bitter tears and babylon revisited

In an all-too-brief lifetime (1896-1940) of crafting some of the very finest American short fiction, Scott Fitzgerald likely reached his artistic peak with the 1931 story “Babylon Revisited.” Ostensibly about the effect on expatriate Americans following the 1929 financial meltdown and the subsequent Great Depression, Fitzgerald magically recreates the melancholy social atmosphere following the Crash and the oftentimes desperate attempts by the American expatriate community to enjoy the dregs of the decade-long party which has come down to what history now terms the Roaring Twenties.

Perhaps Fitzgerald’s most perceptive and sympathetic  critic, Malcom Cowley, calls Babylon Revisited “a new type of story, more complicated emotionally, with less regret for the past and more dignity in the face of real sorrow. “”At last I am mature,” Fitzgerald said around that time, with Cowley saying that this and other contemporary stories “are so close to his personal tragedy that the emotion is in the events themselves…which have merely to be stated in the barest language.” In this Fitzgerald comes closest to Hemingway’s famous “iceberg principle,” in which three-fourths of story remains below the metaphorical surface, a “new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understand.”

Babylon Revisited tells the story of one Charlie Wales, a onetime free spending and hard-drinking Parisian-American now paying the moral and practical cost of alcoholism and his onetime tendency to spend money as if it were printed from an inexhaustible supply. “I spoiled this city for myself,” Wales says. “I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and I was gone.”

“The snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow,” Fitzgerald writes. “If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money.”

And at considerable cost: Wales’ wife died of “heart trouble”  in Paris after he drunkenly and inadvertently locked her out of the house during a post-party snowstorm, and now his young daughter Honoria lives in the custody of his wife’s sister and her own husband. There is much resentment, of course, especially with his former sister-in-law, with which there had always been “an instinctive antipathy between them.” The sister, Marion Peters, bitterly blames Wales for her sister’s death, leaving Wales to become “increasingly alarmed at leaving Honoria in this atmosphere of hostility against himself; sooner or later it would come out, in a word here, a shake of the head there, and some of that distrust would be irrevocably implanted in Honoria.”

That particular thought strikes a bitter chord with any non-custodial parent, of which reluctantly I am one. Typically, I write of and disguise my own enduring pain through allusion and metaphor; I have come to realize that certain types of pain are so deep that they are beyond acknowledgment, far beneath the surface, far beyond even tears. Lately I have begun to wonder if I can even still cry, if the pain has burrowed itself so deep that it can no longer be expressed. It is an unhealthy thing, not being to acknowledge or address your own grief. I know it is, because it leads to hopelessness and a melancholy so intense that even the word depression fails to even begin to describe one’s emotional state. This is my acquaintance with unspoken grief, and, and it has certainly taken its toll during the last eight years. It’s always there, a black veil over my life, leaving me in some ways reluctantly frozen in time, forever seeing and dreaming of the two very young men from which I was once very nearly inseparable.

And as much as Babylon Revisited is a story of moral dissipation, it is also one of the enduring love between parent and child. Little wonder, then, that it affects me so deeply (and so differently than when I first discovered it during my early twenties, shortly before I became a parent myself). I empathize with Wale’s attempts to reclaim custody of his daughter, knowing all the while that my time for such a complete reconciliation is now long since past.

My youngest son and I, Aaron, traded some texts on a recent warm night on the great times we spent together: bookstore and photography trips, Starbucks’ visits and the like. I couldn’t help it; I cried for the first time in what seems like ages. And I needed a good cry in some ways; we all do, I suppose, at one time or another. After all, we can’t keep our emotions bottled up forever.

“I’m afraid we’ve lost the chance to make new memories together,” I said.

‘Don’t think like that,” Aaron said. “There’s plenty of time for that.”

“But you’re so busy. And you’ll be going off to college soon.”

“I know,” Aaron said. “But I sure hope there’s a way.”

“You’re not the only one. You’re all I ever think about.”

And, I must admit, I cried at the conclusion of Babylon Revisited:

He would come back some day; they couldn’t make him pay forever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, beside that fact. He wasn’t young anymore, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn’t have wanted him to be so alone.

