10847723
Dr K.A. Johanson
Literary Studies: English Literature and Culture 30 June 2015
!
!
A Splendid Mirage
Table of Contents
!
Introduction 4
I Romantic Beginnings 10
II Reflective and Restorative Nostalgia 24
III Replicative Nostalgia in The Last Tycoon 38
Conclusion 51
Notes 54
Introduction
!
In a notebook entry entitled “Nostalgia or the Flight of the Heart”, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) compiled a list of places about which he felt nostalgic: “Young St Paul; Florida; Norfolk; Burgundy; Montgomery as it was; Paris Left Bank; New York 1911, 1917, 1920 . . . ” (224-225). The list is an important document for at least two reasons: Firstly, it contains a rare occurrence of Fitzgerald using the term “nostalgia”, despite the omnipresence of various incarnations of nostalgia in his writing; secondly, several of the listed places are accompanied by specific times, a feature made 1
possible by almost two and a half centuries of nostalgic evolution. By the onset of Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age, the term “nostalgia” could be used to mean something quite different to what it meant at the time of its coinage. That coinage, by a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer in 1688, was to denote “the sad mood originating from the desire to return to one’s native land”. Hofer explained the term as being “Greek in origin and indeed composed of two sounds, . . . Nosos, return to the native land . . . [and] Algos, . . . suffering or grief” (381). Nostalgia thus began as a medical diagnosis of homesickness, following the observation of Swiss mercenaries who, upon displacement from their native lands, would show various and varyingly incapacitating mental and physical symptoms. Hofer believed that repeated thoughts of the homeland caused a blockage of the “living spirits” in the channels of the brain containing those images of home (381). This, in turn, prevented those spirits from performing their more vital functions, which would effect the symptoms of nostalgia. Though partially treatable in other ways, Hofer saw the only definitive remedy for nostalgia as a return to the homeland.
Over time, use of the term changed and broadened, and the ostensible “disease” was reanalysed. Almost a century after Hofer’s dissertation, the German poet Friedrich Schiller, who was himself a medical student based at the Stuttgart Military Academy, was tasked to diagnose and treat a patient named Joseph Frédéric Grammont, who displayed symptoms like those suffered by
Hofer’s Swiss mercenaries. Schiller discovered that Grammont’s symptoms, caused and exacerbated by an urge to return to his home of Alsace, could be alleviated without sending him home. This was achieved by allowing Grammont the freedom to walk around the nearby countryside. Linda Austin documents that, in “this rehearsal, the countryside substituted for the native community, thereby illustrating the therapeutic function of a literary tradition within the annals of medicine” (11, emphasis mine). Schiller found that a simulation of a return to the homeland could be almost as effective a cure for nostalgia as an actual return. The nineteenth century saw a gradual abandonment of the term in its medical sense, with scientific developments invalidating many of Hofer’s suppositions. However, the word resurfaced during Fitzgerald’s 1920s “to denote a fleeting rather than debilitating” memory of an earlier time (Austin 1). Twentieth century psychoanalysis observed nostalgia’s move into this new territory. Where earlier medical theorists had identified the homeland as the object of nostalgia, the “psychoanalytic emphasis on symbolism facilitated the generalization beyond spatial location”. The connected ideas that “one can be nostalgic for any object since objects serve as symbols”, and that nostalgia can encompass an “incomplete form of mourning for an idealized past” shifted the object of nostalgia away from the homeland and into the past (Batcho 168, emphasis mine). A resistance to geographical displacement became a resistance to temporal displacement.
Fitzgerald’s nostalgic list is a demonstration of this shift from the geographical to the temporal, whilst being an indication that the author still occasionally considered “nostalgia” to denote something like Hofer’s “homesickness”. Although Fitzgerald wrote about “nostalgia” for the
time of the 1920s as early as November, 1931 (“Echoes of the Jazz Age” 13), the curious nostalgic
list contains only places, though he could not help but identify many of those places with a specific era. A return to New York at the time of that note’s writing, some time in the 1930s, would presumably have failed to cure Fitzgerald’s nostalgia for the New York of 1911, 1917, or 1920, since by 1932 he had “lost [his] splendid mirage” (“My Lost City” 33). Fitzgerald’s work is most
frequently concerned with temporal displacement. It considers lost youth, past love, and missed opportunities in many different ways. By 1934, the author would lie awake at night tormented by “what [he] might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable” (“Sleeping and Waking” 67). Thus, in spite of the geographical nature of the notebook entry, Fitzgerald rarely deals with “homesickness” in that most literal and rudimentary sense, instead channeling puzzling forms of temporal melancholy into his stories.
The central aim of this thesis is to identify the distinct conceptions of nostalgia found in each of Fitzgerald’s novels: This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The
Great Gatsby (1925), Tender Is the Night (1934), and The Last Tycoon (1941, posthumous). The
first chapter, “Romantic Beginnings”, will identify the presence of a consistent form of Romantic desire in the first two novels, with nostalgia operating as a species within the genus of that desire. Fitzgerald’s Romantic ideas will be compared to those of the similarly-disposed German Romantic author Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (1788-1857), criticism of whom will be used to provide insight into Fitzgerald’s own early philosophy. The second chapter, “Reflective and Restorative Nostalgia”, will consider how those Romantic ideas developed into the nostalgia of The Great
Gatsby, whilst considering further elements of the nostalgia in Fitzgerald’s most famous work. It
will then divide Fitzgeraldian nostalgia into two distinct types, using the ideas of Svetlana Boym as a theoretical reference point. In this division, the pessimistic nostalgia of Tender Is the Night will be introduced and differentiated from preceding formulations. The final chapter, “Replicative Nostalgia in The Last Tycoon”, will make an argument for the existence of a unique formulation of nostalgia found in Fitzgerald’s unfinished final work, setting that nostalgia against Susan Stewart’s contemporary narratological conception.
American author and essayist Wright Morris describes nostalgia in The Great Gatsby as “a labyrinth without an exit, both a public madness and a private ecstacy” (169-170), D.G. Kehl emphasises the presence of Sehnsucht, “an intense addiction of and to longing” (309), in the same
novel, whilst R.W. Stallman explores the eponymous Gatsby’s “confused time-world” (3). Critics have thus recognised the connected themes of nostalgia, longing, and time in Fitzgerald’s work, but their attention as regards the topic has often focused heavily upon Gatsby and a few of the short stories such as “Absolution” (1924) and “Babylon Revisited” (1931). Nostalgia is certainly at the core of Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, whose literary significance justifies its critical attention. Because of its literary significance, and because its depiction of nostalgia can be interpreted in many ways, reference to Gatsby will be made throughout all three chapters. However, the charismatic, pink-suited nostalgic of West Egg is but one of many throughout the author’s oeuvre, and the nostalgia particular to Gatsby is but one variant amongst several. By tracing nostalgia through each of the novels, several distinct conceptions of the phenomenon will be brought to light, and commonalities between texts will be revealed.
