Benedict O’Neill
10847723
Dr K.A. Johanson
Literary Studies: English Literature and Culture
30 June 2015
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A Splendid Mirage
Nostalgia in the Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Table of Contents
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Introduction
I Romantic Beginnings
II Reflective and Restorative Nostalgia
III Replicative Nostalgia in The Last Tycoon
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10
24
38
Conclusion
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Notes
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Works Cited
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Introduction
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In a notebook entry entitled “Nostalgia or the Flight of the Heart”, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
compiled a list of places about which he felt nostalgic: “Young St Paul; Florida; Norfolk; Burgundy;
Montgomery as it was; Paris Left Bank; New York 1911, 1917, 1920 . . . ” (224-225). The list is an
important document for at least two reasons: Firstly, it contains a rare occurrence of Fitzgerald
using the term “nostalgia”, despite the omnipresence of various incarnations of nostalgia in his
writing;1 secondly, several of the listed places are accompanied by specific times, a feature made
possible by almost two and a half centuries of nostalgic evolution. By the onset of Fitzgerald’s Jazz
Age, the term “nostalgia” could be used to mean something quite different to what it meant at the
time of its coinage. That coinage, by a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer in 1688, was
to denote “the sad mood originating from the desire to return to one’s native land”. Hofer explained
the term as being “Greek in origin and indeed composed of two sounds, . . . Nosos, return to the
native land . . . [and] Algos, . . . suffering or grief” (381). Nostalgia thus began as a medical
diagnosis of homesickness, following the observation of Swiss mercenaries who, upon displacement
from their native lands, would show various and varyingly incapacitating mental and physical
symptoms. Hofer believed that repeated thoughts of the homeland caused a blockage of the “living
spirits” in the channels of the brain containing those images of home (381). This, in turn, prevented
those spirits from performing their more vital functions, which would effect the symptoms of
nostalgia. Though partially treatable in other ways, Hofer saw the only definitive remedy for
nostalgia as a return to the homeland.
Over time, use of the term changed and broadened, and the ostensible “disease” was
reanalysed. Almost a century after Hofer’s dissertation, the German poet Friedrich Schiller, who
was himself a medical student based at the Stuttgart Military Academy, was tasked to diagnose and
treat a patient named Joseph Frédéric Grammont, who displayed symptoms like those suffered by
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Hofer’s Swiss mercenaries. Schiller discovered that Grammont’s symptoms, caused and
exacerbated by an urge to return to his home of Alsace, could be alleviated without sending him
home. This was achieved by allowing Grammont the freedom to walk around the nearby
countryside. Linda Austin documents that, in “this rehearsal, the countryside substituted for the
native community, thereby illustrating the therapeutic function of a literary tradition within the
annals of medicine” (11, emphasis mine). Schiller found that a simulation of a return to the
homeland could be almost as effective a cure for nostalgia as an actual return. The nineteenth
century saw a gradual abandonment of the term in its medical sense, with scientific developments
invalidating many of Hofer’s suppositions. However, the word resurfaced during Fitzgerald’s 1920s
“to denote a fleeting rather than debilitating” memory of an earlier time (Austin 1). Twentieth
century psychoanalysis observed nostalgia’s move into this new territory. Where earlier medical
theorists had identified the homeland as the object of nostalgia, the “psychoanalytic emphasis on
symbolism facilitated the generalization beyond spatial location”. The connected ideas that “one
can be nostalgic for any object since objects serve as symbols”, and that nostalgia can encompass an
“incomplete form of mourning for an idealized past” shifted the object of nostalgia away from the
homeland and into the past (Batcho 168, emphasis mine). A resistance to geographical displacement
became a resistance to temporal displacement.
Fitzgerald’s nostalgic list is a demonstration of this shift from the geographical to the
temporal, whilst being an indication that the author still occasionally considered “nostalgia” to
denote something like Hofer’s “homesickness”. Although Fitzgerald wrote about “nostalgia” for the
time of the 1920s as early as November, 1931 (“Echoes of the Jazz Age” 13), the curious nostalgic
list contains only places, though he could not help but identify many of those places with a specific
era. A return to New York at the time of that note’s writing, some time in the 1930s, would
presumably have failed to cure Fitzgerald’s nostalgia for the New York of 1911, 1917, or 1920,
since by 1932 he had “lost [his] splendid mirage” (“My Lost City” 33). Fitzgerald’s work is most
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frequently concerned with temporal displacement. It considers lost youth, past love, and missed
opportunities in many different ways. By 1934, the author would lie awake at night tormented by
“what [he] might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated,
unrecapturable” (“Sleeping and Waking” 67). Thus, in spite of the geographical nature of the
notebook entry, Fitzgerald rarely deals with “homesickness” in that most literal and rudimentary
sense, instead channeling puzzling forms of temporal melancholy into his stories.
The central aim of this thesis is to identify the distinct conceptions of nostalgia found in
each of Fitzgerald’s novels: This Side of Paradise (1920), The Beautiful and Damned (1922), The
Great Gatsby (1925), Tender Is the Night (1934), and The Last Tycoon (1941, posthumous). The
first chapter, “Romantic Beginnings”, will identify the presence of a consistent form of Romantic
desire in the first two novels, with nostalgia operating as a species within the genus of that desire.
Fitzgerald’s Romantic ideas will be compared to those of the similarly-disposed German Romantic
author Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (1788-1857), criticism of whom will be used to provide
insight into Fitzgerald’s own early philosophy. The second chapter, “Reflective and Restorative
Nostalgia”, will consider how those Romantic ideas developed into the nostalgia of The Great
Gatsby, whilst considering further elements of the nostalgia in Fitzgerald’s most famous work. It
will then divide Fitzgeraldian nostalgia into two distinct types, using the ideas of Svetlana Boym as
a theoretical reference point. In this division, the pessimistic nostalgia of Tender Is the Night will be
introduced and differentiated from preceding formulations. The final chapter, “Replicative
Nostalgia in The Last Tycoon”, will make an argument for the existence of a unique formulation of
nostalgia found in Fitzgerald’s unfinished final work, setting that nostalgia against Susan Stewart’s
contemporary narratological conception.
American author and essayist Wright Morris describes nostalgia in The Great Gatsby as “a
labyrinth without an exit, both a public madness and a private ecstacy” (169-170), D.G. Kehl
emphasises the presence of Sehnsucht, “an intense addiction of and to longing” (309), in the same
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novel, whilst R.W. Stallman explores the eponymous Gatsby’s “confused time-world” (3). Critics
have thus recognised the connected themes of nostalgia, longing, and time in Fitzgerald’s work, but
their attention as regards the topic has often focused heavily upon Gatsby and a few of the short
stories such as “Absolution” (1924) and “Babylon Revisited” (1931). Nostalgia is certainly at the
core of Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, whose literary significance justifies its critical attention.
Because of its literary significance, and because its depiction of nostalgia can be interpreted in
many ways, reference to Gatsby will be made throughout all three chapters. However, the
charismatic, pink-suited nostalgic of West Egg is but one of many throughout the author’s oeuvre,
and the nostalgia particular to Gatsby is but one variant amongst several. By tracing nostalgia
through each of the novels, several distinct conceptions of the phenomenon will be brought to light,
and commonalities between texts will be revealed.
Fitzgerald uses various methods of presenting his nostalgic ideas. In Gatsby, the eponymous
hero suffers from failing to realise the nostalgic nature of his own passionate longings. It is through
Gatsby’s mistakes—through his simultaneous belief in the repeatability of time and failure to
recognise the distant past as integral to his emotions—that the reader understands how his particular
nostalgia functions. By creating a character who so radically fails to comprehend his condition,
Fitzgerald allows us to reason correctly and understand its cruel operation. In The Beautiful and
Damned, Gloria Patch delivers an extended monologue of great clarity and poignance about the
futility of preserving the past. With her attitudes we are to find no mistake. Fitzgerald’s novels are
extremely useful documents for gauging the author’s personal opinions and philosophies, perhaps
more so than the novels of the average author. Matthew J. Bruccoli, premier Fitzgerald scholar,
interprets everything Fitzgerald wrote as
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a form of autobiography. His fiction is transmuted autobiography. Characters start as selfportraits and turn into fiction, as did Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise; they start as
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fiction and become Fitzgerald, as did Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night. Jay Gatsby is pure
invention and pure Fitzgerald. (Letters xv)
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Because of the autobiographical nature of Fitzgerald’s writing, many of his protagonists share traits
with the author himself. Furthermore, many of Fitzgerald’s key female characters are at least
partially based on Zelda Fitzgerald, author of Save Me the Waltz (1932) and F. Scott’s wife between
1920 and his death in 1940. Although one should always tread carefully around possible conflations
between author and character, approval from Bruccoli, Arthur Mizener, and others means it is often
safe to assume that nostalgia and nostalgic ideas expressed by Fitzgerald’s key male protagonists
have at least some grounding in the author’s own.
This thesis will accept the possibility of a non-contradictory multiplicity of nostalgic
conceptions, so the term “nostalgia” will be used to describe several different things. In drawing
these conceptions, four main features will be referred to for the purpose of easy comparison and
differentiation. The first of these features will be the form that nostalgia takes—its taxonomical
status. Nostalgia has been defined as many different things: a “sad mood originating from the desire
for the return to one’s native land” (Hofer 381); a “desire for desire”; a “sadness without an
object” (Stewart 23); a “mourning for the impossibility of mythical return” (Boym 52);
simultaneous “madness” and “ecstacy” (Morris 170). Fitzgerald’s novels provide several formal
variations on nostalgia, with the structural difference between “desire” and “mourning” becoming
especially palpable when analysing characters like Gatsby and Dick Diver side by side. The second
feature to be kept in mind will be nostalgia’s object: nostalgia can be a desire for something, a
feeling about something and so forth, and it is this “something” which I will attempt to pinpoint
using both the clues given to us by Fitzgerald and insight provided by theoretical discussions of
nostalgia. Hofer identified nostalgia’s object as the sufferer’s geographical home. Immanuel Kant
disagreed with this diagnosis, instead identifying the object of nostalgia as the subject’s youth: “the
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carefree life and neighbourly company” associated with the years spent at home, rather than the
home itself (71). The object of nostalgia fluctuates throughout Fitzgerald’s works, and this thesis
will make explicit its variation. The third feature to be discussed will be nostalgia’s satiability, or
the possibility of resolution and closure. Hofer prescribed a return to the homeland as the only
effective cure for nostalgia, citing the case of a Swiss man “of excellent nature” who contracted the
nostalgic disease. For that particular sufferer, nostalgia manifested itself in a “burning fever”, but he
was “restored to his whole sane self” (382) as he approached his home city of Berne. Modern
scholars such as Susan Stewart and Svetlana Boym suggest that such a reunion with the object of
nostalgia is an ineffective means of satiation. For Stewart, “the past [nostalgia] seeks has never
existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, . . . continually threatens to reproduce itself as
a felt lack.” (23) The fictiveness of the nostalgic object naturally precludes its ability to satiate, and
the subject’s suffering endures in a self-sustaining cycle. The final feature by which conceptions of
nostalgia will be assessed will be their personal effect upon the subject, beyond the immediate
reflective experience. Depending on certain variables, nostalgia appears able to affect the subject in
both negative and positive ways, and can lead to a range of consequences. Hofer’s Swiss
mercenaries were rendered listless and some reportedly came close to death. However,
contemporary psychological studies have taken place whose findings show that, “in addition to
being a source of social connectedness, nostalgia increased participants’ perceived capacity to
provide emotional support to others” (Wildschut et al. 573). Nostalgia, in its various guises, is
described as harmful by some and beneficial by others, and we can find both negative and positive
associations in Fitzgerald’s depictions.