Dedicated to Adam and Aaron

“the last thing that you said as you were leaving…”

The morning I left Pennsylvania, I drove south without looking back. There was no final, bittersweet, last visit to the pub. There was no final walk through the town. There was no final look at the Penn State campus, with people just beginning to realize their dreams. There were no goodbyes; there was no one to say goodbye to. I left the same way I arrived: with a car full of books and clothes, and a mind full of hopes, ideas, ambitions, and dreams. I left with little; I left with the things I came with. I left with the things which can never be taken away.

So now I’m going back again
I got to get to her somehow
All the people we used to know
they’re an illusion to me now
some are mathematicians
some are carpenters wive’s
don’t know how it all got started
I don’t know what they’re doing with their lives
but me I’m still on the road
heading for another joint
we always did feel the same
we just saw it from a different point of view
tangled up in blue*

If you’re busy enough and manage to distract yourself enough, you can convince yourself that you’re not homesick and that you don’t miss the people that you love. At least, not that badly. There’s always a holiday coming up, some time off from work, a long weekend to look forward to. There’s always something to hold onto. But someday, no matter how strong you are, those dates on the calendar are no longer enough. You need to see them more often: the people that you love. And when it comes to children, you cannot help but wonder: do they still love you? I thought about that as I was leaving…and I realized that I just didn’t know.

I can’t remember the last thing you said as you were leaving
and the days go by so fast**

Through Maryland and West Virginia I wondered. As I finally entered Kentucky, I still wondered. I didn’t know if my sons would welcome me back to Lexington, or if they would view my return as another retreat and failure. But this time, I had a story to tell and a book to write, and it wasn’t going to be written in Pennsylvania. I was coming home with a purpose, and that, I hoped, they would understand. If I was to become the writer I always wanted to be, first I had to come home.

Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, wrote that distance is essential in writing of closely held emotions and experiences: “…in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself…and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things.”

Substitute emotional distance for geographic distance, though, and you essentially accomplish the same thing. The key for any writer is maturity, perspective, and command of your material. That I have. So it really doesn’t matter if I write in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, or Katmandu. I remember the old question: who, after all, is a writer? One who writes…of course. We make this alchemy seem too complicated sometimes, I think. Words turn into pages turn into chapters into books. It’s not that difficult, is it?

No. It’s really not. And it’s much easier when you can simply drive across town and spend time with the people that you love.

*Bob Dylan, “Tangled Up in Blue” (from the album Blood On The Tracks)

**Counting Crows, “A Long December” (from the album Recovering the Satellites)

“when the train left the station…”

“I’m nobody,” Emily Dickinson wrote. “Are you–nobody–too?” I like to quote that brief phrase sometimes when I’m lonely, frightened, or otherwise confused. I’ve learned enough by now to know that we all ask ourselves that question, even if only in the darkest hours of our nights. When you realize that, sometimes you don’t feel so all alone.

My darkest hours seem to arrive between midnight and four A.M., the time I used to look forward to when my kids were young because then the house was quiet and I could write, play music and guitar, and refresh my muse, as Hemingway said, “from the springs that fed it.” The nights and years have been so lonely since those times, so very lonely, like the times in the middle of the night when the bedroom door would open and a little boy (or two) would crawl into bed with me while his mother worked. “This bed is empty,” goes the Stones song; I’m not sure it’s something you ever get used to.

Love in vain, love in vain; and all is vanity, even the person I believed I once was.

Well, its hard to tell, its hard to tell, but all your love’s in vain
Well, I felt so sad and lonesome that I could not help but cry

It’s okay. No matter what I once believed when I was young and arrogant, I knew I couldn’t live a charmed life forever. It was always so…precarious…even then. And now the worst times are over, finally, and once again I live a life of seeing and possibility. I sometimes joke about the Fitzgerald line that “there are no second acts in American lives.” It wasn’t so long ago that I believed it completely. But I no longer believe it anymore.

Cormac McCarthy’s “world entire”

What would you do  if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay. 