Fitzgerald uses various methods of presenting his nostalgic ideas. In Gatsby, the eponymous hero suffers from failing to realise the nostalgic nature of his own passionate longings. It is through Gatsby’s mistakes—through his simultaneous belief in the repeatability of time and failure to recognise the distant past as integral to his emotions—that the reader understands how his particular nostalgia functions. By creating a character who so radically fails to comprehend his condition, Fitzgerald allows us to reason correctly and understand its cruel operation. In The Beautiful and
Damned, Gloria Patch delivers an extended monologue of great clarity and poignance about the
futility of preserving the past. With her attitudes we are to find no mistake. Fitzgerald’s novels are extremely useful documents for gauging the author’s personal opinions and philosophies, perhaps more so than the novels of the average author. Matthew J. Bruccoli, premier Fitzgerald scholar, interprets everything Fitzgerald wrote as
!
a form of autobiography. His fiction is transmuted autobiography. Characters start as self-portraits and turn into fiction, as did Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise; they start as
fiction and become Fitzgerald, as did Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night. Jay Gatsby is pure invention and pure Fitzgerald. (Letters xv)
!
Because of the autobiographical nature of Fitzgerald’s writing, many of his protagonists share traits with the author himself. Furthermore, many of Fitzgerald’s key female characters are at least partially based on Zelda Fitzgerald, author of Save Me the Waltz (1932) and F. Scott’s wife between 1920 and his death in 1940. Although one should always tread carefully around possible conflations between author and character, approval from Bruccoli, Arthur Mizener, and others means it is often safe to assume that nostalgia and nostalgic ideas expressed by Fitzgerald’s key male protagonists have at least some grounding in the author’s own.
This thesis will accept the possibility of a non-contradictory multiplicity of nostalgic conceptions, so the term “nostalgia” will be used to describe several different things. In drawing these conceptions, four main features will be referred to for the purpose of easy comparison and differentiation. The first of these features will be the form that nostalgia takes—its taxonomical status. Nostalgia has been defined as many different things: a “sad mood originating from the desire for the return to one’s native land” (Hofer 381); a “desire for desire”; a “sadness without an object” (Stewart 23); a “mourning for the impossibility of mythical return” (Boym 52); simultaneous “madness” and “ecstacy” (Morris 170). Fitzgerald’s novels provide several formal variations on nostalgia, with the structural difference between “desire” and “mourning” becoming especially palpable when analysing characters like Gatsby and Dick Diver side by side. The second feature to be kept in mind will be nostalgia’s object: nostalgia can be a desire for something, a feeling about something and so forth, and it is this “something” which I will attempt to pinpoint using both the clues given to us by Fitzgerald and insight provided by theoretical discussions of nostalgia. Hofer identified nostalgia’s object as the sufferer’s geographical home. Immanuel Kant disagreed with this diagnosis, instead identifying the object of nostalgia as the subject’s youth: “the
carefree life and neighbourly company” associated with the years spent at home, rather than the home itself (71). The object of nostalgia fluctuates throughout Fitzgerald’s works, and this thesis will make explicit its variation. The third feature to be discussed will be nostalgia’s satiability, or the possibility of resolution and closure. Hofer prescribed a return to the homeland as the only effective cure for nostalgia, citing the case of a Swiss man “of excellent nature” who contracted the nostalgic disease. For that particular sufferer, nostalgia manifested itself in a “burning fever”, but he was “restored to his whole sane self” (382) as he approached his home city of Berne. Modern scholars such as Susan Stewart and Svetlana Boym suggest that such a reunion with the object of nostalgia is an ineffective means of satiation. For Stewart, “the past [nostalgia] seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, . . . continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack.” (23) The fictiveness of the nostalgic object naturally precludes its ability to satiate, and the subject’s suffering endures in a self-sustaining cycle. The final feature by which conceptions of nostalgia will be assessed will be their personal effect upon the subject, beyond the immediate reflective experience. Depending on certain variables, nostalgia appears able to affect the subject in both negative and positive ways, and can lead to a range of consequences. Hofer’s Swiss mercenaries were rendered listless and some reportedly came close to death. However, contemporary psychological studies have taken place whose findings show that, “in addition to being a source of social connectedness, nostalgia increased participants’ perceived capacity to provide emotional support to others” (Wildschut et al. 573). Nostalgia, in its various guises, is described as harmful by some and beneficial by others, and we can find both negative and positive associations in Fitzgerald’s depictions.
!
!
I
Romantic Beginnings
!
Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know—because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot. And when I got it it turned to dust in my hands.
—Anthony Patch (The Beautiful and Damned 507)
!
Before approaching the subject of nostalgia proper, we should start where the author himself began: with a “Romantic Egotist”. Amory Blaine, the protagonist of Fitzgerald’s debut novel This Side of 2 Paradise, is not obviously afflicted with nostalgia. He is hugely sentimental, but does not restrict
this sentiment to the past. Nothing in any place or time seems beyond his yearning. He is, despite a confessed ignorance of Schiller, a Romantic through and through. His casual dismissal of “that stupid, overestimated Schiller” (141), coupled with Dick Diver’s reference, fourteen years later, to “Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine” (Tender Is the Night 49, emphasis mine), is somewhat hard to fathom. Neither Amory’s ignorance nor Dick’s blithe attitude to the forgotten Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué are easily reconciled with the Romantic lifeblood running through the veins of both Amory and Anthony Patch, protagonist of The Beautiful and Damned.
This Side of Paradise can, to some extent, be considered a novel of the Romantic genre. It has been
described as “a milestone in American literature for its attempt to combine the normally incongruous elements of realism . . . and romanticism” (Tate 230), and its eclectic composition, a blend of prose, play, and poetry, resembles a “Mischgedicht” or “mixed poem”, a hybrid form of Romantic literature “that incorporate[s] a mixture of genres, dialogue, philosophical musing, letters, song, poem and novella” (Seyhan 18). The Beautiful and Damned has been considered an example of literary naturalism, in showing “that human behaviour is determined by forces beyond the control
of the characters” (Tate 31), and as demonstrating Fitzgerald’s development into “a romantic unrestrained” (Canby 71). Anthony and his wife Gloria Patch are described as “victims of a romantic conception of the world” (Perosa 88), and the shared “Romantic” sensibilities of the two novels’ respective protagonists has been identified (West 56).
