Tea at Trianon: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, April 26, 2021

John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

From The Spectator:

Keats was a Romantic, perhaps the Romantic, with his lyric gift and tragically brief life. Fitzgerald loved the Romantic poets, and romance in the lower case, but was at the heart’s core a modernist, far more egoist than romantic, and quite hard-boiled. The little quatrain above is rather like T.S. Eliot’s ‘jug jug’ in The Waste Land — homage of a sort, but also showing ironic distance, and no intention of writing like Keats. Indeed, it’s all about his own novel in the last line, with ‘Night’ capitalised; the moustache on the Mona Lisa.
Jonathan Bate, in Bright Star, Green Light, speculates on the convergence of the twain. Taking Plutarch’s paralleled Lives as his model, Bate yokes Keats and Fitzgerald together to compare the leading achievements of this oddly matched team — Keats’s mature poems and Fitzgerald’s novels. Some of the parallels work, and some strain. Basic parallels of their lives are well known. Keats died in 1821 at the age of 25; Fitzgerald had his first and most lucrative success a century later, with This Side of Paradise in 1920, when he was 23. Keats loved and lost Fanny Brawne because he died before they could marry; Fitzgerald loved and lost Ginevra King because she married a rich boy instead, and then loved Zelda Sayre, only to lose her to her increasing mental illness.
As Bate chronicles their lives and writings together, his book bounces from Keats to Fitzgerald in alternating chapters. At times this feels like a tennis match, with one’s head as the ball, from reading two disparate narratives that are not always adequately linked. Bright Star, Green Light is chronological, following both writers from boyhood through youth, school, first loves, marriage (in Fitzgerald’s case) and selected works. Bate knows Keats’s life and poetry inside out, and his readings of ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’ and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, among other poems, are elegant and incisive. Using Sidney Colvin’s biography of Keats, a copy of which was in Fitzgerald’s library, Bate selects anecdotes, letters, major events and friendships to flesh out a comprehensive account of the man and his art. (Read more.)