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I
Romantic Beginnings
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Things are sweeter when they're lost. I know—because once I wanted something and got it.
It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot. And when I got it it turned to dust in my
hands.
—Anthony Patch (The Beautiful and Damned 507)
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Before approaching the subject of nostalgia proper, we should start where the author himself began:
with a “Romantic Egotist”.2 Amory Blaine, the protagonist of Fitzgerald’s debut novel This Side of
Paradise, is not obviously afflicted with nostalgia. He is hugely sentimental, but does not restrict
this sentiment to the past. Nothing in any place or time seems beyond his yearning. He is, despite a
confessed ignorance of Schiller, a Romantic through and through. His casual dismissal of “that
stupid, overestimated Schiller” (141), coupled with Dick Diver’s reference, fourteen years later, to
“Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine” (Tender Is the Night 49, emphasis
mine), is somewhat hard to fathom. Neither Amory’s ignorance nor Dick’s blithe attitude to the
forgotten Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué are easily reconciled with the Romantic lifeblood running
through the veins of both Amory and Anthony Patch, protagonist of The Beautiful and Damned.
This Side of Paradise can, to some extent, be considered a novel of the Romantic genre. It has been
described as “a milestone in American literature for its attempt to combine the normally
incongruous elements of realism . . . and romanticism” (Tate 230), and its eclectic composition, a
blend of prose, play, and poetry, resembles a “Mischgedicht” or “mixed poem”, a hybrid form of
Romantic literature “that incorporate[s] a mixture of genres, dialogue, philosophical musing, letters,
song, poem and novella” (Seyhan 18). The Beautiful and Damned has been considered an example
of literary naturalism, in showing “that human behaviour is determined by forces beyond the control
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of the characters” (Tate 31), and as demonstrating Fitzgerald’s development into “a romantic
unrestrained” (Canby 71). Anthony and his wife Gloria Patch are described as “victims of a
romantic conception of the world” (Perosa 88), and the shared “Romantic” sensibilities of the two
novels’ respective protagonists has been identified (West 56).
The aim of this chapter is to explore the connections between Fitzgerald and Romanticism,
and between Romanticism and nostalgia. The protagonists of Fitzgerald’s first two novels, and to
some extent Jay Gatsby, seem to share a certain form of Romantic longing with protagonists in the
works of German Romanticism, particularly those of Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff. This chapter
will attempt to characterise Fitzgerald’s own brand of Romanticism and its relationship with
nostalgia in the early novels, whilst highlighting its parallels with attitudes in German Romantic
literature. Ricarda Schmidt says of that genre that, although there is no firm consensus “as to
whether [it] is an epochal movement with a single, clearly identifiable character, or falls into
different phases” (21), most early Romantic protagonists, such as Novalis’ Heinrich von
Ofterdingen, “are young men who seek their (artistic) destiny in travelling the world and whose
relationship with the world is symbolized in their relationship to a female muse” (27). Fitzgerald’s
early works may have more in common with those of late German Romanticism, which tend to
“portray the artist’s love for the muse less as a way of achieving artistic inspiration and greatness”,
but “in order to explore the gap between expectation and outcome” (31, emphasis mine). A
tendency to revere the experience of that expectation over any possible outcome, with a protagonist
who “loves the dream itself” (Illbruck 151) above and beyond the object of the dream, is the
pertinent characteristic of Romanticism toward which this initial discussion will gravitate.
The purpose of a comparison between Fitzgerald and the German Romantics is not to
explore the extent to which the the latter may have influenced the former.3 Dick Diver forewarns us
of the futility of such an endeavour. It is rather to help add colour and contour to a complex attitude
towards longing, nostalgic and otherwise, that can be found only in fragmentary form within the
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early novels. These pithy yet skeletal fragments of a complex philosophy can be satisfactorily
enfleshed when compatible and complementary fragments, drawn from a more complete body of
work, are grafted onto them. Importantly, the anatomical similarities between the philosophies of
Fitzgerald and the Romantics, particularly Eichendorff, are sufficiently transparent to minimise risk
of the latter contaminating the former. Perhaps most importantly, identifying the connection
between Fitzgeraldian nostalgia and Romantic longing opens up a critical sphere, beyond 20th
century American literary criticism, from which to draw resources.
To understand Romantic attitudes in early Fitzgerald and their importance for his
conceptions of nostalgia, we should think of longing, desire, or yearning as a wide category of
subjective experience, with nostalgia as a particular subcategory within. We might say that
nostalgia, at face value, appears to involve a desire for something in the past: an object lying at a
temporal distance from the desiring subject, whether that be a week or a decade. However, a
temporal distance between present and past is not the only kind of distance that can operate within
desire in its broadest form. The distance between desiring subject and desired object may be
temporal, spatial, or both, and may lie in any direction. The Romantic, like Hofer’s displaced Swiss
mercenary, is often afflicted with heimweh—homesickness—desiring a return to a distant land
about which he has fond memories. At other times, suffering from fernweh or wanderlust, he yearns
for pastures new, places he has never been but whose image burns brightly in his imagination. He
occasionally hopes for some event of the future to come around sooner, tormented by the chasm
between now and next. What is important to both Fitzgeraldian and late German Romanticism is the
idea that this distance, wherever or however it may lie, itself acts as both springboard and
sustenance of desire, and that the eradication of that distance, rather than being a guarantee of
satiation, actually results in disappointment and dissatisfaction with the desired object. Illbruck
explains that “the distant home the [R]omantic dreams of can remain magical only for as long as it
remains distant” (152) and argues that this kind of character “loves distance and fears commitment”
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(157). An emphasis upon the fundamental need to maintain distance is a striking and unusual
characteristic of late German Romanticism. This emphasis highlights the difference between
expectation and outcome, as Schmidt suggests is characteristic of the period. A preservation of
distance is a preservation of expectation, itself often superior to any outcome. A century later, these
attitudes are replicated by Fitzgerald and his characters. In addition to the need to preserve rather
than eradicate distance, an awareness of the futility and counter-productivity of such eradication is
possessed by some of Fitzgerald’s characters characters. This awareness is one feature that separates
Amory and Anthony from Gatsby, a figure with Romantic tendencies but an inability to recognise
their influence.
The early novels contain many instances of desire for that which is spatially distant, and
although not always nostalgic, they are of great importance to our discussion. One such instance is
Amory’s idealistic long-distance correspondence with Isabelle Borgé. It is the process of
correspondence and separation itself, and the freedom it grants Amory to imagine all kinds of
dreamlike reunions with Isabelle, which ignites his passions more than anything about Isabelle
herself. When the estranged lovers are able to reunite, the occasion turns sour, as Amory realises he
has “not an ounce of real affection” for her (Paradise 90). The romance had been “chiefly enlivened
by his attempts to find new words for love” (81), rather than any real manifestation of such love. In
the most explicit formulation of the Romantic attitude in Paradise, Amory (twice) makes the
distinction between Romantics such as he and those who are merely sentimental: “a sentimental
person thinks things will last—a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t” (166).
Although his actions speak louder than his epigrams, it is clear from this statement that separation is
a prized asset for Amory.
Occurrences of longing for the spatially distant, and for the maintenance of that distance, are
also found in German Romantic literature, and have been analysed in greater detail by Romantic
scholars than by readers of Fitzgerald. It is therefore useful to consider their appraisals when trying
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to comprehend Fitzgerald’s conception of Romantic longing. The eponymous traveler of Novalis’
Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) dreams of “regions far distant, and unknown to him”, and of being
“separated from the object of his passion” (24). Alvarez, the naval captain of Eichendorff’s Eine
Meerfahrt (1836), exclaims:
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Boring stuff! There I’d rather have myself a rainbow, dubious towers of towns which I do not
yet see, blue mountains in moonlight, it is as though you were riding into the heavens; once
you get there, it is boring. To court a lover is charming; to marry: boring again! Hope is my
joy, what I love must remain distant as the kingdom of heaven. (qtd. in Illbruck 157)
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Alvarez’s passionate yet necessarily remote feeling for the distant landscape is replicated almost
totally by Anthony in this passage from the first chapter of The Beautiful and Damned, in which the
young heir is captivated by the sight of an unfamiliar woman whilst looking out from his apartment
window:
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He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted
for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently
that the girl was beautiful—then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare
and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air
was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained
second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the
deepest kiss he had ever known. (278)
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Some critical commentary on Eichendorff sheds light upon Fitzgerald’s balcony scene. In assessing
a passage of Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts (1826), in which the titular “good-for-nothing”
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becomes enamoured of the distant Austrian landscape, Detlev W. Schumann observes how “[all]
visible elements of the description are in the distance, on or near the horizon: the setting sun, the
river… hills with villagers and hunters… Elements of definite form are lacking; colors, or rather
light effects… and sounds… take their place” (146). Factors which obscure vision such as distance
and darkness serve to “[dissolve] forms altogether and [leave] only a minimum of objective reality,
thus giving full sway to the imagination” (146). Although it is Amory Blaine who virtually
transforms into the Taugenichts during his poetry-reciting, haystack-climbing jaunt in Maryland,
Schumann’s observations adequately describe the obscurity and imaginative process seen in
Anthony’s balcony experience. The “smell of the afternoon” and the “triumphant vividness of red”
are part of the scene’s allure, and their attractive abstractness is caused by the distorting effect of
distance. There is no definite shape or feature to the woman in red, since Anthony’s cannot see her
face clearly, nor is there any particular source to the “smell of the afternoon”. This vagueness,
which permits and requires the imagination to fill in the missing details however it so wishes, is the
all-important consequence of distance. The Romantic expectation is built up through imagination,
and often let down by an unremarkable outcome. The mysterious woman is the embodiment of
Eichendorff’s ever-distant, ever-recurring setting sun. Anthony’s is a longing in portrait,
complementing the good-for-nothing’s longing in landscape.
Although Anthony quickly identifies the cause of his emotion during the balcony incident,
its true significance fails to strike him. When that event takes place on an inconsequential afternoon,
Anthony’s recognition of the magic of distance strikes him a curious phenomenon and nothing
more. In that context, it is amusing and trivial. However, these mechanisms are at work in other
aspects of his life. For example, it never occurs to Anthony that, in spite of Gloria’s phenomenal
beauty, it is a distance that she constructs between them, and a threat of its expansion, that draws
him in as much as anything else about her. Her evasion of his phone calls, and her lack of interest
during their second meeting renders him to think that she had “never seemed so lovely, so
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exquisitely to be desired” (Damned 343). Although the novel is imperfect, Fitzgerald perfectly
depicts Anthony’s slavery to Gloria’s coolness. In much the same manner, it is said of Rosalind
Connage, who is also based on Zelda Fitzgerald (Tate 36, 234), that “she has still to meet the man
she can’t out-distance”, by which is meant that she “abuses them and cuts them and breaks dates
with them and yawns in their faces” (Paradise 159). Fitzgerald not only depicts distance as alluring,
but presents its manipulation as a skill.