The aim of this chapter is to explore the connections between Fitzgerald and Romanticism, and between Romanticism and nostalgia. The protagonists of Fitzgerald’s first two novels, and to some extent Jay Gatsby, seem to share a certain form of Romantic longing with protagonists in the works of German Romanticism, particularly those of Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. This chapter will attempt to characterise Fitzgerald’s own brand of Romanticism and its relationship with nostalgia in the early novels, whilst highlighting its parallels with attitudes in German Romantic literature. Ricarda Schmidt says of that genre that, although there is no firm consensus “as to whether [it] is an epochal movement with a single, clearly identifiable character, or falls into different phases” (21), most early Romantic protagonists, such as Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen, “are young men who seek their (artistic) destiny in travelling the world and whose relationship with the world is symbolized in their relationship to a female muse” (27). Fitzgerald’s early works may have more in common with those of late German Romanticism, which tend to “portray the artist’s love for the muse less as a way of achieving artistic inspiration and greatness”, but “in order to explore the gap between expectation and outcome” (31, emphasis mine). A tendency to revere the experience of that expectation over any possible outcome, with a protagonist who “loves the dream itself” (Illbruck 151) above and beyond the object of the dream, is the pertinent characteristic of Romanticism toward which this initial discussion will gravitate.
The purpose of a comparison between Fitzgerald and the German Romantics is not to explore the extent to which the the latter may have influenced the former. Dick Diver forewarns us 3
of the futility of such an endeavour. It is rather to help add colour and contour to a complex attitude towards longing, nostalgic and otherwise, that can be found only in fragmentary form within the
early novels. These pithy yet skeletal fragments of a complex philosophy can be satisfactorily enfleshed when compatible and complementary fragments, drawn from a more complete body of work, are grafted onto them. Importantly, the anatomical similarities between the philosophies of Fitzgerald and the Romantics, particularly Eichendorff, are sufficiently transparent to minimise risk of the latter contaminating the former. Perhaps most importantly, identifying the connection between Fitzgeraldian nostalgia and Romantic longing opens up a critical sphere, beyond 20th century American literary criticism, from which to draw resources.
To understand Romantic attitudes in early Fitzgerald and their importance for his conceptions of nostalgia, we should think of longing, desire, or yearning as a wide category of subjective experience, with nostalgia as a particular subcategory within. We might say that nostalgia, at face value, appears to involve a desire for something in the past: an object lying at a temporal distance from the desiring subject, whether that be a week or a decade. However, a temporal distance between present and past is not the only kind of distance that can operate within desire in its broadest form. The distance between desiring subject and desired object may be temporal, spatial, or both, and may lie in any direction. The Romantic, like Hofer’s displaced Swiss mercenary, is often afflicted with heimweh—homesickness—desiring a return to a distant land about which he has fond memories. At other times, suffering from fernweh or wanderlust, he yearns for pastures new, places he has never been but whose image burns brightly in his imagination. He occasionally hopes for some event of the future to come around sooner, tormented by the chasm between now and next. What is important to both Fitzgeraldian and late German Romanticism is the idea that this distance, wherever or however it may lie, itself acts as both springboard and sustenance of desire, and that the eradication of that distance, rather than being a guarantee of satiation, actually results in disappointment and dissatisfaction with the desired object. Illbruck explains that “the distant home the [R]omantic dreams of can remain magical only for as long as it remains distant” (152) and argues that this kind of character “loves distance and fears commitment”
(157). An emphasis upon the fundamental need to maintain distance is a striking and unusual characteristic of late German Romanticism. This emphasis highlights the difference between expectation and outcome, as Schmidt suggests is characteristic of the period. A preservation of distance is a preservation of expectation, itself often superior to any outcome. A century later, these attitudes are replicated by Fitzgerald and his characters. In addition to the need to preserve rather than eradicate distance, an awareness of the futility and counter-productivity of such eradication is possessed by some of Fitzgerald’s characters characters. This awareness is one feature that separates Amory and Anthony from Gatsby, a figure with Romantic tendencies but an inability to recognise their influence.
The early novels contain many instances of desire for that which is spatially distant, and although not always nostalgic, they are of great importance to our discussion. One such instance is Amory’s idealistic long-distance correspondence with Isabelle Borgé. It is the process of correspondence and separation itself, and the freedom it grants Amory to imagine all kinds of dreamlike reunions with Isabelle, which ignites his passions more than anything about Isabelle herself. When the estranged lovers are able to reunite, the occasion turns sour, as Amory realises he has “not an ounce of real affection” for her (Paradise 90). The romance had been “chiefly enlivened by his attempts to find new words for love” (81), rather than any real manifestation of such love. In the most explicit formulation of the Romantic attitude in Paradise, Amory (twice) makes the distinction between Romantics such as he and those who are merely sentimental: “a sentimental person thinks things will last—a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t” (166). Although his actions speak louder than his epigrams, it is clear from this statement that separation is a prized asset for Amory.
Occurrences of longing for the spatially distant, and for the maintenance of that distance, are also found in German Romantic literature, and have been analysed in greater detail by Romantic scholars than by readers of Fitzgerald. It is therefore useful to consider their appraisals when trying
to comprehend Fitzgerald’s conception of Romantic longing. The eponymous traveler of Novalis’
Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) dreams of “regions far distant, and unknown to him”, and of being
“separated from the object of his passion” (24). Alvarez, the naval captain of Eichendorff’s Eine
Meerfahrt (1836), exclaims:
!
Boring stuff! There I’d rather have myself a rainbow, dubious towers of towns which I do not yet see, blue mountains in moonlight, it is as though you were riding into the heavens; once you get there, it is boring. To court a lover is charming; to marry: boring again! Hope is my joy, what I love must remain distant as the kingdom of heaven. (qtd. in Illbruck 157)
!
Alvarez’s passionate yet necessarily remote feeling for the distant landscape is replicated almost totally by Anthony in this passage from the first chapter of The Beautiful and Damned, in which the young heir is captivated by the sight of an unfamiliar woman whilst looking out from his apartment window:
!
He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful—then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known. (278)
!
Some critical commentary on Eichendorff sheds light upon Fitzgerald’s balcony scene. In assessing a passage of Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (1826), in which the titular “good-for-nothing”
becomes enamoured of the distant Austrian landscape, Detlev W. Schumann observes how “[all] visible elements of the description are in the distance, on or near the horizon: the setting sun, the river… hills with villagers and hunters… Elements of definite form are lacking; colors, or rather light effects… and sounds… take their place” (146). Factors which obscure vision such as distance and darkness serve to “[dissolve] forms altogether and [leave] only a minimum of objective reality, thus giving full sway to the imagination” (146). Although it is Amory Blaine who virtually transforms into the Taugenichts during his poetry-reciting, haystack-climbing jaunt in Maryland, Schumann’s observations adequately describe the obscurity and imaginative process seen in Anthony’s balcony experience. The “smell of the afternoon” and the “triumphant vividness of red” are part of the scene’s allure, and their attractive abstractness is caused by the distorting effect of distance. There is no definite shape or feature to the woman in red, since Anthony’s cannot see her face clearly, nor is there any particular source to the “smell of the afternoon”. This vagueness, which permits and requires the imagination to fill in the missing details however it so wishes, is the all-important consequence of distance. The Romantic expectation is built up through imagination, and often let down by an unremarkable outcome. The mysterious woman is the embodiment of Eichendorff’s ever-distant, ever-recurring setting sun. Anthony’s is a longing in portrait, complementing the good-for-nothing’s longing in landscape.
