan tells Daisy contemptuously to take Gatsby home. It is night. Daisy drives recklessly. By chance, Myrtle Wilson has just had a major row with her husband George Wilson and she has run out of their home onto the road at the very moment Gatsby’s car comes speeding along. Myrtle is knocked down and killed. It is assumed that Jay Gatsby was the driver and in effect Gatsby shields Daisy. Daisy and Tom rapidly leave the area, believing Gatsby will take the blame. There are no more parties at Gatsby’s mansion. His fashionable hangers-on no longer come his way as he is now under suspicion.  Convinced of Gatsby’s guilt, George Wilson, angry and homicidal, takes things into his own hands. He stalks onto Gatsby’s property and shoots Gatsby dead as Gatsby is floating in his swimming pool. Then Wilson, having lost everything, shoots and kills himself. It is left to Nick Carraway, in the closing chapter, to put the pieces in place. He meets Gatsby’s father whose name is Gatz.  Gatsby’s given name was James Gatz. Old Mr Gatz is proud of a notebook in which his son “Gatsby” , as a youth, had made up ways to improve himself and become more acceptable to high society. In effect Gatsby had created his persona and the tales he told about himself were fabrications just as his love for Daisy was a fantasy.

 

The original dust-jacket of "The Great Gadsby" combined the mournful eyes of Daisy with the optometrist's huge billboard eyes that watch over us.

A brief synopsis like this is, of course, very misleading. It is a mere skeleton of plot, lacking nuance; and I have missed out a number of characters. There is the gangster and fixer with whom Gatsby consorts, Meyer Wolfsheim, who is clearly Jewish. Fitzgerald has sometimes been criticized for producing a character who comes close to being an antisemitic caricature. Brutish Tom Buchanan’s language is often filled with contempt for blacks. He is essentially what would now be called a white supremacist. More important is Jordan Baker, a golf-playing woman and friend of Daisy, who more-or-less becomes a pal of Nick Carraway and who fills in some of the details about Daisy that Nick would otherwise have not known about. In effect, she is a second narrator. Academics have worked out that nearly every character in this novel is based on people Fitzgerald knew or knew about, but I won’t go down that rabbit hole.

There are some problems with the style of narration. Nick Carraway’s opening – and much-quoted – words set the novel’s main agenda at once. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,’ he said, ‘ just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had’ ” (Chapter 1) This immediately suggests that there are different social classes and there are have-nots, some of whom want to make their way into the wealthier classes, as does James Gatz, alias Jay Gatsby.

But Nick is very pliable  - why does he so conveniently go along with Tom Buchanan to meet Tom’s mistress? And why does he virtually act as pimp in bringing Gatsby and Daisy together in his own house? Could it be that it is simply convenient for Fitzgerald’s plot to have these events? More to the point, Nick simply does not witness some of the important things that happen in the novel.

Fitzgerald delicately removes Nick from the crucial scene (Chapter 5) where Gatsby and Daisy have their first rendezvous (in Nick’s bungalow). Nick Carraway simply has to guess or speculate about Daisy’s impact on Gatsby when they are having their first tete-a-tete after so many years. According to Nick Carraway: “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams – not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.” (Chapter 5) In effect, Nick Carraway is telling us that Jay Gatsby is really deluding himself with the idea that Daisy was the great love of his life. Later, Gatsby almost fanatically clings to his dream even when it is clear that Daisy is not quite the young woman he briefly knew years previously. Nick tries to warn him by saying “I wouldn’t ask too much of her… You can’t repeat the past.” To which Gatsby responds  “‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’ He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here is the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.” (Chapter 6)

A major point where Nick Carraway simply speculates about what he does not know is when he imagines how Gatsby must have felt, floating in his swimming pool, just before he was killed as Wilson crept up on him. Gatsby had been waiting for a phone call, and Nick speculates: “I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world , material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about… like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding towards him through the amorphous trees.”  (Chapter 8) Once again, Nick is telling us what he – and we – want to believe. That Gatsby was deluded about his great love.

Not that Nick is necessarily wrong. As I understand the novel, Daisy is a naïve and somewhat immature woman. Of course we sympathise with her because she has such a brute and philanderer for a husband, but she is far from being the golden girl that Jay Gatsby once thought she was. She is very impressionable, as when Gatsby shows her around his mansion and “ ‘They’re such beautiful shirts,’ she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. ‘It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such – such beautiful shirts before.’ ” (Chapter 5) She is enchanted by Gatsby’s wealth and has childish impulses. She is hedonistic. When they are sweating in a heat wave on Long Island, she is the first to suggest that they should go into the city (New York) to liven things up. That is the type of vacuous life she really wants. Of course she loves her child, but when Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby are quarrelling over which loves her more, she feebly says she loves them both. And although it isn’t necessarily her fault, she (and Tom Buchanan) disappear as soon as Gatsby is in major trouble. Gatsby wants a prize from the past, but she doesn’t really fit the bill. 