As well as frequently depicting desire for spatially distant objects, the early novels contain
several instances of desire for the temporally distant, although there is less explicit focus on the past
than there is in The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. This might be partially explained by the
comparative youthfulness of Amory and Anthony, but also by Fitzgerald’s own age and status. The
period in which he authored This Side of Paradise predated his literary fame and its accompanying
happiness, which would “often [approach] such an ecstasy that [he] could not share it even with the
person dearest to [him] but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to
distill into little lines in books” (“Early Success” 84). The author would go on to look back at this
period of his life with a mixture of fondness and regret, but before that time of ecstasy, Fitzgerald
was looking to the future: to a literary career and prospective marriage to the debutante Zelda Sayre.
For Amory Blaine, a Princetonian very much in the mould of his creator,4 it “was always the
becoming he dreamed of, never the being” (Paradise 24). Before their material and emotional
poverty, Anthony and Gloria Patch dream of the day when they can receive Anthony’s inheritance
money: “Oh, I wish it were now”, bemoans Gloria to Anthony, who has “just been wishing that very
thing” himself (Damned 363). For creator and characters, the contents of the future briefly appear
greater and more appealing than those of the past. An indifference to the present or an inability to
connect to it, typical of so many of Fitzgerald’s characters, is naturally followed by a fascination
with and total prioritisation of the sparkling future. In “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922),
one of Fitzgerald’s most celebrated short stories, he proclaims that “[i]t is youth’s felicity as well as
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its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day
against its own radiantly imagined future — flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream” (107). Linda Hutcheon
highlights the shared taxonomy of the “nostalgic and utopian impulses”, arguing that “[if] the
present is considered irredeemable, you can look either back or forward”. The temporally opposing
desires “share a common rejection of the here and now” (n.p.), though in a sense they really both
concern themselves with the future. The utopian impulse is toward a new future, and the nostalgic
toward what can be termed a “future-past” (Stewart 23). The nostalgic desires an actual repetition
of the past, not just a memory, in his own personal future. To wish for something to come about, for
the first time or for the hundredth, is necessarily to wish for that experience in the future.
Hutcheon’s likening of nostalgic desires to those of opposing directionality reflects a theme upon
which this chapter will build: that nostalgia is formally equivalent to certain non-retrospective
Romantic desires.
Further to the desires we have just considered—desire for things far away, desire for things
in the future—the early novels also contain longings for things past. These cases we can classify as
early Fitzgeraldian nostalgia, but it is important to recognise the formal equivalence between these
and the other kinds of desire just discussed. Perhaps more than mere equivalence, what is important
and particular to these nostalgic longings is the fact that, although the objects of desire are
associated with the subject’s past, they do not exclusively belong to the past. They still exist in the
present, at some spatial distance from the subject, a fact which offers some tangible hope for their
reclamation. They are, in other words, not conclusively historical. These nostalgic desires are
desires for the future reclamation of past-associated, spatially distant objects.
One such case of such nostalgia follows Anthony’s first kiss with Gloria, which, much like
Gatsby’s first kiss with Daisy Buchanan, acts as a kind of high water mark against which future
successes are measured and to which he constantly hopes to return. Just days after the incident,
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Anthony remembers “as though it had been years ago the low freshness of her voice, the beautiful
lines of her body shining through her clothes, her face lily-colored under the lamps of the
street” (Damned 349). This remembrance, coupled with the belief that he may have lost Gloria to
his romantic rival Bloeckman, distresses Anthony to the point of madness but, simultaneously and
crucially, he falls “in love at last, profoundly and truly in love, as the word goes between man and
woman” (349), which enlivens and enriches his meandering young life. Five years later, whilst
preparing to serve in the war and whilst having an affair with a younger woman named Dorothy
Raycroft, he writes to Gloria “a glowing letter, full of the sentimental dark, full of the remembered
breath of flowers, full of a true and exceeding tenderness—these things he had learned again for a
moment in a kiss given and taken under a rich warm moonlight just an hour before.” (496)
Both cases, both remembrances, show Anthony at a peak of emotional expression, and both
are motivated by his physical separation from Gloria. In the first instance, that separation threatens
to become permanent, but is not certainly so. The encounter is vividly remembered, and Anthony
hopes dearly that he might repeat it. The latter instance seems a more complex case. It is perhaps
made possible by Anthony’s belief that he may die at war, thus effecting a more retrospective
attitude. Fitzgerald himself, whose wartime experience was ultimately the same as his character’s,
was allegedly not afraid of the possibility of dying during service, but he was very much aware of
its possibility. He wrote to his mother in November 1917: “To a profound pessimist about life, being
in danger is not depressing. I have never been more cheerful. Please be nice and respect my wishes”
(Letters 14). Gloria and Anthony’s marriage has long been on the wane by the time of Anthony’s
enlistment. Their spatial separation, culminating in his affair with Dorothy, allows Anthony to
imagine the Gloria of old to whom he can address his longings. The “sentimental dark” of his letter
and the “true and exceeding tenderness” he offers her is made possible by the spatial distance
separating them from one another, and inspired by the temporal distance between the present and an
idealised shared past. The filters of memory allow Anthony to eliminate objects of “definite form”,
O’Neill 19
and his vision of the past becomes like the Taugenichts’ vision of the landscape at sunset. The
present Gloria, with whom Anthony has such a problematic marriage, and who is rarely afforded
such tenderness, has her elements of definite form blurred. Anthony, although he does not state this
fact as he does with the mysterious balcony woman, requires the distance between them to persist
for his sentiment to flourish, but paradoxically hopes for reunion nonetheless. Indeed, when he and
Gloria reunite, a fleeting moment of picturesque romance is followed by a hasty return to their
unhappy state. The following chapter will explore Gloria’s own contrasting attitude to the past, but
here we can see that Anthony’s nostalgia, containing the “remembered breath of flowers”, is by and
large a Romantic deification of the spatially distant.
We can analyse this early Fitzgeraldian nostalgia in terms of the four conceptual variables
discussed at the outset. Regarding form, the general omnidirectional Romantic desire tends to be
coupled with a strong associated emotion: “hope” for Eichendorff’s Alvarez, an “intoxication of
joy” (Taugenichts 12) for his good-for-nothing, and deep “adoration” in the case of Fitzgerald’s
Anthony Patch. “Hope”, or “Hoffnung” in the original German, seems a curious term to describe
what Alvarez experiences. It seems contradictory, and this is quite possibly the author’s intention,
that one could harbour a “hope” for something, knowing that one does not expect or even want that
hope to be realised. It is a self-gratifying half-hope, offering no hint of closure. Alvarez has tricked
himself into a state of pleasurable expectation, knowing fully that there will be no outcome.
Fitzgerald’s description of Anthony’s “adoration” also seems an unusually positive way of framing
a momentary romantic desire. He sees the balcony woman and her distance not with any kind of
gut-wrenching yearning, but in a way that one might see a child, with fondness and warmth. For
these Romantic characters there is always a tender glow to their desires. They are not tortured by
them; they relish them.
The genus of Romantic desire in early Fitzgerald, and the species of nostalgia within,
manifests itself as a longing for something at a distance from the subject, caused by that distance,
O’Neill 20
and requiring that distance to endure for the most positive outcome. The distinguishing feature of
nostalgia proper is the object’s association or identification with the subject’s past, but not its own
pastness. Because of the seemingly contradictory states of both desiring an object and needing it to
remain distant, it is a matter of some contention as to what the object or referent of these desires
actually is. Although distance plays the most significant functional role, there is ambiguity as to
whether that distance is the object of desire itself, or a catalyst which serves to attract the subject to
the object. Alvarez declares that “what [he loves] must remain distant”, which—in his reckoning, at
least—logically precludes the possibility of distance itself being what he loves, for it makes little
sense to talk about keeping distance at a distance. Rather, it is the “dubious towers of towns” and
“blue mountains in moonlight” that court his longing; a longing emphatically intensified by their
distance. For Anthony, the woman in red is ostensibly the object of his desire, but it is her distance
that “stirs” something in him, so again it is unclear if he longs for distance or for what is distant.
We can look to contemporary writings on nostalgia for further comment on this distance vs.
distant problem, if not consensus on it. Svetlana Boym suggests that the “[R]omantic nostalgic
insist[s] on the otherness of his object of nostalgia from his present life and [keeps] it at a safe
distance” (13), implying that the object is not that “safe distance” itself, but that such as Alvarez’s
hills and Anthony’s balcony woman. Susan Stewart, with whom Boym is in agreement on many
matters, seems to suggest otherwise, contending that the “nostalgic is enamoured of distance, not of
the referent itself” (145, emphasis mine). Although both positions are plausible, it seems preferable
to consider the distant thing, rather than distance itself, as the object, since the existence of the latter
depends on the former, but not vice versa. Stewart’s ostensible belief that the nostalgic is
“enamoured of distance” can be waived as a matter of semantics, and we might rephrase the
contention to state that the nostalgic is in fact enamoured of the “referent itself” but only if and
when that referent lies at a distance from the subject. We will therefore say that the object is the
thing itself. Whether that thing is human, as with Fitzgerald, or geographical, as with Eichendorff, is
O’Neill 21
ultimately unimportant since its distance from the subject is its most important and desiregenerating feature. Anything that can be distorted, improved, or deified through imagination can
function as the nostalgic object.
As has been discussed, a further distinctive feature of the object of this conception of
nostalgia is its presentness and possibility, however small, of being grasped. When Anthony writes
his sentimental letter to Gloria, the object of his nostalgia is ostensibly Gloria herself, though their
physical separation both causes and permits such sentiment. Unlike Gloria, as we shall see, Anthony
does not grieve for things which are in themselves dead and gone, though the happiness associated
with those things may well be. Likewise, Jay Gatsby’s longing is for Daisy: a real, present person
living just across the water. Although the possibility of a successful reunion between Gatsby and
Daisy may be impossible to reach, she herself is not. The object of this conception of nostalgia is
therefore essentially connected to the past, but not consigned to it. Surprisingly, this aligns
somewhat with Hofer’s original conception of nostalgia. Although in our case we are using a
romantic interest as a substitute for a geographical location, the return “home” is seemingly a path
available to the nostalgic.
To address the third of our four conceptual variables, an irreconcilable difference between
the nostalgia of Fitzgerald’s early novels and that described by Hofer is Fitzgerald’s demonstration
that total satiation by reaching the object is impossible. Although the nostalgic may find a restricted
happiness in reaching the object, as Gatsby briefly does with Daisy, it is no longer
“magical” (Illbruck 152) when its distance is eradicated, and its value is therefore diminished.
Alvarez suggests that to reach this object is “boring”. When Anthony gets a clear view of the
mysterious woman, he sees that she is “fat, full thirty-five, utterly undistinguished” (Damned 278)
and returns to the bathroom to re-part his hair, immediately forgetting her. During Gatsby’s reunion
with Daisy, there are “moments even that afternoon when [she] tumble[s] short of his dreams—not
through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion” (Gatsby 103). Far from
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being “restored to his whole sane self” (Hofer 382), if such a version of Gatsby ever existed, he
gains only a limited satisfaction before the affair falls to pieces in dramatic circumstances. Through
the contrasting spirits of prelapsarian Anthony and post-reunion Gatsby, Fitzgerald shows us that
maintaining distance and preserving the remoteness of the object—keeping the reunion within
dreams and outside reality—is the preferable course of action for this kind of nostalgic. The subject
gains satisfaction, more satisfaction than reaching the object, from the process of desire itself; from
unrealised imagination.
Because of the enjoyability of the desiring process, and of expectation, the effect of longing
on these Romantic characters can, when the right course of (in)action is taken, be a tolerable one.
