Tenderly

………tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown (Ode to a Nightingale)

In the music room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He lit Daisy’s cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across the room, where there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall. (The Great Gatsby)

It began with Keats. Walking through the enchanted world of Ode to a Nightingale I left the beaten track, mesmerized by a summons from the favorite American writer of my youth. I found myself, lost, amidst the rediscovered world of F. Scott Fitzgerald whose poetic illumination of the tragedy of the human soul shines brilliantly. Now that the blush of my younger years has faded, the light’s almost unbearable at times. The tender awareness of human frailty and disgrace blinds me.

We spent time in a wintry London at the start of December. For one tentatively at ease with the Southern Californian climate, a chance to feel the air’s biting cold was a walking, talking fairy tale. Staying on the doorstep of St James’ Park was an added delight. As I walked and thought in the land of Keats, I was deep in the movements of Andrew Turnbull’s beautiful biography, Scott Fitzgerald, which yielded many insights and moments of joyful recognition. It revealed the gossamer threads of Keatsian artistry which are ever present in his work. I stopped a while one day in silent reflection by the Boy Statue on Birdcage Walk. For a fleeting moment, the spirits of Keats and Fitzgerald were intertwined all around me, with time and space ceasing to matter, just those shining threads spinning in the misty grey air.

Returning to Los Angeles a couple of weeks later, I walked out onto the tarmac at LAX and was hit by a wall of heat. The sorrow and despair slammed into me like a steel truck and I couldn’t help a wry smile, remembering Fitzgerald’s comment to a friend about Los Angeles, ‘It’s been a disappointment. It’s so barren out here. I don’t feel anything out here.’ From one heart to another I thought, and jumped into the air conditioned oasis of a black Cadillac SUV.

The rhythms of our Californian days reappeared and the song of the nightingale resumed. We walk and recite and learn a new line or two of poetry each day. Our memory bank is steadily expanding and we have completed Ode to a Nightingale now. Just listening to my eight year old reciting all eight verses causes me to sigh dizzily with happiness. One person, one link, one chain unbroken. It’s the second Keats poem we have memorised and by far the longest. Not quite Eve of St Agnes but more than When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be.

I was walking up the Baldwin Hills reciting it some days past and suddenly stopped, dead in my tracks. Well-versed with traditional learning I understand that memorization alters the mind at a profound level. The words change you. With this particular recitation of Keats I was suddenly inside the poem’s imagery, experiencing a sense of boundlessness as I moved through the final lines of the penultimate verse. Keats is sketching the historical flight of the Nightingale’s song and I was staggered all over again. After a multiplicity of images, landscapes, ideas have flooded forth, we are transported without warning to a new world. We are swept from the beautiful image of Ruth, frozen in time, as Keats paints her grieving amidst the ‘alien corn’ to a dangerously fantastical landscape where the nightingale’s song can open magical windows onto the seas of fairyland’s desolation row.

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath,
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Keats seems to be drawing from a limitless well of inspiration. And indeed why not? For limits are only our own misconceptions after all.

Fitzgerald had a deep and abiding love for Keats’ work and this very poem. He called Keat’s poetry ‘unbearably beautiful’ and said that he could never read Ode to a Nightingale without tears in his eyes. It was the opening verse of this piece that pulled me back into his work. I was helpless against the siren call of Dick and Nicole Diver. Reading Tender is the Night, fourteen years into an American life I am bowled over by the accuracy with which he skewers the American experience.

After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamour of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here.

I have been haunted by Dick Diver’s decline since reading Tender. It’s Fitzgerald’s depiction of the terrifying power of choice and the savage destruction that follows on the heels of taking the easy option and denying one’s capacity for strength that is chilling. The unblinking insight of his writing is such that, as we grow in age and experience, we feel its truth with an ever deepening intensity. It is a sobering, often uncomfortable read and always in the background is Zelda from whose echo Nicole surely emerges.

When I had finished Tender is the Night, I was shaken all the way to my toes. Fitzgerald lays open his innermost heart for his reader in this work, nothing is concealed. As he wrote in an inscription in a friend’s copy of the work, ‘If you liked The Great Gatsby, for God’s sake read this. Gatsby was a tour de force but this is a confession of faith.’

For anyone who sojourns in Fitzgerald’s universe, time is everywhere. Whether we’re dealing in the splinters of Tender’s fractured narrative or bearing witness to memory’s echoing footsteps with Nick Carraway, we hear the ticking of the clocks.

And so we come to Gatsby. Who can ignore Jay Gatsby after all?

Dylan knows. Love and Theft. Summer Days. He’s there. Everywhere. I even see him in Handy Dandy, surrounded by controversy with his cool crystal fountain.

