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

“if you see my reflection in the snow covered hills…”

I seem to have developed a habit of waking up and not knowing “when” I am. To say that it’s a little disconcerting is more than an understatement: it usually takes me a moment or two to understand that my sons aren’t in bed with me, that they’re not in their bedrooms down the hall, that the ceiling above me is no longer that of the house we shared with their mother in Lexington. Not to mention the fact that they’re no longer boys, that they are, in fact, young men.

…and time is long. And times goes on, and time grows large, and time is like a relapse after a long illness…*

I can understand, philosophically at least, the passage of time. But somewhere in my memory my sons are forever young, forever little boys who need my help in making it through their day. So now I hold onto those memories of awaking in the middle of the night to meet some need, of awaking far too early on weekend mornings, of taking a quick nap while either Adam or Aaron sat beside me, enraptured by a movie or a cartoon of some kind.

“Choc milk, daddy. In my sippy cup.”

“Sure, Aaron. I’ll be right back.”

I know. “Even children get older. And I’m getting older, too.”**

But that doesn’t mean I find it easy to believe. It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t give anything to have two little boys sleeping beside me…and in the process stealing the blanket and literally pushing me out of the bed. Those days are often on my mind when I first awake. But then I realize where and when I am, and I spend the day alone.

*Rilke, Requiem For A Friend
**Fleetwood Mac, Landslide

“straight into darkness”

For one summer–one lovely, all too brief summer–I truly loved her. She was eighteen then, and I…I was only a few years older. For those few months she was the woman I thought she could be, while I was the person I was and am still becoming.

There was nothing but joy then when she called, or visited, or we hung out, or when we made love. There was a creek we swam in that summer; I remember holding her in the part where the water began to run deep, her bathing suit off, her body wrapped around mine. I remember the kiss of sunlight on my face; I remember her lips on mine. It was the kind of summer Fitzgerald might have written about, the one with “blonde Northern girls and the tall young men from the farms lying out beside the wheat, under the moon.”*

And then there was the day she told me she was pregnant. I was, to be that young, ecstatic. I had never thought much about becoming a father, but none of that mattered now. If she could have stayed that young and happy forever, and I was going to have all that and be a father also, then that was all right with me. The rest of my college would take care of itself; it was almost over, anyway. I wanted her. I wanted the baby. I wanted to be married.

But she, who so often talked of marriage and of becoming a mother, became truculent and withdrawn. I quickly realized what she planned to do, even before she told me, and the day after it was over the feeling just died.

we went straight into darkness
out over the line
straight into darkness
straight into night**

Every January or thereabouts I wonder about the child who never was. Some years–though by no means all–I’ve also cried. And I can’t help but wonder if things would have different between us, if in the realm of alternate possibilities I would love her still today. Impossible questions, impossible to answer. But I still grieve for our child; I still grieve over what might have been.

I’ve never written of this before, not even in a journal. I’ve never even talked about it, to anyone. Anyone at all. We all live with our silent grief, one way or another. I can’t say with certainty that this is what led to all to the vehemence and hatred later. But one day she told me that I never treated her better than during that summer when she was first pregnant. I hope, someday, that’s the way she’ll remember me. And I will leave the darkness for good.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Absolution”
Tom Petty, “Straight Into Darkness (copyright 1982, Gone Gator Music)

“but I need someone to help me sleep…”

Admittedly, I’ve written of it before: but when I do sleep, the dreams which come to me are all fractal and distorted, which often means that I awake not knowing exactly when I am. Last night (this morning?) I dreamed of Aaron as a little boy, the one who would come repeatedly to my bedroom door until I finally gave in and let him sleep with me (which, of course, I intended all along). It’s rather…disconcerting…to awake and discover that you’ve just been ripped from an apparent reality which no longer exists…one in which the little boy you love with all your heart may not even remember. Existential philosophers would ask: did it really happen, then, at all? And the parent in you answers, “Yes, it did. Yes, it most certainly did.”

I can bleed as well as anyone
but I need someone to help me asleep*

Obviously, I had some fairly odd benadryl dreams last night. I should be grateful, I know, that I slept at all. The irony, of course, is that in my former life I absolutely loved to stay awake all night.  I would read, write, listen to music…and study. It was the time I reserved exclusively for myself…but now, it seems, time is all that I have.

…and time is long, and time goes on
and time adds up, and time is like
a relapse after a lengthy illness…**

Sometimes now when I am alone, time hardly seems to pass at all. The hours between one and six  A.M. can seem like an eternity, one which frequently I’m not prepared to face. In fact, sometimes it seems that I would do anything not to have to live with myself through Fitzgeralds “dark night of the soul,” the one in which it is always three A.M. Loneliness will do that to you, I suppose. Everything is fine during the daytime, but late at night when you know that lovers are melding and all is quiet and solitary in your own life, time slows to an interminable crawl. And that, I’m afraid, is something I find harder and harder to live with.

There’s only one choice, of course: to live, to keep living, and enjoy what you can. This morning I awoke to a breathtaking Indian summer morning, the type of morning when you smell the leaves and the sunlight warms your face. I have no way of knowing, of course, what this day will bring. But I intend to drink it up…and remember that like “fallen leaves in the night…who can say which way we’re blowing?”

*Counting Crows, “Mrs. Potter’s Lullaby”
**Rilke, Requiem For A Friend

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 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.