Even when the subject has full awareness of the workings of his desire, and a consequent awareness
that it cannot be sated by reaching the distant object, he can remain positive. Both Alvarez and
Anthony—the prelapsarian Anthony at least—appear comfortable with their insatiable longings:
Alvarez is boastful about his philosophy and Anthony quite carefree. This is an interesting
phenomenon, for it is perhaps unusual to consider unfulfilled desires as being anything other than
distressing or discomforting. Wright Morris, in his chapter on Thomas Wolfe entitled “The Function
of Appetite”, argues that “[an] insatiable hunger, like an insatiable desire, is not the sign of life, but
of impotence. Impotence, indeed, is part of the romantic agony. If one desires what one cannot
have, if one must do what cannot be done, the agony . . . is one of self-induced impotence.” (155)
The mention of “agony” appears at odds with the seemingly happy-go-lucky natures of Alvarez and
the young premarital Anthony. Is it necessarily an impediment or a sign of “impotence” to harbour
insatiable desires? Need it be distressing to recognise and have to come to terms with this
insatiability?
Fitzgerald appears to answer the former question in the negative through Gatsby, a
personality with “something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of
life”, blessed with “an extraordinary gift for hope” (Gatsby 8). Unlike the doomed Dick Diver of
O’Neill 23
Tender Is the Night, who will be discussed in the next chapter, Gatsby’s confused longing for Daisy
at least impels him to become rich. His dreams of reunion keep him vital, and in a certain way
happy, until he makes the mistake of trying to effect that reunion in reality. It is, as Fitzgerald and
Zelda assert in the co-written “‘Show Mr. and Mrs. F. to Number—’”, “sadder to find the past again
and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious
conception of memory” (50). The latter question, regarding the effect of knowing this insatiability,
cannot be explained by reference to Gatsby, for it is only the perceptive narrator-character Nick
Carraway who recognises the true and insatiable nature of his longing. But in each of Fitzgerald’s
Romantics who do not attempt to bridge that sacred gap, there is a shared positivity about their
condition. Amory finds his own yearning love letters “infinitely charming, infinitely
new” (Paradise 82); Upon seeing the woman in red, Anthony’s emotion is “nearer to adoration than
in the deepest kiss he had ever known” (Damned 278). Similarly, Eichendorff’s Alvarez, in his
constant state of courtship, also finds something “charming” about his limbo-like state, and the
Taugenichts, although he somewhat incongruously goes on to live happily ever after with his Lady
Fair, easily groups together “all the old melancholy, and delight, and ardent
expectation” (Taugenichts 19). D.G. Kehl, in opposition to Morris, argues that the “insatiable
hunger” of Gatsby is “not a sign of impotence . . . but rather a sign of life and creativity” (318), and
this appears to be the case for the characters of both literary worlds. Their shared character may be
neither healthy nor rational, but nor is it immediately self-destructive. The Romantic characters
utilise their contradictory desires to persevere, always seeing light at the end of an infinite tunnel.
The following section will look at the nostalgia of Gatsby in greater detail, followed by an analysis
of youth worship in Tender Is the Night. A distinction will be drawn between Fitzgerald’s nostalgic
creations who lack any extraordinary gift for hope, whose nostalgia provokes melancholy and
inaction, and those like Gatsby who devote their efforts to rebuilding the past in earnest.
!
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II
Reflective and Restorative Nostalgia
!
The Romantic love of distance seen in early Fitzgerald is worth examining for its own sake, but it is
also an important groundwork for the complex philosophy of nostalgia woven into The Great
Gatsby. Gatsby’s complex and stunningly depicted relationship with the past has resulted in
numerous and varying interpretations. Raymond M. Vince, for example, sees the “spatial and
temporal innovations” of the novel as being intrinsically connected to Einstein’s revolutionary
developments in physics (99). In spite of Gatsby’s broad critical coverage, the snippet of Romantic
thought in The Beautiful and Damned’s balcony scene, and its significance as a precursor and
companion to the nostalgia of Gatsby, has not been critically discussed. Gatsby is a Romantic like
Amory and Anthony, but with a gaze fixed firmly upon the past and upon Daisy, a wealthy and
now-married former lover of five years past from whom he was separated during the war. Because
of his exclusive focus on the past, we can consider Gatsby more of a “true” and committed nostalgic
than Amory or Anthony, but his nostalgia, looked at from one angle, is very similar to the Romantic
longing of those earlier characters.
Gatsby’s nostalgia is a desire for something, somebody, Daisy, who still exists in the present,
despite her entanglement with his past. In one of the most cited analyses of Fitzgeraldian nostalgia,
Wright Morris poetically suggests that the “strings of reminiscence tangle on themselves”, spinning
“a choking web around the hero" (170). He sees that “the incomparable milk of wonder overflowed
[Gatsby’s] cup of happiness” during the initial romance with Daisy (169), the overindulgent
recollection of which induces an unhealthy obsession with her and their common past. What Morris
fails to discuss is why exactly Gatsby and Daisy’s reunion fails, despite Gatsby rebuilding such a
convincing replica of the past. Kehl argues that “Gatsby does find fragments of the past, but . . .
finds it inadequate because it is changed, lost, impossible to be relived; further, the past eludes
O’Neill 25
[him] and, merged with the green-lit orgastic future, it yields no . . . open door in East Egg.” (312)
Although Kehl at least attempts to deal with the minutiae of Gatsby’s failure, his explanation is
vague and does not tell the whole story. By suggesting that Gatsby “finds” these fragments,
presumably in Daisy, yet is unsatisfied with them because they are changed, lost, and unrepeatable,
Kehl lays emphasis upon the wrong element. It is not a change in Daisy which prevents the reunion
from being a success, since even a total reconstruction would involve committing the fallacy against
which Eichendorff’s Alvarez warns, and which Anthony spells out explicitly in both the
aforementioned balcony scene and in his pronouncement that
!
you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's
like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some
inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do the sunbeam
moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that
made you want it is gone. (Damned 507)
!
Thoughts such as these are not simply inventions for the character of Anthony; they are absolutely
Fitzgerald’s, and critics are all too aware of this fact. The Beautiful and Damned was, though fairly
well-received upon publication, criticised for its lack of narrative control and an inconsistency in
the presentation of Anthony and Gloria. Various opinions of theirs seem to lack an obvious
congruence with their personalities. It has been somewhat harshly suggested that “[m]ost of the
book’s ‘ideas’ are shallow, some are vicious, . . . few are sustained with much consistency by the
narrative line” (Roulston 113), and that the “least effective manifestations” of these “are
Fitzgerald’s sophomoric asides to the reader and the ‘philosophical’ pronouncements of Anthony,
Gloria, and Maury” (114). Although Roulston likely has the aforementioned balcony epiphany and
sunbeam analogy in mind here, these ideas are more or less consistent with Anthony’s behaviour,
O’Neill 26
especially his inability to find a sustainable form of happiness with Gloria beyond the honeymoon
period of their marriage. Crucially though, in The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald was unable to
incorporate some of his most exciting and original ideas into his characters’ stories. Thus we see his
characters making philosophical pronouncements, rather than subtly demonstrating the
consequences of such philosophy through their lives. In Gatsby, this flaw is abolished and we see a
subtler, grander incarnation of Anthony’s experience, without having its implication spelt out to us.
Even if Roulston is right to doubt the literary merit of Fitzgerald’s philosophical asides, they
are nonetheless invaluable for our project of tracing nostalgia through Fitzgerald’s novels. Although
it would be an exaggeration to describe Daisy as “some inconsequential object” for Gatsby, it is
clear that her own characteristics are not the sole source of her attraction, and that something deeper
and more complex is at work. The “enchanted” green light of Daisy’s dock, to which Gatsby pays a
secret nightly homage, is the “glitter” of which Anthony speaks, turning to dust, a “foul
dust” (Gatsby 8) perhaps, in Gatsby’s hands. When Gatsby “stretch[es] out his arms toward the dark
water in a curious way” (27), offering his worship to Daisy on the horizon, his adoration is limitless.
However, she “tumble[s] short of his dreams” (Gatsby 103) because “the great distance that had
separated him from Daisy” (100) had allowed those dreams to climb to sublime and unreachable
heights. The space between Gatsby’s dock and Daisy’s functions like the space between Anthony’s
apartment and the balconies across his street. Just as Anthony allows his imagination to make the
balcony woman beautiful and desirable, Gatsby had “thrown “himself into [his illusion] with a
creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his
way” (103). Furthermore, just as Anthony’s adoration expires upon his vision coming into focus,
Gatsby and Daisy’s Atlantis loses its magic when dredged to the surface of the sound, its
imperfections denuded and blinding.
Gatsby’s tragic attempt to capture the metaphorical sunbeam darting around the room sets
him apart from the Romantics who are content to indulge in their dreams without action. Amory
O’Neill 27
Blaine, who sadly laments “Oh, Alec, I believe I’m tired of college”, only to retreat moments later
and explain that “I was just wishing. I wouldn't think of leaving” (Paradise 81), shares an attitude
with Gatsby but lacks the latter’s impetus and drive to action. This dichotomy, between those who
possess a drive to act upon their yearnings and those who do not, is significant, and underlines the
main theme of this chapter. As stated in the introduction to the preceding section, Gatsby’s attitudes
can only be bracketed with the earlier protagonists to some extent because, besides maintaining that
selective focus upon the past, he never quite recognises the underlying machinery of his longing,
which causes him to act in very different ways to Amory and Anthony. He is unaware, or perhaps
forces himself to remain unaware that distance, both spatial and temporal, lies at the root of his
feeling. He is an archetypal Romantic and seemingly ignorant of the fact. Furthermore, there are
several further and more complex layers to his longing. Nick Carraway speculates that, for Gatsby,
“some idea of himself . . . had gone into loving Daisy”, which accounts for his life having been
“confused and disordered” since. This is the “missing” element of the past of which Kehl speaks.
Despite his excited belief that he might “repeat the past” (Gatsby 117), Gatsby remains convinced
that the object of his desire is simply Daisy, and that Daisy will be able to satisfy his desire. Only at
sporadic moments, such as during the first night of their reunion, does he gain some realisation as to
the workings of his Romantic mind, and to the impossibility of being able to satisfy his desire
through reunion:
!
Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished
forever… Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had
diminished by one. (100)
!
Thus we can see two important aspects to Gatsby’s nostalgia: the function of spatial distance, and
the fraction of his younger self imparted onto his memory of Daisy. The green light of the dock can
O’Neill 28
remain “enchanted” only when it, and its referent Daisy, remain out of his reach, and his youth itself
is gone forever. The subject of lost youth, touched on in Gatsby, receives the full Fitzgerald
treatment in his next novel.
We have so far discussed nostalgia and its Romantic roots in Fitzgerald’s first three novels,
works which were completed within just five years of one another. Tender Is the Night, Gatsby’s
tortuously constructed successor, took a further nine years to complete, and was written during
some of the most turbulent and personally destructive years of Fitzgerald’s life. It is understandable
then that the novel differs in form and mood from its predecessors. Tender sees Fitzgerald
experimenting with new literary techniques, most apparent in the novel’s modernist structure. In a
letter to Maxwell Perkins in May 1925, shortly after the publication of Gatsby, he immodestly
described the developing novel’s form as “the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching
for, that Conrad didn't find” (Letters 108). Tender’s mood is sombre and tragic without deploying
melodrama or pathos. There is no narrative crescendo as with Gatsby and The Beautiful and
Damned, only a slow ebbing away of its protagonist’s vitality. Scenes are introduced nonchronologically, so the reader’s experience of time is warped. Fitzgerald would later rue this nonchronological approach as a mistake, and begged Scribners, his publisher, to allow him to revise the
novel for future editions. Characters’ attitudes to time and to the past also differ from those in the
previous three novels. Whilst things “are sweeter when they’re lost” for Anthony Patch (Damned
507, emphasis mine), Dick Diver’s lungs “burst for a moment with regret” for “his own youth of ten
years ago” (Tender 170). Whilst Gatsby believes in the “orgastic future” (Gatsby 188) of a repeated
past, Diver’s morale “cracks” (Tender 240) as he approaches middle age.
