How to start a New Year – and, in this case, the first honest-to-goodness post (aside from that general introduction) of this spanking-new blog? Something associated with the holiday, perhaps?
At first I thought of U2’s song “New Year’s Day,” but despite the urgency of its chords and its lyrics, it didn’t quite grab me. Edith Wharton’s “New Year’s Day,” the last of the quartet of novellas that comprise Old New York, then came to mind, but that particular 1870s story is not the best in that her collection. That honor, to my mind, goes either to the delicious satire “False Dawn” or the more poignant “The Old Maid,” which was later adapted into a great Bette Davis film, now unjustly neglected because it came out in 1939, arguably the great year in film history. You know – the same 12-month period that featured Gone With the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Young Mr. Lincoln, Only Angels Have Wings, Gunga Din, and Ninotchka.
No, the cultural work with the greatest resonance for me this time of year is one in which New Year’s Day is not mentioned at all, but might as well be – “Babylon Revisited,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. (That's his statue in downtown St. Paul, in Rice Park, which I visited a few years ago; I found this photo on another blog.) "Babylon Revisited" penetrates the mind and heart of an American in Paris after the spree is over – not only the personal hangover of an alcoholic looking to reclaim his life and his young daughter, but the larger financial and spiritual aftermath for a country after the Black Tuesday brought a crashing end to the Roaring Twenties.
As the roll of bar names continues throughout this 1931 short story that was later collected in Fitzgerald's Taps at Reveille (1935) collection – The Ritz, Place Blanche, Bricktop’s, Zelli’s, and the Poet’s Cave – it’s easy to envision one too many New Year’s Eve parties enjoyed by the protagonist, Charlie Wales, and his now-deceased wife. The central flashback – an incident in which a drunken Charlie locked his wife Helen out of their home in the middle of a February snowstorm – could have happened on any one of these New Year’s Eve celebrations.
And now, the figurative morning after – when Charlie hopes to take back his daughter Honoria from the in-laws, only to be visited by “sudden ghosts out of the past” – former old-time revelers who haven’t gotten the message that Charlie is on the wagon. Or so Charlie thinks: from the moment we first spot Charlie in the Ritz, and from his actions throughout – gripping the sides of a chair, like a man with the DT’s, as his sister-in-law delivers a crushing blow to his hopes; trembling as he hits the streets; ordering only a drink a day “so that the idea of alcohol won’t get too big in my imagination” – one senses that once the story closes, he is all too vulnerable to relapsing. His appearances especially in a bar would remind Catholics – including a lapsed one like Fitzgerald – of an “occasion of sin.”
The story masterfully evokes the substance abuser’s seesawing from giddiness to self-recrimination – emotions that came naturally to Fitzgerald, whose thirst was so acute that he’d gulp Drano if you slipped it into his flask. I do not drink, nor do drugs, nor smoke, yet I see so much in Charlie’s struggle that I identify with. Why?
The simplest answer is that I have had my own form of addiction – to food. No, it has never left me unconscious, the way Charlie (and, of course, Fitzgerald) so frequently was, nor deprived me of the ones I love. But, though I did not reach morbid obesity, I was so overweight that my health was imperiled.
Like Charlie, I was left with all-too-many regrets, perpetually thinking “What’s the use?” at the possibility that I could ever turn things around. And Charlie, like myself, is middle-aged, knowing that his time to turn things around is limited. (The description of Charlie sounds like Fitzgerald at the exact moment when his alcoholism and the struggles of caring for his mentally ill wife Zelda began to take their toll on him: “He was thirty-five, and good to look at. The Irish mobility of his face was sobered by a deep wrinkle between his eyes.”)
Last year, for a variety of reasons best discussed on another day, I began to do something about the problem. A year later, I’m 50 pounds lighter – still, at 175-180 pounds, no lightweight on my 5-ft.-11-inch frame, but certainly better than the alternative. This is the second time in 10 years that I’ve lost so much weight, and though I’m proud that I was able to do so, I’m embarrassed that I even had to.
“Babylon Revisited” is about the hard work of starting anew – a reminder in a new year of the need for constant resolution; of the need to get off the floor, no matter how many times you may have fallen or may fall again; and of the need to stay wary, to live a life beyond endless guilt. And it contains, page after page, the typical small throwaway phrase that lifts a Fitzgerald short story or novel from what would be exceptionally fine for anyone else to downright magical for him. (Can someone provide me with a better description of the self-delusion of a person or country in the midst of a financial bubble: “The snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money”?)
