Sitting on the top floor of the Davidson Library at UCSB, looking out at the Channel Islands, their low gray mountains concealed by gray mist. The ocean is a dark blue, but with a few light blue currents running out like channels on the surface. I see only one sailboat, running with the rough wind and current, bobbing, its sails flapping.  I am reading F. Scott Fitzgerald.

I love Fitzgerald’s short stories, the way he displays human emotions and youthful romance, and the way he expresses people’s dreams, which are, as Malcolm Cowley said, the handle by which Fitzgerald takes hold of his characters. My favorites are stories from his early success years, 1919-24, stories full of glitter of the Jazz Age and Flappers, full of high spirit. This was a time when Fitzgerald was the spokesman for the era, defining it, along with Zelda. “Winter Dreams,” is perhaps the best of the lot, set in Lake Forest, about a poor boy, Dexter Green, who falls for debutante Judy Jones, based on Fitzgerald’s infatuation with Ginevra King while at Princeton. Winter Dreams is beautifully lyrical: “the sun went down with a riotous swirl of gold and varying blues and scarlets and left the dry, rustling night of Western summer. Dexter watched from the veranda of the Golf Club, watched the even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver molasses under the harvest moon. Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet… There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the songs of last summer and of summers before that– songs from ‘Chin-Chin and ‘The Count of Luxembourg…”

“Absolution” is my second favorite, a fascinating psychological story, with interior monologues, about Catholic boyhood in North Dakota and a repressive father and society, and ending with a great passage: “it would be night in two to three hours, and all along the land there would be these blond northern girls and tall young men from the farms lying outside the wheat meadows, under the moon.” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” is about an Eu Claire girl in St. Paul, a beautiful portrait of the early 1919 era just after the war, as the Jazz Age is beginning, showing the old and the new, the modernist changes just starting to take place. “The Sensible Thing,” is about Scott and Zelda and their broken engagement and renewal of it, using the characters George O’Kelly and Jonquil Cary in Tennessee (vice Montgomery, Ala), where George, jilted, goes off to Peru and makes big money as a mining engineer, then returns for Jonquil. There is another great paragraph: George comes back and takes Jonquil for a walk, “…but a curious thing happened. George stepped aside to let her pass, but instead, she stood still and stared at him for a minute. It was not so much the look, which was not a smile, it was the moment of silence. They saw each other’s eyes and both took a short, fairly accelerated breath, and then they went on. That was all. Never would this April moment come again.” “The Jelly Bean” is another poor boy gets rich to deserve the rich girl to no avail story. Shades of The Great Gatsby to come.

Then I came to the second period of Fitzgerald’s writing, from publication of Gatsby in 1924, until Zelda’s first breakdown in 1930, stories of glamour and disillusionment. These are about the gaudy, rich age, and and how this age ultimately brought individuals down. The Lost Generation were victims of their time, of a historical moment. There are two short stories I particularly liked from this era, “The Rich Boy,” about a spoiled wealthy boy’s feelings of superiority and his inability to find love, displaying Fitzgerald’s curiosity about the rich and how their minds work, going to clubs for dinner with friends and living alone with a valet. “The Last of the Belles,” another story based on Zelda (Ailee Calhoun) and Scott’s courtship, this time set in a Tarleton, Georgia camp town, centers on the spoiled Ailee, against the backdrop of what they hear of the horrors of war going on. Fitzgerald drops one of those illuminating insights into the era and humanity: “As they danced on the floor, a three piece orchestra was playing ‘After You’re Gone,’ in a poignant and incomplete way that I can hear yet, as if each bar were ticking off a precious minute of that tune… it was a time of youth and war, and there was never so much love around.” Another illuminating paragraph: “And now the young men of Tarleton began drifting back from the ends of the earth, some with Canadian uniforms, some with crutches or empty sleeves. A returned battalion of National Guard paraded through the streets with open ranks for the dead, and then stepped down out of the romance forever and sold you things over the counters of local stores.” And, “it seemed she was bearing him off into the lost midsummer world of my early twenties, where time had stood still and charming girls, dimly seen like the past itself, still loitered along the dusky streets.”