A clear distinction will henceforth be made between two different ways that nostalgia can
affect its subject’s life beyond the immediate reflective experience, both of which can be found in
Fitzgerald’s novels. Of the four conceptual variables noted at the outset—form, object, satiability
and effect—this section will focus upon the effects or consequences of nostalgia, though variations
O’Neill 29
in the other three variables will also be discussed. A line will be drawn in the Riviera sand
separating nostalgics like Jay Gatsby from those like Gloria Patch. Dick Diver will start on the
former side, before sombrely crossing the divide. To illuminate this division I will use a theoretical
distinction made by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia (2001), between restorative and
reflective nostalgia, noting some discrepancies between Boym’s formulations and Fitzgerald’s
where necessary. Boym’s work has been received positively by scholars, with her book being
considered “multifaceted” (Ratliff 352) and the distinction between restorative and reflective
nostalgia regarded as “helpful” (Fritzsche 128). Boym considers the two concepts
!
not absolute types, but rather tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing.
Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and
patch up the memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the
imperfect process of remembrance. The first category of nostalgics do not think of
themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is about truth . . . Restorative
nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective
nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and
another time. (41)
!
Boym sees the two kinds as distinct ways of giving meaning to a presumably uniform longing, but
the distinction transcends mere reaction to a single nostalgic form. The action of rebuilding and the
inaction of dwelling comprise two distinct forms of nostalgia itself. Restorative nostalgia takes the
form of a desire to rebuild what is lost, whilst reflective nostalgia simply considers that loss without
necessarily wishing to reincarnate.
Although Boym’s project uses homes and cities as its framework, her distinction between
these two kinds of nostalgia can be equally well applied to nostalgia for estranged people, as is
O’Neill 30
prevalent in Fitzgerald’s novels. We can see how her description of restorative nostalgia seems to
almost describe Gatsby’s attempted reunion with Daisy:
!
Nostalgia is an ache of temporal distance and displacement. Restorative nostalgia takes care
of both of these symptoms. Distance is compensated by intimate experience and the
availability of a desired object. Displacement is cured by a return home, preferably a
collective one. Never mind if it's not your home; by the time you reach it, you will have
already forgotten the difference. (44)
!
The five-year distance between Gatsby and the Daisy of his past is somewhat compensated for by
his eventual reunion with her, though of course not entirely, and his displacement from the past is
certainly not “cured” by the reunion. However, the “availability” of the nostalgic object is a central
tenet of the Romantic nostalgia described in the previous chapter. The object is associated with the
past but still reachable at some distant location in the present. Furthermore, Boym’s statement that
restorative nostalgics “do not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is
about truth”, equally well describes Gatsby. He believes that he desires Daisy for Daisy, not for the
past tied up with her, and it is left to Nick to see that error. Daisy, in reality, is “the epitome of
Gatsby's deeper yearning for that which he himself cannot identity” (Kehl 316), and the reader,
through Nick, gradually comes to understand this.
Boym’s other identified kind is reflective nostalgia, and it too has relevance to characters
and events in Fitzgerald’s novels. Having spent much of the first chapter discussing Anthony
Patch’s Romantic attitude, his attraction to distance and fond remembrance of his briefly estranged
wife, we should now turn to the ideas attributed to Gloria Patch herself. An important character
whose attitudes to time and the past occasionally align with those of Anthony but occasionally offer
entirely new perspectives, Gloria finds in a diary of hers the “record of her first kiss, faded as its
O’Neill 31
intimate afternoon, on a rainy veranda seven years before”. She is distraught by this discovery,
because she can “remember only the rain and the wet flowers in the yard and the smell of the damp
grass” (371). She draws a line under the entry and writes “FINIS”. The act of drawing a (literal) line
under the past is evidently a rare occurrence for Fitzgerald’s characters, though Gloria’s behaviour
again matches that of the similarly Zelda-like Rosalind, who would rather preserve her romance
with Amory “as a beautiful memory—tucked away in [her] heart” than struggle to preserve the
engagement (Paradise 181), and the less Zelda-like Rosemary Hoyt, who laments Dick Diver’s
attempt to repeat the past: “Why did you come here? Why couldn't we just have the memory
anyhow?” (Tender 186). Gloria’s reaction to the note in her diary highlights a key difference
between her attitude to the past and Anthony’s. She places a great value upon objects and situations
of to the past, as Anthony does, but attributes a far greater degree of tragedy to their distance,
focusing on those fundamentally irreclaimable objects of the past and resisting the temptation to
hopelessly try and rebuild them. Despite having little memory of her first kiss, she mourns its place
in the forgotten past. Similarly, upon leaving one of Anthony and her’s honeymoon residences, she
is overcome by grief with the realisation that “it won't be—like our two beds—ever again.
Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost—something's left behind. You can't
ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here.” (386, emphasis mine)
Again, keeping Roulston’s criticisms in mind, we might exercise some caution here when
considering Gloria’s attitudes as being representative of a fully developed character, although her
attitudes toward the past are, like Anthony’s, entirely consistent with one another. Gloria’s belief
system, one of lesser optimism but perhaps superior maturity, acts as a counterpoint to Anthony’s,
just as Nick Carraway’s sympathetic scepticism acts as counterpoint to Gatsby’s hopeful idealism.
For although Anthony uses his distant longings as inspiration, it is with a recklessness and
emotional immaturity that he acts upon them. His hope in the face of separation from his goal leads
to unfaithfulness and a series of poor life decisions. Whilst Gloria reacts to separation with
O’Neill 32
melancholy, she is an unlikely voice of reason within the novel, as she expresses the futility of
actively trying to reclaim the past in a powerful monologue:
!
But you can’t [preserve old things], Anthony. Beautiful things grow to a certain height and
then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period
decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they're
preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. (384)
!
This passionate outburst occurs as the Patches are visiting the restored and commodified former
house of General Lee in Arlington. “Do you think they've left a breath of 1860 here? This has
become a thing of 1914” (384), she complains. Not only does Gloria strongly partake in reflective
nostalgia, she admonishes the efforts of restorative nostalgia. Boym, in her explanation of the latter
type, considers the restored ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, with its garish attempt to eradicate the
effects of time, just as Gloria considers the “blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty” (384) that
General Lee’s house has become. Gloria sees the efforts of restorative nostalgics to preserve the
past as counterproductive and hopeless. Her resolve to preserve the past in her heart, rather than
confusedly attempt to replicate it like Anthony does during his affair, is an important critique of the
somewhat reckless restorative ideal. Fitzgerald biographer Arthur Mizener recognises Gloria’s
superior ability to let go of the past, considering her the more “successful character” of the two
Patches, because “when she is forced, in brutal circumstances, to recognize [that her beauty] is
fading, she takes her defeat with something like dignity” (142).
Tension between the two opposing conceptions of nostalgia illustrates the multiplicity of
nostalgic approaches within Fitzgerald. More interestingly, strong similarities between the attitudes
of Rosalind (Paradise), Gloria (Damned), and Rosemary (Tender), suggest that Fitzgerald
considered the reflective, non-restorative “letting go” to be a more feminine approach to nostalgia.
O’Neill 33
Whilst Rosalind and Gloria are modelled on Zelda, Rosemary is a fictionalised version of Lois
Moran, a friend of Fitzgerald’s to whom he was attracted in the late 1920s (Tate 7). Attributing
similar attitudes to female characters who were modelled on different real-life women suggests that
Fitzgerald saw reflective nostalgia as a common female trait. Although this might appear as lazy
typecasting on the part of the author, it does at least grant a degree of personality to those female
characters, often simply the foil to a male subject’s yearning soul. Daisy’s reluctance to erase her
own past with her husband Tom Buchanan, and her inability to commit to a total reconstruction of
five years prior, groups her with these other female characters to some extent, though we are given
little access to her thoughts. Fitzgerald confessed his worry to Maxwell Perkins on the day of
Gatsby’s publication that perhaps “women didn’t like the book because it has no important woman
in it” (Letters 105); a worry that was probably justified. As Bruccoli suggested, the personalities of
his male protagonists all participate at least partially in his own. The frequency at which they grasp
wildly at the past is indicative of his own hopeless yearning to repeat and rebuild. A sobering
awareness of the impossibility of that task presents itself in key female characters, but also in
obscure male figures from the short stories such as Tom Squires, who, “[w]ith the courteous bow of
another generation” (“At Your Age” 493), walks away from his marriage to a younger woman,
recognising that he has “lost the battle against youth and spring” (494).
Fitzgerald, even within a single novel such as The Beautiful and Damned, is able to present
two distinct conceptions of nostalgia. The reflective kind held by Gloria Patch, manifested in a
mourning for small aspects of her own youth, contrasts with the restorative efforts of characters like
Anthony Patch. We have already noted the difference in form between the two kinds, but we should
also consider the difference in object. Whilst restorative nostalgics like Gatsby need some concrete
present referent on which to fix their efforts, reflective nostalgics are able to, or are perhaps forced
to, reflect on things which are conclusively historical and thus ungraspable. To best demonstrate the
difference in nostalgic object between the two conceptions, we should analyse the fate of Dick
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Diver, Fitzgerald’s once-again semi-autobiographical protagonist of Tender Is the Night.5 The novel
depicts the slow decline of Dick, a prodigiously talented psychologist who marries Nicole Warren, a
wealthy patient who has been raped by her father. Dick is initially charismatic and enthusiastic, but
steadily loses his passion for work and his ability to maintain a healthy marriage with Nicole. Just
as specific moments in Gatsby and Anthony’s personal lives—their first kisses with Daisy and
Gloria respectively—can be seen as colossal personal peaks for those characters, Dick’s early
professional life is a high point to which he can never again climb. Fitzgerald considers how
!
[m]ost of us have a favorite, a heroic period, in our lives and that was Dick Diver's. For one
thing he had no idea that he was charming, that the affection he gave and inspired was
anything unusual among healthy people. In his last year at New Haven some one referred to
him as "lucky Dick”—the name lingered in his head. (98)
!
The significant referent of Dick’s nostalgia being, not a particular lover or episode, but simply a
promising “period” in his life, marks him out from many of the other characters discussed. There
are several references throughout the novel to the value he places upon youth: upon his first kiss
with Nicole—the significance of which now becomes a familiar trope in the novels—Dick notices
that “nothing had ever felt so young as her lips” (133). Years later, as the Divers’ lives unravel, he
flirts casually with a girl “not more than fifteen” (162), which angers Nicole to the point of trying to
crash their car. Of Rosemary, the young actress with whom he is infatuated and eventually has an
affair, he is aware that her “breathing was young and eager and exciting” (179). He is
uncharacteristically jealous and angered by Rosemary’s relationship with the young Italian
Nicotera, but later understands and laments that “youth call[s] to youth” (186). Even Nicole, upon
considering “the moving pictures with their myriad faces of girl-children, blandly represented as
carrying on the work and wisdom of the world”, comes to harbour a “jealousy of youth” (244),
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emphasising its thematic importance in the novel. Groundwork for Dick Diver’s youth worship can
be traced as far back as This Side of Paradise, in which Amory Blaine’s “youth seemed never so
vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful
party of four years before” (226), and who, despite being only a step into his twenties, “had wanted
[Rosalind’s] youth, the fresh radiance of her mind and body” (234). The object of nostalgia, for
Dick Diver, is youth itself. He tries to “restore” that youth by having an affair with the young
Rosemary, and, later, through a pathetic and painful attempt to perform a trick on an aquaplane for
which his ageing, alcoholic body is hopelessly ill-equipped. Having no apparent concrete, present
object on which to fix his longing, as Gatsby does, Dick tries in vain to return to a period of
hopefulness by attaching himself to young people and activities, but eventually, unlike Gatsby,
realises the folly of such action.
