My Selection — “Babylon Revisited”
Fitzgerald’s Paris: A Tale of Nostalgia and Regret
Reflection on Youth, Dissipation, and Legacy
Let’s first contextualize this amazing story
It’s 1931. The Great Depression has not only depressed the world markets — the “Lords of Finance” having bankrupted the word — but Fitzgerald was also depressed. The King of the Jazz Age was now dethroned and his royal subject matter — obsolete.
His “golden-girl” and wife — Zelda — had “cracked up” — and was now in an expensive asylum in Switzerland in 1930 called Prangins Clinic. He now just has his beloved daughter Scottie to raise. He’s depressed — and it’s so hard to write while depressed and drinking.
In fact, in a moment of eerie clairvoyance, Fitzgerald’s narrator from The Great Gatsby suddenly realizes at the crazy end of Chapter 7:
. . . I just remembered that today's my birthday.” I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade . . . Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. (135)
It’s spooky to read this, knowing what was coming in five years for the world and for F…