Although Anthony quickly identifies the cause of his emotion during the balcony incident, its true significance fails to strike him. When that event takes place on an inconsequential afternoon, Anthony’s recognition of the magic of distance strikes him a curious phenomenon and nothing more. In that context, it is amusing and trivial. However, these mechanisms are at work in other aspects of his life. For example, it never occurs to Anthony that, in spite of Gloria’s phenomenal beauty, it is a distance that she constructs between them, and a threat of its expansion, that draws him in as much as anything else about her. Her evasion of his phone calls, and her lack of interest during their second meeting renders him to think that she had “never seemed so lovely, so
exquisitely to be desired” (Damned 343). Although the novel is imperfect, Fitzgerald perfectly depicts Anthony’s slavery to Gloria’s coolness. In much the same manner, it is said of Rosalind Connage, who is also based on Zelda Fitzgerald (Tate 36, 234), that “she has still to meet the man she can’t out-distance”, by which is meant that she “abuses them and cuts them and breaks dates with them and yawns in their faces” (Paradise 159). Fitzgerald not only depicts distance as alluring, but presents its manipulation as a skill.
As well as frequently depicting desire for spatially distant objects, the early novels contain several instances of desire for the temporally distant, although there is less explicit focus on the past than there is in The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. This might be partially explained by the comparative youthfulness of Amory and Anthony, but also by Fitzgerald’s own age and status. The period in which he authored This Side of Paradise predated his literary fame and its accompanying happiness, which would “often [approach] such an ecstasy that [he] could not share it even with the person dearest to [him] but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distill into little lines in books” (“Early Success” 84). The author would go on to look back at this period of his life with a mixture of fondness and regret, but before that time of ecstasy, Fitzgerald was looking to the future: to a literary career and prospective marriage to the debutante Zelda Sayre. For Amory Blaine, a Princetonian very much in the mould of his creator, it “was always the 4
becoming he dreamed of, never the being” (Paradise 24). Before their material and emotional poverty, Anthony and Gloria Patch dream of the day when they can receive Anthony’s inheritance money: “Oh, I wish it were now”, bemoans Gloria to Anthony, who has “just been wishing that very thing” himself (Damned 363). For creator and characters, the contents of the future briefly appear greater and more appealing than those of the past. An indifference to the present or an inability to connect to it, typical of so many of Fitzgerald’s characters, is naturally followed by a fascination with and total prioritisation of the sparkling future. In “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922), one of Fitzgerald’s most celebrated short stories, he proclaims that “[i]t is youth’s felicity as well as
its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future — flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only pre-figurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream” (107). Linda Hutcheon highlights the shared taxonomy of the “nostalgic and utopian impulses”, arguing that “[if] the present is considered irredeemable, you can look either back or forward”. The temporally opposing desires “share a common rejection of the here and now” (n.p.), though in a sense they really both concern themselves with the future. The utopian impulse is toward a new future, and the nostalgic toward what can be termed a “future-past” (Stewart 23). The nostalgic desires an actual repetition of the past, not just a memory, in his own personal future. To wish for something to come about, for the first time or for the hundredth, is necessarily to wish for that experience in the future. Hutcheon’s likening of nostalgic desires to those of opposing directionality reflects a theme upon which this chapter will build: that nostalgia is formally equivalent to certain non-retrospective Romantic desires.
Further to the desires we have just considered—desire for things far away, desire for things in the future—the early novels also contain longings for things past. These cases we can classify as early Fitzgeraldian nostalgia, but it is important to recognise the formal equivalence between these and the other kinds of desire just discussed. Perhaps more than mere equivalence, what is important and particular to these nostalgic longings is the fact that, although the objects of desire are
associated with the subject’s past, they do not exclusively belong to the past. They still exist in the
present, at some spatial distance from the subject, a fact which offers some tangible hope for their reclamation. They are, in other words, not conclusively historical. These nostalgic desires are desires for the future reclamation of past-associated, spatially distant objects.
One such case of such nostalgia follows Anthony’s first kiss with Gloria, which, much like Gatsby’s first kiss with Daisy Buchanan, acts as a kind of high water mark against which future successes are measured and to which he constantly hopes to return. Just days after the incident,
Anthony remembers “as though it had been years ago the low freshness of her voice, the beautiful lines of her body shining through her clothes, her face lily-colored under the lamps of the street” (Damned 349). This remembrance, coupled with the belief that he may have lost Gloria to his romantic rival Bloeckman, distresses Anthony to the point of madness but, simultaneously and crucially, he falls “in love at last, profoundly and truly in love, as the word goes between man and woman” (349), which enlivens and enriches his meandering young life. Five years later, whilst preparing to serve in the war and whilst having an affair with a younger woman named Dorothy Raycroft, he writes to Gloria “a glowing letter, full of the sentimental dark, full of the remembered breath of flowers, full of a true and exceeding tenderness—these things he had learned again for a moment in a kiss given and taken under a rich warm moonlight just an hour before.” (496)
Both cases, both remembrances, show Anthony at a peak of emotional expression, and both are motivated by his physical separation from Gloria. In the first instance, that separation threatens to become permanent, but is not certainly so. The encounter is vividly remembered, and Anthony hopes dearly that he might repeat it. The latter instance seems a more complex case. It is perhaps made possible by Anthony’s belief that he may die at war, thus effecting a more retrospective attitude. Fitzgerald himself, whose wartime experience was ultimately the same as his character’s, was allegedly not afraid of the possibility of dying during service, but he was very much aware of its possibility. He wrote to his mother in November 1917: “To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing. I have never been more cheerful. Please be nice and respect my wishes” (Letters 14). Gloria and Anthony’s marriage has long been on the wane by the time of Anthony’s enlistment. Their spatial separation, culminating in his affair with Dorothy, allows Anthony to imagine the Gloria of old to whom he can address his longings. The “sentimental dark” of his letter and the “true and exceeding tenderness” he offers her is made possible by the spatial distance separating them from one another, and inspired by the temporal distance between the present and an idealised shared past. The filters of memory allow Anthony to eliminate objects of “definite form”,
and his vision of the past becomes like the Taugenichts’ vision of the landscape at sunset. The present Gloria, with whom Anthony has such a problematic marriage, and who is rarely afforded such tenderness, has her elements of definite form blurred. Anthony, although he does not state this fact as he does with the mysterious balcony woman, requires the distance between them to persist for his sentiment to flourish, but paradoxically hopes for reunion nonetheless. Indeed, when he and Gloria reunite, a fleeting moment of picturesque romance is followed by a hasty return to their unhappy state. The following chapter will explore Gloria’s own contrasting attitude to the past, but here we can see that Anthony’s nostalgia, containing the “remembered breath of flowers”, is by and large a Romantic deification of the spatially distant.