All of which feeds into one of the main ideas in the novel – that you can’t go back to the past, even if Nick Carraway’s concluding words are “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” This could be taken to mean that, no matter how little we like it, the past will still have a great influence on us and how we have been formed. Or – and I think more credibly – it could be taken to mean that the past is a dream, but only that. Memory distorts reality. It is interesting to know that Fitzgerald knew and had read Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes which is in great part about an attempt to find somewhere that has been lost and can never be retrieved.  A decade after The Great Gatsby was published, the verbose Thomas Wolf was planning his You Can’t Go Home Again, which presents the same idea. And dare I mention the 1930s classic French film Un Carnet de Bal? An older woman idealises a ball she went to when she was a teenager – only to find, years later, that the ballroom she remembered was little more than a small local hall of no distinction. Fitzgerald is playing with an idea that has often been dramatized because it is essentially true. Daisy is the lost ideal that can never be retrieved because in many ways she never really existed.

The other dominant idea is the reality that people can only attempt to be other than what they really are. Gatsby has a self-made identity. His habit of addressing male friends as “old sport” is an attempt to make himself sound like a college man. He spins a tale to Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker  saying: “I’ll tell you God’s truth… I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West – all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition… My family all died and I came into a good deal of money… I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe – Paris, Venice, Rome – collecting jewels, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.” He goes on to spin tales of his heroism in the war (Chapter 4). What is interesting here is that Nick and Jordan don’t for one moment believe what he says, because he is a very bad liar. When Nick asks him what part of the Middle West he came from, Gatsby says “San Francisco”, showing he has a distorted understanding of American geography. He claims Venice as one of the capitals in Europe. His remark that he is “trying to forget” seems planted to make him a man of mystery, like something out of a bad novelette.  Nick Carraway sums up Gatsby’s claims by thinking “My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.” And yet Nick and Jordan Baker still find him a puzzle – something more than just a liar or fantasist.

All this seems appropriate to a society – the United States – in which it is common for people who have struck it rich to present themselves as other than they are… or who are forced to present themselves as other than they are. I think of film stars who used to be given, by their studios or agents, more acceptable names than the names they were originally had (Marion Morrison becomes John Wayne. Jules Garfinkle becomes John Garfield;  Doris Kappelhoff becomes Doris Day etc. etc.); and whose publicists used to make totally fictitious biographies about them.

There is another aspect of The Great Gatsby which is more specific to the era and country in which it was written. When he is ruminating in the last chapter, after Gatsby is dead and his mansion is deserted, Nick Carraway says “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.” (Chapter 9) In this case, when he says “Westerners” he means people from the Mid-West, which is where Fitzgerald came from. In the 1920s, Mid-Westerners were regarded as small towners or farmers, less sophisticated than the educated and cosmopolitan New Yorkers or Ivy Leaguers in the East. This is no longer the case, but it meant that Mid-Westerners had to learn how to be respectable to Easterners... which is how bootlegger Gatsby tries to present himself.

For what it’s worth, I am aware of the symbolism that Fitzgerald sometimes deploys. Best known is the image of Gatsby standing on his lawn at night, and looking across the bay at the green light on the pier where Daisy's and Tom's yacht is moored. The green light becomes an image of the Daisy that Gatsby wistfully imagines, and who is now out of reach or unattainable. Then there is the “Valley of Ashes”, meaning the rubbish dump near where George Wilson and his wife live, symbol of an industrialised world and the privations of a working class who are, possibly, capable of overturning the lives of the well-to-do. And near Wilson’s garage, there is a huge billboard, left by a long-gone optometrist, depicting a huge pair of spectacles. It is almost like a wrathful God looking down on feeble mortals who will be judged… as they are in this novel.

Much more could be said about The Great Gatsby, but this is how I interpret it. It is not the story of a love lost, despite the way it has been distorted in the movies. It is the story of a delusion lost. Nor is it a celebration of America’s “Roaring Twenties” and its partying, hedonism and boozing, much as these things have been highlighted in the movies. Remember, the novel was published in 1925, when the party was still in full swing if ever it was – four years before the Depression hit and the cultural landscape changed radically. F. Scott Fitzgerald was ahead of the pack in exposing the wealthy-class of the 1920s as a sham that was built on fraudulence, some criminality, and false identities. All that roared was untruthfulness.

