Fitzgerald in the Time of COVID

“Don't let yourself feel worthless: often through life you will really be at your worst when
you seem to think best of yourself; and don't worry about losing your "personality," as you
persist in calling it: at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin
to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as
I do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m.” 

Fitzgerald was a distant world, enveloped in the inexhaustible fame of The Great Gatsby. It
was fast paced, kaleidoscopic, lovely and tragic. It was just a name in a list of hundred other
authors and writers. I was almost ashamed to confess having not read Gatsby. The advent of
2020 brought with it a strange and irrepressible craving for Fitzgerald. In January itself, I
ended up buying all five of his novels, and even a collection of short stories.

It only seemed right to begin with the Great American Novel. Gatsby was finished in one
sitting, in the light of the midnight oil, on a cold Sunday of February. My first date with
Fitzgerald’s characters was as spectacular as possible. The most fantastic moment was Nick’s
foremost meeting with Gatsby and that absolutely grand smile of his. After this I took a short
hiatus, returning to Fitzgerald three months later. Tender is the Night still gives me
nightmares. Nicole’s breakdown and the steady deconstruction of her marital life, set in the
backdrop of lavish European villas and tragic, unrequited romances percolated into my skin
with an unearthly pity. I was lingering within the same four walls, waking up with the same
people, but at the same time, strolling down French streets and feasting on Italian delicacies,
getting drunk on the drama of a retinue of lively characters. With Anthony and Gloria Patch, I
felt New York breathing down my neck and nourishing my loneliness. The couple oozed with
passion, ambition, immoderation and intellectual discourse. I learned to appreciate fatality.
There was beauty and there was definitely damnation. The Last Tycoon was a transitory
phase. Yet, the characters were felt with the same intensity, dripping from the pages into my
hands. They still lurk in the dirt under my fingernails.

“We can't possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name's become
proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the
warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without growth...It has no
day.” 

This Side of Paradise was the kiss that sealed the deal. It was Fitzgerald’s first published
novel that I read last. It doesn’t stand with his other works for it’s a bildungsroman; a story of
the academic adventures, romantic escapades and epiphanic moments of the handsome
Amory Blaine. It is undoubtedly my favourite Fitzgerald. It was not that I stitched Blaine
onto myself but that he had, unknowingly, always been a part of my fabric. His youthful
confusions, lost ambitions and vain attempts to being order and certainty to life, were straight
up, reflections of my own anxieties. I came to share his realisations and resolutions; it was a
reversal of character mimesis.

“We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to
believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too
many voices, too much scattered, illogical ill-considered criticism.” 

The distant world that I’d believed Fitzgerald to be was actually not distant at all. It was close
by, rather too close. I could hear so many chapters inhaling and exhaling, heaving with that
stubborn yet incurable thing we call life. In retrospect, I am glad to have not read Fitzgerald
in any other time. I would have probably enjoyed it. But in the last few months, I experienced
it. Fitzgerald sat by my bedside in the midst of a pandemic telling a tale of a generation, I
know not, where to place on a historic timeline.

“Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery
of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love
and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the
worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man
shaken...”