We can analyse this early Fitzgeraldian nostalgia in terms of the four conceptual variables discussed at the outset. Regarding form, the general omnidirectional Romantic desire tends to be coupled with a strong associated emotion: “hope” for Eichendorff’s Alvarez, an “intoxication of joy” (Taugenichts 12) for his good-for-nothing, and deep “adoration” in the case of Fitzgerald’s Anthony Patch. “Hope”, or “Hoffnung” in the original German, seems a curious term to describe what Alvarez experiences. It seems contradictory, and this is quite possibly the author’s intention, that one could harbour a “hope” for something, knowing that one does not expect or even want that hope to be realised. It is a self-gratifying half-hope, offering no hint of closure. Alvarez has tricked himself into a state of pleasurable expectation, knowing fully that there will be no outcome. Fitzgerald’s description of Anthony’s “adoration” also seems an unusually positive way of framing a momentary romantic desire. He sees the balcony woman and her distance not with any kind of gut-wrenching yearning, but in a way that one might see a child, with fondness and warmth. For these Romantic characters there is always a tender glow to their desires. They are not tortured by them; they relish them.
The genus of Romantic desire in early Fitzgerald, and the species of nostalgia within, manifests itself as a longing for something at a distance from the subject, caused by that distance,
and requiring that distance to endure for the most positive outcome. The distinguishing feature of nostalgia proper is the object’s association or identification with the subject’s past, but not its own pastness. Because of the seemingly contradictory states of both desiring an object and needing it to remain distant, it is a matter of some contention as to what the object or referent of these desires actually is. Although distance plays the most significant functional role, there is ambiguity as to whether that distance is the object of desire itself, or a catalyst which serves to attract the subject to the object. Alvarez declares that “what [he loves] must remain distant”, which—in his reckoning, at least—logically precludes the possibility of distance itself being what he loves, for it makes little sense to talk about keeping distance at a distance. Rather, it is the “dubious towers of towns” and “blue mountains in moonlight” that court his longing; a longing emphatically intensified by their distance. For Anthony, the woman in red is ostensibly the object of his desire, but it is her distance that “stirs” something in him, so again it is unclear if he longs for distance or for what is distant.
We can look to contemporary writings on nostalgia for further comment on this distance vs. distant problem, if not consensus on it. Svetlana Boym suggests that the “[R]omantic nostalgic insist[s] on the otherness of his object of nostalgia from his present life and [keeps] it at a safe distance” (13), implying that the object is not that “safe distance” itself, but that such as Alvarez’s hills and Anthony’s balcony woman. Susan Stewart, with whom Boym is in agreement on many matters, seems to suggest otherwise, contending that the “nostalgic is enamoured of distance, not of
the referent itself” (145, emphasis mine). Although both positions are plausible, it seems preferable
to consider the distant thing, rather than distance itself, as the object, since the existence of the latter depends on the former, but not vice versa. Stewart’s ostensible belief that the nostalgic is “enamoured of distance” can be waived as a matter of semantics, and we might rephrase the contention to state that the nostalgic is in fact enamoured of the “referent itself” but only if and when that referent lies at a distance from the subject. We will therefore say that the object is the thing itself. Whether that thing is human, as with Fitzgerald, or geographical, as with Eichendorff, is
ultimately unimportant since its distance from the subject is its most important and desire-generating feature. Anything that can be distorted, improved, or deified through imagination can function as the nostalgic object.
As has been discussed, a further distinctive feature of the object of this conception of nostalgia is its presentness and possibility, however small, of being grasped. When Anthony writes his sentimental letter to Gloria, the object of his nostalgia is ostensibly Gloria herself, though their physical separation both causes and permits such sentiment. Unlike Gloria, as we shall see, Anthony does not grieve for things which are in themselves dead and gone, though the happiness associated with those things may well be. Likewise, Jay Gatsby’s longing is for Daisy: a real, present person living just across the water. Although the possibility of a successful reunion between Gatsby and Daisy may be impossible to reach, she herself is not. The object of this conception of nostalgia is therefore essentially connected to the past, but not consigned to it. Surprisingly, this aligns somewhat with Hofer’s original conception of nostalgia. Although in our case we are using a romantic interest as a substitute for a geographical location, the return “home” is seemingly a path available to the nostalgic.
To address the third of our four conceptual variables, an irreconcilable difference between the nostalgia of Fitzgerald’s early novels and that described by Hofer is Fitzgerald’s demonstration that total satiation by reaching the object is impossible. Although the nostalgic may find a restricted happiness in reaching the object, as Gatsby briefly does with Daisy, it is no longer “magical” (Illbruck 152) when its distance is eradicated, and its value is therefore diminished. Alvarez suggests that to reach this object is “boring”. When Anthony gets a clear view of the mysterious woman, he sees that she is “fat, full thirty-five, utterly undistinguished” (Damned 278) and returns to the bathroom to re-part his hair, immediately forgetting her. During Gatsby’s reunion with Daisy, there are “moments even that afternoon when [she] tumble[s] short of his dreams—not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion” (Gatsby 103). Far from
being “restored to his whole sane self” (Hofer 382), if such a version of Gatsby ever existed, he gains only a limited satisfaction before the affair falls to pieces in dramatic circumstances. Through the contrasting spirits of prelapsarian Anthony and post-reunion Gatsby, Fitzgerald shows us that maintaining distance and preserving the remoteness of the object—keeping the reunion within dreams and outside reality—is the preferable course of action for this kind of nostalgic. The subject gains satisfaction, more satisfaction than reaching the object, from the process of desire itself; from unrealised imagination.