Footnote: About those “mostly dreadful” four film adaptations that have been made of The Great Gatsby which I mentioned in the opening paragraph of this review…. The first film version of The Great Gatsby was made in 1926, one year after the novel came out. It was based on a play version. It is now a lost film, no prints of it surviving, so one cannot pass judgement on it though, given that it was a silent movie, it is hard to believe that it could have carried much of Fitzgerald’s meaning. The second version was made in 1949 when Fitzgerald’s work had come back into popularity. It was a travesty, using just a slither of the novel’s plot and basically turning it into a gangster movie starring, as Gatsby, Alan Ladd, who was at that stage identified with gangster movies (This Gun for Hire etc.). There were a number of television versions, but the next major film version was the 1974 film, starring Robert Redford as Gatsby and Mia Farrow as Daisy. In fairness, it followed Fitzgerald’s novel more closely than any other film version did, but it was plagued by its slow pace as if the producers were all too aware that they were handling a classic and therefore handled with care. It is tedious to watch. Worse, it really does present Gatsby’s and Daisy’s relationship as a romantic love affair, rather than the novel’s sense of a delusion. As for the 2013 version, sorry, I can’t be bothered going into it. Another travesty, it more-or-less followed the novel’s narrative, but changed radically the characterisation of some major people in the narrative, and it focusest on partying and lavish sets backed by music nowhere near the music of the 1920s – an attempt to grab a youth audience. Tripe. Conclusion? Obviously, if you want to know The Great Gatsby, read the book.

Something Thoughtful

 

                                            NOTHING TO DECLARE

Keen readers of this blog might have noticed that instead of a fortnightly gap between postings, this week’s posting comes after three weeks. The reason is quite simple. My wife and I were over in Australia for a fortnight, celebrating a wedding anniversary, so I had to miss one deadline. I might in future concoct postings that deal with the land of Oz, but in the meantime I have nothing to declare.

PS Only this very morning have I heard the sad news that Vincent O'Sullivan, the greatest of New Zealand's senior literary people, has just died. He was a good friend to me and I will write an appropriate obituary for him in my next posting.

Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

“BIRD CHILD & OTHER STORIES” by Patricia Grace (Penguin, $NZ37); “THE GREAT DIVIDE” by Cristina Henriquez (4^th Estate – Harper Collins, $NZ36.99); “MY HEAVENLY FAVOURITE” by Lucas Rijneveld – translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison (Faber & Faber, $NZ37)

Now 87 years old, and with many short stories and novels to her credit, Patricia Grace is very skilled in different genres. Re-workings of ancient mythology,  childhood memories, satirical anecdotes and hard realism – all can be found in her latest collection Bird Child & Other Stories. An introduction tells us that Bird Child & Other Stories is divided into three parts. Part One – reworkings of ancient Maori myths and legends. Part Two – stories about Mereana, a young girl and her life in wartime Wellington. Part Three – her most recent stories dealing with problems of the current era. Seeing as these are three quite different forms of narration, the only way one can read this book is to take each of the Three Parts as three quite different books.

Part One: Patricia Grace begins with the title story of the book “Bird Child”, a variation on ancient myth. It is set in some primeval time when gods are not fully formed and birds are wise, cunning and articulate. A child is born but the spirit is taken out of the child’s body and the spirit becomes part of the bird clan. The child’s bird mother is Kaa, presumably a kea. The bird child is both respected and feared by other birds, but he brings warmth into the world. In a way, Grace’s reworking of ancient beliefs is dominated by the richness of forests before human beings came along. There is a respect for a very verdant nature, so that “Bird Child” becomes an epic of forest. The three stories that follow are shorter, and one reviewer (Paula Morris) has already suggested that these stories are aimed primarily at school-children, enlightening them about Maori lore. I agree with this suggestion. The story “Mahuika et al.” is set in the world of gods, goddesses and spirits. The great mother Mahuika directs how things will benefit human beings when they finally wake up. Fire flashes from her fingertips and gives fire to the people… but Maui the trickster tricks Mahuika and steals the making of fire. “Sun’s Marbles” is the epic story of the gods who, tired of being embraced too tightly between Earth and Sky, are led by Maui to push Earth and Sky apart, to the advantage of the gods. “The Unremembered” takes the traditional story of Rona who cursed the Moon and was forced to be part of the Moon, but who eventually did much to preserve the literal health of the Earth. Grace uses this fable to consider the need for ecological health on Earth. The tone is admonitory, and certainly a tale readable for adolescents.

