One of the finest short stories in the English language, 'Babylon Revisited’, written by F Scott Fitzgerald after the Great Crash, is an intensely personal portrait of a man who has squandered his life. It’s also a perfect tale for the times we live in .
One of the finest short stories in the English language, 'Babylon
Revisited’, written by F Scott Fitzgerald after the Great Crash, is an
intensely personal portrait of a man who has squandered his life. It’s also a
perfect tale for the times we live in .
Today, Francis Scott Key
Fitzgerald may be one of America’s most celebrated novelists, but during his
lifetime, he was best known as a writer of short stories. At the end of the
Twenties, he was the highest-paid writer in America earning fees of $4,000 per
story (about $50,000 today) and published in mainstream magazines such as The
Saturday Evening Post. Over 20 years, he wrote almost 200 stories in addition
to his four novels, publishing 164 of them in magazines.
When Ernest Hemingway first met Fitzgerald, in Paris in 1925, it
was within weeks of the publication of The Great Gatsby; Hemingway later wrote
that before reading Gatsby, he thought that Fitzgerald “wrote Saturday Evening
Post stories that had been readable three years before, but I never thought of
him as a serious writer”.
Gatsby would change all that, of course, so thoroughly that now we
may be in danger of forgetting Fitzgerald’s stories. The haste in which he
wrote them, in order to pay for the luxurious lifestyle he enjoyed with his
wife, Zelda, means that the stories are uneven in quality, but at their best
they are among the finest stories in English. And “Babylon Revisited”, a
Saturday Evening Post story first published exactly 80 years ago next month –
and free inside next Saturday’s edition of the Telegraph – is probably the
greatest. A tale of boom and bust, about the debts one has to pay when the
party comes to an end, it is a story with particular relevance for the way we
live now.
Fitzgerald’s fortunes uncannily mirrored the fortunes of the
nation he wrote about: his first novel, This Side of Paradise, became a runaway
bestseller in early 1921, just as America entered the boom period that
Fitzgerald himself would name the Jazz Age. He and Zelda became celebrities and
began living the high life. They were the golden couple of the Twenties,
“beautiful and damned”, as the prophetic title of Fitzgerald’s 1922 novel
suggested, treated like royalty in America’s burgeoning celebrity culture.
Glamorous, reckless and profligate, the Fitzgerald’s were spendthrift in every
sense. Much later, Fitzgerald would have to take account of all they had
squandered – not only wealth, but beauty, youth, health, and even his genius.
In early 1924, the Fitzgerald’s sailed from New York with their
three-year-old daughter, Scottie, for Europe, where they joined the growing
crowd of American expatriates enjoying the comparatively cheap cost of living
in post First World War Paris and the Riviera. There they became friends with
Hemingway, as well as with other writers and artists of the day. Fitzgerald’s
biographers record that while in Paris, Fitzgerald’s routine was to rise at
11am, and begin work at 5pm. He claimed to write most days until 3am, but the
reality was that usually he and Zelda could be found among the cabarets and
clubs of Montmartre and the Left Bank, where they drank, danced, flirted and
fought into the small hours
When the Great Crash came at the end of 1929, the Fitzgerald’s
crashed also, just as they had roared along with the Roaring Twenties. In April
1930, Zelda had a nervous breakdown and was eventually diagnosed with
schizophrenia; she would spend the rest of her life in and out of psychiatric
hospitals.
And in the early Thirties, as America sank into Depression,
Fitzgerald found himself battling depression. His alcoholism was spiraling out
of control, his stories were now abruptly out of key with the mood of the
nation, and he found it increasingly difficult to earn enough to pay for
Zelda’s medical care and their daughter’s education.
Written in December 1930, just eight months after Zelda’s
breakdown, the elegiac “Babylon Revisited” is Fitzgerald’s exquisitely painful
meditation on what he had wasted, his recognition that the cost of living it
large is not just financial but emotional, psychological and spiritual – and that
one can’t live in arrears forever.
That Christmas, Fitzgerald brought Scottie to visit her mother in
a Swiss sanatorium, but Zelda’s erratic behavior frightened the nine-year-old
girl; Scott took his daughter skiing for the rest of her school holiday.
“Babylon Revisited”, written just as Fitzgerald faced the prospect
that Zelda might be lost to him for good, and in fear for his ability to care
for his daughter, is itself a kind of reckoning of the price one has to pay.
Financial debts, paying the price for past extravagance, becomes a metaphor for
moral debts, the loss of one’s sense of character or one’s personal credit with
the world.
The tale of a man who has lost everything but is fighting to
redeem himself, “Babylon Revisited” concerns Charlie Wales, an American
expatriate who lives a profligate life in Paris during the Twenties. One night
during a bacchanalian spree, he quarrels with his wife, Helen, and she
retaliates by kissing another man. Charlie storms home alone and Helen arrives
home an hour later, too drunk and disoriented to find a taxi. She dies soon
after; Charlie has a breakdown and is institutionalized before losing all his
money in the crash.
