F. Scott Fitzgerald -- A Review of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald

 



     On the word of Ernest Hemingway I read The Great Gatsby and started to read Tender Is the Night. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's memoir of his time in Paris during the early 1920's, he describes Fitzgerald as having written a great novel referring to Gatsby.

     So I read it.

     Hemingway touts the "mot juste -- the one and only correct word to use." He says he learned "to distrust adjectives" as he would later "learn to distrust certain people in certain situations."

     As frustrated as I get with Hemingway's lusterless and often unnecessary dialog attributions, I do like his clean, strong prose. He did use adjectives. Adjectives that infused his prose with life and passion. He wrote of what he called "false spring." After the trees had leafed out and he would feel joy at Spring's arrival then would sometimes come a return of winter. "When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason." Simple, strong adjectives.

     Then came Gatsby. 
     Her front lawn seems the most active thing about Daisy. "The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens -- finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of it run."
     And there's Daisy and Jordan Baker. "We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.
     "All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly: "What do people plan?"

     If it is ennui which I miss, I can stream an emo music performance on You Tube. My attitude about both emo music and bored rich folk is the same. If they're bored with themselves, why would I be interested?

     But surely I must be missing something in Gatsby so I read on.
     Then came this gem from Daisy's husband.
     "Have you read 'The Rise of the Colored Empres' by this man Goddard?"
     "Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone. (This from our narrator.)
     "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be -- will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
     "Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them."

     Throw in a little anti-Semitism and disparage the lower classes with whom it is all right to screw around. Bring in Gatsby, whose wealth is on a par with (or greater than) Daisy's crowd, but its source is unknown and his antecedents are even murkier. And you have a thoroughly disagreeable book.

     The plot is slow to develop. When it did, I immediately thought of Thomas Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, which describes an equally amoral money-centric life-style. But does it better.

    I went back to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and reread what he said about Fitzgerald. He said Fitzgerald produced better work after his wife's first mental break down. So I was back on the hunt.

     I found Tender Is the Night. I got to page 8. "The woman who had recognized her was not a Jewess, despite her name."

     It didn't seem to matter how many more pages I read. Same song, second verse. Could get better... but I gave up trying to find where exactly the 'better' began.

     So, if you're tempted to read Fitzgerald, I would humbly recommend that you read Thomas Wolfe instead.

     And disregarding what I can only describe as his overly generous praise for Fitzgerald's work, I can recommend Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Now I shall have to check out some of the other writers he talks about in that little book. Surely I cannot be so disappointed in them.

X and Y are for X-act-lY a review

     Today is the first day I've written since one week ago yesterday. After a surprise appendectomy late Good Friday, it seemed all was well. And I suppose it was, but Tuesday, a week ago today, things took a turn for the worse and I was back in the hospital with cholitis. Not a good choice. Not a choice at all, really.

     That Tuesday, Wednesday, and most of Thursday, I did nothing but sleep. Then Thursday I opened my reader to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I've never been a big fan of his writing style, however this autobiography of his time in Paris in the early 1920s is wonderful. There are still the passages of dialogue full of he-saids and she-saids, but this particular work is filled with the sights and sounds and lives of people in Paris during the post-WWI era.

 

 

Ernest Hemingway and his son Bumby

Paris 1924

 

    In this book I got to see Hemingway as a struggling writer with a young family. During this period he had given up journalism in favor of creative writing. He turned out short stories that were rejected for publication in the United States. In fact, German publications seemed to be his only markets.

     His approach to writing was as intense and focused as a runner training for a marathon. He talks about writing in cafes, describing them as a warm place to work for the cost of a drink. About interacting with the then and now famous literati of the time -- Gertrude Stein, Evan Shipman, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, etc. About their petty jealousies and unfounded admirations. About their demands and generosities. About their advice, sometimes accepted. And about their writing, adding to my own list of intended reading.

     And, at the end of the day, he went home to his family.

   

Sylvia Beach in the doorway of her bookshop

Shakespeare and Company

 

     He also wrote of his discoveries, solutions to life problems, the greatest of which was poverty. His accidental discovery of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop made his life and work there possible. Sylvia Beach served as a lending library to those who could not afford to buy books. He paid his minimal membership fee right away but not before she sent him home with volume after volume to read. And he could take the books with him when he and his family traveled. He had to read.

      She also loaned him money when he needed it. Freely. And she reassured him during those times that, like all authors, like all people who set themselves lofty goals, he was good and the world would eventually appreciate his work. After all, didn't the Germans already?

     His descriptions of life in Paris at that time are physical. The light playing across damp faces of  buildings. The goatherd piping his arrival on their street. Milk was delivered on-the-hoof in that pre-refrigeration time. How to travel on foot from where you were to where you wanted to go without passing restaurants and bakeries emitting scents of things a hungry man could not afford to buy.

     And always his main interest was to perfect his writing.  Disdaining unnecessary adjectives and adverbs in favor of the mot juste -- "the one and only correct word to use." 

     To show his characters in their world X-act-lY.

    

H is for Hemingway

 

I like this picture because he's smiling, a rather mischievous smile, at that

My cousin and I recently discussed Hemingway. There are few famous writers whom I appreciate less than him. Faulkner and James Joyce, being two. I must admit that I think the failing is mine in their cases. I simply can’t follow their stories. John le Carré fits in that group, now that I think about it.

          Ernest Hemingway and Henry James, however, I do not like because I do not like their writing styles. They both tell good stories, but it’s the way they tell them.

Henry James’ run-on sentences bring out the editor in me. I heard someone once describe him as “chewing more than he bit off.”

Hemingway, on the other hand, never met a complex sentence he liked. And very few compound ones. In The Old Man and the Sea he makes me crazy with his uninspired attributions: “and the old man said,” “and the boy said,” “and the old man said.” But it is a good story and it’s a skinny little book so I wasn’t frustrated with it as long as I was with James’ The Golden Bowl.

Generally speaking, I am not interested in authors’ biographies. If I like their work then I don’t want to know much about them, because I might not like them and that would color my enjoyment of their work. If I don’t like their work, then who cares about their lives?

 Call it inspiration or curiosity or maybe just a way to avoid working on my own book – I found myself reading Wikipedia’s entry on Hemingway. His story would make an epic novel, filled with sex, violence, exotic locations, famous people (some wealthy and powerful), and a tragic ending.

 After all this complaining, I can recommend For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms. Plus, I think his short fiction is excellent. Now I think I’ll read A Moveable Feast, his autobiography, and see what he thought of his life.