Part Two is very different in style and attitude. There are twelve anecdotes about Mereana, a young Maori girl living near Wellington in the 1940s when the Second World War is in progress. Given that this was the time and place of Patricia Grace’s childhood, it is hard not to see these stories as at least partly autobiographical. In one story, Mereana experiences wartime night-time black-outs. In another she waves her father goodbye as he goes off to war. She and other kids are excited when G.Is. give then chewing gum. Her uncle jokingly says he’s going to give his children a monkey when he’s back from his sailing... but in the end it proves to be a joke. Mereana learns how to fish in the company of her uncle and her cousins, and after much trying she does land a fish. Being a Catholic kid, she and her school-mates wonder if they’ve committed a mortal sin by blowing out the red candle that is supposed to stay alight always. When she hears that her father is coming home, she frets that she might have forgotten what he looks like; but she does join in the celebrations of her extended family when the soldiers return home… and this shows that the stories run across a number of years. Mereana is growing up. There is one very sober tale called “The Urupa” in which a child is taken to a cemetery  and learns about his whakapapa. There is also one very chastising story when Mereana was still very young – she is sent off to buy a loaf of bread, but she is accosted by two older Pakeha girls, who first throw away her purse and then physically wound her with a piece of broken glass. When her mother confronts the mother of these two girls, their mother curses her, says Mereana is lying and slams the door on her. This is the one story that raises the issue of racial prejudice in New Zealand. The final story in Part Two has Mereana now a grown-up young student attending a hop, and the problem when gate-crashers butt in. The earlier stories show the simplicity and sometimes purity of a child’s mind, but also carefully and persuasively depict the world she inhabits. 

Part Three, as it deals with the present age, tells us of both compassionate things and brutal things. All the major characters are Maori. Dare I say these are the most grown-up stories in the book? On the challenging side, there is “The Machine”, a sad realist tale of a woman working as a machinist while having to look after an invalid mother. The monotony of machine-work and tiring factory protocols drum through the story. “Green Dress” is about an unhappy domestic situation – a daughter is in conflict with her mother, especially when the daughter marries an unreliable man. The mother nags and can be very quarrelsome but in the end, her traditional scale of values proves to be more resiliant than the daughter’s ideas. “Hey Dude” (deliberately referring to the Beatles’ song “Hey Jude”) is a very short tale plunging into the very discursive thoughts of an elderly woman. One of the most positive and ultimately optimistic stories is “Matariki All-Stars”. A widower has seven daughters – just like the seven daughters of Matariki. He is a hard-working man, but he doesn’t quite earn enough to look after all his girls. Still he doesn’t want to have his family broken up. He often finds himself at odds with his [childless] sister, who is bossy and thinks it is for the best for her to take some of the girls into her care. But the father battles through and ultimately raises all his daughters well. They are his shining Matariki stars. Is this sentimental? No – because among other things Patricia Grace shows how hard single-parenthood is and how it takes a special sort of heroism to raise children well. Speaking of single parents, “Thunder” has a young boy having to look after his even younger siblings and then finding a lost kid who has wandered away from his home. Again the issue is how very difficult single-parenthood is, and how prejudice is often directed at single mothers. And after all these telling stories, there comes the one story which suggests real anger. This is “Seeing Red”. A Maori civil servant in a government department becomes more and more angry at the way his Pakeha colleagues either misunderstand or regard as unnecessary certain Maori norms. This is about the matter of education and how Maori teenagers should be taught – and one thing the author correctly hits on is the way many schools simply “tick boxes” by going through the motions of dealing with Maori concerns without really setting up appropriate programmes. This is where Patricia Grace is an activist.

From all the above you can see that Grace has produced a very varied collection of stories, using many different types of narration but all, in their very different styles, enlightening us about different phases Maori culture and mores.

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Cristina Henriquez’s The Great Divide covers a lot of issues and a lot of characters. Set mainly in the year 1906, it gathers together a cast of people who are somehow connected with the construction of the Panama Canal, when the U.S.A. has expropriated from the state of Panama a “canal zone” six miles wide, which is in effect ruled by the U.S.A..

To give you the general flavour of the novel, the best this I can do is to list some of the major characters. The old Panamainian Francisco Aguina is a fisherman who wants to stick with the traditional ways. But his son Omar never wanted to be a fisherman and he runs away to make money joining with labourers digging the Panama Canal. So there is a father’s loss of his son. The resourceful young woman Ida Bunting, of mixed race, runs away from her home in Barbados because she wants to raise money to pay a doctor who will cure her beloved sister Millicent’s damaged lungs. And in her story there is her formidable mother Lucille Bunting who has to deal with the plantation owner who impregnated her. So there is a mother missing her daughter and many domestic problems. In the “canal zone” there is the family of the American doctor John Oswald, who is trying to find a way of curing malaria now the Yellow Fever has abated. Ida Bunting, by good fortune, becomes the nurse for John Oswald’s wife. The Panamainian husband-and-wife team Joaquin and Valentina bring together a troop protesting against the Yanquis’ plan to destroy their village to made way for a dam as part of the great canal. And there is the sadistic foreman Miller who drives his labourers so harshly that there is a violent outcome for one character. For good measure, I must note that Cristina Henriquez drops in two fantastic characters who come close to the “magical realism” that once flourished in Central and South American literature. One is the soothsayer Dona Ruiz, who is presented almost as a witch. The other is the fisherman Francisco Aguina’s deceased wife Esme, who comes back to him in dreams and in apparitions.