I have to confess that in recent years I practised the art of avoidance where this mercurial American creation was concerned but I have read and loved Gatsby several times. I last completed the book on a railway platform in Reigate, waiting for the train home after another trying and hilarious day as a trainee teacher. For over twenty years I haven’t touched it. Afraid I guess. There are those lines nobody can remember to forget and then there’s a certain city I’d pay money to forget to remember.

‘I wouldn’t ask too much of her’ I ventured. ‘You can’t repeat the past.’
‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’

If my way back to Fitzgerald was directly through Keats then my access to Gatsby was filtered through Hollywood’s silver screen. As time has passed and we’ve all grown older, I’ve been quietly impressed by the acting of Leonardo Di Caprio. This was a vague feeling until I had watched Inception several times. There’s an unshakeable emotional power to his portrayal of Cobb’s doomed love for his wife that transcends the limits of what Nolan’s film would otherwise have been. When I read in The Nolan Variations that the entirety of this aspect of the character was Di Caprio’s creation and its inclusion his condition for acting in the movie I sat up and took notice. I remembered the Baz Lurhmann 2013 movie he starred in, Gatsby.

And so my way back was through Leo. To see his Gatsby I first had to reread. And so I did. Just days ago. With the words still reverberating in the air, it is impressions only at this point. Echoes like reels of rhyme lingering after lines like these:

There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

I haven’t begun to mine seriously for the silver and gold of influences and allusions to other great ones such as Eliot, Conrad and Keats. For now, it is the tautness of the prose and the depth of feeling within it that make Gatsby extraordinary to me. Fitzgerald wrote in a 1934 introduction to a reissue of the novel that he had reread a preface by Joseph Conrad before writing it:

Now that this book is being reissued, the author would like to say that never before did one try to keep his artistic conscience as pure as during the ten months put into doing it. Reading it over one can see how it could have been improved—yet without feeling guilty of any discrepancy from the truth, as far as I saw it; truth or rather equivalent of the truth, the attempt at honesty of imagination. I had just re-read Conrad’s preface… and I had recently been kidded half hay-wire by critics who felt that my material was such as to preclude all dealing with mature persons in a mature world. But, my God! it was my material, and it was all I had to deal with.

This particular preface of Conrad’s is a fascinating discourse on the nature of art itself and begins with the opening line, ‘A work that aspires..to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line’. This rings true on each page of Gatsby for as Fitzgerald goes on to say, ‘What I cut out of it [Gatsby] both physically and emotionally would make another novel.’

We can find Jay Gatsby delusional or distasteful with his display of the American dream, particularly if we are of an Old World mentality, and yet complete a reading with our hearts firmly stolen. Mine certainly was, again!  Time has made no difference to that particular fact. It’s his capacity for hope and the scale of his dreams that pull the rug from under my feet. You know that he would have laid those golden and silver cloths of heaven at Daisy’s feet. As Nick says in chapter 1,

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life…This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the ‘creative temperament’ - it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall find again.

A sense of something incorruptible in the midst of a corrupt and careless crowd, even in the midst of his own false origin story. Nick again,

No - Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interests in the abortive sorrow and short-winded elations of men.

But then there’s that question as the clocks tick on. That one about the narrative voice…

At a deeper level, we’re all Gatsby. Chasing our Daisy. Chasing that green light. I’ve been lost in thought for some time now over the ending lines of the novel. They hang in the air long after the pages have closed. Oceans of criticism have been written about them but I’m slow to catch on. I’m at the back of the class rolling each syllable around in my mind, sounding out the meaning encoded in the spell of each one.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic 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.

There is sorrow, loss and the aching truth of our humanity all wrapped up with the tenderness of Fitzgerald in this book. He sees so much so clearly and yet, even in the depths the dark is illuminated. I thought that Leo caught this beautifully in the movie, the hopefulness and shining promise, which Jay Gatsby reached for and somehow embodied, remaining undimmed in spite of the brutishness of Tom and Daisy with all of their ‘vast carelessness.’

I close up Gatsby for now. I sit in on my white chair gazing out at the blue skies of Los Angeles and smile as I feel those echoes. The nightingale will sing again in the minds of those who listen. I think about Turnbull’s recollection of his mother’s remarks in his biography. They seem a fitting way to bid farewell for now,

My mother was grateful she knew Fitzgerald when she did, for he must have been more impressive than at almost any other time - because more tragic and therefore more profound. He said to her once, with a wry sort of pride, ‘It is from the failures of life, and not its successes that we learn most,’ and he was counting himself among the failures. He was Dick Diver. My mother became, for a brief season, listener to and therefore a sharer of his thoughts, and they blotted out the surface lights and carried her, as the poetry of his books has carried others, down into the depths. And not the depths of weakness and illness alone. They were there, but also the angels.