Because of the enjoyability of the desiring process, and of expectation, the effect of longing on these Romantic characters can, when the right course of (in)action is taken, be a tolerable one. Even when the subject has full awareness of the workings of his desire, and a consequent awareness that it cannot be sated by reaching the distant object, he can remain positive. Both Alvarez and Anthony—the prelapsarian Anthony at least—appear comfortable with their insatiable longings: Alvarez is boastful about his philosophy and Anthony quite carefree. This is an interesting phenomenon, for it is perhaps unusual to consider unfulfilled desires as being anything other than distressing or discomforting. Wright Morris, in his chapter on Thomas Wolfe entitled “The Function of Appetite”, argues that “[an] insatiable hunger, like an insatiable desire, is not the sign of life, but of impotence. Impotence, indeed, is part of the romantic agony. If one desires what one cannot have, if one must do what cannot be done, the agony . . . is one of self-induced impotence.” (155) The mention of “agony” appears at odds with the seemingly happy-go-lucky natures of Alvarez and the young premarital Anthony. Is it necessarily an impediment or a sign of “impotence” to harbour insatiable desires? Need it be distressing to recognise and have to come to terms with this insatiability?
Fitzgerald appears to answer the former question in the negative through Gatsby, a personality with “something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life”, blessed with “an extraordinary gift for hope” (Gatsby 8). Unlike the doomed Dick Diver of
Tender Is the Night, who will be discussed in the next chapter, Gatsby’s confused longing for Daisy
at least impels him to become rich. His dreams of reunion keep him vital, and in a certain way happy, until he makes the mistake of trying to effect that reunion in reality. It is, as Fitzgerald and Zelda assert in the co-written “‘Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—’”, “sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory” (50). The latter question, regarding the effect of knowing this insatiability, cannot be explained by reference to Gatsby, for it is only the perceptive narrator-character Nick Carraway who recognises the true and insatiable nature of his longing. But in each of Fitzgerald’s Romantics who do not attempt to bridge that sacred gap, there is a shared positivity about their condition. Amory finds his own yearning love letters “infinitely charming, infinitely new” (Paradise 82); Upon seeing the woman in red, Anthony’s emotion is “nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known” (Damned 278). Similarly, Eichendorff’s Alvarez, in his constant state of courtship, also finds something “charming” about his limbo-like state, and the Taugenichts, although he somewhat incongruously goes on to live happily ever after with his Lady Fair, easily groups together “all the old melancholy, and delight, and ardent expectation” (Taugenichts 19). D.G. Kehl, in opposition to Morris, argues that the “insatiable hunger” of Gatsby is “not a sign of impotence . . . but rather a sign of life and creativity” (318), and this appears to be the case for the characters of both literary worlds. Their shared character may be neither healthy nor rational, but nor is it immediately self-destructive. The Romantic characters utilise their contradictory desires to persevere, always seeing light at the end of an infinite tunnel. The following section will look at the nostalgia of Gatsby in greater detail, followed by an analysis of youth worship in Tender Is the Night. A distinction will be drawn between Fitzgerald’s nostalgic creations who lack any extraordinary gift for hope, whose nostalgia provokes melancholy and inaction, and those like Gatsby who devote their efforts to rebuilding the past in earnest.
II
Reflective and Restorative Nostalgia
!
The Romantic love of distance seen in early Fitzgerald is worth examining for its own sake, but it is also an important groundwork for the complex philosophy of nostalgia woven into The Great
Gatsby. Gatsby’s complex and stunningly depicted relationship with the past has resulted in
numerous and varying interpretations. Raymond M. Vince, for example, sees the “spatial and temporal innovations” of the novel as being intrinsically connected to Einstein’s revolutionary developments in physics (99). In spite of Gatsby’s broad critical coverage, the snippet of Romantic thought in The Beautiful and Damned’s balcony scene, and its significance as a precursor and companion to the nostalgia of Gatsby, has not been critically discussed. Gatsby is a Romantic like Amory and Anthony, but with a gaze fixed firmly upon the past and upon Daisy, a wealthy and now-married former lover of five years past from whom he was separated during the war. Because of his exclusive focus on the past, we can consider Gatsby more of a “true” and committed nostalgic than Amory or Anthony, but his nostalgia, looked at from one angle, is very similar to the Romantic longing of those earlier characters.
Gatsby’s nostalgia is a desire for something, somebody, Daisy, who still exists in the present, despite her entanglement with his past. In one of the most cited analyses of Fitzgeraldian nostalgia, Wright Morris poetically suggests that the “strings of reminiscence tangle on themselves”, spinning “a choking web around the hero" (170). He sees that “the incomparable milk of wonder overflowed [Gatsby’s] cup of happiness” during the initial romance with Daisy (169), the overindulgent recollection of which induces an unhealthy obsession with her and their common past. What Morris fails to discuss is why exactly Gatsby and Daisy’s reunion fails, despite Gatsby rebuilding such a convincing replica of the past. Kehl argues that “Gatsby does find fragments of the past, but . . . finds it inadequate because it is changed, lost, impossible to be relived; further, the past eludes
[him] and, merged with the green-lit orgastic future, it yields no . . . open door in East Egg.” (312) Although Kehl at least attempts to deal with the minutiae of Gatsby’s failure, his explanation is vague and does not tell the whole story. By suggesting that Gatsby “finds” these fragments, presumably in Daisy, yet is unsatisfied with them because they are changed, lost, and unrepeatable, Kehl lays emphasis upon the wrong element. It is not a change in Daisy which prevents the reunion from being a success, since even a total reconstruction would involve committing the fallacy against which Eichendorff’s Alvarez warns, and which Anthony spells out explicitly in both the aforementioned balcony scene and in his pronouncement that
!
you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone. (Damned 507)
!
Thoughts such as these are not simply inventions for the character of Anthony; they are absolutely Fitzgerald’s, and critics are all too aware of this fact. The Beautiful and Damned was, though fairly well-received upon publication, criticised for its lack of narrative control and an inconsistency in the presentation of Anthony and Gloria. Various opinions of theirs seem to lack an obvious congruence with their personalities. It has been somewhat harshly suggested that “[m]ost of the book’s ‘ideas’ are shallow, some are vicious, . . . few are sustained with much consistency by the narrative line” (Roulston 113), and that the “least effective manifestations” of these “are Fitzgerald’s sophomoric asides to the reader and the ‘philosophical’ pronouncements of Anthony, Gloria, and Maury” (114). Although Roulston likely has the aforementioned balcony epiphany and sunbeam analogy in mind here, these ideas are more or less consistent with Anthony’s behaviour,
especially his inability to find a sustainable form of happiness with Gloria beyond the honeymoon period of their marriage. Crucially though, in The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald was unable to incorporate some of his most exciting and original ideas into his characters’ stories. Thus we see his characters making philosophical pronouncements, rather than subtly demonstrating the consequences of such philosophy through their lives. In Gatsby, this flaw is abolished and we see a subtler, grander incarnation of Anthony’s experience, without having its implication spelt out to us.