There are many other characters I could mention, but this probably gives you the general idea. The Great Divide is a kind of saga, with many characters, many different problems, and always some new event happening. A page-turner certainly. For me, the tempo is somewhat stop-start. Whenever a new character is introduced, we have at length his or her back-story. This should not worry most readers, however.

The Great Divide is a novel intended for mass readership and so it has a happy ending for at least some of the most tried and mistreated characters. That’s as it should be, I suppose. But though Cristina Henriquez touches on the making of the canal, she does not really dig deeply into it. Another author might have focused even more on the harsh and dangerous conditions in which the labourers had to toil, the poor wages they were given, the authoritarian way the Americans overlorded them, the segregation of races that was practiced, the quelling of any discontent from the indigenous Panamanians  – in short, all the practices used by a new colonial power. In these matters it might be worth your while to look up on this blog my review of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo , in which I mention the Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vasquez’s The Secret History of Costaguana, which really concerns the way the U.S.A. took over the “canal zone”.  In fairness Henriquez does make some reference to all these things and there are some brutal episodes. But The Great Divide is more focused on the adventures of her main characters and how they fare.

Clearly written and showing real research, I see no reason why this shouldn’t be a very popular novel for a large readership.

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            How very different is Lucas Rijneveld’s My Heavenly Favourite .

In Death in Venice, Aschenbach ogles a young boy but never lays a finger on him. In Lolita, Humbert Humbert drools over a pre-pubescent girl but barely gets to possess her. But when the Dutch novelist Lucas Rijneveld writes about a paedophile, he gives us all the explicit details of a 14-year-old girl being sexually groomed and exploited by a middle-aged man.

This is Rijneveld’s second novel. His first, The Discomfort of Evening, earned acclaim and won the International Booker Prize. It concerned in part a 12-year-old girl being introduced to sex games. Rijneveld identifies as non-binary, but he was born and raised a girl and was then subject to much teasing. The ultimate vulnerability of young girls concerns him, as does the abuse that can plague them. [NB Rijneveld by choice prefers to be called “he” when he is spoken about in the English language.]

Kurt is a veterinarian working in a rural farming area (the country Rijneveld comes from) with a wife and teenage sons. He is occasionally shocked, such as finding the corpse of a farmer who hanged himself when his herd of cattle was fatally diseased. But otherwise Kurt is generally happy doing his rounds, offering advice to farmers or thrusting his gloved hands up cows having difficulty giving birth.

Then he meets a farmer’s 14-year-old daughter. He is bewitched by her. He is fascinated by her odd talk about Hitler and Freud and the destruction of the Twin Towers. He plays along with her favoured pop music, everything from the Cranberries to Bowie, Kurt Cobain and multiple others. He takes her to movies. He buys her sweets. He calls her “my heavenly favourite”. He dreams about her and masturbates with her in mind. And bit by bit he fondles her a little, then a lot, then in an extreme way. This is where the explicit sex scenes come in, finally amounting to rape although Kurt doesn’t see it that way. He likes to see himself as avuncular.

There are some side issues. At one point, Kurt’s son is attracted to the girl – unaware of his father’s behaviour – so Kurt had to find ways of warning him off. Kurt has nightmares about his mother, suggesting that he has been warped by incest in his family. The Calvinist Reform Church seems to have done him no good when he was young.

But the skill of the novel is not in the situation. It is in the narration. My Heavenly Favourite is told throughout in the first-person by Kurt, who is addressing the girl in a sort of on-going confession. He speaks in sentences that scamper through page after page without a full-stop in sight. This is the narration of a man’s fevered mind. His brain is crowded with desire, fear, guilt, lust, grandiose schemes, a sense of victimhood, and of course some self-vindication. Most unnerving is the way he introduces animal penises to the girl before he introduces his own penis to her. His animal imagery has the tendency to equate the girl with just another animal. Yet in all this, he is aware of clear warnings that he will ultimately face trial and retribution. Which he does.