The strong yet confused desire to return to youth is an idea found in the philosophy of
Immanuel Kant, for whom nostalgia involves the longing for an irrecoverable and intangible object:
one’s youth. For Kant, nostalgia is satiable, or perhaps forgettable, through an acceptance that its
object is forever lost:
!
The homesickness of the Swiss… that seizes them when they are transferred to other lands
is the result of a longing for the places where they enjoyed the very simple pleasures of life
- aroused by the recollection of images of the carefree life and neighborly company in their
early years. For later, after they visit these same places, they are greatly disappointed in
their expectations and thus also find their homesickness cured. To be sure, they think that
this is because everything there has changed a great deal, but in fact it is because they
cannot bring back their youth there. (71, emphasis mine)
!
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Kant describes an opaque nostalgia in which confusion reigns over its subject. The nostalgic
laments the change in the ostensible “object”, considering it no longer adequate, whilst failing to
realise that the object is in fact his own lost youth, not his geographical home. The perceived
inadequacy of the “object” is, however, enough to quell the initial desire and “cure” the nostalgic.
Elements of Kant’s nostalgia can be seen in both Dick and Gatsby, the latter of whom “wanted to
recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy” (117). However,
contra Kant’s understanding, both Dick and Gatsby’s conditions go uncured. Dick’s resignation
after the failed affair with Rosemary does not cure him, but rather destroys the last shred of zeal left
in him. Fitzgerald’s conception of nostalgia in Tender is thus at direct odds with Kant’s, for
although they are dealing with the same form and object of nostalgia, Fitzgerald sees torment where
Kant predicts satiation or placation. However, the fact that Fitzgerald employs Zürich, Switzerland
as one of the places in which Dick “enjoyed the very simple pleasures of life” at least weaves a
pleasing thread through the nostalgic histories of Fitzgerald, Kant, and Johannes Hofer.
For Dick, “Rome was the end of his dream of Rosemary” (188), and that brief affair
followed by the aquaplane incident signals the end of his role as a restorative nostalgic. The end of
the novel sees Dick falling into a deep apathy. He abandons his work entirely, and puts up no effort
to prevent Nicole leaving him for the caveman-like Tommy Barban. Fitzgerald’s reflective
nostalgia, shown through Dick, is different to Boym’s in an important area: its effect on the
happiness of the subject. Boym’s reflective nostalgia “cherishes shattered fragments of
memory” (49), as does Fitzgerald’s, but dissimilarities appear when Boym explains that
“[r]estorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be
ironic and humorous” (49). For Gloria and especially Dick, Fitzgerald’s foremost reflective
nostalgics, reflections are accompanied by melancholy, devoid of irony and humour. Consequently,
while Boym suggests that both types of nostalgia can partially satisfy the nostalgic in their
respective ways, the collective impression of Fitzgerald’s novels strongly suggests that the confused
O’Neill 37
and irrational restorative nostalgia is actually the most psychologically beneficial. In an essay
entitled “The Crack-Up”, published in Esquire magazine in 1936, Fitzgerald declared that “the test
of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and
still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless
and yet be determined to make them otherwise” (69), whilst embracing the “contradiction between
the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future” (70). Fitzgerald, like the character
whose story he was laboriously trying to finish, cracked as the determination to make the
impossible possible left him. Both Dick and his author lacked Gatsby’s “gift of hope”. Jay Gatsby is
rarely considered to have held a first-rate intelligence—a “soiled or rather cheap personality
transfigured and rendered pathetically appealing through the possession of a passionate
idealism” (van Vechten 167) seems to describe rather the opposite. But it is Gatsby’s belief that he
can “repeat the past”; that he can marry the “dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the
future”, in contrast to Dick’s sober realisation that he himself cannot, which enables Gatsby to
maintain such a powerful lust for life. For Fitzgerald, wholeheartedly pursuing an insatiable
nostalgic desire is preferable to simply reflecting upon the past. The next and final chapter will
consider whether Fitzgerald foresaw a third way: a nostalgia which could be rational, satiable, and
psychologically beneficial.
!
!
!
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III
Replicative Nostalgia in The Last Tycoon
!
It is time now for Mr. Fitzgerald, with his remarkable technical mastery of his craft, to give
us a character who is not the victim of adolescent confusion, who is strong enough to turn
deaf ears to the jingling cymbals of the golden girl.
—The Nation review of Tender Is the Night (Troy 21)
!
The first chapter of this thesis provided an outline of Romantic longing in Fitzgerald’s early novels,
This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. It described the relationship between
Romantic longing and nostalgia found in those novels, and focused on the relationship between
subject and object. The second chapter considered the early novels’ relationship to The Great
Gatsby, and an opposing conception of nostalgia found in Tender Is the Night, focusing on the
varying personal effects of nostalgia which result from its form. Where that second chapter used
Svetlana Boym’s distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia as a theoretical point of
reference, this chapter will examine the conception developed by American poet and academic
Susan Stewart, one of the most important contemporary scholars on the subject. Cited favourably by
Illbruck, Boym, and Hutcheon, Stewart’s work has been described as “a wonderful exploration of
several cultural forms” whose conception of nostalgia is “not so much developed as it is
divined” (Rapaport 115). Stewart’s conception of nostalgia will be analysed alongside those of both
The Great Gatsby and The Last Tycoon.
To give a concise and representative account of Susan Stewart’s conception of nostalgia is
not easy, as she frames the phenomenon in several ways throughout On Longing: Narratives of the
Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984). Scholars often cite that work’s
definition of nostalgia as the “desire for desire” (23), a phrase which is ambiguous taken on its own
O’Neill 39
and fails to explain the nuanced account she gives. Works which represent Stewart’s account using
only that aphoristic definition or “a sadness without an object” include Susan Bennett’s Performing
Nostalgia (Psychology Press, 1996, page 6), Nadia Atia and Jeremy Davies’ “Nostalgia and the
shapes of history editorial” (Memory Studies 3.3 (2010), 181-186, page 182), and Johan Callens’
Dis/Figuring Sam Shepard (Peter Lang, 2007, page 217), to name just a few.
On Longing situates nostalgia within the domain of narrative. Nostalgic recollection depicts
an event with a narrative structure—beginning, middle and end. Nostalgic reconstruction is itself
always a narrative process, in which the subject desires a repetition of that event, but with an
important yet impossible caveat: the repetition should be real whilst retaining a measure of
transcendence only possible in its remembered, narrative state. Narrative “offers transcendence,
[but] it lacks authenticity, for its experience is other” (22). In the process of remembrance, the
nostalgic is able to contextualise his past experience in a way that cannot be achieved in the
immediate present, which has no clear ending or boundaries of any kind. However, life in the
immediate present possesses an authenticity that remembrance and imagination cannot provide. The
nostalgic longs for the best of both worlds: the transcendence of memory and the authenticity of
immediate lived experience.
!
[W]e can see a simultaneous and contradictory set of assumptions. First, the assumption that
immediate lived experience is more "real," bearing within itself an authenticity which
cannot be transferred to mediated experience; yet second, the assumption that the mediated
experience known through language and the temporality of narrative can offer pattern and
insight by virtue of its capacity for transcendence. It is in the meeting of these two
assumptions, in the conjunction of their symptoms, that the social disease of nostalgia arises.
(22-23)
O’Neill 40
Stewart is not alone in holding these ideas. Svetlana Boym, who refers to Stewart in her work,
describes these contradictory nostalgic needs in metaphorical terms, but the similarity in thought is
clear. Boym considers the “cinematic image of nostalgia” as like “a double exposure, or a
superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life.
The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.” (19-20)
The transcendent possibilities of “dream” and the authenticity of “everyday life” are simultaneously
craved, though their mutual realisation is impossible.
When introducing Stewart to Fitzgerald, we can see how adequately her account of nostalgia
serves to illuminate Gatsby. Gatsby’s fatal decision to collapse the distance between himself and the
green light on the dock accounts comprises one element of his failure. His inability to recapture lost
youth accounts for another. Using Stewart, we can also see a disappointment in the mode of
experience through which Gatsby’s reunion with Daisy takes place: “There must have been
moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault
but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond
everything.” (102-103) Gatsby’s dreams of Daisy cannot fully satisfy his longing, because they are
by their nature “inauthentic”. He craves the authenticity of immediate lived experience—an actual
reunion with Daisy. However, when the pair are finally able to reunite, that immediate lived
experience cannot but disappoint, since the transcendence of his dreams—the “vitality of his
illusion”—is absent. Fitzgerald recognised the relationships between what Boym refers to as “past
and present, dream and everyday life”. A Stewartian conception of nostalgia, the contradictory
desire for these incompatible states, is embedded into the depicted failure of Gatsby. His nostalgia is
insatiable due to the paradoxical nature of its object: dream Daisy and living Daisy, together as one.
Curiously, Fitzgerald suggests in his “Early Success” (1937) essay that he once lived through such a
contradictory experience. He describes his lavish life on the French Riviera in the mid-1920s, and
O’Neill 41
having all he ever wished for. Somehow, he is able to summon up his past self who once wished for
those very things, allowing that younger self to participate in their realisation:
!
It was not Monte Carlo I was looking at. It was back into the mind of the young man with
cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York. I was him again—for an instant I
had the good fortune to share his dreams, I who had no more dreams of my own. And there
are still times when I creep up on him, surprise him on an autumn morning in New York or a
spring night in Carolina when it is so quiet that you can hear a dog barking in the next
county. But never again as during that all too short period when he and I were one person,
when the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment—
when life was literally a dream. (90)
!
Fitzgerald’s vivid recollection (of recollection) describes the nostalgic utopia of whose nonexistence Stewart warns, the attainment of which eludes Gatsby. Simultaneously dreaming of and
participating in a single, near-perfect experience, Fitzgerald believed that he had attained
transcendence in reality. Unable to fuse the two modes of experience like his author, Gatsby’s
happiness remains limited. Despite the presence of a preliminary Stewartian philosophy in Gatsby,
Fitzgerald was considering some very different nostalgic ideas toward the end of his life. These
ideas will be discussed for the remainder of this chapter.
