Fitzgerald’s text is one that has recurred several times in my reading. Initially it was read at University, where I wrote an essay on the connection with Macbeth, a connection which fascinated me as I started to get to grips with the issues that go with relationships. This is a novel about relationships: specifically the doomed love affair between Nicole and Dick. To what extent is our idea of love merely a crutch to help us see out the darkness of the universe in which we find ourselves abandoned? Nicole’s trauma has a specific incestuous root, but her sense of crisis, which Dick inherits, feels existential. The pointlessness, the pointlessness. We can conjure the most beatific and beautiful surroundings, but in the end we are all caged tigers. There’s a disarming nihilism at work here and the more glorious Dick and Nicole’s mystique, the more hollow it becomes.
I wonder where Fitzgerald slides to in my worldview as I get older. As I bypass youth and enter late middle age. Is Fitzgerald a young person’s writer? When we all go through the mirror does it all start to look tawdry? Which is the paradox that lends his novels their existential glory. Those shallow western dreams and their hollow hearts.
Then reading Bruccoli’s biography, the book is cast in another light. The tragic roman a clef. Because Scott and Zelda lived on both sides of the mirror. They had the Divers’ glamour lifestyle. But they also inhabited its hollowness, as their genius was ignored, hung out to dry, and their empire faded to dust.
It’s hard not to have a soft spot for Tender, for Dick’s relentless drive towards middle American mediocrity, for Nicole’s flight from a madness which is positively glorious. The vainglory of humanity, like a sparkling Mediterranean morning blue, iridescent, seductive, irredeemably flawed.
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