Perhaps not since Hemingway has an American writer been so visible on the big screen (I know…what about William Faulkner? Faulkner is different; he found lucrative work as a screenwriter).       

There’s something of an industry these days for making movies based on the novels of, arguably, the greatest living American novelist, Cormac McCarthy: No Country For Old Men, All The Pretty Horses, and soon, The Road.

I first read The Road three years ago during a particularly difficult time: I was losing the closeness I had always enjoyed with my sons, and for the life of me I don’t know why (and I’m not sure that I ever will). The Road, with its description of a love between father and son so strong that each was the other’s “world entire” affected me to the depths of my soul; it was a love that I knew and lived for my entire adult life. That’s what made the tears flow so easily as I read: I know the sort of love where a parent feels that life has no meaning without children. I know: you can’t protect them forever. But still you feel the responsibility to prevent or bear any hurt. And so I wonder…will that feeling ever go away? I think not. Somehow, I think not.

So I bought a copy for my youngest son, the one who had seemingly withdrawn from me the most. I wanted him to read between the lines. I wanted him to know that as a father I wasn’t that much different from the man in the novel…that my love was deep enough to assume any sacrifice. I wanted him to know that, if I had to, I could learn to live without his love and respect. But I could not abide a world in which he no longer lived. The Road, as you may know, is a sort of “post-apocalyptic” novel in which the world has been burned over (apparently the result of nuclear war) and covered with ash that, years later, still swirls like snow. All food sources destroyed, the survivors are either scavengers or cannibals–good guys and bad guys, in the view of the boy, who struggles to understand why the pair can’t share their very limited supply of food with the few sympathetic people they encounter. They can’t, of course, because doing so means that they would die.

He looked at the boy but the boy had turned away and lay staring out at the river.
There’s nothing we could have done.
He didn’t answer.
He’s going to die. We can’t share what we have or we’ll die, too.
I know.
So when are you going to talk to me again?
I’m talking now.
Are you sure?
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.

So they constantly, and cautiously, search for food and supplies as they make their way south, toward the sea. They find a significant cache at one point in an underground shelter, but the man knows they can’t stay more than a night or two because others are looking as well–and for reasons both practical and sometimes sinister, aren’t willing to share either. After all, this is a world without life save for the nomads who wander the land. This is a world where some people have resorted to cannibalism, while others would kill for the sake of a few cans of food.

The Road, although filled with terror and tension, is at its core a love story: a love story of the best kind, that between a father and his son. And just like the man in the book, I’ll spend the rest of my life offering my love, whether it’s accepted or not. Just like him, I’ll spend the rest of my life “carrying the fire.”

Babylon Revisited

“There are no second acts in American lives,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote. Who can actually vouch for the accuracy of that statement, though? At the time of his death from a heart attack at age 44 (in 1940), Fitzgerald was said to be working on what could have been the best novel of his career, The Last Tycoon. The manuscript as he left it does indeed show flashes of the old brilliance; it might not have been Gatsby, but perhaps, with further work, it would have been close enough.

Reinvention, though, is the basis for continuing American celebrity. New looks, new sounds, new influences–these are the currencies of American celebrity. As one in need of reinvention, I still hold out hope that the same rules are true for the rest of us mere mortals as well. In this I look to Fitzgerald’s best short story, “Babylon Revisited,” in which a flawed but deeply loving parent attempts to earn passage back into his young daughter’s life.

And I should know, living apart from two teenage sons for five years now, long enough for them to become adults and begin new lives and decide that they don’t need their father in quite the same way as they used to. It’s normal, I know, and part of me should be greatly proud. But even though I know better, it mostly makes me sad.