Then the final act, (1930-40), as disaster comes to Fitzgerald, with Zelda in a sanitarium and Scott an alcoholic. This is a new type of story, more emotionally complicated, with less regret for the past, more dignity in the face of real sorrows. We see such tragedy in his most wonderful short story, “Babylon Revisited,” about a man named Charlie Wales, who is in Paris to see his daughter, but fails to regain custody as he recovers from alcoholism. It is a sad, touching story of a father’s love. Wales drops his young daughter off at his sister-in-law’s after a visitation day together. “All right, ‘good bye Dads, Dads, Dads, Dads,’ the daughter says. He stands out front and looks up at her window, waiting in the dark street until she appeared, all warm and glowing, in the window above, and kissed her fingers out into the night…” “Babylon” has beautiful lyrical passages of Paris: “Outside, the fire-red, ghost green signs shone smoothly through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon, and the streets were in movement; the bistros gleamed… The Place de la Concord moved by in pink majesty.”

Then there is Fitzgerald’s second novel, Tender is the Night, one of my all-time favorites. Like all his works, there is glamour, with a lot of underlying thought. The story is about the decline of Dr. Dick Diver, who becomes an expatriate in France after World War I, his wife, Nicole, who suffers from schizophrenia, and the young actress Rosemary, with whom Diver has an affair.

Tender is the Night has beautiful lyrical passages which evoke the European Riviera and the time: “It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark. It was pleasant to pass people eating outside their doors, … when they turned off the Corniche d’or and down to Gausse’s hotel through the darkening bands of trees, set one behind the other in many greens, the moon already hovered over the ruins of the aqueducts…” It is a novel of imagery and lyricism. “A false dawn sent the sky pressing through the tall French windows, and getting up, she walked out on the terrace, warm to her bare feet. There were secret noises in the air, an insistent bird achieved an ill-natured triumph with regularity in the trees above the tennis court; footfalls followed a round drive in the rear of the hotel, taking their tone in turn from the dust road, the crushed stone walk, the cement steps, then reversing the process and going away…” Even Hemingway admired Fitzgerald’s genius with words.

Fitzgerald is analyzing Diver’s decline, and looking at himself in the process a bit. Diver was corrupted by money and the times, and by his early successes and what people said about him, and he had some internal weaknesses going back to his childhood. He had been brilliant at Harvard and Hopkins, became a psychiatrist, and written some good early papers which got him attention from the Austrians. But, he was not perhaps serious enough, and succumbed to a young actress, and to his wife’s easy money, taking him out of the mainstream of his work, to the Riviera, to run a guest house. The conclusion seems to be that Dick Diver was never really solid enough, even though he attracted people with his charm and intelligence. He was a good psychologist at Hopkins, did a few good scholarly papers, but never advanced beyond that initial flash and was influenced by the admiration others showed for him. He practiced in Austria, met Nicole, his patient whom he married, got involved with the rich at Antibes, and fell for a young actress, who eventually moved on. Diver should have confined himself, as his wife’s sister said at the end, to his bicycle excursions on the Riviera. When people get out of their depth, they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up. He fell eventually to alcohol and dissipation. He lost himself, as he said at one point, he wasn’t the same person he had been. He couldn’t tell what hour or month this had happened. “Once he had cut through things… but, at some point the spear had been blunted.” His psychiatrist business partner in Austria put it best: “Dick is no longer a serious man.” Dick was a bit of a romantic fool, like Fitzgerald, charged by illusions and imagination, but also destroyed by them.

At the end, Nicole is recovered, from years of just existing and taking care of the kids, and she and Dick are separated. He is, she hears from his occasional letters and from mutual friends, living in the Finger Lakes region of New York, in an inconsequential practice, still working on an unpublished treatise, having relationships with younger women, and ending up in smaller and smaller towns in the region. “Perhaps, she liked to think, his career was biding its time again, like Grant’s at Galena.”

The story is haunting and autobiographical, reminding the reader of Fitzgerald’s early phenom success, followed by his drinking, Rivera and Hollywood years, a downward spiral that led to his final heart attack in 1940 (age 44).  This is a novel less of external action than of internal consciousness. It is narrated. Fitzgerald is telling, not showing, unlike Hemingway. But, it has greatness in it. It is about how people re-define themselves as they go along in life, how they are defined by others based on their successes and failure.