At first I thought of U2’s song “New Year’s Day,” but despite the urgency of its chords and its lyrics, it didn’t quite grab me. Edith Wharton’s “New Year’s Day,” the last of the quartet of novellas that comprise Old New York, then came to mind, but that particular 1870s story is not the best in that her collection. That honor, to my mind, goes either to the delicious satire “False Dawn” or the more poignant “The Old Maid,” which was later adapted into a great Bette Davis film, now unjustly neglected because it came out in 1939, arguably the great year in film history. You know – the same 12-month period that featured Gone With the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Young Mr. Lincoln, Only Angels Have Wings, Gunga Din, and Ninotchka.
No, the cultural work with the greatest resonance for me this time of year is one in which New Year’s Day is not mentioned at all, but might as well be – “Babylon Revisited,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. (That's his statue in downtown St. Paul, in Rice Park, which I visited a few years ago; I found this photo on another blog.) "Babylon Revisited" penetrates the mind and heart of an American in Paris after the spree is over – not only the personal hangover of an alcoholic looking to reclaim his life and his young daughter, but the larger financial and spiritual aftermath for a country after the Black Tuesday brought a crashing end to the Roaring Twenties.
As the roll of bar names continues throughout this 1931 short story that was later collected in Fitzgerald's Taps at Reveille (1935) collection – The Ritz, Place Blanche, Bricktop’s, Zelli’s, and the Poet’s Cave – it’s easy to envision one too many New Year’s Eve parties enjoyed by the protagonist, Charlie Wales, and his now-deceased wife. The central flashback – an incident in which a drunken Charlie locked his wife Helen out of their home in the middle of a February snowstorm – could have happened on any one of these New Year’s Eve celebrations.
And now, the figurative morning after – when Charlie hopes to take back his daughter Honoria from the in-laws, only to be visited by “sudden ghosts out of the past” – former old-time revelers who haven’t gotten the message that Charlie is on the wagon. Or so Charlie thinks: from the moment we first spot Charlie in the Ritz, and from his actions throughout – gripping the sides of a chair, like a man with the DT’s, as his sister-in-law delivers a crushing blow to his hopes; trembling as he hits the streets; ordering only a drink a day “so that the idea of alcohol won’t get too big in my imagination” – one senses that once the story closes, he is all too vulnerable to relapsing. His appearances especially in a bar would remind Catholics – including a lapsed one like Fitzgerald – of an “occasion of sin.”
The story masterfully evokes the substance abuser’s seesawing from giddiness to self-recrimination – emotions that came naturally to Fitzgerald, whose thirst was so acute that he’d gulp Drano if you slipped it into his flask. I do not drink, nor do drugs, nor smoke, yet I see so much in Charlie’s struggle that I identify with. Why?
The simplest answer is that I have had my own form of addiction – to food. No, it has never left me unconscious, the way Charlie (and, of course, Fitzgerald) so frequently was, nor deprived me of the ones I love. But, though I did not reach morbid obesity, I was so overweight that my health was imperiled.
Like Charlie, I was left with all-too-many regrets, perpetually thinking “What’s the use?” at the possibility that I could ever turn things around. And Charlie, like myself, is middle-aged, knowing that his time to turn things around is limited. (The description of Charlie sounds like Fitzgerald at the exact moment when his alcoholism and the struggles of caring for his mentally ill wife Zelda began to take their toll on him: “He was thirty-five, and good to look at. The Irish mobility of his face was sobered by a deep wrinkle between his eyes.”)
Last year, for a variety of reasons best discussed on another day, I began to do something about the problem. A year later, I’m 50 pounds lighter – still, at 175-180 pounds, no lightweight on my 5-ft.-11-inch frame, but certainly better than the alternative. This is the second time in 10 years that I’ve lost so much weight, and though I’m proud that I was able to do so, I’m embarrassed that I even had to.
“Babylon Revisited” is about the hard work of starting anew – a reminder in a new year of the need for constant resolution; of the need to get off the floor, no matter how many times you may have fallen or may fall again; and of the need to stay wary, to live a life beyond endless guilt. And it contains, page after page, the typical small throwaway phrase that lifts a Fitzgerald short story or novel from what would be exceptionally fine for anyone else to downright magical for him. (Can someone provide me with a better description of the self-delusion of a person or country in the midst of a financial bubble: “The snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money”?)