It is hard to categorise this novel. It could be read as the analysis of an unbalanced mind, even if the protagonist has sharp observation of the world he inhabits and is apparently quite sane. It could be an exercise in being – to use what is now a cliché – “transgressive” just for the hell of it. It could simply be condemning paedophiles. But here is the greatest problem. The prose often rises to brilliance with unexpected turns of phrase, startling metaphors and shrewdness. But you always have to ask yourself – what purpose is this virtuosity serving?

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NOVELS AND STORIES OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD – PART TWO, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

                                   F.Scott Fitzgerald - The young established author in 1921
 

Continuing my survey of the novels and short-stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald’s second novel The Beautiful and Damned is not as idealistic, muddled and romantic as This Side of Paradise and is in many ways a more mature book. It also has a robust and almost straightforward narrative, unlike the fragmented  This Side of Paradise. There is a greater awareness that youth has its limits, in spite of there still being a yearning for careless (or carefree) youth and the dread of growing old. Taking advice once again from Edmund Wilson and his editor Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald worked hard at revising and re-revising The Beautiful and Damned, trying to purge himself of the lush, romantic prose he had often deployed in This Side of Paradise. In this, he was not entirely successful. The Beautiful and Damned was first presented to the world in serial form in the (now long-since defunct) Metropolitan Magazine between late 1921 and early 1922, and only then published in book form in mid-1922. Once again, Fitzgerald divided his novel into “Books”, with each “Book” divided into chapters. It’s also worth noting that most of the novel takes place before the 1920s. We follow the life of the protagonist Anthony Patch from the age of 25 [when he has finished studying at Harvard] to the age of 33 – that is, from the years 1913 to 1921.

The title The Beautiful and Damned at first seemed to me to be a cheaply sensationalist title – the type of thing that would be attached to a B movie. But as I read my way through this longish novel (about 400 pages) I gradually understood its meaning. The “beautiful” are those who think they can float through life supping on aesthetic experience, enjoying the moment and imagining that life will always be easy, especially if somebody else is footing their bill. They rejoice in their youth. But they are “damned” because youth is ephemeral – it passes, adult responsibility falls on them, and they are no longer youngsters, no longer the brightest and wittiest… and yet there is still that unfulfillable yearning for flaming youth.

The first cover illustration of the novel once again used Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald as models... sort of...
 

Here is my simplified synopsis:

Book One is almost completely set in New York. Fresh from college [Harvard] and renting a very luxurious apartment, Anthony Patch lives off the money regularly sent to him by his multi-millionaire grandfather Adam J. Patch. Old Adam is intensely Protestant, a moral reformer, a promoter of Prohibition who expects and assumes his grandson Anthony is living the same sort clean moral life he himself endorses. Anthony is also aware that he will inherit a fortune when his grandfather dies. But Anthony is a hedonist, a party-goer and a wastrel. Seeing himself as an aesthete, he believes he has a superior appreciation of the arts and he will one day prove himself, probably in the arts… but not yet. He has his moments of doubt, but still talks big with college friends such as Maury Noble, who sees himself as a sort of philosopher; and Richard Caramel, who is set on writing a novel. More alluring of course are women and Anthony tries to find one. First there is Josephine, but she becomes a pal rather than someone to love. Then the beautiful Gloria Gilbert comes into his life. She is young, fashionable, often unsuccessfully wooed by other men, insouciant, careless, self-absorbed, often silly, emotional - in short a flapper of the age. Gloria is fully aware that men are attracted to her. Anthony Patch’s courtship of her is, credibly and painfully, drawn out. He is envious of the other beaux who follow after her. He is aware of her apparent impassiveness and her loud annoyance at anything that will disturb her hedonistic ways. Yet gradually they are drawn together.

