Though I do not count Gatsby among the characters of this kind, for Gatsby, though he died in a way that could be seen as the epitome of indignity (wrongly believed to have run a woman down with a vehicle, shot dead in his swimming pool by her distraught husband, and attended in death by only a smattering of mourners), the completeness of his devotion to Daisy Buchanan, wrongheaded as it may have been, allowed him to share, at least as he would exist in the memory of both the narrator and the reader, in that idealism that partakes of what is best about romantic or courtly love.
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Which is why Fitzgerald was essentially a spiritual writer, and not a writer of amusements, or a chronicler of the escapades of the wealthy and the socially refined, though certainly those types could be said to have comprised his subject. For his eye, as is the case with all great artists, was always on that which imparts dignity to reality, which isn’t to say that this dignity always made itself known explicitly, for so many of his characters, in valuing that which is fleeting and insubstantial, find themselves on a trajectory of self-abasement, so that a reader who would recognize the meaning of his work must first encounter the fact that this meaning often becomes apparent only through suggestion, or through what is not there.
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For it is really about a reversal, this novel, the reversal not so much of the fortune and charm and promise that had belonged to the character of Dick Diver (though that would be there too), but of the illusion that, in the absence of a deeper or more profound goodness, in the person to whom they would pertain, any of these things have a reality or substance beyond that which can exist in a milieu of wealth and privilege. Which even there isn’t much of a reality, for nobody is tried in such a milieu, as there one can withdraw, at any time one would like, if one’s ego or comfort is threatened, into the security of one’s own luxury, which lasts only as long as catastrophe can be averted.
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Which is to say that Fitzgerald uses perspective here as a sort of symbology, or as a language of visual meaning.
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Though I suppose it is better to say that the ending of that novel has the same camerawork as the beginning, but in reverse. For while the beginning zooms in slowly, with a sort of romantic promise, from somewhere above the French Riviera, until it takes us up close to the “rose-colored” walls and “deferential palms” of a very specific hotel, the ending zooms out, from a medical office in Buffalo, in the state of New York, where the main character has ended up in what can be understood as his professional and moral decline, until it dissolves into the vagueries of the Finger Lakes region, and “one town or another…almost certainly in that section of the country.”
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The ending of the novel Tender Is the Night, which came to my mind when I mentioned Fitzgerald several entries ago, and which I want to say something about, because it is my favorite of Fitzgerald’s novels, though also the saddest, has the same camerawork as the novel’s beginning, if one can talk about a work of fiction having camerawork, which I think one can, for the reader’s eye, when entrusted to an author, will be drawn not only to whatever landscape or interior that author’s prose would have it drawn to, but at whatever pace, and with whatever range of movement, and from whatever distance, that author would choose.
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This isn’t to say that those instances when we yield to temptation should bring us to despair, as if we’d failed irredeemably, for to expect perfection in one’s self is to misapprehend one’s nature, and even to profane the love of the creator by assigning to it a quality that is conditional and human, rather than mysterious and divine. But only that the path of virtue is always there, that it is always beleaguered, and that one’s footing on it will become surer the more attention one pays to it.
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For temptation, when we yield to it, even in what seems like the smallest of instances, has the same effect on our will that rust has on iron. It is corrosive, and makes our will weak, and susceptible to breakage when we are met by demands of greater significance.
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Meaning, if we are not aware of temptation in the solitude of our own rooms, for example, when we are sitting at our desks, or looking out a window, while thoughts and feelings arise in us unmediated and unchecked, we open ourselves to a degradation that is habitual.
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Which is easier said than done, for while we may want to be virtuous, and try to be so, we are assailed by temptation, which isn’t present only in moments of high drama, but also in the most ordinary aspects of our lives.
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In other words, talent participates in reality in a way that is more rarefied and arbitrary than is the way of things like wisdom and understanding, and that is because talent, in substance, isn’t as close to virtue as they are. And the reason this matters is because virtue avails itself to everyone, regardless of the circumstances of one’s birth. To be a sporting great, for example, I would need to have been born with the talents that are native to athleticism, and that belong to the realm of physical grace, but to be virtuous all I need is to want to be so, and to act on that want.
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For while wisdom and understanding, and certain other traits, will obtain to anyone who is willing to orient themselves to reality in a way I’d describe as reverential, talent in its specific modes obtains to specific individuals, at first through what we might designate as luck, or circumstance, and then, if it is developed, through practice.
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I am not certain why this is true, though I suspect it has to do with the difference in the categories to which things like wisdom and understanding, on the one hand, and talent, on the other, belong.
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The difference between an artist’s juvenilia and their mature work has less to do with the sophistication of their mind than with the sophistication of their talent. In other words, a mature artist needs not to have made some leap forward in wisdom, or understanding, or anything like that, but to have experienced a progression in their talent such that their talent becomes the means by which a wisdom or understanding that they may not even have been aware of, or expecting, finds articulation.
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Which seems to me both true and untrue, for you do not get better as a writer, really, once you’ve reached artistic maturity, but only vary your mode of expression, by innovating, say, or by working in different genres, though certainly you do get better throughout your early years, when you’re producing what is known as juvenilia.
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Which I’m reminded of now because of what I was saying about the soul, though Stein herself may not have been thinking of the soul when she’d made the remark, but about literature; for those words of hers appeared in a letter she’d written to F. Scott Fitzgerald, in reference to his novel The Great Gatsby (after he’d sent her a copy), and how it compared to his previous book, This Side of Paradise, which she had read and had also liked. The line from that letter goes like this, in its entirety: “This is as good a book and different and older and that is what one does, one does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.”
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“One does not get better but different and older,” Gertrude Stein once wrote.
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It is Aquinas who expresses this best, in the Summa Theologica, though his thought finds its basis in scripture, in the Book of Genesis.
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Or, what I should say is that, when the person is alive, in corporeal form, the soul is its animating factor (a person’s ‘vitals’ or physiology notwithstanding). And so there is one nature, not two natures united.
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And yet the soul is not distinct from the person when the person is alive, in corporeal form.