Even if Roulston is right to doubt the literary merit of Fitzgerald’s philosophical asides, they are nonetheless invaluable for our project of tracing nostalgia through Fitzgerald’s novels. Although it would be an exaggeration to describe Daisy as “some inconsequential object” for Gatsby, it is clear that her own characteristics are not the sole source of her attraction, and that something deeper and more complex is at work. The “enchanted” green light of Daisy’s dock, to which Gatsby pays a secret nightly homage, is the “glitter” of which Anthony speaks, turning to dust, a “foul dust” (Gatsby 8) perhaps, in Gatsby’s hands. When Gatsby “stretch[es] out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way” (27), offering his worship to Daisy on the horizon, his adoration is limitless. However, she “tumble[s] short of his dreams” (Gatsby 103) because “the great distance that had separated him from Daisy” (100) had allowed those dreams to climb to sublime and unreachable heights. The space between Gatsby’s dock and Daisy’s functions like the space between Anthony’s apartment and the balconies across his street. Just as Anthony allows his imagination to make the balcony woman beautiful and desirable, Gatsby had “thrown “himself into [his illusion] with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way” (103). Furthermore, just as Anthony’s adoration expires upon his vision coming into focus, Gatsby and Daisy’s Atlantis loses its magic when dredged to the surface of the sound, its imperfections denuded and blinding.
Gatsby’s tragic attempt to capture the metaphorical sunbeam darting around the room sets him apart from the Romantics who are content to indulge in their dreams without action. Amory
Blaine, who sadly laments “Oh, Alec, I believe I’m tired of college”, only to retreat moments later and explain that “I was just wishing. I wouldn't think of leaving” (Paradise 81), shares an attitude with Gatsby but lacks the latter’s impetus and drive to action. This dichotomy, between those who possess a drive to act upon their yearnings and those who do not, is significant, and underlines the main theme of this chapter. As stated in the introduction to the preceding section, Gatsby’s attitudes can only be bracketed with the earlier protagonists to some extent because, besides maintaining that selective focus upon the past, he never quite recognises the underlying machinery of his longing, which causes him to act in very different ways to Amory and Anthony. He is unaware, or perhaps forces himself to remain unaware that distance, both spatial and temporal, lies at the root of his feeling. He is an archetypal Romantic and seemingly ignorant of the fact. Furthermore, there are several further and more complex layers to his longing. Nick Carraway speculates that, for Gatsby, “some idea of himself . . . had gone into loving Daisy”, which accounts for his life having been “confused and disordered” since. This is the “missing” element of the past of which Kehl speaks. Despite his excited belief that he might “repeat the past” (Gatsby 117), Gatsby remains convinced that the object of his desire is simply Daisy, and that Daisy will be able to satisfy his desire. Only at sporadic moments, such as during the first night of their reunion, does he gain some realisation as to the workings of his Romantic mind, and to the impossibility of being able to satisfy his desire through reunion:
!
Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever… Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one. (100)
!
Thus we can see two important aspects to Gatsby’s nostalgia: the function of spatial distance, and the fraction of his younger self imparted onto his memory of Daisy. The green light of the dock can
remain “enchanted” only when it, and its referent Daisy, remain out of his reach, and his youth itself is gone forever. The subject of lost youth, touched on in Gatsby, receives the full Fitzgerald treatment in his next novel.
We have so far discussed nostalgia and its Romantic roots in Fitzgerald’s first three novels, works which were completed within just five years of one another. Tender Is the Night, Gatsby’s tortuously constructed successor, took a further nine years to complete, and was written during some of the most turbulent and personally destructive years of Fitzgerald’s life. It is understandable then that the novel differs in form and mood from its predecessors. Tender sees Fitzgerald experimenting with new literary techniques, most apparent in the novel’s modernist structure. In a letter to Maxwell Perkins in May 1925, shortly after the publication of Gatsby, he immodestly described the developing novel’s form as “the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for, that Conrad didn't find” (Letters 108). Tender’s mood is sombre and tragic without deploying melodrama or pathos. There is no narrative crescendo as with Gatsby and The Beautiful and
Damned, only a slow ebbing away of its protagonist’s vitality. Scenes are introduced
chronologically, so the reader’s experience of time is warped. Fitzgerald would later rue this non-chronological approach as a mistake, and begged Scribners, his publisher, to allow him to revise the novel for future editions. Characters’ attitudes to time and to the past also differ from those in the previous three novels. Whilst things “are sweeter when they’re lost” for Anthony Patch (Damned 507, emphasis mine), Dick Diver’s lungs “burst for a moment with regret” for “his own youth of ten years ago” (Tender 170). Whilst Gatsby believes in the “orgastic future” (Gatsby 188) of a repeated past, Diver’s morale “cracks” (Tender 240) as he approaches middle age.
A clear distinction will henceforth be made between two different ways that nostalgia can affect its subject’s life beyond the immediate reflective experience, both of which can be found in Fitzgerald’s novels. Of the four conceptual variables noted at the outset—form, object, satiability and effect—this section will focus upon the effects or consequences of nostalgia, though variations
in the other three variables will also be discussed. A line will be drawn in the Riviera sand separating nostalgics like Jay Gatsby from those like Gloria Patch. Dick Diver will start on the former side, before sombrely crossing the divide. To illuminate this division I will use a theoretical distinction made by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia (2001), between restorative and
reflective nostalgia, noting some discrepancies between Boym’s formulations and Fitzgerald’s
where necessary. Boym’s work has been received positively by scholars, with her book being considered “multifaceted” (Ratliff 352) and the distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia regarded as “helpful” (Fritzsche 128). Boym considers the two concepts
!
not absolute types, but rather tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing. Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance. The first category of nostalgics do not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is about truth . . . Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time. (41)
!
Boym sees the two kinds as distinct ways of giving meaning to a presumably uniform longing, but the distinction transcends mere reaction to a single nostalgic form. The action of rebuilding and the inaction of dwelling comprise two distinct forms of nostalgia itself. Restorative nostalgia takes the form of a desire to rebuild what is lost, whilst reflective nostalgia simply considers that loss without necessarily wishing to reincarnate.
Although Boym’s project uses homes and cities as its framework, her distinction between these two kinds of nostalgia can be equally well applied to nostalgia for estranged people, as is
prevalent in Fitzgerald’s novels. We can see how her description of restorative nostalgia seems to almost describe Gatsby’s attempted reunion with Daisy:
!
Nostalgia is an ache of temporal distance and displacement. Restorative nostalgia takes care of both of these symptoms. Distance is compensated by intimate experience and the availability of a desired object. Displacement is cured by a return home, preferably a collective one. Never mind if it's not your home; by the time you reach it, you will have already forgotten the difference. (44)
!