I miss the closeness, the closeness between parents and children which Cormac McCarthy described in The Road as the state of being each other’s “world entire.” That world is gone, forever, for reasons of both nature and circumstance. But still I often awake in tears, torn from a dream in which I’m caring for two little boys, boys who still believe their father can do no wrong. And I don’t know which brings me more tears: the fact that they no longer believe it, or the fact that they may be right. And the fact that their mother now detests me only makes matters worse.

circa age twelve

Perhaps, though, love will see me through, as Fitzgerald wrote:

He would come back some day; they couldn’t make him pay forever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, beside that fact. He wasn’t young any more, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn’t have wanted him to be so alone.

a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song

“Time and distance are out of place here,” Michael Stipe sang on “Feeling Gravity’s Pull.” I thought of that lyric tonight as my son Aaron and I made the round of the bookstores in Lexington, because even though I don’t see him nearly as much as I like or need, we always talk as if we’ve never been apart (so time and distance are truly out of place here). Now that may be wishful thinking on my part, but that instinctive sort of communication never goes away: I feel it, it’s tangible, I know it’s there. Sure, I rub him the wrong way sometimes (well, maybe more often than that), as any parent does any teenager, but no matter what we understand each other without having to say anything at all.

We talked about this year’s track season, his training, the difficulty any athlete has of knowing how far he or she can push their body–and the euphoria which comes when you realize you can push harder than you ever thought imaginable. He’s strong and becoming stronger…and the main part is that he is simply becoming. Becoming the person, the intellectual, and the athlete he was born to be.

So, amped on Starbucks’ cappuccinos, we went bargain hunting first, with Aaron finding some study books on German and me reclaiming works by Jay McInerney and Rilke. Aaron’s already decided that he likes this Rilke poem best:

I live my life in widening rings
which spread over earth and sky.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but that is what I will try.

I circle around God, the primordial tower,
and I circle ten thousand years long;
and I still don’t know if I’m a falcon, a storm,
or an unfinished song.

 A falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song. I’ve always believed those lines came easily to Rilke, perhaps not as easily as Coleridge’s dream fragment of Xanadu, but somehow preordained nonetheless. Preordained in the same way that I feel ancient purpose in the simple fact of being Aaron’s father. I may not be there every day, but I think of him with great love and longing every waking moment of the day. If only he knew; but what child truly understands the depth of a love so strong that it must forever remain beyond all understanding?

So, together we face an uncertain future; full of endless possibility on his part, the promise of salvation, redemption, and reclamation on mine. I may have squandered an opportunity or two (or three, or four…whatever). Yet here I am, where I began, late at night at the keyboard and surrounded by books and candles and memories and insights and everything that makes me the writer I am and the artist I want to be. So goodnight, Aaron, and sleep with contentment, possibility, and endless potential. I will continue this attempt to write the story of my life, of which you and your brother are the most important part.

a sort of homecoming

Aaron and I raided the bookstores yesterday morning in Lexington, and had, I think, a nice time (at least I think he had a nice time). He bought some German textbooks and dictionaries at Barnes and Noble (just think, I was the one originally studying German because of my fascination with Rilke) and that evil bookstore across the way at Hamburg; I picked up U2′s new No Line On The Horizon (and yes, Lanois and Eno still have the good mojo as producers) and a first edition of Kenneth Lynn’s Hemingway biography. Supposed to hook up with Adam, too, but it didn’t work out this time. I miss them both in a way that no one who isn’t a parent could ever understand; my eyes still tear up thinking about it.

U2 No Line On The Horizon

I’m hoping for good news from Pennsylvania this week that will mean I’m close to getting my career back on track. I either get the invite to fly up or find myself out of the running; not difficult to figure out which one I prefer. The position would be in State College: I have visions of cool bookstores and cafes, restaurants and shops. College town. I like college towns. 

The U2 album is rather strong, although I don’t believe it has the joy and the surprise of the “back to basics” approach of All That You Can’t Leave Behind. I especially seem to like the title track (which is basically irresistable), “Unknown Caller,” (reminds me of something from side two of War…and yeah, I’m thinking of vinyl) and “Magnificent.”

Only love, only love can leave such a mark
But only love, only love can heal such a scar

And browsing around just now, I found out that Dylan has a new album coming out in April. The man is amazing in every possible way: historically, melodically, lyrically, musically. What’s that old saying, slightly twisted for the occasion? If we didn’t have Bob Dylan, we’d have to invent him (so God bless Jack Frost–and if you don’t know who Jack Frost is, you got no biz reading this blog). But we do have Dylan, or should I say, he’s the one who has us. And something tells me he likes it just the way it is.