Their daughter, Honoria, goes to live with Helen’s sister Marion.
As the story opens three years later, Charlie has returned to Paris sober,
financially successful again and determined to pull his life together. He has
come to reclaim his symbolically named daughter: if honor is restored to him
perhaps he can salvage something from the wreckage of his life.
“Babylon Revisited” clearly chimes with Fitzgerald’s own life in
late 1930: the extravagant dissipation of life in Paris during the boom years;
the wife lost to illness; a fortune frittered away in the confidence that “even
when you were broke, you didn’t worry about money,” as Fitzgerald later wrote
about the rampant spending in the Twenties, “because it was in such profusion
around you.” And it is a story about a father’s recognition that, especially in
the absence of her mother, his daughter needs him to face up to his
responsibilities.
Fitzgerald carefully patterns the story so that it comes full
circle, and Charlie ends where he began, in the Paris Ritz Bar. The setting is
emblematically appropriate, suggesting Charlie’s twin crimes: his careless
squandering of wealth and his drinking. But beginning and ending in the same
location also hints at one of the story’s deeper themes: Charlie will end up
where he began, borne back ceaselessly into the past, as Fitzgerald wrote at
the end of The Great Gatsby. For Charlie Wales revisiting Babylon does not
bring closure; coming full circle merely creates a spiraling sense of loss.
Throughout “Babylon Revisited”, Fitzgerald uses economic metaphors
to underscore the idea that debts must be paid. The story reverberates with
uncanny echoes – or rather, anticipations – of our own era, the way in which we
trusted that living on credit could last forever. What Fitzgerald shows us is
the effects that this mistake has not only on our economy, but on our characters:
that money is the least of what we have to lose.
The poignancy of the story derives from its sense of injustice: a
recovering alcoholic is trying to prove that he’s reformed and if we feel from
the outset of the story a sense of impending doom, we might predict that
Charlie will fall off the wagon. But Fitzgerald twists the knife by making
Charlie’s reformation authentic: he has accepted his responsibilities by coming
back to face the past, own up to his mistakes and remedy them by repairing what’s
left of his family. But that may not be enough.
At one point during his stay in Paris, Charlie revisits his old
haunts on the Left Bank and understands at last: “I spoiled this city for
myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and
then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.” He has got
himself back but the question the story poses is whether everything is gone for
good.
Wandering through Montmartre, Charlie suddenly realizes the extent
of his wastefulness in what is perhaps the most superb passage in this tale:
“All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he
suddenly realized the meaning of the word 'dissipate’ – to dissipate into thin
air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the night every
move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for
the privilege of slower and slower motion. He remembered thousand-franc notes
given to an orchestra for playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed
to a doorman for calling a cab. But it hadn’t been given for nothing. It had
been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that
he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that now he
would always remember – his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a
grave in Vermont.”
The idea of “dissipation” as an active loss is perhaps the story’s
central insight, and it is one to which Fitzgerald would return again and again
in his fiction of the Thirties. The passage evokes the sense of vanished and
wasted time, the remorse that characterizes the morning after the night before,
the sense of everything being spent.
“Babylon Revisited” is at once timeless and startlingly modern in
its evocation of a single father struggling with alcoholism and trying to care
for his daughter and coming to terms with the costs of extravagance. Part of
the tale’s poignancy is Fitzgerald’s recognition that the tragedy is not just
Charlie’s: it is also his daughter’s. When Charlie comes to ask Marion to
return Honoria to him, he realizes Marion is bitter, particularly because of
Charlie’s easy acquisition of wealth.
Marion says she is “delighted” that Americans have deserted Paris
following the crash: “Now at least you can go into a store without their
assuming you’re a millionaire.” Charlie’s response is revealing: “But it was
nice while it lasted… We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort
of magic around us.” Only it didn’t last long: they wasted their “sort of
magic” in search of a life that could never be as magnificent as their hopes,
just as surely as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald did.
Nine years after the publication of “Babylon Revisited”, less than
a year before he would die at 44, Fitzgerald wrote his daughter Scottie a
letter about the story: “You have earned some money for me this week because I
sold 'Babylon Revisited,’ in which you are a character, to the pictures (the
sum received wasn’t worthy of the magnificent story – neither of you nor of me
– however, I am accepting it).”
Like Charlie, Fitzgerald learnt
the hard way that loss is remorseless, absolute; what has been wasted is
irrecoverable. But as “Babylon Revisited” also shows, even out of the wreckage
some things can be salvaged, if not everything: what Fitzgerald retrieved he
bequeathed to us, the hard-won lessons of his life transformed into
heartbreaking art.