Book Two. And so Anthony consults his sceptical grandfather, Adam J. Patch, who tells him that he should by now be thinking of work – getting a profession and earning his way in the world. Adam nevertheless endorses Anthony’s getting married and still funds him.  Anthony marries Gloria. They are in conjugal ecstasy… for a while. With the money they have at their disposal they idle about and travel. They think of going to Europe, but by now the World War is in progress [though the United States are not yet involved]. Instead they dawdle off to California and the West Coast and they swim and tan and idle… and they get bored… and they dawdle back to New York and they begin to quarrel. Should they have a baby? Gloria isn’t up for it. Gloria wants to go down South and visit her family but Anthony doesn’t like the food they serve down South and isn’t sure he likes her family. And, between moments of carnal passion, they have their first really violent quarrel. They think they can enjoy life more if they live somewhere out of the city, so they buy a grey house in a rural area north of New York. In matters of importance, Anthony and Gloria are chronically lazy. When Anthony is offered a job in finance, he lasts for one week. When Anthony is dissatisfied with his Japanese servant Tana, he is too lazy to fire him. There is much tension when other men make passes at Gloria, for her beauty is legend, and in one very vivid section Gloria runs away after she has been frightened and humiliated by one such pass. We would now call it sexual harassment. For all her faults, and for all her flightiness, she nevertheless remains loyal to Anthony. And they drink and they party and hope for the best and they party and drink and assume their workless lives will go on forever. It is magic. It is romantic. At which point catastrophe hits. While Anthony and Gloria are hosting a wild and boozy party in their rural grey house, grandfather Adam J. Patch unexpectedly drops in, is disgusted with Anthony’s drunken behaviour, and stalks away cancelling the payments that have so far supported Anthony. He also cuts Anthony out of his will. When grandfather dies, Anthony begins the long and expensive legal business of contesting the will.  Meanwhile, he has to earn money for the first time as he and Gloria have to shift into a less salubrious apartment in a more slummy part of New York. He tries writing trash for popular magazines, but he doesn’t have the talent to succeed. But at this stage (in 1917) the United States joins the Allies in fighting the war in Europe and Anthony is drafted into the infantry… after having failed to join the officer corps.

Book Three. The third part of the novel is very different in tone from the first two parts. It is more matter-of-fact, more concerned with material events, than Parts One and Two. There are fewer of the intensely analytical passages charting the different moods of Anthony and Gloria. With the United States now involved in the World War, the army enlists Anthony and he is taken to a camp down South. For a while he acts as a well-behaved soldier and he is promoted to sergeant. There is even a possibility that he might be officer material. But he is more interested in women. He begins flirting with a clearly working-class woman called Dorothy Raycroft who apparently has had many lovers. (She is most often called “Dot”, which rather cruelly suggests how unimportant she was to all the men who loved-her-and-left-her.) Flirtation turns into an affair. [Okay, the novel was published in 1922, so there are no explicit scenes of sexual engagement, but that is clearly meant.] Dot thinks Anthony is her one true love. But Anthony falls foul of the army when he goes A.W.O.L. after a boozy engagement and breaks curfew. He is broken back to the ranks and later, for other misdemeanours, he spends some time in the lock-up. The army moves up to New York, expecting to be transported to the war in Europe. But it is late 1918, the armistice had been signed and the war is over. Anthony is discharged from the army and is at last reunited with Gloria, who has written him few letters and has also had to ward off some wolves. She has taken things hard in their diminished circumstances. They depend on what little money they have by selling bonds. She drinks more. He drinks more. In fact, with Prohibition having become law (in 1919), there is more desperate drinking in society than ever. They are well on the way to being alcoholics, especially as much of the hooch they drink comes from unreliable bootleggers. Fitzgerald inserts some raw satire when Anthony  tries to train as a travelling salesman, attempting to sell booklets on how to get rich. It is pure, nonsensical boosterism, not helped by the inebriated state Anthony is in when he tries to sell his worthless wares. Former Harvard pals shun him. Now 29 years old Gloria, still hoping they can raise more money, still believing she is as beautiful as she was when she was twenty, decides she might make it in the movies [then still silent]. She is given a screen test… but she is told that she is too old for any leading part and might at best gain a small walk-on part. She is devastated. She weeps. Where have her youth and beauty gone? Anthony and Gloria sink lower and lower, drunker and drunker, ravaged by alcohol, more and more degraded. At which point you may think that Fitzgerald has written a perfectly conventional morality story – thoughtless, hedonistic youth destroyed by its own idleness.  But, literally in the last three pages of the novel, Fitzgerald turns the unexpected knife. Grandfather’s will has been overturned. Anthony has inherited millions after all. Is this a happy ending? No. Because, worn out by his boozing debauchery, Anthony can no longer enjoy the things he once enjoyed. He has created nothing and does not have the will to create anything. He has reverted to a sort of permanent childishness, poring over his old stamp collections… 

              Anthony Patch and Gloria Gilbert were clearly based on Scott and Zelda
 

            And of course, dear reader, I have stripped The Beautiful and Damned of much of its texture by giving you a very simplified synopsis, ignoring Fitzgerald’s distinctive style and even ignoring some of the characters who play important roles. Perhaps I will amend things a little by quoting some of the things in the novel that stood out to me. In summing up a character, Fitzgerald paints the picture of a wealthy young man’s ideal, money-dominated life, thus: “Behind Maury Noble’s attractive indolence, his irrelevance and his easy mockery, lay a surprising and relentless maturity of purpose. His intention, as he stated it in college, had been to use three years in travel, three years in utter leisure – and then to become immensely rich as quickly as possible.”  (Book One, Chapter 2)