The primary subject of this section is not, after all, Gatsby, but The Last Tycoon, an
unfinished work whose realisation was curtailed by Fitzgerald’s death in December 1940. The
events of the novel take place in Hollywood, and concern protagonist Monroe Stahr, a movie
producer and the eponymous “last tycoon”. The novel was praised for its portrayal of the movie
industry, about which Fitzgerald learned a great deal during his time as a screenwriter between 1937
and 1940. The New York Times Book Review called it “the best piece of creative writing that we
O’Neill 42
have about . . . Hollywood and the movies” (Adams 251). Like his author, Monroe Stahr is said to
have risen to success at an early age, and the story sees him at a personal and professional
crossroads in his mid-thirties. After some early clues, Fitzgerald eventually reveals to us—eerily
and tragically, given his own fate—that Stahr is dying of a heart problem, although Fitzgerald’s
notes for the novel suggest that he was considering a more dramatic death for his protagonist, with
“Stahr’s death in the plane crash bring[ing] the novel back to its beginning” (Tycoon 379). Eerier
still is Fitzgerald’s indication that Stahr’s wife Minna Davis had died in a fire prior to the events of
the novel—a fate that was to befall Zelda Fitzgerald eight years after F. Scott’s death. As with all of
Fitzgerald’s novels, a romance underpins the central narrative of The Last Tycoon. Stahr encounters
the mysterious Kathleen Moore in one of his studios after an earthquake hits the area, and is
immediately captivated by her. She is, besides being beautiful, a near-perfect double of Minna.
There are important autobiographical aspects to this aspect of the story. During his final years,
Fitzgerald entered a relationship with Hollywood journalist Sheilah Graham, and Matthew J.
Bruccoli notes in his introduction to the Cambridge Edition that “Fitzgerald’s friends saw a close
resemblance between Sheilah Graham and Zelda Fitzgerald” (xxv). This narrative development, and
Stahr’s subsequent pursuit of this character who represents both past and future, makes the novel a
perfect candidate for nostalgic investigation.
There are several obstacles to overcome in undertaking such an investigation. First and
foremost, the novel, compiled and edited by Edmund Wilson, remains unfinished. Despite totalling
60,000 words, what Fitzgerald wrote tells only half the story outlined in his notes. Furthermore, the
written chapters remain in an unrevised draft state. This state of incompletion hinders the
maturation of various themes and ideas Fitzgerald had planned for the novel. For this reason,
authorial notes and biographical information will be given greater credence than those pertaining to
the previous novels. Authorial notes outside of the text do not necessarily represent ideas deemed
surplus, since they may have been incorporated into the completed work. Secondly, mentions of
O’Neill 43
time and past in The Last Tycoon are minimal, even intentionally cryptic. Were it not for the
recurring themes of history and repetition, they might be altogether forgotten. Although arguably an
artistic triumph, it is nonetheless an investigative obstacle that the novel contains a relative paucity
of philosophical rumination such as furnishes The Beautiful and Damned. “Gone is the expansive
and speculative rhetoric of his first four novels. Every page is packed with things
happening” (Maurer 266, emphasis mine). Ideas in The Last Tycoon must therefore be deduced
from events. Thirdly, much of The Last Tycoon is written from the perspective of Cecilia Brady, the
young daughter of Stahr’s business partner and rival Bradogue Brady. Although Fitzgerald intended
her interpretation of events to seem near-omniscient, Cecilia is perhaps in a less privileged position
to Stahr than, for example, Nick Carraway is to Gatsby. It is therefore possible to assume that the
narrative voice of The Last Tycoon provides a less complete picture of its protagonist’s mindset.
Finally, being one of Fitzgerald’s less celebrated works, The Last Tycoon has received less critical
analysis than the major novels, and the relatively small body of secondary literature focuses
infrequently upon the subject of time. In spite of these obstacles, when one combines the text itself,
the author’s notes, and the existing secondary literature, it is possible to find a new and distinct
conception of nostalgia in The Last Tycoon.
The goal of the previous chapter was to apply a contemporary theory to Fitzgerald’s classic
texts. Boym’s ideas can be used as a lens through which to view Fitzgerald’s depictions, as can
Schumann and Illbruck’s ideas on Romanticism. Stewart’s account of nostalgia can also be used in
such a way, but considering its opposition to The Last Tycoon rather than its correspondence yields
more interesting conclusions. As shown through Gatsby, it is not difficult to find literary instances
of nostalgia which “fit” the model Stewart provides, but The Last Tycoon is not one of those
instances. Throughout the four completed novels, nostalgia is presented in numerous ways as a
burden for its subject. It is variously shown as symptomatic of vanity, confusion and depression.
Even in its most psychologically beneficial manifestations, as for pre-reunion Gatsby, that positivity
O’Neill 44
is borne of confusion. The Last Tycoon appears to mark a departure from this habit of negative
portrayal, and, brief and embedded though they are, its nostalgia presents a challenge to the
contemporary ideas of Stewart, who describes nostalgia as a regular phenomenon—“the nostalgic is
enamoured of distance” and so forth (Stewart 145, emphasis mine), but whose account does not
represent the likes of Monroe Stahr.
We should examine the themes and particular passages of The Last Tycoon which contain
attitudes toward the past and suggest the presence of a certain kind of nostalgia. Fitzgerald reveals
to us not only that Stahr’s wife is dead, but that he converses with her: “he waited a moment,
thinking of Minna. He explained to her that it was really nothing, that no one could ever be like she
was, that he was sorry” (323). Fitzgerald’s personal notes appended to the Cambridge Edition reveal
that “Minna burned in a fire. But [Stahr] never forgot—he was forever haunted by the picture of the
girl floating slowly out over the city at dusk, buoyed up by delicious air, by a quintessence of
golden hope, like a soaring and unstable stock issue.” (184) Minna’s eternal “haunting” of Stahr is
suggested only briefly in Wilson’s text, but Fitzgerald had reminded himself to “Reinforce [the]
sense of a deep rich past with Minna—[Stahr] brusquely says to Kathleen that it can never be the
same. Her reaction is in spunkily saying the same, but knowing it’s comparatively in a minor
key.” (167) These notes show that Stahr’s feeling for Minna was intended to appear stronger than
Wilson’s text suggests, which makes our analysis of his relationship with Minna and Kathleen all
the more interesting. Unlike Dick Diver, Stahr does not yearn for his youth once shared with Minna.
For obvious reasons he is unable to seek reunion with her in the manner of Gatsby. What is
arguable, however, is his being a recipient of the same nostalgic stimuli as those nostalgic
characters. Dick is haunted by his golden era, Gatsby by young Daisy, and Stahr by his dead wife.
Stahr is therefore burdened by the past as much as Fitzgerald’s other protagonists, but his reaction
to this nostalgic stimuli sets both himself and the novel apart.
O’Neill 45
Whilst Dick eventually succumbs to a state of apathy and reflection, and whilst Gatsby fails
in his attempt to rebuild the past, Stahr’s relationship with Kathleen is relatively successful. A
comparison of the three novels’ respective depictions of “reunion”—using the term loosely in
Stahr’s case—illustrates significant development of Fitzgerald’s thinking. Dick’s frustrating reunion
with Rosemary after a four-year separation is blighted by his jealousy and self-loathing. It is
evaluated by Dick as “self-indulgence”; “less an infatuation than a romantic memory” (Tender 182).
After a final argument, Dick confesses: “I don't seem to bring people happiness any more.” (186).
In a different manner, but in its own unsatisfying way, Daisy “tumble[s] short of [Gatsby’s] dreams
—not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion” (Gatsby 103),
following their own five-year separation. The “expression of bewilderment [comes] back into [his]
face, as though a faint doubt [occurs] to him as to the quality of his present happiness” (103). The
experiences of Monroe Stahr are entirely unlike those of Dick and Gatsby. Kathleen’s appearance,
bringing the face of Minna back into Stahr’s life, renews the “old hurt . . . , heavy and
delightful” (323, emphasis mine)—terminology very similar to Eichendorff’s in describing the
Taugenichts’ renewal of “all the old melancholy, and delight, and ardent expectation” (Taugenichts
19). Stahr’s experience involves the peculiar delight experienced by the Romantics, but Kathleen is
not kept at a distance; she and Stahr become fully intimate.
In spite of an apparent positivity about the romance, there is critical disagreement over just
how satisfied Stahr is supposed to seem with Kathleen, which in turn affects how we should
interpret the depiction of his nostalgia. John F. Callahan describes how, “having faced Stahr's and
his own nostalgia, Fitzgerald invokes checks and balances against the romantic pull of the past . . .
In short, Stahr is able "to retain the ability to function” amidst the contradictions of democracy and
corporate power and property.” (389) If correct, Callahan’s “Crack-Up”-citing analysis supports the
idea that a new, more positive approach to nostalgia can be found in the novel. Not only does
Callahan explicitly consider Stahr a nostalgic, he sees him managing to control that nostalgia
O’Neill 46
without harm, prospering professionally and personally. Callahan sees that the producer, “whether
in conversation or the act of love with Kathleen, or in his renewed sense of aesthetic possibility in
response to a black man's rejection of the movies, comes to know that his vitality depends on
mingling passion and tenderness toward Kathleen with the pragmatic imagination of his producer's
craft” (392). Stahr’s journey is therefore one of progression and understanding, not decline. John E.
Hart interprets the novel in the opposite way, considering the aforementioned developments to show
that “Stahr is losing his grip on life” (68). In support of this claim, he reminds us of events such as
the character’s mistaken belief that he has been telephoned by the president, which in Hart’s eyes
renders him “helplessly confused” (68). Robert E. Maurer also sees Stahr’s story as a “fall” (265),
though mainly because of the protagonist’s unwritten death. Hart, like Callahan, also makes
reference to “The Crack-Up”, though perhaps more tenuously, using Fitzgerald’s words to describe
Stahr’s life as one “of contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the
future” (68). He sees that Stahr “falls in love with [Kathleen], and like the rest of his past with
which she becomes identified, she becomes absolutely necessary to him” (67). But, he continues,
“clearly something has gone wrong” (68). This analysis seems to more aptly describe Gatsby’s
relationship with Daisy, into whom “some idea of himself” (Gatsby 117) has been placed, a
transference which contributes to his obsession and ultimately denies the possibility of a functional
relationship between the two. Clearly, something goes wrong for Gatsby. It is questionable whether
Kathleen’s association with Stahr’s past is so total, or so problematic.
If Stahr’s is a story of failure, then the producer falls into the same category as his literary
predecessors. However, there is good evidence to undermine Hart’s interpretation and support
Callahan’s. Fitzgerald describes Stahr’s “vague happy thought[s]” of Kathleen which “warm” (349)
him; the pair are able, in the old-fashioned sense, to “[make] love as no one ever dares to do
after” (321), and Stahr is delighted by Kathleen’s attitude as he wishes to “repeat yet not
recapitulate the past” (342). Besides textual support, further evidence can be found in Fitzgerald’s
O’Neill 47
summations of the novel. In a letter to Kenneth Littauer of Collier’s from September 1939,
Fitzgerald said the following of his work in progress:
!
“Unlike Tender Is the Night it is not the story of deterioration—it is not depressing and not
morbid in spite of the tragic ending. If one book could ever be “like” another I should say it
is more “like” The Great Gatsby than any other of my books. But I hope it will be entirely
different—I hope it will be something new, arouse new emotions perhaps even a new way of
looking at certain phenomena.” (Letters 412, emphasis mine)
!
In a later message to Edmund Wilson, the author described the novel as “upstream in mood” (471).
Since Fitzgerald emphatically precluded the possibility of a “deterioration” story, it seems fair to
assume that he did not wish for Stahr’s life to appear as one of growing “contradiction”. Although
Fitzgerald’s words may have been hyperbole in the hope of securing an advance from Littauer, the
“new way of looking at certain phenomena” may well refer to Tycoon’s presentation of nostalgia.
The novel is “like” Gatsby in tone, but the phenomena of time and history are treated differently, as
Stahr succeeds where earlier protagonists failed.