The five-year distance between Gatsby and the Daisy of his past is somewhat compensated for by his eventual reunion with her, though of course not entirely, and his displacement from the past is certainly not “cured” by the reunion. However, the “availability” of the nostalgic object is a central tenet of the Romantic nostalgia described in the previous chapter. The object is associated with the past but still reachable at some distant location in the present. Furthermore, Boym’s statement that restorative nostalgics “do not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is about truth”, equally well describes Gatsby. He believes that he desires Daisy for Daisy, not for the past tied up with her, and it is left to Nick to see that error. Daisy, in reality, is “the epitome of Gatsby's deeper yearning for that which he himself cannot identity” (Kehl 316), and the reader, through Nick, gradually comes to understand this.
Boym’s other identified kind is reflective nostalgia, and it too has relevance to characters and events in Fitzgerald’s novels. Having spent much of the first chapter discussing Anthony Patch’s Romantic attitude, his attraction to distance and fond remembrance of his briefly estranged wife, we should now turn to the ideas attributed to Gloria Patch herself. An important character whose attitudes to time and the past occasionally align with those of Anthony but occasionally offer entirely new perspectives, Gloria finds in a diary of hers the “record of her first kiss, faded as its
intimate afternoon, on a rainy veranda seven years before”. She is distraught by this discovery, because she can “remember only the rain and the wet flowers in the yard and the smell of the damp grass” (371). She draws a line under the entry and writes “FINIS”. The act of drawing a (literal) line under the past is evidently a rare occurrence for Fitzgerald’s characters, though Gloria’s behaviour again matches that of the similarly Zelda-like Rosalind, who would rather preserve her romance with Amory “as a beautiful memory—tucked away in [her] heart” than struggle to preserve the engagement (Paradise 181), and the less Zelda-like Rosemary Hoyt, who laments Dick Diver’s attempt to repeat the past: “Why did you come here? Why couldn't we just have the memory anyhow?” (Tender 186). Gloria’s reaction to the note in her diary highlights a key difference between her attitude to the past and Anthony’s. She places a great value upon objects and situations of to the past, as Anthony does, but attributes a far greater degree of tragedy to their distance, focusing on those fundamentally irreclaimable objects of the past and resisting the temptation to hopelessly try and rebuild them. Despite having little memory of her first kiss, she mourns its place in the forgotten past. Similarly, upon leaving one of Anthony and her’s honeymoon residences, she is overcome by grief with the realisation that “it won't be—like our two beds—ever again. Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost—something's left behind. You can't
ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here.” (386, emphasis mine)
Again, keeping Roulston’s criticisms in mind, we might exercise some caution here when considering Gloria’s attitudes as being representative of a fully developed character, although her attitudes toward the past are, like Anthony’s, entirely consistent with one another. Gloria’s belief system, one of lesser optimism but perhaps superior maturity, acts as a counterpoint to Anthony’s, just as Nick Carraway’s sympathetic scepticism acts as counterpoint to Gatsby’s hopeful idealism. For although Anthony uses his distant longings as inspiration, it is with a recklessness and emotional immaturity that he acts upon them. His hope in the face of separation from his goal leads to unfaithfulness and a series of poor life decisions. Whilst Gloria reacts to separation with
melancholy, she is an unlikely voice of reason within the novel, as she expresses the futility of actively trying to reclaim the past in a powerful monologue:
!
But you can’t [preserve old things], Anthony. Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. (384)
!
This passionate outburst occurs as the Patches are visiting the restored and commodified former house of General Lee in Arlington. “Do you think they've left a breath of 1860 here? This has become a thing of 1914” (384), she complains. Not only does Gloria strongly partake in reflective nostalgia, she admonishes the efforts of restorative nostalgia. Boym, in her explanation of the latter type, considers the restored ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, with its garish attempt to eradicate the effects of time, just as Gloria considers the “blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty” (384) that General Lee’s house has become. Gloria sees the efforts of restorative nostalgics to preserve the past as counterproductive and hopeless. Her resolve to preserve the past in her heart, rather than confusedly attempt to replicate it like Anthony does during his affair, is an important critique of the somewhat reckless restorative ideal. Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener recognises Gloria’s superior ability to let go of the past, considering her the more “successful character” of the two Patches, because “when she is forced, in brutal circumstances, to recognize [that her beauty] is fading, she takes her defeat with something like dignity” (142).
Tension between the two opposing conceptions of nostalgia illustrates the multiplicity of nostalgic approaches within Fitzgerald. More interestingly, strong similarities between the attitudes of Rosalind (Paradise), Gloria (Damned), and Rosemary (Tender), suggest that Fitzgerald considered the reflective, non-restorative “letting go” to be a more feminine approach to nostalgia.
Whilst Rosalind and Gloria are modelled on Zelda, Rosemary is a fictionalised version of Lois Moran, a friend of Fitzgerald’s to whom he was attracted in the late 1920s (Tate 7). Attributing similar attitudes to female characters who were modelled on different real-life women suggests that Fitzgerald saw reflective nostalgia as a common female trait. Although this might appear as lazy typecasting on the part of the author, it does at least grant a degree of personality to those female characters, often simply the foil to a male subject’s yearning soul. Daisy’s reluctance to erase her own past with her husband Tom Buchanan, and her inability to commit to a total reconstruction of five years prior, groups her with these other female characters to some extent, though we are given little access to her thoughts. Fitzgerald confessed his worry to Maxwell Perkins on the day of
Gatsby’s publication that perhaps “women didn’t like the book because it has no important woman
in it” (Letters 105); a worry that was probably justified. As Bruccoli suggested, the personalities of his male protagonists all participate at least partially in his own. The frequency at which they grasp wildly at the past is indicative of his own hopeless yearning to repeat and rebuild. A sobering awareness of the impossibility of that task presents itself in key female characters, but also in obscure male figures from the short stories such as Tom Squires, who, “[w]ith the courteous bow of another generation” (“At Your Age” 493), walks away from his marriage to a younger woman, recognising that he has “lost the battle against youth and spring” (494).
Fitzgerald, even within a single novel such as The Beautiful and Damned, is able to present two distinct conceptions of nostalgia. The reflective kind held by Gloria Patch, manifested in a mourning for small aspects of her own youth, contrasts with the restorative efforts of characters like Anthony Patch. We have already noted the difference in form between the two kinds, but we should also consider the difference in object. Whilst restorative nostalgics like Gatsby need some concrete present referent on which to fix their efforts, reflective nostalgics are able to, or are perhaps forced to, reflect on things which are conclusively historical and thus ungraspable. To best demonstrate the difference in nostalgic object between the two conceptions, we should analyse the fate of Dick