            Despite his attempts to live the easy life of a wealthy aesthete, even from early in the novel Anthony Patch has the uneasy sense that his life is really pointless, thus: “Back in his apartment the greyness returned. His cocktails had died, making him sleepy, somewhat befogged and inclined to be surly…. Anthony Patch with no record of achievement, without courage, without strength to be satisfied with truth when it was given him. Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle…” (Book One, Chapter 2)

Though he is deeply in love with Gloria, Anthony is very soon aware of Gloria’s narcissism and hedonism, as when he takes her to a dance: “Would she sit on her right or on her left? Her beautiful eyes and lips were very grave as she made her choice, and Anthony thought again how naïve was her every gesture; she took all things of life for hers to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter.” (Book One, Chapter 2)  Later, Anthony asks her “Aren’t you interested in anything except yourself?” To which she replies curtly “Not much.” (Book One, Chapter 3) When they are about to agree to marry “Peace was restored – the ensuing moments were so much more sweet and sharp and poignant. They were stars on the stage, each playing to an audience of two; the passion of their pretence created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression – yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving.”  (Book Two, Chapter 1) Later, showing her flightiness “Anthony found that he was living with a girl of tremendous nervous tension and of the most high-handed selfishness.”  (Book Two, Chapter 1)

Long before disaster strikes him, Anthony intuits that his way of life cannot last forever: “He had been futile in longing to drift and dream;  no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.” (Book Two, Chapter 2) Then there is Gloria’s howl when she for the first time realises, after she has had a screen test, that she is 29 and her beauty is fading. She looks in a mirror and “ ‘Oh, my pretty face,’ she whispered passionately grieving, ‘Oh my pretty face! Oh, I don’t want to live without my pretty face! Oh, what’s happened?’ ” (Book Three, Chapter 2)

It has to be noted that there is much unlikely dialogue in this novel with elevated language out of character and sounding like words spoken in a melodrama. In Book Two, Chapter 1 Gloria is angry about Anthony’s love for old things, antiques etc. and she launches into a long tirade when they visit the preserved home of Robert E. Lee, giving an articulate argument about the irrelevance of the past. In Book Two, Chapter 2, after they have had a quarrel, she says “It seemed last night… that all the part of me you loved, the part that was worth knowing, all the pride and fire, was gone. I knew that what was left of me would always love you but never in quite the same way.” This is really Fitzgerald’s diagnosis of Gloria’s situation, not something that Gloria herself would have said. In the same chapter Maury Noble gives a whole lecture about his experience and how he has learnt that life teaches you nothing. Again, this reads like a gratuitous tirade inserted by Fitzgerald to illustrate the blasé mood of young, affluent people of the time. He was often criticised for the way, in The Beautiful and Damned, that he often intruded in his narrative to make admonitory points about his characters.

One trouble in reading Fitzgerald is to assume that most of his work is disguised autobiography. It is easy to play this game as, in later years, Fitzgerald admitted that Anthony and Gloria were really versions of Fitzgerald himself and his wife Zelda Sayre. Zelda was a “belle” from the South, to which she sometimes wished to return, and Fitzgerald was drafted into the army and sent South, as in the novel. But the novel is not entirely autobiographical, even if academics have diligently attempted to identify which of Anthony’s college friend was based on which of Fitzgerald’s college friends. Besides which, unlike Anthony Patch, Fitzgerald went to Princeton, not to Harvard. More to the point, in 1922, when The Beautiful and Damned was published, Fitzgerald and Zelda were beginning to go down the slippery slope of alcoholism – their worst years came later. In the novel, the ambitious author Richard Caramel has a hit in his early twenties with a sensational novel The Demon Lover… but after this success Caramel is lured into writing profitable trash for magazines and film scenarios. This appears to be Fitzgerald mocking himself. He too had a hit in his early twenties (This Side of Paradise) and he too wrote profitably for magazines. But it was only much later, in the 1930s, that he became a Hollywood scenario hack.

So much for the plot and the context of the novel. But what does it add up to? As I read it, I find an author criticising the obsession with youth and the fear of ageing, regret for the past that has gone and the loss of youthful beauty. In spite of this, Fitzgerald was essentially a Romantic. It is telling that his favourite poet was John Keats, a great poet for sure but loved most fervently by adolescents who want to preserve the idea of an ideal, childlike beauty and simplicity, where there are no worldly challenges and complications. But romantic idealist though he was, Fitzgerald understood that this was a dream that could not be sustained. Age comes. Beauty fades and hard reality kicks in. Anthony and Gloria live in a long daydream, and when reality strikes they fall apart .