Fitzgerald’s development of the Minna/Kathleen Doppelgänger narrative raises several
interesting questions in the discussion of nostalgia. What happens when the ostensible object of
nostalgia—a deceased love, consigned to the past—seems to present itself anew, in a different
body? Can the seemingly impossible wish to renew acquaintance with a lost loved one be granted
by such a straightforward occurrence as finding a physical likeness? Stahr wonders whether
Kathleen’s familiarity “might not be a trick to reach him from somewhere. Not Minna and yet
Minna” (317), yet it would be misleading to think of Kathleen’s sole function as one of physical
surrogate for Minna. The facial similarity between the two characters, present and past, is symbolic
of the possibility of repetition through replication. In giving the two characters a strong physical
O’Neill 48
resemblance, Fitzgerald is not prescribing lookalikes as the panacea for grief. He is providing a
hopeful picture of the possibility of repeating the past—not through restoration of exact particulars,
but through replication of the elements which made those times of the past valuable. Nick
Carraway’s cautious assertion that you “can’t repeat the past” (Gatsby 117) is vigorously denied by
Gatsby in a way that seems naive and erroneous in the context of that novel. It is implicitly denied
by Stahr also, but the reader does not see him as he sees Gatsby. Stahr is a pragmatist as well as a
Romantic. His repetition appears neither misguided nor futile; it appears “authentic”. Stahr’s
relationship with Kathleen demonstrates a kind of nostalgic repetition, heretofore unfound in
Fitzgerald’s writing, in which a duplicate object is introduced instead of an attempt to restore the
original. Stahr is haunted by Minna, with whom he has a semi-reunion through Kathleen, who
herself is able “to give life back to him” (Tycoon Facsimiles 166)—a life absent since Minna’s
death. The nostalgia of The Last Tycoon is not restorative, for Minna herself cannot be restored. Nor
is it simply reflective, for Stahr is able to actively satisfy his desire to “repeat yet not recapitulate
the past”. The most suitable term to describe the conception of nostalgia in The Last Tycoon, in
which a new object replaces the old, is replicative nostalgia. The object of nostalgia, in Stahr’s case
Minna, is substituted with a replica, in Stahr’s case Kathleen, whose role matches the original.
There is textual support for seeing Kathleen as the substituted object of replicative nostalgia,
in spite of the novel’s elevation of events above ruminations. After hearing Kathleen philosophise
on the inevitability of sex and noticing the “experienced” ring to her words, Stahr’s reaction is one
of great pleasure and admiration, because his mood is “passionately to repeat yet not recapitulate
the past” (342). Although the phrase is highly ambiguous, taken in the context of Stahr and
Kathleen’s sexual encounter, it appears to describe the desire to relive an experience of the past,
minus a summary of certain specific points. It is perhaps the burden of the reflective nostalgic to
persistently “recapitulate” the past, but it is not Stahr’s. Elsewhere in the novel, symbolic language
establishes Kathleen as both past and future, playing the function of Minna, but with a personality
O’Neill 49
entirely her own. When Stahr questions what Kathleen has to hide, her response is “‘Perhaps the
future,’ in a way that might mean anything or nothing at all.” (333) There is a playfulness and
obscurity to both Kathleen’s answer and Fitzgerald’s appraisal. Kathleen is trying to hide the secret
of her engagement from Stahr and from herself, but her connection to Stahr’s former marriage is
both an embrace of the past and a camouflaging of the future in historical colours. Shortly after that
exchange, Kathleen conversely affirms the future and denies the historical, drinking a Coke instead
of tea because “tea is the past” (335). Outside of his romantic involvement with Kathleen, there are
hints of replicative nostalgia in Stahr’s professional endeavours. A great innovator in the movie
industry until this point in the novel, Stahr is strongly moved by a chance conversation with a
stranger on the beach who carries with him a work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and who refuses to
take his children to the movies, seeing “no profit” in them (346). The encounter encourages Stahr to
sacrifice some lucrative but tasteless projects in favour of artistically valuable ones. The grunioncollecting luddite with his literature inspires Stahr to reintroduce forgotten literary qualities to the
futuristic medium of film. He does not abandon his position for a new career in publishing, nor does
he mourn the decline of literature; he seeks to incorporate desirable elements of the past into a
contemporary form.
We can see how Stahr’s replicative nostalgia is at odds with that described by Stewart.
Stewart’s nostalgia is “always ideological” because “the past it seeks has never existed except as
narrative, and hence, always absent, . . . continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack” (23).
Stahr’s past does not continually threaten to reproduce itself, as the producer seeks to satiate that
desire with a new object, present and tangible. The absence in his nostalgia, the absence of Minna,
is—coarse though it seems—filled by his relationship with Kathleen, and the ease with which he
does so suggests that the object of his nostalgia was never “ideological” in the first place. Rather, it
seems simply to have been a desire to return to a state of lost vitality through love and romance.
Setting The Last Tycoon against Stewart’s ideas highlights key differences between two
O’Neill 50
irreconcilably different conceptions of nostalgia. That described by Stewart is necessarily insatiable
because what is desired is ultimately an internal fantasy invented by the nostalgic, but Stahr does
not desire a utopia in which “authenticity suffuses both word and world” (Stewart 23)—he is
content with the authenticity of the real world in which he and Kathleen reside.
The events of Fitzgerald’s final work call to mind a particular stage in the early history of
nostalgia. Amory Blaine may have denigrated “that stupid, overestimated Schiller”, despite never
having read him (Paradise 141), but the German poet’s unusual treatment of Grammont worked on
assumptions fundamentally equivalent to those held by Fitzgerald circa 1939-1940. Grammont,
suffering from severe homesickness, desired a return to his pastoral homeland in Alsace, but
Schiller was able to treat him by having him walked around the countryside near to the academy at
which they were stationed. Schiller was able to replicate the feel of Grammont’s home, the object of
his nostalgia, in a geographically equivalent area. The substitution, though not a restoration of the
original object, produced comparable results to an actual return. Monroe Stahr is unable to return to
the “homeland” of Minna, but his stroll around the countryside with Kathleen satiates his nostalgic
longing. Fitzgerald may have failed “to give us a character . . . strong enough to turn deaf ears to the
jingling cymbals of the golden girl” (Troy 21), but he at least gave us a character wise enough to
sail with the current, borne hopefully forward with just one eye on the past.
!
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Conclusion
!
The tragedy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s premature death is concomitantly human, literary, and
intellectual. Leaving behind a family in need of financial and personal care, and dying with the
bitter taste of critical rejection in his mouth, Fitzgerald did not live to see the fruits of his labours.
Despite possessing a great confidence in his own ability, disappointing sales figures for The Great
Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, coupled with tepid critical responses to the latter, meant he would
never have predicted his posthumous rise in popularity. Ultimately, Fitzgerald did not live to see
himself considered one of the great American authors. Besides this personal misfortune for
Fitzgerald, we are left to wonder where his imagination might have taken him in another thirty
years of writing, and whether he might have developed his nostalgic ideas further. Wright Morris
wrote that, in spite of nostalgia’s presence in Wolfe, Hemingway, and Faulkner, “it was left to . . .
Fitzgerald, the playboy, to carry this subject to its logical conclusion” (157). Some, Morris included,
see that conclusion in The Great Gatsby, a work of towering splendour which penetrates to the heart
of the nostalgic’s temporal struggle. Nonetheless, in spite of that work’s profundity, Gatsby did not
signal the end of Fitzgerald’s literary treatment of the phenomenon. Although Tender Is the Night is
imperfect and has its messages buried deep beneath the surface, Dick Diver is every bit as real and
true a picture of the temporally tormented as Jay Gatsby. Furthermore, Monroe Stahr, Fitzgerald’s
final creation, hints at freedom from the temporal antagonist. Though his demise was to be
definitive, he briefly tasted rejuvenation—a life after life that had heretofore eluded both
Fitzgerald’s tragic heroes and the author himself. This glimmer of hope was no fairytale, or attempt
at escapism from the grim realities of linear time, for Fitzgerald saw the glimmer himself. He tasted
post-crack-up rejuvenation in Hollywood, with new partner Sheilah Graham, and with a vision for a
great novel set to “arouse new emotions” and provide “perhaps even a new way of looking at
certain phenomena” (Letters 412).
O’Neill 52
Bruccoli considers the “dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald” to have been
“aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol” (Letters xix). Bruccoli,
knowing Fitzgerald perhaps better than Fitzgerald did, could not have overlooked the importance of
nostalgia’s influence on the author, so its absence here might seem surprising. In all likelihood, its
eventual admixture with several of these key influences probably precludes its being considered an
influence in its own right. Fitzgerald’s “aspiration” had turned in on itself by the 1930s. Having
achieved his dreams at so young an age, the author was rendered rudderless and retrospective,
recalling that “Early Success” with bittersweet longing. A biographical study of the nostalgic
consequences of Fitzgerald’s early peak is touched on in Morris’ analysis of “The Crack-Up”, but
parallels between the early peaks of Fitzgerald and those of his characters could be more thoroughly
examined. Returning to Princeton in the final scene of This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine feels
the “spirit of the past brooding over a new generation”, accompanied by “the pain of memory” and
“regret for his lost youth” (260). Perhaps because of their premature conclusion, Fitzgerald’s
university days are the subject of wistful yearning, with “Princeton” understandably included in the
“Nostalgia or the Flight of the Heart” notebook entry. It is beyond the scope of this study to delve
into the complex relationship between F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, but their marriage suffered a
steep decline with Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and professional struggles, and with Zelda’s mental
health problems. Both The Beautiful and Damned and Tender Is the Night depict promising early
stages of marriage followed by decline and retrospection, and similarities between the real and the
fictive are not coincidental. Perhaps the most compelling area of thematic crossover lies in the
relationship between Fitzgerald’s alcoholism and his nostalgic tendencies, personal and literary. In a
passage that is two parts intriguing and one part disturbing, Fitzgerald explains the appeal of alcohol
for once-successful composer Abe North, a minor character in Tender Is the Night whose creativity
has dwindled with age: “Afterward he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy
things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the
O’Neill 53
future, as if they were about to happen again” (88). Contemporary psychiatric studies on nostalgia
show that, since “[i]dealized past emotions become displaced onto inanimate objects, sounds,
smells and tastes that were experienced concurrently with the emotions”, nostalgia has a “negative
impact in the treatment of alcoholism” (Hirsch 390). It is unclear to what extent Fitzgerald’s fatal
alcoholism was accelerated by a subconscious association of highballs with the halcyon days of the
early 1920s, but a thorough investigation into such matters is yet to be made.
!
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Notes
1
The Great Gatsby contains not a single instance of the words “nostalgia” or “nostalgic”. Tender Is
the Night contains one.
2
“The Romantic Egotist” was a working title for This Side of Paradise and eventually became the
title of its first section (Paradise xiv).
3
This Side of Paradise (1920) was written during the First World War, and Tender Is the Night
(1934) during the interbellum. To what extent this may have affected Fitzgerald attitudes, genuine
and fictional, towards German literature is unclear. On the other hand, both Amory’s denigration
and Dick’s slip may be ironic acknowledgements of the similarities between Romantic works and
Fitzgerald’s own.
4
“I don’t want to talk about myself because I’ll admit I did that somewhat in this book.” (qtd. in
Tate 232)
5
Though he is, in terms of appearance and lifestyle, based upon Gerald Murphy, a friend of the
Fitzgeralds, there are “many similarities, specific, highly detailed, between Dick Diver and his
author” (Mansell 228).
O’Neill 55
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